Devastation

by Jane Dougherty

  “Igerne, Raimund…” he whispered.

  “Hush, master,” the healer comforted him as she placed an anesthetic around the wound, trying to keep her distress from showing in her face. “The modelers are patching up the breach. Don’t you worry.”

  But Rorik had seen. The barrier was breached in ten different places, and the slime continued to seep, rising into a viscous mist that muttered and whined in anticipation. The guards stood their ground bravely and defied the creeping menace with their arms for crowd control, but when the blackness enveloped the first men and sucked them, screaming, into oblivion, the rest backed away in horror.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Cold Deepens

  The afternoon light was waning and the chill in the air was growing more intense. Gray clouds filled the sky, bowling along in a stiff wind that ripped the dead leaves from the branches and carried with it the smell of snow. Jim longed for a sight of the sun that he feared was throwing out less heat, growing more distant every day, retreating into the bleakness of space.

  Already at four o’clock, Kat had made Jeff put on his winter jacket, and she was rummaging through her own saddlebags for something warmer. Carla rode on, seemingly impervious to the cold, her face closed and pinched. Tully rode beside her wherever possible, stealing sidelong glances, his face a picture of anxiety. Even Jeff seemed preoccupied, letting his mare trot along at her own pace. Jim let his own horse fall back level with the little palomino.

  “Hey! What’s up, little ’un?”

  Jeff gave a fleeting smile. “It’s been years since anybody called me that.”

  “About a fortnight, probably. Seriously, though, what’s the matter?”

  Jeff sighed, and Jim caught the gleam of tears in the corner of his eye.

  “Dreams. My mother, my big sister. The last time I saw them, before…the Abomination.”

  Jim was silent.

  “You know, the worst thing is that the last time had to be seeing them get dragged off in a screaming crowd, with all that stuff raining down on them and cracks opening up the ground. And knowing that…that…” The lump rose back into his throat, and Jeff couldn’t finish.

  “It’s tough, but at least you had Kat.” Jeff attempted a smile and Jim went on. “All that’s in another world now. Even we’ve changed.”

  Jeff nodded. “Sez Goldilocks.”

  Jim laughed. “Funny, isn’t it, what’s happened to us? And what’s hardest to get used to isn’t being able to…model things. It’s this!” Jim ran his hands through his thick, fair curls. “And this!” He opened his hands and gestured to the whole of his body. “The way we’ve changed physically is amazing. Tully’s like a giant, easily as big as his dad already. Carla’s like a statue of Diana or one of those warrior goddesses. Do you think they’ve noticed too?”

  Jeff shrugged. “I don’t think so. They see everything in such a different light now. They take themselves more or less for granted.”

  Jim hesitated to ask the question that had been bothering him for hours. He scratched his head, then blurted it out. “Is there really nothing there now, in our world?”

  Jeff sighed. “I don’t know. All I can see is darkness.”

  “Because I still think about them too. My mum and dad, Grandma Rachel, my kid brother… It’s been years now. I know there’s probably no hope…”

  “Sometimes it seems like water, a vast, dark ocean covering everything. But there’s no light to see by—no sun, no moon, no stars. Nothing.” Jeff hung his head in silence.

  It was Jim’s turn to heave a great sigh. “And it’s coming here.”

  The cold bit deeper. Flowers and leaves wilted and dried, and the grass looked duller, browner. The hound often bounded ahead, soon out of sight in the meanders of the forest paths. Tancred suspected she ran as much to keep warm as to sniff out trouble. The trees were beginning to thin out again, their branches bare and skeletal against the dull sky, and dead leaves banked up where the wind had pushed them, when he called a halt.

  “The woodland ends just ahead,” he explained, “and a region of pastureland begins, crossed by the river Llyfn. The river is shallow, and there is a ford, but it would be best to wait for daylight to attempt it. A short day’s ride will take us across the farmland and into the forest of Retz.”

  The others exchanged glances. The forest was the next landmark on their journey. At the other side lay the Briga Mór, the mountain wilderness that hid Poll Ifrinn, the gateway to Hell, the hole that would suck Wormwood back to where he came from. They knew all this in theory, but Tancred was painfully aware that none of the Earth-dwellers knew how savage was the Briga Mór, and even he had no idea what it had become in these last days. He shivered.

  He took Dusty farther up the track to where the beech wood gave way to low shrub, young trees then the close-cropped pastureland. In the gathering shadows, he called the hound to heel and looked out across the rolling fields to a quiet hamlet of five or six houses. A sizeable herd of brown cows stood huddled together at the drystone wall around the nearest farmyard. They pushed their heads over the wall, eyeing the closed barn door miserably, and even at a distance of half a mile, Tancred could distinctly hear their uneasy lowing. The hound whined in sympathy, and Tancred put a hand on her head.

  “We’ve seen this somewhere before, I think.”

  Dusty growled in answer, and she slunk back to where the others were setting up camp.

  “No fire tonight.” Tancred said, standing on the spot where Jack had begun to lay down a circle of fire stones.

  “Ah, come on, man! It’s freezing!”

  Kat caught Tancred’s eye. He frowned and shook his head.

  “Just tell yourself it’s still only June.” Kat nudged Jack. “It can’t be as cold as all that.”

  “You’re full of good sense, aren’t you, Kat,” Jack grumbled. “Careful, I think that’s a mosquito on your neck, or maybe it’s a tsetse fly. I can’t see straight in this goddamn heat. The sweat’s dripping in me eyes!”

  Kat shrieked as Jack put his freezing cold hands on her neck.

  “Please,” Tancred snapped in anger. “No fire and no noise! We cannot afford to attract unwelcome attention. Remember last night?”

  Jack scratched his ear sheepishly, and Kat shot him an angry look.

  “Be serious, Dad, just for once,” Tully pleaded. “It’s not—”

  “The Mickey Mouse Show, I know, I know. But do you all have to behave as if you’re burying your favorite auntie? Speaking of which, my Auntie Winn used to say—”

  “Please,” Tully roared. “Just put a sock in it, Dad!”

  “Oh, go on, Tully.” Carla nudged him, her mouth twitching with suppressed laughter. “He’s only having a bit of fun. As his Grandma Quinn used to say, you’re a long time dead.”

  “Which is what we might all be by tomorrow morning if we carry on making such a din.” Tancred glared at Jack, unable to keep his anger out of his expression, while Kat wrung her hands anxiously.

  “I think we’ve probably all got the message,” Yvain said in a conciliatory tone. “So we had better pitch the tents and get something to eat, before this sub-tropical heat gets the better of us.”

  Yvain winked at Jack, who grinned back. Tancred exchanged a soft, furtive look with Kat, and he couldn’t help noticing how Jack’s smile faded.

  Given the proximity of the silent hamlet, they decided to keep watch in pairs. Eirian volunteered to take the first watch, and Jim shyly proposed to keep her company. Dusty prowled restlessly about the campsite, adding to the nervousness of the already jumpy horses. The others sorted themselves out among the three tents, Jeff bunking down with Carla and Tully.

  “Remember.” Tully looked intently at Carla, his eyes pleading. Carla nodded and bent over to whisper in his ear.

  “I’ll try to catch you. Just let yourself go, don’t pull against it.”

  The night was cold and starless, and Tully had difficulty getting to sleep, even wrapped in a blanket and
curled up in Carla’s warmth. When he did, the dreams began immediately, dreams of falling through a cold, black sky.

  He reached out his arms and touched nothing. His feet trod air, a cold wind rushed past his face. He wanted to call out but no sound came. In a panic he threshed and kicked. Utter darkness surrounded him and the wind roared in his ears, reminding him of falling down the wormhole. He tried to scream, to drown out the disembodied voices he thought he heard, but darkness filled his throat like black porridge, and he felt himself drowning—drowning and falling.

  Then the dream stopped and began again, like a new take in a film.

  Again, he fell through cold air, but this time he was aware of Carla’s presence beside him. He fought against his fear and struggled to control his breathing and relax his rigid muscles. He let himself fall, slowly raising his arms until they were perpendicular to his body. The sensation of falling slowed, then stopped. The cold grew less intense. He tipped himself forward, and the air—balmy now—buoyed him up. He soared.

  In the midst of the emptiness, he felt his fingers gripped, and he turned his head. At first there was nothing, then an instant later Carla appeared floating beside him, her fingers entwined with his. Tully smiled—or thought he did—and he tried to speak. Carla shook her head and pointed ahead. Far below, the darkness was broken by a gray ripple, like waves on a choppy sea. There was no sun, no daylight, but the glimmer of the last stars was thrown back off snowy mountain peaks.

  “The roof of the world,” a voice said in his head.

  “If Garance is still alive, she’s somewhere down there,” Tully replied silently to Carla’s voice.

  Carla nodded gravely and dipped downwards. Together they followed the star paths, skimming just above the world, Tully watching like an eagle for signs of life, Carla looking—he had no idea how—for signs of a dreamer. They saw the desolation of a scattering of large towns and cities in ruins and the charred remains of smaller settlements. In the mountain pastures, herds of lifeless goats and yaks lay bloated and frozen. In the valleys, darkness slopped and writhed, and they hurried past to the higher places. Carla frowned, and her grip on Tully’s hand tightened, but they found nothing. Tully saw Carla draw in her breath, her eyes wide with hope as she grasped at something he couldn’t see. But the hope died in her eyes as they followed the invisible flutter of the dream until even she could no longer see it. Tully thought he heard it, the faintest sound of music, that brushed his senses before it faded into silence. But the diaphanous sensations were not enough to hold onto, not enough to lead them to Garance.

  Bright teardrops pearling on Carla’s lashes were the last things Tully saw before he slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  * * * *

  Carla and Tully slept deeply, wrapped in one another’s arms. The others slept fitfully, hunched against the cold, occasionally muttering and rolling over in an attempt to find a more comfortable position. Jim was playing with a handful of leaves, making the veins ripple with light, as if they flowed with golden blood. He was watching Eirian and the way her eyes glittered when his leaf-light caught them. Jack was right. She was an attractive girl. Not just in the way she was…put together, but she had an inner beauty that came out in her face. A calm force radiated from her that Jim was certain she was completely unaware of. Ever since she had reached inside his head and pulled out the long, poisonous tendrils that the golem had planted, Jim was aware of her presence there. Eirian had left something of herself inside, and Jim was glad. He caught Eirian’s eye and smiled. Whenever he wanted, he could find his way along the slender, warm thread back to her.

  The others were asleep. Eirian and Jim were supposed to be keeping watch. Jim looked about then rose cautiously and moved round the fire next to her.

  “I never really thanked you,” he began.

  Eirian placed a finger on his lips. “Healing is my function.”

  For a second Jim’s face changed color, as if he had been slapped. Then he hung his head. “I just thought that maybe…you know, that you cared about the outcome…” he mumbled.

  “Of course I cared.”

  Jim looked up quickly, a blaze of hope across his face. Eirian smiled.

  “I always care,” she said.

  Jim couldn’t prevent the pang of disappointment he felt showing in his face. Eirian smiled, and the starlight glittered in her eyes.

  “But sometimes,” she added, “I care more than others.”

  “Can I thank you then?” he asked, hope making his voice unsteady.

  Eirian nodded. Jim took her hands. Then, after a moment’s hesitation to take a deep breath, he bent his face to hers and kissed her lips.

  “Thank me again,” she whispered.

  Jim did.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Black Slime Sucks the Ruins Dry

  Erelah sat hunched in a corner of the hideout. She was tired, and her long yellow hair hung in a curtain around her face, hiding her features. Rajeev made his way across the rubble that lay strewn across the floor and sat down, drawing her into his arms. Erelah sighed but didn’t even raise her head in response. It could have been any time of day. There was no way of telling in the perpetual gloom. They slept when they were exhausted and ate whenever they could. They were always hungry. Their stomachs always cried out to be fed. And they were always cold. Erelah trembled, and Rajeev felt around for a blanket.

  “You stay out too long,” he chided in a whisper. “You waste too much energy. And it’s getting too dangerous.”

  Erelah finally raised her head and pushed a lock of dirty hair back behind her ears. She gazed back at Rajeev, her eyes deep blue and huge in her emaciated face, her full lips cracked with the cold and too little water to drink. “I have to find it. There isn’t much time.”

  Rajeev longed to believe that there was a way out of hell. He hung onto Erelah’s ferocious certainty like a lifeline. But sometimes it was hard.

  “How can you find something you’ve never seen?” he asked

  “I’ll know it when I find it.” Her lips set into a determined line and her jaw jutted.

  Rajeev wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and smiled. “I know you will,” he said softly. “What did you see out there?”

  Erelah turned her face away. He knew she didn’t want him to see the fear in her eyes. “The stars have retreated. I have seen it, the emptiness in the sky beyond the darkness. The dead lands have emptied, and the soulless ones are all around us.”

  A scream rang out, breaking the deathly silence. Rajeev froze.

  “Sanjay,” he whispered.

  There was a scuffling in the entrance to the hideout, and Erelah and Rajeev reached for their weapons, four long butcher’s knives. In an instant, Rajeev was at the flimsy door, wrenching it open. A slight, bony body with a head of tangled black hair tumbled through it, his breathing heavy and painful. Sanjay, his little brother.

  “I found others.” The words rasped out and his dark eyes were wide.

  “Who? Where?” Rajeev asked, in his excitement forgetting the fear he had seen in his brother’s eyes.

  “Four boys, in a cellar, half an hour from here.”

  Rajeev turned to Erelah, his lips parted in a smile.

  “I had just left, to come back—”

  “You saw them? Talked to them?” Rajeev interrupted.

  “I saw them!” Sanjay shouted. “And I saw the darkness spreading their way.” Sanjay buried his head on Erelah’s shoulder and sobbed. “I didn’t dare go back…to warn them. Just kept…running.”

  “Hush, Sanjay.” Erelah stroked his hair, her voice low and comforting. “You couldn’t have done anything. Once the souleaters smell warm blood—”

  “Oh, Erelah, when will it end?” Sanjay raised dark, empty eyes to her luminous blue gaze. “I want it so to end, but I don’t want to die.”

  * * * *

  The teardrops were still damp on Carla’s lashes when she woke the next morning. All through her watch in the early hours with Tull
y, she had not spoken a word. Now, with the eastern sky completely obscured, she felt such a wave of despair submerge her that she gave an audible shudder. Tully’s eyes flicked open and he reached for her hand.

  “Next time, we’ll get her. I heard her last night. I’m sure of it.”

  Carla braved a smile. “And I almost caught a dream, but almost isn’t good enough.”

  “Next time, we’ll try somewhere else. We can’t have trawled the entire mountain range. It’s not possible. So, we went through Tibet with a fine-toothed comb, searching all the places that looked forested, like they’d have monkeys, and Garance isn’t there. But there are loads of other countries tucked away in the mountains that we haven’t tried yet. There’s Nepal for a start, and Sikkim, Bhutan…”

  The shock made Carla feel faint. “Bhutan,” she whispered. “That was the name.”

  ‘You’d love it here, Carla, nothing but forests, monkeys and gorgeous butterflies.’

  “Tully, she’s there, in a temple restoring paintings. The pictures she sent… I remember now. She went through northern India, where the tea comes from. I remember that, Darjeeling, Assam, then through the mountains, and it’s there, just before you get to China.”

  Tully grabbed Carla in his arms and held her tightly. She wrenched herself free.

  “How could I have been so bored with what she was doing that I just glanced at her letter and pictures and barely registered that she’d moved to a different country?”

  “Garance is always on the move, Carla. That’s her job. Since you were aware you had a mother, she must have been on a hundred different missions, all over the world. It’s become second nature to you, to have a mother who sends you postcards from weird places—”