In which Tom Black meets the Master of the Upper and Lower Nile and Vinnie De Soth meets a demon temptress. Again.  Hijacked flight BA-19957 came in low over Cairo, its fuel tanks filled with only vapour after its unscheduled diversion past Heathrow, England. Air traffic control was already appraised of the situation, some kind of bizarre malfunction in the aircraft’s command and control systems which had diverted the plane all the way to Northern Africa. Now fire trucks and police vehicles and even a pair of army jeeps were stationed near the runway to take charge when the aircraft landed.Tom Black moved his seat to an upright position and returned his tray. Then he dissipated the little will o’th’ wisps he’d generated with his internal kaos energies, ending their possession of the navigation circuits and servos of the Boeing 727. Landing was best left to pilots trained for these kinds of emergencies. “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats,” came the captain’s voice. “When we land you will be escorted to the terminal for interviews. Arrangements are being made for a shuttle back to Heathrow.” “We do not need to wait,” Saladiya Hussein abd Ramah told Tom. He held out a badge to the first soldier aboard the downed aircraft, received a smart salute, and co-opted an escort to leave the plane. The heat hit Tom like a wave as he stepped from the air-conditioned compartment into the open. At first he thought it was the discharge from the cooling jets, but then he remembered that this was just what it was like in the middle east, dry and sweltering. A discreet black car purred across the runway and Tom was shepherded into air-conditioned luxury again. Nobody mentioned customs or passport control. The vehicle drove straight out of a side gate and off towards the heart of the city. “I’m curious,” Tom confessed as they threaded their way through three lanes of traffic, weaving perilously and driving lesser vehicles aside with a blare of the horn, “When and how did your secret boss come to power here anyhow?” “The master will tell you everything you need to know when you meet him,” abd Ramah promised. “Only I recall seeing a file that said that Koo Koo Ka Chuu was resurrected via some kind of ancient necromantic tome, possibly one of the many disguises of the Necronastycon, and that his first act on getting back was to kidnap an American superhero’s wife to become his bride. And then he got his arse kicked.” The government envoy twitched nervously. “That is… an incomplete account of things,” he replied. “So he didn’t get his plans trashed by characters called Jackie Rabbit and Little Guy? They didn’t grab the book and reverse his resurrection and leave him as a pile of dust?” Black enjoyed pushing buttons. “The stars at that time required that my master deal with old business from his last incarnation,” Abd Ramah snapped. “When he returned he transcended those needs and drew his power from another well.” “The Judas Casket?” speculated Tom. The Egyptian looked even more uncomfortable. “We may not discuss this,” he said at last. “We are approaching the palace.” Tom checked through the car window. They’d driven into the modern urban centre of the city, along Sudan Street then along the Shari 26 July over the Nile and the river island of Geziza, then down the eastern bank into the financial district. There were old buildings here, overshadowed by the steel and glass skyscrapers, relicts of the days of colonial occupation; but no palace. And then the air shimmered around the vehicle and the world changed. Suddenly Tom was not in a sleek 1970s limousine but rather in an ornate blackwood carriage drawn by four white horses. The tall mirror-glass towers were gone, replaced with three and four story white-clay houses with flat roofs and coloured awnings. Minnarets rose behind them, surmounting the high roofs of ancient temples and the great hall itself, home and palace of Koo Koo Ka Choo. “Okay,” Tom admitted, “that is a good trick.” Vinnie De Soth looked up from futile attempts at filling in his tax return as the beautiful raven-tressed woman called to him. “Vincent De Soth. I want you.” Vinnie put down his calculator and rubbed his forehead. “Did my mother send you?” he asked. That wasn’t usually the first question men asked Regret of the Damned when she smiled at them. “What?” she said. “My mother. I keep telling her I’m not interested, but she keeps on trying to pair me up with ‘suitable’ girls who can breed the next generation of miserable De Soths. Valentia Harrow. Opheli Incantatrix. The Coriomundi sisters, both of them. Druella of the Morgolath. Cousin Synne, even though we’d have two-headed kids. She even made them wheel out poor timid Francine Feywane, and it’s well known she gets sunburn from bright matches.” “Your mother did not send me,” Regret confirmed. Vinnie looked even more irritated. “Father, then. Look, just tell him I’m not coming back. I meant what I said when I walked out and I’m doing just fine without my inheritance. Relatively fine. I’m getting by. Mostly.” “Your father did not send me either, Vincent.” “Vinnie. I’m called Vinnie. Or Vin. Or the Vinster. Or hey you. But not Vincent.” “Fine. Vinny. I’m not here from your family, Vinny.” The young man with the pale face and the uncontrollable hair looked sceptical. “Are you sure? Because you’re not the first succubus that father’s sent down here to try and tempt me back into the family fold.” Regret blinked. “Succubus?” she said. “What makes you think…? I’m not a succubus. I don’t drain men’s souls. Well, not professionally. Maybe as a hobby. I’m more of a temptress, really. If I do any succubing it’s purely recreational.” “But you are a demon,” Vinnie accused her. “And you do have my father’s occult stink on you.” “I was bound by your father a while back,” Regret admitted, “but we parted company. I trust he’s still in pain after that incident at the Heck-Fire Club the other week?” “I don’t keep in touch,” Vinnie replied. “So you’re a freelance demon loose on Earth now? Hey, look at this.” He handed Regret a scrap of paper. “What is eeeeekkkk!” Regret replied, breaking into a low-pitched scream that rather interrupted the browsing of everyone else in Alto Tumour’s Second Hand Occult Books and Postcards store, “Dude, did you just nail a demoness with a sigil of binding?” asked an interested fat geek, peering round the corner to the scene going on under the shadow of the stairs. “Can I borrow her when you’ve done with her?” “He has not bound me,” Regret Kiskilla replied, sucking her fingers where the rune-paper had burst into holy flame. “I don’t bind that easily. Sometimes not until the second date.” “You’re new on Earth, right?” Vinnie calculated, looking carefully at his visitor. “An actual honest-to-Lucifer exile from the lower planes. You can’t get sent back there because you’re tied to this world now. Maybe even the world you first lived in before you metamorphosed into a fiend.” “How do you know I’m new?” Regret demanded. The conversation wasn’t going anything like the way it ought to by now. She shifted her shape and found herself looking like a young Chinese woman. “You’re new because you fell for the old ‘Hey, look at this’ trick,” Vinnie told her. “And fatboy was wrong about it being a sigil of binding. The last thing I need right now is a demon temptress bound to me. Mother would be far too pleased.” Regret gave up on the oriental girl and tried a graveyard-chic party ghoul on for size. “So what was the spell?” she asked. “That? Sigil of Truth,” Vinnie explained. “You can’t lie any more.” “Of course I… can’t,” Regret said, her eyes going wide. “Oh, this is terrible!” “You could rend me limb from limb, of course,” Vinnie admitted, “but then nobody would ever be able to break the sigil.” “I could torture you until you begged me to let you undo this curse,” the demon temptress said wrathfully; but then the sigil compelled her to add, “except that my employer has sent me here to hire you for a job, so I can’t. Damn, damn, damn!” Vinnie plugged in his battered old kettle to make them a cup of coffee. “Tell me more,” he said, very precisely. Koo Koo Ka Choo looked out over the desert landscape, admiring the way the sun set over the Nile washing the West Bank with blood. The seasonal floods had just passed and the land was lush and green. “There was a time,” he said, turning back to regard Tom Black, “when this realm was the most powerful in the world. All art, all science, all philosophy was born here. All civilisation.” “So not in Mesopotamia?” Tom checked. “Or Babylon? Or Atlantis?” “Here,” insisted the Lord of the Upper and the Lower Nile. “Here blossomed the ultimate flower of humanity. Here was perfection of society, of form and function. Every thing has its place, its season. In Egypt.” Tom looked down at the ragged paupers slopping mud from their recently flooded houses and trying to irrigate their corn fields. “So everyone was happy,” he answered wryly. “Everything was as it should be,” the sorcerer-king replied. “Before change came. Before the JumpingPapyriPowerEgyptian! and the Pigeonman and the Hooded Heretic and all that came after. Before they committed their great sins.” “I’m guessing they didn’t agree with you about the definition of a golden age,” Tom surmised. “Their greatest sin,” proclaimed Koo Koo Ka Choo, “was in releasing time into the world.” Tom nodded sagely as if he understood this. “That’s always a problem, that is,” he answered. “A total bugger.” “In my realm there was no time, save for the seasons as I ordained them. I was the morning and the evening star. All was as it should be, eternally, beneath the wheeling skies, above the dreaming sands.” He gestured out of the window at the scene from the balcony. “Like this.” “So you’ve come back and you’ve recreated a little world like you used to have it?” Tom ventured. The mage chuckled. “Oh no. I have reordered reality to be what it should be. What it once was, and now is again. The foul abomination of a city you saw as you travelled here, the Egypt all those visitors remember when they return to their foreign hovels, that is mere illusion. The true Egypt is here, now. And it slowly spreads.” “Like a fungal infection,” Tom muttered. He turned back to the mage-king and asked, “How big is it now, then? The true Egypt restored, I mean? The mud-and-sand-fest.” Koo Koo Ka Choo frowned as he perceived insolence. “The realm is now almost at the borders of this modern day nation. Soon my power will spread into Kush, and across the Great Deserts to Persia and Assyria and hated Babylon. And from there it will reorder the world.” “Okay,” Tom said. “How?” “How?” “Yeah, how. If you don’t mind me asking. But there’s got to be a power source for all this. I know you were a red-hot magician back six thousand years before Christ but nobody can repaint the whole world like that without some kind of back-up battery. So what’s your secret?” Abd Ramah and the priests in attendance to the sorcerer-king winced, but Koo Koo Ka Choo took the enquiry in good part. “My secret? My secret is that this is how the world is supposed to be. Ordered. Unchanging. There are many powers in this creation that are pleased to see the Earth return so.” “There have been a fair number of sponsored reality shift attempts recently, admitted,” Tom conceded. “But also, this creation is moulded by belief. Modern delusions have reshaped the world to be a globe, have pushed the gods and monsters into myth, have bound reality in restraints of physics. All because fools believed.” The mage-king gestured to the land beyond. “But when foreigners come here – tourists – and experience Egypt as it should be, then they believe differently. They go away thinking they have seen the ruins of a once-great empire, but in reality they carry with them the concepts of the eternal kingdom.” “You’re conquering the Parodyverse one tourist at a time?” The undead ruler snorted, amused. “If you choose to express it thus, yes.” “And the heroes that stopped you before? And that special lady you thought was the reincarnation of someone you’d had the hots for eight thousand years back?” “I am a man of passions, Thomas Black, but I do not enjoy being thwarted. I have learned from my previous errors. First I shall conquer all. Then I shall take the spoils and deal my revenge.” Tom nodded. He’d been worried that might be the case. “And this is the part where you tell me how I fit in to the master-plan, right?” Koo Koo Ka Choo nodded. “It is.” His smile was like an open grave. “So you want me to go to Egypt,” noted Vinnie. “Yes,” agreed Regret. “To help your evil kaos-filled master.” “Yes.” “And face down one of the most powerful occult figures in ancient history.” “Yes.” Vinnie pushed his hair back from his forehead and sighed. “And why would I be doing this?” he checked. “Because you will get paid time and a half,” suggested Regret. Vinnie knew then that she’d got him. “Well?” demanded the well-disguised figure under the heavy burnoose. The palace servant looked round nervously, as if there could be anyone else in the dingy crowded alley off the Street of Thieves. “You promised gold,” he whispered. “You promised information. Tell me the one and I shall give you the other.” The servant trembled. Sweat stained his grubby clout. “There is a visitor, as you said. A Westerner.” “And?” “And the master has greeted him and given him hospitality. He is set in a suite next to the master’s own, and he has been awarded Allitou as a bodyguard.” “That could be a problem,” came a soft female voice from nowhere the servant could see. He looked around in alarm. “Ignore her,” said the hooded stranger. “What does the mage-king want with this Westerner? He never brings the diplomats and dignitaries he suborns to his great hall.” “I do not know, I swear!” A wicked sabre was suddenly at the servant’s throat. “Work it out fast.” The palace slavey would have swallowed, except that would have gashed his own windpipe. “They say… they say he is the key to the master’s final triumph,” he confessed. “That this Westerner has the power to give my master all that he desires and to seal the Age of Koo Koo Ka Choo forever.” The stranger’s eyes narrowed. “Do they now.” Again that other woman’s voice: “What do they call this Westerner? What’s his name?” “Tom Black,” confessed the servant. “Please… I must go. Don’t kill me!” The stranger pressed a purse into the informer’s hands. “Do not speak to any of this. I will know, and my wrath will be terrible.” As soon as he was unpinned the servant pelted away, scrambling for his life. “Useful information, if true,” the woman’s voice said. “Useful indeed,” Desert Rose admitted to her sentient blade Aree. “It looks as if this Tom Black is going to have to die.” Continued in Tom Black #7: Death and Glory Thanks to Dancer for the image. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2008 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2008 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
