Destroyer of Worlds

by Mark Chadbourn

  Veitch gave Shavi’s shoulders a brief, firm shake. Deep inside he felt something swell, growing stronger, bright with the energy of the Pendragon Spirit; he had never felt its like before, but he knew it was something he had wanted all his life. ‘Listen to me - we’re going to be the heroes they want us to be. We can’t let them down. We don’t have the luxury to be soft.’ He planted his thumb and forefinger in an L on his forehead. ‘To be losers. We’ve got to be hard, whatever the cost. And we’ve got to win, not for us, but for them, because that’s the job we’ve been given. All right?’

  Shavi smiled, but in his eyes Veitch caught a hint of pity at Veitch’s naïvety. That only made Veitch more determined, and for the first time he had a clear vision of his own role. Despair was starting to infect all of them, unsurprising given the scale of the threat they faced. It was down to him to stop that despair spreading, to turn them around and show them the right direction. This was where he could finally transcend the person he had been all his life. The swelling emotions grew so strongly, he thought he might burst.

  A hubbub rose up from the end of the street and they realised word was spreading rapidly about the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons in the city. ‘They want us to save them, but they’re going to end up getting us killed. That’s . . . what? . . . irony, right?’ he said with a note of pride at his use of the term. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here before we’re hanging from a lamp post.’

  With the shouts and cries drawing closer, they hurried down a deserted alley until they came to a secluded inn few would have known was there. The sign above the entrance to the Wolf’s Surprise showed a man’s face with unmistakable lupine qualities. Out of place amongst the sleek metallic lines, it was a squat building with a corbelled flint wall and small bottle-glass windows that caught flickers of lamplight within, but reflected only darkness. Veitch and Shavi ducked into an atmosphere of ale and smoke, sweat and damp, but the coolness of the interior was inviting.

  They kept their heads down and averted their eyes until they found an obscure spot at the end of a curving bar.

  After a pause to take in the new arrivals, the clientele returned to their drinks, as sullen and dispirited as the crowds filling the streets. A few surveyed Veitch and Shavi as potential opportunities, but the glint in Veitch’s eye and the hand on his sword deterred any advance.

  Veitch looked around at the array of bizarre figures. ‘Used to drink in a boozer in Camberwell just like this,’ he muttered. ‘Still, better than being out there with all those bombs going off. What do you want?’

  ‘Fruit juice.’

  ‘There’s an old joke there somewhere.’ Veitch grinned. ‘God, I’ve missed winding you up.’

  ‘You have missed trying.’

  As Veitch ordered the drinks, the door crashed open and a voice boomed, ‘There! I told you. Brothers of Dragons!’

  ‘Not a-bleedin’-gain.’ Veitch sighed.

  Striding next to the bar was a man wearing furs despite the heat, with a wide-brimmed hat that had seen better days and a string of lizards round his neck. A blunderbuss hung from his belt. Behind him strode a painfully thin, extremely tall man in a dark suit, a huge stovepipe hat threatening to topple from his head, with darting eyes that had a silvery glint.

  The hunter clapped a hand on Shavi’s shoulder. ‘I knew it! Even in the middle of a crowd I can recognise a Brother of Dragons. What do you say, Shadow John?’

  Leaning down to examine Shavi and Veitch, the man in the stovepipe hat exclaimed, ‘Bless my soul, you’re right, Bearskin.’ He pumped their hands furiously. ‘How very wonderful to meet you both. We had the honour of making the acquaintance of one of your colleagues, young Hal of Oxford. A fine, upstanding fellow in the long tradition of your line. Mallory and Caitlin, too. The legend lives on.’

  ‘All right, all right, nice to meet you and all that. Now clear off. We’re actually trying to be incognito,’ Veitch said.

  ‘Very wise,’ Bearskin noted, ignoring Veitch’s urgings. ‘This is not a time to be a Brother of Dragons. The Enemy must be hunting and harrying you.’

  ‘We are hunting and harrying the Enemy,’ Shavi said.

  The clap of Bearskin’s arm across Shavi’s shoulders almost pitched him into the bar. ‘That’s the spirit, good Brother!’

  Shadow John grew lachrymose. ‘This is not a good time to be any living thing. How I regret fleeing the Court of the Soaring Spirit to seek sanctuary in a safer part of the Far Lands.’

  ‘There is no safety anywhere,’ Bearskin agreed.

  ‘How I miss the Hunter’s Moon.’ Deep in maudlin recollection, Shadow John rested his hands on his silver-topped cane, rocking gently from side to side.

  ‘Best inn in all of the Far Lands.’

  ‘I miss that place like the Golden Ones miss their long-lost homeland,’ Shadow John cried.

  Veitch saw Shavi scrutinising the new arrivals closely and recognised the light of an idea appear in his face. ‘You are a hunter?’ Shavi said to Bearskin.

  Bearskin tapped the edge of his right eye. ‘Never miss a thing. I track through the thickest parts of the Forest of the Night, or across the desert out there. I can see a blade of grass move on a hillside on the distant horizon.’

  ‘Then you could perhaps help us locate someone, in the heaving mass of this city? A woman?’

  ‘A Fragile Creature?’ Bearskin laughed heartily. ‘Fragile Creatures are the easiest to locate. Why, I have tracked them across . . .’ His words dried up when he caught Shadow John’s anxious expression. ‘Well, enough to say that I could sniff out a Fragile Creature anywhere in this forsaken place.’

  As the barman laid a tankard of ale on the bar, Veitch eyed it longingly and sighed. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  8

  Along the western wall of the city - though directions meant little in the Far Lands where west could become north in the blink of an eye - lay a walled-off garden containing rows of monuments: statues commemorating some great moment from the long history of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, pyramids and spires of less-obvious meaning, sculptures that contained some unobtrusive element that was alien to the human sense of proportion and which caused an involuntary increase in anxiety and flutter of the heartbeat, gargoyles, beasts, spheres that glowed with an inner light though made of stone, and other, more abstract designs. Some areas of the garden would have been a peaceful oasis in the crowded city, with works of great beauty dappled by the sun through a canvas of willow or yew. Tropical plants with long, spiky leaves grew here and there, some sporting strong, sweetly perfumed pink flowers, and stone benches were placed intermittently in the cool shade along the gravelled paths.

  Laura scrambled over the spike-topped wall only to discover that she was not the first to gain access. Several men, women and children had managed to haul themselves in, hoping to find a cool refuge from the seething madness of the city. They had all died where they sat, huddled in blankets against the chill of the night, or fiercely protecting a morsel of food with a knife. Under the shade of one tree, a mother and two children lay as if asleep, their faces peaceful, no marks on their bodies.

  Laura was not deterred by this macabre sight. She gave the bodies a cursory glance as she crunched along the path, her well-honed ability not to accept anything with which she did not agree coming into play; her ego defined her world-view specifically, a pleasant place that was always Laura-centric. She didn’t even think of Hunter when she saw the images of death all around; she couldn’t, for that left her mind recoiling and placed her at risk from the rising tide of guilt and self-loathing.

  The sun was high overhead when she came to a quiet grove at the heart of the garden where she had been summoned. The trees were densely packed and it was impossible to see into their dark heart, but she knew instinctively that a presence waited there. Her heart beat faster as she approached, and a deep dread enveloped her so that she had to fight not to flee back to the comfort of people in the crowded streets.

  Ten feet from the gro
ve, she realised she could barely hear the once-deafening sounds of the city that droned constantly in the background from morning to night. It was as if an invisible cloak had been thrown over that part of the garden. The silence was so intense in her mind that it had a texture, soft and gluey, almost liquid. It was unpleasant and unnerving, and felt, in its own unnatural way, as if it was waiting to be filled by something terrible.

  ‘All right,’ she said, forcing the bravado into her voice as she had so many times, ‘I’m here.’

  There was no response. She could feel the pulse of her blood, so strong she was sure she could hear her own heartbeat growing steadily faster. Her stomach flipped queasily, the instinctive response to a hidden gaze moving slowly across her. The presence was so powerful it felt even larger than the grove hiding it, the electrical cloud of its inhuman intellect enveloping her, holding her fast. She had a mental flash of teeth, of talons, of being consumed, and she couldn’t prevent a shudder.

  For a long moment, she waited, too afraid to run away for fear it would pursue her, too scared to take a step closer in case it dragged her into the grove to a fate that she feared would be worse than anything she could imagine. And then, with such unbearable slowness that she felt she would faint with the dread of anticipation, a hand extended from the trees. At first she thought it was the paw of a big cat, sleek with black spots on white and orange fur, but within a flicker of her eye it changed to a desiccated, grey-skinned human hand clutching a rectangular hand mirror edged in silver with horns on each corner.

  For some reason she couldn’t explain, the mirror increased Laura’s feelings of dread, pulling in her gaze until she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. The mirror glass didn’t appear to be glass at all, but rather some kind of liquid with the silvery quality of mercury turning slowly to black as she watched; she was convinced she could plunge her hand into its depths. After a second, the mirror began to smoke.

  ‘Sister of Dragons.’ The voice rang clearly in the zone of silence, but it sounded unused to human words, each syllable ending with a hint of an animalistic growl.

  Laura forced herself not to faint; hidden within the voice were hints of blood and torn, decomposing flesh, of graveyards and inhuman savagery. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked haltingly.

  ‘The time has come for another to die,’ the voice growled.

  After the presence in the grove had issued its order, Laura muttered a feeble response, but her thoughts screamed in the echoing halls of her head. Before she knew it she was running back through the garden in blind terror, throwing herself at the wall, kicking and scrambling over and losing herself in the sweaty throng, desperate for human contact, devastated by what she had given up, appalled by what she would do next.

  9

  Whistling a jaunty tune, the Libertarian wiped the blood from his fingers on the clothes of the young man who had offered him a hand of friendship and the promise of shelter, and then slowly climbed the steps in the tallest tower of the Court of Endless Horizons.

  Through his lidless eyes, the world always looked blood-red. He wore sunglasses as an affectation, one of the many he had adopted for the theatrical style he had chosen to present to the world, but they had increasingly become a necessity to prevent the unpleasant psychological side effects engendered by the constantly swimming colour. At times it was almost hallucinogenic, plundering half-memories from the never-touched depths of his mind, twisting them into what-might-have-beens, conjuring distorted faces of old friends, long-slaughtered, old emotions, long-crushed. He could not be the person he was if he was reminded of the person he had been. That was why he had created such a ludicrous public persona, pieced together from silent movies, vaudeville and comic books. He had never been theatrical in his old life, and now he was somebody else, somebody so completely different that he could believe in it implicitly.

  But still the fragmentary locked-off recollections haunted him.

  When they became too intense, he killed, for that was the ultimate denial of his past-life; enemies, random strangers, even those who dwelled in the daily sphere of his existence; he couldn’t really call them friends for there was no room for warm emotions in his sleek, secure, granite world.

  And he loved who he was with a manic desperation. There were no circumstances in which he would choose to go back. In the restrictions of his life, he was free, as were all who believed in what he believed. There was not the tyranny of choice, the sickening insecurity of hope, all the striving and failing, the never-being-content. The world under the Void was the best possible world under the circumstances of existence. Everyone had the peace to live out their brief lives as best they could, slotting into a familiar mundane rhythm that asked nothing of them; and so they too were free. And when death finally came, it made them freer still. He couldn’t understand how the person he once was had never recognised the stark, comforting simplicity of that life.

  Throwing open the door at the top of the tower, he stepped out into the baking midday heat. A small balcony ran around the tower providing him with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista of the entire city. The noise and the stink rose up from below in a sickening wave, but he found it rather comforting. Distress was part of the Void’s way of letting people know they were alive. How could they possibly appreciate the tiny jewels they were allowed to discover if they were not surrounded by a field of ordure?

  Yet for all the reassuring things he told himself, he felt increasingly uneasy, and he hated his old self for ruining the clean lines of his existence. As the time neared the point of transformation when he - and the Void - would finally be secure for ever, there were too many potential vagaries, shifting nodes of possibilities and blank spots in his memory. Events were reaching a point of flux. It was a desperate time, and as he always told himself, desperate times bred desperate men.

  He’d waited long enough, a touch on the rudder here, another there, subtle manipulations and nuance to guide his sheep to the place he needed them to be. Now it was time for grandiose actions, hardness, brutality and blood. He could not risk any further deviation from the true line. It was time to be bold.

  Gripping the rail, he peered into the dizzying drop, hawked up a glob of phlegm and spat before looking out across the gleaming city. His heart beat harder with anticipation.

  And then it came, at first feeling like a brief shadow across the eye, growing more intense by the second. The high sun, brilliant white, dimmed as though a cloud was passing before it. The temperature dropped a degree, and a wind rushed across the rooftops.

  Down below, the din reduced a level, and as the city darkened, it faded to an eerie silence, stark and unsettling. How long had it been since this vile place was quiet? he wondered. In every street, heads turned up to examine the dimming sun. People hung from windows, craning their necks to search for clouds or flocks of birds. There were none.

  Darker and darker still, until finally a deep, abiding gloom settled across the entire city. No sun was visible, no moon or stars. Fearful cries rose up as the inhabitants tried to make sense of the night coming down at noon. Frantically, torches and lamps were lit, but the quality of the dark was strange and intense, and their illumination only reached a fraction of its usual distance.

  Then the shadows moved, and all across the great city, people began to die. Screams rose up. Panic swept through the streets as vast crowds stampeded for safety, crushing underfoot all who fell, desperately forcing their way into buildings to barricade the doors, killing anyone who impeded them.

  The Libertarian smiled and nodded.

  There was terror and there was blood and there was a night that would never end.

  Chapter Six

  NIGHT COMES DOWN

  1

  In the alleys and winding streets of the Court of Endless Horizons, the dark was impenetrable. Ruth and Tom were en route from a false lead of a distressed Fragile Creature hiding in the grand marble interior of the Hall of Records when the gloom descended on the city. As
the temperature plunged and the sun disappeared from view, Tom dragged Ruth into one of the deserted side alleys that, from the vile stench, had clearly been used as a toilet. His quick thinking saved them both from the frenzied crush that thundered down the street. People crashed through windows or had the life squeezed from them against the walls or underfoot.

  Ruth covered her ears to block out the agonised screams and dying calls of the victims, which somehow stood out from the panicked roar of the crowd.

  Although Tom stood next to her, she couldn’t see him until she brought up her spear - the Blue Fire limning the head was just enough to illuminate the Rhymer’s worried features.

  ‘What have they done?’ she said.

  ‘The Enemy decided killing the Caretaker and blowing up huge chunks of the city wasn’t enough. They’ve made it their place now.’