Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  “And for his part, I expect Strigoi will have lost face letting him escape in the first place. No one’s ever escaped from the Hive before. It’s a windowless, doorless pyramid of death.” She looked thoughtful. “I still don’t quite understand how he managed it. Given everything, it’s unsurprising there’s more than a little bad blood between them.”

  “We have to help him though,” Robin insisted. “If they’re taking him back to this prison. I’m not just going to abandon Hawthorn and give him up for dead.”

  “Hmm.” Karya was noncommittal. “Honourable of you, Scion, but one thing at a time. Our business with the dryads takes precedence. You have a beast to hunt and kill, a deal with the redcaps to repay.”

  Robin balked at Karya's dismissive tone. They scrambled down the other side of the hill, kicking up rich golden leaves as deep as their knees. “Look, I know I owe the redcaps, and I know that killing this monster will get me off the hook, but priorities change. Someone we actually know is in danger here.”

  Karya stopped and turned again, looking troubled.

  “That’s just the problem,” she said, shrugging in her huge coat. “More than one person we know is in trouble here.”

  Robin studied her face. The high canopy above undulated in the breeze, rolling dappled light over the company.

  “What is it?” he asked, getting a bad feeling in his stomach. “Karya, what aren’t you telling me?”

  Karya sighed, and signalled to the dryad to stop.

  “We’ll make camp here for a while,” she told him. “We all need a rest, I think.”

  Splinterstem nodded courteously.

  “I’ll go get some firewood for a fire!” Woad suggested happily.

  The dryad straightened up to his full intimidating height, narrowing his green, insectile eyes at the faun. They glittered in the forest light. “No fires,” he said sternly in his deep voice.

  Karya dropped to the floor, sitting on a tangled root. “It’s Henry,” she said.

  “Henry? What about Henry?” Robin demanded.

  “I’m afraid … he’s been taken by the redcaps,” Karya explained. “Sit down, Scion, for the sake of the fates. Your hair’s all stuck to your forehead with sweat. You need to rest. Sit and I’ll explain.”

  Robin sat beside her on the log. He dropped his pack heavily to the ground. “What do you mean taken by redcaps? Taken where? Why on earth are you only telling me this now? This is Henry we’re talking about!”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” she snapped. “I wanted to hear your side of things too. To see whether you’d seen or heard anything through your trip. You didn’t wonder why he wasn’t with me?”

  “Forgive me for being distracted!” Robin said. “I’ve had one friend admit to murder and run off into the night, and another captured by the Darth Vader of the Netherworlde. There’s a lot going on! Taken by the redcaps?” he repeated, pointedly. “What for?”

  The dryad had wandered some way off, standing still as a tree in a distant patch of golden light and looking upwards quietly at the canopy far ahead, as though tactfully giving the children their privacy. Woad sat cross-legged on the mossy floor opposite his friends, looking worriedly from one to the other.

  “For insurance, it seems,” Karya sighed. She had produced a small leather thong from somewhere within her hide coat and was using it to tie her wild mass of hair up in a pony-tail, dragging it off her neck. It was hot and still here in the great forest, despite the season, and the long morning’s march through the uneven woodlands had taken its toll even on her. Robin noticed for the first time as she tied up her hair that her mana-stone bracelet looked almost black instead of its usual fiery amber. She had clearly recently used a lot of mana. He was suddenly concerned.

  “Hey, are you alright?” he said, making an effort not to snap at her. “You look kind of drained.”

  “I’ve been busy,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Look, I’ll tell you both what I know, which isn’t much.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes briefly with the heels of her hands.

  “Halloween night,” she recapped. “You left with Hawthorn, off to the Netherworlde, but Henry hadn’t turned up at Erlking, right? We all agreed this was odd.”

  They nodded.

  “I’m sure on some level we were all just thinking he’d been avoiding the place because of Jackalope,” she said. “You know what a sulking childish ninny he’s been since the Fae woke up. He’s always making excuses not to come, or not to hang around as much, you must have noticed. He’s been pretty absent since the school year started.”

  Robin had noticed this of course, but hearing others confirm it still stung a little.

  “So obviously, I offered to stay behind. The plan was, I go to the village, grab Henry and tell him what had happened, slap some sense into the idiot, and then the two of us would catch up to you lot in the Netherworlde, using my tearing skills to travel.” She frowned darkly, her gold eyes glimmering.

  “Well, that wasn’t to be. When I got down to the village, the cottage was dark. Mr Drover is away down in London with your aunt of course, but Henry, if he wasn’t at Erlking, should have been there, home from school by then. The door was open.. It was still snowing back in the mortal world and it was all over Mr Drover's hall carpet.” She glanced up. “Which is horrible by the way.”

  “Is that relevant?” Robin pressed.

  Karya shook her head apologetically. “I searched the cottage, no Henry, but the place stunk of redcaps. In the kitchen, there were signs of a struggle. A chair overturned on the flagstones, a smashed cup on the floor. But no sign of Henry, or of the redcaps. I tried to hex Henry but his parchment was there on the bloody floor. They were long gone.”

  “But I don’t understand!” Robin argued. “Why would the vile little buggers take him? I’d already agreed to do as they said. When they came to Erlking to collect on their debt. I said I would honour it! I promised to come to the Netherworlde and stop this monster, didn’t I?” He was furious. “Didn’t they trust me? Isn’t my bloody word good enough?”

  Woad shook his head in bewilderment. “Poor Henryboy,” he muttered quietly to himself. “He is so popular with the bad things.”

  “Popular?” Robin said, aghast. “He’s captured more times that the Doctor’s bloody assistant!”

  The faun looked up confused. “What doctor?”

  “Never mind,” Robin waved the question away irritably. He looked desperately to Karya. He was furious with the redcaps, but with himself too for thinking they would be reasonable or honourable. They had made deals with the redcaps in the past and been betrayed before, and now that he thought of it, when the two redcaps had left Erlking, they had seemed decidedly smug, and had assured him they had their ‘insurance’.

  Horrible, deceitful little things! They must have already waylaid Henry at that point. Maybe had him tied up in a bush or goodness knows where like a trussed pig, before they even dragged Hawthorn to the door, acting like good Samaritans.

  “Where would they take him?” he asked Karya. “How do we get him back?”

  “They would take him underground,” Karya explained, picking thoughtfully at moss growing on the bark of their log. “The network of barrows and tunnels which the redcaps own, they run further than anyone knows, all under the Netherworlde. They would have to get to a Janus station first, to cross over from the mortal world, the same one they used to get to Erlking. And then once in the Netherworlde, they would need to get to a barrow entrance.”

  She smiled grimly. “I knew I had limited time. Once they got Henry underground, we would never find him again. Never. Not unless Deepdweller wanted us to. And if for any reason we failed to kill this thing marauding the forest, they’d keep him forever.”

  “So you gave chase, boss?” Woad asked grimly.

  Karya nodded. “Your aunt was away so I couldn't use the Erlking station. Hestia couldn’t contact her either … bloody farce! I mean, what is the point of leaving a number if you're not there to answer it?
Anyway, I left Hestia's trying and gave her Henry's hex-message parchment in case she got through. I knew that the nearest Janus station to Erlking, the one they must have used to get to the human world with Hawthorn in the first place, was across the moors, near to the village known as Howarth. It’s above the village, in a fairly remote spot by a waterfall. I tracked the redcaps there. The smell of Henry was mixed with them. When I flipped over to the Netherworlde, I followed their tracks on this side. Smells are stronger here. The air is clearer. They were easy to follow and, as I suspected, they were headed for Spitrot. It must be the nearest way into their warrens.”

  “But Henry isn’t with you,” Robin pointed out. “And that’s a lot of ground to cover on foot with a prisoner in tow. It took us forever just to get to Briar Hill, which is only half the distance, and we were riding extremely fast cats fuelled by the mana of four people.”

  Karya shook her bracelet at him testily, rattling it in his face. “Why do you think I’m so drained, hornless wonder?” she rebutted. “I’ve been snapping back and forth, tearing across two worlds non-stop like a bloody ping pong ball, trying to cover as much ground as possible to find them. To head them off. I completely exhausted my mana. But … I did eventually find the redcaps. Terp and Tine, or Swar and Feega, whatever the hell they called themselves.”

  Woad’s eyes lit up. “That’s good news! And Henryboy?”

  Karya shook her head. “It’s not good news,” she said. She looked at Robin. “I didn’t find them alive.”

  Robin felt his blood run cold.

  “Centaurs,” Karya said. “I’m almost sure of it. The tracks were muddled and confusing, the earth all churned up, but I can read a fight written in the earth like you can read one of your books, Scion. It’s clear as day to me what happened. The redcaps, with their bartering chip, ran into some trouble of their own. One of Strigoi’s centaur patrols, same as you did. Only unlike you, they didn’t have powerful Earth mana to help them escape.” She looked stern. “Centaurs kill for sport. The redcaps are dead. Very … extremely dead. I found their heads on spears driven into the ground.” She shivered a little. “Still had those silly winter hats on top. But good riddance to them, treacherous little demons. The good news … kind of, is that there was no third spike.” She looked at both boys. “No Henry.”

  “He got away?” Robin asked. It seemed unlikely, though he was massively relieved to hear that his best friend had not been decapitated by evil horse men.

  “Henryboy has a good head on his shoulders, after all,” Woad nodded sagely, giggling a little with nerves. Both Robin and Karya gave him a sharp look.

  “I couldn’t track Henry,” Karya admitted, sounding extremely irritable to admit her own limitations. “There were too many prints, too much churned earth, and it had rained heavily. I couldn’t pick out Henry’s smell or even guess in which direction he had fled.” She looked genuinely worried. “They wouldn’t have taken him prisoner. He’s just a mortal. They’re not highly prized here. If he hadn’t run off, I would have found his head.

  Robin took a moment to digest this grim news. “So what you’re saying …” he said slowly, “is that Henry, our Henry, who let’s remember, once got lost in the herb garden at Erlking for a solid hour,” he sighed. “Is lost and alone somewhere in the wilds of the grasslands?”

  Karya shook her head. “Not the grasslands, I don’t think,” she said thoughtfully. “As I told you, I’d been travelling all over, following these tracks. The Elderhart forest is large, it sweeps alongside the edge of much of the grasslands like a border. This scene I found, where the redcaps were killed, where Henry fled, it was in sight of the tree line.”

  “You think he ran in here?” Robin looked around, as though expecting to see Henry waving at them from around a nearby tree trunk. Henry obviously made no such appearance. The woods were solemn and peaceful around them, the only movement in the air the soft drift of leaves, flickering in the sunbeams as they twirled, making the air in the distance twinkle like gold-dust.

  “Makes sense to me,” Woad said. “Open hills full of centaur everywhere, barren and featureless moors, or a good old wood to hide in. I know which one I’d choose. I’d make a bee-line for the tree-line.”

  “Well, that settles it then,” Robin stood up decisively. “We have to find Henry, right now.” The thought of him lost and alone, maybe even wounded, somewhere in this sprawling, primal expanse made Robin very uneasy. Karya grabbed him by the wrist, stopping him.

  “Scion, think for a moment,” she counselled. “The Elderhart is vast. I mean, extremely large indeed. It's the size of Wales. And Henry, for all his lanky gangliness, is comparatively small. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “Well, we can’t just leave him, can we?” Robin threw his hands up. “It’s Henry! I don’t care if he has been a pain in the backside lately. He’s not going to last out in the wild woods in a strange world on his own. You know what he’s like! He’ll get eaten by wolves, or starve to death, or poison himself with the wrong type of mushroom, or lose an arm to a septic splinter–”

  “I’m not suggesting we abandon him!” Karya snapped, stopping Robin's worried tirade. “He’s an Erlkinger. We don’t abandon each other. You are not the only person here who cares about Henry.” Her eyes shone angrily at Robin, who thrust his hands into his pocket, chastised.

  “But,” she continued, taking a deep breath, absently running her fingers over and over her dark and drained mana-stone bracelet. “There is a creature loose in these lands, at large in these very woods. It is fuelled by a Shard of the Arcania, and very bloody dangerous. We need to find and stop it before it finds Henry.” She let go of Robin's wrist, seeing that he was visibly trying to calm himself down.

  “Look,” she said. “If we do what we came here to do, stick to the plan, find and kill this thing, it solves all our problems. The creature stops destroying towns and haunting the forest. The debt to the redcaps is paid and our dealings with them are done forever, and the dryads …” She pointed emphatically at their guide, “… have their king avenged. When I couldn’t find Henry, and I found you two instead, I made a pact with this one. Splinterstem here was patrolling the edge of the forest, close to where I found the … remains of the redcaps.” She glanced over at him. “I was lucky to find him.”

  “There is no luck,” the dryad replied, looking over. “Only the will of the forest that brought you to me, great one.”

  “Great one?” Robin mouthed the words at Karya in confusion. She looked distracted.

  “Don’t even ask,” she said dismissively. “He’s been calling me that all day. Look, we do what we planned to all along, and when the beastie is dead, Splinterstem has promised that the dryads themselves will find Henry for us. They know this forest better than any of us. And they have better reason that anyone to want this monster dead.”

  Robin glanced at their guide. He was looking solemnly at them from between the trees. He nodded slowly. “Bring peace back to the forest,” he rumbled. “And the services of my people will not disappoint you. We will locate and return this human to you.”

  “If he’s not been eaten by the scourge before then, of course.” Woad noted dutifully.

  Robin walked a little way off from the others, agitated and worried, running his fingers through his messy blonde hair and lacing his hands on top of his head.

  More than anything else in the world, he wanted someone to tell him what to do for the best. He would have given anything to have Aunt Irene fix things. She always seemed to know exactly what to do. Jackalope was lost to them, Hawthorn was captured, Henry wandering the Netherworlde alone. None of these people would be in this situation if it wasn’t for him.

  His awakening of the Shards, back on the Isle of Aeolus, had set events in motion which had put his friends in danger, as well as loosing monsters on the Netherworlde, destroying villages and harming an ancient race who wanted nothing more than to be left alone in the deepest woods.

&nb
sp; “Saviour of the bloody Netherworlde,” he muttered angrily to himself. Unbidden, he heard the voice of the banshee in his ears, echoing in his Grandmother’s voice. You walk a path of broken bones, Scion.

  Was this what it meant to be the Scion? To court disaster at every turn? How did he even begin to fix everything?

  Staring up into the distant golden sea of leaves undulating far above him, watching them drift down through the sunbeams, an endless quiet rain, it was Gran's voice which rose in his head again in response. But this time, not the harsh false-Gran of the banshee. The voice of his real Gran, from memory, long ago.

  “Snakes and ashes, Robin,” she muttered good-naturedly in his mind. “Pick your bottom lip up off the floor before you trip over it. If things have gone wrong, don’t mope and wring your hands about it. Ain’t nobody in this life going to make everything better for you. When things fall down, you pick them up. And if they look too heavy and too many, then you pick them up one at a time, ‘til your arms are full again.”

  Robin smiled a little to himself, despite his worried mood. Of course, at the time, Gran had been talking about an armful of laundry that Robin had dropped down a flight of steps at the upstairs laundromat near their house. There had been socks and underpants everywhere, strewn down the staircase in a cloth waterfall. A tangled mess. He must have been really young at the time, maybe six or seven, as he remembered being on the verge of tears about the magnitude of his disaster.

  But the same applies here, he thought to himself. Pull yourself together. One thing at a time. Taking a deep breath, he ran a mental checklist. Find this monster, kill this monster, find and save Henry, find and save Hawthown, home in time for lashings of ginger beer and all that nonsense. He took another deep, settling breath in through his nose, breathing in the rich and spicy air of the Netherworlde forest. That’s what the Scion would do. Puck it all.