“Clara is a dentist,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” said Gerald.
“She fixes teeth.”
“I understand what a dentist is,” he growled. “I just don’t understand why you’re married to her.” He turned to Clara. “That is not meant to offend you, Hugo’s wife.”
Finn had seen some shocking things in the past year. Gerald’s attitude was right up there with the worst of them.
Clara opened her mouth again to make it clear just how offended she was, but again Gerald spoke first. “Hold on a moment, that means that the boy here is a …” he looked at Finn in withering disgust, “… a half-civilian too.”
A jolt of anger shot through Finn. The energy crackled in him. He felt like he might explode. Wondered briefly if he would. The lights flickered, but so fleetingly only Finn noticed it.
Calm, calm, calm, he told himself.
Clara took a step right up to Gerald. “You want to know what my Legend Hunter lineage is?” she said, indignant. “You are looking at it. I am the mother of that remarkable young man. How far back does my family go? We’ve survived famines and wars and ice ages and everything else that all families needed to get through to make it this far. Oh, and I’ve been to the Infested Side too. Twice as it happens. I was at a little thing called the Battle at the Beginning of the World, but you’re so freshly thawed out you won’t even know what that is.”
Finn felt his humour lift, his anger drop. A good thing too. There was a crackle in the air around him that he didn’t like at all. He wasn’t sure, but thought he could hear the distant sound of a car alarm from outside.
Gerald prepared to speak again.
“What else?” Clara said. “Oh yeah, my scars. I have them, trust me. They may not be on my skin, but they are fresh and raw and came from meeting things far scarier than you. And finally, for a man who’s been dried out for so long, you have a very heavy bead of sweat running down your brow.”
They eyeballed each other. Finn noticed that a bead of sweat was indeed trickling down Gerald’s ridged forehead, running round a mole, through the crevices of his brow, towards eyebrows that stuck out like waves.
“Has anyone else here been to the Infested Side?” he asked eventually.
Cautiously, Estravon put his hand up.
Finn elbowed Emmie.
She blinked at him. Then she raised her hand too.
“So, I sleep for a few years and when I come back the Infested Side is a holiday destination,” Gerald sighed. “I think I preferred being desiccated.”
Gerald turned slowly, taking in every one of these people who so clearly disappointed him. “So, you are expecting half-civilians to do the job of proper Legend Hunters. You’ve run out of Legend Hunters anyway. The Infested Side is apparently somewhere children and men in shiny trousers can just wander in and out. Now one of the Trapped is here. Am I missing any other disasters?”
“Nothing we haven’t been able to cope with,” said Hugo angrily.
Again, Gerald ignored him, faced the Council instead. “And you have brought me back because many years ago I warned the Council they existed.”
“You did,” said Aurora.
“But I was told it was superstition and nonsense.”
“You were,” admitted Cedric.
“Well, you are lucky I refused to listen to anyone else,” said Gerald. “So, what’s he doing, your Trapped visitor?”
“He’s appeared three times over the past two days,” said Estravon. “Each time he has evaporated a Half-Hunter. Disappeared with them into thin air. Or maybe killed them.”
Finn saw Emmie stir in silent protest. He thought he should speak up, but didn’t get a chance.
“He is trapping them,” said Gerald as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Explain,” said Cedric.
“He is not killing them, he is trapping them,” said Gerald in a louder voice, as if talking to an idiot. “Bringing them with him into the space between worlds.”
“You’re here two minutes and you think you have it all figured out,” said Hugo, and Finn could see this was a challenge to Gerald, as if Hugo’s territory had been encroached on, his expertise suddenly bettered.
“I had it figured out decades ago,” he snarled. “It’s only now anyone’s bothered to listen to me.”
“What do you know?” asked Aurora.
“That there were many old stories about the Trapped,” continued Gerald, “and some tell of how they can be far more than just wisps floating in limbo. Fuelled by torment, they can become strong, powerful. They can return to take others with them.”
“It’s more than that,” blurted Finn, talking almost before he could stop himself.
Gerald gave him a laser-beam stare that suggested the interruption had better be worthwhile. Finn felt like every eye in the room was giving him that same look now.
“Go on, Finn,” Hugo said, seeing he was hesitant.
“He’s controlling them too. I think.”
“You think?” asked Gerald, sceptical.
“Give him a chance,” said Clara.
“Mr Glad almost trapped me. That’s what it felt like anyway. I’m trying to get that feeling back. It’s all a bit fuzzy. I could hear other voices there. See … things. I can’t remember it all properly. But, when he was doing it, he was in my head. I know that. It was like he was able to control me. I was fighting him, but it became easier to give in to it, to let it happen. I almost did.”
Finn stopped, realising that everyone was looking at him, mouths agape.
They continued to watch him expectantly.
“Um, yeah, that’s it,” he said.
Gerald was nodding, though. “He’s building an army,” he said. “An army of the Trapped.”
“But why? What does he want?” said Cedric.
“We have little time left to figure that out,” said Aurora.
“He’s coming back quicker each time,” Estravon informed Gerald. “And he has left marks in the air. A countdown. Three marks, then two, then one.”
“That news is about as welcome as the tie you’re wearing,” said Gerald. “Who wears a tie to a battle?”
“Incredible,” sighed Clara.
“No,” said Hugo, resigned. “This is what I grew up with.”
“How long until the next visit?” Gerald asked Estravon, without looking at his grandson.
“Just over eight hours now,” Estravon answered. “And we expect he’ll be able to return a short few hours after that again, about midnight.”
“Well, his next visit must be his last,” said Gerald.
“We really didn’t need your help,” Hugo said to Gerald, and Finn thought his father was acting pretty much like he usually did when he was being pushed into something he didn’t want to do.
“You will if this Mr Glad is coming back,” said Gerald. “Especially if he can bring other Trapped.”
“If Mr Glad’s coming back,” said Emmie, as if waking from her trance, “will he bring my dad back?”
“Is your father Trapped?” asked Gerald. Emmie nodded. “Then yes, he’ll be back.”
Hope crossed Emmie’s face.
“Although he will not be your father in any meaningful sense. If this young boy is right, when you meet him, he will likely try and trap you,” Gerald said.
Finn’s mouth hung open.
“Or kill you,” added Gerald, nonchalant.
“Unbelievable,” said Clara.
“Really all too believable, I’m afraid,” said Hugo.
Gerald had already started to walk from the dance floor towards the exit. He paused, turned to all those watching him somewhat stunned. His family. Emmie. The Twelve and their assistants. Estravon. “Well, come on then,” he said, exasperated. “You brought me back so I could sort this mess out and I want to do it before I die for real this time.”
Broonie awoke in a great hall he recognised, with a seismic headache that was also all too familiar. Tied
upright to a pillar, he tried to force open eyes still swollen shut from the blow that had knocked him out in the first place. He could hear the grumbled conversation of Trom and Cryf, but also a chant somewhere else in the room. Incantations and pleadings in a language he recognised as containing all the bitterness and bile of Troll.
Broonie knew this hall as the place where fires had once blazed, in which crystals were forged in anticipation of taking over the Promised World. Now it felt cold.
Then Trom and Cryf’s conversation, and the constant stream of Troll language, were drowned out by the sound of screeching metal. Broonie raised his head to see the sparks from Gantrua’s sword as the great Fomorian leader arrived in the hall, emerging from the corridors, dragging the weapon along the ground, his eyes alive with an anger that seemed to exceed even his usual levels of rage.
Broonie saw that the weighty cauldrons that had once blazed with fires that were never put out now hung lopsided from rusting chains. No wonder it was cold.
And there was something new, an addition to Gantrua’s armour: great broken wings, folded at his back, but jutting above his fierce, domed head. Then Broonie saw the dried blood where the wings met the armour. It looked as if Gantrua had ripped them from a serpent, one of the enormous flying creatures that had been fighting Gantrua’s army at the Battle at the Cave at the End of the World, and tied them on somehow.
A thin, curving tooth dominated the grille of Gantrua’s helmet, reaching from jaw to forehead, no doubt another souvenir of the battle against the serpents. It was the biggest tooth on a row of many different types and shapes. Their owners were most probably too dead to miss them.
“Yygggghh,” murmured Broonie, a string of bloody saliva hanging from a gap where one of his own teeth used to be. The tooth itself was now some metres away, on the floor, being gnawed by a scabmaggot.
“Just kill me,” he said. “Release me from the torment that is my life.”
Gantrua stopped in front of where he was tied up. “Do you think you matter enough to kill?” he asked. “I have had far more important victims than you.”
He triggered a mechanism at the left edge of his armour, and the great broken leather wings on his back opened in the most alarming fashion, wide and intimidating, once attached to a living being and now hacked away and strapped to the back of someone who was not built to fly.
“You see the red daubed on these wings?” asked Gantrua. “That is not paint. It is the blood of the traitors who tried to take advantage of this time in which crystals are rare and the Promised World is being cut off from us. But that rebellion has been crushed. The serpents lie dead. I enjoy taking a souvenir after I have won a great victory. And, in a few hours, the humans will be next. I will finally conquer those who abandoned us here like stinkrats, and who selfishly hold on to the world of light and growth that they stole from us once, so long ago.” He leaned in to Broonie, then bent and picked up his tooth. “And, when I am done, I will cover this armour with their skin.”
Gantrua moved further along the hall towards the plinth and its hard throne, carved from the glassy hardness of a petrified tree. As he pressed into the throne, there was a terrible sound of cracking bones as the leather wings pushed up at his back.
The Troll incantations were quickening now, growing louder. As Broonie’s vision cleared some more, he could see their source to the right of the plinth.
It was indeed a Troll – lumpen, bulbous-headed, stooped over a massive upturned skull filled with claws and what Broonie thought could be entrails, although he had never seen them so far outside of where they were supposed to be coiled. The Troll was rubbing dust in his hands as he chanted, letting it crumble into the skull. Broonie guessed he was casting some sort of spell, using the magic of hatred to bring more darkness into the Infested Side.
“We destroyed the Cave at the End of the World, where the humans came through,” said Gantrua. “We tore that place apart, dug every last handful of dirt from it in search of Coronium, to find a way through to the Promised World. But all we found was dust, the decaying remains of crystals. Useless.”
He examined Broonie’s tooth, turning it over in his giant hand.
The Troll’s spell grew ever more insistent.
“They tried to open gateways with it, to find a way for that soft dust to become a knife that would cut through the walls that trap us here. They failed. They paid the price.” He crushed Broonie’s tooth between his fingers, licked its remnants from his fingers. “Now I trust only my own Fomorian kind. They will not betray me. They are loyal. They will fight.”
The Troll was calling out louder and louder, quicker and quicker, in language harsh and demanding. More dust was clapped into the skull. Cryf and Trom stood back, as if wary of what was about to come.
“Although, my Hogboon turncoat, the dust did bring us something quite wonderful. It revealed one ally, a figure who came screaming into our world, and who we now control. We found that the dust can release those trapped between worlds, that in its purest form it can bring them back. But if you dilute the dust, control it, use it expertly, then you can have the best of both worlds. We can fill the air with dust and …”
The Troll released dust into the foul castle air. As it fell, its dull shimmer strangely beautiful in this ugliest of places, Broonie could have sworn he saw a face. A human face.
Gantrua stood once again, waited while a figure formed from the dust. Broonie recognised it as the same human he had seen tear a gateway in the Half-Hunter in Darkmouth. He knew this was the one who had so occupied the thoughts of Finn and Hugo and all those bags of skin in the human world.
The one they called Mr Glad.
Mr Glad did not pour into the Infested Side in the way he did in his own world.
He struggled and thrashed with the pain of being in two worlds and none at the same time. It was as if he was being plucked into reality, atom by atom.
The Troll continued his work, chanting, dusting the air, but Broonie could see that even he looked terribly nervous about all this.
Gantrua, though, remained unmoved, upright, in charge.
“We saw your message in the sky. The last victim is trapped,” he said, when Mr Glad finally stopped twisting and warping, settled into a semblance of a person. “Can we begin the attack on the humans?”
Mr Glad’s mouth opened so wide it actually swallowed the rest of his head, turning it inside out until it reappeared in the right place and his face followed. When he spoke, it was in tones of deepest anguish. “Promise me.”
“I have promised you already,” Gantrua said, his voice edged with annoyance.
“Then promise me again.”
“If your army helps take Darkmouth,” said Gantrua in a bored tone, as if he’d said this many times, “then we will give you back your body. We will take the dust that has brought you here and purify it, thicken it, fill the sky with it so that it will not bring you back in some half-form any more, but re-form you completely. No more of this life between lives. You give me Darkmouth, I promise I will give you life again.”
Mr Glad seemed to breathe out, his body shedding half its molecules while he steadied himself.
“They trapped me,” he said. “Hugo and the boy trapped me. Promise me too that you will make them suffer.”
“Oh, I will make them suffer a thousand times over. Believe me.”
Mr Glad began to thrash and fade, but reappeared as the Troll worked feverishly, crushing dust and throwing it into the air.
“Soon you will return to Darkmouth. You will help us destroy them. And then I shall return you to your body,” Gantrua told him, then motioned to Trom. “Start the timer.”
The Fomorian guard turned a large hourglass, and what to Broonie looked very much like blood started to drip slowly through.
“When the last of the blood falls,” Gantrua said to Mr Glad, “you shall have all the vengeance in the world.”
Mr Glad thrust his shoulders back, chest forward, summoned his last scraps o
f energy.
“Vengeance in two worlds,” he said, before scattering across the ceiling and disappearing. Nothing was left but the exhaustion of the Troll, and the horror on the watching Broonie’s face.
“Hold him,” Gantrua instructed, and Trom and Cryf grabbed the Hogboon from either side, as if preparing to tear him apart.
Gantrua stood before him and pulled the sharp serpent’s tooth from his grille, held it to the Hogboon’s thin skin.
“Do what you want,” muttered Broonie, helpless, yet finding a defiance that pleased him in these, his last moments. He knew this was the end for him, and some fleeting, final scenes from his life flashed through his mind.
He thought of his mother and the way she would entertain him by licking her own earhole.
He thought of the home he’d grown up in, allowed his memory to flood his nostrils with the comforting smells of ripe feet, freshly boiled scaldgrubs, the polluted earth they would sleep so close to every day.
Broonie dropped his head again. Awaited his fate. And lifted it back up only when it became clear to him, with some surprise, that Gantrua was using the serpent’s tooth to saw through his restraints and free his arms.
“Just because you are worth more alive now does not mean you will not eventually die in a most terrible way,” Gantrua said. “I have a plan for you that requires you to be breathing. Then, when my plan is carried out, you will pay for living among the humans. You can be sure of that. When I am done, only then will you truly know what it is like to wish yourself dead.”
The last string of rope snapped.
“But first,” Gantrua told him, “we will go for a walk.”
Lucien of the Office of Lost Arts needed a trusted source for his investigation. Someone who he knew would give an honest, reliable and loyal account of what had happened on the Infested Side. Someone who played by the rules, even when the rule book had been torn up, then burned and its ashes shredded just to be sure.
“Good morning, Estravon,” he said, pouring tea for them both. “I have asked you here under rule 33x of—”
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