Ignoring Broonie, Steve added his voice to Finn’s and their shouts carried across the hard grass toward the gnarled, leafless trees that bordered the clearing. The field stretched away from them, up a hill, beyond which the land dipped and then sloped upward again to the foot of bare, forbidding mountains.
“Dad! Mam!”
“Hugo! Clara!”
In the distance, a squawk pierced the foul air.
“You can shout all you want,” said Broonie. “I’m not waiting around to see who answers.”
Steve, his voice still muffled by the visor, leaned down toward Finn. “They could be gone by now. And our gateway isn’t going to remain open much longer. We’ll have to leave soon.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Finn. He called again for his parents, ending with more gagging.
There was another squawk from above, and nearer this time. Steve pointed the Desiccator at the sky. A shadow moved through the low cloud. Fast.
Finn took a couple of steps away from the still-open gateway and cocked his head toward the distant mountains. “Do you hear that?” he asked Steve. It was an almost imperceptible rumble through the ground.
“I hear nothing, Finn. And we have to go.”
The shadow crossed over them. A high-pitched call stabbing through the cloud. Finn, Steve, and Broonie turned their attention skyward.
From the ground, they sensed the tiniest tremor.
The anxiety in Broonie’s voice ratcheted up a notch. “Well, I have a hovel to attend to, so if you’ll excuse me.”
A creature bolted from the cloud. Serpentine, with wings scooping at the sky, it coiled its body, bared its fangs, and shot forward toward the isolated Broonie.
The Hogboon screamed and ducked, hands over head. The mouth of the winged serpent enveloped Broonie’s crown, his skin grazed by the tip of a fang.
Phzzzzt.
With a whuuupfh, the creature crumbled, half-desiccated, its head and a wing mashed into a rough sphere, its tail writhing on the ground, every flail of its undesiccated wing pushing it farther around in a circle. Broonie peeked out from the gap in his hands as the serpent quickly exhausted itself and stopped still in the scrub, the gateway illuminating its horrific state.
“Interesting,” muttered Steve, lowering his smoking weapon. “The Desiccator doesn’t seem to work as well here.”
Finn didn’t hear him. He was again concentrating on the rumble, which was getting louder, closer. The gathering tremor in the ground now tickled at the soles of his boots.
The sparkling edges of the gateway dipped for an instant.
“The gateway’s going to close soon,” said Broonie, beginning to back away from the scene. “It was interesting meeting you. Let’s never do it again. Good-bye.” He sprinted toward the twisted forest.
Steve gripped Finn’s shoulder and pulled him over to the gateway. “We’re going.”
Finn shrugged him off. Steve grabbed him again, hauling him to the edge of the light. “We will come back for them, Finn. Somehow, we’ll come back.”
Feeling the gateway’s warmth against his skin, Finn looked back at the empty, bleak world, making a silent promise to return. He began to step into the hole between worlds. Then he heard it.
“Finn!” His father’s voice reached them from the edge of the trees. Then two figures appeared. In the gloom, they were hardly recognizable, only dark shapes kicking up dust. Finn’s mam’s arm was slung around his dad’s shoulder as they ran toward him.
“Dad!” He jumped forward a few paces. Steve shouted at him to stay where he was.
Hugo and Clara separated, both concentrating solely on Finn, but, even in just a few steps, Finn’s mam had fallen behind and Finn watched as his dad stopped for a moment, grabbed her hand, and then began running again.
The earth shuddered. The tremor worked its way up through Finn’s armor, forcing a rattle through his fighting suit. He peered out at the hill.
Over its crest emerged an army.
Manticores and Wolpertingers in the front, giant loping Fomorians following, and between them an array of other Legends. It was a crazy mass of shapes, scampering, lumbering, snarling, charging toward them.
“Hurry!” Finn screamed as loudly as he could.
66
Finn’s parents ran hard, their gaze fixed on the gateway. Steve fired a volley from his Desiccator. The net traced a blue arc toward the hill, but fell short.
Behind Finn, the gateway groaned a little, beginning to collapse inward. “Quick!”
Over the trembling earth, the army raced. At its head there were two figures riding on the backs of enormous three-horned, four-legged beasts. One of the individuals was a giant, and even at this distance Finn could make out a jagged grille reaching upward from his neck.
The other figure looked puny beside him, almost completely concealed beneath a hooded cloak.
Finn watched his father and mother race across the hard ground. Steve fired off another shot toward the onrushing Legends and this time the net landed in the front ranks, sending creatures sprawling and falling. The rest of the army plowed through the victims and ever forward.
Finn stood at the precipice of the gateway. “Hurry. Hurry!”
The light bent again as a prelude to the gateway’s imminent closure, just as his parents reached it.
Hugo grabbed Steve’s Desiccator, thrust Clara toward him, then pushed them both toward the gateway.
“I suppose I have to thank you now,” he said to Steve.
“Nah. Looks like you had everything under control here,” said Steve before taking Clara’s arm, the light swallowing them as they both vanished to safety.
Now only Finn and his father were left on the Infested Side.
The wall of cursing, ravenous Legends was almost on top of them. The two lead riders pulled hard on their beasts and halted as the hordes bore down behind them. The giant at the front snarled through the broken teeth lining his mask, pushing up the scars that crisscrossed his face, holding the beast below him in place with arms that were each wider than Finn’s father’s chest.
The Legend held Finn’s stare, as if he knew exactly who this boy was. At that moment, Finn realized that this must be the Fomorian Broonie had talked about. This must be Gantrua.
Beside him, the hooded figure held tight against the bucking of the beast beneath him, face lost beneath the hood.
Finn refocused. He was standing at the rim of the buckling gateway. “Dad, we need to go!” he called. But instead of leaping through the gateway, Finn’s father aimed the Desiccator at the two leaders on their beasts before setting his sights on just one of them. His target pulled the hood slowly from his head.
Hugo recognized him instantly, at least as far as Finn could tell from the way he staggered back, horrified. It took Finn a moment longer.
The man’s skin—because it was a man, not a Legend . . .
. . . the man’s skin was drained of color and terribly scarred, his eyes a burned-out pink, but enough remnants of the face from the portrait clung on. Hugo lowered his weapon, his mouth hanging open in disbelief as a wry smile crept across his father’s wizened lips.
Niall Blacktongue, the man who had tried talking to Legends and it didn’t end well, Finn’s father’s father, the one who was lost, stared back at them until he was swallowed by the swarm of Legends clamoring to reach the intruders.
The gateway groaned. Finn screamed at his father to go, but Hugo didn’t move at first, instead keeping his eyes glued to the spot where Niall had been before the Legends engulfed him. He finally turned to Finn.
“Tell your mam I love her and I’ll see her soon,” he shouted, “but I have to do this.”
“Do what?” asked Finn.
“Go after my father.”
“But—”
“You’ll be all right. You’ll find a way to get me back here. You’ve already shown me that. Finn the Defiant.” He looked behind them quickly, the clamoring wall of Legends now almost upon them. “L
isten to me, Finn. There’s a map somewhere. In room S3 in the house. Do you hear me? Find the map.”
He pushed his son through the gateway.
Finn’s last tumbling vision from the Infested Side was of his father turning away and charging into the oncoming army of Legends.
He lay on his back, the acrid breath of the Infested Side escaping his lungs. His mother crouched beside him, hacking, while Emmie and Steve attempted to comfort her. Finn reached out and touched her hand.
The gateway snuffed out.
From A Concise Guide to the
Legend Hunter World, vol. 7,
chapter 42: “The Great
Unpleasantness,” from footnotes
to the introductory paragraphs
After the disappearance of Niall Blacktongue, the Twelve investigated thoroughly, sending a team to Darkmouth and imploring anyone with any information to step forward. In many cases, what emerged were little more than snippets, snatches of rumors, half truths wrapped in guesswork.
Still, some hard facts did rise to the top and a comprehensive report was compiled, only to be buried again by investigators who decided that the consequences of sharing it would be catastrophic.
Over the years since the event, there have been occasional leaks that have allowed us some glimmers of understanding of Niall’s final moments. This is what is known.
Niall was at the location of a gateway before it even opened. His boy, Hugo, hardly old enough to lift a sword, was also at the mouth of this open gateway.
It is said that in the gateway’s dying, stuttering light, Niall kneeled down to his only child and whispered to him briefly. Then he stood, held his right hand to his heart, pulled his hood over his head, stepped back, and allowed the jaws of the other world to devour him.
The message he imparted to his son has yet to be revealed, if it was remembered at all by a boy not yet tall enough to reach the shoulders of a Manticore. But as the gateway collapsed, it is said that one final word echoed across two worlds.
“Map.”
67
The door swung open so suddenly that Finn almost sprawled across the floor. He righted himself just as his mother, Emmie, and Steve pushed in behind him.
The room was S3—a storage room down the Long Hall. Near the entrance to the main house, it had a thick wooden door, with iron rivets studded across it from top to bottom and a fat brass lock. It was sandwiched between E1, an equipment room, and A2, where some of the family’s hundreds of years of archives were kept.
But otherwise it appeared unremarkable. Even the fact that neither Finn nor his mother had ever been in it was not unusual. There were many doors along the Long Hall. Many rooms they had never set foot in.
Steve tried the light switch. The single bulb in the room flared, sparked, and died.
The room was narrow, with only a slit of a window high on the far wall, through which a single stream of moonlight fell on the only object in the empty space: a tall, thin table halfway along the right-hand wall.
On the table was a brown wooden box. Finn walked over to it and the others followed, his mother first, but slow in her movements, shock still dulling her senses.
Finn examined the simple box, which had no markings, no patterns, not even a keyhole, just clean, rounded edges. Dust scattered from it when he touched it, dancing in the pale light. Finn worked his fingers around the rim of the box, searching for a lid. Finding it, he gently prized the box open.
Inside was a piece of paper, clean, folded. Finn looked around at his mother for consent to pick it up. Exhausted, frail, still suffering from the atmosphere of the Infested Side, she simply nodded.
He took it in his fingers, unfolded it gently. It was obviously stiff with age, fragile, and he was careful not to tear it at the folds.
He looked at it, then back to his mother, his uncertainty clear.
“What?” she whispered.
“It’s not a map. It’s a sentence. Just one sentence. And it’s not even in Dad’s handwriting.”
“What does it say?” asked Emmie.
Finn read it aloud: “Light up the house.”
68
They turned on every light, every lamp, in every room and every corner of every room, illuminating the house in the early morning before the sun had yet peeked through the windows.
“Where do we even begin?” Finn asked Emmie. “Where would someone hide a map?”
“At least we’ll get a day off school for this,” said Emmie.
The corridor stretched ahead of them. Behind them, in the library, Steve was standing amid debris, examining the long curves of shelves while holding an atlas in his hand. “The good news is that there’s a map here,” he called out to Finn and Emmie. “The bad news is that there’s another, oh, couple of thousand alongside it.”
Finn’s mother approached down the Long Hall, opening her mouth to speak when she reached them only to get caught on a cough. “I guess it’ll take a few days still,” she said when she finally cleared her throat.
“You need rest, Mam.”
“I’ll rest when we find your dad.” She placed her arm around Finn’s shoulder and he snuggled into her, briefly forgetting to be embarrassed in front of Emmie. His mother gave him a kiss on the head and walked into the library.
“Clara, I know we’ve only just met,” said Steve, “and you might not exactly trust me, but I want you to know—”
“Let’s just find this map, okay?”
“Okay.”
Emmie leaned in to Finn. “Does your mam know about the prophecy?”
“I haven’t told her. She has enough to worry about. Don’t you tell her either.”
“My spying days are done, I promise,” said Emmie.
“No more secrets, please.”
“Agreed,” said Emmie, with a nod of her head. “Except for that one we’re keeping from your mother, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Emmie looked at the line of doors in the Long Hall. “Which room should we try first?”
“I don’t know. The nearest one, I suppose,” said Finn.
“And then?”
“Look for a pattern maybe. Anything that seems like it could be a map. If it was obvious, Dad would have told me where to find it. It must be hidden somewhere.”
Emmie hesitated. “Do you think he’s going to be okay?”
“I do,” said Finn. “I really do. Even when he was our age, he was doing incredible things, fighting Legends five times our size. Did I ever tell you about the time he—?”
“Yes.”
“And the day he—?”
“That too.”
“Well then, you know he’s going to be okay.”
“And what happens when we find the map?”
“Then we go after him,” said Finn, with more confidence than he actually felt.
“I’m not sure I’ll be much use,” said Emmie.
“I don’t know. I could teach you a couple of moves. Do you know MacNeill’s Limb Severer?”
“Whose limb did he sever with that?”
“His own, actually.”
Emmie eyed Finn for a moment, then gave him a poke in the shoulder. “I told you, don’t try and scam this city girl.”
She moved to the first door and turned the handle. Finn followed her. “But it’s a real move, I swear.”
Behind them, Niall Blacktongue looked down from his portrait, head bowed, eyes refusing to meet anyone who might look at him. Instead, fixed in crusted paint, he gazed downward, toward a red table at his side, on which were scattered a few items: a compass, a feather in an ink pot, a magnifying glass, some coins, a couple of unnamed books, and a small square mirror propped upright.
And in the mirror was the reflection of a piece of paper, no bigger than a thumbnail yet bright and detailed, at the center of which was painted a tiny but very distinguishable X.
About the Author
Photo by Roisin Macken-Price
SHANE HEGARTY was born and raised
in Skerries, Ireland, where he now lives with his wife and four children but no pets since an unfortunate incident with the family goldfish. He is a journalist with the Irish Times, and this is his first novel.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Credits
Cover art © 2015 by James de la Rue
Copyright
DARKMOUTH #1: THE LEGENDS BEGIN. Copyright © 2015 by Shane Hegarty. Illustrations copyright © 2015 by James de la Rue. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hegarty, Shane.
The Legends begin / Shane Hegarty. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Darkmouth ; book 1)
Summary: “Darkmouth is the only village in the world where the fierce magical creatures known as Legends still attack—and it’s up to twelve-year-old Finn, the worst Legend Hunter in Darkmouth’s history, to uphold his family’s legacy and save his hometown”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-231125-2 (hardcover)
Darkmouth Page 21