‘What’s the Void’s world going to be like?’ Mallory shouted. ‘Constant night? Blood? War? Death? Hopelessness?’
Reid merely gave a faint smile, then a shrug. ‘Do it,’ he said to Kirkham.
‘There’s still hope,’ Hunter said to the others.
From the back of the faceless crowd of politicians and civil servants, the General made his way forward. He had a gun. ‘Time to stop this,’ he said.
Reid turned just as the General raised the pistol and fired. The bullet hit Reid directly between the eyes. His body slammed against the bars and then slumped down in an awkward jumble of limbs.
‘Come on,’ Hunter said under his breath.
‘I’m in charge now,’ the General said to the others. ‘Stop this nonsense immediately. Free these people.’
Hunter, Caitlin and Mallory watched, silently urging the crowd to obey the General. No one moved.
The General brandished his gun at the crowd. ‘I said-’
‘Kill him.’ The voice may have come from the deputy prime minister, or one of the Cabinet members, but it didn’t really matter which. The guards responded instantly, turning their weapons on the General and cutting him down.
‘Look at them,’ Mallory said sickened. ‘Like animals, fighting amongst themselves.’ The General’s blood flowed into Reid’s, mingled with it, formed an ocean that separated the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons from the small crowd huddled together against the gloom.
Mallory glanced at Hunter. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? All over.’
Shaking violently, Kirkham continued towards the frozen door that was now leaking darkness rapidly.
Hunter repeated his mantra, now a wish, a prayer: ‘There’s still hope.’
Kirkham’s palsied hand grasped the handle. Hunter guessed that the ice must be burning his flesh, but the scientist didn’t flinch; he almost appeared to be in a trance.
From somewhere that could have been far, far away or in the next corridor, an awful sound rose up that made all of them feel sick to their stomachs. It resonated deep into their bones, stabbing into their brains. They wanted to scratch at their ears, make themselves deaf. The howls of dogs joining together to form one note, one ringing chime of despair.
The blood drained from Caitlin’s face. ‘The Hounds of Avalon,’ she whispered.
For all the time they had been imprisoned, Sophie had stood silently, observing. Mallory stepped back to take her in his arms and when he saw her face, he realised the truth. ‘You knew. Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I couldn’t take the risk that the Void might discover the fifth.’ There were tears in her eyes, but no despair. She smiled. Mallory pulled her to him and they held each other tightly.
Caitlin closed her eyes and bowed her head, resting it gently against the bars.
Hunter couldn’t believe it. He’d put his trust in Existence and he’d been wrong. They’d failed in the worst way possible. There was no hope.
Kirkham opened the door. The obscene howling grew deafening, subsuming every other sound. Between one tick of a clock and the next, the moment appeared to drag on for ever as all eyes focused on the gaping door. Kirkham stared into its depths, frozen. And then darkness began to seep out, slowly at first, then faster, rapidly becoming a torrent. Everything it touched became fluid, began to alter, twist out of shape, the very molecules of the fabric becoming something else. With it came an awful wave of despair, a million times more potent than anything sent out by the Lament-Brood, and everyone it touched fell to their knees, devastated at what was to come.
Hunter gripped the bars, tears burning the corners of his eyes, still unable to accept that humanity had betrayed itself, that the basest elements had won out over all that was noble in mankind.
Reality began to warp and as it rushed towards him, he had a glimmer of what it was becoming. It looked very much like the worst of all possible worlds. It looked very much like hell.
Jagged static jumped across Sophie Tallent’s mind. It startled her so badly that she almost knocked her polystyrene cup of coffee across the keyboard. She guessed she had been daydreaming. It must have been a particularly deep one, for it took her a moment to orient herself, and though she couldn’t recall the details, it must have been satisfying, for she felt a great wistfulness at having left it behind.
She was sitting at her desk at Steelguard Securities, the screen in front of her flickering with the constant updating of currency information from all over the world. Beyond her was the window, offering views from high over Canary Wharf across London’s financial district, sitting smug and bloated beneath the thick blanket of pollution from car exhausts and the jets flying into Heathrow or London City Airport every few seconds.
Something hit her across the back of the head and this time she did spill her coffee. It was Kane, his chubby face looking like a side of ham above his salmon pinstriped shirt, and he was clutching the file with which he had clipped her. ‘You’re useless, Tallent. How do you expect to get any bonuses? Watch the screen.’ He tapped it with a fat forefinger. ‘Never take your eyes off it. If anything interesting happens, get on the phone.’ He snorted with disgust. ‘You’re a waste of space. You know they only keep you on here because you’re decorative? Mister Rowe likes to look at your tits in that nice white blouse. So if you want to hang on to your job, take your jacket off.’ He stalked off to abuse some other unfortunate labouring for ten to twelve hours a day in front of one of the rows and rows of screens on the Steelguard floor.
In the corner, the TV came alive as someone turned up the sound for the morning news. More deaths after the rebels shelled a market in Najaf in Iraq. A Western businessman had been taken hostage somewhere else in the Middle East. His captors had released a video of him, staring beaten and humiliated at the camera, a knife at his throat. The prime minister and the president of the United States shook hands; another successful summit, another announcement of millions poured into a new joint weapons project. Inflation holding steady. (A cheer ran around the room.) The poverty gap had widened again. (Another cheer.)
Sophie’s attention was caught by a cleaner making his way slowly across the floor, unnoticed by anyone else. He had a handsome face, though he occasionally let his long hair fall across it, as if embarrassed. He looked beaten and dejected, like a badly fitting shoe.
Mallory briefly met Sophie’s gaze. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his subconscious, something stirred: a hint of recognition so vague that it was almost a shiver across his synapses, there then gone. Crazy, he thought. No details surfaced because there weren’t any. His kind and hers would never meet. It just wasn’t done; better keep his mind on the work if he wanted to hold on to his job. There were the toilets on this floor to clean, then the two floors above, then back to this floor. An endless cycle, never to be broken.
The dying part of Mallory knew that he would see Sophie every day as he crossed that room; their eyes would meet in vague, uncomfortable recognition, but it would never be reconciled. They would never meet. They would never speak.
Five burgers sizzled in pools of grease. Laura DuSantiago watched them, oddly captivated by something she didn’t quite comprehend. How many had she cooked that day in the fast-food joint stinking of stale fat down a dingy side street not far from Northampton’s main drag? How many tomorrow and the endless days after? Why was she so unaccountably queasy? It was a job; she should be thankful.
On the other side of the counter, a queue of dead-eyed people shuffled and waited, most of them overweight, heading for a heart attack sooner rather than later, clad in ugly, cheap leisurewear and knock-off trainers from the market.
Laura flipped the burgers. Five, she thought. Why was she so ill at ease? Get a grip. This is it, this is your life.
Caitlin sat in a traffic jam, listening to a Radio I DJ trying to get listeners excited about some kind of event that weekend. The cars snaked on for eight miles ahead of her and another four behind. They hadn’t moved for the last five minutes
; she knew because she’d watched the clock tick around on the dashboard.
She should have been at the beautician’s in Gateshead fifteen minutes ago. In the boot, the boxes of samples sat, pretty pinks and russets, hair products that had been ‘scientifically tested’, that could make you into someone else. Really. Truly.
And of course, if she was late for the Gateshead appointment, how was she supposed to get down to Middlesbrough on time?
She thought about this for a second, then shrugged. Who cared? Who cared about anything, really? The thought made a lot of sense to her, but she still couldn’t explain the grating feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach. She turned up the radio so that she didn’t have to think.
Shavi sat at his desk in the accountancy office of Gibson and Layton and wondered why he’d absently doodled the number five on his pad. He didn’t have time to spend daydreaming. Mr Gibson had just brought in the file for some property developer, ‘a personal friend’, and Shavi had a few hours to locate every possible loophole and find every creative way to lie, cheat and deceive so that the income-tax liability was as close to zero as possible.
As Shavi opened the box file, he wondered why he felt such an abiding sense of despair.
Ruth Gallagher broke off from her shift in the old people’s home to sneak outside for a little cry. The owners salted away most of the vast amounts of cash paid by the loving relatives and left the poor occupants to survive — or not — on a subsistence diet, drugged up with Valium, staring vacantly at daytime TV.
Another one had died that morning, and it had been Ruth’s job to clean the bedroom. She was always cleaning bedrooms. They came and went with remarkable regularity, a production line shipping them to the afterlife. No point getting to know them; they were too drugged for any conversation. The relatives didn’t really care; it made the visits so much easier.
Ruth dried her eyes. No point being miserable. It was a life, wasn’t it?
And Hunter sat in the briefing, overcome with a strange feeling of deja vu. The map on the wall showed the former Yugoslavia, little flags signifying the rebel forces threatening to break the fragile peace.
‘OK,’ he said wearily, ‘who do you want me to kill this time?’ while entertaining an odd thought of a world where he was a force for life, not death.
In a quiet, dusty room in Brasenose, Hal huddled against a door, wondering why he was such a failure. He grew tense as footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, then rigid when they stopped at the door.
‘Open up.’ A familiar woman’s voice.
Hal flinched. He could pretend that the room was empty, but what good would it do? She’d come in anyway. He’d been caught, might as well own up. After all, there was nowhere left to run.
When he opened the door, Catherine Manning stood there, swathed in her expensive furs. ‘Ms Manning,’ Hal stuttered. ‘Were you looking for me?’ He caught himself when he saw Manning’s glassy eyes and the disturbing waxy sheen across her face; she looked oddly like a marionette.
Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and when a sound finally did come out it was no longer her voice. ‘The strain has been too much for this form. It cannot hold.’
Hal took a step backwards at the eeriness of a man’s voice emanating from Manning’s full, feminine lips.
Suddenly Manning collapsed, and as she fell to the floor she wasn’t like a flesh and blood woman at all. Her body appeared to be made of paper, or perhaps just skin, folding up on itself. What was left of her lay on the floor, flat and wrinkled and twisted, like a discarded set of clothes.
And where she had been, someone else now stood. At first, the face appeared to swim before Hal’s eyes and he had fleeting images of people he thought he knew and probably disliked, before the visage settled down to that of a stern-faced man dressed in flowing scarlet robes.
‘Who are you?’ Hal gasped.
‘In the time of the tribes, I was known as Dian Cecht of the Court of the Final Word, wise man, healer, now the last of the Tuatha De Danann.’ The bitterness in his voice made Hal wince.
‘Ms Manning-’
‘She thought she could use me for her ends. I was using her for mine. I rode her body and her mind through these Fixed Lands, avoiding the notice of the Devourer of All Things, preparing for this moment.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Hal knew that he sounded like an idiot, but he didn’t know what else to say.
‘Your kind have long been an interest of mine,’ Dian Cecht said in a manner that on the surface appeared quite unassuming, but Hal found distinctly menacing. ‘I know how you work. Inside and out. Down to the smallest particle. Though many of my kind had a strange affection for Fragile Creatures, I was not one of them. I saw in you something else: a chance for the Golden Ones to survive in a place that had grown tired of them.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ Hal said weakly.
‘In you lies the last hope of my people, and the last hope of your own. Are you ready for the task that lies before you?’
Hal stared blankly at Dian Cecht for a moment, then nodded.
‘Then come.’ Dian Cecht led Hal out into the corridor. ‘You are a strange people,’ Dian Cecht continued. ‘I told a Sister of Dragons what was planned. I needed her to be there, at the end, so that the Devourer of All Things would not suspect. And she kept the secret well, even though it meant her suffering.’ Dian Cecht clearly could not understand Sophie’s sacrifice.
Several feet away, a shimmering wall of blue ran from wall to wall.
‘What’s that?’ Hal asked.
‘Though it took all my abilities, I have closed this small space off from Existence. It lies beyond the world on the other side of the wall, yet is still a part of it. But only for a short while. And here the Devourer of All Things has no power to see.’ Dian Cecht strode ahead, so that Hal had to skip to keep up.
The god led Hal to the research rooms where Kirkham had carried out most of his experiments into finding a way to cross over to T’ir n’a n’Og. They came to the Plexiglas window that looked on to the lab where Glenning had turned to a pile of dust after returning from his trip to the other side, and Hal was surprised to see it awash with a brilliant blue light. The stately bluestone that had been brutally ripped from Stonehenge was glowing with the sapphire radiance.
‘It never stopped working,’ Hal said in amazement. After Glenning’s death, no one had felt the need to return to the labs down here. It was considered a failed experiment and everyone had more important things on their minds.
The sheer power coming off the megalith gave Hal pause. ‘That’s why,’ he said to himself. Then to Dian Cecht: ‘Oxford was flitting in and out of the Otherworld because of this stone! The power must have been infusing the whole city!’
The door opened of its own accord and Dian Cecht stepped into the blue world. Hal followed.
‘He is here,’ Dian Cecht said. ‘He is in your hands now.’
Standing nearby was the giant who had appeared to Hal in the Grove behind Magdalen what seemed like so long ago. The Caretaker held the Wayfinder lantern aloft, and when he smiled warmly, Hal felt all the tension leave his muscles. ‘I knew you would be here, now, Brother of Dragons,’ the Caretaker said warmly. ‘This lantern will light your way, as it has done for many of your kind before you.’
As Hal’s eyes adjusted to the megalith’s flooding light, he realised that there was something else in the room. Coiled around the walls was an enormous Fabulous Beast that appeared to be made of the blue energy, yet which had solidity and weight. Its sapphire eyes were fixed firmly on him, and to Hal they appeared not like those of a beast at all, but wise and calm and wonderful. Hal had no idea how it could have entered that enclosed space.
And standing in the sinuous loops of its tail was a woman, her own eyes as blue as the Fabulous Beast’s; skin pale, hair black. ‘This is your time, Brother of Dragons.’ It was the woman who had spoken, but the voice was deep, male and slightly sibila
nt.
All eyes were on him. Hal looked from one to the other and realised that he was being asked something of great importance.
‘Do you understand your responsibilities, Brother of Dragons?’ the Caretaker asked.
‘Yes. I haven’t lived up to them,’ Hal admitted. ‘I’m sorry…’ He caught himself and then added honestly, ‘I think I’m too much of a coward for this job.’
‘Everyone has a different strength,’ the woman said. ‘You have used yours effectively.’
Energy arced across the room. The power emanating from the bluestone was growing more intense. Hal stood entranced by the light show for a moment before adding, ‘You’re talking about the code, in the painting.’ He sighed. ‘I know who the king is now. But it’s too late.’
‘It is never too late,’ the Caretaker said firmly. ‘The signs were left for you, and you alone, to prepare you for this moment.’
‘Me?’ Hal said, puzzled.
‘You have a choice,’ the woman added. ‘You may turn away now and give all of Existence up to the Devourer of All Things. Or you must find the king and bring him back here, but the sacrifice you make will be great indeed.’
‘You’re saying I have to die,’ Hal said. Not far from the megalith, the Blue Fire had begun to take on some kind of shape.
The Caretaker stepped forward and, for a second, Hal felt as if he was in the presence of his father. ‘Nothing dies. Nothing new is created, nothing is destroyed. It is simply transformed.’
‘And he’s not dead? The king?’
The Caretaker smiled once more, reassuringly. ‘Nothing dies.’
‘He is lost,’ the woman said, as if she could read Hal’s mind. ‘In distant times, in a faraway place, his memory fading. He will not find his way home without your guidance.’
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