The Hounds of Avalon tda-3

by Mark Chadbourn

  Yet he was surprised to find a well-fed, generally content population. Fruit trees sprouted from the pavements, heavy with apples despite the weather. The buildings in some areas had been demolished and given over to fields where potato plants, carrot tops and broccoli forced their way through the snow. Their survival made no sense.

  As he neared the cathedral, he reined in his horse to talk to a trader manning a creaking stall laden with a variety of fruits and vegetables, some of it exotic and not seen in Britain since all contact with the outside world had ceased at the Fall.

  When asked about the abundance of produce, the trader responded, ‘Every visitor to Lincoln has the same question. All I can say is that we’re especially blessed.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve got our very own Green Angel.’

  Hunter couldn’t decide whether the trader had been unbalanced by too long on a diet of swedes or if he was honestly hinting at some kind of divine intervention. It was impossible to tell in a time when madness and miracles abounded in equal measure. He urged his horse forward, following the flame.

  Not far on, Hunter encountered a large group of people gathered in a square, many of them wearing the black T-shirts with the red ‘V’ that signified followers of Ryan Veitch. Hunter had seen the mounting intelligence gathered on the group as their numbers increased, but he’d always dismissed it as just one of the many cults that had sprung up amongst people desperate for a god, any god, to drag them out of their suffering. Yet now that he had discovered his own link to the Pendragon Spirit, the matter took on a new resonance. What would it take to drive a Brother of Dragons to betray the very principle of life?

  On a platform of pallets at the centre of the crowd, a speaker preached with fire and brimstone that kept the like-minds of the crowd rapt. He had a shaven head and the unflinching eyes of someone for whom brutality was a way of life. ‘The day is drawing closer when He shall be returned to us!’ he roared in a cod-religious tone. ‘We can all see the signs — the world is ending. Only He can save us! And only we can bring him back! The mass ritual will be held shortly when we’ll pray for Him to walk once more upon the Earth! In this day and age, prayer has power! The gods listen! If we concentrate… if we believe… we can change anything! The dead can live again!’

  Hunter shrugged; maybe the preacher was right — it was difficult to be sure about anything any more.

  The lantern led Hunter to the cobbled street rising steeply up to the cathedral. On either side was a profusion of medieval houses that had once been antique shops and had now returned to their original use. They were all ablaze with colour: red, pink and yellow roses swarmed around doors, clematis was still in flower, tulips and daffodils and pinks and geraniums sprouted from boxes on the pavement. Yet all around it was bitterly cold.

  The steep cobbled street was treacherous with snow and ice, so Hunter dismounted and led his horse. By the time the street reached the shadow of the cathedral, dark, heavy clouds had swept across the blue sky and snow was starting to fall again.

  The lantern pointed towards the main door of the cathedral, which was locked. Hunter tethered his mount and wandered the vast perimeter of the building searching for a way in, but all the entrances were barred. An unusual atmosphere emanated from the stone, not reverence or transcendence like he had felt at many other cathedrals, but a brooding sadness that began to affect him deeply. The building was strange in other ways, too: like the houses that lined the old pilgrims’ route to the door, the cathedral had more than its fair share of verdant growth — ivy crawling over the windows, Russian vine spreading over stonework, the leaves turning red as though it was autumn. In Lincoln, all seasons were unfolding simultaneously.

  He returned to the main door and rapped loudly. As he listened to the echoes, a disturbing sensation tickled his lower leg. He was shocked to see ivy wrapped around his ankle and crawling slowly upwards before his eyes.

  Jumping backwards, he wrenched the ivy out of the ground, but it still continued to grow up towards his thigh. He tore it away with frozen fingers and hurled the remnants against the wall.

  Quiet, cynical laughter echoed around the cathedral precinct. Hunter looked around for the source, but there was only stillness over the snow.

  ‘She won’t let you inside.’

  A woman in a green cloak emerged from the side of one of the buildings adjoining the cathedral, her hood pulled forward so that her face was hidden by shadows.

  ‘You want to be careful creeping up on me. I’ve killed people for less,’ Hunter said.

  ‘Oooh,’ she replied with childish sarcasm. ‘Big man, big threat.’ The woman threw back her hood to reveal messy white-blonde hair above a face that had a faint greenish tint to the skin, but which didn’t hamper her flinty beauty. The hardness made her appear aloof and a little arrogant, but she had a wry smile that suggested she was entertained by Hunter’s appearance.

  ‘The Green Angel,’ Hunter guessed.

  ‘Love you, too.’

  ‘You did that trick with the ivy?’

  ‘I can’t reveal my secrets.’ She teased him in a manner that some would find irritating. ‘You’re not a local. Come for some free fruit and veg? The store’s down in town.’

  ‘You did all that with the plants, too. I’m impressed. Green fingers.’

  ‘Green everything.’ She came over, now more intrigued than entertained. ‘You’re not here for food. Who are you?’

  ‘I can’t reveal my secrets.’

  The woman circled him slowly, looking him up and down. ‘Lean. Mean. Packing some weapons, if I’m not mistaken by the bulges under your cloak. Or are you just pleased to see me?’

  ‘You’re very sparky. Give it a bit of time and you might be able to develop it into a personality.’

  The woman suddenly noticed a flare of blue illumination inside Hunter’s cloak as it blew aside in the wind. She yanked at the hem to pull the cloak open, revealing the Wayfinder where it had been hanging out of sight in Hunter’s hand. Her demeanour changed instantly.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘A giant gave it to me,’ Hunter said wryly, but his mind was already turning at her recognition. ‘It’s called the Wayfinder.’

  ‘I know what it’s called,’ she snapped. In that moment, the defences of her face were stripped away to reveal a flow of honest emotion: memories of good times, memories of sadness, hardship and suffering. It ended with a faint, contented smile as though she had just recognised an old friend.

  ‘I think,’ Hunter said, ‘I’m looking for you.’

  She blinked away a furtive tear. ‘Come far?’

  ‘From the ends of the Earth.’ That’s what it felt like to him. Now that his own defences had broken down he felt a deep affinity with the odd woman, and he could see in her eyes that she felt it, too.

  She put her arms around him warmly and held him in silence for a moment. When she broke away, she said, ‘I’m not usually one for hugging. So don’t tell anyone about that, all right?’

  ‘Sister of Dragons.’ He nodded slowly; he could see it now.

  ‘And you’re one of the new ones. The pale copies.’

  ‘I like to think you were the prototypes and we’re the definitive article.’ He held out a hand. ‘Hunter.’

  ‘Is that a name or some sexual role-play thing?’ The woman held his hand for a long second.

  ‘Are you always like this?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so lovable any other way. Laura DuSantiago.’

  He looked up at the towering cathedral. ‘And this is where you hang out? Nice. Bet it’s a nightmare to clean.’

  ‘Now there’s a thing. Wait till you see the inside. If she ever lets us in,’ she added tartly.

  ‘“She” being…?’

  ‘Ruth Gallagher. Uber-Witch of the whole fucking multiverse. And doesn’t she just know it.’

  She shook her head with irritation and motioned for Hunter to follow her. This time the main door swung open easily.

  ‘Looks like she�
��s out of her sulk,’ Laura said. ‘But you still won’t be able to see her yet — she’ll be off brooding somewhere. Better come in and take the weight off for a while.’

  Hunter followed Laura into the cathedral and was even more surprised than she had indicated he would be. The interior was a bizarre mix of tropical greenhouse and ice cave. Strange gargantuan ice formations almost obscured the lofty roof and curved across the nave, which entered into a series of tunnels through the permafrost. Yet tropical trees thrust up from the frozen floor, breaking through the stone to press against the ice, and creepers and vines hung down from above. It made the inside of the cathedral claustrophobic and disturbingly otherworldly.

  ‘So you can control nature? Make things grow, even where they shouldn’t?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘One of the pluses of being a plant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Long story. Basically, I’m an avatar of the Green, gifted — or cursed — by Cernunnos. You heard of him? He’s one of the Tuatha De Danann, a nature god, basically, or the nature god. Anyway, I’m his chosen one, and he’s given me lots of cool powers to use as I see fit. Course, I get the chlorophyll skin, but these days there aren’t many beauty parades.’

  Laura led Hunter through the maze of ice tunnels to a room where a brazier glowed with hot coals. He warmed his hands over it eagerly. ‘There’s bread and fruit over there.’ She motioned to a cupboard in one corner before lounging on a hard wooden bench. ‘Now you’d better tell me why you’re here.’

  Hunter told her everything, from the impending end of the world at the hands of the Void, to the attack on his troops by the Lament-Brood and their lethal generals, and the fragmented state of the current quincunx of Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. Laura listened intently, chipping in with sarcastic comments or wry asides, but beneath the patina of levity, Hunter could tell that she understood what was at stake and recognised her responsibility.

  ‘We need your help,’ he said finally, ‘to make up the numbers, in the hope that it might make up for one of us being dead. But we need your experience, too. To be honest, none of us knows what the hell we’re doing with this Pendragon Spirit thing.’

  Hunter was taken aback by Laura’s laughter. ‘This is the best! You’re coming to us for help and advice? Listen, we were the biggest collection of fuck-ups you could ever imagine. Church — Jack Churchill — he was up to his neck in grief over the death of his girlfriend. Unhealthy? You bet. Ryan Veitch was a crook who’d killed a man, who turned out to be a relative of the Uber-Witch, but Ruth had got her own problems, one of which was a poker up her arse. Shavi, our seer, now he was cool. Not what you’d call wholly present, if you get what I mean, but a nice guy. And me? I was perfect, but you’ve got to have one or the whole thing falls apart.’

  Laura was a woman who liked to play games, to distort for effect and for her own aims, and Hunter knew he couldn’t trust everything she said. Their conversation was a dance, defining boundaries, deciding status; he was impressed.

  ‘Two questions. First: if you were all so useless, how, out of all the possible candidates in the human race, did you get selected for the Pendragon Spirit?’

  ‘Maybe you get selected at random.’

  ‘Secondly, the Fall. Overnight, the Otherworld pumped out gods, devils, monsters, every supernatural creature that ever existed in any fairy tale anywhere. All the conventional responses failed. But you five stopped us from being wiped out. If you were so useless, how did that happen?’

  ‘We were just lucky.’ She smiled tightly, giving nothing away.

  ‘Go on,’ he pressed.

  She shrugged, pretending it was old news, but the memory was carved in the tense muscles of her face. Whatever had happened to her during the Fall had shaped her character, eradicating the woman she had been before, replacing her with someone forged in the cauldron of strife.

  ‘How long have you got?’ As a faraway look appeared in her eyes, some of the hardness dropped from her face. ‘We made lots of mistakes, but somehow… somehow everything turned out all right in the end.’ She caught herself. ‘All right for the human race, that is. Not so great for us.’

  ‘You’re talking about Jack Churchill and Ryan Veitch dying.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that. Things never happen in isolation. You deal with the repercussions for ever. Anyway, you can talk to Ruth about that later. You want to hear tales of swashbuckling adventure, five people beating the odds to come up with the goods for humanity? Yeah, I can do that. It was all about the Pendragon Spirit, all those myths about King Arthur that Church was always banging on about. I don’t really care about how it’s all linked together. The bottom line is, despite all the failures and the mistakes, everything came together right when it needed to. Just like it was planned. And you’re right, it was a big win. At the Battle of London…’ She closed her eyes in recall. ‘The city, burning… things swarming all over it that would give anybody nightmares…’ She drifted for a moment.

  ‘How did Jack and Ryan die?’ he probed gently.

  ‘We were steered to a tower that had risen up on the banks of the Thames. There was something inside…’ An expression of distaste sprang to her face. ‘A power… evil, yeah, definitely evil. If we hadn’t stopped it, that would have been it, game over.’

  ‘Did it have anything to do with the Void?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s nothing to say it did… but maybe all these things are linked together, you know? Everything that wants to stop us getting a foothold on the ladder. I used to think good and evil were ideas for kids. Too simple. Fairy-tale stuff. But now… on the big scale, the universal scale, I think good and evil are what it’s all about. A constant war from the beginning of time to the end. And we’re just little troops, cannon fodder, there to make sure things don’t go belly-up for our side.’

  Hunter moved closer to the brazier. He felt as if he couldn’t get enough warmth.

  ‘We confronted this thing at the top of the tower,’ Laura said. ‘We’d got the right tools, magic shit, a sword, a spear… Church was about to deliver the killing blow. Then Ryan stepped in.’

  ‘Why did he do it?’

  ‘He didn’t mean to,’ Laura said wearily. She’d obviously spent long hours turning the tragedy over in her head. ‘Ryan was just that little bit weaker than the rest of us. He was manipulated, by the gods, the evil things. All those so-called Higher Powers just manipulate us all the time. And Ryan paid the price. There was a fight. He died. Church managed to kill the thing that had been waiting for us, but Ryan had thrown everything off-balance. Some kind of hole opened up in the air… like a hole into space. The thing went into it with its last dying gasp, and Church got sucked in after it. So we won and we lost. Story over.’

  ‘You’ve been through the mill-’

  ‘I don’t want your sympathy.’

  ‘And you’re not going to get it. You had a job to do and you did it. There’s always a price to pay in situations like that… like this. No point crying over it. So after that you came here?’

  ‘Not at first.’ Laura rubbed her fingers together and a rose grew magically out of the floor, its bud bursting, blossoming into black petals. She stared at it thoughtfully. ‘Ruth wanted to pass on all her witchy skills, so we travelled the country for a while with her doing her Hogwarts bit to a load of wannabes. But her heart wasn’t in it. When we reached this place she decided she wasn’t going any farther.’

  ‘And you stuck with her.’

  ‘Somebody had to. She didn’t have anybody else.’ She snapped her fingers and the black rose shrivelled and died.

  Hunter cracked his knuckles, then put his feet up on a small table; he’d found out all he needed to know for now. ‘Must be boring here for you.’

  ‘I’m not getting any, if that’s what you mean.’ She gave him a challenging smile.

  ‘Fancy some?’

  Laura thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  The sex was the first physi
cal contact either of them had enjoyed for a while, and was passionate and unguarded. Hunter discovered that Laura smelled of lime and roses, but afterwards she told him that she could manipulate her scent at will. ‘That’s probably my greatest power,’ she added, ‘now that we live in a world without deodorant.’

  When they were both dressed again, Laura reluctantly agreed to take Hunter to see Ruth, who Laura said would be ‘brooding in her batcave’. They moved through the fantastic ice tunnels and chambers, a crystal world within the very heart of the cathedral, their breath trailing behind them in clouds.

  Finally they came to a cavern so large that it dwarfed all the others. It was a work of art, with icicles hanging ten feet or more from the ceiling and reflecting surfaces designed to catch and distribute the light of many candles. At the far side was a throne made entirely from ice and sitting in it was the saddest woman Hunter had ever seen.

  She was swathed in black fur, her fragile features as pale as hoarfrost. Her hair was long, dark brown and curly, and black rings beneath her eyes emphasised the painful grief in her face. Those eyes, too, were dark, filled with a surfeit of shattered emotion. A black and white woman in a frozen world.

  ‘There she is, the Witch-Queen of the world,’ Laura said quietly to Hunter. ‘We’ve got a guest,’ she added loudly. ‘Get out the best china.’

  Ruth had been lost to her thoughts and unaware they had entered. Her eyes flickered to Hunter, then moved away.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Laura whispered in his ear before departing.

  Hunter marched up to the throne. ‘Are you expecting me to kneel and kiss your ring?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Ruth said coldly.

  ‘My name’s Hunter. I’m a Brother of Dragons. And I still haven’t quite come to terms with that as an introduction.’

  ‘You never will. What do you want?’

  Hunter was surprised by her brusque, uninterested nature after Laura’s curiosity. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you, and Laura. You’re needed, both of you.’