She caught herself humming along with the gentle ripple of their song, and stopped, self-conscious.
“You are welcome to join us, Sister,” Mazoe told Alex. “The more voices in the song, the more powerful its healing properties.”
“But I don’t know the words,” Alex said, feeling stupid.
“You do not need to. The healing is in your heart. It is who you are. So sing if the spirit moves you. It can only help.”
“I don’t know…” Alex said, not so much an objection as doubting her own usefulness. Even so, before too long she found herself humming the healing melody once more and didn’t stop herself this time.
And they drifted on, the boatman piloting them home.
Finally, what felt like forever later, Ellie Taylor broke her silence, pointing ahead to a looming dark shadow that turned the sky in the distance black. “What’s that?”
“Murias,” Sister Mazoe told her. “Where he dwells.”
“He?”
“Our lord. Time is broken here. It has been since before he died. Our song now is all that remains of him. His last gift.”
The tower solidified as the mists parted before them.
They heard the tolling of a bell guiding them in to shore.
A few minutes later the hull of the flat-bottomed boat ran aground and the boatman extinguished his light.
They were at journey’s end.
They had reached the other side.
A seventh white-veiled Sister waited for them on the sands.
“No mortal eyes have seen this place for centuries,” Mazoe told her, as she offered a hand to help Alex out of the boat. The water was icy cold around her calves.
The waiting woman bowed her head as they walked ashore with their burden.
She didn’t acknowledge their arrival, but rather turned and walked away. At her feet a flame flickered to life between the cracks in a small cairn of stones. Small cairns lined the path all the way up to the door of a crumbling tower. As the woman passed each one, a small fire flickered and blossomed in her wake. Alex couldn’t see how she was doing it, but the effect was uncomfortably funereal given their burden. The Sisters walked slowly up the winding path, once more giving full voice to their haunting song.
The mist thinned as they made the climb.
On either side, she saw apple trees. The skeletal limbs were overburdened with ripe fruit, each tree carrying enough to feed a small army. The red of the fruit was the only color in this otherwise gray landscape.
The tower, Murias, as Mazoe had named it, took shape before them. Alex craned her neck trying to see the very top. The ramparts were crumbling, the stones weathered and broken from the battering they’d taken from the elements over however long they’d stood. Roses grew up the side of the wall, as gray as the stones they clung to.
There were no windows in the first three stories, and no obvious door on this side of the tower.
The Sisters followed the well-lit path through the Orchard, beside a ruin that stood in the shadow of the tower itself. There was no roof, though parts of the beams and cross braces were still visible where they were anchored in the walls. They had turned black with age and calcified like stone. Trees had begun to grow inside the walls of the ruin. They walked slowly along the crumbling wall toward the door of the high tower. It was like something out of a twisted fairy tale, though there was no Rapunzel at the top to let down her hair.
The Sisters approached the door.
The woman who had greeted them on the shore walked to the head of the procession, and rapped on the door three times with her knuckles. The door opened, though they couldn’t see who stood behind it, and the procession filed slowly inside one by one.
Alex stood beside Julie. Ellie hung back a couple of steps behind them.
The mist had thinned, reduced now to little more than a ripple of white snakes curling around their ankles as they watched the Sisters’ devotions.
The music swelled, the acoustics of the tower changing it, and in it Alex realized she was hearing something that went beyond simple music—if something that stirred the heart could ever be termed simple—and tapped into something more elemental. As the notes swelled to fill the air, they became the stuff of the land itself; this was the Song of Albion.
The tune cut through her like a razor’s blade paring away her flesh to get all the way down to her soul.
And in that moment she found herself believing in something bigger for the first time in her life. Alex hesitated to use the word God, as in the last few days her understanding of what that word actually meant had changed substantially. What the song tapped into was creation.
She let it wash over her, and in that moment of absolute reverie, she caught a flicker of movement out in her peripheral vision: the emerald dog had returned.
“Do not let it concern you, Sister,” the old woman who had led the procession to the bier told her, reading her mind. She offered a gentle smile, her eyes filled with sadness. “The Cù Sìth will not find him within the keep of Murias.”
“How can you be sure? It’s out there. Somehow it followed us here.”
“It is drawn to death, but your brother is under our protection. You have my word. The hound will not claim him today.” Alex didn’t want to ask the question that was on her mind, put there in no small part by the hound’s persistence. The holy woman answered it anyway: “The Cù Sìth lingers because it smells death. Your brother is gravely ill. We cannot heal his damaged organs, but we can hold death at bay, weaving an enchantment around his body while it heals itself. The body needs time. Always. Time is the master.”
“But if you can’t heal him—”
“The song keeps his heart poised between one beat and the next, freezing time around him like a shell so that his body might recover from its wounds naturally. That is how I know he will live. Every moment we sing the song, he grows stronger. It will take time, but this is the place of immortals. Time is all that we have. He must remain here as long as it takes for his body to be restored. To move him is to risk letting the Cù Sìth in, for it will not leave these shores until it knows that it has been denied. That the dog lingers is a sign that death has yet to relinquish its grip on your brother, but we are stronger than death, Sister.” In the distance, the bells tolled on. They sounded like Josh’s pain being given voice. “It has no dominion in this place.”
44
The police lined up against them in a barricade of blue. Voices carried up and down the line, barking orders, demanding they stay firm. Cries of “Hold the line!” echoed back and forth.
Robin sat on a garden wall, smiling to himself at a job well done.
He peeled a scrap of cloth away from his tattered shirt, tearing it away from the seam and held it up in front of his face. He let go, but it did not fall. The material hung there in the air, held in place by nothing but the pent-up tension in the street, waiting to explode, waiting to fall.
His smile spread at the sight of Arawn loitering between the blossom trees along the grass verge of this perfect slice of suburbia.
This battleground wasn’t some broken-down cluster of paupers’ shacks; there was wealth here, and comfort. Or at least there had been. Now there was row upon row of riot police shaking in their shoes, as they stood toe-to-toe with the youth of London.
This was good.
This was better than good.
This was bloody fantastic.
Robin stretched, making himself comfortable for the coming attractions as the front line pulled down plastic visors and raised equally plastic shields before they squared up to the growing army of kids. It was ritualistic. The trappings of war hadn’t changed since he’d last walked this land. It didn’t matter if the swords and bows were gone; the rituals remained the same. It was a dance. It always had been. The tension in one side was matched by a youthful swagger from those opposite them. The blacktop of the street between them would become their battlefield, and somewhere in the middle, as they clashed, the bloo
d would spill back into the earth.
There was magic in blood. Nourishment. Life.
And that was just one part of the loss that had leached the magic out of Mother over the centuries. But all of that would change now. This was the first day of a new world. The buildings would fall. The houses would be burned down. The suffocating crap that put a layer between the land and her people would be torn up or pulled down until the factories and their pollutants were no more; the old reserves given the chance to replenish as the voracious appetites of man had been quelled once and for all. Everything they did now, all of the pain and suffering they inflicted, was in the name of a greater good. They were saving the land from the greatest threat it had ever faced—the scavengers and parasites that crawled all over it, stripping her bare with their insatiable hunger. They were fulfilling an ancient vow.
He looked at the kids. They really were his finest accomplishment. They were so ready to die, eager even to be battered down by the truncheons, Tasers, and tear gas of the riot police facing them simply because he had planted the seed in their minds when he had asked them if they were willing to answer the call.
The tension between both groups crackled in the air. The police were trying to kettle the protesters into bottlenecks of streets to minimize their efficacy, but the kids were having none of it. They struck back in the most basic of ways—hurling bricks and bottles at the lines of cops as they crept forward. The police kept their ranks, but it was a struggle as more and more kids piled into the protest. The crowd was easily five thousand strong, and barely held in check, and similar crowds were gathering all across the city, rising up to the call of the old god.
A bottle sailed over the heads of the police, trailing fire.
It shattered, bursting into flame where it splashed petrol all over the street.
They almost broke. They almost charged.
But somehow their discipline held.
Robin hopped down from his perch and walked between the ranks of the enemies, putting himself in the middle of the battlefield. He looked at the kids, one face after another, and saw their hunger for the coming fight, before he turned to the police and saw the dread in their eyes.
A boy broke rank and ran at the line of riot shields.
In response, the officers hammered their truncheons off the toughened plastic, raising hell.
There was no rhythm to the noise. It was noise for the sake of noise, aimed at putting fear into the minds of the kids facing them. Each booming sound promised broken bones and pain.
It wasn’t enough.
The police edged toward him; one step, another, encroaching on the middle ground.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Robin said, lightly enough, like they were all old friends here.
And, as they shuffled another step forward, not quite as one this time, green shoots began to creep up through the tarmac beneath their boots.
“Seriously,” he said, sweetly. “It’s not a good idea.”
But that didn’t stop them. Another step, and then another, close enough that they could almost reach out and touch him with the blunt end of their truncheons if they stepped forward into the swing.
The green shoots sprouted up, curling around their feet, tangling with their laces, and climbing higher, to get to the bare skin of their ankles, where they used their thorns to cut open the skin and burrow down. He watched as the green shoots spread like veins through the bodies of the officers, their screams drowned out by the cacophonous banging of truncheon on shield in the ranks of the men behind them.
The men were rooted to the spot.
They couldn’t step forward; couldn’t fall back.
The green shoots of vegetation wouldn’t let them.
Now that they had taken root in the men’s bodies their growth turned pernicious. Green veins became capillaries and arteries and—hidden by their uniforms—grew up through their groins into their guts, into their armpits, and down their arms so they thickened, clogging up the blood flow into their hands, and up their necks into their faces, growing with every heartbeat until there was nowhere left for them to go except out of the dead men who still swayed on their feet but couldn’t fall.
“I did warn you,” Robin said. “Okay, kids, they’re all yours. Have at it.”
He stepped aside to let the children go to war.
Arawn looked on approvingly.
45
It was snowing.
Josh held out a hand to catch a few of the flakes. They didn’t melt on his fingers. They settled, gray on his palm. It wasn’t snow. It was ash. Ash was falling from the sky. He looked around. He didn’t recognize this place. He couldn’t remember coming here, wherever here was. There were trees. All manner of trees. Oak, sycamore, silver birch, and a different kind of ash altogether.
There was something about the place.
It felt different.
He struggled to think of a word that best described it, but all he could fasten on was mystical. There was an air of the ancient about it.
He walked on into the falling ash.
The flakes reduced visibility to no more than a dozen feet or so in front of his face. He walked slowly on. He was lost. The last thing he remembered was the savagery of the knife going into his side again and again. Not even the pain, just the surprise of the attack and the brutality of the stabbing itself. Everything after that moment was vague, as if it, too, were damped down beneath blankets of ash. There were snatches of conversation, a few images—faces looking down at him—and above it, around it, beneath and inside it, the stench of burning flesh. But, beyond that: nothing.
And now he was here.
He wasn’t stupid. He knew what this place was.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a voice said.
He couldn’t see the speaker. The four words swirled around him in a rush. He tried to see through the patterns in the ash cloud. Slowly, up ahead, a shadow began to take shape. He recognized the ragged layers of coats and the magician’s scuffed boots as Damiola walked through the ash toward him.
“You’re dead,” he said.
“And you don’t look pleased to see me,” the old man joked. “Do I look that bad? I flattered myself to imagine I would return to the dashing figure of my youth when I passed.”
It had to be a trick. The enemy, somehow, playing with his mind, taunting him with what he wanted more in the world than anything else, a friendly face.
“I don’t—”
The magician held up his hand to cut off any pointless denials or arguments about the impossibility of their meeting here, like this.
“I’ve waited a long time to see you again, Josh. Walk with me.”
A long time? He’d been dead less than a couple of hours, Josh thought, but then remembered how strangely time itself seemed to flow around Glass Town, so why would it be any different in this place?
Josh joined the old man on one of the strangest walks of his lifetime. This was a desperately sad place, he realized. He could feel just how empty it was, devoid of the very essence of life. Of magic.
Damiola led him through trees and thickets of brambles along an old cobbled path toward a circle of standing stones.
“Just watch,” he said. In the distance, Josh saw a flickering line of lights, torches burning in the gray night. Cloaked men, dressed in the colors of the forest, walked in a funereal procession toward them, circling the stones once, twice, three times, before entering and gathering at the altar. Josh heard the rise and fall of their chant. They were offering prayer, but to whom he had no idea.
Before they could finish, soldiers stepped out of the trees on either side, their steel swords shining bright in the moonlight.
The slaughter was both brief and brutal; the druids had nothing to defend themselves with. They simply surrendered to the weapons of their attackers. As the last man fell, his murderer turned and seemed to look right at Josh; his gaze piercing whatever veil separated them across time and space. The man’s face was inhu
man: pale translucent skin; hollow cheekbones, both delicate and sharp; and eyes of the most chilling blue, the only glimpse of color in this entire place.
“What’s happening?”
“He is Aos Shee. And those druidic priests that fell before his blade would have been the death of the world,” Damiola said.
“How do you know this?”
“Because this is my heritage. I was born here. He is my father. Or was. In the same way that he was your father, and so many more of the children of the Isles. He is Manannan. A hero for the ages and that sword in his hand is Freagarthach, the legendary Aos Shee blade.”
“None of this looks heroic,” Josh said.
“Unless you know the nature of the dead men, and what they were plotting to do to the land,” the old man observed. “Perspective can change even the most brutal of actions. As I said, they were looking to bring about the death of this place. Their song was a chant of undoing. And this place, this circle of stones, like the fairy ring back in Coldfall Wood, is a weakness between the worlds, only what lies on the other side of this veil isn’t London, it is the home of the Bain Shee, the enemy of man. Had they breached the weakness here and formed a bridgehead, that would have given them an entire world to conquer, and a way into ours.
“It was a war, lad. A war like none we’ve ever seen. A war for the land itself, the Earth Mother, the spoils. On one side, there was Macha and the Aos Shee; on the other, the Summer Queen and her king, Arawn, Lord of the Underworld. And between them, ordinary men, mortals, like Manannan. Like you. That war was waged for three generations. And then everything changed with the arrival of a new threat; the Bain Shee, an enemy so dangerous both put aside their enmity to fight them. But, at the last Arawn was sacrificed. The goddess hoped to use his essence to bolster her own magic so that she might have the strength to resist the Bain Shee. He lost his life that day, but was offered a chance at redemption, or cursed, even as his own blood and magic spilled into the land, to come again, to fight at the time of its greatest need. And now the war has begun again and he is returned. This is important. I need you to hear this. He’s coming for you here. He’s going to tempt you with promises. But, remember who he is; don’t let yourself be tempted. The key to it all is in your own hand.”
Coldfall Wood Page 27