by Simon Kewin
No reply came. Dread seeped through her. Maybe the possession magic, or whatever it was the girl had worked back in Manchester, didn't survive the leap between the worlds. Maybe Cait really was on her own.
She tried again, yearning for the girl's presence. That cool mountain pool. This time there was a stir, like brittle leaves drifting in a breeze. The girl was there. Distant, but definitely there. Relief flooded through Cait.
Can you hear me? she said.
The reply was faint when it came, like a winter wind shaped to form words. I can hear you. But everything feels so strange. Where are we?
We've left our world. We jumped through a gateway to Angere.
The land of the masters? The horrors? Say it's not true. Why would you do such a thing?
I'm sorry. We had no choice. It was the only way to defeat them.
It's no way. You will never defeat them. Not like this. They always win, always… She sounded fainter and fainter, as if fading there and then.
No! said Cait. Don't go. Don't give up. I need you. You're the only one here that can help me. Promise me you won't go.
There was a pause, a long moment that stretched. Then, finally, came the reply. I won't give up on you. For better or worse. But I won't be enough. We won't be enough to defeat them. You know that?
“Yes,” replied Cait, speaking out loud. “Yes, I know that.”
Ran glanced at her with a puzzled look on his face then returned to scanning their surroundings. But the girl was right. They wouldn't be enough. They could only try. What else could they do?
“We should get away from here,” she called out to Nox and Ran. “They'll find us easily.”
“No hurry,” said Nox, grinning as if she was amusing. “We're a long way from the White City. Hundreds of miles. They probably think we're still somewhere in our world. I kept the details of the Iceland portal very secret.”
Anger swelled within her. “Yeah. Or maybe you want to wait here so your undain friends can come pick us up.”
Nox shook his head. “You're not making sense. Why would I do that?”
“Because if you could get back in their good books you would. I bet you'd jump at the chance if they offered it.”
Nox regarded her thoughtfully. “You know what, Cait? Perhaps I would. But that's not going to happen. I've failed them and I've betrayed them. Trust me, Menhroth is not the forgiving type. He doesn't do grey areas. And ironic as it is, my only hope for revenge lies with a few witches and their ridiculous plan to get both halves of the book to Andar.”
Cait met his gaze. Maybe Nox did want revenge on the undain. But it was just as likely he wanted revenge on her. His fall was her fault. He wasn't going to forget about that.
“We have to head for the White City,” she said. “Find the other half of the Grimoire. And then somehow make it across the An.”
It sounded ridiculous as she spelled it out. How was any of it going to be possible? She didn't mention the thing that was uppermost in her mind: Danny. Would the undain take him to Angere? If they did, she had to rescue him as well. Another impossible task. They'd been an item for, what, one day before he'd been captured by an army of undead freaks. It was typical of her luck.
“We should work out where in Angere we are first,” said Nox.
“I thought you knew about the portal?” said Cait. “I thought you were all, like, I make it my business to know what's going on.”
“I knew about the gateway in our world, not this side. We should assess the situation, gather facts before deciding what to do. It could be weeks before they think to look for us out here.”
“No,” said Cait. “We have to move. They could be here at any moment.”
“I don't think so. I told you, I'm very good at keeping secrets.”
“I'm sure you are. But I don't think Danny is.”
“Danny?”
“Danny. Didn't you notice he wasn't with us? They took him in Manchester. We tried to rescue him, but we couldn't.” She stopped for a moment, fighting back tears. She had to get a grip on herself. “Don't you see? The undain have him and that means they'll soon know everything.”
Nox looked startled. This was clearly news to him. He really was cut off from Genera and everything that had happened recently. “That changes matters. We have to leave now.”
“Yeah. Like I said.”
Ran jumped to the ground, landing beside Cait with cat-like grace. He said a single word in his language, nodding toward a clump of trees that crowned a nearby hill.
“What did he say?” asked Cait. She needed to learn some of Ran's language. She hated being dependent on Nox to translate for her. Problem was, she wasn't much good at languages. She'd barely scraped a D in French.
“He said crows.”
“Crows?”
“Crows,” said Nox. “Look.”
Above the trees, a great flock of birds wheeled around in the dawn like a cloud of black smoke from some raging fire.
“They're rooks,” said Cait.
“What?”
“Rooks, not crows. Crows are solitary birds.” Her mother had explained it on one of their holidays. Strange the things that stuck in your mind. “And why are we even talking about it? You think there's time to do some bird watching?”
“Rooks or crows,” said Nox. “What matters is they might be looking for us.”
Cait turned back to the shifting cloud of black dots. One or two were peeling off from the flock, flying in different directions. Fanning out.
“Which way is the An?” asked Cait.
Nox studied the sky. “We're west of the river, so we need to head toward the rising sun. Which takes us directly past the crows.”
“Rooks.”
“Whatever.”
She longed to ask Ran what he thought they should do. His people were from here. Long ago, sure, but he might know something useful. She didn't know the words. And she didn't want to ask Nox to speak for her. She didn't trust Nox not to misrepresent her. In any case, she needed to seem like she knew what she was doing, even if she didn't have a clue.
The seeing stone. Maybe it would help. She had to do something.
“Wait here,” she instructed, trying to sound like she was used to giving people orders. It sounded ridiculous even to her. She marched out of the circle. Maybe they'd think she was working some terrible magic. Communing with the whatever-the-hell-it-was you communed with. When she was far enough away, making sure they couldn't see what she was doing, she squinted through her gran's glassy green stone at the rooks.
It was impossible to identify individual birds in the flock. They swooped and circled, and by the time she'd picked one out with her right eye, she'd lost it through the stone. She turned her attention to the lone birds. One flapped toward them, calling out with a grating caw. She eyed it through the stone. Its body glowed with a yellow light. It was natural; it was just a rook. It glided overhead, black plumage shining in the slanting rays of the sun, wings splayed wide into fingers. It didn't stop.
Another approached, this one much lower, flapping hard to stay in the air. It landed on one of the standing stones and regarded them with shiny eyes, head cocked as if trying to understand who or what they were. It, too, glowed with an inner light through the seeing-stone. She studied three other birds and each time it was the same.
“Come on,” she called to the others. “They're birds. They can't harm us. We'll head into those woods. At least we won't be out in the open. Then we'll decide what to do.”
She set off walking. Ran immediately caught up with her and raced on ahead.
Nox shouted to her. “Are you sure?” He sounded doubtful, like she couldn't possibly know what she was talking about. She ignored him. After a moment she heard him muttering to himself and setting off to follow them up the hillside.
The ground sloped more steeply as they ascended. They walked in shadows, the sun not yet high enough to illuminate this flank of the valley. Cait said nothing. She needed to try and thin
k of a plan. She'd assumed her mother would know what to do when they got there, but now it was up to her. Which was ridiculous. She didn't have a clue where to start.
She tried again and again to see a way to defeat the undain, save the world. Save the worlds. But all she could think about was Danny. What was happening to him? What were they putting him through? He'd try and be brave. Crack stupid jokes instead of telling them what he knew. They'd get everything from him sooner or later.
Half-way up the slope, she stopped to catch her breath. A stitch already pulled at her side. That wasn't good. There were hundreds of miles to cover. Nox reached her and stopped. He was breathing hard as well, which made her feel a little better. Ran, of course, looked ready to race up the hill.
“How do you know the birds aren't undain?” Nox asked once he could talk.
Cait shrugged. “I just do.”
“Some spell?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, be careful. If they can detect the use of magic you'll alert them to us.”
“I know what I'm doing.”
“I hope so,” said Nox.
So did she. She changed the subject. “So the sun rises in the same direction in this world?”
Nox nodded. “Angere is different from our world, but in some ways it's very similar.”
“So the seasons? Back home it's the end of the summer.”
“It's a month or so later here, but the worlds stay more or less in sync. That's why the portals work. So I was told.”
She nodded as if that was what she'd suspected, and looked away, up to the trees. The rooks still thronged the branches. The leaves up there were definitely turning to yellows and reds. The grass beneath her feet was crisp with overnight frost. How long before the snow came? Time was short. She set off walking again.
She'd thought vaguely the frozen river would be a way to reach Andar. But, no. That was no good, was it? By then it would be too late. If they could walk across the ice so could the undain, and Andar would already be lost. Everything would be lost. Somehow, they had to find another way. And do so before winter struck.
She was still thinking these troubled thoughts when she came upon the dead rook. Or maybe it was a crow. She nearly trod on it. She stifled a shriek of horror. The ruined carcass lay on the ground beside a rock as if it had simply fallen off its perch. It was little more than fine white bones and sinews held together with tatters of flesh and feathers. Its head was just a skull. It moved and, for a moment, she thought it was alive, impossibly alive. But it was only flies, fat and purple, crawling through it. The bird was long-dead. Tiny white maggots wriggled and writhed through its eye-socket. The cloying smell of decay filled her nose.
She recalled a holiday, a day when she and her mother had come across a dead sheep in a field, little more than a bag of wool stretched over a gaping frame of bones, buzzing with fat flies. The sight of it had filled her with shivering horror. But her mother had pulled her away, held her close, told her it was OK. It couldn't harm her. That was how it went. Life and death. She wished her mother was there now to repeat her words. She glanced at Ran, watching her with his wary eyes. No comfort there. She sighed, stepped around the dead bird, and carried on up the slope, heading for the safety of the trees.
The ground rose more steeply the higher they climbed, and it took another twenty minutes to reach the tree line. Darkness lingered under the eaves of the great branches as if reluctant to yield to the daylight. The cacophony of the rooks' calls filled the air. Cait turned to look the way they'd come. The standing stones were unexpectedly distant, a perfect circle in the centre of the valley, like the pupil of an eye. Nox toiled up the hill toward her, his chest heaving. They were both going to have trouble crossing Angere, even without the undain pursuing them. Only Ran was unaffected by the effort of the climb. He stared into the trees in case some unseen danger lurked within.
A rook flapped awkwardly into the sky from down the slope. It was injured; it climbed as if one of its wings was damaged. She watched it, wondering how it had hurt itself. How they hadn't noticed it. It must have been feeding on some carrion. Then, for the briefest moment as it laboured and flapped, she saw daylight through its body. Alarm pounded within her. She thought of the dead bird on the ground, the maggots swarming in its broken skull. The eye-socket staring up at her.
Was it the same bird? The broken rook struggled into the sky, wings ragged. It shed feathers on each flap, as if it was only the memory of how to fly that kept it in the air. A rasping croak came from it. She thought it would fly east, toward the White City, but instead it jerked away from them, heading down the valley.
Nox arrived. “What is it? What have you seen?” He peered around in clear alarm.
Should she tell him? Maybe she'd imagined that glimpse of light through the rook's body. It had been such an insane few days. “It's nothing. Just … thinking. I'm in another world. I mean, it's amazing isn't it?”
“Yeah,” said Nox, pushing past her for the cover of the trees. “Amazing.”
When he'd gone she lifted the stone to her eye. But the bird was only a speck of black, too far away for her to tell if it was natural or not. It flew underneath the stone arch and disappeared from sight. She waited for it to emerge from the other side, hoping to discern some clue about what it was doing, where it was going. But there was no sign of it.
Frowning, she turned to follow Nox into the trees.
2. A Nation of Slaves
An hour later, they sat on the other side of the hilltop copse, eating the supplies they'd brought with them from Dublin: dry biscuits and some sickly, sugary cake that Cait could only nibble at. They sipped at water from plastic bottles. They didn't have enough of everything to get them very far; some time soon they'd need fresh supplies.
Loose boulders lay scattered around, half-buried in the ground, as if someone had attempted to erect a building long ago but it had fallen into ruin. They sat on them, each alone with their thoughts. The rooks racketed in the treetops, but their calls were less harsh. It sounded more like they were chortling with laughter. A wind had come up, gusting strongly enough to send the branches swaying and lashing. Autumn leaves – lime-green, blood-red, honey-gold – fell around them, gliding to the ground like dying butterflies.
Angere lay stretched out before them, flooded with white sunlight. Nox glugged back water and handed her the bottle. “So, does Angere surprise you?”
“A little,” Cait replied, not looking at him. In truth, it surprised her a lot. It wasn't what she'd expected at all. She'd imagined a scarred, ruined landscape: grim metal buildings, raging fires and the air heavy with smoke. But Angere was beautiful, there was no other word for it. It looked more like a vast garden than a wilderness. A carefully tended patchwork of lawns and avenues and meadows stretching in all directions. Even this late in the year, swathes of colourful flowers were everywhere. The air was thick with their heady scents.
Dotting the landscape were shining white houses: palaces with towers and domes and steeples. They looked like the stately homes her mother dragged her to on weekend trips to the country. But those had been old and crumbling, their oak-panelled corridors carpeted with fading rugs, their walls hung with the blackened portraits of stern former owners. These houses sparkled in the light of the sun, their white stones glowing.
“Are you sure this isn't Andar?” she said. “Maybe we ended up on the other side of the An by mistake.”
“This is Angere,” said Nox. “Things aren't always as they seem here.”
“So you know this area?”
“No. I've only ever visited the White City. Never this far west.”
She shaded her eyes as she gazed across the landscape. One or two other hills rose from the plain, also crowned by copses. Upon one she discerned another of the stone archways like that in the valley. This rose above the trees like the legs and body of some vast beast. Definitely not a bridge, then.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing at the distant hill. �
��Something to do with the undain?”
“No, the arches predate the undain. The dragonriders built them, scattered them over the land. No idea why; they don't do anything except slowly crumble away into dust. Maybe Ran knows what they were for.”
Between the hills there was only open countryside. She'd hoped for dense forests, but there was little cover in the wide, rolling landscape.
“I don't see how we're going to get to the An,” she said.
Nox shrugged. “Perhaps we shouldn't try. Perhaps we should seek help in one of those palaces.”
“That's a mad idea.”
“Coming here was a mad idea, Cait. Trying to defeat the undain is a mad idea. The truth is we don't have much chance either way. We're exposed out here and we need help.”
“From the undain. Right.” It made no sense. Their only hope was to avoid being detected, however unlikely that was. “If they spot us they'll throw us into their dungeons or eat us alive or something.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He held up his right hand to show her the gold ring he wore. “Do you know what this is?”
It looked expensive. Probably not the sort of thing you bought in Bling Thing. She shrugged. “Just a ring.”
“I was given this by Menhroth himself when he made me a Baron of the Undying Land three years ago. Anyone here would recognize it and know its meaning. Unless they were an earl or a duke or a lord, they would be duty-bound to do what I tell them. That's the way it works here. We could go and demand food and shelter and whatever help we need.”
“You're not one of them. You're not an undain.”
“That doesn't matter. They do what they're told by those higher up. This society is basically feudal. Damn good system if you ask me.”
“But even if they were to accept you, which seems pretty unlikely, what about me and Ran?”
He'd clearly been thinking about this. Making plans. “You at least are OK, Cait. Children only go through the Ritual of the Seven Ascensions when they reach seventeen. It wouldn't be odd for you to be … normal.”