Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  From the corner of his eye Veitch could see his crossbow where it had fallen. Slowly he crept his hand spider-like along the floor towards it; it was already loaded, so he could put a bolt through the wolf’s head with just one hand.

  He was halfway to it when the wolf noticed what he was doing. A low, bass rumble started somewhere deep in its throat then rolled upwards into a bloodchilling snarl. Its movement was so swift Veitch barely saw it. Those golden eyes were shining before him, and then suddenly he was encompassed in darkness and the foul stink of the beast’s breath. He felt its fangs sink into the flesh at the top of either cheekbone; fiery pain ran deep into his temple. It had his entire head in its mouth; it had to exert only slightly more pressure and his skull would shatter.

  It held him like that for a few seconds while every desperate thought he had ever had rattled through his mind, and then, mysteriously, it released its grip. Before he could begin to fathom what was happening, it had released the crushing pressure on his chest and was padding away and out of the door.

  All the other wolves had gone too, but the room looked as if it had been torn apart by a tornado. Shattered furniture lay all around, covered with shards of glass and torn material. Tom was slumped in a daze in one corner, but as he struggled to sit up it became apparent he wasn’t badly hurt.

  McKendrick, however, lay on his back half in, half out of the bedroom. His face was covered in blood and his gun was nowhere to be seen. Veitch scrambled over to him and raised his head so he could dab at the wounds with a remnant of curtain. After the shock of his appearance, the cuts seemed mainly superficial and it wasn’t long before his eyes flickered open. Veitch began to speak, but the panic that flared in McKendrick’s face silenced him instantly.

  “They’ve taken Anna,” he croaked.

  The winds had moved off across the mountains with the first light of dawn as they picked their way across the chill, dew-laden hillsides in search of Anna. Veitch took pole position with Tom at the rear; between them was McKendrick, who looked like a spectre, his skin grey, his eyes filled with a painful desolation; it was the face of a man who had seen his entire world destroyed in an instant.

  They hadn’t been able to bring themselves to discuss Anna or what was likely to have happened to her after the wolves took her. Instead they had attempted to understand why the pack had acted so unnaturally, and there were no easy answers there either. And so, silently and unanimously, they had agreed to pursue the creatures to bring back Anna, or what was left of her.

  Veitch felt numb. His emotions about Anna and Ruth had been so confused, although even his usually superficial self-analysis admitted that Anna’s minor problems were a psychological substitute for Ruth’s more intractable ones; solving the former had been his unrecognised key to achieving his heart’s desire. And he had been thwarted again.

  The track was easy to pick up, even for the untrained eye: flattened grass and too many splatters of blood, which they tried to convince themselves belonged to the wolf McKendrick had wounded. They made quick progress downhill, but there was no sign of the wolves ahead of them. The pack had moved away from the croft with alarming speed.

  They soon found themselves on the perimeter of the new-grown forest, which already seemed to have attained its own ecosystem: thick forest floor vegetation, woodland flowers and a wide array of birds. Mist had settled in the depths of the valley and among the trees like candyfloss. The more they penetrated the shade beneath the verdant canopy, the thicker it became, blanketing all sound, obscuring what lay on every side.

  After they had moved through it a little way, Tom pulled Veitch on one side. “This is insanity. If the pack attacks here we don’t stand a chance. They could be circling five feet away from us now and we wouldn’t know.”

  Veitch agreed, but he couldn’t turn back. “If we retreat now we’ll lose the trail.”

  “You can’t help saving damsels in distress, can you?” Tom said sourly. “It’s a pathological obsession.”

  “I might listen to what you’re saying if you weren’t so fucked up yourself.” Veitch marched back into the lead with an irritation that came from knowing Tom was right. He had to save Anna because that was what heroes did. And if he couldn’t be a hero, he had to be the person he always had been, and who could live with that?

  They’d progressed about half a mile into the thickest part of the forest when they first heard movement, all around. McKendrick’s finger jumped to the trigger and Veitch had to rest his hand on the barrel to calm the crofter; he looked like he was about to have a breakdown.

  “Take it easy, mate,” he whispered in a strong, calm voice. “You’ll end up blowing one of us away.”

  McKendrick’s bottom lip was trembling. He plunged his teeth into it and a trickle of blood ran down on to his chin.

  The mist continued to distort the forest sounds; the birdsong seemed to come and go, and when they heard the vegetation crushed beneath loping paws it was impossible to pinpoint the location. But the pack was undoubtedly nearby, possibly surrounding them, as Tom had feared. Twigs cracked from somewhere behind them, grass or a bush swished just ahead. Yet despite the muffled nature of the sounds, something about them didn’t sound right to Witch’s heightened awareness; the weight burden was wrong, the movements not as sleekly lupine as he would have expected.

  “They’re moving closer,” he hissed.

  “How can you tell?” McKendrick’s gun was wavering so much Veitch thought there was more danger there.

  “I can hear things clearly.” These days, he mentally added. He truly did feel a different person to the woolly-minded, sluggish old Ryan Veitch. The Pendragon Spirit had given him the chance to rise above himself.

  Tom moved in close so only Veitch could hear him. “So what’s the big strategy now, warrior-boy?”

  A large figure shimmered in and out of the tendrils. “There!” McKendrick cried and raised his gun.

  Another shape erupted out of the mist and knocked McKendrick flying; the gun disappeared into the undergrowth. Veitch lashed out instinctively and caught the attacker a glancing blow. It howled sharply before it was gone.

  He dropped low, whirling around. “That wasn’t a wolfl”

  As if in response to his words, another figure dropped out of the air in front of him, obviously from a tree branch above. It was a man, but oddly different to any man Veitch had seen before. His long, matted hair was a deep black and his skin swarthy, with an excess of body hair. His bone structure was clearly defined above his sharp jaw, forming handsome features which suggested both pride and an incisive intelligence. He was naked, his body lithely muscled, filled with power. But it was his hands and feet that caught Veitch’s attention; they were over-sized, the fingers long and gnarled, with sharp, jagged nails that more resembled talons. He was sweating profusely from his exertions and there was a sheen of forest dirt across his skin. Gradually Veitch’s attention was drawn to his thick, dark eyebrows which menacingly overhung glowing golden eyes; Veitch knew instantly he had seen those eyes before.

  Veitch went to lift his crossbow in warning, but the man raised his arm quickly with a strange hand gesture that had the little finger and index finger extended while the others were folded back; oddly, it was filled with a threat Veitch didn’t feel comfortable opposing, and he let the crossbow drop.

  “Who is this?” McKendrick said in a broken, uncomprehending voice. Tom helped him to his feet.

  “The Lupinari have returned to the deep forests,” the man said in a deep, almost growling voice which rang with an unplaceable accent.

  Recognition suddenly dawned on Tom’s face and he took a step towards the strange, beast-like man to communicate, but he was halted in his tracks by the same threatening hand gesture.

  Tom held his open hands up, palms outwards; a primal gesture. “I never encountered your people in the Far Lands.”

  The man eyed him coldly. “Then you never ventured into the forests of the night.”

  “No, I nev
er did.”

  The man let his hand drop slightly and used it to gesture around. “The Far Lands, for all their twilight appeal, were uncommon grounds to us. These are our homelands. This is our world, where we have hunted since time began.”

  Other figures began to appear out of the mists, both men and women, all naked, dark-haired and swarthy-skinned; they moved low and sinuously, like animals; occasionally their eyes gleamed like cats’.

  “In the days of our ancestors, we lived side-by-side with humankind. The wild men of the woods, you called us, and in the dark wintertime you even came to look upon us fondly, as you yet feared us. For sometimes we would bring gifts to your door, and keep away the privations of the long, dark nights. For it is in our nature to help fellow creatures of intellect.” There was a hint of anger in this last sentence. “Your people knew us, and our powers, and never hunted us, for they knew we never ate human flesh. For if we did, the taste of it would consume us and we would desire it ever more and there would be nothing but war between our races.”

  The other members of the pack circled round, filtering in and out of the mists. Witch kept a wary eye on them; the mention of human flesh had unnerved him.

  “And if one of our people turned rogue, and ate mortal meat, we would hunt him down and destroy him ourselves,” the leader continued. There was a long pause while he looked into each of their faces, and then he said, “But this night gone you did attack us.”

  Veitch suddenly noticed the splatter of dried blood across his left ribcage. “You attacked his sheep.”

  The leader fixed his cold eyes on Veitch. “But we never ate human flesh.”

  Tom took a cautious step forward to attract the leader’s attention away from Witch’s lack of diplomacy. “We had no idea the Lupinari had returned to these lands,” he said in as conciliatory a tone as he could muster. “We would never wish to offend you. We would hope to live in peace, as we always did in times past.”

  Golden eyes blinked slowly, implacably. “Nevertheless, a blow has been struck. There must be some retribution before we agree a pact.” His face contained no emotions they could understand, and they all feared the worst.

  McKendrick had seemed in a daze to this point, but in that moment he appeared to grasp what was happening. “Not Anna,” he whimpered.

  “His sheep, given freely,” Tom suggested hastily.

  The leader shook his head slowly. “We had no knowledge they were his beasts or we would not have taken them. We can easily find other prey. For that is what we do.”

  “Not Anna,” McKendrick said again.

  “You better not have killed her,” Veitch snapped.

  The leader’s eyes flashed towards him, filled with such bestial rage Veitch instinctively went to protect his throat. “I held your head in my jaws,” the leader growled. “You are nothing to me.”

  “You don’t eat human flesh,” Tom noted. “You said.”

  As if on cue, another figure advanced from the mists; it was Anna. At first she moved with the sluggish pace of someone who had been hypnotised, but when she neared them, recognition dawned in her eyes and she ran to her father. They held each other, crying silently.

  “What do you require?” Tom asked quietly.

  The leader fixed his unflinching stare on the Rhymer. “For one night, every year, she will leave her father to be with us.”

  McKendrick’s eyes grew wider. “What will happen to her?”

  “She will learn to hunt with the Lupinari.”

  “To hunt?” McKendrick brought the back of his hand to his mouth. “My wee girl?”

  Veitch saw something else. “She isn’t going to stay around here forever.”

  The leader’s eyes narrowed. “If the pact is broken the Lupinari will seek retribution through the hunt.”

  “It is agreed,” Tom said.

  “No!” McKendrick was blazing with righteous anger now. “I won’t leave my daughter with these things!”

  Tom placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “There isn’t another way. If you want to save her life, and yours, then you’ll do this.” He turned back to the leader and repeated, “It is agreed.”

  The leader nodded slowly. “Then perhaps in times to come our peoples can live closely and wisely once more.”

  There was a note of conciliation in his voice. Veitch herded McKendrick away before he could put up any opposition, relieved that it hadn’t come down to a fight, knowing they wouldn’t have stood a chance if it had.

  After a few paces he glanced back, just to be sure they were not being followed. But all he saw were vague impressions as the Lupinari melted back into the mist, and not a single footfall was heard to mark their passing.

  Back at the croft McKendrick was in a state of shock, but Anna seemed to have accepted her tribulation with equanimity. When she saw Veitch watching her intently, she left her father sitting on the floor next to the hearth and pulled him to one side.

  “No grim faces now,” she cautioned with a gentle finger on his cheek. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “You don’t know what they’ll be expecting of you on your nights with them.”

  “I’ll deal with it when it happens.”

  “And it’s going to be hard for you ever to get away from here now.”

  “What’s to stop me coming back just for the night?” But they both knew it wasn’t going to happen. “I just wanted to say, thanks for helping us.” She seemed to read every troubled thought passing through his head. Then she took his face in her hands, stood on tiptoes and gave him a long, deep kiss. Afterwards she said, “It’s a shame you have to go-“

  “I have to.”

  “I know. But it’s a shame.” And then she smiled once and turned to her father. Veitch watched her for a while, kneeling next to McKendrick, one hand round his shoulder, whispering comforting words that only the two of them could hear. But then Tom caught his eye and nodded towards the door.

  They made their goodbyes as best they could, and then when they were out walking over the sun-drenched hillsides, Veitch asked, “Is this always how it is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you’re trying to do the right thing in the world. When you’ve got all these responsibilities. Like a big fucking rock on your shoulder.”

  Oddly, Tom appeared pleasantly surprised by the comment. He clapped Veitch warmly on the shoulder. “That’s how it is. You get your reward later.”

  “How much later?”

  Tom’s tight smile seemed filled with meaning, but Veitch couldn’t understand it at all. “Much, much later,” the Rhymer said before turning his attention to the path ahead.

  They walked nonstop for the next day across the exhausting mountainous landscape and made camp in a gorge as night fell. They hadn’t seen or heard anyone since they had left the croft; in the desolation, humanity could have been stripped from the face of the planet and they would never have known.

  Since he had left Anna, Veitch hadn’t been able to settle. He had found his thoughts turning to the others he had spent so long with over the past months. Why did they act the way they did? Why did they say one thing while believing another? His own thoughts had always moved swiftly and directly into words, and in the past he had judged others by the same standard, although he had known subconsciously that was rarely the case. And finally his attention had turned to Tom; he had spent the day secretly watching the way he moved, the subtleties of his facial expressions, his strange choice of words, and by the evening he knew that he didn’t know the man at all.

  As they sat around the fire finishing up the last of the provisions McKendrick had given them, the questions were plaguing Veitch so much he couldn’t keep them in any longer. “You said yesterday your eyes were better than mine.” Tom nodded. “How much else has changed?”

  The Rhymer prodded the fire, sending the sparks soaring. “A great deal.”

  “Like what?”

  “I can hear better. Smell things more acutely. Can’t r
eally taste very much any more, though.”

  Veitch gnawed on a crust while he thought. “If a doc cut you open,” he began, “what would he find inside?”

  Tom stared into the fire, said nothing.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it-“

  “I don’t think I’m quite human any more.”

  “Don’t think?” Veitch watched Tom’s face in the firelight, wondering why it was always so hard to tell what he was thinking or feeling.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I should be here with people, or back in Otherworld with the rest of the strange things. I don’t know if I can trust my feelings, if I really have any feelings, or if I just pretend to myself I have feelings. I don’t know if I cut myself open if I’ll find straw inside, or diamonds, or fishes, or if all the component parts are there, just in the wrong order.” He continued to watch the flames.

  Veitch had a sudden, sweeping awareness of Tom’s tragedy. He had lost everything; not just his family and friends, who were separated from him by centuries, but his kinship with humanity, his sense of who or what he was. He was more alone than anyone ever could be. Yet he still wished and hoped and felt and yearned; and he still tried to do his best for everyone, despite his own suffering.

  “I think you’re just a bloke, like me and the others,” Veitch said.

  Tom looked at him curiously.

  “And I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  Tom returned his attention to the fire. “Thank you for that.”

  “It must be hard to go back to that bitch who wrecked your life.”

  Tom remained silent, but Witch noticed the faint tremor of a nerve near his mouth.

  “You know when I said I couldn’t understand why everybody thought you were a hero. I’m sorry about that.”