Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  Abi’s face flashed in the dark, eyes wide with anguish. ‘Cade, calm down!’

  Her voice steadied him a moment, and he held his shaking hands before him, long enough to realise the lightning didn’t burn. It merely prickled his hands, fizzing like blood returning to a numbed limb. Impossible.

  ‘Steady, Cade,’ said Abi. ‘I think I know what’s happening.’

  She was laughing. Why was she laughing? Cade didn’t want to know. He wanted no more of this terrible new world. He wanted it gone. He wanted blue skies and familiar green. The maelstrom in his hands intensified, seeming to feed upon his distress. He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to be gone from this place. He brought his hands together, gathering the coruscation, then hurled it away with a cry of rage.

  The blast of lightning struck the gates, shattering the ancient lock as it shoved the doors aside with a groan that shook the chamber. Behind them stood a crumbling wall of roots wallowing in blessed emerald moonlight.

  Cade fell whimpering into Abi’s arms, his hands smoking and shaking as the archway’s lintel sagged high above, dribbling dust. She pulled him through the rain of crumbling dirt. The debris rattled on the floor behind them as they clambered up the screen of roots. Cade heard the lintel come free with a momentous gasp. A torrent of earth and stone followed after it. The deluge thundered to the ground, shaking the wall of roots to which he clung, deafening him. Choked by the uproar of dirt and blinding dust, he climbed on, spurred by the sight of the pale green moon peering through an aperture in the earthen ceiling.

  Cade clawed his way up through the soil, pulling clods of turf down upon Abi as he fought his way through the hole, hungry for the air of the outside world. She struggled up after him, tearing the rags of her skirts as she hauled herself through the gap. Cade glanced back through the hole at the mounting wall of collapsed rock and earth.

  Nothing could get through that, he told himself. Nothing.

  An enormous oak whispered above him. He pulled himself out from between its roots and fell onto a grassy slope, gasping in the fresh night air. The mountains of the Cradle rose behind him. Before him lay the Lands Beyond.

  Cade knelt on a grassy shore before an ocean of corn, deep enough to drown in. The shaggy stalks stood taller than any crop that grew in the Cradle, their stiff leaves clacking in the night breeze. The rows combed the land all the way to distant hills patched with farmland. And beyond them one would find cottages, towns, even cities, all populated by strangers who knew nothing of life within the Cradle. He was no longer looking down upon this world as if studying a map. He was now part of it, thrillingly vulnerable to all it might contain. Yet his wonder soured as his reason returned. He shuddered to think of Abi seeing him so unmanned before those awful gates. He felt suddenly naked, piteous in his terror. Throne forgive him, he had even struck her. He clutched the ground with his wounded fingers, welcoming the pain.

  Abi stood in silence nearby. As he struggled for words, Cade felt subtle currents shift in the air. Light flickered nearby. He turned to see threads of lightning squirming over Abi’s knuckles. As she watched the little bolts play about her fingers, Cade recognised her look of awe. He had seen it before when she had stood by the boundary stone and surveyed the Lands Beyond for the first time. The lightning vanished obediently as she closed her hand.

  She looked up at him, grinning despite her bloody nose.

  ‘I was right,’ she said, delighted. ‘This is what they were keeping from us for all these years. The boundary stones, Cade. They cast a pall to hide us from those that would hunt us, as I said. But they did so by cloaking our abilities, by cutting us off from whatever sphere we derive these powers. But now that spell is broken. The veil has been lifted from our eyes. Now those energies could be ours to command.’

  Cade did not want to think about ‘energies’, about how he had destroyed those unbreakable gates. All he wanted was as much distance as he could muster between himself and that which had hunted them through the metal catacombs beneath the Tor.

  From the north, those storm clouds had now conquered the sky, blotting out the stars and reaching for the pale green moon. He hungered for dawn to arrive and chase them away, give him time to think, to make sense of his shattered world. The destruction of the Cradle, the Nothings, lightning conjured out of the air. The cornfield began to whirl sickeningly, forcing him to look away.

  Abi paced about, oblivious to his disquiet as she jabbered on. ‘Our folks brought us to the Cradle as babes, brought us there for our protection. They must have known what we are.’

  ‘Our parents are dead, Abi. We were brought to the Cradle because tradition demands every foundling be raised there.’

  ‘Perhaps our parents still live,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we were told they were dead to keep us from leaving. We cannot trust anything we’ve been told, Cade. The world is bigger than we knew. This morning, did you think the Tor could have been anything other than what you have been told it was?’

  Cade recalled those iron halls wrought by some unimaginable race, the ancient frieze of that laurel-horned monarch, a mocking echo of the world he once knew. The thought that his parents may still live felt yet more fantastical. His mother and father had been so complete an absence in his life, they may as well have never existed.

  Cade groaned, his fists bunching the grass.

  ‘Don’t hide from this, Cade. Don’t hide from what you know you are.’

  ‘No, Abi.’

  ‘We’re witches.’

  The words seemed to vibrate as Cade heard them, blurring the world and its few remaining certainties.

  ‘And not just us,’ said Abi, relentless. ‘Everyone in the village, every orphan in the Cradle. Mother Alder. Even Barrion. Everyone!’

  ‘How could that be, Abi? They would have known. Wouldn’t they?’

  ‘How could they have known when none of them ever set foot outside the boundary? Not even the Matriarchs.’ Her eyes flashed with mounting excitement as she hounded her thoughts, chasing a grand revelation. ‘It’s why we were told never to leave, never to think. It’s why I was forbidden from questioning the scriptures. Everything we did, everything we were taught, every­thing we worshipped was to keep us hidden from those that might harm us, from superstitious folk, from creatures like the Nothings. All was done to preserve the lie.’

  Cade wished he could fault her logic.

  ‘If it was done as you say, Abi, then it was done to keep us safe. The Father, the Matriarchs, they sought to protect us.’

  Abi smiled darkly. ‘Well, I no longer need protection.’

  The certainty in her voice unnerved him. ‘Even if you’re right, Abi. We still must be cautious.’

  Cade’s head throbbed. The Nothings were near. He imagined them scrabbling below ground, perhaps even burrowing like worms through the barricade of rubble that had descended beneath the tree. Abi muttered to herself, absorbed in her own epiphanies. Cade stared at the hole between the roots of that great tree, half-expecting pale faces to emerge. They were definitely near. He could feel them like a precipice at the rim of his senses, an absence waiting to engulf him.

  ‘I’ll be a slave to guilt no longer,’ said Abi. ‘Not for the crime of knowing the truth.’

  Cade stared at the hole, realising that his eyes could linger there without pain. There was nothing there. Nothing. Surely nothing, though he could feel something’s gaze upon him from somewhere. Stubble bristled on the back of his neck.

  He turned to look out across the corn.

  The rumbling storm clouds obscured the moon. Gloom was descending.

  Abi was nodding to herself. ‘And if that power be bought in blood, then I swear to honour its cost.’

  ‘Abi?’ Cade pointed into the distance.

  Things were moving through the corn, steadily ruffling the leafy avenues. Though it burned his eyes to do so, Cade counted at least six of them
, still far away but steadily advancing. Cade felt the icy cloak of terror settle upon his shoulders once again. Those that had pursued them through the Tor had been left buried to the south, while the ones that attacked the village must still be within the Cradle. These were approaching from the north, shadowed by the storm. Were the Lands Beyond infested with Nothings?

  ‘The scrolls,’ said Cade, his mouth dry. ‘Did they tell you where next we might run?’

  ‘Why would we run now?’ she said.

  Cade felt a fresh ripple of terror, thinking she may have gone mad.

  ‘Remember what you did to those gates?’ she said, eager and excited. ‘Think what destruction we could summon together. We could blast these things back to the realm that spawned them.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ said Cade, his voice quivering.

  ‘There is nowhere we can run that the Nothings cannot follow,’ she said. ‘We need to stand and fight them.’

  The thought of facing such darkness again stole his voice away. He tugged at her arms, whimpering like an impatient child. She shook him steady.

  ‘I may not be able to destroy them alone,’ she said. Her voice was firm, though bubbled with fear. Her eyes were bright in the darkness, expectant. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said.

  Those words steadied him like magic, recalling his shame before the gates of the Tor, a memory he longed to obliterate. He stiffened, making ardent promises in his head to stand by her, protect her, tear apart with bare hands any horror that threatened her if it would but prove himself a man in her eyes.

  His hand found hers and something shivered in the air between them. The clouds devoured the last of the moon, obscuring the cornfield and all that lurked there as they ran down the hill and plunged into crackling blackness.

  Cade dashed as stealthily as he could between the ragged walls of corn, shielding his eyes from the deluge of leaves. He gripped Abi’s hand as she followed, as sightless as he. The soil underfoot felt soft and treacherous, keen to twist an ankle as they ran.

  Cade halted. Abi bumped into him, breathing hard. He heard a steady crackle nearby, leaves disturbed by the passage of something other than the wind. He tugged Abi and they moved on. His hand was numb from squeezing hers. Something throbbed between them like a heartbeat. Together they would banish the thing back to the netherworld with a rush of lightning, perhaps set the corn ablaze in doing so, then flee as the conflagration consumed the others. He blundered through another wall of stalks, pain beginning to knuckle at his temples, announcing the presence of the Nothings.

  What was he doing? This was folly, glorious insanity. Cade welcomed the waves of fear he felt crashing through him. Abi groaned beside him, their grip now squirming with sweat. He hurried on, the blackness settling into a jungle of dark shapes as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The pain in his temples burrowed into the backs of his eyes.

  He paused again to listen. Something crunched nearby. The sound was blurred somehow, as if his ears fought to reject it, though the creature’s tread was unmistakably heavy. Cade did not welcome the sudden conjecture that these things might once have been spirits, but by now had passed fully into this world as things of muscle and fang. Perhaps they had been nourished by his fear, gorging themselves until their forms congealed into some kind of unholy flesh.

  The leaves rattled like talons. The sound sliced through him, a blade of fear that threatened to slit loose his bowels. The thought of fouling himself before Abi only encouraged his rising panic.

  ‘Ready?’ whispered Abi.

  Cade shook aside his dread long enough to concentrate, to reach into that well of energy beyond the world and draw lightning into his hands, summon light and power enough to drive the horrors away.

  Agony was all he found there, a spike of it transfixing his brain.

  His eyes bled dancing lights. Abi shrieked too as they collapsed in the dirt. Their powers had abandoned them. Why?

  The corn was crackling, louder and louder, rushing towards them.

  Abi reeled, moaning in pain as Cade pulled her away and they broke into a run. Pelting through the corn, he continued in his flight for at least a minute before realising that she had slipped from his grasp.

  He swayed on the spot. The realisation that he had lost her sent his insides spinning. He wheezed her name, hands groping for her in the dark. He could hear her calling him, though her voice seemed distant.

  Something else was crunching steadily through the corn towards him.

  His spit turned to dust. His heartbeat choked him. His head screamed. Pain and darkness wove a delirium of childhood nightmares: spidery fingers picking at his window; voices giggling dark promises under his bed; his young hands lifting the sheets beneath which he lay and revealing a pair of famished yellow eyes peering up at him. Impossible things, childish delusions banished by maturity. And yet, just such an aberration was moving towards him with a hunter’s tread, its existence an affront to everything he knew of the world. Fear sucked strength from his legs, slowing his pace until the field felt like a swamp. The universe was broken, fractured into madness and chaos. Cade clutched his head as if it might burst with pain.

  He staggered through several banks of corn, dazed as he paused to stare into each darkened alley for any sign of Abi. He fumbled for an axe from his belt and lurched into the next row of corn.

  Something stood there.

  Cade froze, tormented by the sound of his own whimpering sobs, as the shape turned to face him.

  Its outline was obscure, Cade’s senses resisting the sight of it. But he glimpsed its eyes, gleaming and merciless. The sight of them choked the scream mounting in his throat just as it sent a fresh wave of agony exploring his brain. He dropped his axe before he could hurl it, dazzled by pain as the monster came at him. Reduced to instinct, Cade bolted off through the corn like a startled hare, only to see another oily silhouette emerging from the stalks to receive him. Gleaming hands flowered in the dark, reaching for him.

  The thing flinched back as something glittered past its face – the slender blade of Cade’s own hunting knife. It had been flung without finesse, well wide of its target, but it granted Cade the second he needed to pivot and spring in the direction of the girl who had thrown it. Buoyed by relief, Cade caught Abi with such force that he almost lifted her off her feet. They stumbled into a run, Abi leading the way, their hands locked in the darkness.

  The Nothings rushed after them as they blundered through the corn. The pain in Cade’s skull seemed to shepherd him left and right like a buffeting tide. But Abi held him tight on course as she crashed through wall after wall of corn ahead of him, never slowing. They gained ground and the pain in his head began to evaporate. He felt like he could run forever. His palm began to tingle in Abi’s grip.

  They smashed through leaves, tripping on stalks, deaf to any sound of pursuit. Cade felt the pain start gnawing at the back of his skull every time he slowed his pace. This cornfield was another maze, nothing but dark lanes of dirt and leaves to left and right, endless and identical, a relentless monotony. It was as if the earth itself had succumbed to the night’s madness and was replicating the walls of their prison as they ran, hoping to lead them on until they collapsed from exhaustion. His hand throbbed.

  Abi pulled him to her every time he stumbled or slackened his pace. His lungs felt like bloody rags, struggling to feed his tortured limbs. There was no way out of here. Even Abi was slowing, stumbling, her breath reduced to drowning gasps. The Nothings would soon be upon them. He closed his eyes.

  Horned Throne, hear my prayer.

  He thought of the earth beneath their pounding feet, the fertile loam beneath its crust. His fingers tingled, aching to feel that crumbling soil, moist and cool.

  I beg not Your forgiveness, only that You receive Abigael, orphan of the Cradle, into Your keeping. She was just. She was kind. She was loved.

  Cade reached
deeper into his vision until he felt himself electrified by roiling whispers, the secret energies of the soil.

  Lead Your foundling into pastures green, for she has served You well.

  His hand stiffened as if in seizure, though Cade barely felt it.

  Deliver her from darkness, Father.

  Abi’s cry startled him. A blinding thicket of lightning was writhing in the air between their parted hands, the fulmination apple-green, ripe as the moon. They both fell aside as they pulled their hands away and the lightning snapped into nothing, releasing a luminous green vapour into the air. Abi lay gasping in the dirt beside Cade as they watched the smoke thicken. Its tendrils thrashed like wounded snakes, knitting into a pair of unreadable yellow eyes either side of a narrow head crowned with curling horns.

  For an instant, Cade thought he might still be in the Cradle, perhaps in bed, stricken with fever as the imaginings of his childhood frolicked before his eyes.

  The Faun Light shook itself into existence, its body twice the size of any goat herded in the Cradle, its shaggy black fur steaming green, casting a lantern-glow about the swaying corn. Another miracle sprung from a fairy tale, an envoy of the Horned Throne, an angel of soil and sky sent to lead benighted wanderers from the dark.

  He could feel it drawing vigour from him, using him to channel energy from beyond the veil. The Horned Throne was reaching out beyond the sundered boundary of the Cradle to help them, despite all they had done. If evil sorcery dwelt in the world, then so too did mercy and goodness. The Faun Light skipped as its cloven hooves materialised, each leg thudding in the dirt.

  Abi wheezed with exhaustion as she touched its muzzle, confirming its miraculous reality, then bowed her head as if she couldn’t bear to meet its gaze.

  Cade felt pain cramping the back of his skull once again, heralding the approach of the Nothings. The Faun Light pawed the ground, eager to lead them to safety, but they were both too drained to move. Spurred by pain and fear, Cade managed to lift himself. He hauled Abi onto the Faun Light’s bony back. Its thick fur smelled like soft summer apples. Abi suddenly struggled, realising what he was doing. She clasped his hand as fiercely as ever, but the sweet green vapour steaming from the creature’s fur seemed to send her into a daze. Cade could hear the approaching rustle of corn through the pain shrieking in his ears as he gently transferred Abi’s grip onto a fistful of the goat’s fur.