The Faeman Quest

Forty-Eight

Hairstreak was in the forest for almost an hour before he heard the screams. They were some distance off, but carried an interesting degree of urgency. It was difficult to be certain, but he thought it might be a female scream. Specifically a girl’s.

‘What’s that?’ Aisling asked.

Aisling had been slowing things down. With his new body, Hairstreak could walk indefinitely without tiring, but Aisling was a bundle of complaints after the first few hundred yards. Her feet hurt. Her legs hurt. She scratched her hand on a thorn bush. She was out of breath. The forest was smelly. Couldn’t they rest a little while?

‘Somebody in trouble,’ Hairstreak said tritely. ‘You stay here: I’ll go and find out.’

He expected she might protest, but she only said, ‘Please be careful, darling.’

It was odd to be called darling, but he rather liked it. ‘Use your whistle if anything comes near you.’

‘Of course,’ Aisling said. She stood on tiptoe to give him a brief kiss. He liked that as well.

The scream came again.

Hairstreak flicked his new body into turbo mode and ran. Mostly he kept to the paths, but from time to time found it convenient to push his way directly through shrub and bushes. Although his mind was occupied, he was aware of the scrapes and scratches that resulted; and also the pain. Consolidated Magical Services had enabled the body to feel pain in the normal course of events, since pain was a necessary – and familiar – signal of malfunction. But the pain was less intrusive than it would be in a natural body and if it grew troublesome, he could always switch it off using a small stud built into his left nipple. On the whole, he was too distracted to care. The screams – they were definitely girlish screams – had to mean Mella was in trouble: after all, the forest was not exactly teeming with young women. She’d been caught by a manticore, perhaps, or fallen down and broken her stupid leg. But the question was, which Mella? With luck, it would be the real one. In which case he could finish her off and resume his search for the clone. But if it was the clone…

He kicked his speed up another notch.

The screams were continuous now, and closer. There was an overlay of other noises, an animal growl and a snapping sound like the breaking of bones. Someone was under attack, but so long as she was screaming, she was not dead. Hairstreak put on another burst of speed. He ran along a narrow pathway, then left it for a more direct route. He broke through a screen of bushes and found himself in a broad clearing. He was no longer alone.

The manticore seemed seized by a frenzy. It was crouched over the girl, stabbing at her viciously with its scorpion tail, tearing at her flesh with its hideous fangs. The girl’s clothing was ripped and her body streaming blood. If she had fought the beast when it first attacked, she was not fighting it now. Her body was as limp as a rag doll. Her eyes were closed, her throat bloody and exposed. The girl was Princess Mella, to judge from the remnants of her torn clothing. She was not the one screaming.

For Hairstreak, it felt as if he had been struck by a slo-mo spell. The pace of time dropped to a crawl. The great scorpion sting thudded like a background drumbeat, stabbing the ground in some hideous reflex now the girl was dead. He turned slowly towards the source of the screams and uttered a profound, slow prayer of thanks to the powers of Night: the girl screaming was the Mella clone, standing paralysed several yards from the manticore, her back against a tree. She looked terrified, but physically unharmed.

The manticore dropped the body of the girl and swung its head around to stare at him with glowing, insane eyes. It opened a mouth packed with bloodstained teeth and roared, a sound so vast the trees on either side of him reverberated and rustled their leaves. Then, still with the appalling slowness that characterised the whole encounter, it launched itself forward and began to run towards him. Rippling muscles propelled padded feet in stately haste.

The manticore was huge. This was the first one Hairstreak had seen close up, outside of the laboratory. They were about the size of a medium-sized dog when they were finally released into the wild, but it seemed as if they only started growing at that point. This one was larger than an ox, large as an elephant in height and appreciably longer when it uncurled the scorpion tail. Despite its size, Hairstreak pondered for a moment on the possibility of fighting it. At another time he would never have entertained the thought, but there was something in his new relationship with the Lady Aisling that spurred him towards heroic deeds. And it was a practical thought. His new body was virtually indestructible – or so the salesman claimed.

But there remained a weak point: his natural head was as vulnerable as it ever was. One crunch of those massive teeth and he was dead. He remembered a time when he would have welcomed that outcome, but that time was long gone. He was on the brink of the coup of his entire career, poised to rule the Realm and countries beyond, poised to become the greatest Emperor history had ever known. This gory scene showed beyond all doubt his luck had changed. Princess Mella was dead. Her terrified replacement stood unharmed only yards away. He would have to calm the clone down, of course, persuade her to forget the horror of the last few minutes. But she had always been amenable and he expected no trouble. So perhaps best to waste no time in dangerous heroics. Especially when Aisling was not even here to see them.

Slow time reverted and he was faced with a beast hurtling towards him at breakneck speed. For something so large, it managed to move with the swiftness of a striking snake. The long forelegs ate distance at an alarming rate. It was already more than halfway across the clearing. In seconds he felt a wave of heat from its foetid breath. Strangely, the predominant smell was that of ageing fruit. The creature roared. Hairstreak pressed the control on the whistle around his neck.

The tone was too high-pitched for faerie ears, but the manticore reacted at once. It stopped dead, only yards away from him and stood for a moment, swinging its great head from side to side. Then, in a curiously cat-like gesture, it raised one foreleg to brush against its ear, as if trying to remove a flea. A puzzled expression crept into its eyes and it backed off a few steps. Then, suddenly, it swung away, and bounded across the clearing. Hairstreak had assumed it would simply run, but it took time to swoop and grab the limp corpse of the dead Mella. It turned towards him, her body hanging from its mouth. (The face looked surprisingly serene in death.) Then the manticore blundered away into the depths of the forest.

‘Uncle Hairstreak!’ shrieked the Mella clone. ‘I was so frightened, but I knew you’d come to find me!’

He had been wondering if he might have trouble with his Mella clone since he entered the clearing and realised the two girls must have met. It was difficult to predict the effect of an encounter with one’s clone. It might even have shaken his Mella’s carefully induced determination to become Queen. But her words reassured him. She was still the same old Mella he had nurtured so carefully over the past few years. Hairstreak walked across and put one arm around her shoulders. She was trembling, but she looked up into his face with trusting eyes.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I need to get you home.’

‘To your Keep?’ asked Mella.

With a sudden surge of satisfaction, Hairstreak shook his head. ‘To the Purple Palace,’ he told her. ‘I think it’s time you took your rightful place.’