The Phoenix Variant

Chapter 3-1

Chapter Three

Denton settled the mostly consumed wine bottle on the table and stacked the trays of prisoner food to his chest. There were only six, fortunately. He started down the observation tower’s stairwell, metal lantern hanging from two fingers. The stairwell took him to the dungeon. Each cell contained two prisoners, limbs whittled and eyes faded.

He dropped the trays on the floor and pushed them under the cell doors with his boot. The trays contained a bowl of soup, sometimes brown, sometimes green. His father had made an effort to add bread rations, wanting the prisoners in better shape if a Phoenix virus did emerge. Denton hadn’t been hopeful but he kept the bread on the trays because he couldn’t be bothered removing it.

He placed the last trays before the third cell and noticed one of the prisoners standing. That’s new, he thought. The man was no older than himself. He had greasy, knotted hair and dirt-filled fingernails.

‘You are different from the others,’ the man said.

His words were barely louder than his breath.

Denton pushed a tray in. ‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Why is an American helping the Nazis?’ the man said.

‘Why not?’ Denton kicked the other tray in. ‘The food’s great.’

‘You don’t help anyone,’ the man said, louder this time. ‘Unless it helps you.’

Denton considered knocking the man down but it was too much effort to open the cell door. He hadn’t finished that bottle of wine yet. ‘Is this a new discovery you’ve been working on?’ he said.

‘You were betrayed.’ The man frowned. Confusion seemed to pass over him like a shadow. ‘You weren’t meant to come back.’

Denton was on the edge of walking away, but he found the feeble man curious. ‘By who?’ he said, scooping up the square-shaped lantern from the ground.

‘I don’t know.’ The man’s gaze dropped to the trays of soup.

The conditions in this place must have driven the man to madness.

‘It might be the soup,’ Denton said.

‘But you are angry,’ the man said. ‘Like smoke in the air. You are restless. There’s an itch—’

‘That I can’t scratch. It’s on my left just here—’ Denton pointed to his lower back ‘—do you think you can get to it?’ he said.

‘It’s worse than you think,’ the man said.

‘Are you some kind of witch? You know, they used to burn witches in this castle. We could rekindle that for you.’

‘I’m just a tailor,’ he said. ‘Or I was. I don’t know what I am now.’

‘Nothing,’ Denton said. ‘Nothing anymore.’

The man seemed confused. ‘You talk of yourself?’

‘Yes,’ Denton said. ‘But I’m also quite drunk.’

His hands closed around the bars of the cell. The lantern clanged against the iron. He needed some wine. Well, more wine. But he lingered at the cell for a moment. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Yiri Novotný,’ he said.

‘Eat your soup, Yiri.’

Denton left the deranged Yiri to eat his nutritionless soup and returned to the kitchen. Bottle in hand, he walked through the Hall of the Knights, past the long table and toward the senior officers’ quarters. The meteorite fragments had been cleaned up—no doubt his father, a hoarder if there ever was one, had stowed them somewhere safe. The silk text was still on the long table, untouched since Sievers’s visit that afternoon. The light of Denton’s lantern scattered across its hard plastic cover.

He opened it, almost ripping the front page from its binding, and flicked through. The primitive drawings of each comet looked more like branches sprouting from seeds in the ground. He knew as they breached Earth’s atmosphere they became meteors. Beneath each circle—or meteor head—an annotation: a thin strip of Chinese characters. On the opposing page, Denton could see the matching words in German.

Comets are vile stars.

They wipe out the old and establish the new.

Maybe it was the viruses, sprinkled with comet dust or dispersed from a nearby meteor impact. Maybe the viruses helped the evolution of new species.

Fish grow sick, crops fail, Emperors and common people die, and men go to war. The people hate life and don’t even want to speak of it.

‘Vile stars,’ Denton muttered as he leafed through the pages.

If this text was to be believed, everything from smallpox to the common cold could have come from space. The silk stories certainly explained his father’s obsession with the Spanish flu and good old Encke.

He reached the final pages and noticed the word Fenghuang and, next to it, Phönix.

The last leaf had pictures of three comets under the title Di-Xing, the long-tailed pheasant star. The three comets connected by three drawn lines. A single character labeled each. He checked the German translations.

The Detector

The Recognizer

The Scryer

The character in the center of the comets was not for any comet but rather the group, or the combination of all three. He peered at the dark ink. It was older than those with which he was familiar, an ancient seal script. It was less rectangular, more decorative in appearance. The character looked like a man with a sharp spike emerging from his head. It translated to The Controller.

Below the illustrations were streams of Chinese characters. The translations described three Phoenix comets as rare, and made of otherworldly metals.

Denton turned the final page to discover more German translations.

The Detector — a shaman with high sensitivity to the aroma of people; a fragrance or smoke that betrays words, mood, health and humanity.

Denton smirked. ‘That’s loony-town.’

He swilled the last of his wine and planted the bottle on top of the plastic cover. He checked his watch. It was still early, half ten, so he decided for another visit to the wine cellar, re-opened by his disgusted father. Just half a bottle tonight: he’d save the rest for the morning.

Lantern in hand, he walked the open grounds of the terrace to the cellar. The stark, primal drawings of the meteors were imprinted in his vision as he looked at the stars. The night’s air was chilled, silent. He stopped walking. The calls of the owls he’d grown used to were absent. He looked over his shoulder at the machine-gun sentry on the parapet walk. The machine gun sat on its tripod, glimmering in the moonlight. The sentry was missing from his post.

There was always a snugly dressed soldier on the machine gun.

Denton’s heart kicked.

He broke into a run. Back for the hall, one hand gripping the lantern, the other reaching for his Polish Vis pistol. An explosion rang from the terrace, the sound rippling and bouncing off the castle walls. The hall windows shattered from the pressure of the explosion. He ducked inside. It took a moment to figure out where the explosion had come from. It was surely the southern wall, which faced the terrace. But there was a precipice below the southern wall, just as there was a precipice on the western wall and a steep drop on the north. How could someone even attempt to access the castle from such a steep angle?

Gunfire cracked across the terrace.

‘OK, so definitely the southern wall,’ he muttered.

Snuffing the lantern, he crouched and moved for the nearest window. He hoped to catch a glimpse of the attacking force and their strength. He knew his Polish pistol wasn’t quite up to the task. He watched seven soldiers move whisper-silent across the snow-coated terrace grounds. They moved for the senior officers’ quarters—right where he kept his rare MP 41 submachine gun and magazines taped in pairs.

The soldiers hadn’t spotted him at least. They wore dark wool jackets, small packs over their shoulders. They were carrying belt kits with holstered pistols, but no webbing. The soldiers were traveling light with mixed weapons, mostly M1 carbines.

Maroon berets.

Paratroopers, he thought. British.

They were supposed to be in France. So much for retrieving the submachine gun then. There was only one way out and that was through the gatehouse and over the moat.

He crawled across the floor, reached the long table and snatched the silk text. The bottle fell from the table. He lunged for it. The bottle landed in his palm. His fingers clamped over it. He breathed for the first time in a minute.

He could hear distant shouts in German, some faint scuffling and single pops from a pistol. Leaving the bottle on the ground, he clenched the silk text under one arm—the plastic too rigid to roll or fold—and moved for the keep.

He aimed his Viz pistol at the figure in the dungeon. Yiri’s cell was already unlocked but he was still hunkered inside.

‘What are you doing?’ Denton hissed.

His father turned to face him, his own Colt .45 pistol in his hands. ‘You’ve been drinking. Lower your weapon.’

‘Someone blew my cover in Norway,’ Denton said, pistol still aimed. ‘Was it you?’

‘You’ve been drinking,’ Alastair said. ‘I needed Victor, why would I endanger that?’

‘Then why isn’t Victor here with you?’ Denton said. ‘Not valuable enough to save?’

‘Sometimes we make sacrifices.’

Denton lowered his Viz to his father’s legs, but no lower.

‘What are you doing here?’ Alastair said.

‘Same as you, it seems,’ Denton said. ‘Taking our Phoenix virus with us.’

His father had a small leather bag slung over one shoulder. Denton knew the meteorite fragments would be inside.

‘Looks like you finally got what you asked for,’ Alastair said. ‘A little bit of excitement.’