“You’re not coming to save us at all,” he said. “You’re coming to … to …”
But he couldn’t put it into words, the scope of it making him dizzy, twisting his tongue.
“What becomes of gods when no one believes in them?” the Lady said. “What becomes of magic when faith grows sour? All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the crop entire. The rot has crept along the leys, spreading from all we left behind. It took us too long to learn of it. Your world is a canker. Nothing more.”
“No. It can’t be. It can’t be.”
But in the pit of his stomach, the core of his soul, he knew it was so.
“You will bring us the sword,” Nimue told him. “You will bring it, or I promise you, we will make of your world a hell before the end. A blazing hecatomb from shore to shore. An ocean, a sky full of screams. Bring us the sword. Bring us Caliburn. Let us sever the rot from the branch. In return, we shall grant you a painless death.”
He’d like to think she meant him alone, but he didn’t flatter himself. She meant all of humanity. All of the Remnants. Everything that lived. All the same, in the cold, in the dark, it sounded oddly appealing. An end to his troubles. To betrayal. To fighting. To the sight of his world falling apart. To loneliness and hiding in the shadows. To fear.
An ending. A return to dreams, perhaps. The dreams from which the first dragons had sprung.
But he’d made a promise. A choice.
And thinking of Von Hart, the hope on his face, he realised then that he wasn’t the only one.
Together, we’ll go into the dark.
“He doesn’t know, does he? Your envoy. He believes in the Troth. That’s why he did all of this. He thinks that you can save us.”
Memories raced through Ben’s skull, a picture trying to form. The conspiracy of the CROWS, bringing about a breach in the Lore, making all of this possible. Into the weakened magic, Von Hart had played his hand, using Jia to see the truth. To shatter the glass. Open the way … For a moment, Ben experienced a pang of sympathy for his one-time ally, the envoy extraordinary.
Lord Blaise of the Leaping White Hart. I’ve never known you. Not really.
If never exactly a friend, the fairy had saved his life on at least two occasions, muttering about some future task, something that Ben wouldn’t like. And in all the confusion, Arthur coming to London, Ben hadn’t stopped to question it, distracted by the chaos. Now, standing here in the Orchard of Worlds—the cosmos in decay under his feet—the intricacy of it almost overwhelmed him, the centuries that the envoy had required to spin his plan, his redress of an ancient mistake. The way he’d kept an ace up his sleeve, playing the odds, hoping that Ben could save his servant, his pupil …
Let me fall.
In all of that, would Von Hart honestly have forgotten the prize in question? The relic, jewelled and silver, that the Lady so desperately craved? Under London, Ben had resisted the fairy’s spell, tearing at the suit. He’d refused to help recover the Eight Hand Mirror and almost breathed his last in a spreading pool of blood. What challenge had he presented then? What threat? Von Hart had no one left to face in the crypt and yet he’d departed empty-handed, neglecting the task of centuries.
The envoy had left him the sword.
“What becomes of gods, Benjurigan?” the Lady asked him, bringing him back to the here and now. “When the gods fall. When Creation unravels. When the hunger is all that remains.”
She turned to face him, a whisper of silk on the sward. She was crying, he saw, tears rolling like gems down her cheek, silver on brown. Her eyes, violet and sharp, revealed only coldness, her concern simply for herself. For the destiny she’d wrought. Corrupted. Deadly. The slow venom of greed.
But here, all masks fell. In a heartbeat, he noticed that something was wrong with her face. Her braids, coiled high, were seething, dislodged by a sudden fluidity of bone. Her cheek looked swollen, as if she was chewing on something large and bitter, unable to spit it out. Then, as the cold snaked into his extremities, a delta of fear, he watched Nimue’s body convulse, her flesh rippling. A shimmer passed through her like static. A flash of fire, white as snow.
What the hell?
Under her skin, her bones surged, a sharp crackling in the air. Wincing at the sound, Ben wasn’t sure whether he was shrinking at first, his gaze glued to the Lady, the trees around him a blur. Leaves swirled, her transforming bulk breaking through the branches, her spreading shadow freezing him to the spot. Up she rose, her legs stretching, impossibly long, throwing off her humanoid shape. Sinews strained, creaking and popping, into a blanched, bony tarsus. There came a snap of ribs, sharp as a pistol in the gloom. Ben watched, breathless, as her back ballooned outward, bulging into an egg-shaped abdomen, milky and striated with markings. Dwarfed, he choked, gagging in shock. For all her shifting, swelling presence, he could see that a part of her remained. Her right arm, breast and leg merged with the front of the creature’s head like a rag doll hanging from its jaws. As eight eyes, burning with ghostly light, settled upon him, one of them, he saw, still shone violet, pressing a warning upon him. A need.
We are Fallen. And falling still …
As Nimue’s words shuddered through his skull, he grasped the full horror before him, the curtain of the dark rising on a nightmare. In her fangs, her quivering pedipalps, the skeletal legs bursting from her body, the sight of the monster barrelled into him, threatening to snuff out his mind. The rot wasn’t only around him, infecting the orchard, the palace walls. It was in her too, eating away at her essence, the ancient, alien life of her. The Lady was dying, yes, but worse than that, her decline was distorting her, revealing a terrifying truth.
What becomes of gods …?
He’d seen masks before. And what hid behind them. Nimue, Our Lady of the Barrows, was a Lurker. Or on her way to fast becoming one. A phantom, a ghost of a withering power. With a bellow, a bark of dismay, memories went spiralling through Ben’s brain. His encounters with the ghost-beasts iced his veins even as their manifest queen crowded his vision, rising into the dark.
Lurkers. The Walkers between the Worlds, drifting through the gulfs of the nether, mindless and blind—or so he’d believed. No one could say where the creatures had come from, these spectral watchdogs of Creation. These silent guardians, feeding on an excess of magical force, drawn to the souring of the earth.
Now he had an idea.
There are more of them now. Again, he pictured Von Hart in Club Zauber, his chest heaving under star-spangled silk. His hair hanging like gold in his face. They gather like … flies on shit.
And Ben had wondered where the ghost-beasts had got to lately. The last time he’d seen the phantoms, they’d been in the guise of an Emperor, converged on the bait of a living source. Despite the sorcery, the spells, wreaking havoc on London and the world, the Lurkers had been absent from recent events, a fact that struck him as strange.
You don’t know. Panic fluttered in his breast, his fear moot, unable to reach the envoy. You don’t know what has become of them.
A chill fist closed around his heart, the sight of the Lady making a terrible kind of sense. The pale amoebae, circling ravenous, drifting in the dark, were nothing less than the vestiges of gods. The putrefaction of fallen powers. The degeneration of the Fay.
We are not what we were.
No shit. Ben turned and ran. He ran with his lungs raw and his eyes closed, trying not to hear the crashing through the trees, the Lady—the hunger that she had become—lurching after him.
The Lurkers are coming. They always were. Trying to return …
With all the sluggishness of a dream, his feet pummelled the fruit, sweet and foul. On the back of his neck, her breath like winter, hissing through the thrashing branches, heavy with desire. He cried out, slipping down a slope and splashing through muck, the stagnant brook sucking at his knees, his thighs. Grunting, gasping, he wrenched himself free, pulling himself up on the opposite bank.
Chancing a look over his shoulde
r, he saw fangs descend, pale, slick with ichor. When he turned again, nothingness filled his eyes, his mind, as he ran out of ground.
Screaming, he tumbled headfirst into the dark.
TWENTY-ONE
Coughing, spluttering, Ben dragged himself from the river, up onto the stony shore.
In human form, he sprawled on his back, shivering with the chill of the water and the kiss of near death. And dreams—or something much like them—their clarity fading, leaving only a vague sense of horror and the sting of the truth. The First-Born had fallen. And the Fay had never stopped falling, poisoned, warped by their souring magic. The rot had spread across centuries. Across worlds. The knowledge shuddered through him, the scales of his suit thickening, hoarding warmth. The dead king was no more than a harbinger, an evil sent to prepare the way. They were coming, this debased race. These half-ghosts. These Lurkers. Coming to destroy the earth.
Not on my watch. Not if I can help it.
He grimaced, scoffing at his own bravado. Nothing, he knew, would ever be the same. He was alive, that was something, but his world was already over. As he lay there on the bank, the pebbles needling his spine (Get up. Get up, you bastard), he knew that there was no going back. Who among humans could deny the truth now, the fact of fabulous beings and beasts in their midst? All the prophecies had come true, after a fashion. But the future, he feared, belonged only to war.
In his hand, he clutched the horn, the ivory relic cold in his grip. With the same sense of guilt, he remembered he had command of an army. That a battle played out somewhere above him, along the banks of the Thames. All he could hear, however, was the roar of the flames. The collapse of buildings. The distant surrender of wood, glass and stone. The dragon city. Devoured … He couldn’t hear any choppers or planes. No doubt the inferno had pushed the squadrons back to the suburbs, the sky claimed by smoke. No shriek of wyverns harried the air. No whistle of brooms. No gunfire, no clash of swords. He wondered how long he’d been out for, the time slipping, out of sync, between worlds. Through his dismay, a spike of relief. He couldn’t hear any screams either. It was short-lived. A false hope, all the same. The people trapped in the city had either managed to flee or met their end in this Hell.
He sat up, jarred by the thought. The ice had gone from him, Arthur’s touch dispelled by the embrace of the Thames. He remained a mess of cuts and bruises, and he winced as he moved. But his muscles were tingling too, busy with magical needles, stitching him back together. One last time. You can do this … Swaying, he climbed to his feet. Not like you have a choice. To the left of him, the bridge struts loomed in the dark, concrete giants catching the light from the city, reflecting off the water. Nearer to him, a ramshackle jetty, driftwood steps leading up to the Embankment. Ash coiled across the sky, the ruin mixing with the charred wall of thorns, stray sparks flickering like fireflies. There was no going back. No time to look back either. The king in the mountain had fallen, his corpse hanging up there in the dark, broken and empty on the summit of the Shard.
There was only one thing left to do.
Even as we speak, a company of Fay rides across the nether, bound for the gate to your world. The envoy will meet us there, Benjurigan.
One thing alone.
He found them at the north end of the bridge, a huddled, ash-streaked band of knights. Around them, he made out shapes in the dark, some leather-clad, some furred and beaked, the bodies of the slain. Too many. Way too many. Motorbikes lay abandoned in the road, their wheels like the makeshift markers of graves. Pools of oil and blood glimmered here and there, catching the enveloping glow. The few who remained, thirty or more, were sitting on the pavement nursing their wounds, their heads bowed and silent, or shuffling blank-faced through the piled-up mass, calling for their dead. The battle, it seemed, had moved on, leaving a mournful lull. He didn’t kid himself that it was over.
As Ben emerged from the smoke, a flame-haired figure staggering into view, one by one, the knights stood, a hush falling over the scene. Then a cheer went up, weary and hollow, but a cheer nevertheless. He raised a hand, heavy as lead, to wave away their regard.
I’m not your champion, he wanted to tell them. Hardly.
As much as he longed to absorb their hope, draw on each expectant face like a flower in the sun, he knew that he’d failed them, every man and woman here. Downriver, Tower Bridge sailed through the smoke, torn black sails to the wind. The outline of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, the old church spire, scratched at the billowing night. The Walkie Talkie building, its meshed windows, a thousand or more, rippling with unchecked flame. These sights supported the fact of the matter, a deadweight on his heart. These people were merely temporary survivors; he’d only saved them for the end. This fight, he might’ve said, was just the beginning. A greater threat rode towards them through the dark. Bringing cataclysm. Bringing death to all.
He opened his mouth to offer them this, or perhaps an apology, feeble on his lips, when his breath went out of him. A scrawny figure ran from the throng and flew into his arms.
“You’re alive! You’re alive!” Defeated or no, he couldn’t help but welcome her warmth, her head on his chest, a tousled ball of black. But her words, joyful as they were, thrummed sadness into his bones. He’d never be what she believed him to be. “We saw you from the bridge, snatching up the king …” She spoke in a breathless rush, a touch of hysteria through her fatigue. “He’s dead, isn’t he? Arthur? Tell me he’s dead.”
And over the top of her head, he found himself looking into malachite eyes, du Sang on his feet, watching him in silence. Blood soaked the front of the Vicomte’s suit, at odds with his luxuriant curls and smooth skin, his arrested youth in full, bone-white bloom. Of everyone assembled here, the vampire perhaps grasped the gravity of the situation. Du Sang gave him a nod. An acknowledgment of his survival, nothing more.
“He died centuries ago,” Ben told the girl. And the world along with him. Gently, he put his hands on her shoulders, pushing her away. “Annis, what happened here?”
The Black Knight appeared to remember where she was, exhaling and straightening. As she looked up at him, he took in the scar across her face, the welt showing white under the soot. No one around him remained unscathed for long, it seemed, and he could’ve cursed, but he didn’t, for her sake. Sensing his scrutiny, she glanced down at the road, between her boots.
“We fought,” she said simply. “The goblins scattered when you grabbed the king. The bugbears came up on our rear … greenteeth, ghouls … it wasn’t pretty.” Remembered fear trembled on her breath. “There were so many of them. We were seriously outnumbered. But then, for some reason, they … Well, the horde fell back, retreating into the streets. Perhaps because of the fire. Or the sword, I don’t know.” Caliburn, sheathed through her belt, gleamed, but stayed thankfully silent. Satiated, perhaps. For now. “And the goblins never returned.”
“It was the horn,” Ben said, holding up the relic in question, flames dancing in gold. “The spell. It was only going to last for so long. When Arthur—or whatever he was—met his maker, I guess his minions lost heart.”
None of the summoned creatures, from goblin to ogre to wyvern, had ever been fond of a fair fight. Shit, du Sang wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t struck our little bargain. Few of them, he reckoned, would’ve rallied beneath a banner of war under their own steam, not without dragons and giants to help them. Even then, it was unlikely, when faced with the British Army, let alone the risk of Remnant retaliation. And in the Old Lands, at Camlann, Ben had read that the Usurper, Mordred, had employed a similar charm, beguiling all foul and craven hearts. A charm that the Lady had sought to counter, with harpsong and magical slumber … Not that he placed much faith in fairy tales. Not any more. He’d closed the book on that particular dream.
News of the horde’s retreat didn’t cheer him. These Remnants still presented a threat, whether hiding in sewers to prey on humans or taking their chances out in the open, in the shell-shocked counties of Britain. Th
ere was nothing to stop them now, no way to send them back into the Sleep. And no Lore to hold them to account or an official body to uphold it. The Anarchy had returned, grown fat and deadly on the ages. In that moment, every long, lonesome second of them felt like a massive waste of time.
Old Lands. Dead Lands. At this hour, they were much the same.
Annis read his misgiving, plain on his face, and did her best to encourage him.
“Well, it isn’t all bad,” she said. “You still have the horn, don’t you? There’s an army down there, in case you hadn’t noticed. Waiting on your call.”
Ben followed her outstretched arm to the side of the road, the girl pointing west, upriver. Reluctantly, unmoved by her optimism—but glad to slip away from du Sang’s patient gaze—he strode over to the railings. Down there stretched a riverside path, a broad open area wreathed in shadows cast by the water. In the drifting smoke, he couldn’t see anything at first, picking out the hazy silhouettes of bankside piers, tugboats and darkened restaurants, the cross-Thames railway and Southwark Bridge beyond. As he stood there, it began to rain, gently at first and then harder, hissing through the smothering pall. He looked up, quietly thankful, and when he peered down again, the downpour had washed the ash from his eyes.
He saw them, gathered in the dark. Two hundred or so Remnants filling the space, packed in ranks between the Thames and the bankside office buildings, the troops stretching off into the gloom. The tall, colourful caps of the gnomes, the creatures sat on the stone shoulders of ettin or clinging to the gnarled backs of the green men. Dwarves shuffled at the front of the crowd, their helmets dented, beards bloody. He picked out tiddy mun, reynardine, hedley kow, blue caps and hunky punks, dotted throughout the restless throng.
A fluttering drew his gaze up to the Victorian towers that flanked the Cannon Street railway bridge, the twin spires retaining grandeur despite the blaze. Against the skyline, he made out griffins perched on the ledges, proud-chested and visibly impatient. Witches leant against the weathervanes, their robes like flags in the haze, though despite their pale shade, he knew that these women would never surrender, would rather die than admit defeat.
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