by David Hair
She knew that she had to act. Parukau was going to use that hideous fire again, and this time Mat would burn, and Tu and all the others. Then after that she would be at Parukau’s mercy. She felt the blaze mount, the light growing hotter and hotter. The goblin was feeding that flame, and it was going to burn Mat and Tu and the others to ash. She felt Mat flounder, and so she did the only thing she knew.
She called on water to counter the flames.
She could see no physical water here. But this wasn’t a physical battle. And she was an avatar, of a legend entwined with a whole lake full of water. Water that filled her dreams, that soaked her soul. She swam through it all her life, the deep water that wanted to swallow her. She called it, called it to douse the fire, and protect those she cared for. She called in desperation, but with total conviction and belief.
And the deep water came.
Mat staggered, lost his link to Parukau’s mind, and almost fell. The flame in Parukau’s hands burst into a ball, and the goblin pulled back his arm to hurl it. But with a sudden roar, water exploded from the very ground around them, as if every geyser in Rotorua had come here, right now. The windows of the Bath House erupted. Walls shook, and fountains of scalding water tore through the earth. A multitude of massive geysers gushed from the ground and from the broken pipes of the Bath House itself, in a torrent that scythed them all down.
Perhaps the primal flame protected him — he felt no pain.
But the others about him did, as torrents of boiling water slapped them off their feet.
Water and steam billowed about him. He could no longer see Parukau. Riki staggered beside him through the steam and fountaining water, his face buried in his cloak as he stumbled towards the Bath House doors. Mat followed, and he saw Hine Horatai, on the landing, roped to a taller shape holding a sword. Water … She is an avatar of water … She did this!
He didn’t question this miracle. Parukau reappeared, silhouetted in the Bath House door, and then was gone, the swordsman dragging Hine with him.
He leapt past Riki and ran after them.
The ground bucked, and the lower floor of the Bath House seemed to explode outwards in sheets of boiling water and clouds of steam. A geyser erupted at Donna’s feet and threw her sideways, tearing her from Rose’s surprised grip. She found herself flung sideways along the steps, landing on her ankle and going over on it, the pain wracking through her. All about her, water flew. She saw Parukau lifted by a geyser that burst up through the ground at his feet. She had no strength to resist, nor even the will to do so any more. The steam and gushing water rendered everything a blind grope through wet darkness, then it dissipated and vision returned.
The first thing she saw was Parukau, upright again, but drenched and no longer holding verdant fire in his grasp. His goblin face was contorted in rage. She saw his teeth flash as he roared fresh orders. ‘Stone, bring the girl!’ Then he saw Donna, lying alone on the stairs. ‘Rose!’
Rose emerged from the mists, her dress plastered to her body, her livid face full of teeth. ‘Master?’ she mewled.
Parukau’s finger stabbed towards Donna. ‘Rip her apart — I don’t need her any more!’
Riki had always believed there was good in everyone. It was something his granddad liked to say, and Riki generally thought he was right. Which was just as well because some of the guys who hung around his family were pretty bad eggs by society’s reckoning. Ex-crims and street toughs, the sort of guys who ended up being defended in court by Mat’s father. If Riki had not believed in his granddad’s wisdom, he would have been too scared to leave his bedroom every day.
But Puarata’s warlocks were a different class of being, and he didn’t think of them as human. Not after the things he had seen at Waikaremoana, and the stuff Jones and Mat had told him. They weren’t people; they were hollow things who had emptied themselves of normal feelings to make room for something darker.
The mercy shown him by Kurangaituku had changed his view on that point slightly. He had been forced to see her as a being trapped by circumstance, lured and tempted by a dark life that promised everything and delivered little more than fear. Power, too, but a false kind of power — the sort that permitted inflicting pain on others, but failed on delivering peace of mind and security and happiness. A devil’s bargain. It reminded him of a drug dealer who used to be friends with his brother, until some rival shot him in the spine and left him paraplegic.
So when he saw Donna Kyle sprawled on the stairs, and some vampire girl in a wet floral dress looming over her with bared fangs, he didn’t hesitate. While Mat turned left and ran after Hine and her captors, he went right, swinging his taiaha as he shouted to distract the thing from its prey.
The girl spun and reared back like a snake, swaying from his blow. She hissed and then sprang before he had even completed the follow-through, his whole weight off-balance and his weapon askew, leaving him utterly exposed. Her mouth widened into a jagged fence of teeth as she uncoiled and sprang. She hissed exultantly, in her mind already feasting on him.
The taiaha looks like a wooden spear, but it isn’t. It’s a long wooden club, held two-handed just above the pointed tongue. Which makes it a two-ended weapon. And Riki wasn’t top of his taiaha class for nothing. Even as the patupaiarehe leapt, he was moving his left hand up the shaft, spinning the weapon like a bandmaster twirling his staff, bracing and thrusting.
The taiaha punched through the girl’s chest and burst out her back. A thin splatter of blood sprayed down the shaft as her weight settled. He twisted the weapon and drove her down, slamming the tongue further through, and into the wet earth. Her body thrashed blindly, her talons raking, but he rolled clear, and came up on all fours, staring at the hideous sight of the young girl dying. She convulsed and jerked to stillness as he tried and failed to look away. Her face turned towards him.
She smiled just like his little sister did, and died.
All at once the horror of the moment struck him, and he felt a gorge of bilious food rise up his throat. He had sagged to his knees and vomited over the steps before he could stop himself.
Damn, I’ll never get used to this.
By the time he thought to look for Donna Kyle, she was gone.
When Rose loomed above her, Donna didn’t have the strength to move. But someone shouted, and the girl turned and leapt at a youth — Mat Douglas’s friend Riki.
Rose moved so fast it seemed he would be torn apart, but somehow he turned a missed blow into a hidden thrust, and Rose went down with a wooden stake through the heart. The boy moved the way Wiremu did. He looked only seventeen, but she was suddenly scared of him, even when he went down and spewed like a child who has had too much cake.
She suddenly didn’t care about winning any more. Or even escaping.
She had lost. It wasn’t her fault.
Donna lay back on the wet stone, listening to the gushing water slow. She felt utterly out of her depth. The world had turned on its head, and the only familiar thing left was the distant but familiar sound of a tipua war-party disintegrating in confusion.
Perhaps she could crawl away …
Daughter!
She groaned.
Daughter — come!
She wanted to block him out. But some kind of silvery cord, like that with which she had bound the patupaiarehe, appeared, sprouting from her chest.
‘No, Father! Please!’
Edith Madonna Kyle: I summon you! Come to my aid!
She sobbed as she rose to her feet, tried to resist, but the cord at her heart jerked and she flew through the air like a toy, towards a bank of broken windows lit from within by vivid green light.
Mat raced through the Bath House doors into a beautiful, deserted lobby, with polished marble floors, oil paintings and furniture of deep mahogany. A stairway curved upwards, and on it was Parukau, his goblin body hunched, his hand about Hine’s wrist. His face was contorted by pain and desperation. Mat stormed after them even as his brain screamed a warning: Where’s t
he swordsman?
From above him something cracked, and a chandelier, with the patupaiarehe riding it, snapped from its moorings and plummeted towards him.
He threw himself aside, diving and rolling as half a ton of steel and glass smashed into and through the tiles with an almighty crash. Glass fragments and stone slivers ricocheted about him. The swordsman erupted instantly from the tangle, emerging from the dust and splinters as fast as sight, with a blur of steel in his fist. The sword flashed, and Mat twisted and threw himself sideways. The blade scoured his back and he fell against the balustrade, lifting his taiaha one-handed, just in time to parry another slash. Steel jarred on wood, and the pale face snarled at him from beneath lank hair. The sword in his fist looked huge.
Mat gripped his taiaha and beat away another blow, but was forced to give ground. He tried to bring the weight of his taiaha to bear, but the blade that met his blow was thick and heavy. Wood chips splintered from his weapon as he parried a series of blinding attacks. He could barely see the blows he was parrying, and knew he was outmatched.
He desperately blocked, and then shouted as the tip of the blade left a bloody trail up his left forearm. He had to give more ground, until his foot caught in the wreckage of the chandelier, and the world tipped. He crashed to the floor amidst the twisted metal, half-winded and gasping for air.
He couldn’t move.
The pallid thing licked his lips, and thrust downwards.
Parukau dragged Hine up the stairs, threw open the doors and pulled her deeper into the building. They burst into what she realized with shock was a hospital ward. And yet it was much more: in the centre of the room on a stone dais was a ghastly thing that drew the eye and appalled it. It appeared to be a giant heart which pulsed in emerald splendour. A giant heart carved from pounamu. It hung above the room like some alien squid, a distended sac of stony, translucent flesh from which spread a tangle of tentacles that became veins, which gripped and punctured the skin of at least a dozen patients on life support in the hospital beds. There were no doctors, no nurses, but there were beeping machines and diodes everywhere.
As she stared at that great alien leech, she saw that one of its chambers was darkened, the same chamber through which a taiaha handle had been thrust, piercing the flank of the organ. Viscous black fluid ran down the flanks of the organ and pooled in an overflowing stone bowl. A gold chalice sat beside the bowl, as if on an altar.
The men and women imprisoned here lay on hospital beds, pierced by the tubes that ran from the life-support equipment, and the veins that distended from the giant heart. Those veins were fixed to their flesh like huge, sucking worms. Most of the prisoners were Maori. They gazed out sightlessly, their chests rising and falling slowly.
Parukau turned to her, his goblin face eerily reminiscent of Evan Tomoana’s shaven skull. ‘Welcome to my parlour, little fly. Two avatars will make a potent addition to my little coterie. You and Tutanekai, joined forever in my service. And the Adept boy, too. You will all feed me, Hine.’ He jabbed a finger at her. ‘Stand still!’
She felt herself locked in place, her limbs frozen. She could not even scream.
He went first to the chalice and drained it thirstily, licking the spillage on his chin and inhaling deeply, as if it were the finest of wines. ‘You cannot imagine how good this feels, Hine,’ he told her. ‘It’s better than anything I’ve ever tasted. Like booze and drugs and sex and murder all rolled up into one.’ His eyes were glazed. ‘If only I had more time to savour it. But unfortunately my tipua outside are falling apart, and my enemies will be here soon, although with luck Col will slay the leaders. And there is one thing I need to do here before I can wreak full havoc upon them.’ He turned to a male patient, a Pakeha. ‘I must fulfil my Pledge to this man, so that my powers will not be hampered.’
Hine didn’t comprehend. All she could see was that horrible beating heart, to which he was going to bind her forever. She tried to call the water again, but her mind was as locked up as her body. All she could do was watch as Parukau removed the old man from the huge heart. The newly detached veins swayed like worms. He made a gesture, and they all moved in unison: towards her, snaking slowly with their maws widening.
The patient was an ancient white man with long, grey hair and a hook-nosed face. Parukau leant over him, chuckling softly. ‘See, old man: I keep my bargains; I’ve freed you. But I’ve a wee surprise for you, Asher.’ He pulled open the man’s slack mouth, as though about to administer rescue breathing. ‘You see, I won’t need to let you rule over me as agreed — if I am you!’
His parasite soul slid from his mouth, just as she had seen it do at Taupo police station. It began to slide from his mouth and into the old man’s. She gaped, while those detached tentacles writhed through the air towards her, readying to latch on. She opened her mouth to scream as they lunged.
But it was Parukau they seized.
The mouths of the giant veins clamped on Parukau’s back, and he howled in sudden terror. The mocking, knowing eyes of Asher Grieve looked up at him, the mouth curving with wicked glee, and then the world turned to liquid pain. Some kind of tongue stabbed into him, entrails from each vein, and all he could do was scream. He could feel those rasping proboscises inside him, ripping, tearing; and fluids were pouring into him, acidic, burning. He thrashed in their grip, feeling the darkness closing in.
He tried to leave this body, tried to flee, but it was as if some kind of vacuum cleaner were inside him, sucking his soul, and instead of escaping he was drawn deeper, into the mouths that bound him.
Something tore. His soul.
A swirling, sucking oblivion shredded him.
His last perception was of Hine, watching motionless. Without pity.
Then nothing.
She saw the old man on the hospital bed flicker his eyes knowingly, and realized then that it was he who was commanding the tentacle-veins. The hideous appendages struck Parukau, clamping over torso and head and limbs. He screamed once, and then one engulfed his head. She saw his serpent-spirit try to free itself, thrashing out of his mouth, but it was sucked back inside. All the veins turned black as the soul of Parukau was torn from the goblin body, ripped apart and digested. The goblin sagged, and was pulled into place beneath that huge, pulsing heart.
The old man coughed once, and slowly sat up. His rheumy eyes swung about. Except for a loin cloth, he was naked. There was no muscular degeneration despite his imprisonment.
She found she could move, and speak. She staggered towards him. ‘Don’t get up, sir! I’ll get help—’
Too late it dawned on her just who it was who needed help.
Two cold eyes pinned her in place. ‘Hold,’ he croaked softly, and she found herself frozen again.
The old man stood slowly, brandished his right hand, and conjured clothes about him, long velvets in an antiquated style. An ebony cane appeared in his hand. He shook slightly, and peered at her. ‘You will be the avatar,’ he said, musingly. ‘The Hinemoa. So nice of you to come.’ He turned, waved his left hand, and fresh veins coiled from Te Iho, towards her. ‘My name is Asher Grieve, and I will be your god for the rest of eternity.’
Wiri hacked a path through the fleeing goblins. It wasn’t a fight; it was a slaughter. They had begun to run before contact was even made, the assault falling apart in the final volley Manu ordered. From then it was brutish and nasty. Warriors bashing the skulls of goblins as they turned to flee — there was no glory, just butchery. But he had to get through fast. Mat was somewhere ahead, and the enemies he faced would be beyond him.
A small part of him worried that he wasn’t horrified enough by all this. Had all those years in Puarata’s service killed the part of him that felt remorse? Maybe it had, but now wasn’t the time to think about it. He dispassionately stabbed and bludgeoned, running through the disintegrating mob. All of a sudden the steps to the Bath House were in front of him. He passed a dazed-looking Riki, kneeling and vomiting beside a dead girl. There was no time to wonder. H
e took the steps three at a time, stormed through the open doors, and bellowed as he dived, whipping his taiaha at the steel blade that was poised above Mat Douglas’s chest.
Col hissed, and his sword snaked at Wiri, but he was already rolling, sweeping at Col’s legs, making him dance aside. He came up gymnastically, thrusting and shuffling his feet, seeking a clear patch in the smashed glass and tangled metal.
Wiri saw Mat roll away, throw him a look, and then run for the stairs. The pale swordsman went to follow, but Wiri blocked him, shoving him away with a surge of strength. He spun the taiaha and poised to counter, three steps above the pale thing.
‘Wiri,’ Col breathed. ‘The former Immortal. I always thought you were overrated.’ His blade levelled at Wiri’s chest. ‘I am commanded to prevent pursuit.’
‘Then you’ll have to come through me,’ Wiri panted.
‘Perfect. En garde, human!’
The wizard and the tohunga
Friday night
Mat tore up the stairs, following the pulsing, green light through rooms filled with steam bursting from broken pipes, skidding over wet floorboards, before bursting through into the ward. The greenstone heart hung like some kind of hideous parasite above the lines of hospital beds, and he saw Ngatoro at once, right beneath the heart. Hine stood as if stunned and unmoving, but he burst past her, blocking a lordly man he recognized from his vision. Asher Grieve! He swung his taiaha at the man’s skull in a killing blow.
The blow struck the man’s head and the taiaha splintered — but the wizard never even flinched. It was as if the weapon had been made from polystyrene. His eyes swivelled and he gestured coldly. Mat felt himself picked up and flung aside like a doll. He skidded into the stone platform that held the heart, and two veins bunched above him. Hine gasped, and he saw her try to move. And fail.