The Hounds of Avalon tda-3

by Mark Chadbourn

  ‘Maybe it is. I don’t know,’ Hal back-tracked. ‘But this is the place where the last battle will be fought. The Void is going to be here, and you need to be ready to face off against it. That’s where whatever skills the Pendragon Spirit has given you will come into play.’

  ‘See,’ Hunter said, ‘I told you he’s not just an ugly face.’

  ‘Then I say we do what we can on the front line,’ Mallory said, ‘to make sure that the city doesn’t get swamped while we try to find out where the Void is.’

  ‘Or what it is,’ Sophie said. ‘For all we know, it could be a little glass bottle of nothing. Or a ten-foot teddy bear.’

  ‘I can help,’ Shavi said. ‘I can contact the spirits for more information. But it takes a great deal out of me, so I should not attempt it until I really need to.’

  ‘Enough jawing,’ Laura said. ‘All you lot do is talk, talk, talk. It wasn’t like that in our day.’ She gave Shavi a wink. ‘Let’s hit that front line.’

  As they trooped out, Hal called Hunter back. Hal had been fighting with what he had to say ever since they had entered the brothel. But when he saw the bravery the others were exhibiting by putting their lives on the line for a greater cause, the guilt consumed him. He had to speak out.

  ‘That was smart talking there,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m proud of you.’

  ‘You won’t be in a minute,’ Hal began. He steeled himself, then blurted, ‘I’m a Brother of Dragons. I’ve known it for a long time, but I hid it away… I lied to you because… I was afraid.’

  Hunter searched Hal’s face. Hal couldn’t read what was going on in his head, but knew that if Hunter condemned him, it would tear him apart.

  ‘You know, now that you say it, I can see it,’ Hunter mused.

  It certainly wasn’t the reaction Hal had expected. ‘Aren’t you angry with me?’

  ‘Everybody does what they have to. You don’t need to be fighting at the front to play your part — that’s not why you were chosen. I’m betting you’re doing your own thing, secretly, away from the limelight, which is just so very Hal.’

  Hal was deeply moved by Hunter’s complete belief in him. For the first time, he realised the true depth of their friendship and how much it meant to him.

  Hunter clasped Hal’s arm in a powerful gesture of support. ‘You decide where you need to be, and what you have to do. If you don’t want to come to the front line, that’s fine.’

  ‘Don’t let me off the hook,’ Hal said. ‘Make me come! I’m a coward!’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ Hunter glanced towards the open door: he had to go. ‘I bet you haven’t been hiding out in a bunker since you found out what you are. You’ve been doing something to help, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘See? You’re playing your part, Hal. You’ll be where you need to be. I trust you.’

  ‘How can you say that? I’ve betrayed you, and what it means to be a Brother of Dragons. I’m not up to it.’

  ‘Stop talking such bollocks. Now, I need to go before someone nicks my horse, but I’ll see you again soon, all right?’

  Hal nodded reluctantly. ‘Come back. For Samantha. I think she’s in love with you.’

  Hunter gave him a curious look, then one more smile and he was gone, to death or glory. Hal wanted to hate himself, but Hunter’s words were still flying around in his head: perhaps he hadn’t been fooling himself that his investigation into the mystery of the Wish Stone was vital. Was that really his role as a Brother of Dragons? If so, he had to find the solution quickly.

  Hunter reined in his mount next to Mallory, who was just climbing into the saddle of Laura’s horse. Sophie, Shavi and Laura waited next to one of the patrol jeeps that had been fitted with a snow plough; Laura claimed that she had ‘found it’ in the next street.

  ‘There’ll be hotspots at three main barricades,’ Hunter began. ‘On Saint Giles, Saint Aldate’s beyond Thames Street and the High Street beyond Magdalen. There’ll be another couple of barricades to the west, and on the smaller roads to the north-east, but those routes won’t present easy attack routes, so I’m betting that the main forces will come in from the north, south and east.’

  ‘We can’t be everywhere,’ Mallory said. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I’ll take the High Street, you head south down Saint Aldate’s.’ Hunter turned to Laura. ‘Think you can grow something strong enough to form a barrier across Saint Giles? It’s a big road.’

  ‘No problem.’ Her smile unnerved Sophie, who hadn’t taken to Laura at all. ‘Looking forward to it.’

  ‘Sophie, you need to stay in the jeep with Shavi,’ Hunter went on. ‘Move back and forth between the main battle areas and do what you can with your thing. Storms, rats… ferocious rabbits, if you’ve got any hats you can pull them out of.’

  Sophie felt excited at the prospect of using her Craft to the extent of her abilities. It would be a massive release after all the stress and suffering of the preceding weeks.

  ‘Shavi, we’re counting on you to find our primary target,’ Hunter continued. ‘Do whatever you have to do. If Sophie stays by your side, she can protect you if you get into a weakened state.’

  Shavi smiled enigmatically.

  ‘What?’ Hunter said.

  ‘You remind me of my good friend, Church.’

  Silenced by the comment, Hunter urged the others to leave. They didn’t say goodbye, didn’t consider the future for a second. Surviving the present situation was the only thing that mattered.

  Alone in the room, Hal watched the crackling flames as he sank deep into thoughts of King Arthur, a raging Blue Fire and the secret language of symbols. The solution was so close that he could almost touch it, and this time he was going to succeed.

  Carefully, he laid out the evidence in his mind. It was complex, but he was sure he had all the information he required; the only thing he needed was the key that would unlock the code.

  The underlying pattern of the mystery was the legend of King Arthur. From everything Hal had learned, it was clear that the story had been devised at some point in ancient times as a symbolic means of passing information down the years. That was a standard way of operating for cultures without the written word. In the distant past, memory skills had been developed far beyond what modern man was used to. Greek storytellers could recite by heart every word of Homer’s Iliad. The Celtic bards had vast, detailed story banks recorded in their heads, passed down from father to son. Those stories were a secret language: locked in their accounts of gods and heroes and men were rules for living life, as well as tracts of knowledge about the stars and animals and plants. Most importantly, the stories preserved for all eternity the vast mysteries held by the wise men and women in the only way their culture knew.

  It was an elegant solution. Lists of facts and figures, rules and regulations, could be corrupted by memory or easily forgotten. But stories went on for ever. With the vital information stitched into the fabric of a tale, it would always be there to be discovered by anyone who understood the secret language of symbolism.

  The true story, the important story, was not the one on the surface; it was the one hidden beneath. And that’s what Hal knew he had to do: cut through the surface story to find the real message.

  The Arthurian legends spoke of places where the power of the king was concentrated, of Camelot and Avalon and the lake where Excalibur was found. Many of these places, the stories said, were pathways to another world. But Hal knew that the power of the king in the legends was not meant to be the temporal power of an earthly ruler. It was real power: the Blue Fire, the energy that coursed through the Earth and every living thing upon it. That was the first, and greatest, of the hidden messages.

  Ley lines, spirit paths, the dragon lines of the Chinese. King Arthur, who was a force for good against evil and the defender of the land against the darkness, was a code for this power. Any place linked to Arthur was a spot where the Earth Power was strongest. And these power nodes could
be used to cross over to the Otherworld, the place he had witnessed with awe when he had gazed through the reversed monument at Shugborough.

  As Hal turned these things over in his mind, he found himself becoming increasingly excited, for instinctively he knew that he was nearing some point of revelation. When a log crackled and spat, another connection leaped forward: he suddenly realised that like the Shugborough monument, the symbols coded into the stories had two faces, dual strands of information operating one on top of the other. In fact, the more he considered it, the more he knew this to be true. Duality was everywhere. Two worlds, side by side, reflecting each other yet different, both influencing the other. Good and evil. Humans and gods. Life and Anti-Life.

  So if there were double meanings in the legends, what did that suggest? Certainly, on one level, that King Arthur was a symbol of the Blue Fire.

  But on another, also that there was a king. A king who embodied the Earth Power. A defender waiting to be called back in Britain’s darkest hour — that was what the legends said. And surely this was the darkest hour of all, when life was about to be subsumed by Anti-Life.

  His heart beat faster.

  Et in Arcadia Ego. And in Arcadia — the Otherworld — I wait. But ‘I’ was not death. It was the king, and the tomb in Poussin’s painting was where he lay, waiting to be awoken.

  And the flipside of that was the anagram of the inscription on the tomb: I Tego Arcana Dei. Begone! I conceal the secrets of God. The king was infused with the power of God, the Blue Fire. The power of life that could throw back the Void.

  That was why the secrets had been waiting until this moment to be revealed, to be discovered by Hal: so that he could bring the defender back. Hal felt a frisson as the pattern surfaced. It suggested the influence of a hidden intelligence, and a vast, unimaginable master plan with connections stretching across millennia.

  Almost there now. One final question: who was the king?

  The plan had clearly been put in motion at some point in the ancient history of Cadbury Hill when the Wish Stone had been buried. But not just anyone could have found it.

  Another connection.

  Not just anyone: only a Brother or Sister of Dragons. That was the key: the Pendragon Spirit was integral to this grand scheme.

  And then he had it. ‘Jack Churchill,’ he said out loud. The symbolic ‘King’ of the last group of Five. Ryan Veitch was definitely dead and buried after the devastation of the Battle of London, but Jack Churchill was only presumed dead. There hadn’t been a body, that much was clear from the intelligence briefing Samantha had recovered from the files.

  What if, during the final cataclysmic struggle, Jack Churchill had somehow been thrown into T’ir n’a n’Og? Perhaps amnesiac, perhaps in a coma. Hal’s mind raced. What if he was such a powerful avatar of the Pendragon Spirit that he could defeat the Void’s Anti-Life? A secret weapon, waiting to be found, and brought back, and used. The ultimate weapon that would tip the balance in the war.

  Hal couldn’t be sure that he was right, not completely, but the symbolism and the facts fitted together nicely; and instinctively he was convinced.

  He had to tell Hunter immediately. Perhaps there was still time for the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons to cross the barrier between the worlds somehow and bring Jack Churchill back from his exile. The stories said that time operated differently in the Otherworld. Hunter and the others could be there and back in the blink of an eye.

  Hal felt a rush of excitement mingled with relief. He had played his part, and he’d done so without leaving his armchair. With a whoop, he jumped up, ready to rush out to the High Street to find Hunter.

  Only he was no longer alone. Two armed soldiers stood just inside the door, and between them was Reid.

  ‘Time to go, Hal,’ he said, with a cold smile.

  As he made his way along the High Street towards the barricade, Hunter heard his name called anxiously. He turned to see Samantha running through the snow, looking desperate.

  Jumping down, he ran to her and they embraced passionately. ‘How did you find me?’ he said softly when they pulled apart.

  ‘There was a giant… all surrounded by blue light…’ Samantha appeared dazed after her meeting with the Caretaker. ‘He told me where you were, said I had to take his lantern back to him.’

  Hunter fetched the Wayfinder from the horse, where it had been hanging from the saddle. ‘Tell him thanks for the loan,’ Hunter said, handing it over.

  Touching the lantern had an effect on Samantha: her pupils grew less dilated, her mind cleared. ‘Hal’s in trouble,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s-’

  Hunter took her by the shoulders to calm her. ‘He’s safe. Don’t worry.’

  She leaned forward to kiss him strongly, and Hunter felt a surge of love so deep and powerful that it shook him to the core. As he pulled away, he could see that Samantha felt it, too. ‘Don’t get killed, Hunter.’ She caught herself, then added, ‘You and I-’

  ‘You know Hal loves you,’ Hunter interrupted. It was a truth that he had only come to realise in the last hour, but once he had recognised it, it was obvious.

  Samantha was taken aback by his response. ‘I know he likes me-’

  ‘You should go to him. You’ll make a good couple. If all this pans out right.’

  Samantha took a step back, struggling to find solid ground. ‘I thought… we could…’

  ‘A betting man would say I probably won’t come out of this alive. And even if I do, there are lots of places to go, people to see. Women

  …’ His voice trailed off; he couldn’t keep it up any longer, but he could see from the hardening of Samantha’s face that he had done enough. ‘Go to Hal. He’s at Mrs Damask’s,’ he said. ‘He needs you.’

  She backed away, still unsure what to make of his words, but her pride would not allow her to say any more. ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  When Hunter was a short way down the road, he allowed himself one quick glance back at the tiny departing figure, the blue light from the Wayfinder washing out across the snow. The sight was heartbreaking.

  Then he turned towards the sounds of battle rising up from all sides and spurred his horse onwards, his mind locked on conflict and victory.

  The snow was falling heavily when Mallory arrived at the southern barricade. It added an incongruously ethereal atmosphere to the street scene, dampening sounds, blanketing the flaws of human living. But as he neared the hastily erected metal wall, the sounds of battle rose up. There were no cries of pain or anger from the Lament-Brood beyond; they remained eerily silent, washing against the barricade like a summer swell in a harbour.

  But the soldiers lined up along the walls made up for it with a cacophony of defiance. It was all an act; Mallory could see that their faces were etched white with fear. Beyond the barricade, the hellish invading army stretched as far as the eye could see.

  They fired SA8os, hand pistols, rifles, from the walls and from all vantage points on the nearby buildings. Brass cartridges rained through the air, glittering in the arc lamps, and the sound was like a Caribbean rainstorm. Further back from the barricade, the big guns waited for any enemy breakthrough of the front line.

  Mallory reined in his horse and waited; it was only a matter of time before the defences were swept aside by the massive, unfeeling force pressing against them. Yet it happened even more quickly than he had anticipated. Within fifteen minutes, there was a sound like the howl of a dying animal as the metal plates began to buckle under the weight of bodies crushed against them.

  One of the soldiers firing from the top of the wall lowered his weapon, his mouth gaping. ‘Jesus Christ. What’s that?’

  On the other side of the barricade, the purple mist was rising as the Lament-Brood clambered on top of each other to allow those behind to gain purchase. They reminded Mallory of ants. But riding the crest of the twisted bodies was a gleaming yellow-white figure that Mallory recognised from Hunter’s
description as the Lord of Bones. It had grown in size, now almost twice the height of a man, its bulk increasing a little with every skeleton sucked into its voracious mass. There was a hunger to it, in the avid gleam of its eyes and the way it reached out with clacking-bone hands, desperate to snatch anything that fell within its reach.

  Most of the soldiers leaped from the wall as it fell apart, but one remained in position a second too long, firing his pistol futilely into the seething mass. The Lord of Bones’ eyes swivelled towards the soldier, fixed on its target and then moved towards it with alarming speed. Crushing hands shattered the soldier’s wrist and yanked him forwards.

  The Lord of Bones stood erect on the roiling Lament-Brood beneath it and pressed the yelling, squirming soldier against its chest. Mallory was sickened as he watched the victim’s skeleton sucked out of his body, leaving a flopping sack of skin and organs that was tossed to one side to splatter into the snow.

  And then the Lord of Bones threw its head back, opened its mouth and released a sound that was not a sound. It made Mallory’s stomach turn and his brain fizz. It was the creature’s roar of victory.

  Mallory lost sight of the Lord of Bones in the confusion as the barricade burst apart and the Lament-Brood flooded through into the city. For a brief moment, he was rooted as the Lament-Brood caught hold of fleeing soldiers, broke necks, ran swords through stomachs, gouged out eyes. And then, mere seconds later, repossessed the dead, twisting their bodies, forcing weapons to meld with bone and flesh, the re-animated corpses joining the ranks of those who had slain them to turn on their former comrades.

  The big guns released a hail of massive fire power. Mallory fought to control his horse, glad that something had torn his gaze away from the hellish vision. Smoke swept across the street. When it cleared, scores of the Lament-Brood had been ripped to pieces, but hundreds more surged in to take their place. The gun positions were overrun in seconds, the remaining soldiers fleeing, powerless.

  Mallory drew Llyrwyn and suddenly the street was flooded with brilliant blue light; even the falling snow appeared to be sapphire flakes. Mallory had never seen such a powerful display: the flames raged so forcefully along the blade that it vibrated in his hand, rang up his arm and into his heart.