“—subsection 87/b of the Guide to Subliminal Investigations,” interjected Estravon as if answering a quiz question. “It’s one of my favourite subsections.”
“Have a mini-muffin,” Lucien said, sliding a plate across the desk to Estravon.
Estravon had been on the Infested Side and had the extensive notes to prove it. He furnished Lucien with these notes and sketches and a large bill for the dry cleaning needed on the suit he had worn when he was there.
“Did anything there strike you as strange?” Lucien asked him.
Estravon almost choked on his mini-muffin at that question.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said while Estravon wiped raspberry icing from his chin. “I’ll rephrase the question. What happened when you met Niall Blacktongue?”
“Well, I didn’t meet him myself,” explained Estravon. “I heard about him. I might even have glimpsed him in a forest at one point.”
“Might have? And what about the boy? What did you see of his explosion and defeat of the Legends?”
“Not much. Nothing actually. He looked crispy around the edges when he returned, though. And the Legends I met on the Infested Side seemed to back up his story.”
“Legends confirmed his story?”
“Yes,” replied Estravon. “In some detail. They did help Finn and Hugo escape after all.”
“So, I’m just going to throw an idea out there,” said Lucien, smiling. “Do you think there’s anything, I don’t know, suspicious about all of that?”
Estravon was quiet. He felt a bead of sweat run down his temple, crawl along his ear, tickle his neck before settling into the collar of his shirt. It was a new shirt. Expensive. Tailored. Bought just for this meeting. The damp spread of sweat was seeping into his armpits.
Lucien didn’t wait for an answer, but simply topped up his tea. “So, tell me, Estravon. How have things been for you since you left Darkmouth?”
“Honestly?” asked Estravon.
“Honestly.”
“Dull. Boring. Nothing like the adventure and excitement and wildness of what I went through in Darkmouth and the Infested Side.” He stopped himself, realising he was rising out of his chair while gripping the edge of the table. The tea sloshed in its cup. “I thought I’d at least get a medal or two out of it. I know another Assessor who got one just for fixing a broken microwave.”
“Life is boring,” agreed Lucien.
“Unexciting.”
“You had such an incredible experience, something we’ve all dreamed of. And now you’re back to this.”
“This,” agreed Estravon, looking out of the office window at the ranks of assistants sitting at row upon row of computers, typing monotonously.
“That’s our lot now. Office work when we should be – could be – warriors.” Lucien straightened up, clasping his hands on the desk between them and leaning forward. “Estravon, I could get you a medal. I could get you a medal tomorrow. A dozen medals if you wanted. Each hanging from a gold ribbon.”
“That would be quite—”
“But what would you say if I told you I could get you something even better than that? Something I know you’ll treasure far more than any mere trinket.”
Lucien took a breath. Estravon held his.
“Estravon, I have a mission for you. In Darkmouth.”
“You got rid of the great skull from the front door,” Gerald snarled as he approached the doorstep.
“It didn’t seem appropriate,” said Hugo, catching Clara’s eye.
“Appropriate?” said Gerald. “What’s appropriate got to do with it? Maybe it should have been painted some nice shade of lilac to match the colour scheme, uh? Maybe you could have surrounded it with flowers to make it look less fierce.”
“This might have been your home once,” Clara told him, “but it’s ours now.”
They began to step inside, but Gerald stopped and turned to the trailing gaggle of elders and their assistants. “Family only,” he told them. “Darkmouth is still this family’s Blighted Village to protect after all. Although the girl can come with us too. She’s been to the Infested Side. I like the seriousness of her. She looks useful.”
“She just lost her father,” Hugo pointed out.
“Good,” Gerald responded. “A bit of anger could be needed.”
Emmie didn’t react; she had retreated into numbness again. Clara placed a hand round her shoulders, comforting her as best she could.
“I’ll come too,” said Estravon, making to follow them.
“No,” said Gerald, a hand out. “I don’t like your trousers.”
Finn hesitated as Gerald walked straight for the door to the Long Hall, eventually following only after giving the crestfallen Estravon a sympathetic look. They had, after all, been on the Infested Side together.
Inside, Hugo pressed the panels of the door in a sequence and, when he pulled it open, Gerald inhaled deeply of the interior’s musty smell, before pushing on through to the corridor burrowed through a whole street of houses.
As they bustled towards the library, Gerald scanned the portraits, ran his fingers along the frames and door handles, while the spikes of his armour scraped the walls. “Shay Gutbuster,” he said, stopping at a painting.
“Here we go,” sighed Hugo.
“My great-great-grandfather,” Gerald explained to Finn, looking up at a portrait of a very rotund Legend Hunter. “Shay Gutbuster lived in very difficult, hungry times in Ireland. Had to make do with what he had. So, he hid in the belly of a washed-up whale to avoid detection from a rampaging Legend. Once he was done, he fed the whole of Darkmouth with the same whale. That’s the kind of spirit that ensured this family and this town survived for so long. Are you one of those who’ll swim in whale guts for Darkmouth?”
Finn didn’t even have time to answer such a ridiculous question. Gerald was already striding on again.
“Next time you get to time-travel,” Clara said to Finn, “maybe you’ll go back and advise me to marry into a family in which all the dead people are actually dead.”
Before the steps at the end of the Long Hall, they reached the final portraits. First was the woman who would have been Finn’s great-grandmother, Elsie the Patient. She had a serenity about her that could not have been easy to maintain when living with Gerald.
Further down was that of Niall Blacktongue. Father and son were side by side on the wall. Gerald cast a disdainful eye on Niall, who was staring at a selection of items it transpired contained clues about how to get to the Infested Side.
“That traitor should be turned to face the wall,” he said.
“You don’t know the whole story,” Hugo told Gerald.
“He abandoned this town,” he snarled.
“He abandoned me, his son.”
“Leaving me to raise you,” said Gerald.
“Don’t I know it,” muttered Hugo.
Finn looked on, bristling from listening to the constant arguing.
Gerald turned away from Hugo and took the briefest of looks at his own portrait, where he appeared as deeply upset with the world as was humanly possible. “And that looks nothing like me at all. A chimp would have done better.” He stormed on.
“Actually,” Finn said to Emmie, “he looks positively cheery in that picture compared to real life.”
Gerald burst into the library, practically taking the door off its hinges, and looked around him while tutting for no obvious reason, or perhaps for a thousand reasons. It was hard to tell.
He assessed the sweeping walls, stuffed with jars of Legends caught long before his time and long since. He saw the detritus of inventions, half started, half abandoned, scattered about the floor. He tried to mask his surprise at the computer on the desk at the centre of the room, technology too modern for him to immediately comprehend, yet surrounded by the ancient armour standing proud throughout the room.
He pointed at a spot near the curving edge of the library where a dark stain was smudged on the floor. “Is this
where it happened? Is this where you pushed the Fixer into a gateway?” They’d filled him in on the events with Mr Glad on the way back to the house.
Finn nodded.
“So, this is how you trapped him.” He glowered at Finn.
“Yes, but only because—”
“You did the right thing,” said Gerald, surprising Finn. “It just had the wrong results. What do you know about the Trapped?”
“Um. They’re a rumour. A story. Or at least that’s what people thought until just recently.”
“And what do the rumours say?”
“It’s not a test, Finn,” said Hugo.
“It’s OK, I learned a bit about them before,” said Finn, stepping to a section of the library that actually held books and pulling from it a colourful, frayed copy of 101 Astonishing Myths of the Legend Hunters. “When I was younger, I read about them in here.”
“You don’t need books,” tutted Gerald. “I am books.”
“The page is here somewhere,” Finn said as he searched for the right chapter, but instead fell on an old wives’ tale about how some old wives had tails.
Finn found the page. The story told of an anonymous Legend Hunter who had seen a phantom in the sky, the reappearance of a warrior long ago thought to have been lost through a gateway. “Shall I read it out?” he asked.
“No,” said Gerald.
“It says that the Legend Hunter became obsessed with finding out the truth of the Trapped and even began to study how the Trapped might be rescued again.”
“I don’t need to hear it—” insisted Gerald.
“But he was called a bit of a fool for his beliefs, it says here,” continued Finn. “Everyone mocked him.”
“—because the Legend Hunter in that book was me,” growled Gerald.
Finn slowly closed the book, its spine cracking a little bit as he did.
“Like the book says, I saw one once,” Gerald said, a little subdued for the first time since arriving. “It was in battle, here in Darkmouth, and at the opening of a gateway I saw, well, I saw something. A face, in the sky. Not properly human, but I recognised it. It was that man, our ancestor, Shay Gutbuster. He was said to have given his life for Darkmouth, said to have chased a Manticore straight into a gateway, never to be seen again.”
He walked to a suit of armour, his lava-red face distorted in its reflection. “The vision was gone soon enough, but the agony of his expression burned into me. I couldn’t forget it. I was young enough that I almost let them convince me I was talking rubbish. But I’m not soft. I know what I saw. And I sought out every story ever whispered about the Trapped, every sighting, every Legend Hunter dismissed as crazy because of what he said he’d seen.”
He turned again. “And I found that sometimes they come back and take others. And when they do.” He clapped his hands shut, like imitating the snap of a crocodile. Finn wondered if everyone saw him jump. “That’s when you have your chance to get them back.”
Emmie perked up again. “You can rescue my dad? Please say you can.”
“Yes,” said Gerald. “In a way.”
“How?” asked Hugo.
Gerald lunged forward, snapped the sparkling locket from Finn’s neck before he could react.
“What’s in this?” he demanded, holding it up.
“Dust,” said Finn.
“Crystal dust,” said Hugo. “From here, in Darkmouth. We found them growing in a cave.”
“Did you have that on you when Mr Glad touched you? When you avoided being trapped?” asked Gerald.
“No,” said Finn. Then he paused. “Actually, I did. I mean, I wasn’t wearing it. But it was in my bag. I took it off and put it in there because it was itchy around my neck. When Mr Glad attacked me, I must have grabbed my bag without realising, clung on hard. I was holding it tight when it all ended. And this was in it. No, I remember now. Mr Glad let go of me when I did that.”
“And your father, girl. I’m willing to bet he didn’t have any dust on him?”
Emmie shook her head mournfully, while removing Steve’s locket from her pocket. “He didn’t wear it this morning. Said it made him too itchy. He put it down. I took it. I didn’t want it to get lost.”
“I didn’t have mine on either,” said Clara. “I don’t wear it at work. For hygiene reasons and all that.”
“That is something many stories about the Trapped have in common,” said Gerald. “Coronium. Either as crystals or as dust. The ancient stories were always the same. Those rare shards of crystals would be sought out and used as charms, as protection against the Trapped.”
“Why?” asked Hugo.
“I died before I could find out,” said Gerald. “Maybe it’s poisonous to them. Destroys them perhaps. But if Mr Glad let go of Finn because he caught hold of his bag, with the dust in it, then that would suggest the protection works.”
He considered all this. “What matters now is that the Coronium energy levels are building all the time and Mr Glad and the Trapped are most likely coming back in a few hours. And you had better have enough dust to go around or a lot of Half-Hunters are going to die fighting them.”
“But you said there was some way to get my dad back,” Emmie reminded him.
“Yes,” said Gerald. “Hugo, there used to be a Desiccannon in this house. Big long thing on wheels. You put bombs in it and fire them at Legends. Is it still here or did you replace it with maybe a comfy sofa?”
“We have it,” said Hugo, biting his tongue. “It’s on the stage for Finn’s Completion Ceremony. For decoration really. It hasn’t been used in years.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Gerald decisively. “We need serious Desiccation firepower, and we need it quickly.”
“There’s a problem, though,” said Hugo. “To make the bombs, we have to fill them with Desiccator fluid, but we used up a huge amount of it in attacks over the past year and it hasn’t been restocked fully. The stuff doesn’t exactly flow from a tap.”
Gerald’s face lit up into something that Finn thought might be, or at least was very close to, a smile. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Of course I’m wrong,” muttered Hugo. “I’ll always be wrong.”
Gerald stepped back to the suit of armour standing proud at the edge of the library. “Have you shown the boy what’s under here yet?”
“Not yet,” said Hugo. “I’ve been saving that for after his Completion. It’s Highest Level Information.”
“Highest Level Information?” said Gerald. “Rubbish. I was sharing Highest Level Information with you before you were even born.” He yanked the tip of the lance held in the gloved hand of the standing armour. It moved aside steadily, revealing a wide hole in the floor. A deep hole. It was dark down there. Finn couldn’t see the bottom.
Finn looked into it. “Is that a hole?”
Gerald dropped to the edge, dangled his feet over it for a moment. “Of course it’s a hole,” he said. “You know for a moment there I thought you might be a smart wee fella, but that’s a daft question.”
“You can’t say that,” Clara said.
“I’m dead!” bellowed Gerald. “I can say whatever I want.”
With that, he dropped down into the hole.
The Fomorian kicked Broonie forward, shoving him along the sharp ground, a path roughly tramped down by centuries of wheels and feet, heavy bellies and dragged tails. The Hogboon shuffled as best he could without falling over, the manacles tight at his thin wrists, rubbing at his even thinner legs.
The path skirted the edge of a cliff that formed one great wall of a chasm so deep its bottom had never been seen. Instead, the sheer wall of the mountain disappeared into blackness. Many creatures had fallen in there in the past. Many more had been pushed. They could still be falling for all Broonie knew. For this was the Chasm of Bewilderness. No one knew what was down there, only that finding out would be the very last thing you would ever do.
Trom kicked Broonie again.
“I won’t walk any
quicker if I have to use my face as feet!” complained Broonie, just about keeping himself from falling nose first into the dirt.
“It’s all right,” said Trom, “I won’t be kicking you again.”
“No,” said Cryf. “It’s my turn now.”
Ahead of them, Gantrua considered kicking them all into the chasm, but restrained himself, concentrating instead on the steady sway of the Sleipnir beneath him, its snorting and bucking needing occasional restraint, using the sharp bones in his feet to plant firm digs into its ribs. Gantrua glanced behind him, at the phalanx of Fomorians in his wake, a couple of dozen of them, compliant but sullen, carrying various weapons. Clubs. Crossbows. Swords. And, at the rear, a giant trundling along a catapult.
The Fomorians’ only mission for eons had been to bring further brutishness to this already brutal world. Soon he would offer them a chance to take it to another realm altogether. The Promised World would be theirs.
But first there was business to do.
“Stop!” he commanded.
They stopped, the halting of the line confirmed by the grinding screech of the catapult at its rear, already sprung back and held ready for action. Beside it, the line of rocks clacked as they settled.
The cavalcade had reached what appeared to Broonie to be some form of long bridge, but one that looked as if it had grown organically from the detritus, rising from its mists.
“You can just tell me what’s on the other side,” said Broonie, peering across at where the bridge disappeared into the general gloom. “We don’t need to go and have a look ourselves.”
“There would be no enjoyment in that,” said Gantrua. “Kick him on.”
Because neither Trom nor Cryf could be sure which of them he was talking to, they both kicked Broonie together, sending him flailing forward, his feet struggling to keep the rest of him up, the shackles bashing at his legs.
Gantrua motioned his Sleipnir forward and its eight legs moved almost as one as it began to cross the bridge. The line of Fomorians followed, the catapult beginning to slowly build up momentum again at the back.
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