Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) Read online

  Big Lachlan was not impressed by witches. He sailed to Islay on Thursday because stormy winds prevented his going on Wednesday, and he landed at Ardnave in the shallow bay of Loch Gruinart on the north shore. The day was hot and sultry, and as he and his army marched inland along the Kilnave track to attack the Macdonalds, Big Lachlan stopped to take a drink at the forbidden well. Not long afterward, a strange sight met his eyes. Sitting atop a rock at the pathside was a horrible-looking creature all in black, with a head of snarled hair and a face almost invisible behind a filthy beard. It was the dwarf Dubh Sìth.

  “Good day to you, Big Lachlan,” said the little man. “I’ve come to offer my services, for I’m the finest bowman in Islay.”

  The giant chieftain of the MacLeans roared with laughter. “I’d not have such an ugly runt as you for love nor money,” said he. “Now begone before I set my deerhounds on you.”

  The Dubh Sìth melted away into the heather and bracken. Then he went by one of the secret underground ways that he knew to the place at the head of Loch Gruinart where Sir James Macdonald was waiting with his outnumbered force of defenders. The dwarf presented himself to Sir Jamie and made the same offer.

  “Well, we don’t have much of a chance, and you’ll never get your pay if we lose,” Sir Jamie said, “but I’ll hire you gladly.”

  “Let me worry about that,” said the Dubh Sìth. “And now farewell, for you won’t see me again until the battle’s won.”

  The army of MacLeans now fell howling upon the Macdonalds in the marshlands of Gruinart Strand, and the fighting was fierce and bloody for there were three times as many invaders as there were defenders. Before long the Macdonalds began to notice that more and more of their enemies lay fallen with black arrows through their throats or sticking from their eyes. But never a sight of the dwarf archer did they see.

  The MacLeans took note of their arrow-shot comrades, too, and word began to pass among them that the Dubh Sìth was lurking invisible, killing man after man and laughing like the Devil himself. Lachlan MacLean tried vainly to rally his force, but they were now stricken with fear and reminded him how he had disregarded the witch’s warnings. Many of them declared that they wanted to retreat.

  Big Lachlan threw his head back and cursed the witch with ringing shouts, and cursed the Dubh Sìth, and cursed his men for a pack of low cowards. But just then a black arrow came flying and pierced his throat above the steel gorget, and he crashed to the ground stone-dead near a hawthorn all covered with milk-white blossoms.

  Suddenly, a small shape leapt out of the thorn tree, shrieking with glee, and began capering around the fallen chief. It was the Dubh Sìth who had killed Big Lachlan MacLean, as well as scores of his men, by shooting them from his hiding place among the white flowering branches.

  When they saw the enemy chief fall, the Macdonalds took heart and shouted their battle cry and fought with fresh vigor. By the end of the day the marsh was heaped with three hundred MacLean bodies, and the invaders knew that they were beaten.

  They took up their wounded and began to flee back along the Kilnave track, toward the place where they had left their boats. Then a great storm broke and rain poured down in torrents. A crowd of MacLeans took shelter in the ancient church of St. Nave on the seashore, but the Dubh Sìth, who had followed the fugitive army through his secret underground tunnels, found out where they were hiding. He soaked rags in seal oil, tied these to his arrows, set the oil alight, then shot dozens of flaming missiles onto the wood-and-thatch church roof.

  In spite of the rain the roof blazed up, and the Dubh Sìth danced about madly while the trapped MacLeans burned to death in the sacred building.

  Now some of the victorious Macdonalds came on the scene, and they were horrified and disgusted at what the wicked dwarf had done.

  “Pay me!” the Dubh Sìth cried. “Pay me my weight in gold! For I slew Big Lachlan MacLean and sixty-three of his best fighters with my black arrows, and I have made a merry bonfire of this lot!”

  “You are no ally of Clan Donald,” the leader of the Islaymen said. “You have desecrated a holy church through wanton murder and you are fit only for the company of the Foul Fiend, Satan himself. You shall receive your payment for tonight’s work in hell.”

  The two strongest Macdonald men seized the Dubh Sìth by his arms and legs and began to swing him back and forth, for they intended to fling him into the inferno. “If I burn, then so shall ye,” cried the dwarf. “So shall ye all!”

  The Macdonalds gave a mighty heave and sent him flying through a window into the blazing church, and he uttered one last terrible cry before he disappeared into the roaring flames.

  But that was not the end of the Dubh Sìth.

  From time to time during the past four hundred and fifty years, people walking or riding in the lonely northern places of Islay have caught glimpses of a small, scuttling black figure. They came to call it the Kilnave Fiend, for very often after it was seen a person would disappear, and later a body would be found, burnt to a cinder.

  There are those who put the blame for those awful deaths on lightning, while others believe that the Dubh Sìth himself is responsible. They say that his ghost still prowls the bogs and moors of the island, and he pops in and out of the secret tunnels and caves that only he knows, laughing and taking his terrible revenge.

  “Dee? Are you asleep? Wake up! The ferry’s almost ready to dock.”

  She opened her eyes and saw Ken. Only Ken, standing over the deck chair she lay in, looking down at her with a condescending big-brotherly smirk.

  Slowly, she pulled herself to her feet and stretched. Had she really fallen asleep? It seemed that the melodious coercive voice of the woman named Magdala MacKendal still echoed in her ears. She remembered the vivid scenes her imagination—or something—had conjured up to accompany the story: the marshy battleground, the fighters in their breastplates and helmets, Lachlan MacLean bareheaded and gigantic, urging his men on, the flowery thorn tree with the hideous dwarf leaping out of it, the stormy night and the flaming church …

  She still felt unaccountably uneasy, even though the tale of the Kilnave Fiend was really rather tame when compared to Frankenstein or Aliens or Moon of the Undead or some of the other classic horror shows she had seen on the Tri-D.

  The ferryboat was pulling into its berth at Port Askaig, a steep little town with quaint whitewashed stone buildings and a great number of flower beds. Dee looked about the deck, but none of the women who now crowded the rail wore an elegant scarlet outfit, and none of the men were tall and blond and dressed in a gray Beau Brummel suit.

  “Come on,” Ken said. “They’re waiting for us.” He gestured to the deck beside the canvas chair. “And don’t forget your book-plaques.”

  Dee looked down in surprise. The small plaque was hers, of course, but the other was probably the one the dark-haired woman had been reading. Its title was Folktales and Fairy Lore of Islay and the Inner Hebrides. When Dee touched the corner activator she discovered that the book was handsomely illustrated in full color.

  In the table of contents she found “The Kilnave Fiend at the Battle of Gruinart.” When she called up the story and swiftly scanned it, she saw that the pictures exactly matched those she had “dreamed.”

  The ferryboat hooted.

  “Come on!” said Ken.

  Dee tucked both plaques into the kangaroo pouch of her anorak as she followed Ken back inside the passenger saloon. Perhaps she would see Magdala MacKendal again sometime during the holiday weekend, and she would be able to return the book.

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATBEN REMILLARD

  SHE WAS CALLED BY SO MANY DIFFERENT NAMES … AND THAT, too, was part of her mask.

  Dorothea Mary Strachan Macdonald was christened in the year 2057 at the tiny chapel of St. Margaret the Queen in Grampian Town on the continent of Beinn Bhiorach on the planet Caledonia, the first “Scottish” ethnic colony. Her mother, the operant psychophysicist Viola Strachan, called her baby girl by the nick
name of Dody. So did the monster known as Fury, in its later attempts to intimidate and destroy her.

  Her father, Ian Macdonald, called her Dorrie, a name that she did not like very much because (she told me years later) it seemed as though it properly belonged to a pretty little doll-faced girl with golden ringlets and melting eyes who was the apple of her doting Daddy’s eye.

  But her hair was an unexceptional brown, and her face was plain but pleasingly heart-shaped. While her eyes were an interesting hazel color, they were also close-set, piercing, and disconcerting—and they did not weep easily, nor did they readily reveal the secrets of the mind behind them. Her troubled father Ian did undoubtedly love her in his fashion, but the little girl finally realized that he would much rather have had a brawny second son who would have assuaged his disappointment over Kenneth. Even worse, she had hidden within her tremendous mental faculties that Ian feared … almost as much as she feared them herself.

  Her beloved older brother Ken called her Dee, and this was also the first name she called herself, because it could have belonged to either a male or a female—or even to something that was not a person at all. Janet Finlay, Ian Macdonald’s crusty factotum, called her Doro. The nonborn fosterlings and the hired hands at the family airfarm teased her by calling her Dodo in her early years, when her mindpowers were still mostly latent. Much later they would respectfully style her Dirigent, after she assumed the metapsychic leadership of Caledonia.

  Her grandmother, the colorful Rebel stalwart Masha MacGregor-Gawrys, never called her anything except Dorothea.

  To the awesome Lylmik, who were her tutors and ultimately her canonizers, she was Illusio, the evasive one, because the physical perception of her gave no hint of her true nature.

  Jack the Bodiless, himself a profound human anomaly, gave her the name Diamond—at first ironically, then later in the clear blaze of newfound love.

  I, who am an antediluvian Franco-American, obstinately clinging to remnants of the tongue of my Québecois forebears, always called her Dorothée, which a speaker of Standard English would pronounce dor-oh-TAY. She said she liked that name best of all. But perhaps she was only trying to be kind to an old man who loved her even before she showed me what lay behind her mask.

  It was none other than the Family Ghost who directed me to introduce the grandparents of Dorothée, and it was through them that I eventually came to know Diamond Mask herself.

  Kyle Macdonald was a charming, hard-drinking author of popular science fiction novels and Tri-D scripts. He was no littérateur, only a competent journeyman writer with a fine comic flair who made a lot of money at his trade and frittered most of it away at the night spots and casinos of Earth and the cosmop worlds.

  We first met in 2027, when Kyle was only twenty-one and enjoying the controversy provoked by his first outrageous novel, Prometheus Regnawed. We chanced to be lubricating ourselves side by side in the hotel bar at a World Fantasy Convention in Sydney, Australia, when a trio of well-sloshed local fans let their literary criticism get offensively verbal (Macdonald’s novel featured a blockheaded Aussie character) and then physical. My innate Franco chivalry resented the odds against the embattled young author, who was brawny but unskilled in the martial arts, and I lent him moral support and a friendly fist or two to scatter the ungodly.

  We celebrated our victory with triple drams of Lagavulin 16, discovered that we had compatible bibliophilic tastes, and I wound up promising to help him dispose of some valuable Roger Zelazny collector’s editions he had inherited. Kyle lived in Scotland, so we only managed to get together at the occasional fantasy or science fiction con to lift a jar, but we gossiped rather often over the teleview. I helped him with literary research, and from time to time he purchased rare old paper-printed fantasy items by mail from my antiquarian bookshop in New Hampshire.

  Kyle Macdonald was not a metapsychic operant like me. He was, as were some 26 percent of humanity at that time, a normal possessing significant MP latencies, meaning that he carried the genes for higher mindpowers and had potentially strong metafaculties tucked away deep within his cranium—but for various reasons the powers were unusable. Sometimes latents were spontaneously raised to operancy by severe psychic trauma, but the more usual means involved specialized therapy by meta preceptors, using techniques pioneered by Catherine Remillard and her late husband Brett McAllister. But Kyle Macdonald’s enormous font of latent creativity proved to be quite inaccessible—except insofar as it fueled his imagination and enabled him to earn a living as a writer of fantastic fiction.

  My friendship with Macdonald might have remained casual if a certain Ghost had not intervened, commanding me to attend the 2029 World Fantasy Convention in London. I was ordered to make certain that Kyle met a young woman named Mary Ekaterina MacGregor-Gawrys, whom I myself would have to squire to the con and introduce to him.

  Of all the humans possessing metapsychic powers in the mid twenty-first century, three families stood out: my own Franco-American clan, headed by Denis Remillard and his wife Lucille Cartier, the MacGregors of Scotland, and the Gawrys-Sakhvadzes of Polish-Georgian descent, who at that time lived mostly in England. Mary MacGregor-Gawrys, who was usually called Masha, was then a student at Oxford, where her parents Katharine MacGregor and Ilya Gawrys headed an important metapsychology research group at Jesus College. I had no acquaintance with Masha, but more distinguished Remillards than I—notably my nephew Denis—knew the MacGregor and Gawrys clans well. Once I had determined that the young woman enjoyed reading fantasy, I was able to trade shamelessly upon Denis’s name and concoct a scheme that successfully lured her to the convention and to her destiny with Kyle Macdonald.

  In spite of the fact that their minds were disparate, the two young people fell instantly in love. Brilliant, operant Masha, who had lived only for her studies up until then, was enchanted by Kyle’s dynamic personality, his roguish good looks, and his screwball sense of humor. He in turn thought she was the loveliest creature he had ever seen, with a cascade of shining red hair, eyes like living emeralds, and a passionate temperament that she had successfully kept under control until Kyle Macdonald inspired her to cast restraint to the winds.

  To the horror of her academic family, Masha dropped out of Oxford to spend the winter with the dashing Scottish scribe in his cruck-frame cottage on a windswept, romance-laden Hebridean island. The following spring the pair announced that they would marry. Masha was carrying Kyle’s child, a boy of great metapsychic potential whom they planned to name Ian. The Gawrys and the MacGregor families gritted their teeth, shielded their thoughts well, and professed to be delighted. The newly-weds planned to move into more civilized digs in Edinburgh once the baby was born. Meanwhile, Kyle finished writing his second madcap transmedia best-seller, Nijinsky Takes a Quantum Leap.

  Ian was born three months prematurely, but he was a sturdy child and he throve under intensive neonatal care, seeming little the worse for his abbreviated tenure in the womb … except that his substantial metafaculties, like those of his father, proved to be intractably latent.

  When it became evident that her firstborn son would not achieve operancy, Masha fell into a profound depression and seemed to lose interest in the baby. A nanny was hired and the young mother enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. There she resumed her studies under the benevolent eye of her maternal uncle, Davy MacGregor, who would later be appointed Planetary Dirigent of Earth.

  During the next five years Masha and Kyle had three more children, Lachlan, Annie Laurie, and Diana, all powerful operants. Kyle’s comic novels continued to top the best-seller lists and four of them were converted into blockbuster Tri-D shows. The most notable, Cream Cheese for Birkhoff’s Bagel, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2036, and only lost because of the enduring prejudice of the Hollywood cinéaste establishment against any production smacking of sci-fi.

  Masha earned doctorates in medicine and metapsychology, eventually deciding to devote her talents to latency research. At the same time,
her relationship with her husband grew stormier and stormier as a widening gulf opened between operant wife and nonoperant husband. Their quarrels were Homeric, especially when Masha took Kyle to task for neglecting his writing in favor of the more amusing perquisites of authorship—parties, travel, and the occasional overly attentive female fan. He was also an enthusiastic tosspot (one of the reasons we two got on so famously). The pressures of Kyle’s celebrity, Masha’s increasing impatience with his frivolous behavior, and her preoccupation with her own important work eventually caused the marriage to break down. They separated in 2044, but over the years there would be reconciliations, and they were never formally divorced.

  Happy-go-lucky insensitive egotist that he was, Kyle had never considered the possibility that Masha would actually abandon him and take the children. His writing career faltered, and for six years after she chucked him out of their Edinburgh home he produced nothing, passing the time in drinking, gambling, sexual dalliance, and touring colonial planets of the Human Polity, supposedly in search of inspiration.

  In 2051, when he was nearly broke, he attempted to pull himself together and wrote another novel, Mustangs of the Sombrero Galaxy. After this proved to be an excruciating flop, he emigrated with his tail between his legs to the Scottish ethnic world of Caledonia, where he became Writer in Residence at the colony’s small University of New Glasgow. He taught creative writing classes to earn bed and board in the faculty apartments and spent most of his free time in seedy pubs, ranting against perceived injustices in a Galactic Milieu run by elitist operants such as his perfidious wife, and cadging free drinks from science fiction fans who remembered his days of glory. When the Rebel faction expanded to include normals as well as metapsychic operants, he became one of its most eloquent literary proponents, achieving polity-wide notoriety as well as an improved bank balance by writing dark satires traducing the Milieu.