Legion, p.1
Legion, page 1
LEGION
Book Three of the Parric Trilogy
By Charles L. Grant
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Ptacek
Original publication by Berkley – June, 1979
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
Photo by Jeff Schalles
Charles L. Grant taught English and history at the high school level before becoming a full-time writer in the ’70s. He served for many years as an officer in the Horror Writers Association and in Science Fiction Writers of America.
He was known for his “quiet horror” and for editing the award-winning Shadows anthologies. He received the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award in 1987 for life achievement; in 2000, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from HWA. Other awards include two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards for writing and editing.
Charlie died from a lengthy illness on September 15, 2006, just three days after his birthday. He lived in Newton, NJ, and was married to writer/editor Kathryn Ptacek for nearly twenty-five years.
Book List
Horror
Novels
Black Oak: Genesis
Black Oak: The Hush of Dark Wings
Black Oak: Winter Knight
Black Oak: Hunting Ground
Black Oak: When the Cold Wind Blows
Fire Mask
For Fear of the Night
In A Dark Dream
Jackals
Millennium Quartet #1: Symphony
Millennium Quartet #2: In the Mood
Millennium Quartet #3: Chariot
Millennium Quartet #4: Riders in the Sky
Night Songs
Raven
Something Stirs
Stunts
The Bloodwind
The Curse
The Grave
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead
The Last Call of Mourning
The Nestling
The Pet
The Sound of Midnight
The Tea Party
The Universe of Horror Trilogy
The Soft Whisper of the Dead
The Dark Cry of the Moon
The Long Night of the Grave
Collections
Dialing the Wind
Nightmare Seasons
The Black Carousel
The Orchard
Science Fiction
A Quiet Night of Fear
Ascension
Legion
Ravens of the Moon
The Shadow of Alpha
As “Geoffrey Marsh”
The Fangs of the Hooded Demon
The King of Satan’s Eyes
The Patch of the Odin Soldier
The Tail of the Arabian, Knight
As “Lionel Fenn”
The Quest for the White Duck Trilogy
Blood River Down
Web of Defeat
Agnes Day
The Kent Montana Series
The Really Ugly Thing From Mars
The Reasonably Invisible Man
The Once and Future Thing
The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire
668, the Neighbor of the Beast
The Diego Series
Once Upon a Time in the East
By the Time I Get to Nashville
Time, the Semi-Final Frontier
The Seven Spears of the W’dch’ck
As “Simon Lake”
The Midnight Place Series
Daughter of Darkness
Death Cycle
He Told Me To
Something’s Watching
As “Felicia Andrews”
Moonwitch
Mountainwitch
Riverrun
Riverwitch
Seacliffe
Silver Huntress
The Velvet Hart
As “Deborah Lewis”
Eve of the Hound
Kirkwood Fires
The Wind at Winter’s End
Voices Out of Time
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For Andrea and Pete,
Who prove beyond doubt that two is indeed a legion of friends.
LEGION
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
I
The valley, broad and deep and capped by a sunsparked river, created from its image shadows, and from the shadows permitted structures to rise … structures that had once been a village of no small size, now spread through the trees to cover the valley floor to each of the slopes, to the river that ran clean despite the blood it had seen. A town without spires, without spirals, without central monoliths to rival the hills; a town deliberately in memory of the village that had spawned it in the vacuum of the PlagueWind. The roofs, then, were peaked and black, the walls white and simulating overlapping clapboard; there were narrow porches and narrow windows, small lawns and low hedging. A tree in the front yard for sitting and shade, another in back for climbing and swinging. That all were the same had made no difference at all to the androids that had occupied them before the ’Wind, made no further difference to the people who had fled there, to the people who were still fleeing there as the world sighed down and there was no place else to go.
It had been called Town Central, with smaller satellite communities scattered throughout the hills as far south as the Potomac. Where people learned to live with androids not quite human; where androids were programmed to live like humans. An experiment to bolster a flagging population and the resulting mirror economy. It might have worked had it been given the chance.
But there was the Wind.
And the dying.
And the village grew to a town, to a fervent small city that had survived and was growing, and was struggling to escape.
The streets were carefully marked—all angles, no curves—and served as playgrounds when the lawns would not do. And each of them without exception came to an abrupt end at the forest wall behind which grew the mountains that now defined a world. The forest wall, and an invisible barrier … a dome that was powered from deep beneath the earth and thrown up only at night when the hills grew black.
There were landcars, but seldom used; hovercats, but used scarcely at all. The streets for walking, and the tunnels that linked most of the larger buildings whose roots had grown rooms where the Government worked to climb into the air.
There were birds, but they were silent now in the first dark light of the sun’s slow retreat; there had been a wind, but it calmed now with the birth of grey shadows; and there were lights … in the houses, at the corners, scattered throughout the large park in the center where there was soft music and soft laughter, and the unspoken thanksgiving that another day had passed without the coming of the end.
And there were stars.
On the shoulder of the road that brushed by and above the city, Mathew stared up at them and wondered. Not of their distance from his scowl to their core, nor of their origins, nor of their planets. He wondered, rather, if any of them would be moving had they the chance. He knew it was something more than simple speculation—one of these days, or one of these years, one of those stars would pulse into a starship returning to base. The crew would be older; the Earth older still. The crew would be …; the Earth would be …
Good luck, Alpha, he thought as the scowl faded and died; there’s a hell of a lot down here who know you’re going to need it. And are you ever.
A Eurecom war, the PlagueWind an aside …
Good God, he thought, are you going to need it.
“Be careful, y ou Plaguedamned fools! You want to break your fool necks?”
He turned to the voice, his lips fighting a grin. Basil Kalen; massive at chest and shoulders, waist and hips, tall and taller for the shadows sweeping around him. He wore, despite the law of dark clothes outside the dome, a dizzying combination of daylight colors that did nothing at all for his sunred hair or the curiously black eyebrows that sprang from his forehead like spikes of dark iron. In spite of his anger he was grinning. He was always grinning.
Three men were hoisting a winding sheet bundle to their shoulders, were swaying under the weight while Kalen inserted into the unseen domewall a patchkey that disturbed the field that bound the air. Once done, the field parted and the men staggered through, a fourth moving ahead with a torchlite over the path.
“Incredible,” the giant said as he made to follow. Stopped. Turned slightly and looked at him. “You know, Mathew, you’re going to have to go now. That poor bastard has got to be the clincher.”
Mathew had found him.
He had been walking through the trees for no particular reason, had glanced up the path toward the road and had seen a dark figure pressed against the sky. A trick of the light, he’d thought, found that it bothered him and he moved closer.
It was a man, fallen against the power dome. His head was turned to one side, his arms up and over his head as he leaned against the inward curve. Mathew had his patchkey out and was running before he realized the man was dead. Blood, black and drying, slid down the domewall to the leaves at the feet of the corpse. Mathew could only stare, seeing a man frozen in the act of falling, in the act of dying. He’d summoned a team, then, and the man was identified as a member of a rehab crew sent out some weeks before.
“Well?” Basil asked without pressing.
“I’ll let you know,” he said.
Basil nodded. “Good. I’ll talk to you later, after I fill in Robbins.”
He vanished into the darkness spilling down the slope, and Mathew realized he had felt nothing, was feeling nothing for the murdered man. Only a faint and distant anger.
When the footfalls and the torchlite at last left him, he looked back to the stars and shrugged, as though they were watching and waiting for his reaction. Then he rubbed a palm against his loose-fitting blouse and turned to take the first step from the road to the trail, the triangular ’key already in hand.
“Wait a bit,” a voice asked him; and he waited.
Until the forest was silent again, and the birds disturbed by the dead man’s passing had settled back to their nesting. The lights of Central winked through the trees, drifting one by one to darkness as people moved to beds, to company in the yards, company in the park. The protection of Central was complete: from the road there was only a village again.
He looked down then, and offered one of his rare smiles. The man who had spoken was something less than short, especially in the wake of Kalen’s image. He had a deceptively old man’s weary face nearly buried beneath a tumble of moon-grey hair. The lines about his pale eyes and small mouth were deeply slashed, his chest broad, his hips narrow; and in one mottled hand was a constantly charged weapon that not once relaxed its vigilance as it swept nervously up and down the length of the road.
“Steel,” said Mathew with a grin, “you’re incredibly, poorly named, did you know that? Cat it should be, or something with trembles. Like Mouse. Or Birdling.”
Timothy Steel spat at the road. “You haven’t been around here at the right times, Matt,” he said, his voice cracking and high. “You wouldn’t say things like that if you’d been here a few winters ago.”
“A few winters ago I was burying my wife and my sons.”
Steel looked away quickly, as though he had been slapped. Tried for a deep breath that came more like a sigh. “All right,” he said, as if continuing was an effort, “I’m sorry, Matt. I asked for that. I wasn’t thinking, and I’m sorry. But what I want to know now is this: what are you going to do about it, damnit? All you’ve done in the past two years is play with the kids and take these dumb long walks. You vanish on a rehab mission, you come back with your team, and all you do then is play and walk. Blessed priest. Matt, aren’t you mad anymore?”
Mathew did not answer. If, in fact, there’d been anything to do—if, in fact, he’d wanted to do anything—the simplest would have been to harangue the young men until he’d had himself a hot-blooded army, then plunge through the forest and over the mountains and eventually return to Town Central bloodred in glory, return to ContiGov carrying back on a platter the cause of that which had been lost over the past few years. And it wasn’t that he was not tempted. He dreamed the campaign each night—though he’d never told Steel or Kalen about it—and each night attributed to himself grander feats of heroics than any dream before it.
And when he awoke, sometimes in sweat and always in cold, he wondered if dreams really were portents, and if portents really happened.
“Mathew.”
“What? Oh. Oh, I’m sorry, Tim,” he said quickly, with a shake of his head. “Sorry, but I was … well, I was away.”
“You’re always away,” the little man said sourly. “That’s your biggest problem, you know. You’re always away. You’re never here, damnit!” He grunted and tucked the handgun into his waistband, reached down and picked up a black piece of the road and tossed it angrily toward the city. It struck the domewall, rebounded and landed at his feet. “You know, Matt, I can remember a time when you would come into Dinko’s for a drink with a few friends, before your father died, and your mother. Lord, those were the nights, when you’d drink with the best of us and before the night was out haul out the stupid ivory dice. You’d head for the nearest corner of the room and dare us to make you your fortune. Dinko, you would say, we will now roll these harmless little dotted cubes for a bit of the world and a piece of the action. Dinko would stake you a drink or two, and you’d … well, you’d lose more often than not. Show you a lesson I learned at my mother’s knee, you’d say.
“But I’ll tell you this, Matt—she never taught you to lose, damnit. Not in a million years.”
“Tim, wait a minute.”
“I remember the day, not long after your father was killed, when you said goodbye to Dinko and took your first rehab mission. You were what, twenty-five? You took those damned dice with you, as I recall. And now you’re back and they’re not, and sometimes I wonder which was the more valuable.”
“Now hold it, Tim, please, I’m—”
“No,” Steel said, sidling away from his outstretched hand. “No, damnit. No more please’s and no more I’m tired’s. It’s time you came back all the way, Mathew, and stayed here for a change.”
“Tim—”
“Just tell me—if you’re still not in mourning, what’s wrong with you?”
“Tim, really, I’m—”
“Say it and I’ll break your arm. Robbins wants an answer tonight and you’re going to have to give it to him. You can’t delay it any longer.” He grabbed the ’key from Mathew’s hand and set it to the wall. “Matt, you’re not the ass with the dice that you like us to think. I know better. And you know I do.”
“Now that much I’ll admit is true. That much, at least, you can bet on.”
“That’s not bet, it’s a steal.”
Mathew groaned, slapped the man’s back so hard he nearly stumbled, then followed him through the temporary breach; and in following, thought that if there was ever a time for his legs to shortcircuit his reason and obey his instinct, it was now—knock Steel aside, grab the handgun and retreat from the city into the mountains south and west. It would take probably forever, but eventually he would reach his aunt and uncle and whatever army of cousins he must have by now. It was tempting, almost too much so, but he had no specific idea where they were, nor how long it would take him to get there … or even if they’d survived the trip they’d taken.
But he had to admit it was a pleasant temptation. More. An option. And one he hoped to choose before it was too late.
Several minutes later they broke from cover onto a street moving darkpaved around the city’s perimeter. They were in a primarily residential area where the homes had been left virtually untouched save for a few additions here and there as families expanded. Central’s Hive they reached after crossing the now-dark park—and here the structures were taller, and broader, and as gaily painted as imaginations allowed; a small-city face perpetually smiling, while the brains behind it existed mostly underground.
