Always Forever taom-3

by Mark Chadbourn

  It was a strange, hanging moment of complete silence; he was looking up at a tidal wave the instant before it crashed down. And then they moved.

  Veitch launched himself across the rocky ground as the wave broke. In the instant of his turning he had glimpsed them all shifting as one, a single grey beast of hatred and retribution bearing down on him with outstretched arms, wide, staring eyes and silently screaming mouths. A million dead, hunting. If he survived, he knew it was a sight that would haunt him for as long as he lived.

  As he passed the treacherous spirit that had guided him to that spot, she spat like a wildcat and lashed out with sharp nails that raked open the side of his face. Without breaking his stride, he cursed and returned the blow with his sword. Her bloodless arm fell to the ground.

  The fear and adrenalin took conscious thought from his head. Instinctively he recognised his only hope was to run faster and longer. But could the dead tire? And he had already been pushed to his limits by the Night Rider.

  The ground passed in a blur beneath his feet, the featureless, rocky landscape streamed on either side; he was locked into the beat of his heart, the surge of his blood, the pump of his muscles. Through it all he could feel the weight of them pressing at his back, just a hand's-width from him, constantly reaching. One wrong step and they would have him.

  And he ran.

  The silence was the worst thing. His ears told him there was nothing there, seductively teasing him to stop, but the primal part of him sensed them, responded to them as his ancestors would have done. He had reached the foot of the hill, crossed the first two miles of a flat plain that reached to the horizon. But he was starting to tire. The constant pounding on the hard rock sent spikes of pain from his knees into his groin and a knot had formed in his gut. Fire was creeping out in a web across his lungs.

  He slowed, almost imperceptibly, but it was enough. Some fluttering thing brushed the back of his jacket. He propelled himself forward to escape it, but he didn't have the energy to maintain the spurt. When he slowed this time, the touch on his jacket was as sharp as a knife. He pressed forward again. Stars burst across his vision. Winding down, nearly over. A pinching sensation seared his shoulder like red hot pokers. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling from nearly contact.

  He would never give up. Death or glory.

  The rock fell away beneath his feet. For one frightening moment he was pedalling thin air, and then he reconnected with the ground hard, skidding on his heels down a pebbled scree slope, windmilling his arms to maintain his balance. Dark walls rushed up around him and shadows clustered far below. A fissure of some kind, invisible until he was upon it.

  Gravity dragged him faster, barely able to keep his balance. A boulder leapt out of nowhere, but he had no control of his momentum to avoid it. He clipped it and did a forward roll in the air, crashing down on to the stones and shale, twenty knives in his back, ripping his flesh. Faster and faster, the shadows looming up, impossible to tell what dangers they hid. His head slammed against the rocks and he lost consciousness for the briefest instant. He awakened to realise the sucking shadows were close at hand. The force propelled him over a rock ledge into the heart of them.

  He awoke in so much pain he was convinced something bad was broken. Blood slicked his clothes from a deep gash on his head and numerous other cuts across his body. He wiped a puddle from his eye and loosed the splatter with a flick of his wrist. Cautiously, he tested his limbs. Apart from a searing pain in his ribs, he appeared in one piece; he guessed that was probably bad bruising rather than a break.

  After the initial stupefaction, he came to awareness sharply, jumping to his feet to flee his pursuers. He was alone on a flat stone floor. High overhead he could see a sliver of grey sky and, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the shapes of the dead moving down the walls of the fissure towards him.

  Exhausted and brittle from the pain, he headed along the floor of the fissure into the dark.

  It continued much further than he imagined. At the far end he found stone that had definitely been worked into blocks. It formed a doorway around a black hole leading into the ground. With the relentless grey shapes drawing in on him, he had no choice: he dived in.

  Inside he was surprised to find more worked stone lining the walls, floor and ceiling. He had no idea who was responsible-surely not the dead-but it gave him hope it might lead to a way out. Fumbling for the matches he always carried in his pocket, he struck one and saw the walls were covered with primitive paintings, inexplicable in design but which resonated uneasily with him. The match also illuminated a dead torch. It was dry as a bone and lit quickly.

  Glancing back, he could just make out hints of movement at the other end of the fissure. There was no time to proceed with caution. His footsteps bounced off the walls of the tunnel as he ran.

  After five minutes the tunnel led into an enormous room that must have been carved from the bedrock and then lined with stone blocks. The ceiling was lost in the shadows far beyond the reach of his torch. The effort that must have gone into its construction stunned him: the wall paintings were now the size of three men, and there were carved effigies all around, squat, misshapen figures with no human characteristics, and tall, spindly forms that loomed over him like grotesque children's doodles. He couldn't help slowing to a walk to mask the echoes of his feet; suddenly he didn't want to make any sound that would bring attention to him. The scale of the place suggested no human sensibilities, nor did the jarring lines of the alien and unsettling architecture. It reminded him of a temple. Did the dead have their own gods? Did they pray for relief from the bitterness of their grey reality?

  The grey shapes were again visible where he had entered the cavernous chamber. He hurried on, hoping he hadn't taken himself into a cul-de-sac.

  But the more he progressed into that place, the more he felt an oppressive dread, even worse than the feeling when he had first entered the Grim Lands. Something was out there, lurking in the shadows, perhaps, or even further afield: just beyond the spiderweb veil that separated the worlds. Close enough to reach out and swallow him whole.

  Do the dead have their own gods?

  He couldn't shake the question from his head.

  Before he could consider skirting the perimeter in search of an exit, he found himself at a slightly raised area. At the centre of it was a short column on which stood a foot-high egg, its surface swirling with shades of sapphire and emerald. The moment he laid eyes on it, a part of him told him to avoid it, keep moving by. But there was something hypnotic about the thing that sapped his natural caution. He took a step on to the dais and realised obliquely it was even more than that: the egg was actively blanketing his fears to draw him in; he could feel it tinkering on the edge of his consciousness. The time when he could have ignored it had already past, and so he found himself approaching the column with trepidation.

  Three feet from the egg he passed through some invisible boundary. The air wavered briefly and then he was inside a bubble where everything was greentinged, the chamber beyond unreal, all sounds muffled. The egg was pulsing slightly, although it was certainly not alive in any true meaning of that word.

  Tentatively, he reached out. The air itself gathered a charge, humming like an electricity pylon. A second later he felt a dull jolt and the bubble transformed. He was in the centre of a three-dimensional view, so real he might as well have been amongst the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the banks of Loch Ness, looking down at himself being charged by the Questing Beast. The detail left no doubt that it was a true view, across time and space. Had it been plucked from his mind, he wondered? And if so, why that moment? He had a vague answer to that: it was the moment when he felt he had really, truly failed, not only everyone else, but also himself.

  The repercussions of what he was seeing began to worm its way through his mind. On a hunch, he thought of Ruth and what she was doing at that moment. The 3-D view shifted and he was on the rolling deck of a boat in the middle of a nighttime storm.
The rain was flying horizontally, the sails flapping so wildly it was almost deafening. A figure crept in the shadow of the raised cover to the hold, its long hair flattened to its head and back. As he watched, Ruth looked around, her face grimly determined. The first thing Veitch noticed was how much her features had changed in the short time they had been apart. A hardness made her appear, if not a little older, then certainly more mature; some of the innocence that softened her features had gone.

  Seeing her brought a damp wave of emotion inside him, but in an odd way it invigorated him too; here was all the motivation he needed. Focusing his mind, he pushed Ruth out of it and thought of Shavi.

  There was only the briefest period of transition before the image around him showed a strange, hopeless landscape of yellowing grass and twisted, leafless trees. Shavi sat on a stone box of some kind, staring deeply towards the horizon. Witch couldn't tell if there was anything wrong with him or if he was simply lost in thought.

  "That's a start," he muttered. "Now show me how I get to him."

  He was now looking down on himself standing at the egg, only the shadows all around had cleared to reveal several tunnels leading off. The angle of his view highlighted one directly ahead.

  Cautiously he walked backwards until he stepped out of the bubble with a faint pop. Away from the magical cocoon, he felt suddenly exposed and hurried towards the tunnel, pausing at the threshold to look back. Curiously, the dead did not appear to have pursued him; he would have expected some of them to have arrived by that time. Something else was in the chamber, though far away. He could hear the dim echoes of the movement of an enormous shape. With an involuntary shudder, he hurried along the tunnel.

  Laura lit a small fire in the corner of the warehouse while the Bone Inspector foraged for food. The last time he came back with cans for just the one meal. She berated him enough that he wouldn't make the mistake again, stressing that a choice between meatballs resembling glutinous chunks of mud and fatty steak pie filling was really no choice at all.

  In the cavernous warehouse, the fire provided little warmth, particularly at night when the chill radiated up out of the concrete floor. For some reason she felt the cold more than she ever had.

  She pulled the packing crate closer so she was almost on top of the flames and rubbed her hands together. She found it amazing she still hadn't given in to despair. The Fomorii now appeared to be everywhere in the city. They'd climbed up into the roof of the building to peer through broken slates across the capital. There were swarming black shapes as far as the eye could see. The sheer volume was sickening, drawing on the basic human revulsion for anything insectile. At times they would disappear to some lair, possibly beneath the ground, in an eerie, silent exodus. The Bone Inspector had suggested fleeing through the deserted streets at that time, but the beasts were never gone for long and the thought of being trapped as they swarmed out of the sewers filled Laura with dread.

  In the firelight, her skin looked even greener. Earlier she had cut her wrist on a rusty nail. The blood-green blood-had flowed freely for a second before performing a startling u-turn on the back of her hand, returning to the wound, where it proceeded to seal it as if it had never been there.

  The Bone Inspector had stared in amazement, but nothing shocked her any more. She'd died and come back; after that anything paled into insignificance.

  She was a freak in a world that no longer made any sense. What was the point in considering it for even an instant? Instead, her thoughts were for the others: Church, of course, Shavi, Ruth, Tom, even Veitch. She missed them in a way she never thought she'd miss anyone. More than anything, she wanted to be sitting round a roaring campfire in the cold night, laughing, teasing, mocking; the company of good friends made life right.

  The army of Fomorii on every side told her it would probably never happen. Samhain was coming up hard, the world was going to hell, and they were scattered God knows where.

  She wondered what was to become of her; what was to become of all of them.

  The rope bit roughly into Church's wrists and his joints ached from having his arms dragged so tightly behind him. He'd been in this position before, looking up at a sneering Callow pacing maniacally and triumphantly back and forth, and it had made him sick to his stomach then; of course, on that occasion Callow hadn't looked like someone had injected printer's ink into his veins. Now his nightmarish appearance made the situation even worse, as if Church had found his way into a Goya painting.

  The Malignos kept to the shadows-they'd extinguished several torches to feel more comfortable-and the Fomorii were now nowhere to be seen. Baccharus was next to him, bound just as tightly, but the rest of the room's occupants had been dragged somewhere else, out of sight, possibly out of the chamber.

  It was obvious what his own eventual fate would be, but Callow was determined to get some kind of payback for the suffering that had been heaped upon him; agonies which he blamed on Church and the others, but which had come only from his own will.

  "These are the ways we live our life," Callow was saying, not making much sense any more. "In fear of this and in fear of that, never quite knowing the wherewithal and the whywithal. It makes us broken, like dogs in the yard. But you wouldn't know about that, would you?" He turned and spat in Church's direction, the lamps of his lidless eyes bright and terrible.

  "Take a stress pill, Callow." It was childish, but Church couldn't resist it, even knowing the reaction he would get.

  Callow hovered for a long moment, then threw himself forward wildly to swing a vicious kick into Church's gut, as if he were planting a football the length of the pitch. Church snapped shut, retching, before two of the Malignos ran forward to haul him back up. The pain was so acute he cursed his stupidity, fearing something had ruptured and his stomach was now filling up with blood.

  "Violence is unnecessary," Baccharus interjected gently. "You fail to see we have a common enemy."

  "Oh, you're so superior," Callow mocked in a pathetic singsong voice. "I have no friends, I have no enemies. That makes it easy to understand how things work. No surprises." He bent down until his face was inches from Church's, the rotten meat reek of his breath blooming, his features hideously distorted by the tear blur in Church's eyes. "You and your filthy little followers destroyed everything. I had plans for my life. I had a way out of the misery of my existence. Unlike you and your favoured brood, there have been no opportunities in my life. No pleasant acts of chance that lead me on to the sunlit uplands. It has been hard toil and suffering. And when I found a way out of that, you spoiled it for me."

  "Quisling," Church said through gritted teeth. "You tried to sell out all of humanity just to get some grubby little advantage for yourself."

  "You say that like it's a bad thing." Callow jumped back, his eyes rolling like a madman. "Life is brutal and short and we need to take what we can to make ourselves comfortable before the jaws of night close around us forever."

  "Fine. As long as no one else gets hurt in the process."

  "Oh, why qualify it? Will it matter you made a few people cry when the worms are crawling in and the worms are crawling out?"

  "Look at yourself, Callow. Where's your self-analysis?" The sharp pain had turned to a dull throbbing. "Has that philosophy worked for you? At all?"

  "There is only hope," Baccharus interjected, "if you look beyond your petty concerns, to the needs of your fellow Fragile Creatures, to the needs of all things of existence. Everything is-"

  "You should not preach goodwill to your fellow man." Callow danced around him, but couldn't bring himself to strike out.

  "So you've teemed up with those things now?" Church nodded towards the Malignos. "Are they the only ones left who'll have you?"

  "The Malignos recognise the opportunities for personal gain in any situation. They always loved their hoards of gold. And their human flesh, of course."

  "But you're helping the Fomorii again, after all they've done to you!"

  "I may not be able to forg
ive, dear boy, but I am incisive enough not to antagonise the eventual winners."

  Church snorted bitter laughter. "You think they're going to take over like any other invader? They're going to wipe out everything, you mad bastard! They're not interested in gold, or any other creature comforts." He laughed again at the stupid pun. "They're driven by the need to eradicate all of existence. They're a force of nature. A hurricane-"

  "Oh, well, you've won me over. Of course I'll help you," Callow mocked.

  He wandered over to converse with the Malignos. Church seized the opportunity to talk to Baccharus. "How did the Fomorii manage to get on board the ship without anyone knowing? I thought it was completely under Manannan's control?"

  "The power of the Heart of Shadows is growing. The Night Walkers can achieve things they never would have been able to do before."

  "Do you think this might actually motivate your people to do something about it?" Church asked acidly.

  "It may already be too late for that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If the Night Walkers can strike at the heart of Wave Sweeper, they can strike anywhere. They might have already launched their assault on the Court of High Regard."

  "If only you'd done something before." Church caught the negativity before it spread. "The first thing we have to do is get out of here." He looked over at Callow, who was performing a mad little dance around the Malignos. "Before that bastard slits my throat. Or worse."

  "Then you are fortunate to have friends in low places."

  The voice was barely audible, but Church recognised it instantly. It felt as if a mouse was scurrying around his hands. Marik Bocat was hard at work severing his bonds with a tiny implement that occasionally pricked his flesh. A surge of hope rose in his chest, but he kept it from reaching his face.