Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  Seconds later he was in dark, freezing tunnels only occasionally lit by a barely flickering torch. Branches broke off on either side from which drifted foul smells like the cooking of rotted meat; from the distance he could hear odd sounds of indiscernible origin which made him strangely fearful. It was a maze. The chances of finding Ruth were slim, of returning alive even slimmer.

  chapter nine

  the well

  ight had fallen by the time Shavi and Laura made it back to Edinburgh on the back of a lorry delivering builders’ supplies to Leith. The Bone Inspector had long since abandoned them, loping across the fields in the direction of the city, one backward glance of contempt and horror showing them what he felt of their actions.

  From more than five miles from the city centre it was obvious something terrible was happening in the Old Town. The sky was filled with flashes and rumbles and as they drew closer they could see the wintry clouds that obscured the area were churning as if violent winds were gusting in that one spot.

  “What do you reckon?” Laura said as they stood on the pavement where the driver had dropped them off.

  Shavi could tell from her voice she feared the worst. “We will see when we get closer.”

  “We’re going in there, then?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Do you think the others will be all right?”

  “I do not know.”

  “That’s him, isn’t it? That freak?”

  Shavi said nothing. He felt complicit in the awful things that were happening, were bound to happen. If he had listened to Laura’s doubts, if he had not been so driven in his desire to accomplish their mission, the mad god might not now be loose. Perhaps Maponus had been subtly influencing him, drawing him in until his free will was compromised, but that was not enough of an excuse. His mind was strong; he could have resisted.

  “Come on.” He walked away from Lothian Road into Bread Street. Shivering in their light summer clothes, they hadn’t gone far through the shadowed, twisty-tunny streets before they noticed a building which had crumbled into a pile of rubble, as if it had been hit by a bomb.

  Shavi ran forward to inspect the wreckage, then noticed a curious sight. It took a second or two before it dawned on him what he was seeing. “Look here,” he said as Laura joined him.

  She followed his pointing finger over the debris and saw another crumpled building beyond it, and more beyond that. A swathe had been cut through the city to the outskirts. She turned a hundred and eighty degrees and realised the path continued in the opposite direction to the heart of the Old Town. They looked at each other, but couldn’t think of any way to express the thoughts that were colliding in their heads. After a moment of silent contemplation they scrambled across the bricks, stone and tiles towards the Royal Mile.

  In the next street they found the body of an old man who had obviously refused to abandon his home during the great evacuation. It wasn’t simply crushed by the housefall; it had been lovingly rendered into its component parts. The head was missing, but there was a fine red dew across an arc of virginal snow. Shavi and Laura both blanched.

  “We’re going to burn for this,” she said.

  They could see the battle raging through the gap in the buildings long before they clambered up on to the Royal Mile. It was furious in its intensity: a clattering of light and dark, summer and winter, two different aspects of hell; Shavi and Laura could barely look at it. Maponus’ beautiful face was contorted by an expression of such overwhelming hatred it made their blood run cold. His eyes were ranging wild, his fingers flexing, unflexing, as the energy or whatever it was rolled off him. Sometimes his attention wavered and he would let off a venomous blast at one of the abandoned buildings nearby, as if his pent-up hatred was for everything in existence. But then the Cailleach Bheur would strike again in her coldly emotionless way and his skittering attention would return to her.

  At that moment the crone seemed less human than ever; her features had dissolved into the sucking darkness of the void, her limbs were black and angular like the branches of a wind-blasted tree on a wintry heath. Her power was awesome to experience; even at a distance they could feel the cold like knives in their skin. The way the blue illumination shimmered drove Laura’s mind back to the club, as the flashing lights had been refracted then obscured by the hag’s relentless ice. For the first time she truly realised how close to death she had come. Before the power of these old gods, they were nothing. She wiped a stray tear away hurriedly before Shavi had a chance to see it.

  They scurried for cover behind a tumbled-down wall, their breath clouding in the cold air. “What’s going to happen if he gets by her?” she asked.

  “At the moment they seem fairly well matched-“

  “But sooner or later-“

  “We put our faith in the others. In Church and the blue fire.” It was the first time she had heard an edge to his voice.

  “What about Veitch?” They both looked into the depths of the thick mist that shrouded the castle.

  “We should head to the rendezvous point. Just in case.”

  Laura snorted derisively. “Is it me, or is this a head in the sand situation? You know, I hope one of us bastards has a Plan B. Otherwise I’d say, in our fine tradition, we’ve made things even worse.” Shavi was already departing. “Don’t walk away, you bastard! If that thing we set free gets away from here, we’re going to be knee-deep in killing fields.”

  He turned slowly; his eyes were brimming. “I know,” he said quietly. And then he was moving away into the night once more and she had no option but to follow him.

  Veitch could barely control his shivering as he progressed along the freezing, gloomy tunnels. The torches on the walls were too far apart to give him any comfort, but at least he didn’t encounter any Fomorii guards. That unnerved him even more, because he knew it was only a matter of time-he would have expected the place to be swarming with them. Were they all hiding to lure him in there so they could sweep down to tear him apart? He drove that thought out quickly.

  The entire place was a maze. All the tunnels looked the same, all were filled with the foul stench of spoiled meat cooking. Roughly constructed wooden doors were occasionally spaced on both sides. He had tried some of them tentatively, but they had all been locked. In the end he had been forced to hiss Ruth’s name, expecting to be answered by a Fomorii roar, but there had been no response from any.

  In a way he almost wished he would be confronted by something; that would be better than the unbearable tension of expecting an encounter around every corner, of constantly straining to hear footsteps approaching from behind.

  When the side tunnel loomed out of the dark it came as a shock. Its surround was ornately carved with writhing things and disturbing twisted shapes; over the top there was a stone face so unbearably hideous Veitch had to look away. The cold air currents which swept from its depths suggested it opened on to a large space. As he took a few steps in, trailing one hand along the wall for support, he picked up a strange, deep bass rumble like heavy trucks rolling; it made his stomach curdle. A few paces later and he recognised voices, scores, perhaps hundreds of Fomorii, but instead of the chaotic jumble of their usual dialect, it was controlled, two conflicted notes repeated over and over again. They were singing.

  In a strange way, that was worse than anything he could have anticipated. There was something about that sound that made him want to flee back to the lights of the New Town, but he forced himself to press on. By the time he emerged from the tunnel, he was shaking uncontrollably, his body once again covered in sweat. He was at the top of a flight of rudely carved stairs leading down into a large chamber. And the room was filled with Fomorii. He had been right: hundreds of them. The sum of their presence was so terrible the bile surged into his mouth and he had to shuffle back to retch where he would not be seen. When he looked down into the chamber again, his vision became liquid; he couldn’t fix on their forms and for an instant he was convinced there was just one beast down there, enormous and
black and filthy with all the evil of existence.

  He averted his gaze as his eyes swam, then they fell on what appeared to be a raised dais at the far end, flanked by two flaming braziers. On the centre was Calatin; the corrupt half-breed had his arms raised in some act of worship. When he dropped them, the intolerable singing stopped on one drawn-out note which slowly faded into the dark. Then he began to speak animatedly in the barks and shrieks of the Fomorii dialect. Veitch couldn’t bear any more, but just as he began to retreat he glimpsed something in the shadows beyond Calatin: an enormous Fomorii dressed in black battle armour and resembling some giant insect.

  Back in the main tunnel, he fought to control his nausea and spinning head. He couldn’t work out what he had witnessed-a rallying of the troops? A prayer session?-but it had left him thoroughly disquieted. There was no point wasting time considering it. He returned to his mission with a renewed vigour born of dread.

  Lost in his thoughts, he almost walked straight into a Fomorii guard as he rounded a corner. At the last minute he threw himself back, praying he hadn’t been seen. The guard had been at the end of a tunnel which was reached down a short flight of steps. Veitch had only glimpsed him, but he had been alerted by a buzzing in his head and the now-familiar sickening in his stomach; it could have been instinct, but it was more as if the Fomorii existed on some level beyond the corporeal, as if they were a foul gas he could smell or a discordant sound constantly reverberating. But it was more than both those things; the creatures offended some fundamental, instinctive part of him.

  Peeking round the corner as much as he could dare, he watched the dense area of blackness and the suggestion of a shape at the heart of it. The creature was so big and threatening, its position in the tunnel was almost impregnable; a full-frontal attack would undoubtedly be suicide. He could sneak by, continue exploring the tunnels, but a guard suggested the first site of importance he had come across. He gnawed on a fingernail, desperately urging himself to make the right decision, at the same time aware that he had never made the right decision in his life.

  Church and Tom scrabbled away at the rocks that blocked the tunnel until their fingers and knuckles bled, but eventually they had cleared a large enough path to crawl through. It was warmer on the other side and the air smelled of lemon and iron. The breathing sound that had first alerted Church was now so loud it made their ears ring.

  Tentatively, he advanced down the tunnel. More rubble crunched underfoot and the walls were cracked and broken open; there were holes so big he could put his hand through them.

  “We must be right in the heart of Arthur’s Seat now,” he said, suddenly claustrophobic at the weight of rock lying above his head.

  “You would think,” Tom replied.

  “You have a remarkable knack of sounding superficially like you agree with me while at the same time suggesting I’m completely wrong and an idiot into the bargain.”

  “It’s a skill. I’ve had centuries to perfect it.”

  Church suddenly noticed an unusual texture on the rock that lay at the end of one of the fissures in the wall. Squinting, he could just make out a strange diamond pattern. “That’s odd.” Cautiously he reached in and ran his fingers over the surface; it was rough and cool to the touch, but the pattern was certainly regular.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed, snatching his hand back.

  Tom was instantly at his side. “What is it?”

  “It moved! No, the rock didn’t move, but something just beneath the surface of it did. It was like … It was like …” He blanched.

  “What?” Tom stressed.

  Church leaned forward and peered into the fissure, shaking his head.

  “Like what?” Tom repeated. There was an irritated edge to his voice.

  “Like … Like muscles moving beneath skin.” He swallowed, moved to another fissure further along the wall. Bending down, he peered into it, then hesitantly held his hand over the opening, wondering if he dared. Slowly he reached in, all the time watching where his fingers were going.

  “Oh my God!” This time he threw himself back, shaking his hand in the air in disgust. The movement had been greater, something seemed to roll up. In the dark of the fissure he could see something red glinting. He crept forward. “Oh my God”-a whisper this time. The red glowed brighter, shifted slightly.

  “What is it?” Tom hissed.

  “An eye.” Church swallowed, repulsed. “I touched an eye and it opened.”

  Suddenly there was a tremendous rumbling deep in the rock and the tremors rippled out so powerfully it threw them off their feet. Showers of dust fell from the ceiling, choking them, blinding them, as the wall cracked and finally crumbled.

  “Get down!” Church threw himself over Tom to protect him. But the ceiling held steady and only a few tiny rocks from the wall bounced across his back. When he eventually felt safe enough to look up, coughing and spluttering, he instantly realised what the unnerving sound had been.

  On the other side of where the wall had been lay a long, sinuous figure, its muscles and tendons shifting under the scaled skin that reflected the faint light in bronze and verdigris with a touch of gold. The Fabulous Beast breathed in and out, regularly, peacefully, moving gently in its deep sleep, but its bulk was so big even the slightest tremble of its lithe body sent tremors through the rock. Church couldn’t even get a sense of its true size, for much of it was hidden under the fallen rock; even that had not disturbed it.

  He took a step forward, overcome by the sudden wonder of what he was seeing.

  “You feel it?” Tom was watching him curiously.

  “What?”

  “An affinity. You may not be of the same blood, but you are of the same spirit.”

  And he did feel it, tingling in his fingers, up his spine, singing in the chambers of his head; he felt like a tuning fork ringing in harmony with the sleeping beast. “A Brother of Dragons,” he muttered.

  “Your heritage.” Tom moved in next to him, clapped a grounding hand on his shoulder. “You are learning, growing. It’s been a slow process, but you’re getting there.”

  “Why hasn’t it woken?”

  “It hasn’t woken for a long, long time. It is kin to the old one that lies beneath Avebury, younger, but only just. This place was once almost as potent a source of the blue fire as Avebury, but for some reason the energy dried up quicker here once the people turned away from the spirit.”

  “And the Fabulous Beast went into hibernation?”

  “Hibernation? I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. It is detached from the world and everything in it.”

  Church dropped to his haunches to examine the creature’s flank. “It’s magnificent … beautiful-“

  “And dangerous. Make no mistake, the Fabulous Beasts are not pets. They are wild and untamed, a force of nature.”

  Church stood up, sighing. “Where did they come from? They don’t fit in with how we thought the world operated.”

  “They fit in with the way the world should be, and once was.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Church asked, looking down the steep slope of tunnel where it disappeared into the gloom. “I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to get the earth energy moving again. And to be honest, even if we could find a way, I still don’t see how it’s supposed to help us.”

  Tom set off walking, his voice floating back ethereally. “Perhaps it won’t help us. But healing the wounded land, perhaps, is a mission that exceeds opposition to the Fomorii. Your prime mission.”

  “If Balor returns, there won’t be a land left to heal,” Church said sourly, trying to keep up.

  The tunnel pitched downwards steeply until there were points when Church had to grab hold of the walls to stop himself slipping out of control. The air grew colder and dustier and at times he felt the blast of strong air currents, although he couldn’t begin to guess where they were coming from. As they descended they seemed to move into an oppressive doom-filled atmosphere; their sporadic
conversation dried up accordingly, so the only sound was the soft tramp of their feet.

  The air currents grew worryingly stronger until gusts surged up the tunnel, knocking them against the walls. It was almost as if they were coming to the edge of a cliff. Church had a sudden vision of the vast underground sea inJourney to the Centre of the Earth. And then the tunnel ended abruptly and the the source of the wind became clear.

  They were standing on a small ledge which ran around a yawning hole so big they couldn’t see the other side. It plunged away from their feet in a dizzying drop into darkness, but the rush of air and odd, disturbing echoes suggested it was very deep indeed. It may well have gone down forever. Church closed his eyes and threw himself backwards into the tunnel mouth as a rush of vertigo made his head spin.

  “Here we are,” Tom said. “The well of fire.”

  Church eventually found the strength to creep forward on his hands and knees to peer over the edge into the abyss. The wind rushed up, buffeting his face, tugging at his hair. His head reeled as he fought the sensation that he was being sucked over the lip.

  “There are spirit wells like this all over the country, all across the world.” Tom’s voice floated distantly behind him; Church felt like the darkness was swallowing him whole. “Few as mighty as this, however,” Tom continued. “And fewer still that are actually alight.”

  Church sat back, pressing himself firmly against the rock wall. “What am I doing here? It’s a dirty, big hole in the ground. This is hopeless.”

  “Hopeless?” Tom said. “Haven’t you learned anything yet?”

  “You’re great at tossing out cryptic advice. Why don’t you say something useful for a change-tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Sort it out yourself,” Tom snapped. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be learning.”