We Will All Go Down Together

by We Will All Go Down Together (v5. 0) (epub)

  She leaned in over the back of the couch, bonelessly, and draped both her arms around his crepey neck, hands twining to form a sort of loose pectoral—a gesture both comforting and off-putting, when you saw how her knuckles bent like tentacles.

  “If you give them the sigil,” Ygerna Sidderstane murmured, “then you’ll be defenceless. Against . . . everything.”

  Gaheris didn’t stir, though. Not even when her next earlobe-lick drew blood.

  “That’s as may be,” he said. “Will you try to stop me?”

  “Not I, brother.”

  “Thought as much.”

  With that, he rummaged inside his jacket and drew out what seemed to be a plain-made, age-blackened iron horseshoe. Ygerna, more Fae than not, at this point, flinched back from its cold, antithetical halo, letting her grip slip—a circumstance Gaheris exploited by leaning forward himself, swifter than Carra would have given him credit for, and slipping it into Jude’s outstretched fingers.

  “Give that to Miss Devize, please,” he told him. “It’s a key of sorts—a bit of a battering ram, when used correctly. If she’s human enough to hold it, I believe it’ll fit her purposes.”

  Jude shrugged and offered it to Carra. For just one split second, she found herself shakily unable to recall the last time she’d touched anything pure iron . . . but reached out, nonetheless, braced for pain. Not until she felt it fit her hand, hard and cool and heavy, did she truly relax.

  “There you go,” she heard herself say, strangely triumphant. To which Gaheris nodded, answering: “There you do. So . . . that said, perhaps you should collect all these various oriental gentlemen of yours and get to it.”

  Jude rose, pulling Carra to her feet; Sy and Kim looked at each other, then did the same. “I’m Mohawk, actually,” Sy pointed out to Gaheris, now drooping as though exhausted, who waved him feebly away.

  “Asshole,” Kim muttered.

  Glancing back over her shoulder, Carra couldn’t help noticing that, the farther away the horseshoe travelled, the closer Ygerna drew—eventually plumping wetly down on the couch itself to lay her head in Gaheris’ lap, like some radioactive, uncomfortably moist house cat.

  “Be careful of something else,” Gaheris called after them, listlessly. “Another of the Three Betrayed, Euwphaim Glouwer—she also seeks a way inside.”

  Sy, frowning: “Jo Glouwer, you mean. The medium.”

  “No, I mean Euwphaim. She found a way here too, in 1968. We helped her.”

  “What?”

  “He’s right, you know,” Ygerna called out, staring up at Gaheris, lidless eyes enrapt. “She is here, though perhaps not in body. I recognize her smell.”

  “Follow the seams,” Gaheris added, indistinctly, his own eyes drifting closed. “They’ll take you . . . where you need to be. Do not falter. . . .”

  Carra felt a stab of sympathy mixed with dread as Ygerna reached up, cupping her twin’s jaw. Thank you, she projected before they were out of reach. You didn’t have to—and what will happen to you, now? The way she looks at you . . .

  But the old man simply shook his head. She loves me, that’s all, he thought, in turn. We only have each other, you see. And I owe her.

  For what?

  My sin. The sin of offering her hope when there was none.

  Carra cast her mind out further, into the night. Felt that same hum start up again, beneath her feet, and finally realized its cause: it must surely be the Druirs’ infamous Stane itself, grown out beyond the brugh into fine tendrils, filaments, seams fit for mining, underlying the village like roots, every one of them a road leading back to their trunk, their seed, their source.

  “What now?” Carra heard Ygerna ask, softly, her clawed nail tracing along Gaheris’s jugular.

  And: “You tell me, sis,” he replied, eyes still shut.

  A heartbeat eked by while the awful light she cast ebbed and flowed with her breath. Until:

  “. . . I don’t know,” she said, finally, sounding equally tired and sorrowful.

  And hungry.

  The horseshoe hung heavy in Carra’s inside pocket, knocking against her heart. “Expect a rise in weaponized glamour,” Jude told her out the side of his mouth, as they moved, quick as possible, away from Sidderstane Cottage.

  “Psychological warfare,” she explained to Sy and Kim. “You’re going to start to see things, hear things . . . ignore them. They’re not real. Just keep to the path.”

  Kim: “What damn path?”

  “Keep near me, is what I meant. You can do that, right?”

  Soon, the horseshoe at her breast and the seams beneath her feet became twin anchors of solidity in an ever-thinning world. Walking the Stane’s conduit took them a different way back than the one they’d come, veering steadily away from the Lake; the path she felt out brought them scrambling over rises, squeezing between fallen trunks, twisting away from branches that seemed to clutch or strike at them.

  Movement flickered constantly in the corners of Carra’s eyes: blossoms swivelling like fly-traps sensing prey, rocks easing slyly closer, poised to turn an unwary ankle. Clenching her jaw, she trudged on, Sy’s hand on her shoulder; his touch was warm, so at least she had that to cling to.

  “Galit!” With a yell, Kim lunged past them, and had almost disappeared before Jude caught him, hauling him back. “Get off me, you fucker—it’s her! Galit—!”

  Carra yanked the horseshoe out and slapped it against Kim’s side; Kim cried out, then slumped. She saw the face peeking out between the trees too, now—dark-haired and pale, lovely as some pre-Raphaelite model, but with its glint of mischief twisted here into sadism, malice, and contempt.

  It spat at Kim, hissing—“Who asked you to come? You really thought I’d want your help? Just run, Josh. Run now, while you still can—”

  Here, Carra grabbed Kim’s hand, closing his fingers ’round the horseshoe and thrusting it forward in best Peter Cushing style. The Galit-face went out, mid-syllable.

  Kim made a sound that fell somewhere between gasp and sob, then swore so fluently—in three different languages, no less—that Jude gave him a one-person standing ovation.

  “That’s more like it,” he said. “Ai-yaaah, that glamour! Gets you every time.”

  Carra could feel watchers on every side, now. The bluebells’ distant toll intensified, taking on a sense-skipping echo that carried the Clarke’s stink of disinfectant, drugs, and oiled metal. At one point, Carra saw a heavyset Native man striding along beside them, mouth moving like he was bellowing in rage; Sy’s hand grew painfully tight on her shoulder as he stared fixedly ahead, jawline taut.

  Keep going, she tried to send his way. Just keep on going.

  Two steps past an awkward kink in the path, they suddenly realized they’d lost Jude, and came back to find him down on hands and knees, draped in blackness—half-smothered by it, as if a massive stage curtain had fallen on top of him, twining itself tight ’round wrists and ankles. In this case, even the horseshoe was of little use. It wasn’t until a fourth figure joined their efforts—a certain black silhouette, which Carra thought maybe she wasn’t the only one to notice, this time ’round—that they finally managed to free him. Jude shrugged off their hands as they helped him up, but they could all feel him shivering.

  The path wound on into sections ever darker, deeper, ever more aware and hostile. The sheer weight of glamour was stifling; the air stank with it, a choking mix of pine resin, leaf mould, ozone, and honey that made every step burn. Her own blithe words came back to her: Won’t know ’til we get there. Will we?

  And now they were here, Christ help her. A place where they’d been outmatched from long before the very beginning.

  And it’s all your fault, too, another voice said from deep inside. You could have foreseen it, Carraclough, if you’d really wanted to look. What in God’s name made you think a deranged, washed-up medium stood any chance at all against what dw
ells here?

  Like Jude before her, Carra found herself leaning over, hands on knees, gasping for oxygen. A stitch spiked through her side. Knowing the only thing left was to run, fast and as far as she could in the other direction, the moment she got her breath back. . . .

  Yes, dear. Run.

  (No, no, I know that voice. I know you.)

  Lifting her head seemed to take all the strength she had. The path was gone, her hands empty—she’d dropped the horseshoe somehow, no idea where. Only blackness, the forest smell, dirt. And Gala.

  Perhaps a stride or so on, her (dead) mother shook her head, long braid swaying, that mix of exasperation and disappointment in her voice, note perfect. “Oh, Carra,” she reproved. “This is what you get when you treat your talent like a toy. What have I always said? ‘Nothing for nothing—”

  “‘—and not an ounce more,’” whispered Carra.

  Wearing the same dress she’d died in, Gala circled her, arms folded. “Yes. Well, lay that by: we can’t do anything for the others, now—these friends of yours. These people you think are your friends. . . .”

  (Sy kneeling beside her, folding her close, but she couldn’t feel him. Everything at once, and nothing; an all-over wound, cancelling itself out. Everything, all the time.)

  (Haven’t you noticed I have no skin?)

  “The local . . . landlords have a strict policy about trespassers,” Gala went on. “But if you were to leave, immediately, I think I could persuade them to look the other way. We’re family, after all—distantly.” Gala’s sudden smile was as beautiful as ever. Tears blurred Carra’s eyes. “So please, darling, let me help you, one last time. And then . . . it’ll all . . . go. . . .”

  (away)

  But: no.

  “No.”

  Carra’s hands fisted, damp soil under her fingernails. She forced herself upright.

  Made herself say, with effort—“I was the one, the helper. Not you. I . . . cleaned up after your—her messes. Looked after her. My mother, Gala, who fucked up in, Christ, so many ways—”

  Made me a medium

  Made me her meal ticket

  Made money off me, and threw it away with both hands

  Left me alone, even when she was there

  Both fists came up, pressed hard against her breastbone, the hidden horseshoe—knocked once, twice, hard enough to bruise.

  Grinding out, through clenched teeth—“Took the bag off my face, though. Took me to the Clarke, that first time. Let me come back, again and again. . . .”

  Her glasses fogging, blowing that false face up like a lit balloon, a wavering thing full of nothing but air. Pressing harder, ’til she felt it start to give.

  “My mother, who you are not. Because my mother, for all her faults, would never tell me to leave my friends behind.”

  Pounding in her ears, her head; blurry streaks of light, crackling everywhere. Carra’s skin tingled.

  She flung both fists out, horseshoe magically found gripped in her left, and shrieked: “Now I see you, free and clear, with both my open eyes! So SHOW US WHO YOU REALLY ARE!”

  A whipcrack of shimmering force burst out in all directions, unnatural dark peeling away, stars and moon and shadow suddenly all back in their proper places. The four of them stood on a hillside, slope stretching back towards the Dourvale Shore, with every stone shape once found crowding those streets gathered in a silent crowd around them. At the very top, a single stone thrust skyward, like some black aerial. From its base, wavery spiral lines curved down around the hill, branching and rebranching in fractal whorls that converged, in turn, on a single circle, perhaps a yard across, at Carra’s feet.

  Without a second’s pause, she threw the horseshoe down with a muffled thump, so hard it almost bounced.

  “It is Galit Michaels I knock for,” Carra announced as the others watched—Jude, Kim, Sy. The silent stones. She felt the words thrum up through her, needing only to open her mouth and let them out. “This the key, this the place; I bear your blood and have kept your rules. It is she I knock for, therefore—and you who must open, without delay.”

  And: Aye, something replied, far underground. So ’tis. . . .

  (cousin)

  Beneath them, the earth shifted, humping up. Carra moved back to let it, eyes held steady on the horseshoe’s iron shape, around which the hill—the long-sought Dourvale brugh itself—was beginning to smoke and scorch and crack, wounded by its touch, its very presence. The grass folded up like a lip, flipped back like a lid, extruding sickness: black loam, mulch of bone fragments and rotted tubers, tiny worms a-glow with their own pale light. And then, at the last . . . a door.

  Two slabs of Stane, ill-laid, overlapping like British teeth. They groaned open slowly, spraying earth to either side, to let out the person—the people—

  (but not people, not really)

  (not entirely)

  —who stood behind, smiling, just waiting to be revealed.

  In the middle, a woman, face obscured by a fall of lank roan-red hair. To one side, a darkly handsome man with too-blue eyes, whose long-lashed lids shut upwards; to the other, a creature larger than both, stooped and cramped under the lintel, his noble head deformed by a low-slung jaw and two up-thrust canines long as tusks, forever furling his mouth like a hound’s. And all of them likewise earth-stinking, borne on an outwards wave of cold, of apple-smell and rot. All of them ruffed and gowned, like extras from some eternally ongoing production of Macbeth playing roughly six feet under, every night for the last hundred years.

  “Waaah, ha wo de bang,” Carra heard Jude mutter from behind her. The handsome man raised an eyebrow, smirking.

  “I see thee too, guid our coz,” the giant rumbled in Carra’s direction, lisping slightly. “Th’art somewhat o’ my Quire’s doing, I wit, as well as the Devize’s get. And thus do I greet thee for it fondly, wishing ye travellèd here for other purposes.”

  From the handsome man, a hoot. “What, will ye go down on ane knee t’her too, Uncle? She, who makes hersel’ our enemy?”

  “Shut thy mouth, nephew.”

  “Dinna warn my son tae silence, Minion Druir,” the woman said, unmoving. “For though ye hold place as heir, ne’er forget, I am yuir elder.”

  Minion, Carra thought, numbly. With Saracen, over there. And this must be—Enzemblance.

  Now, it was the woman’s turn to smile.

  “Aye,” she repeated. “And you Carraclough Devize, Jonet’s legacy: very well. Ye have knocked for Galit and her boy besides, both of ’em mine tae give or keep, according tae my druthers. Which is why, as ye no doubt ken full well, ’tis I who answer.”

  Carra gulped.

  “Yes,” she said. “So let’s . . . talk about that, reach some sort of agreement before anybody else gets hurt. Shall we?”

  Her “cousin’s” smile stretched to her back-teeth, and Carra saw there was a jagged thread of scar tissue running from ear to ear beneath her jaw, dimpling with pressure. Enzemblance Druir drew herself higher, hands out-spread, to show the length of their claws. Saying, as she did:

  “I think not.”

  “Your family, huh?” Judy Kiss asked, watching alongside Roke and Jo from the woods’ further edge, as the hill opened up to birth monsters. To which Roke replied: “Some of my family.”

  “Aye,” Jo agreed, “and none of mine. Yet, seeing this is what we came for, we should go down before anyone gets hurt.”

  “She’s got a point,” Judy said. “That woman with the hair—”

  “Enzemblance.”

  “Gesundheit.” Roke snorted, unamused. “She seems dangerous, is all. ’Specially to Little Miss Lost-in-the-Woods with the braids and the specs. . . .”

  “Carraclough Devize, that is,” Jo put in.

  “Really?” Judy squinted and grinned. “Yeah, it is her. I brushed by her in the street once, about a year after Exorcism Day, and I guess she didn’t
like whatever she could smell on me very much, ’cause next thing I knew, she was puking all over my shoes.”

  “Great story, honey,” Roke shot back. “Look, nice as I’m sure it’d be to do the heroic thing, this is actually perfect for our purposes. A ready-made distraction. As long as Enzemblance and company are dealing with Miss Devize and hers, I can get down there without being seen, slip ’round the back, pound this sucker in before anyone notices me. . . .”

  At this, Judy stood up straight, putting her roughly chest-height to Roke, if that—yet when she jammed her finger at him, he had to stop himself from recoiling.

  “Wait just a minute. Are you scared of her?”

  “Who?”

  “Sneeze-name woman.”

  Roke squared his shoulders, grasping for dignity. “Not quite shitless, but yes, I rather am. Disappointed?”

  “Kind of depends on what you do next, I guess,” Judy replied, cocking her head to one side, shadow of Mister Nobody passing behind her face, like a figure behind a scrim.

  This wastes time, Euwphaim said, inside Jo’s skull. The Roke’s a sheep-heart, same as all priests. Yet do we proceed, Glauce’s girl will soon find she canna stand against us.

  More than just her down there, from what I see, Davina commented. Best plan to leave ’em to it and get the hell out now, before the shooting really starts.

  Euwphaim huffed. Do ye think I came all this way for nothing, ye great dead tribade? I’ll pinch yuir soul t’a point and snuff it, an ye try tae hinder me further!

  Yeah? Bring it, Gramma!

  With a mental wrench, Jo managed to focus instead on the standoff still happening less than ten yards away. Neither Fae nor humans involved seemed aware of anything but each other . . . but as she bent her gift further, she saw lines writhe across the reddening nape of Carra Devize’s neck and shoulders, scars which curled and slid and knotted together, finally forming letters that said—

  STOP

  BLOODY

  LOOKING

  Aye, indeed! Dinna look! Euwphaim’s command struck hard, and Jo whipped automatically away as Judy and Roke also slapped hands to eyes, both no stranger to things too dangerous to look upon. ’Tis seeing the Fair Folk crave, making mortal eyes their mirrors, for that they have nae true semblance. Look on ’em too keen, therefore, and they’ll surely ken that we—