There was something very odd going on; a dark magic that Alan felt too tired to understand, yet he knew it could prove to be the ultimate threat. Mo might understand it, the way she had understood the dark shapes that had been invading his mind during the journey here. But Mo was not by his side.
Perhaps something the Tyrant himself had hinted at . . .
Alan was reminded of the time he had been threatened by the golden robot. He had witnessed visions of galaxies and nebulas moving around him, and explosions of what he took to be supernovae giving rise to oceans of light and fire more brilliant than any rainbow. Places where new stars were coming into existence . . .
He had demanded an explanation from the Tyrant.
‘The witches saw fit to criticise the harnessing of such a wonder. Small minds terrified of the ultimate ambition – infinite power!’
Now he witnessed the Citadel close to, Alan wondered again just what lesson he had been taught in that frightening encounter.
‘You’re talking about the Arinn?’
‘Of all the beings on all the worlds, the Arinn alone had the knowledge and the courage to embrace infinity. Such was their vision, they constructed a malengin capable of harnessing the root of existence. They became one with it.’
The Tyrant had always been several steps ahead of them. And now a thrill of fear ran through Alan’s heart as he gazed up at the bizarre moat of clouds. Were they approaching the third fosse of Ghork Mega?
A new message from Iyezzz interrupted his musings:
The Garg prince had been forced to fly very high, out of reach of the heavy crossbows of the enemy, who had the advantage of enormous height when firing from the upper reaches of the Citadel. But the eagle-like visual acuity of the Garg had overcome the disadvantage.
‘You heard?’ Alan spoke to the Kyra.
‘Yes.’
Then Alan had his first glimpse of the bridge. It was illuminated by flames at least fifty feet high in the neighbouring buildings.
‘That looks really weird! What do you make of it, Ainé?’
The Shee replied: ‘All is blurred and strange. I can make out little beyond the clouds.’
Alan studied the crossing, which consisted of a bridge running through the wheeling barrier of nothingness. There was an indication of what could be stone walls at its entrance, but then the distant half of the bridge was lost in shadow. The shadow itself appeared to be a living thing that oozed and crept out of the Citadel, as if feeding the encircling emptiness with its dark stream. Looking more closely at where the bridge led, he couldn’t see beyond the shadows.
The Kyra called the Shee to form a spearhead, its point now having a specific focus. As if sensing their purpose, two platoons of black-armoured enemy cavalry appeared out of the surrounding streets to take up formation between them and the bridge. The cavalry charged into the Shee with lances and tridents, spurring their heavy steeds, covered in battle mail, into the advancing front line. Alan watched the Shee’s metamorphosis to great cats in a spreading ripple.
The Shee trumpets sounded faint and tinny in the elevated air. The fighting entered a new ferocity. Alan felt peculiarly distant from the new roars of the Shee and the screams of the injured and dying. The cobbled road beneath his feet was running with blood, making it difficult to keep his feet.
Ainé’s sibilant purr interrupted his thoughts: ‘Do you not sense it?’
‘What?’
‘The Legun Incarnate.’
A new roar, deeper by far than any tigress, sounded from horribly close. Alan shivered in apprehension. A spectre reared out of the confusion of battle no more than thirty yards ahead. Its huge skull-like countenance turned from side to side, as if searching, until the furnace pits of its eyes detected him. Then the fanged maw gaped as it roared its challenge anew – a challenge directed at Alan personally. There was no mistaking the Legun called the Captain. It reared, colossal and deadly against the wall of flames. Dark power crackled and streamed around its arm as it struck with a huge flailing mace, scattering dozens of Shee in that single blow as if they were skittles.
Ainé purred again: ‘It is forming the apex of a wedge – attracting the Death Legion’s warriors to its side.’ She hesitated, looking to Bétaald, whose eyes met the Kyra’s. ‘There is no time to be lost. We must attack before they build up an unstoppable momentum.’
Alan shook his head. ‘I think I should deal with this.’
‘You are not yet fully recovered from the last confrontation.’
Sweat stung in the tired corners of his eyes as he looked to Bétaald for support. ‘This monster killed the Kyra’s mother-sister in the Battle of Ossierel. And in the arena of this city it also killed her grandmother-sister. The present Kyra is of the same pedigree as those brave ancestors. If she confronts it, it will kill her.’
‘What then? You would confront it by yourself. You who were equally powerless to destroy it at Ossierel?’
‘I’ll find a way.’
The Kyra stared at him, with those huge blue eyes. ‘If I die, I will be born again. But not so you.’
‘Neither of you will die,’ Bétaald declared. ‘The Fir Bolg defeated it with battleaxes. We will do the same with arrows and javelins.’
The Legun was smashing his way towards them at the apex of a dense wedge of emboldened defenders. The Kyra transmitted a new command through her oraculum. The Legun became the focus of a thousand arrows and javelins. But something was wrong. The weapons struck the monster, but bounced off, as if encountering a shield wall.
‘There is some kind of protective force.’
Bétaald nodded. ‘The Tyrant has learned from the defeat at Ossierel.’
The Legun roared again and executed a forward thrust, one huge arm still wielding the giant spike-covered mace, the other arm wielding talons a foot long and sharp as daggers. It smashed through the wall of Shee that stood between it and Alan. A voice that hissed, like lava polluting a lake of ice, battered Alan’s mind:
Alan’s oraculum blazed in his brow. ‘I call upon the Trídédana to strengthen me!’ Assuming the First Power, he held aloft the Spear of Lug, so that the weapon forged by his grandfather, Padraig, shone with runes, like a rubicund sun.
In a huge leap, the Legun was before him, the arm wielding the giant mace drawn back to destroy him. Alan drove the spiral blade, incandescent with the First Power, into the throat of the Legun. But the thrust encountered some strange defensive force there, with the Spear rebounding as if from a pillar of steel. Then the defensive force struck back at Alan, weakening his spear arm, and extinguishing his oraculum. He was thrown down onto his back before the massed ranks of Shee. As if in one streamlined action, the Legun’s arm reared back, the ball, with its terrible spikes descending towards his head . . .
‘Stay your malice, you ugly brute!’
It was Qwenqwo’s voice. The shadow of his friend, the dwarf mage, fell over Alan’s eyes, the runestone cascading light in his left hand, the Fir Bolg battleaxe aloft.
‘No!’ Alan cried out with shock.
No – no – no! Alan’s mind was unable to accept what was happening. The killing blow tore through Qwenqwo, the malice too great for runestone or battleaxe. A miasma of grief invaded Alan’s heart, the unbearable anguish of loss . . .
‘Quickly, Alan!’
‘No!’ His flailing mind was filling up with those metamorphosing spectres of black, they were invading every part of him . . .
An arm curled around his shoulder. He knew, without turning, that it was Mo’s. As he turned to face Mo he sensed the difference in her. Then he sa
w it in her eyes. Mo was talking to him, but it didn’t sound like Mo’s voice. It sounded like the beauty of music, but at the same time a voice of enchantment:
‘They call them weaves.’
‘What . . .?’
‘The black things that so tormented your mind.’
He wanted to lose himself in his friend’s embrace, but nothing was capable of curing his pain. His friend Qwenqwo Cuatzel was dead.
Alan turned and glimpsed the Monster crowing with triumph, hoisting the shattered remains of their bravest warrior – their greatest hero – aloft.
‘You cannot fight the Legun. You’re exhausted and outmatched, just as you were at Ossierel.’
‘Then we’ve lost the battle, Mo.’
‘Not yet. Magtokk and I will help you.’
‘Magtokk?’
‘You must trust me.’
‘Oh, Mo . . .’
‘Rest . . . Let me help you.’
Alan felt tears fill his eyes. ‘I failed them, Mo. I failed my mom and dad.’
‘No.’
‘How can I die, knowing I failed them?’
‘It isn’t over.’
*
Alan was suddenly immersed in a strange sense of peace. Time hovered, suspended here in this unreal world of drifting light and shadow.
He sensed her friendship, her love for him, through their communion. His mind, still confused by grief at the death of his friend, drifted. He was surrounded by creatures resembling angels: ethereal beings who existed in a perfect harmony.
He saw her then, as a figure detached from the others, a being of gentleness and light, one who knew neither malice nor selfishness. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He was dumbstruck for several moments.
Alan felt his spirits rise.
The importance of that slowly dawned on Alan.
How comfortable she seemed in this strange world. Stars wheeled and spiraled about them. Nearby Alan saw a shining disc of whirling energy. It reminded him of the black holes that the cosmologists talked about being at the centre of galaxies. But this was a mirror image of that: black was white and white was black. And the hole was a disc of utter darkness that ran around the rim of a brightly shining hole.
Mo said:
He stood, or at least it felt as if his spirit stood, and he took hold of her slim shoulders.
Mo gazed back calmly into his eyes.
Alan hesitated, confused by what he sensed in that simple communication.
Mo looked down at the Torus and the bog oak figurine dangling around her neck. She had kept the figurine safe since Padraig had given it to her, all the way back in Clonmel. The Torus was glowing brightly, pulsating with Mo’s heartbeat.
He asked her:
*
Alan awoke to the sight of a blazing Ghork Mega. He looked around, aware that Ainé and Bétaald were supporting him. They were helping him to his feet, as if he were only now recovering from the shock of the annulling of his power. He confirmed that the noise and violence of battle had ended, but the Black Citadel still towered above them, surrounded by its river of nowhere. The single bridge had disappeared.
‘Is the battle really over?’
‘There is some residual fighting in distant streets, but it is mainly the legionaries attempting to flee.’
‘Thank goodness!’ Alan turned around to search in vain for his friend. ‘Mo? I hope you’re still here with me? I’ve got some more questions to ask. And I doubt that I’ll like the answers – if I even begin to understand them.’
A Tactical Inbound
Mark roused himself within the rickety garage to one more dawn in a world that had gone insane. The death of Tajh had thrown the crew into a pall of gloom. Bull and Sharkey hadn’t slept at all throughout the night. They were still singing rowdily to themselves, drunk as skunks on the lavish supplies of Bourbon that Brett was doling out to anybody who wanted it. The singing was drowned out by another cyclone of wind that hurled bricks and debris against the increasingly precarious walls and roof. New holes were appearing all over the place, letting in the smoky morning light. The pulsations were coming more and more frequently, heralded by a whistling noise, like a monstrous kettle coming to the boil. Then there would be a huge throb, a battening red glow and a thunderous rumble that would shake the ground before an explosion of heat that would illuminate the inside of the garage as if it were a blacks
mith’s forge.
The news, what little of it they had managed to glean from a patchily recovered line of communication with HQ, was hardly comforting. The Rose was drawing out a huge flare from the sun. Scientific advisers to the American president blamed the flare for the climatic disturbance that was wracking the globe with earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclone winds and ferocious storms. The scientists had provided the President with charts and graphs, and increasingly gloomy prognostications: the bottom line was that Earth was heading for a global disaster in no more than days.
‘Anyone for a Havana?’
An unwashed heavily stubble-faced Brett broke the panicky silence following the latest pulsation. He had spent the night in the passenger seat of the cabin of the Pig, exchanging jokes with an equally dishevelled Cogwheel. Overnight they had just about finished a bottle of whiskey between them.
Cogwheel hiccupped before a carefully enunciated reply: ‘I’ll have a couple, if you don’t think me presumptuous.’
‘Help yourself, buddy.’
Cogwheel slid one of the cigars into the pocket of the driver’s side door, then allowed Brett to cut the head of the second for him, before putting it between his lips and sucking against the flame of the lighter. When Brett himself lit up, the cab filled up with smoke. Brett looked through a single squinting eye into a three-quarters empty bottle before taking a swig. He passed the bottle to Cogwheel. ‘So, Buddy, what’s the plan?’
Cogwheel finished the bottle before slinging it out onto the concrete floor through the open driver’s window. ‘Folks, seeing as the darned place is about to fall in on us,’ he did a slurring imitation of Brett’s Kentucky accent, ‘I reckon it’s time we moved out.’ He puffed some more on his cigar before abandoning the accent. ‘Problem is we got nowhere to bloodywell go. We head east, we hit the Rose. We head north, west or south, we hit Seebox’s cordon.’
The Return of the Arinn Page 36