Into the Infested Side

by Shane Hegarty

More than that, he wanted the spasm spreading through his arm to go away. He wanted the energy to dissipate, to flow from him gently. But he knew that wouldn’t be possible. The destruction was simmering inside him. It would not be long reaching boiling point.

  Then everything around him stopped.

  The shooting.

  The noise.

  The light.

  The fury.

  The desiccations.

  The invasions.

  But not the electricity in his arm. It was spreading through his shoulder into his chest.

  The beach was quiet, except for the cry of gulls high above, the gentle splash of waves, and the clatter of a ball of desiccated Legend rolling down the high, wide pile at the cave’s mouth and splashing into the sea.

  Along the clifftop, a pall of blue smoke cohered over the barrels of weapons. Excitement lit the eyes of the Half-Hunters as one by one they flipped open their visors, removed their helmets and soaked up the scene, this great moment in their lives.

  Clara started to rush along the cliff path, but Hugo raised a hand, a gesture that told her, “not yet”. This wasn’t over. It was a battlefield and the battle wasn’t necessarily won.

  All Finn could concentrate on now was the rush in his ears. The bubbling well of energy rising within his hand, his arm, his chest. Impatient.

  From out of sight along the clifftop, there was sudden shouting. A figure appeared on its edge, wearing a full fighting suit except for a kilt and metal sporran. He had a sword in each hand and a beard you could lose a Legend in.

  “A’m Douglas o’ the Isle o’ Teeth and a’m here to defend this Blighted Village o’ Darkmouth!” he yelled. “Have a’missed anything?”

  Back up the beach, away from the cave, crouching tight against the cliff, Emmie finally pulled her hand away from her eyes to see if the silence meant the fight really was over.

  “That was far too close for comfort,” said Estravon, standing up cautiously to survey the carpet of desiccated Legends littering the stones. Emmie had seen a lot in the past couple of days, but that had scared her in a way that left her breathless. At her ribs, she felt a prodding.

  “Can you get off me now?”

  It was Broonie, wedged beneath her where she had protected him from the hungry aim of the Half-Hunters.

  She stood aside, letting him push himself up while shaking his head and dusting down his rags. Emmie sniffed at the stench the Hogboon still carried with him from the Infested Side.

  “Why don’t you hold your nose?” he asked her. “Your disgust isn’t quite obvious enough.”

  Hugo was already out on the beach, holding up a hand towards Clara, a wave that doubled as a greeting and a warning to stay on the cliff, in case there were any Legends still lurking in the cave.

  Impatient Half-Hunters were making their way down towards them, and the first to reach them raised their Desiccators at the sight of Broonie. He shrank down to protect himself, but Emmie placed herself between him and the barrels.

  “Don’t you dare,” she scowled. “Or you’ll regret it.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Steve as they turned to him for support. “I’m only her father. She doesn’t listen to me.”

  He stood forward and aimed a series of hand signals at the Half-Hunters, ending with a closed fist that suggested they wait. Finn’s father walked straight past him, grabbing a fresh Desiccator from a Half-Hunter as he did.

  He carried the coldness of a soldier still on duty. Warmth and reunions could wait until the mission was done or, perhaps, when all these Half-Hunters weren’t watching him. They were crowding on the beach now, high-fiving and tossing desiccated Legends between each other like beach balls, adrenalin fuelling their excitement.

  “Are you really alive?” one asked Hugo.

  “This would be a pretty good trick if I wasn’t,” Finn’s dad replied, not breaking stride.

  “Will you be filing a 114-dash-P form for this?” a Half-Hunter asked Estravon.

  “You bet,” Estravon answered, pulling the shredded lapels of his suit together and sticking his chin out. “And maybe even a 23-slash-K. After all, you only live once.”

  They reached the entrance to the cave. There, half buried by the balls of Legends, was a rough black metal sphere. “My van,” said Steve glumly. “That’ll never iron out.”

  There was no sign of Finn. Neither was there a sparkle of light, no whirling of a gateway, but there was a dim glow suggesting that if one way to the Infested Side had closed, the other had not. So, they didn’t go in. More importantly, nothing came out.

  “He didn’t get desiccated, did he?” Emmie asked, sorting through the carnage in search of something that might look less than Legendary.

  “No, I saw him go in here,” said Hugo and began to enter the cave.

  Steve, Estravon, Emmie and most of the Half-Hunters started to follow after him. It only took Hugo to glance over his shoulder for them to know he wanted to do this alone. So they stopped, waited.

  Emmie stared after Hugo as he moved further into the cave, rubble-strewn from the invasion, roots dangling through the shredded ceiling, its passageway forced wider by the violence.

  Hugo reached the chamber they had fled from. The red gateway was gone, having seemingly exhausted itself during the battle. But the hole between worlds was still open. Unmoving. Unchanged. A fixed blast with its edges uneven and soft, a torn fabric with its stitches pulled and loose.

  Grim daylight and rank air seeped in from an Infested Side that was relatively quiet now, the view filled only with the fallen Legends of both Gantrua’s army and the resistance. Nothing moved. All life had been swept away by battle, or lost in the invasion of Darkmouth. There were no flying serpents. No snarling Orthruses. No ranks of attacking Legends. No Cornelius and Hiss. Just an abandoned tunnel to the Infested Side, waiting to be exploited.

  There was a noise.

  From the darkest corner of the chamber, stumbling a little as he emerged, stepped Finn. Half in grey light, half in darkness.

  “You OK?” Hugo asked him.

  “Dad...” started Finn.

  “I’m sorry, son,” said another voice.

  Niall Blacktongue pushed Finn forward by the arm.

  Finn’s father – Niall’s son – raised his Desiccator. “Don’t take another step,” he told him.

  “I am coming home, Hugo, and you must let me,” Niall said.

  “Why should I do that?” demanded Hugo.

  “Because it’s time I finished what I started.”

  ‘The Leaving of Niall Blacktongue’

  From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse,

  as told by the inhabitants of the Infested Side

  YESTERDAY

  After his son had been rescued by the serpents and flown away from him, Blacktongue retired once again to his tower. His mantra recommenced, an incessant stream of words.

  Outside, ranks of guards once more circled his prison. Maybe for his protection. Maybe for theirs. No one was quite sure.

  Eventually, Gantrua arrived, pushing through those soldiers too slow to step aside or leap away. Trom and Cryf followed him, marching in step, heads up and snarling at any of the Fomorians sniggering at them.

  Inside the tower, Blacktongue looked up from where he sat, silenced his mantra and allowed the full intent of Gantrua’s sinister grin to fill the room.

  “Come with me,” the great Fomorian said.

  Together they climbed the stairwell, Gantrua grinding the bone to dust as he pressed ahead. Behind him, Blacktongue climbed even slower than he had thirty-two years before when he had followed his grandson up those very stairs. A boy it had taken so long to see again. But one he had thought of every day since.

  They reached the room at the top of the tower, the bone melted and set, its walls still mutilated from when his weapon had detonated so long ago. One section still open to the void. They stood at the edge, but did not look down.

  High above them, the sky was filling wi
th Quetzalcóatls, all travelling in one direction.

  “We have found them,” Gantrua said. “Your son and the traitors who sheltered him.”

  Blacktongue remained silent but for the deep, even wheeze of his breathing.

  “An army will meet them. You will lead it.” Gantrua turned, the teeth gleaming on the grille at his mouth. They looked freshly sharpened. “And you will destroy them all.”

  He left Blacktongue where he stood, his long sword scraping the steps as he left the tower, but his presence was still imprinted in the atmosphere. The human eventually left the room too, pulling his hood up so that no Fomorian could divine his emotions as he walked from the tower for the last time.

  Trom and Cryf stepped into the building and stood in the flicker of the candlelight, observing the mural painted in clays on the bone.

  Rising up the wall, in a sweep of the tower’s curved interior, the image was rough yet vivid.

  Niall had drawn a sky that went from a blue deeper than any in the Infested Side had ever seen to its familiar grey, hovering above a dirty landscape that melded into a land of unimaginable green.

  “That’s not good,” said Trom.

  “I think it’s all right,” said Cryf. “Nice colours and all.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh.”

  The mural contained a human, a boy, in clear anguish high in the sky. The dead centre of a cataclysm at the breaking of two worlds.

  Niall Blacktongue pushed Finn forward in the cave, the creak of his body almost audible, a thin film of dust on his tattered cloak from where he had left one world for another.

  He held a short sword to Finn’s neck, its point pressing against his skin. Finn stayed as steady as he could. The energy had such a hold on him he feared even flinching would cause it to ignite.

  That, of course, would stop his grandfather. It wouldn’t kill Finn. He hoped. It hadn’t last time anyway.

  But it would kill his dad, who was creeping forward with the Desiccator trained at his own father’s forehead. Through clenched teeth, he spat venom at Niall. “If you hurt Finn—”

  “You can’t desiccate me, son,” Finn’s grandfather rasped, unsteady, as if regretful. “It would mean desiccating both of us, and untangling that mess would not be easy. Do you remember, when you were very small, I desiccated a Wolpertinger and Hippogriff in the same shot?”

  “Stop talking,” Hugo told him.

  “Of course you don’t remember,” he said sadly. “You used the feathery, leathery thing as a football. You were so, so young.”

  A voice called in from outside the cave. It was Steve and they could hear the faint sound of his steps crunching at the entrance. “Is everything OK in there?”

  “Stay outside!” Hugo shouted back. “Do not let anyone in.”

  Sword still held at Finn’s neck, Niall edged them both forward another step so that the frigid air of the Infested Side raised goosebumps on Finn’s skin, triggering a shiver he struggled to suppress.

  “Let him go,” Hugo demanded. The anger was building in him like the energy was bubbling inside Finn. Neither could be contained much longer.

  “You have to understand,” said Niall.

  “I understand clearly,” said Hugo.

  “You don’t. You didn’t see what I saw. The end of this family, this town. The end of everything.”

  Finn breathed deep, searched for clarity to calm the welling catastrophe within him. He had tried not to engage with his grandfather’s vision, with the prophecy, the idea that he really would do something terrible if he wasn’t stopped. Now it loomed within him, casting a shadow.

  What if I really am going to destroy everything?

  Energy pulsed and bubbled in his veins.

  “There must be so much you want to know,” said Niall.

  “I know all I need to,” said Hugo, disgust thick in every word. “You betrayed the Legend Hunters.”

  “I was trying to save them,” Niall insisted.

  “You became a weapon for Gantrua.”

  “No,” said Niall. “I helped him gain power only so it would be concentrated on him, so there was only one leader to watch, so I could know every detail of his plans, every threat to this world. Everything he was plotting with Mr Glad, for example.”

  “You almost let that traitor destroy Darkmouth,” exclaimed Hugo, incredulous.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like that,” Niall said urgently. “I didn’t expect Glad to succeed in his plan. It was my idea to pass crystals through because I knew you were working on that great device to close up the gateways. Glad had told us. The crystals were to help you make the bomb work. All that time, I was trying to protect you as best I could.”

  “You betrayed Darkmouth.”

  “I was trying to be a Legend Hunter, even so far from my Blighted Village.”

  “You betrayed me,” Hugo said. That statement echoed about the chamber, settled in the grim light of the Infested Side.

  Finn felt the urgency of the ticking bomb inside him. He didn’t know if he had power over it or if it had power over him. He tried to speak, but it came out as a meagre croak from his throat, so afraid was he of the blade pressed to it. Neither his father nor grandfather heard him.

  “I left the map in the painting for you, son,” said Niall.

  “Stop calling me that,” Hugo told him.

  “I left in the hope that someday you might find it, learn about this cave. Protect it from those who would seek to use its power. Maybe even use it, if you wanted, to find me. To find the truth about me.”

  Finn tensed, the energy rippling across him. He spoke again. Louder. “Leave us, Dad.”

  “What, Finn?” his father asked.

  “Go,” Finn told him.

  “I can’t—”

  There was a scrape of shoes on stones and the sound of someone climbing through the rubble of the passageway towards the chamber.

  “I said no one was to come in here,” said Hugo. “I’ll send you back out in a desiccated ball.”

  Finn’s mother appeared in the chamber. She stopped as soon as she saw the set-up, gasped a little. “Finn.”

  “Mam,” said Finn. He sensed Niall’s breaths quicken a little, noticed a change.

  “Does he want to...” Clara could hardly say the words. “...kill you?”

  “No,” said Niall.

  “You were going to desiccate me in the tower,” said Finn. “I’d never have been reanimated. No difference.”

  “No, I don’t suppose there would have been to you.” Niall sighed and glanced back through the hole to the Infested Side. “But there was a difference for me.” He adjusted his grip on Finn’s arm, shifted the position of the sword so that it almost felt like a relief to Finn to have it pressing somewhere else. His grandfather spoke almost directly into his ear. “It’s the energy, yes?”

  Finn nodded carefully.

  “A charge,” continued Niall. “Ready to go off.”

  Finn felt like the filament in a bulb about to burst into brightness. “Get out, Dad,” he repeated.

  “He thinks he can use this power given to him by the blood crystals,” said Niall.

  “I can,” said Finn. “I did before. On the Infested Side.”

  “The Legends told me about it,” said his father. “It will kill you.”

  “I survived last time.”

  “You weren’t under tons of rock last time.”

  Finn hadn’t thought of that. He glanced up at the roof of the cavern, just waiting to bury him. He felt defeated. But he could still feel the energy mounting inside him.

  Niall drew him in tighter. “You know, son,” he said to Hugo, “I could have lost any sense of the passing of the years in that place where there’s hardly any difference between darkness and day.”

  “Stop it,” said Finn’s father.

  “And the Legends, they have lifetimes that make ours seem no longer than the strike of a match. We come into this life, we leave it sho
rtly after. But they live on, some of them for centuries. And they complain constantly about it. Never-ending gripes about their boredom. And that eats away at any sense of the days, the years, the decades. But I never lost count. Not one day. Not one minute.”

  “Enough,” said Hugo.

  “Thirty-two years,” recounted Niall.

  “Stop.”

  “One day.”

  “I’m warning you.”

  “And twenty-three hours. That’s how long since I left Darkmouth. Since I left my family to find the boy, to save the world. And, over those long, long years, I have ignited, and I have destroyed, and I have filled those Legends with so much fear of me. And yet there’s something they do not know.”

  He pushed his face forward fully into the light. The scraggle of his white whiskers. The sag in his skin. The scars. “It is gone. The energy. The power. All of it. Drained.”

  The sword was no longer pressing into Finn’s skin, but was almost resting on his collarbone. He wondered if he should elbow his grandfather in the ribs and run for it.

  “And now I am nothing. I’m not a weapon. I’m not a bomb. I am old skin. Crumbling bones. I can’t go out there into Darkmouth. I can’t go back to the Infested Side. I am trapped here. In this cave. Called a traitor to the Legend Hunters. A traitor to my son. And now a traitor to the Legends too. Of no use to anyone.”

  Niall fixed Hugo with a stare, his eyes blanched, a ghost. “But, while I am not the man you see in that portrait, one thing never changed.” He pulled Finn closer. “I am not a killer. I only ever wanted to stop the sky from falling apart. To protect a town our family has stood guard over for a thousand years. To be a Legend Hunter. First. Always.”

  He pressed his blade tight again, its tip touching Finn’s chest. In reaction, the energy seemed to pool at that very point.

  “Prove it,” said Clara. “Let Finn go.”

  “I will, but first I must create a new path.”

  Niall whispered into Finn’s ear, a death rattle in his voice. “This blade is not for harming you, but to release you. To release your energy. We will close this hole and you will live. But you will need to let go of the power. Are you ready for that?”