The Power of Five Oblivion

had been educated, taken to theatre and opera, encouraged to read. If he became sick, doctors would look after him. He could not imagine scrabbling in the mud like the people he was looking at now. People? It wasn’t even the word for them. They were little more than animals.
    “A glass of white wine?”
    The chairman had slipped into the office behind him and stood there with a bottle in one hand.
    “Thank you, sir.”
    “I’m afraid it’s not quite chilled. Even here in the United Nations, the power is not completely reliable. It goes on and off. Please, take a seat…”
    The chairman seemed younger than he had on the stage, as if he had put the effort of his long speech behind him and could now relax. He moved carefully into the room and poured two glasses, then took his place behind the desk. Jonas took a glass and sat on a leather sofa. It occurred to him that he knew nothing at all about the chairman – where he lived, whether he had a family, or even his name.
    “Your very good health, sir,” he said.
    “No, Jonas. I’m afraid you’re drinking to something that doesn’t exist. I’m old and my body is full of cancer. Fortunately, I have drugs to contain it but the truth is that I may not have more than a year left. Maybe we should drink to the Old Ones. And to the new world that they’re helping to create.”
    “Of course.” Jonas sipped his wine. It was excellent. He wondered how many hundreds of dollars the bottle would have cost.
    “So what did you make of the conference?” the chairman asked. His face gave nothing away. There were so many folds, so many lines that it was barely more than a leather mask.
    “I thought it was amusing,” Jonas replied.
    “The other delegates may not have agreed.”
    “I’m sure they didn’t.” Jonas paused for a moment, swirling the wine in his glass. “What did you mean by ‘adjusted’ – if you don’t mind my asking?”
    “Adjusted?”
    “You said that some of them would be adjusted in the training camps.”
    “Oh yes.” The chairman sounded uninterested. “They’ll have their hands or their arms cut off and replaced with saws and blades. It’s very hard for a soldier to lose his weapon when he is the weapon. Some of them will be disfigured in other ways. Their faces will be altered to make them uglier. You take someone’s lips away, they never stop snarling. They’ll all be branded – name, rank and serial number. It makes them feel they belong. And it terrifies the opposition.”
    There was a pause. The two men sipped their wine.
    “Does it ever bother you, Jonas?” the chairman asked. “When the Old Ones have finished with you, they’ll probably kill you too.”
    Jonas shrugged. “That won’t happen while I’m still useful to them.”
    “And do you think you still are?” He paused. “Useful?”
    “I’m sure I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t, sir.” Jonas leant forward. “I’ll do anything to prove myself. You only have to ask.”
    “That’s good.” The chairman set his glass down. His eyes became hard. It was time for business. “You’ll be leaving today for Italy. We have two prisoners for you to deal with. They were captured a couple of weeks ago in the Abbey of San Galgano, just outside the city of Lucca.”
    “Two of the Five?”
    “Exactly. There was something I didn’t explain back in the conference hall, but you need to understand it as it’ll make sense of your mission. In fact, it’s very important.”
    “Please go ahead, sir.”
    “Well, it concerns the Five. I said there were five children at the battle ten thousand years ago and five children now – and, as I explained, they’re the same five children. But what I should have added was that, somehow, they have the ability to exist in two different times, simultaneously. More than that, they can replace themselves. Take the girl, for example. If you killed her today, she would be replaced immediately by the girl from ten thousand years ago.”
    “So you’d need to kill her a second time.”
    “Exactly. But you’d have to find her first and that might not be so easy. You see what I’m getting at, Jonas? If we want to control them, we have to keep them alive. We can lock them up. We can hurt them. But it’s better for us if they don’t die.”
    “Is that how they won … the last time?”
    “Yes.” The chairman nodded. “There were five armies but they were hopelessly outnumbered. All the forces of the Old Ones – the