Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  “You came back,” Robin said, wonderingly. He shook his head. “The Hive … got the Shard … Karya … we’re injured.”

  Jackalope glanced over at Robin’s friends, taking in the sight of the fallen girl and her circle of protectors. “You idiots can’t do anything right, can you,” he muttered, still clasping Robin’s arm firmly.

  “Jackalope,” Robin said seriously. “You should run. Don’t stay in this place … Eris is coming.”

  “No,” the older Fae said, staring across the field of roots and centaur to the crumbling edifice of the pyramid. His voice was grim “Eris is here. Running is done.”

  LUX

  Robin followed the other boy's gaze. He could see a figure standing in a gaping opening in the side of the pyramid. All around it was chaos, but this figure, cloaked and hooded, almost lost to view in the destruction, was perfectly still. He could feel its eyes.

  “We can’t get away,” Robin said, unable to tear his gaze away from the distant figure. It seemed to be searching the hilltop, hooded head slowly roaming across the battle of dryad and swarm, scanning the mess of thrashing vines and piles of tumbled masonry, searching through the crowds of centaur. It was looking for him, he knew.

  It was only a matter of moments, Robin realised. Eris would see them. The centaurs would close in again. There was nowhere left to run for any of them. He became vaguely aware that he was still clutching the Shard of the Arcania, the green stone still and silent in his hand. Hope seemed to fail them all.

  And then, from the far border of the long hilltop, someone emerged from the forest. A solitary figure, clad in a long pale dress. She strode onto the battlefield without hesitation, calm and commanding, stepping into the mass of centaur without the slightest hint of fear or concern. Robin glimpsed her blearily. An old woman, tall as a spire, back ramrod straight, long silver-grey hair flying out behind her loose and long in the wind, a shining, spider web curtain reaching well below her waist.

  It was impossible. He wondered if he was hallucinating. Some fevered wishful thinking brought on by the desperation of their situation. She couldn’t really be here. She seemed so out of context, out of place.

  But his aunt was no illusion. She was here in the Netherworlde, alone and unarmed, and seemingly undaunted by the massed ranks of her enemy. Aunt Irene stopped after she had walked a few steps into the chaos of the raging centaur army.

  Her sharp, eagle eyes quickly roamed the field, finding Robin and Jackalope immediately. He saw her swiftly take in the scene. See Karya fallen, see Hawthorn, Henry and Woad surrounded, and Ffoulkes unconscious nearby, face down in the dirt.

  Her expression was calm but stern. Her eyes as hard and glinting as diamond. Her hair blew loose around her shoulders.

  The old woman slowly raised her hand, holding it out towards the distant pyramid, across the minefield of danger, levelling her palm directly at the shadowy, barely glimpsed form of Lady Eris. Robin saw the shadowy figure in the ruins turn its head to contemplate her.

  The two faced one another a moment, both still and silent across the battlefield. Two queens on either side of a great gameboard.

  There was a flash from Irene's hand, silent and bright. As powerful and blinding as lightning frozen in a great nebulous storm cloud. It rolled out from the old woman in a wave, a torrent of light, flowing over everything in a tidal wave. Centaurs fell before it, hundreds of them, knocked to the ground like toys, their ranks toppling.

  Giant roots in the path of the beam snapped and blasted apart, torn to shreds by the advancing wall of silent destruction. It flew through and over Robin and the others, bathing them in an eerie calm. A warm tingle of power like pins and needles as the shockwave washed over them harmlessly, its touch as light as a feather, while all around them, centaur were blown from their hooves like leaves in the wind, and high above, the swarm were blinded and dashed out of the air.

  The wave hit the pyramid. Bathed in light, the crumbling rocks trembled and shook.

  The shadow of Eris, after a moment, was lost in the darkness, retreating silently from the light into the shadows within.

  Irene walked forward, arm held before her. The fallen forces of Eris rolled out of her way, debris and bodies scattering as though driven aside by an invisible snowplough, clearing a path through which Irene walked swiftly and calmly, the long hem of her pale dress swishing around her ankles.

  She did not look at the creatures surrounding her. She paid no heed to the swarm above, nor did she glance at Robin or the others as she walked. Never once, as she made her way to them, did she take her bright eyes from the pyramid.

  She stopped by the companions, standing amongst them like a lighthouse in a choppy sea.

  “Karya,” Robin stuttered, staring up at his aunt. She seemed so tall. Strength and silent power blazing from her like a phoenix.

  “Hush, Robin,” she said softly, her voice firm, but not unkind. “Karya. Daughter of Dis. Wake up. You’re needed now.” Her voice was commanding and no-nonsense, as though Karya were being a silly girl for having the temerity to bleed to death on a battlefield while there was work to be done.

  Robin heard a shallow gasp from nearby. The light around them was blinding, the silence absolute. As nothing more than a faint outline, sketchy in the brilliance, he saw Karya move, her chest rising in a hitch.

  “Can you take us home please?” Irene asked politely, her eyes still trained on the pyramid, lost in a blaze of white light.

  Robin faintly heard Karya reply.

  “Good,” Irene said, the slightest strain in her voice. “Quickly now, girl, to the mortal world. All of us.”

  Henry and Woad were staring at Jackalope, still clutching Robin's arm. They both seemed to have only just noticed his arrival in all the chaos.

  “He’s a killer,” Henry said softly.

  Robin gripped Jackalope’s forearm tightly, staring up at Irene. She glanced down at him, taking her eyes from the pyramid for a split second. Long enough to read her nephew's expression. She nodded. To Karya she said again, “all of us.”

  Robin felt the world twist as Karya tore between the worlds. Everything fell away. The light around him died, and exhausted, he sank gratefully and helplessly into utter blackness.

  A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE

  Robin later remembered the journey back to Erlking only in fragments. His communion with the Shard had left him weakened and disoriented. He’d wanted to black out, but he fought it, clinging to consciousness by sheer willpower alone. He couldn’t leave Karya, not in the state she was in. He had a terrible fear that if he did, she wouldn’t be there when he woke up.

  And so he stayed awake, drifting in and out of his senses and remembering events like a jumbled and disjointed dream.

  They had flipped back to the human world. He remembered that. The chaos of the Elderhart, the threat of Eris, the centaur and the swarm, and nature reclaiming the broken stone bones of the Hive itself, dragging it to the ground with strong green fingers. All were gone.

  It had been cold when they arrived on the mortal side. Late afternoon and sleety rain. Slivers of slush were falling on his face. They were somewhere in the wilderness. A high and bristling hill, but there were signs of the mortal world everywhere. The vapour trail of an aeroplane, high overhead, a line of electricity pylons stalking away over the hills, metal skeletons strung with wire.

  Hawthorn had woken Ffoulkes. Woad carried Karya, cradled carefully in his thin but strong arms. Robin thought he remembered Henry and Irene either side of himself, propping him up, helping him to walk, but in truth the memory was unclear and confused.

  There had been patches of snow on the ground, he had noticed, melting in the grass. The blazing firework autumn of the Netherworlde was gone. The colours here seemed by contrast muted and quiet.

  There had been a country road, Robin remembered that much quite clearly, a ribbon of tarmac edged by an old drystone wall. And cars were parked there, two of them. One was Henry’s father’s. Mr Drover'
s beaten up and ancient old rustbucket. The other had been a classic car, a Phantom, he recalled with odd clarity. Ffoulkes' car, which he had gifted to Irene.

  The next memory was of driving, the countryside rushing past the windows of the car. Sleet was hitting it thickly and the sky was dark outside now. Some time had passed. He didn’t know who was in this car with him, and who was in the other which followed. He knew that he was in the Rolls Royce though. It smelled of expensive leather and polish. Irene was driving, her hair was back in a tight silver bun. She looked just like an old woman again. It seemed funny to see her at the wheel. He had never imagined she knew how to drive. She always seemed the kind of person to be driven. He was half-lay across the seats, his head resting on the shoulder of the person next to him, who had their arm protectively around his shoulders, occasionally giving him a soft pat. It made him feeling strangely, but not unpleasantly, like a young child. He vaguely remembered it being Hawthorn who held him. To Irene he said, rather slurred, “you got my message then.”

  The old lady hadn’t turned around. She kept her eyes on the road, the headlights of the car cutting through the rain in the darkness. “It is lucky for you, my young ward …” she had said. “That Hestia is prompt with the post as always. Whether it’s a letter in the post or a cry for help on enchanted parchment, written in blood.”

  “Hush now,” Hawthorn told him. “Rest, son. Home sooner than you think.”

  *

  The next jagged slice of memory was the iron gates of Erlking, open in the dark as the convoy passed through it, rolling up the long avenue of trees which led up the hill. And then, as Robin’s senses seemed to finally return, there was much confusion within the great entrance hall.

  They had all come inside at once. The place was dimly lit, and Robin had the sense that it was sometime in the very dead of night. Everyone was talking at once. Irene barked orders over the top of the clamour as they all dripped November rainwater onto the hall floor in great puddles. Karya was carried in, limp and silent, and given over immediately to the care of Hestia, who had been waiting attentively, Calypso by her side with folded arms, looking vaguely interested. Their faces were both serious and businesslike. The girl had been whisked immediately away, despite loud protestations from Woad. The faun was instructed by Calypso to stay out in no uncertain terms. And to let the housekeeper do what she could. They had disappeared behind closed doors.

  Robin remembered seeing Jackalope standing slightly off to one side on his own, looking lost and awkward, and Irene taking him by the wrist and leading him gently but firmly into her study. In her other hand, he saw, she had carried Robin's satchel.

  The overwhelming relief of being home, of having Erlking’s warm and welcoming walls surrounding him, listening to the rain beat against the leaded window panes as autumn slid away like a thief in the night and winter rapped its first icy tattoo on the glass, washed over Robin. The others were all talking amongst themselves, and he caught his own reflection in the long, age-spotted mirror which stood in the hallway.

  When he had first come to Erlking, what seemed like a lifetime ago, a twelve-year-old boy on the cusp of turning thirteen and with no one to share it, he had done the same thing. Looking at himself appraisingly before he had gone through to meet his Great Aunt for the first time.

  Now he looked curiously at himself again in the dark glass. He looked so odd, taller, wilder, still dressed in Netherworlde clothes. His face looked tired, his hair a little crazier than usual. But it was his eyes that had changed the most. One of them was blue, the same as always, but the other, he saw, was green. What he had come to think of as the colour of the Puck.

  It hadn’t reverted when the power of the Shard had left him, as it had done before.

  Henry appeared, dragging him away from his strange reflection, the glass in which he barely recognised himself. Ffoulkes was asking fussily about a shower, he said. Everyone should get cleaned up, get some rest, maybe some sleep.

  No one did of course.

  *

  They made some effort to still themselves, allowing themselves to be herded by Mr Drover into a side parlour, where a warming fire was blazing in the shadows, despite the lateness of the hour. They allowed themselves to be forced into chairs, soft and comfortable. Robin, Henry, Woad and Hawthorn. Drover pressed drinks into their hands. Something strong and bitter and, Robin suspected, quite ‘medicinal’, as Drover himself would have put it.

  But aside from Ffoulkes, who fell into a deep, exhausted slumber almost immediately, his plans to bathe forgotten, none of them could relax.

  They sat in silence in the quiet night-time parlour, perched on the edge of their seats. Wrapped in blankets Mr Drover had fetched, they waited. For news of Karya.

  The clock ticked on the mantle in the dimly lit room. The rain beat softly on the window as the night rolled onwards, and the fire crackled and popped in its grate.

  It seemed hours, painfully long hours, surely close to sunrise, when the parlour doors finally opened, and Hestia entered. She was holding a towel, cleaning her hands, and her grave little face with its dark small eyes fixed on them all as they stared at her as one, expectantly.

  “I have never seen a wound like it,” she said, rather tremulously. “It was all I could do to dress it.” She shook her head in disbelief. “There was nothing I could do.”

  Robin almost felt the glass slipping out of his fingers. Woad had gotten to his feet.

  “Nothing for me to do,” Hestia continued. She sounded bewildered. “That girl … I don’t know what … the wound was already knitting. Healing itself. There was nothing for Hestia to do … but watch and wonder.”

  “She lives?” Hawthorn asked.

  The housekeeper nodded emphatically. “She is not yet out of the woods,” she told them. “And she needs rest, lots of it, and time too. But her body is … putting itself back together.” She shook her head in quiet disbelief. “She will live. She is too hard-headed to die, that one, whatever manner of thing she is.”

  Relief rushed through Robin, more powerful a force than any mana he had felt of late. Henry and Woad were hugging each other tightly. Mr Drover shaking his head in wonder and relief.

  Robin barely noticed any of this celebration. The only important thing were Hestia’s words, ringing in his ears. She will live.

  As though as one, the tiredness seemed to have caught up with everyone. A soft bed seemed like a promise of paradise. Robin felt he would be able to sleep for a week, maybe longer.

  Hestia firmly rejected Woad and Henry’s pleadings to see Karya immediately. The girl was resting, the housekeeper told them firmly. Sleeping herself, and the nymph was watching over her, seemingly rather gruesomely fascinated by her wounds. The last thing she needed was idiot boys clamouring and shouting in her sickroom.

  They should all go to bed, she insisted. Sleep before they all dropped down dead on the spot and she would have to hoover around their corpses in the morning. She glanced over at Robin. “Except you,” she said. “Your aunt wants you first. In her study, if you please.”

  Robin followed Hestia out of the parlour and along the corridors of Erlking, leaving the others to celebrate, to rest. The housekeeper's flat, polished shoes clacked on the floorboards as she hurried along, Robin in her wake.

  He wanted to thank Hestia. If she hadn’t seen the message … if she had locked Henry's hex message parchment away peevishly in some drawer somewhere, instead of keeping it on her person … they would all be dead. Eris had almost taken them all.

  As they stopped outside of Irene’s study door however, he couldn’t think of a thing to say to the small woman. She looked him over critically.

  “You look as though you have been dragged backwards through a hedge,” she said sharply. “A mess of a boy, that is what Hestia thinks!” She shook her head. “Supposed to be the young master of Erlking and here you are, a half-drowned chimney sweep. It is shameful.” She glanced down. “And you have left footprints on my floor I see. Tr
acking your filthy boots. Dragging half the soil of the Netherworlde over the floors. What peace I have had while you horrible children have been gone.” She sniffed a little, not looking directly at him.

  “I have had no cleaning up after your messes to do. And now? You all come back in pieces and chunks! And I suppose those two, the old Fae and the fiery thief, they will want rooms made up for the night too.” She tutted angrily as though this were all too much to bear.

  “Sorry we’re such a bother, Hestia.” Robin said, a little listlessly.

  She made a face, as though he were the most irritating child she had ever known. “You will be wanting a fire in your room I imagine. Little lord of the manor.” She nodded. “Hestia knows what is what. It is already set. And a bath is drawn, and clean sheets laid out.”

  Robin blinked at her, lost for words.

  “Do not bleed on them, or I shall give you cause to fear old Hestia more than Eris!” she grumbled. “Now go to your aunt, foolish boy.”

  And with that she walked off, busy as an irritated hedgehog, to tend to the others.

  *

  Irene was standing by the fire in her study. Jackalope sitting opposite her on the edge of a high-backed chair. The knife Phorbas was resting innocently on a side table, and his aunt held in her hand the Mask of Gaia, dangling loosely from her fingers.

  Robin closed the door softly behind him as he entered, looking from one to the other curiously.

  Irene looked … normal. Stately and calm and perfectly turned out as she always did. If he hadn’t seen her in the Netherworlde with his own eyes, he would have sworn her most exerting activity recently had been a game of bridge.

  “Firstly,” she said to him, fixing her with her sharp eyes over the top of her half-moon spectacles. “I may never let you out of my sight again. I step outside of these walls, and you step outside of this reality and into danger it seems." She raised a hand to silence him as he made to speak. “I am aware you were under the geas of the redcaps,” she allowed. “And as it happens, I do agree that you had no choice but to go, given the circumstances.” She raised her eyebrows. “A debt to those people must always be repaid, and repaid in full. You have retained the honour of Erlking, as foolish as it may have been to rush off chasing dragons. We will speak of this matter later … of the Earth Shard … in depth.” She sounded stern about this, making it plain that Robin was not off the hook.