‘I think he must have.’
‘I still don’t understand what that’s got to do with the Professor,’ protested Ted, who in any case was having great difficulty following what they were saying. He was tired, it was cold, and more importantly he’d been winning.
‘Professor Barber,’ said Andy, ‘plans to take advantage of this alignment and punch a hole right down to the centre of existence, where he will inhabit and control the wellspring of creation itself. Very simply, he intends to make himself God.’
Incredibly, Bex started to giggle.
‘Bex?’ Ted was even more confused now. ‘What’s so funny?’
She couldn’t answer. All she could do was press both fists against her mouth and apologise mutely to Andy with her eyes as irresistible waves of laughter crashed around inside her and leaked out from between her knuckles. ‘I’m sorry!’ she managed to gasp eventually. ‘It’s just… it’s just…’ she swallowed hard. ‘I just got this mental image of him as the Great Onion God…’ and she was off again, collapsed in the cushions, clutching herself and hooting. Somewhere in the middle of it he caught the phrase ‘Lord of the Onion Rings’.
After a little while, she subsided, gasping for breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, ‘I couldn’t help it. But just how mad does that sound? Even by our standards. He is insane, isn’t he? He has to be. He couldn’t possible do that, could he?’
Andy smiled mirthlessly. ‘It doesn’t matter. He believes he can, and he’s going to kill thousands more people because of it. You haven’t heard the half of it yet. ‘Barber’s problem has been in generating the amount of power needed to reach down that far. You know how big the stone circles are at places like Stonehenge and Carnac? Huge things, great earth-ch’i accumulators hundreds of yards across, built using massive granite pylons, some of them twenty tons apiece, the ritual focus for hundred of human souls – and even then only able to open a way through to the nearest realms, the ones where their ‘spirit ancestors’ lived. Even with the alignment of solstices working in Barber’s favour, it’s still a massive undertaking.
‘Fortunately for him, when he returned from the Dobunni armed with everything he could learn, he found a nice big fully charged energy circle around Holly End, waiting for him.’
Ted sprang up in alarm. ‘Then that means…!’
Andy held up a hand. ‘Hold your horses, Tonto. It’s too small. He pulled an entire Cotswold valley out of the world and it’s still too small. Do you see the scale of the forces we’re dealing with here? It’s all just a matter of scale. He drains the life out of a single person to open or close a Narrow, like flicking a switch. He tries to kill me, but he can’t, and desperate for more power, he drains the life out of Holly End – or at least he would have done, if you hadn’t broken the stone.’
Ted sat back down, looking haunted. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘It was like he was, I don’t know, calling it back in. That’s the only way I can describe it.’
‘Calling it back in,’ mused Andy. ‘Yes, that’d be a fair description. Like a big, psychic noose. Be that as it may, it’s still too small. Too few souls. Good as a prototype, like I said, to test the principle and refine the mechanism, but just too small. Think bigger.’
‘What’s bigger than…’ and Bex put her hands to her mouth again, but this time there was no laughter – just naked, shocked understanding. ‘It’s the closures, isn’t it? He’s going to turn the middle of Birmingham into another Holly End.’ In her memory, she saw again a circle of death tightening across fields and hedgerows, draining the life out of everything it touched, and she tried to imagine it on a city-wide scale, washing over buildings and streets. That, she could believe. ‘How big? How many people?’
‘Roughly fifty square miles. Just over half a million souls. Enough life energy to punch down to the centre of everything and become the Winter King incarnate. Absolute winter, everywhere, forever.’
For long moments, it seemed as if the night itself had been shocked into silence. The sounds of the caral beneath them – footfalls, shutters closing, murmured voices – seemed far away. By the outer watchfires, flames glinted on armour and the tips of javelins as the warband’s sentries stood together in small groups, talking quietly. Alien constellations burned clear through an atmosphere devoid of any kind of pollution. Yet it seemed to Bex that she could see all of it – sky and earth, light and voices – overwhelmed by a blood-black tide of the same corrosion that was in her own soul, from one horizon to the other, in every world, with no hope of healing.
‘It won’t be winter,’ she said, half to herself. ‘It won’t be anything that natural.’ She shook herself. ‘Right. So. Plan. Where do we go to put a stop to this? What’s at the centre of this one? An Egyptian bloody pyramid?’
Andy told her.
She looked at him. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope.’
She blew out her cheeks in surprise. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Talk about having a twisted sense of humour.’
2 Into the Circle
It sounded to Rosey more like Ullo puhleezmun.
Carling was all but buried in a thick coat, scarf, and hood, beneath which his eyes glittered. Despite the bulky clothing that hid his body, Rosey got the impression that there was something twisted and malformed about it. His strength, though, was prodigious.
‘No need to run,’ Carling said. Nonee-durun. ‘Not here to hurt you. Far as I know, you’re the only person who’s tried to help me. Person, anyway.’ He chuckled, a thick phlegmy sound. ‘You stopped her killing me.’
A horrible suspicion made Rosey turn around and look back down the length of the bus. An elderly Indian woman sleeping, surrounded by Sainsbury’s carrier bags, was their only other travelling companion – unless you counted the skavag squatting beside her, and the other one sniffing her shopping.
‘Please,’ Rosey begged, ‘don’t hurt anybody.’
Carling responded with a sound which might have been a laugh or a snort of derision. ‘We don’t do that any more.’
We?
‘We’ll kill, but we’re not killers. Not for Barber, not anymore. Not for anyone. What he did to us – what he made us do – it was wrong. Sick. But we’re better now.’ Beddanow.
‘Then why are you here?’
‘Just got one question. The girl. Bex. Did she do it? Did she take out Barber’s stone?’
‘The honest truth is I don’t know.’ Rosey explained everything that had happened since the fall of Moon Grove, including Bex’s disappearance into thin air on the road above Aston-sub-Edge. He spoke quickly, hoping to answer Carling’s questions and get rid of him as soon as possible, and praying inwardly that the woman didn’t wake up, or that the bus didn’t stop for some innocent member of the public who fancied a ride up top. ‘I don’t know if she found the village,’ he finished. ‘I don’t even know how we’d know if she’d done it or not.’
Carling made that guttural noise again which might have been a laugh. ‘You know, for a policeman you’re not very good at keeping track of people, are you?’
‘Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me.’
‘Been watching you going round and round, all morning. We know what you’re looking for. Piece of advice: don’t.’
Rosey turned to face him squarely. Either he had wrapped the scarf particularly thickly, or there was something wrong with the lower half of his face. ‘Tell me why I’m going to take your advice,’ he replied sceptically.
Carling sighed, threw back his hood and started to unwind the scarf. ‘We’re not animals – not stupid. Barber never got that. We learned. We saw what was done, and we learned how to do it ourselves: how to steal life and how to give it back. I was dying – shit, I was dead, or as good as – and they gave themselves to me to bring me back. Not from kindness – they needed someone to lead them. Someone stron
g, to make sure nobody like Barber ever took advantage of them again. He pulled the strings, but I led the pack, you understand? Top dog. I had a right to expect it from them. So they fixed me up, gave me everything they could spare of themselves. Only…’ he finished unwinding the scarf and grinned at Rosey, who shrank back involuntarily ‘…only it was a bit rough and ready, know what I mean?’
Rosey had never been a big fan of horror films, preferring good old-fashioned war movies over the strange and fantastical – it had all seemed a bit near the knuckle after rescuing baby Andy. But one he remembered, back when such things were called ‘video nasties’, was called The Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum managed to get his DNA mixed up with that of a common housefly. Typical rubbish. The monster at the end had been freakish enough but obviously a big puppet; it was the intermediate transformation stages which he remembered as being the most disturbing – when Goldblum was part human and part something else. All twitches and sweat and bits dropping off.
Carling was worse, probably because he was real and sitting next to him, in broad daylight, on a number eleven bus.
He was a mottled, badly-patched thing, hunched heavily within his coat and hoodie. Where the Fane had eroded him, the skavags had given him new flesh, but it sat ill at ease with the old: parts of him were leathery grey and lumpen, as if something were struggling to free itself from his human shape, and there were gaps where naked muscle and sinew worked. A twisted jawline crammed with too many teeth grinned at his evident shock.
‘I know I’m pretty,’ he said. ‘The way I see it, this is what I always was – just now it’s on the outside. You’re going to take our advice, because we’ve got no reason to give it. You’ve got nothing we need and you’re not a threat to us.
‘Gates.’ He tapped a gnarled finger at the map, which Rosey had tried unsuccessfully to hide between his knees once he’d realised who was sitting next to him. ‘The Twelve Gates of Jerusalem. Guarded gates.’
‘Guarded by what?’
‘We won’t go near them. When we were just me, we saw what came up for the poor buggers that got sacrificed. He laughed – laughed and said it was like going fishing.’ Carling shuddered, and the skavags mewled their unease. ‘Urdrog,’ he growled and spat.
Urdrog?
‘You think we’re dangerous.’ Carling wound the scarf back about his face and stood as the bus slowed towards it next stop. ‘Policeman, you got no idea. You never have. Hell, it’s your funeral.’
He clumped down the stairwell without another word, and when Rosey looked back for the skavags, they too had gone. He peered out of the window as the bus pulled away again, trying to catch one last glimpse, maybe to reassure himself that Carling had really gone, and thought he saw him – just another coat in the crowd.
He looked back at his map.
Skavags. Urdrog. The Twelve Gates of Jerusalem. It’s your funeral. As if he could simply do that: let creatures like Carling wander freely in the parts of the city where people were weakest and most vulnerable. Might as well suggest he change the colour of his eyes. Rosey was no idiot; twenty years of unremarkable policing – with the one obvious exception – had taught him the virtue of being slow and deliberately careful. It was broad daylight; he was only going to inspect these places, and probably not even all of them, safely from the outside. If anything looked remotely dodgy, he’d be straight onto the real police.
He’d thought it all through very carefully.
***
At dawn the following day, Andy, Bex, Ted, Bruna and Edris rode out east and a little south, back up into the range of hills from which the caral had but lately descended. The day was clear but not particularly bright, with banks of cloud massing behind them and a biting north wind which promised snow before nightfall. Being unable to ride a horse, Andy clung behind the warrior, while Bex shared Bruna’s mount. Ted had surprised everybody by climbing smoothly up into the saddle of an old roan mare and settling her with a few gentle clucks and pats on the neck, and in response to their questioning stares simply said, ‘Farm boy,’ as if they were all idiots.
Lady Holda had granted Andy and his companions an audience, despite the lateness of the hour, in the long chamber which comprised most of the caral’s ground floor.
It served as both feasting hall and factory for the clan, whose history was told in brightly-worked tapestries hanging between many tall, narrow windows. At the room’s heart, and occupying a good portion of it, four great looms were set in a square, powered by cogs and shafts which were linked to the wheels below and fed by bales and reels and skeins and bobbins of thread in every colour and texture imaginable; the whole being tended by wiever-maidens like the priestesses of an oracle. At one high end of the chamber Lady Holda took their audience while sitting amongst a group of her seamstresses on wide cushions, embellishing the plain cloth with gold thread and precious stones.
After considerable wrangling with Bex, Andy had agreed to simply express their gratitude for a hospitality which they could never hope to repay before taking their leave. He’d wanted to warn the Dobunni about the threat which Barber posed, but she was vehement that they say as little as possible. Even if they believed a single word, she argued, there was nothing they could do, and they’d most likely make things worse by insisting that Andy stay to explain himself before their king or high priest or whatever, and wasn’t he supposed to be in a hurry?
So Andy, Bex and Ted took their leave of the Lady, who accepted their apologies graciously but nevertheless insisted on one final gift for them: the loan of horses for their journey, with her handmaiden Bruna to tend them and the warrior Edris to guard them.
‘Yeah right,’ Bex had muttered. ‘She probably just wants to make sure we’re orf her lahnd,’ this last delivered in a thick yokel accent which made Ted scowl at her. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Things had been frosty between them ever since Ted had said goodbye to Hael. Andy had seen the two of them struggling over the language barrier and, realising that the new-found friends might never see each other again, offered to help. Rather than simply translating, which was what everybody had expected, he had placed his hand at the base of Ted’s throat and made a series of odd swirling motions with his fingers, as if dialling an old-fashioned telephone. To his delight, Ted found that he and Hael could now understand each other perfectly. When Andy had offered the same thing to Bex, explaining that it was simply a minor adjustment of the daath chakra governing speech and communication, her reaction had been violently negative. Nobody, she insisted, was making any ‘adjustments’ to her, however minor.
Now, bouncing along uncomfortably behind Bruna as they picked their winding way up a thickly wooded escarpment, she called ahead to Andy: ‘Where exactly is it that we’re going, anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, and while she was hunting for precisely the right piece of abuse to hurl back at him, he added ‘Which is to say, I’ve never been there, but I know it’s up ahead.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a lacuna.’ Barber’s word, she noted with unease. ‘A thin place, where the skins of the world are close together, or the walls between them are weaker. Same thing. It’s like a Narrow, just a lot older and deeper.’
‘And you know this because?’
‘Pins and needles, just here.’ He placed a hand in the middle of his chest.
‘Tell you what I can bloody feel,’ she grumbled, shifting painfully. ‘My arse. How can something be completely numb and in total agony at the same time?’
They reached a wider space in the zigzagging trail, and Ted urged his horse past hers. As he did so, he stuck out his tongue.
‘Great comeback, farmer boy!’ she retorted. Ted grinned and went on ahead.
Eventually, the slope evened out, and they found themselves at the edge of a wide upland which stretched as far as they could
see, in swelling rises of russet moorgrass and black, winter-bare heather. Patches of unthawed snow clung in dips and northfacing hollows. During their climb, the clouds had overtaken them and slid past overhead like huge pieces of slate, seemingly near enough to touch.
Bex dropped from the saddle and landed gracefully on her back in a clump of heather, clutching her buttocks and swearing softly to herself.
Ted nudged Edris and pointed. ‘Looks like we’re stopping here for a bit.’
Edris frowned and cast a doubtful eye up at the clouds. ‘Very well. But as brief as may be. Even without resting, we will be hard-pressed to reach the gate before this weather strikes us. I fear it will not be pretty.’
‘Oh no she doesn’t,’ Andy declared and dismounted to stand over her. ‘Come on, you.’
She squinted up at him. ‘Five minutes. Just five. I’m knackered.’
He seemed to consider this. ‘Fair enough – give you a hand up?’ He reached down and helped her to her feet – but as her hand grasped his she felt a sudden wave of pins and needles sweep through her from feet to head. She gasped and staggered back, nearly falling again.
‘Did you feel that?’ she asked. Her hair seemed to be waving like sea anemones, and the pain in her back, buttocks and thighs had disappeared completely. ‘What just happened?’
‘What does it matter? Do you feel better?’
‘Yes, but…’
‘Well then. Come on. We have to get out of this weather.’
‘No, wait.’ She was staring at him suspiciously. ‘Did you just do something to me?’
He sighed. Why did every conversation with her have to turn into an argument? ‘Bex, I need you. Sorry if that sounds all Hallmark, but it’s true. The plain fact is that I’m stronger with you than without you, and I’m going to need that if I’m going to deal with Barber. I’d love to have the luxury of time to fight with you over it, but I just don’t. I’m done pissing around. I really am.’
The Narrows Page 30