Anything but Ordinary (11 page)

‘What state of mind do you think Tamar must have been in to design such a room?’ Cindy asked Finvarra abruptly and as far as he was concerned, irrelevantly. Even used, as he was, to Cindy’s sharp non-sequiters, Finvarra looked nonplussed at this one. 

‘Well, she did it for the kiddies, didn’t she?’ he asked. ‘I mean … Well, all right, I see what you mean.’ he conceded. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was a little bit … perhaps not quite herself maybe. Never really had her down as the decorating type at all really,’ he admitted. 

‘How is this helping?’ interrupted Denny impatiently. ‘We
know
she hasn’t been herself – assuming you’re right,’

‘What could do that to someone as powerful as her, do you think?’ said Cindy ignoring this. 

Finvarra looked perplexedly from one to the other trying earnestly to understand what they were getting at. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said eventually, hoping this was right. 

Cindy lost her temper. ‘Oh, for God’s sake Fin,’ she snapped. ‘They’re still here, aren’t they?’

‘Who?’

‘The Tuatha de Danann,’ she said quietly, as if they might be able to hear her.  ‘Leir’s race.’

Light finally dawned on Denny. ‘My God,’ he said softly.

Finvarra froze. ‘Don’t talk about them,’ he said. 

‘We
have
to,’ said Cindy firmly.  ‘Tell us what you know.’ She took Finvarra’s hands gently. ‘It’s important darling,’ she said. ‘We need your help.’

Finvarra looked nervously behind him at the two little boys who were watching this scene avidly. ‘Not here,’ he said, indicating pointedly at the children. 

‘Let’s go downstairs then,’ said Denny.

* * *

‘They fled into the hills,’ said Finvarra, ‘The Tuatha, many centuries ago. Long before the Sidhe were banished by men. Their power had dwindled, so it was said, and now they are supposed to be nothing more than spirits that haunt the hills and forests.’

‘But they never actually left?’ asked Denny. ‘I thought they had left, or died or something.’

‘Where would they go?’ asked Finvarra, not unreasonably. ‘And gods do not die. Rather do they diminish as the world moves on without the need of them.’

‘So, they
are
still here, then?’

‘There’s one way to find out for certain,’ said Cindy. ‘Where’s Jack?’

* * *

Having dealt summarily, as predicted, with the sorcerer, Tamar had suddenly vanished from sight. The Director, when the bewildered Team Alpha had reported this to him, had taken it very well. ‘Don’t bother looking for her,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have done this if she hadn’t worked out how to beat the isotope tracking. But she’ll come back,’ he added confidently. ‘This was just something she had to get out of her system. No, I don’t blame any of you. This was foreseen, but not how or when it would happen. You can go now.’ he dismissed them. It is doubtful, that had he known where Tamar had gone and for what purpose, he would have been quite so blasé about it.  However, he did not. 

* * *

In a scene never witnessed before in any male prison in the whole of history, an attractive woman traversed the entire cellblock, passing cell after cell of humanity’s worst and wickedest to the accompaniment of not a single catcall, whistle or jeer. 

At cell 420, she stopped and passed, apparently unimpeded, through the bars without the need of a key. ‘Matthias Greyholme,’ she said to the cell’s present incumbent, who was reading a book about crochet. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’ 

‘Tamar the Black?’ he said apparently undisturbed by this sudden and unorthodox intrusion.  ‘Neither have you.’

He looked up at her. ‘But I am wrong,’ he said. ‘I see that you are no longer a Djinn.’

‘Well,’ Tamar laughed. ‘There’s not much gets past you anyway.’

‘But it is very obvious,’ said Matthias. 

‘To you maybe,’ she said shortly. ‘Look Matthias I need … why are you reading a book about crochet?’

‘Ah, when one is given a sentence of three hundred and forty years, it is not expected by anyone that one will have to serve every last day of that sentence. In such a case, one passes the time any way one can.’  Which was not really an explanation, but it did raise another question. 

‘So why do you stay here?  You don’t have to.’

‘I like the peace. Besides, how to explain?’

‘Explain what? That you are not an ordinary prisoner but a 500 year old necromancer?’

‘That too.’ he said. 

‘But you wouldn’t
have
to explain,’ pointed out Tamar. ‘You’d be gone.  How are you going to explain being here so long anyway? They’ll be expecting you to die eventually.  What did they get you on anyway?’

‘I think I’ll be asking the personal questions actually,’ said Matthias suddenly. ‘After all, I don’t suppose you came here for a social visit. You want my help with something I take it? Well it’s going to cost you.’

‘Cost me what?’ sighed Tamar in a resigned tone.’

‘Tell me how you became human. I’m just bursting with curiosity on that one I have to admit.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, Okay, well I got a new master about six years ago and he freed me.’

‘How?’

‘We found Askphrit together and tricked him back into the bottle. It was all Denny’s idea actually.’

‘Denny?’

‘He was my master. That was … that’s his name.’

‘And, I’m sorry, I must have missed a bit. Who is Askphrit?’

‘Of course,’ Tamar thought. ‘Until Denny, I never told anyone about Askphrit – well no one ever asked.’

*

She had met Matthias four hundred years earlier when he had been the court magician to a horrible Emperor in one of those savage rural fiefdoms that were pretty much everywhere in those days. She had been the Emperor’s Djinn, and they had struck up something that approximated a friendship. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” as Matthias said.

Of course, the Emperor had not really been an Emperor; he had given himself the title and had Tamar enforce it. When Tamar had become free upon the Emperors untimely death, Matthias had also mysteriously disappeared.

Tamar suspected that he was now in prison for grave robbing – he was a necromancer after all.

She had kept in touch with him in a desultory way over the years, often not seeing him for years at a time but still, until Denny, he had been the closest thing she had had to a friend in five thousand years.  She had found out that he was in prison from himself; he had contacted her in the usual way – that is to say, along the mystical grapevine. She had actually had the news from a passing gnome, who could not remember where he had heard it.  That had been twenty-seven years ago, and she felt suddenly ashamed that she had not visited him before. This guilt, she recognized as Denny’s influence. However, Matthias seemed neither surprised nor injured that she had not come before. 

*

For the next twenty minutes or so, under Matthias’s patient questioning, Tamar found herself explaining the whole story of how she had become a Djinn and how she had met Denny and how he had saved her.

‘And you are still with him?’ asked Matthias at the end of the tale.

‘Y-yes.’

‘And I bet he is neither handsome nor rich, is he?’ asked Matthias ignoring her hesitation. ‘Or powerful, eh?’

‘Well, he is powerful – now,’ said Tamar, thinking of the Athame. ‘But he wasn’t then. He was just ordinary when I met him.’

‘Ordinary?’ said Matthias. ‘Oh I don’t think he was ordinary. Do you?’ he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

‘No,’ said Tamar thoughtfully. ‘He’s anything but ordinary.’

There was a silence.  ‘So, what can I do for
you
, then?’ said Matthias after a long few minutes of this. 

‘Hmm, what? Oh yes, I was miles away there, sorry.’ she turned to face him and said abruptly. ‘What can turn a wolf into man?

‘I take it you don’t mean a mere glamour,’ said Matthias.

‘No, I don’t. I mean the full transmogrification – brainwaves and everything. I mean who or what has that kind of power?’

‘Hmm,’ Matthias looked thoughtful. ‘That’s some powerful magic. Odin used to be fond of that sort of thing of course. Very into the genetic engineering thing, as they call it now in quantum circles.’

‘Odin?’ but he couldn’t do
that
. He was just a god … wasn’t he?’

‘Ah, but if he was only a god, then why didn’t he go the way of the rest of them?’ Matthias said. 

‘What do you mean by
that
?’ asked Tamar, in sudden alarm.

‘Oh, old Odin’s still around.’

‘He
is
?’

‘Oh yes, most certainly.’

So,
not
just a god then?’

‘I have no idea my dear. No idea, not my area. I
do
know he still has many worshippers, which might account for it if he were.’

‘That wouldn’t explain the, what did you call it, genetic engineering?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Matthias. ‘Anyway, I didn’t say for certain that he was your man …’

‘God.’

‘… God. Just that he
might
be.’

‘So, what else is likely responsible?’

‘Could be a Djinn of course,’ said Matthias. ‘But I doubt it.’

‘So do I,’ said Tamar emphatically. She had already discarded this idea at the beginning as unlikely, being as the Djinn could only access their power by means of a direct wish from a human, and what human would make such a wish?  Humans were crazy, but not, in her experience, as crazy as
that
.

‘A bio engineer looking for a Nobel Prize,’ said Matthias as if reading her thoughts.

‘Bollocks,’ scoffed Tamar.

‘I suppose, so,’ said Matthias mildly.

‘I should be going,’ said Tamar. ‘Thanks for your insights anyway. I’ll have a think about it. And Matthias?’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s with the shaggy beard? You look like an old hermit’

‘Well, it’s a look, isn’t it?’ he said in a hurt voice. ‘I thought it made me look venerable.’

‘Just scruffy really,’ she said scathingly and vanished.

‘She hasn’t changed at all.’ said Matthias to the space that she had just vacated. 

* * *

Jack Stiles gingerly slipped his hand into the gauntlet and waited. It only took seconds before the filigree tendrils began extending through the skin and into the nerves in his arm. Although they had seen it before, (except Finvarra) they all watched fascinated as the tendrils writhed under the surface of his skin extending up his arm and into his central nervous system.

When it stopped, Stiles looked up sharply and opened his eyes – they glowed briefly and then faded to normal. 

‘Are we
certain
this is absolutely necessary?’ he asked, somewhat belatedly.  

The problem here was that once the gauntlet was attached, there was no way to remove the damn thing. It just came off when it wanted to – or at least so it seemed.  The last time he had worn it, it had removed itself after its purpose had been served. Created by the Tuatha god Leir as a means of preserving and passing on his power, the wearer became the Avatar of Leir possessing his knowledge and power as a means to continue the fight against the Sidhe. As far as anyone knew, no previous owner of the gauntlet had ever been able to shed it until their death. But then, none of them had ever fulfilled its purpose and defeated the Sidhe. Stiles had.

Now he was putting it on for a second time, and who knew whether it would ever come off again.  He had not even been certain that it would attach, and a part of him had fervently hoped that it would not.  It was not pleasant having another’s thoughts and memories roaming around in one’s head.

‘Well?’ said Denny.

‘Give me a minute,’ said Stiles impatiently. He closed his eyes.

‘The brethren of Leir fled into the hills and mounds,’ he said somewhat pompously. He always talked like this when he was channelling Leir; it was very different to the way he normally talked which made it easy for the others to tell which one of them was speaking. 

‘Some diminished, but a great many more did not. A way was found to survive. They became wraiths, spirits. Ascension was achieved. They left their physical bodies. They are now the spirits of wood and water, of lakes, rivers, forests and hills. To answer your question, yes, they are here still, in a manner of speaking. But there is fear. A great enemy of old seeks them now. I feel its presence also. A terrible war approaches. The Tuatha will rise again, take new physical form, and fight the enemy, though they have little hope of victory, and this world and all its people will be swept away in the ensuing battle for dominion.’

This extraordinary statement was met with shocked silence. They had asked the question and been told much more and far worse than they had expected. 

‘It
is
the Tuatha who have been influencing your minds,’ said Stiles in his ordinary voice. ‘All that stuff about taking a new physical body – they’ve been doing that for a long time. All it means it they can inhabit a human body if they want to. They can take over completely and run the body or they can just live there and make suggestions – you’d never know they were there.’ 

‘You mean I’m
possessed
?’ screeched Denny in absolute horror.  (This was getting worse and worse.) ‘Tamar too?’

‘They were not intentionally influencing your behaviour,’ said Stiles as if he was reading from some invisible script inside his head and incidentally answering Denny’s question.  ‘It was a side effect of the inhabitation. They chose the strongest – you, Tamar, and others like you, in order to be ready for the enemy that is coming.’

‘And when this enemy arrives they were just going to take over our minds completely and have us fight this enemy for them? I don’t
think
so,’ said Denny. ‘How do I get it out of me?’

‘The spirit has already gone,’ said Stiles. ‘Once you knew it was there, you were no longer a viable host. You would have fought for control and probably won. Taking control of the body relies on the host’s obliviousness to the spirit’s presence.’