“He’s still working with the Legends,” said Hugo, a new understanding dawning on him.
“Dad’s gone, isn’t he?” Emmie was saying, disbelieving.
“So sorry, Emmie,” Finn said.
The gateway was spreading, widening, its centre brightening in intensity, a hole being bored between worlds.
Finn, who had seen more than enough gateways in his life, in the past year alone, knew exactly what this meant. “Mr Glad must have known we could protect ourselves with the dust,” he said. “He was never going to fight us directly. He was trapping the others so together they could open a huge gateway. To the Infested Side.”
Hugo paled. “It’s an invasion,” he said.
From the other side, still invisible to them, they could hear the thumping rhythm of sticks on shields.
The Half-Hunters took another step back, the mulch of their boots on wet grass competing with the jolting engines of the trucks hosting the Council of Twelve.
“Do not back down,” Hugo said.
“Do not retreat,” Gerald ordered.
A single screaming Fomorian burst from the vast gateway, his chunky legs propelling him down the hill towards them as he waved his stick. Hugo fired and his shot was true, striking the Fomorian square on the chest and desiccating him instantly.
He was followed by a couple more screaming Fomorians. And then three more.
“This would never have happened in my day!” said Gerald.
“Fire!” shouted Hugo.
Those few with Desiccators let loose. Some missed wildly. Others hit targets so that lumbering Fomorians disappeared with a stifled whoooop drowned out by the maelstrom of the battle.
“You and Emmie get back,” Hugo ordered Finn.
“I don’t want—” Finn started to protest.
“You two have to be safe now,” said Hugo, desiccating another Fomorian as it appeared through the gateway. “Go.”
Finn hesitated. Emmie was still simmering with anger.
Gerald fired his Desiccator. “Listen to your father, boy. You’re the future of this family. A brighter one than I had reckoned, to be honest. So, if you don’t go now, I’ll use the spike on these boots to send you on your way.”
He and Hugo stood and fired again, in unison.
Finn realised he had no choice: he pulled Emmie’s arm to encourage her to leave with him. She didn’t budge, but he pulled again and finally she moved. Together they crouched and ran towards the rear, the noise and light of battle briefly behind them. Ahead of them now, Finn could see the Half-Hunters hurrying to fill the Desiccannon with the second bomb, while Estravon shouted at them to, “Load it, load it, don’t drop it!”
They dropped it.
Every one of the Council of Twelve and their assistants held their breath as the bomb rolled away and finally settled, unexploded, on a clump of weeds.
Finn and Emmie reached the rear as the Half-Hunters scuttled over to pick up the bomb and once again attempt to load it. At the top of the hill, Fomorians were pushing through the open gateway, but continued to get picked off by Desiccators.
Finn and Emmie held their Desiccators out over the back of a hoarding (Eye Spy Opticians) to be prepared. To their right they could see that the Half-Hunters at the Desiccannon were growing increasingly panicky, their inexperience beginning to overcome them.
Aurora was watching them too, fidgeting with impatience, seemingly finding it impossible to stand by as disaster approached. “Right!” she shouted from where she stood among the Twelve. “Leave this to the experts.”
She rolled up the sleeves of her robe and marched forward. Without hesitation, Cedric followed. So did the others. One by one, the Council of Twelve advanced, each of these people Finn had until recently only known through the stories of their past glories, the adventures they had once lived. He watched as they dragged robes across the mucky ground, found their once-tired legs reinvigorated.
Only Stumm struggled to rise from the chair he sat on. Cedric turned to put a hand on his shoulder, a wordless recognition that he didn’t need to move.
Their assistants tried to help the Council of Twelve as they went, lifting the hems of their robes, leaning in to whisper to them, asking them not to do anything rash. Cedric turned and calmly said to his assistant, “Let us be young again. Just this once.”
The assistants stood back, and these ancient members of the Twelve began to lift the slippery bomb from the ground and together placed it smoothly in the Desiccannon chamber. Every one of them left their great age behind, and found the strength and focus they’d had in the glory days when every day brought a battle.
At the gateway, the Fomorians still came.
“We’re winning!” a Half-Hunter shouted. Finn recognised him as Nils, the always chirpy, weak-bladdered, gadget-loving Norwegian he’d met at the house and on the street. He was chirpy even now. “We’re pushing them back!”
It was true. Gradually, the Desiccators were beginning to eat away at the Legends’ numbers, to block the entrance, to have an effect. Some of the Half-Hunters began to cheer.
Finn watched. He’d seen enough before to know that things were not always as they seemed. He focused on the gateway rather than the invaders. Its centre was darkening, a shadow within the lake of light, growing, approaching. “Emmie, why do they need a really large gateway?”
“For all those Fomorians,” she answered.
“But they’re not nearly tall enough to need a gateway that size.” He thought about it, while the Desiccators fizzed and the elders finished loading the bomb. “Maybe it’s a large gateway, because something—”
“—very large is coming through,” said Emmie.
The dark spot grew.
“Not a step backwards!” they heard Gerald cry.
Everyone took a step backwards.
The shadow enveloped the light. And, just as suddenly, a Hydra was in the world, impossibly huge, building-huge, cliff-huge. It towered above them, its many necks rising up into the sky. Heads. Teeth. Roaring from every mouth.
Finn stared up in horror, barely able to comprehend the size of the thing.
“As the ancient saying goes,” said Lazlo the Second, stepping back from the Desiccannon, “we’re in big trouble.”
The Hydra reared up, before dropping back on to its feet with force enough to jolt every Half-Hunter, send a shock wave through the crowd, shuddering through the Twelve at the Desiccannon, sending the trucks and cars into a roar where they revved engines in an unbearable need to escape.
One Half-Hunter turned from his place on the hill and ran, crashing through the shocked throng, fleeing as he shouted, “I’m a tennis coach, not a warrior!”
“Don’t fire your Desiccators at the Hydra!” Hugo called to all around him.
A Half-Hunter fired a Desiccator anyway and a spreading blob of blue arced through the twilight and caught one of the heads, snapping it down immediately, like a snail retreating into its shell.
“It’ll only make it worse,” growled Gerald.
From the Hydra’s wounded neck, a bud appeared. And another. Each one growing, bubbling into life, until something resembling eyes appeared on each one, then something else most definitely approximating teeth. After a last, violent spasm of growth, there were two heads at the end of one neck.
Finn had been at the centre of the beach battle. He had been cornered by a Minotaur. He had fallen from a tower of bones tall enough to pierce clouds. He had exploded in another world. But this was frightening on a level so deep it shook parts of him he didn’t know existed.
Gerald and Hugo had no choice but to move back, abandoning their protective hoarding for another a couple of metres in front of Finn and Emmie.
The Hydra stomped steadily from the entrance to the gateway, while Fomorians poured in behind, using the enormous Legend as a shield.
“We need to get under that beast,” said Gerald, gritting his teeth at whatever pain his disintegrating body was causing him. “The only way to
shrink a Hydra that big is to ram Desiccator fluid right in its guts.”
Around the Hydra’s legs, behind its belly, out of the flaming jaws of the gateway, they could make out more Fomorians pouring in. A legion of them. From behind the Hydra there came the sound of arrows being shot into the air. Except they weren’t arrows, but long, deadly shards of the fossilised trees on the Infested Side, and they sliced the earth around Finn and Emmie with terrible effect.
Finn dived out of the way, heart pounding, as one buried itself in the ground where he had been standing. He picked himself up out of the mud. The Half-Hunters fired their Desiccators, but now understood it wasn’t even worth targeting the colossal creature, instead trying to lob fire over the Hydra that stood between the humans and the incoming Fomorians. They launched stones, waved wooden swords, flung clumps of dirt, whatever was to hand.
A couple more turned and fled for safety.
Hugo waved back at the Desiccannon. “Get that thing up here!”
Gerald stood upright, shooting his Desiccator from the hip. The blue fire arced towards the edges of the Hydra, scorching past a gaggle of Fomorians peeking out from its rear.
Finn was sure that in this moment of great madness, Gerald was loving every minute.
Three blades landed in the grass in front of Finn and Emmie, cutting deep into the earth and forcing them to drop down for safety. When Finn popped his head up again, he saw the colossal Hydra, its teeth bigger than a person, most of its heads snapping and biting and swinging at the oncoming humans. But Finn noticed that a couple of heads weren’t engaged. It was almost as if they were dozing, or comatose. Odd, he thought.
Then he saw something far more surprising on the Hydra’s back. A small figure, strapped and helpless as the battle raged no more than the width of a Hogboon’s earlobe away.
“That’s Broonie!” he told Emmie. “On the Hydra.”
“Can’t be.” She peered into the flares and colours of the battle. “It is!”
“Why?” said Finn. “How?”
With that, figures came running towards them, and they tensed until they realised they were only more Half-Hunters, dodging the falling dagger-like shards dropping all around them.
“Heave!” The Twelve were trying to move the Desiccannon forward to where they could aim it at the belly of the beast.
“Heave!” Its wheels were stuck in the mud of the hill.
“We need to help,” said Finn, dashing to the Desiccannon to push. Emmie joined him. Before they knew it, other Half-Hunters were there too. Nils was just ahead of Finn, Estravon behind him. “I am never wearing new trousers to a battle ever again,” he grumbled.
“Use the robes!” Aurora yelled, and the Twelve started to pull the garments from their necks to place beneath the Desiccannon’s wheels to form a silk pathway in front of it.
“Heave!” shouted Aurora. They heaved. Heaved again. Finn wedged his shoulder in, pushed as hard as he could, felt the ground slip under his feet, but replanted them and went again.
The Hydra was a great silhouette against the light of the gateway, heads like tentacles seeking out victims. A Half-Hunter just managed to vault a barrier as a Hydra’s neck smashed through it so easily the metal wrapped round its chin. It shook it clear, and the hoarding sliced over the heads of those at the cannon.
“Heave!”
The Hydra found its grip on a Half-Hunter, a tooth piercing his jacket and lifting him high. He managed to shake himself from it before hitting the ground with a thump, rolling and then running away as the Hydra swallowed his coat.
“Heave!”
The Desiccannon moved. A few centimetres. Then a few more. The wheels found their grip on the robes and it jerked forward suddenly. Finn fell, face down, taking Estravon and Emmie with him. He looked up to see the Desiccannon gaining traction and speed, rolling steadily across the grass.
Behind it was the unlikely force of ten aged Legend Hunters, and Nils cheering at the back.
“Light the fuse! Light the fuse!” Aurora was shouting. Cedric just managed to smack the flint, and it sparked, sparked again. Lit.
The Desiccannon trundled straight for the Hydra’s belly. Its fuse burning down, bomb ready to fire.
Something glinted in the sky. It was an arrow, a shard slicing through the air from the gateway, and heading straight for the Desiccannon. Finn identified its source. It was a newly arrived Fomorian, larger than the rest, his helmet rimmed with what looked like teeth, dominated by one serpent’s tooth, and he had wings stretching wide across his back. In his hands rested a hefty bow.
Finn knew who this was, recognised him from the stories, from the things Broonie had told him. And he remembered him now from his vision when Mr Glad had almost trapped him.
“Gantrua,” he muttered to Emmie where she lay. He pulled her to her feet, jumped, shouted above the melee. “Gantrua!”
Gantrua’s arrow dropped fast and true, hitting the muzzle of the Desiccannon at the precise moment its fuse triggered the release of the bomb. The two met in a piercing flash, an explosion within the weapon, running through it in a devastating cascade.
Aurora’s face froze for the merest moment.
Then she spoke.
“Oh no.”
The bomb burst over everyone attached to the Desiccannon – Aurora, Cedric, Lazlo, every other member of the Council of Twelve there, and Nils whose eyes were wide open with terror.
There was a pulse, then a stifled whoooop, and it desiccated them all at once, together.
Shock grabbed hold of Finn, shut down his vision so that all he could see was the ball left behind. A brightly coloured horror. All those people. Fused into one.
Everything seemed to slow down. Sound seemed to dull.
“They’re gone,” said Finn.
“No, we can reanimate them,” said Emmie. “Even just for a day, we can bring them back.”
“They’ve been desiccated together. When two beings get fused like that, it’s hard to separate them. But all of those, in one go? Impossible.”
“Oh …” said Emmie, but there was nothing left to say. All they could do was stare at the large multicoloured ball that had been the Twelve.
Dead. Or as good as. The oldest, wisest, most experienced Legend Hunters in the world. All gone.
Then Finn realised something had landed at his foot. He picked up a cufflink. Nils’s cufflink. The last thing left of him.
The heads of the Hydra rose up and roared with a terrifying fury that shook the hill.
Suddenly Gerald and Hugo were there, climbing over the final barriers, directing a retreat of Half-Hunters.
“We’ve got to run,” said Finn, recognising an instinct that had served him well so many times before.
“This family does not go backwards,” insisted Gerald, and looked up at the chaos descending upon them. “But the boy is right.”
“We have no choice,” said Hugo, facing the hordes pouring through the gateway into Darkmouth. “We have to evacuate. We have to use the tunnels. We have to let the Legends take Darkmouth.”
Gantrua stepped into a world he had always yearned to see. The first thing he did was to close his eyes.
He drew breath through his nostrils. Filled his senses with the scent of this place. The crispness of its air. The life that filled every crumb of soil. The manure of whatever creatures had passed through was the most glorious he had ever encountered. He savoured it.
“My Lord of Unbound Death,” said Trom, “what do you command us to do?”
“Ask him again,” said Cryf. “In case he can’t hear …”
Gantrua roared in Cryf’s face. His eyeball bulged so hard a blood vessel popped and filled a corner of his left eye with fresh blood. He kept roaring, a sound not just of fury but of victory, of relief, of a long lifetime aching for this exact moment that had now been fulfilled. It quietened the entire hill, every Legend and every insect.
When he finally shut down his roar, it carried on across Darkmouth, a wave pounding aga
inst the town below.
The Hydra bucked. Broonie held on through instinct, even as the chains ensured he could not possibly fall anyway.
“Ssssmmmmmffff,” he said. “Ssssmmmmmmmmmffffffff!”
Gantrua, chest heaving with violent breaths, reached down and scooped up a palmful of dirt and grass and one very confused worm.
Behind them the gateway closed.
“This is our world now,” said Gantrua, then turned to the army, raised his sword and commanded, “let us take it!”
Crushing the earth in his hands, he led the Legends into Darkmouth.
“Tell Lucien about it,” Axel of the Office of Snacks said as he bit into a cheesy cracker. “Go on.”
The Half-Hunter remained behind his desk, a hand on the computer keyboard, and narrowed his eyes. In front of him was a small name plaque that confirmed that he was Karl, Department of Rumours, Legend Sightings and Bathroom Maintenance.
“They say there’s a face appearing in the sky in Darkmouth.”
“A face?” prompted Lucien.
“Or maybe legs. We’re not sure. But what is happening is that Half-Hunters are being killed there. Zapped. Just turned to dust.”
Axel ate the last of his cheesy cracker, swept up the crumbs from the table and tipped them into his mouth.
“The point is,” said Karl, “it’s all kicking off there again.”
“You were in Darkmouth, weren’t you?” Lucien asked him. “At the battle by that cave.”
“It was incredible,” said Karl, animated. “It cost me a week’s holiday to make the journey to Darkmouth when Hugo disappeared, and I got a bit lost on the way, but it was worth it to see that battle on the beach. But now I’m back to …” he turned his computer screen to face Lucien, revealing numbers, charts, “… ordering toilet paper.”
“Well,” said Lucien, studying the Half-Hunter, “we don’t want civilisation being flushed away, do we?”
“Hmmm,” said Karl, and pulled the screen back towards him and hesitated before continuing. “We’ve all heard about the experiments in the basement, that you’re attempting to make that Darkmouth dust work, to see if gateways can be opened from here.”
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