Veitch was surprised by his reaction. He had forgotten the peculiar, rich, uplifting qualities of the Far Lands, the potent scents - spices, fruit and perfumed candles - colours more vibrant than his home and the rich textures of the stone, metalwork and carvings demanding that he touch them. It felt as if he was in a dream; it felt like coming home.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Ruth asked him between nods to the well-wishers lining the way.
‘Do I need a reason?’
‘You? Usually.’
At the Palace of Glorious Light, drenched in the mid-morning sunlight, they were guided to chambers that had once been occupied by Niamh, the court’s former queen, where Mallory, Hunter and Caitlin now waited.
‘I didn’t believe it when the guards told me,’ Mallory exclaimed. He shook Church’s hand forcefully, and then the two groups hugged and greeted each other like long-lost friends.
Laura and Hunter adopted a blasé attitude, but were soon sequestered together deep in conversation, their eyes gleaming, oblivious to the high emotions that whirled around them.
After the reunion, Mallory said, ‘We couldn’t find the Extinction Shears. We failed. I failed.’
‘That’s because you were looking in the wrong place,’ Church said reassuringly. ‘The Market of Wishful Spirit is in the Grim Lands.’
‘Why on earth would it be in the Land of the Dead?’ Caitlin asked.
‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll start working on a plan to get to them immediately, ’ Mallory said.
‘Not going to be that easy, mate,’ Veitch interjected. ‘We come in and out of this place like it’s a tourist destination, but there are strict rules about getting to the Grim Lands. I’ve been there twice. The first time I brought the Void back and caused all this mess. And the second time I had to die to get there.’
Leaving the others to share stories, Mallory led Church along the sun-drenched corridors to Doctor Jay’s laboratory. As they neared, the constant low-pitched hum set their teeth on edge.
When Church saw Jerzy, unconscious, silver-coated eyes wide and staring, his heart went out to his friend. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘I’ve got Math . . . everybody . . . working on it. No one has any idea.’
‘It’s got to be linked to the Void’s return in some way.’
‘Yeah, but . . . Jerzy? What could he have to do with anything?’
‘The Puck took an interest in him. Even kidnapped him for a while. That could be it—’ He cursed under his breath. ‘I’m useless. All these important details, and I never see them at the time. Why didn’t I question why the Puck got involved with Jerzy?’
‘What would you have been able to do?’ Mallory led Church out of the chamber and closed the door to muffle the unsettling noise. ‘All these connections . . . half the time they could be random. No one sees their importance till after the fact.’
‘I hope he’s going to be all right.’ Church cast one last glance back at the door separating him from his friend; it had been too long since they’d spent time together.
‘Yeah, he’s one of the good ones,’ Mallory replied, ‘so this is going to sound harsh, but we’ve got too much else to worry about right now. Doctor Jay is doing what he can for Jerzy, and if there’s any significance to this change we’ll find out quickly.’
‘We saw the Enemy’s army all over the Far Lands,’ Church said.
Mallory nodded. ‘They’ll be here soon. We’ve already been softened up by the Riot-Beasts. The Enemy’s going to throw everything at us. There’s an assassin loose in the city, trying to pick us off one by one. We’ve got strategies in place to tackle it - no Brother or Sister of Dragons travels alone, trebling patrols - but sooner or later someone will make a mistake.’
‘Tonight we rest, and plan,’ Church replied. ‘Tomorrow we start fighting back.’
7
Too many suspicious glances from the others eventually drove Veitch out into the deserted corridors, where his incipient guilt over the last few violent months gradually subsided. For a while, he wandered, deep in thought about Ruth and his belief that if he had any chance of redemption, it was through her, until a faint echo told him he was not alone.
He waited, watchfully, and when no one materialised, he slipped around a corner, ready to draw his sword. Hesitant footsteps heralded the cautious approach of a woman of around twenty-five, her delicate face framed by blond ringlets in an old-fashioned style that Veitch had seen many times during his stays in Victorian London.
‘Oh,’ she said, startled that he was waiting for her.
‘Why are you following me?’ Veitch growled.
‘You are Ryan Veitch?’ she replied in a cockney accent. ‘That’s what the guards say. All the fellers and the girls are talking about it downstairs.’
‘What’s it to you?’
She smiled. ‘Let me tell you, ducky.’
Rough hands grabbed Veitch’s arms and threw him against the wall. Three men had come up behind him with the stealth of Brothers of Dragons, strong arms, strong faces, sharp eyes, but he could see the hatred in their eyes. He struggled to throw them off, but in a second the woman had a knife against his throat.
‘Name’s Cathy, lovey, and as God is my witness, I’m going to carve your flesh for what you did to me.’
‘I’ve never met you before.’
‘Which is why I’m still here. I’m one of the lucky ones. But back in my old time, you murdered three of my Brothers and Sisters. We never got the chance to be Five. And I’m not alone there.’
‘You’ve got a lot of blood on your hands, Ryan Veitch,’ a voice said at his ear. ‘Good, decent people, just trying to do their bit for Existence. I saw my fair share of twisted slaughter at Dunkirk, but nothing like what you did. You betrayed the Pendragon Spirit. You betrayed everything Existence stands for. You killed people who would have been our friends and lovers. And now you’re going to pay.’
Veitch opened his mouth to account for himself, but Cathy pricked the knife deeper into his flesh. ‘No lies,’ she hissed. ‘Just a quick cut and you won’t be hurting any more of us.’
Before she could thrust, there was a shift in the quality of the light and shadows appeared, source unknown. A background drone swelled, like the hum of a generator, a charge to the very air itself.
Ruth rounded the corner, eyes crackling with an unearthly power, hair snaking around her head as if it was alive. From her outstretched hands whirled a storm of blue light. Veitch had seen her like that once before, during the Battle of London when her Craft had consumed her and she had become a lethal weapon that could destroy friend and foe alike.
Cathy’s knife slipped from trembling fingers as a gale flung her and her three helpers across the flags. The knife whisked up and embedded itself to the hilt in the thin join between two wall-stones.
‘You’re protecting him?’ Cathy raged.
Ruth’s appearance slowly normalised. ‘He’s working with us now. No one forgets all the people he’s killed, but we need him.’
‘We don’t need him!’ Cathy shouted. ‘He’ll always be a danger. At the end, he’ll turn, you’ll see.’
Veitch winced when Ruth cast an unguarded glance his way.
‘See? He knows it himself!’ The three men helped Cathy to her feet, their expressions no less murderous. ‘We owe it to all the others to kill him before he destroys everything. Never forget, never forgive!’ Tears of anger streaming down Cathy’s face, she ran back along the corridor, with the others close behind.
‘Thanks,’ Veitch said. ‘I should have expected that.’
‘Probably best if you don’t go wandering off on your own from now on.’
Veitch tried to put out of his mind how much he had thrown away, the camaraderie, the sense of being on the side of right, respect, love, all for some immature desire for revenge that had become more undefined with each passing day. He felt pathetic. He hated himself.
Seeing some of this in his face, Ruth’s expression so
ftened with pity, and that made him feel even worse. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be tough, but people will come around.’
‘You know what? I don’t care. I’ve got a job to do - that’s the important thing. The sooner I can start using this blade to cut things down, the better.’
A window framed the distant shape of the Burning Man, hazy in the mid-morning sky, and for the briefest instant, Veitch thought it was looking deep into his very heart.
8
Fiddles and pipes and voices created an exuberant music that rippled out from the Palace of Glorious Light across the rooftops of the night-shrouded city and raised the spirits of everyone who heard it. The celebration centred on the great hall of feasting, though the thronging revellers spilled out into corridors and antechambers. Musicians from the Court of the Yearning Heart and the Seelie Court took it in turns to play. The former chose long, rich, dense reels that exuded eroticism and could ignite passion with a simple run of notes, while the latter selected uplifting melodies that exhorted the listener to love life and focus on higher purpose. Dancers whirled continually, collapsing in corners when exhausted for new couples to take their place.
The sprawling kitchens at the heart of the palace had been working all day to prepare the feast, in clouds of steam and ferocious heat from the ovens that left every worker stripped to their underclothes. Pies and roasts and delicately spiced dishes, stews and soups, fruits and cakes and sweetmeats were piled high on the tables around the edge of the hall. Goblets were never empty; a small army of servants moved steadfastly around with flagons of wine and ale.
The atmosphere was one of wild abandon, from the dancers to the staggering drunks to the couples who made love in the shadows, not caring who saw them. The festivities had been called to celebrate the reunion of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons as they prepared for the next and final stage of the campaign, but it was also a statement: that even in the sight of the Burning Man, life was a powerful driving force.
Shavi, mildly drunk and happy, watched the proceedings with one foot on a beer-washed table and a goblet clutched tightly to his chest. ‘This is the reason why we do what we do,’ he said.
Sipping his ale, Mallory watched Laura grab Hunter by the hand and drag him behind a pillar. ‘Free booze?’
Shavi laughed. ‘We lived in a world where strange and wonderful things happened on a daily basis, yet we barely raised our eyes from our work to see them. We were truly blessed to exist in the Fixed Lands. Everything that is writ bold here in the Far Lands was there, moving quietly on the edge of our vision, just waiting to be discovered.’
‘I never saw that much of it.’
‘Then you never looked. Every magical thing is invisible until you find the right eyes to see it, whether it be love, or joy, or friendship, or a small flying pixie.’
‘Do you ever get depressed?’
‘If you saw the world as I did, you would not. Yes, there is hardship. Yes, there is pain and suffering, and if you focus on each instance in detail then the only thing you will find is pointless misery. But the mysteries of cause and effect are far beyond our abilities to understand them. Because we love science so much we believe there is a process where a simple action has a straightforward reaction. But the system in which we operate is massively complex, and what may have started at the beginning of time caused a billion, billion connecting reactions that are only now bearing fruit. Pick any point along that chain and you would not see what came before or what the final result would be, only that instant, good or bad in and of itself.’
‘Oh, yeah, the Butterfly Effect. Flap, flap, big storm a world away.’
‘Indeed. We fool ourselves into believing we understand cause and effect, but we see nothing, we know nothing. That is why you cannot plan to influence the world, for good or bad, in the same way that the butterfly cannot plan to create the storm. No one can predict the repercussions in a complex system. In the end, all you can do is trust your heart and hope.’
‘Then why are you so upbeat? It could all be trending towards misery.’
‘Because if you examine your own life, you will see that the universe is kindly and that it does its best to help you.’
‘Laura’s right. You really are an old hippy.’ Mallory sipped his ale, thoughtfully. ‘So nobody knows anything, and we just trust our instincts?’
‘Our hearts.’
‘I wish I’d had somebody like you on our team to keep the morale up.’
‘Hal would have fulfilled that role if he had not become part of the Blue Fire.’
‘Be kind of good to get him back.’ Mallory stirred uneasily. ‘I still don’t understand why there’s only four of us. Every other team gets five, but us . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I keep expecting somebody new to walk through the door. I can’t shake the feeling that something’s missing.’
‘Perhaps it was simply meant to be that your team has only four members.’
‘Why? I don’t get it.’
‘That is my point. We cannot see the patterns. We can only trust that things will work out for the best.’
‘I really wish I could see the world like you do, Shavi. I just feel . . . sad.’
‘We all have our pain, Mallory, because in the vast, indecipherable pattern we are all insignificant, while at the same time we are each and every one hugely significant, for our actions, small and large, make up that very pattern. We are threads in the warp and the weft.’
In the centre of the room, Caitlin danced alone, lost to herself, the Morrigan’s love of sex and life evident in each seductive movement.
Loading his plate with roast meat, Veitch ignored the pointed stares of the other Brothers and Sisters of Dragons from across the ages. They milled around the hall as they tried to avoid being dragged into Decebalus’s ribald revelry as he stalked back and forth, swilling ale by the flagon while indulging in outrageous flirting to make Aula jealous.
For much of the evening, Church and Ruth had been involved in intense conversation, but they broke off to join Veitch as he made his way over to Shavi and Mallory.
‘You know how to throw a good party,’ Church said.
‘One of the perks when you get your own Great Court,’ Mallory replied.
‘I still can’t believe the Tuatha Dé Danaan let you take over.’ Ruth laughed.
‘They owed me big time.’
Church surveyed the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons with pride. ‘They seem like a great crew, from what I can tell. Brave, fierce - we’ll do well with them on our side.’
‘Would you expect the Pendragon Spirit to choose any other?’ Shavi said.
‘You think they’re formidable, you wait till you see the gods,’ Mallory said with a sly smile. ‘Norse, Greek, Chinese, the whole terrifying, insane collection.’
‘Where are they?’ Ruth asked.
‘We’ve got them in their own separate camps outside the city walls. If you think the Tuatha Dé Danaan are fractious when they get together, you really don’t want to see this lot mixing with time on their hands. They’d be at each other’s throats in a second.’
‘Imagine them side by side on the battlefield,’ Church said. ‘Whatever troops the Void can throw at us are going to be up against it.’
‘As long as our lot don’t kill each other first.’
The revelry was disrupted by the crash of the main door slamming open. In staggered Ronnie Kelly, a Brother of Dragons in a field uniform from the Great War, his expression devastated. He flailed for a moment before raising his hands in a silent plea. They were covered in blood.
‘Murder,’ he eventually stuttered. ‘There’s been a murder!’
The band came to a sudden halt. Church, Veitch and Mallory raced towards Ronnie before the others realised what he was saying. In one of the branching corridors off the main approach to the hall, a woman in a pink satin Georgian dress was sprawled, eyes wide open. A neat hole had been punched in the centre of her forehead.
‘Marie,’ Mall
ory mouthed. All he could think of was her accusation the previous day that he had attacked her. Haunted, he dropped to his knees to check her pulse, though it was clear she was dead.
Angry voices rose up from a small crowd of Brothers and Sisters of Dragons further down the corridor. A man in a Georgian morning suit pointed an accusing finger at Veitch. ‘He did it. He killed our Marie.’
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