Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  The fire roared as Tom threw on another broken dining chair, the glow painting a dull red over his wire-rimmed spectacles. Shavi sat cross-legged in front of his tent, staring deep into the flames. His long hair hung limp around his face, his perfect Asian features so still he could have been a mannequin. Wiping the sweat from his brow, Tom eyed him surreptitiously as he turned from the blaze.

  “It was a terrible experience, but you gained wisdom from it.” He adjusted the elastic band holding his grey ponytail in place.

  Shavi’s eyes flickered, as if he were waking from a dream. “At the moment that seems little consolation.”

  “There’s always a price to pay for knowledge. What you did was a great leap forward in your abilities.” Tom sat next to him, but far enough away so as not to encroach on the invisible barrier Shavi had placed around himself.

  “I feel something has broken inside, deep in my head. Only I cannot tell exactly what. I simply feel different, damaged.”

  “You projected your consciousness, your very self, out of your body and into an unthinking beast. It was a triumph of your shamanistic abilities. Unfortunately there will be short-term repercussions-“

  “I have no wish to talk about it further.” Shavi fell silent for a few minutes, then said, “I am sorry. I am being very insensitive. What I have experienced is nothing compared to your suffering over the centuries in Otherworld.”

  “It wasn’t centuries when I was there.” Tom paused. “Although it felt like it.”

  “And was the wisdom you gained from your experience worthwhile?”

  Tom looked away into the night.

  “What does your power of prophecy say for us, True Thomas?” Shavi lay back so he could watch the stars twinkling through the gaps in the smoke. He felt a twinge of deep regret that his experience with the serpent on the crossing to Skye had left him with such a black depression that he could no longer truly appreciate them.

  “There are hard times ahead.”

  “Even Ryan could have predicted that.”

  “It’s not as if I see the future rolled out before me like a map. There are flashes, glimpses through different windows on a winding staircase. I prefer not to say too much. Guessing at the meaning of a future image can alter the way one would react in the present.”

  “Do you know who will live and who will die?” Shavi’s voice floated up hollowly.

  Tom remained silent.

  A second later they heard the sound of the others approaching up the road from Kyleakin. Church had his arm around Laura’s shoulders, while Ruth and Witch carried the bags of provisions. They were all laughing at a joke.

  “Come on, you old git. It won’t ruin your image if you smile. It’s not as if you’re going to get any more wrinkles,” Laura shouted to Tom. He looked away haughtily.

  Shavi forced a smile. “Any fine food for dinner?”

  Ruth upended her bin bag. “Beans, fruit salad, muesli, pasta or any combination of the above.”

  “Better get your cauldron on then,” Laura said to her tartly.

  “There’s meat for those who eat it.” Tom motioned to a brace of pheasants that lay on the outskirts of the camp.

  “How the hell did you get those?” Veitch asked in amazement. He picked up one by the claws and searched for any kind of injury.

  “Don’t ask him that,” Church said. “It’ll just give him a chance to put on his mysterious-but-wise Yoda routine.”

  “Well, meat for me.” Veitch threw the bird down. Laura wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  While Tom set about preparing the birds, Ruth got out the cooking utensils they had picked up from the camping shop where they’d also, in Laura’s words, liberated the tents. Tom jointed the pheasants with his Swiss Army Knife and they cooked quickly over the campfire, while Veitch prepared pasta and beans to accompany them.

  After they’d eaten, they all sat back listening to the crackle of the fire. It was Church who spoke first, and from the way they turned to him as one he realised they had been waiting for him. “I think,” he began, “it’s time to decide what we’re going to do next.”

  “Let’s weigh up the options.” Church watched Ruth’s face grow serious as she turned her sharp lawyer’s mind to the mountainous problems that faced them.

  “Rolling over and doing nothing, always a popular favourite. That’s my number one.” Laura began to count off on her fingers. “Driving off until we find a nice, secluded beach somewhere. Taking a boat and getting away across the Channel. Taking a shedload of drugs and spending whatever time we’ve got left blissed out.” She paused thoughtfully. “Um. Burying our heads in the sand-“

  “Or,” Veitch interrupted, “we could do the right thing.”

  “And what’s that?” Laura sneered. “Rob a building society?”

  Shavi leaned forward, his eyes pools of darkness despite the firelight. “We are Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. After all that has happened, there is no denying it. For better or worse, we, of all the people in the world, have had responsibility thrust upon us. We can no more turn our back on what is expected of us than we could on life itself.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Laura sulked.

  “And what is expected of us?” Church said, although the answer was obvious.

  Shavi moistened his lips. “To oppose the powers that threaten to drive humanity into the shadows. To shine a beacon of hope in the night. Whatever the cost.”

  “Plain English,” Veitch interjected. “To overthrow the bastards or die trying.”

  Ruth raised her eyes and muttered, “Thank you, John Wayne.”

  They all fell silent for a long moment, and it was Laura who gave voice to the thought on all their minds. “Look at us. What can we do?”

  “I can give you all the cliches,” Church began. “David and Goliath. The ant that moved several times its own weight-“

  “Okay.” Laura smiled falsely. “Now let’s talk about the real world.”

  “There’s some way out there,” Veitch said adamantly. “We don’t have to go out in a blaze of glory like the Wild Bunch. There’s guerrilla warfare. There’s-“

  “-different rules now,” Church said. “Powers out there we can use. Like the artefacts we uncovered.” He still felt troubled that objects of such great power were in the hands of such an unpredictable race as the Tuatha De Danann.

  “Guerrilla warfare,” Ruth said. “I like that. We turn our weakness into a strength. Move fast, strike hard and be away before they can respond.”

  “Excuse me? Are we living in the same world?” Laura said. “These are things that can crush us faster than you can get on a high horse.”

  “Get a spine.” Ruth turned to the others. “We all know what’s going to happen next.”

  Every head dropped as one.

  “Somebody’s got to say it-“

  “Let’s not, and say we did.” Laura tried to make out it was more sour humour, but they all heard the faint undertone in her voice: fear.

  Ruth looked around the circle slowly. “They’re going to try to bring Balor back. If we don’t try to stop them-“

  “Why us?” Laura no longer made any pretence of humour.

  “But that is why we have been brought together,” Shavi said quietly. “That is the reason why we contain this nebulous thing called the Pendragon Spirit, this thing that none of us truly understands. But it has been gifted to us so we can defend the land against this overwhelming threat.”

  Laura winced. “If you can believe all that-“

  “You don’t believe it?” Veitch asked sharply.

  “You know what? I don’t feel any different to before I met all you. You’re just fooling yourselves, playing at being heroes. We’re normal. Some of us, worse than normal. Weak, pathetic little shits. And the only time you’re going to realise what a fantasy it is, is that second before you die in a gutter.” Her features were flinty; it was obvious she wasn’t going to back down.

  There was a long period of silence f
illed only with the crackle of the fire. Then Tom began slowly, “It is all right to be scared of Balor. This is not some Fomorii like Calatin or Mollecht, who are frightening, but within our power to beat. As the Fomorii are to us, so Balor is to the Fomorii. He is their god, the embodiment of darkness, evil, death, chaos …” He shook his head slowly. “He is more than a force of nature, he is an abstract given form: destruction. You only have my word for this, but I can see from your faces your fear goes beyond what I say. Because you know. In the furthest reaches of your worst nightmare, in the dimmest purview of your race memory, in your primal fear of the night, he lives. If Balor returns, it truly will be the end of everything.”

  No one spoke. They listened to the wind whistling across the hills of Skye and somehow it seemed harsher, colder, the night too dark.

  “Then we really do have no choice,” Church said.

  Laura turned away so the fire didn’t light her face.

  “How are they going to bring him back?” Ruth asked finally.

  “None of those ancient races truly die,” Tom said. “They flitter out of this existence for a while. Time is meaningless, space insignificant. They simply need to be anchored and dragged back.” He shrugged. “How? I have no idea. Some ritual using the powerful distillation they have been amassing which we saw in Salisbury and under Dartmoor.”

  “Then we’ve got to stop the bastards before they start the ritual.” There was an innocent optimism in Veitch’s voice that raised all their spirits slightly.

  “But where will they be doing it? And when?” Ruth asked.

  “The when I can answer,” Tom said. “The ritual of birthing will not be conducted until the next auspicious date when there is a conjunction of power and intent. What the Celts named the feast of Lughnasadh, the Harvest Festival. August 1.”

  “Three months.” Church mulled over this for a second or two. “Doesn’t seem very long. But we managed the unthinkable by our last deadline-“

  “With no time to spare,” Tom cautioned. “This task is far, far harder. The essence of Balor will already be contained in the birthing medium, ready for the ritual, and the Fomorii will have it hidden in their deepest, most inaccessible stronghold. To them, this thing is more valuable than anything in existence. Imagine if you held the spirit of your God? How much would you fight to protect it?”

  “Do you think they’ve got it at that fortress we saw them building in the Lake District?” Ruth asked.

  Tom shook his head. “It will be somewhere none of their enemies will have seen, beneath ground, certainly, and protected against all eventuality.”

  The wind came howling down from Sgurr Alasdair high in the Cuillin Hills, whipping up the fire so the sparks roared skywards like shooting stars. Looking up into the vast arc of the heavens, they felt suddenly insignificant, all their plans hopeless.

  “Then how are we going to find it?” Ruth asked. “If they’ve gone to such great pains to make it safe for them, we’re not just going to stumble across it.”

  Tom nodded in agreement; slowly, thoughtfully. “We need guidance. There is a place we could go, a ritual I could conduct-“

  “Then let’s do it as soon as possible.” Church looked around at their faces; they were watching him with such intensity it made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t want the responsibility they were forcing on his shoulders.

  “So you’ve decided, then.” Laura’s expression hid whatever she was thinking. “We’ve been lucky so far.” Her hand went unconsciously to the scars on her face. “If you can call barely surviving luck. But sooner or later someone’s going to die, and I don’t intend it to be me.”

  “No one wants-” But she had risen and marched off into the night before Church had a chance to finish. He sighed and waved his hand dismissively. “We better get some sleep. We can start at first light.”

  Veitch and Shavi headed off to their tents while Tom lit a joint from his rapidly diminishing block of hash and wandered off beyond the light of the campfire.

  Ruth sat down next to Church, slipping a tentative arm around his shoulders to give him a comforting squeeze. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “No rest for anyone.” Church sighed. “I wish I had some Sinatra to play. He always makes me feel good at a time like this.” Overhead a meteor shower set pinpricks of light flashing in the black gulf. “You remember when we sat in that cafe after we first got dragged into all this under Albert Bridge? You asked me if I was scared. I didn’t even know what the word meant then. Now every morning when I wake up, it hits me from a hundred different directions: fear of screwing up again, fear of dying, fear that the world doesn’t make sense any more, that there’s no secure place anywhere.” He paused a second before continuing, “Fear of what this nightmare means on some kind of spiritual level. That there is no meaning. That we’re just here as prey for whatever things are higher up the food chain than us. Fear that the whole mess doesn’t even end with death.”

  “You think too much.” Ruth gave him another squeeze before removing her arm. “That morning in the cafe? It seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? I barely knew you then.”

  Church looked up, unable to pinpoint the tone in her voice. She was smiling, her eyes bright in the dying firelight.

  “I think you should look for meaning in the small picture, not the big one,” she continued. “It seems stupid with all the upset and suffering, but on that micro level my life is better now than it ever was before. I was in a job I hated, just going through the motions because I knew it would have made my dad happy, not really having any idea who I was at all. Now everything in my life seems heightened, somehow. Even the smallest thing has passion in it. You know I’m not one to get poetic, but compared to how I live my life now, I was dead before. Maybe that’s where the meaning lies.”

  “Maybe,” he answered noncommittally, but he knew what she meant.

  “And I feel like my life’s been enriched for knowing you and the others. I feel closer even to the ones I don’t particularly like than anyone I knew before. Maybe when the rulebook was redrawn, the dictionary was too.” She laughed at her metaphor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know what friendship means now.” Her smile slowly faded until her features were sadly introspective. “I don’t know how to say this, but at this point, with all that shit lying ahead, it seems important.”

  “So what does friendship mean?” He tried to raise the mood with a smile.

  “It means being prepared to lay down your life for someone.”

  “If we’re careful, that’s something we won’t even have to think-“

  “Church, be realistic. If we go into this, we’re not all, maybe not any of us, going to come out of it alive. You know that. Don’t insult me by pretending it’s not true.”

  He was hypnotised by what he saw in her eyes.

  “You’ve changed too,” she continued. “You’ve grown in a lot of ways, in just a few short weeks.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how it is. Pressure is the catalyst for change.”

  “It’s a shame we have to lose our innocence.” Although she said we, Church felt she was talking about him.

  “You can’t stay innocent and face up to sacrifice and death and war. Those bastards killed my innocence when they arranged for Marianne to die. To forge my character,” he added with a sneer.

  “You mustn’t let it eat you up.”

  “I won’t. I let that happen before, when I thought I was somehow complicit in Marianne’s suicide. It’s not going to happen again. I’m going to find whoever killed Marianne and I’m going to get my revenge, but I won’t be consumed by it. This is different. It’s colder, harder.” He could tell she wasn’t happy about what his words implied about the change in his character, but on this subject he didn’t care. “I’m not stupid. I’ve read the classics and I know how revenge destroys people. But for the kind of suffering that’s been caused to all of us, there has to be some kind of payback.”

 
The fire was starting to die down and a chill crept across the campsite, belying the summer that was just around the corner.

  “What’s to become of us all?” Ruth said with a troubled smile.

  It was a rhetorical question, but Church felt the need to answer it nonetheless. “We’ll do the best we can and damn the consequences.”

  The morning was clear and fresh. The fires on the mainland had mostly burned themselves out, but there was still the occasional tendril of smoke snaking up into the blue sky. Shavi was the first to rise and he immediately went to the sea wall to survey the stretch of water that separated Skye from the blackened ruins that remained of the Kyle of Lochalsh. Returning to the camp as the others prepared breakfast, he announced that the serpent which had patrolled the waters seemed to have departed with the Fomorii presence. Only Ruth caught the glimmer of relief in his face.

  After they had eaten an unappetising breakfast of muesli and water, they found a boat on the sea front and Tom steered it across the strait to where they had abandoned their van the previous day. By 10 a.m., they were on their way north along deserted main roads. Ten miles outside of the Kyle of Lochalsh, they saw a farmer attending to hedges away on a hillside, and the further they progressed the more signs of life they encountered, until it seemed the devastation they had encountered was just an aberration.

  When they stopped at a pub in Achnasheen for lunch, they were chased away by the landlord and some irate locals. The explanation came at an old-fashioned garage further along the road. When the owner shuffled out to fill their tank, checked cap raised over a ruddy face, he told them of a rumour circulating in the area that the Government’s imposition of martial law and the censorship of the media was to prevent panic because a plague was loose in the country; what kind of plague, no one was quite sure. He didn’t believe it himself. The view among his own particular group was that the “bastard politicians” had finally been overcome by their innate corruption and were using a manufactured crisis as a smokescreen to get rid of the democratic process. It had all started with the gun laws, he said. The tragedy at Dunblane was the excuse, but the weapons had really been controlled to prevent an armed uprising. But, he said conspiratorially, a few landowners had held on to their shotguns and were stockpiling them for use “when the soldiers come.” At this, he decided he had said too much and took their money in silence before retreating to his dusty shack.