Closer to the stone leviathan that hung impossibly in the sky. Closer, to a viewport of glass that looked uncannily like a slitted reptilian eye. Into the beast, passing through solid matter as though twere no more than smoke. Down corridors, now, faster and faster, left, right, everything a blur. Past Foresters, Tuladors. Past the woman the Woodsman had rescued earlier that day, scurrying her way as stealthily as she could down a small side-corridor. Perhaps she might have shivered at their passage as they flew on by.
Their bodies up ahead.
A rush, a dizzying sensation, pins and needles. Limbs came into focus once more; hands palm-up in her lap; legs crossed beneath her. Lungs filled and emptied with real, tangible air. The feeling of a soft cushion underneath. The smell of incense. The sound of another person’s gentle breathing.
Gwenna opened her eyes and smiled.
There was Virginie, sat before her, her petite and beautiful form bathed in the soft light of the Quiet Room. Behind her, a glass window, or what seemed like glass, at any rate, through which a vista of stars could be seen, twinkling against the inky blackness of the night sky. The French girl opened her eyes and returned the head shaman’s smile. In the space between the two young women, a pond burbled serenely, white and gold carp content to gently swim their way to and fro.
The two sat, content to be silent in each other’s presence as they recovered their strength. The air was thick and smoky with sweet incense that drifted in lazy wisps from slowly burning sticks. Gwenna breathed in and out, slowly, steadily, letting the last vestiges of spirit-sickness ebb away from her mind with every breath. Spirit-walking, the act of which they had just employed, was a mighty feat; the spirits of air and water coming together to grant the power to free ones consciousness, albeit temporarily, from the bonds of its mortal flesh; to soar as the spirits do upon the ethereal winds.
Back in her homeland, such feats as required the co-operation of more than one type of spirit would exact a harsh toll upon ones strength, for in shamanism each spirit that aids you always takes a morsel of your soul as payment for its aid. Yet here, in this land, even with the encroaching cities, the concrete, the deforestation, the spirits were strong, willing and ready. They gave much and took little, as if they had waited centuries for someone to call upon their aid and now granted it with gusto.
Gwenna felt stronger here. The power flowed freely and the spirit-sickness hurt less and lasted a shorter time. There was potential in this land. It gave her hope for the future.
Yet it also made her heart throb with sadness. For how far gone must her homeland have already been by the time she’d been born? She remembered the words of Master Wrynn, the late head of the shaman order, her predecessor and teacher. He’d told her a long time before how their world had been ravaged by the demon hordes of Those Beyond the Veil. How only a small area of land had been left alive and fertile, as a trap, an arena, wherein they could take Stone, forge him to become their unwitting pawn. It hadn’t worked, of course. Thanks to the actions of a brave few, Stone had managed to thwart his former demonic masters and their plans to invade this world.
They’d managed to escape, what few of them had survived that final, apocalyptic battle, and fled to this world through the portal of their enemies before blowing it shut behind them. It was too late for her homeworld, Gwenna knew that. The mountains of the North. The Plains about the great river Yow. The fertile fields of Tulador. All lost now, she knew in her heart.
Yet that same sadness steeled her resolve. The same would not happen to this world, not if she could help it. Virginie was right, she knew; Stone knew what he was doing. He had a plan for this world, a grand vision of the future. He’d shared it with Gwenna, in part, and the scale of it had taken her breath away. The coming invasion couldn’t be fought with technology alone, for the demonic hordes of the enemy were not of this world. Physics only affected them in part, for they were spirits, albeit of a different and darker kind.
The scale of Stone’s plans, this entire revamping of mankind, it had almost scared Gwenna in its size and scope. What he planned was to take an entire world and unite it to one purpose like no-one had ever done before. To forge one race out of many. One army for the salvation of mankind, rather than many disparate forces at each other’s throats. It was a plan beyond the capability of any man to accomplish.
But Gwenna knew what all of their little troupe knew.
Stone was no longer just a man.
She often wondered what he had sacrificed to become what he was today. Did he still think and feel like a mortal man? Could he still laugh and joke, still relax and make merry, knowing all he knew, being all that he was? He gave a good impression of it, true, but was it all a mask?
Even now she could feel his presence, half a mile away, down in the depths of Draconis. Anyone with a touch of the gift could feel him, for it was impossible to ignore; like standing in a small room with a resting tiger, hoping it wouldn’t glance in your direction, captivated by the power and beauty but always wary of the danger. Power. Pure power, beyond anything that could possibly be contained by a human vessel. He was like a star, a sun, given mortal form and walking upon the Earth. Without his two weapons his indestructible Glaives, there to channel that power, she shuddered to think of the havoc his mere existence would wreak upon reality.
He was an impossibility. A paradox.
Yet without him, they would be lost.
Could a man, any man, endure what he had, channel what he did – the raw, unadulterated power of the Avatars, the lords of all the elements – and suffer no ill effects? Could the mind of any man, no matter how ancient, survive such an ordeal untarnished?
She vowed, there and then, that she would keep an eye on him. For he had so much on his plate, so much to hold his attention, that perhaps, just maybe, he might not notice any problems that might arise closer to home.
***
Nikki rounded another corner, what seemed like the millionth to date. Yet another corridor, stretching far off into the distance. Where the hell was she? It was like a rat run, a rabbit’s warren, a network of tunnels with seemingly no end. Wait, was that a break in the wall there? She made for it, eyes and ears keen, alert, ready to dash for cover at the slightest hint of anyone else.
Though so far she had encountered not a soul.
The gap in the wall revealed a staircase, smooth, stone steps, spiralling down to another, lower, level. Should she? The tugging in her mind told her yes, to go that way. Hesitantly, she obeyed, slowly making her way down the stone stairs. They descended and kept on descending further and further, until after several minutes she gave up counting how many steps she had taken. The further down she went, the darker it became, but as she went, that soft, ambient glow seemed to follow, the steps just ahead of her lighting up gently as though anticipating her path, just light enough for her to see her footing. It was an eerie feeling. Here she was, trying to sneak, trying to remain unnoticed as best she could, yet this building, this bunker, whatever it may be, seemed to be announcing her every moment like the unfurling of a red carpet. Motion sensors, that’s all it could be she thought to herself. Yet if the lights were motion activated, maybe other things were, too. Alarms.
Traps.
A sudden cold tingle went up her spine and she descended slower now, her nerves afire with nervous anticipation, as though she expected Evans and Jones to come sprinting around the corner to tackle her to the ground. Yet so far she’d not met any resistance.
And something at the back of her mind kept nagging her; this place was like no government building she’d ever seen.
At length she reached the bottom of the staircase and stopped. Before her was blackness, pure, heavy and impenetrable, the glow that had followed her down now content to merely wait behind her at the last step. She could see no further than a few feet in front of her eyes, yet even so, she was assailed by a powerful sense of vastness, of immense space and open air. She remembered visiting Lincoln Cathedral on a school trip when sh
e was young. Standing there within that huge building, staring up, up at the high vaulted ceiling had filled her with dizzying vertigo, a feeling that she might suddenly, impossibly, fall upwards to dash against the stone above her head. Standing here, even in the darkness that enveloped her like a shroud, she felt that same feeling. A fear, a nervousness. Space, vulnerability. The unknown.
Yet that nagging feeling in her head was still insistent, still tugging, urging her to move forwards. But she didn’t want to. She was comfortable enough right here, thank you very much. She didn’t want to know what was in the vast space before her. She was trying to leave this scary new world behind, wanting nothing more than to return to her own mundane life. Moving to London had been a mistake. Nothing had been the same since the day of the bomb. Things were moving too fast. She felt like a tiny boat carried helpless by the vast ocean waves, out of control of her own destiny.
Move, the feeling commanded. Step forwards.
Despite all her willpower, all her objections, she did.
She stepped forwards.
Nothing happened at first. But then an instant later the glow that had followed her down the stairs rushed past her, beneath her feet and out, out into the vast space before her, dispersing and reaching out, left, right and straight on to spread its glow along the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The gentle light revealed a vista that stunned her into stumbling backwards, falling against the steps behind as her mouth opened in awe.
Was it a cavern before her? Or a room? Surely it was too large a space to have been carved by mortal hands? Vast columns of stone soared into the air, wrapped by tendrils of the soft glow that had thus far guided her, reaching up to brace a vaulted ceiling that hung a hundred feet above her head. Before her, a floor of stone tiles extended out some fifty feet in front of her, where it terminated in stone balustrades that drew together from the walls towards the centre, making it so the only way forwards was over a bridge that began directly before her.
A bridge over what, she had no idea.
To the left and the right of the bridge, out in the vast open space the bridge traversed, what looked like windows of stained glass that once more put her in mind of that ancient cathedral; several on each side, composed of many glass panes of numerous hues; reds, blues, greens, yellows; windows of such scale that a double-decker bus could drive through each pane with room to spare. They were translucent and she thought she could see a hint of sky there, but no light came streaming in. Perhaps it was night time…
Her eyes saw, took it all in, soaked in the scene with wonder, but her mind failed to process it, refused to believe what the eyes were telling it. What was wrong about this scene? What about it did her mind fail to comprehend? Slowly it dawned on her: she’d gone down the stairs, down, down, descending what felt like hundreds of feet. This entire place had the layout of a bunker. An underground building. That’s what she’d been assuming all along.
Yet she’d descended the stairs… and found windows.
What… what kind of crazy upside-down building was this? Or was it some kind of skyscraper? No, what kind of skyscraper was built from stone? This was no building she’d ever seen in London. She shook her head, screwed her eyes shut, but when she opened them again, the scene was still the same. She couldn’t understand, none of this made any sense.
The only thing she could do was to continue.
Slowly, shaking, she rose to her feet. And moved warily forwards, step by cautious step.
She moved over the stone floor, the flagstones smooth yet irregular, more like the scales of a lizard or snake. They seemed to have been grown, rather than hewn, from the solid rock. The floor she was on narrowed, the balustrades drawing close, till she was funnelled onto the bridge before her, feeling for all the world like a rat in some mad scientist’s labyrinth. She took a few steps out onto the walkway, then taking a deep breath, she moved to one of the balustrades at the edge. Her hands reached out to grasp the cool stone, but again, it wasn’t cool, but warm.
Gulping, summoning her courage, Nikki looked down.
Her eyes widened. One hand shot to her mouth, even as the other grasped the guardrail with white knuckles. She could feel her heart freeze in her chest, her bated breath staying in her lungs, resolute in hiding, as if scared itself to come out and face the scene before her, till at last, her chest burning, she released it in a terrified gasp.
No. This couldn’t be. She was in a building, a building. The walls were stone. She could feel the solidity of the ground beneath her feet, the railing beneath her fingers. Yet she couldn’t deny what she saw, what her frightened eyes were telling her to be true.
There, beneath her, below the bridge that spanned this vast chamber, a window the size of a football pitch lay spread out like the hull of a glass-bottomed boat. How a window could be so vast and not simply shatter beneath its own weight, she hadn’t a clue, but there it was. And through it, she could see… Was it… London?
It was… Impossible though it might seem, it was!
There, the Thames, snaking its way through the city, twinkling as it reflected the lights of the buildings and the glow of the silver moon. Oh god… she was in the air. So high, so very high, the houses, the factories, the streets; all nothing more than tiny Monopoly board toys so many miles below. A sudden wave of vertigo assaulted her, and her second hand had to reach out, to steady herself against the sturdy, stone balustrade.
She was in the air. Flying.
But how? It made no sense. This… building that she was in, it was made of stone. Solid, heavy, real stone. Yet the evidence was in front of her. This was no building. It was an aircraft. A vessel.
“Welcome to Draconis, Miss Taylor.”
She started at the sudden words that came from behind her. That voice; she recognised that voice. It had lost some of the mind-numbing volume, but the quality was the same, those few words carrying with them a vast wash of emotions; evocative, thrilling, authoritative. She’d heard that voice before.
Nikki turned.
There, standing upon the bridge with her, a figure. She was right, memories of the dream returning in a flash; the silhouette standing in the frozen light of the bomb-blast; those green eyes that seemed to almost glow with an unearthly luminescence. There was no mistaking; this was he.
She could see him clearly now, in the soft light of this stone chamber. His face was chiselled, handsome, with those remarkable eyes, a square chin and long, brown hair tied back into a pony tail that reached down past his shoulders. He was tall, towering above her, and muscular too; larger in every way than any man she had ever seen, almost frighteningly so. The grey jerkin, trousers and boots he wore, and the dazzling white cloak wrapped about him, all combined to lend the appearance of an avenging angel. All he was missing was the flaming sword.
And yet there was a softness about him, too. The friendliness in his smile, the relaxed, almost casual way that he held himself. She could feel his power – literally, the same prickling, static feeling you got as you ran your hand across the screen of an old TV set – and yet she didn’t feel threatened. The more she stared at him, the more she found herself lost in the glow of those green eyes. She shook her head, blinked, trying to snap herself back to reality.
“Who are you?” she asked. “What am I doing here?” She gestured down to the sprawling cityscape that twinkled miles beneath them and spluttered, waving her hands as she struggled to frame what she wanted to ask. In the end it just erupted out as an exasperated: “How!?”
The titan before her took a step closer, the warm smile never leaving his face. Even from several feet away, she could feel the heat of his body.
“My name is Stone. You’re here because you were in danger and it was our fault you were caught up in it. So we rescued you.” He glanced down at the object of her last question. “And right at this moment, you’re riding on board a Dragon, a living creature of solid rock, circling London at an altitude of forty thousand feet.”
Nikki stood there for
a moment, face blank. Then slowly she nodded.
“Oh,” she said simply.
Then fainted.
Chapter Four:
Tear. Scrunch. Throw. Sizzle. Tear. Scrunch. Throw. Sizzle.
Michael Jenkins, city trader, bachelor and Brotherhood operative, sat in the Brig, tearing scraps of paper from one of the books they’d brought him to read, scrunching it into little balls and throwing them into the shimmering haze of energy that served to bar him from leaving the tiny, stone room. Upon contact, each ball of paper would disappear in a flash, leaving nothing behind but drifting ash and a soothing, woody smell in the air.
It was quite therapeutic.
Was he angry, indignant, at his capture? At first he had been. He was trained, lethal; a man who could kill with his bare hands, should the need arise. He had done so, in the past. Yet that woman with the red hair had manhandled him with terrifying ease. Such helplessness wasn’t a feeling he was accustomed to. He was not keen to relive it, yet his mind betrayed him, replaying those fateful moments in exquisite detail whenever he sought to relax. Even his dreams, usually so enjoyable, had been haunted by her these last few weeks. And not in the way that he would usually like a lithe young redhead to haunt his dreams…
Bloodless Revolution (The Graeme Stone Saga Book 5) Page 4