Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3)

by Manners, Harry

  Aggie had been right: when the grips of dementia had been at their highest, he looked so very old.

  He had stood before innumerable crowds through the decades and wielded them like clay upon a potter’s table. Now, he felt himself shaking. He gripped the handle with such vehemence that he thought he might tear it from its fixings. Still they gabbled, scrabbling weakly to their feet.

  They come for me. The Alexander Cain, he thought with a note of disgust. The messiah.

  He licked his lips and cleared his throat. His voice had grown weak and broken—probably just from the wine, but it struck another note of fear in him nonetheless. “What do you want?”

  A unified expression of confusion rippled through the crowd.

  “We come for you,” said the closest of the men. “We’ve come to stand by you.”

  “Why?” He sensed the harshness in his voice but failed to filter it out.

  The confused expressions intensified.

  Alexander wobbled on his feet as he released the doorknob and stepped onto the front step, chagrined to realise the wine’s fog remained. “You’ve come to hear me? Hear my plan?”

  The confusion lessened some. A few expressions of unfettered hope blossomed like flowers amidst the carpet of vapid attentiveness.

  “How far have you come?” Alexander didn’t want to know the answer, couldn’t bear to hear that they might have wandered any more than a mile or two.

  Please, let them be from the next town over.

  There was no such mercy.

  Cries of Lincolnshire, Nottingham, Oxford, and Southampton filled the air. Some even claimed to hail from so far north as Leeds. He looked around at them helplessly and spread his arms. “Why?”

  People have been coming from as far and farther for years, before any of this was going on, said that self-same sneering voice in his head. Now that the shit’s hitting the fan, how can you blame them?

  But he wouldn’t be stopped. There was no solace in reason.

  “You think that you can just pour from the forest like sheep and I’ll take you into my arms and show you the light?”

  They bunched together as though for communal safety. To see the bare, unflinching admission in the eyes of some that what he spoke of was exactly what they hoped for almost cut him to ribbons.

  “Please, sir.”

  Alexander turned to a man in the second row, a broomstick of a figure, a nervous hunchback who angled his head to one side constantly as though afraid of being beaten for speaking out. The left side of his face was so bruised and swollen that Alexander wondered how he spoke at all.

  “Please, Mr Cain. We… You must understand. We have nowhere else to go. They burned… everything.”

  Alexander hesitated a moment. “Anywhere is better than here, trust me.” He raised his voice and spoke to the crowd once more. “I’m not what you think. I’m just another fool who forgot what was really important.”

  The man panicked, so much so that he took a step from the crowd; an act that seemed to terrify him, but he did so through apparent duty. “Please, don’t!”

  Alexander rounded on him. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t speak like that to them. Please don’t. They need this. We all do.”

  “I can’t help you. I really can’t.”

  “I know,” the man said, faltering then gathering himself as though afraid he would never speak again if he stopped now. “I don’t reckon anything can stop what’s coming. But we’ve lost everything. Most lost the last of their families on the way here.”

  “Then you should have stayed where you were.”

  The man’s face paled. “You have no idea what you’re saying,” he muttered. “You haven’t seen what we have.”

  “No, I haven’t. That’s why you shouldn’t be here. I’m not going to save you.”

  The man gripped Alexander’s sleeve. His brow twitched as though electrified. “Please, just let us stay. We want nothing from you.”

  Alexander paused, looking down at the man’s hand upon his sleeve. So long had it been since a stranger had touched him like that. Nobody had dared. He had been no mere mortal in the height of his power, after all. Now, the man’s grip upon him had all the fierceness of one who had no intention of letting go.

  “We’re… we’re the ones they didn’t even bother to kill. If you send us away, we’ll die out there.”

  Alexander looked over the homogeneous sheeplike gazes, tired and shocked into stupor, and knew them anew: the dregs left behind by James’s army. These were those placid and infirmed or benign; exactly the people who always lost the most when egos grew too large, and the world’s balance of power shifted.

  These are the ones I should have protected. Instead, they’re the ones I took the most from. The worst part of it is that they’re looking at me like I’m the good guy in all this, like I had their backs while the Bad Guys slaughtered their parents and children. The truth is… nobody would have had to die if I hadn’t written them off like lines in a ledger.

  Something round lodged deep in his throat, so big and immovable he felt he might choke.

  “Please, just let us stay,” the man was saying, still clutching Alexander’s sleeve.

  Alexander wrenched himself free and stepped between the blankets and precious bundles of photographs, jewellery, and the myriad detritus of lives destroyed. The crowd parted like water around him, absorbing him into their bulk and reaching out to lay hands on him.

  Fingers brushed his skin, flinching at the contact, as though he might invest some mystical charge if they let their flesh linger.

  They’re dead no matter what they do, he thought.

  “Listen, listen to me,” he said, turning on the spot, drawing in their gaze. “All of you, listen. We don’t have space for you here. There is no food, there is no power. There is no shelter. The army that destroyed your homes is marching here as we speak, and there is nothing in between to stop them. If you stay here, you’ll just have to watch it happen all over again. I’m sorry, I truly am, but our time is done. We had a dream, but it was only that; a dream.” He stopped turning and pointed to the hills. “You have to go while you can.”

  A hundred blinking eyes, uncomprehending and deaf to his every word.

  “Believe me, I’m telling you the truth. You will die if you stay.”

  Still, the maddening stare of the docile flock.

  They can’t afford to think. They’ve had to turn it off. That’s why they came here; they’re all on autopilot.

  He gripped them one at a time, shaking each of them in turn. “You, you, and you. All of you. You have to go. Get out of here. Please, go!” He started pushing them, rushing through the crowd, staggering drunkenly between them, shoving shoulders and thrusting them in the direction of the fields and forests. “Get out of here, you fools! Save yourselves!”

  By the time he came to a stop, panting and yelling wordlessly, they still stood, unmoved. The expectancy had gone out of their gazes—it was clear his words had extinguished their last flickers of hope—but he realised that was exactly the worst thing that could have happened.

  Now they had nothing. Broken and beaten and lost, he saw a hundred faces birthing the beginnings of horror, of loss and fear. Any moment now, he knew, they would start screaming. And once the panic started spreading, there would be no wielding them. Somewhere in the crowd of hyperventilating, half-crazed glares, he caught sight of the bruised man who had stepped forth.

  The blackened side of his face remained immobile and bloated, the unwounded part reddened and glittering with tears. Slowly, he shook his head. Alexander saw into him, as though the man had decanted memories of their long trek into his head like water from a bucket. He might have kept them together as the threads of refugees wandered south, from myriad places set ablaze by the scourge. While the screams died out and the fires burned low, this man and others had kept the rest moving.

  Now they were here, and the messiah had thrown off his mask.

  The w
eight of a hundred lives freshly crushed came down over him, and Alexander realised he had done the one thing he had never thought he would do: he had taken a crowd willing to lay down and die for him and shattered its resolve in under a minute. He watched helplessly as they began sinking to their knees, lowering their heads or crying out to the skies, clutching their belongings and one another. He could only watch, disbelieving. A moment ago they had been in awe only to touch him; now he seemed not to exist at all, and they transported back to the moments of destruction and death that had sent them here.

  Then thunder. Everywhere, a calamitous roar that ripped the fug of woe and loss away and sent the entire flock jerking and screeching. Alexander crouched low on the balls of his feet by instinct and reached for a gun at his hip—a gun that wasn’t there. Cursing, he waited for death, suddenly certain the army had crept up on them while he spoke.

  I never got to see the others, never got to make it right.

  After all this time, this was how it ended. He was on the verge of closing his eyes and accepting his fate when the roar stopped as suddenly as it had started. Blinking, he stood, alone amongst all the others who now cowered at his feet, arms over their heads.

  Allison, Sarah, and Heather stood at the edge of his lawn, knee-deep in garden gnomes. Automatic rifles smoked in the late afternoon light.

  “City’s closed to outsiders,” Sarah called. There was nothing of the mousy librarian who had once worked beside Alexander in the city vaults. Her eyes were dead, shark eyes, round holes in her head that seemed at once to see every one of the refugees, and also none of them.

  “Sarah…” Alexander motioned helplessly. “What are you doing?”

  Sarah, to his surprise, ignored him. “All of you are trespassing on the lands of New Canterbury. We’re not taking refugees. All of you will take your things and leave now.”

  The crowd stood slowly, taking their hands from over their heads and staring wide-eyed. Some of them mouthed like fish out of water.

  “All of you, get out of here!” Allison yelled. “There’s nothing for you here.”

  As though to illustrate the point, Heather raised her rifle and fired a few more rounds into the air. The racket seemed to have trebled in volume since the first shots. The crowd burst into action, some sweeping up their things in a single scrabbling motion and others abandoning what they had altogether. They shuffled quickly away, looking fawningly over their shoulders all the way but going.

  Alexander was left alone in the epicentre of what remained: a few blankets muddied by footprints, stampeded bags of bread and biscuits, a few water bottles. He watched, aghast, until the newcomers had fled from sight, jumping the wall and shuffling as a single ragged mass down the cobbled street, heading for the hills. Then silence.

  “Thank you,” he said at last. He had to say it again, for his voice had abandoned him, and all that emerged the first time was an airless gasp.

  They nodded together and seemed to consider him.

  Alexander realised he was still swaying, despite his efforts to hold a firm footing. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I failed you all, again.”

  After an uncertain pause, they stepped forwards. The four of them met just beyond the semicircle of abandoned leavings.

  “They’ll live,” Sarah said.

  “Some of them, anyway. At least they have a chance, now,” Allie said.

  Alexander looked after the departed crowd, shaking his head. “I tried. I really thought I could convince them. The way they looked at me…” He turned to them. “How could you ever have followed a fool like me?”

  Heather reached for him and looked carefully into his eyes. Her lip twitched disapprovingly. “You’re drunk.”

  He blinked. “I sobered up.”

  A wry smile touched her lips. “It’s hard to convince people to do anything if you’ve been on the booze.”

  “I’m fine. It wasn’t that… I just… They didn’t listen to me.” He hung his head. “I couldn’t even save them. If you hadn’t…”

  Heather’s hand wrapped gently around the crook of his elbow. “They’re lost. They came because going somewhere was all they had left, not because they wanted anything from you. Come on, you’re in a state. You were out there a long time, wandering around the wilds. We need to get some food into you.”

  “I’m fine.” He tried to turn for home, but her grip on him was vice-like.

  “Don’t even think about it. I might have hung the scrubs up for good, but I can still give doctor’s orders.” She and Allie began pulling him towards the street.

  Sarah walked ahead of them, rifle swinging before her. “We need you strong,” she said.

  “You don’t need me. All I’ve done is bring death on you all.”

  “Don’t ever say that,” she said, turning to face him. Her gaze shattered his miserable cascade, and left him staring blankly. “Not ever. We’d have nothing if it wasn’t for you. The wars in the north would have spread. The Old World would be gone. We owe you everything.”

  Before he could retort, she had turned away and was walking again. He wanted to cry out to her, to scream: But at what cost? So many died by our hands that we’re no better than the lords of the North.

  But she kept her back resolutely to him, and he hadn’t the strength left to fight.

  “I don’t deserve any of you,” he said.

  Allie laid a kiss on his cheek. “None of us deserve anything,” she said, sounding so much older than he remembered. “All we can do is play the cards we’re dealt.”

  Alexander went with them as the sun began to sink below the horizon, and the people of New Canterbury hunkered down to what he suspected was their last night of peace. When the sun rose tomorrow, there might be nobody left to watch it set. The voice in his head spoke again, but this time it was a shade less invidious—perhaps, just perhaps, it lent a sliver of new strength.

  She’s right. If we’re going to stand a chance, we can’t afford to wallow. Now it’s only about surviving what’s coming.

  XII

  “Not this again!” Lucian barked.

  Norman was on the verge of asking what when his body was stuffed through a slot the size of a letterbox once more. He gritted his teeth, abandoning all hope of making sense of any of it, and waited for it to be over. A cacophony of colour, icicles on his skin, a moment when he, the others and the Frost itself whirled into a melted Dalian monstrosity. Then suddenly, he stood quite still beside the others.

  Light. Birds singing. Grass brushed his shins. It was late afternoon, the light already failing, casting orange and purple highlights over mossy rocks. A circle of rough cuboid-shaped rocks stood nearby, some standing and others laid horizontally atop the others; a ringed pattern that was eerily intentional.

  These are so much older than the Old World, he thought.

  “Stonehenge,” Richard said. “We’re on Salisbury Plain…” He mouthed wordlessly. “How is that possible? That’s hundreds of miles from Radden…”

  “You’re really going to ask what’s possible after the crap we just saw?” Lucian said.

  Richard kept shaking his head.

  “I don’t understand,” Norman said, turning in a circle, then settling on Fol and Billy. “How could we…?”

  “This is a special place, too,” Billy said. “It showed me things. It helped me find you.”

  Fol shrugged. “What she said. It’s as close as I can get you.”

  “That shaves five days off our travel time,” Norman said. A weight seemed to have lifted off his chest. Maybe, just maybe, they really could get home first.

  And what then? Wait to die with the rest.

  One step at a time, he told himself. We’ll figure something out.

  “We’re still a hundred miles from New Canterbury,” Robert said.

  “Maybe we can make London before sundown,” Richard said uncertainly.

  The look in Robert’s eye shut him up. “We’ll move through the night if we have to.”

 
Norman ran a quick calculation in his head. “We’re still two days’ walk from the city.”

  “Then we better get going.”

  They made to move, but Fol remained before the largest stone pillar. “This is as far as I can go,” he said.

  “What?” Billy said.

  “I can’t go. It’s against the rules.”

  “You can’t leave us,” Billy said. “You have to come.” She stamped her foot.

  “I’m sorry. But I can only show you the way. It’s”—a moment of pain flickered amidst Fol’s ever-shifting expression—“part of my punishment.”

  She glowered. “For what you did?”

  “For what I did.”

  “What did you do?” Norman said.

  Fol blinked solemnly. “Good luck. You’re going to need it.”

  Robert stepped forwards, not saying a word until he was face-to-face with the Jester. “I don’t know who you are, what you are… But, thank you.”

  Fol winked but didn’t take Robert’s hand. “Sure.”

  Billy still stood before Fol, her face red and downcast. “You really can’t go with us?” she muttered.

  He looked skywards and sighed. “I can’t go with you any more than I could stop the End, or save your father. We’re all bound to the laws of the Web, scuttling like bugs under the thumbs of powers so much bigger… All we can do is be brave.”

  “That’s what you’re doing, then? Dropping us off to go fight your battles for you?” Lucian said.

  Fol ignored him. “You’re going to have to be brave a little while longer.”

  Norman stepped forwards and placed his hands on Billy’s shoulder. He almost jumped when her fingers rose to clasp his. “She can stop the End coming again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a shot,” Richard said.

  “It’s all we’ve got.” Already Fol seemed farther away, as though he wasn’t quite there with them on the plain, but only an echo of a dream. “I’m sorry I can’t do more. I truly am.”

  “What do I do?” Billy cried, lurching from Norman’s grasp.