Let me go.
Daddy’s image was fading. The darkness, the pain, the Vanished. The Pendulum.
“What say you, Billy Peyton?”
Let me go, just let me go back to before with Ma and Daddy and Grandpa before it all went bad. Please let me go back, let me be happy, let me go!
But it would never stop. She knew that just as clearly as she knew all those people were really here hidden in the world behind the world—that it was all really here. She couldn’t unsee this, unknow these terrible truths.
And now amongst all that woe and evil, fear, and craziness, she glimpsed something new: thousand-mile-long, black, furry legs, eight in all, leading to a hairy, bulbous thorax and abdomen, snapping fangs and eight diamond-studded eyes fixed on her. In the Spider’s eyes was every story ever told, every dream ever dreamt, and every star in the sky—whole galaxies turned amidst the eternal orbs.
Another moment and there would be no return. Her stomach roiled like lava, and the anchors tethering her to sanity were popping lose, tearing nebulous chunks of memory and feeling loose at they went.
Twang, ping, snap!
This was it, the end.
The Panda Man’s voice came a final time, inhuman and alien and deafening. “WHAT SAY YOU?”
Then she was screaming. “YES! YES! I’ll do it. Just make it STOP!”
Then it was all gone. The Spider, the Vanished, the Pendulum. All the darkness and cold. All gone in an instant.
Warm air caressed her skin. Grey stones and rustling grass lay under a glittering sun and an infinity of pale blue sky. A pigeon cooed nearby.
But she felt no relief because something was different now. She had changed something, signed some ethereal contract.
Sold my soul. But to whom? The angels, or the devil?
Daddy’s face flashed before her once more and shame filled her gut.
I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m so sorry.
A sigh whistled beside her and she jumped, almost surprised to see the Panda Man standing beside her. Somewhere behind that wolfish, victorious grin or his face, she saw regret. “I’m sorry I had to do that. Such things aren’t meant for your kind. If I hadn’t been sure you were so special, I would never have taken the risk. But I had to show you the truth.”
“The truth?”
“This world never ended. Everyone is still alive and kicking—literally. They’re just elsewhere. All part of a master plan to royally screw up all the worlds of the Web. And if you come with me, we can bring them back. You can save them all, Billy.”
She didn’t know what to say. But the words came anyway, without her help. “I don’t care. I don’t care about the dark or those people. I only care about Daddy.” She swallowed, wiped the tears from her eyes—here, back in all the realness, the tears were real again—and stared him hard in the eye. “If I help you, will you leave me alone? Will you let me go back to Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Will you make him better?”
A shadow crossed his face. “I can’t do that.”
“Then let me go now.”
“Billy, please—”
“No. I don’t care. I want Daddy. He might go away any time. I was stupid when I listened to you and came all this way in the first place. I’m going back now. I’m not scared of you anymore.”
She turned on her heel and made to walk away, but the Panda Man’s voice made her freeze. It wasn’t the words so much as the tone, so far removed from usual. He was begging. “If you go now, we all fall. Please, Billy.”
She turned back to him slowly. “And Daddy? If I go back?”
“You’ll see him awhile. But even if he recovers, what’s coming will mean his end, and yours, just as surely as it’ll spell it for everyone else.”
“And if I go with you?”
He blinked. “I can’t say. Nobody can see what is yet to come. If he’s strong, he may live.”
Fresh tears stung her eyes. “And we might be okay?”
“Maybe. I make no promises.”
“Then why are you making me go?” She stamped. “Why did you bring me away from him?”
“Like I said, I’m offering a chance. Nothing more.”
The stones and the Panda Man swam before her eyes as the tears piled up behind her eyelids. The patter of the teardrops falling to the grass joined the gentle whisper of the wind and the incessant cooing of the pigeons. Then, she was nodding, nodding despite the ache in her chest and the bubbling fear in her belly. “Okay.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“What do I have to do?”
He held out his hand once more. She winced at the thought of touching those fingers again, of the creeping cold they had brought, but stepped forward anyway. She made herself.
He smiled, but it was anything but comforting.
The moment she touched him, rain splashed down around her, and night swooped up to envelop the sunlight. Tall buildings sprang up all around, the very same from the half-forgotten dreams. She had tumbled into the dream world for real.
Once more the ragged cluster of people surrounding the twitching boy. One of them was the blond man she had seen before leaving daddy. The boy on the ground bore a striking resemblance to the other man she had seen.
It was all playing out before her all over again. This time, though, she knew the Panda Man was with her. He had something about him, not a smell but something like that.
“Why am I seeing this?” she said.
The next moment, he was beside her. She was a little worried that he didn’t startle her.
Am I getting used to the silliness? That can’t be good.
The Panda Man gnawed on a hanging fingernail, shrugging. “It’s all part of your big journey. The ones running the show are big fans of melodrama.”
She waited, bearing the jibe.
He continued. “It’s important, that’s why.”
“Like me?”
He guffawed. “Him? No, not like you.”
“Then what?”
The Panda Man gestured to the groaning lad, who bled steadily from a ragged cut on his forehead. “All this, all you’ve ever known, is just a scrim on top of … well, your language is too rudimentary to describe its scale and grandeur. In time, you’ll see what I mean. This place is just some backwater nowhere. But at the same time it’s vital, some kind of cosmic high ground.” His face screwed up. “Excuse the purple prose, but in the words of the Solstice Scrolls: All-Where is a web woven from the Pendulum’s silk, and as with all things it has its ends; ends which can be moulded by those who take hold of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it. All you have to know is that this world has to stay safe, in balance. It’s already been stretched thin by what you call the End. You’ve sensed them, haven’t you? The darkness moving over the land?”
Billy swallowed, watching the twitching boy. He looked as if he was in so much pain. “Yes.”
“If they aren’t stopped, the show’s over for everyone. And this idiot”—he pointed to the boy—“is one of the few people who can make a difference. So before we can start our real work, we’ve got to go save his sorry backside.”
She blinked, suddenly exhausted by his words. “What real work?”
“One thing at a time, Billy.”
Then the boy, the streets, and the rain were gone, and she was back at the Henge.
“Just help them,” he said. “You’ll know what to do.”
“How?”
“The same way you got here.”
The itch, the Light.
She felt her lip twitch. She didn’t want to feel these things anymore or be pulled around like a puppet on strings.
But I have a choice. That’s why he brought me all this way. All this funny magic can poke and prod, but it can’t make me do anything. I can choose to go home to Daddy.
But if I go, we all go away. Me and Daddy will get sick, then everyone else … They go away because of the
bad things that are going to happen. Attishoo, attishoo, we all fall down.
She swallowed hard. “Where do I go?”
He gave her a look that made her feel like he was looking inside of her, peering down through her eyes all the way to her toes. His eyes narrowed a tad, then he gave a small grunt of satisfaction. “You’re in luck. We have an express service bound for your destination due to depart inside of a minute.” He tittered. “I think you’ve walked far enough.”
She shook her head. “What?”
He laughed more good-naturedly. “Just amusing myself, at your expense.” He reached forward to grip her shoulders and turned her about-face, such that she was looking through the nearest of the ringstones.
The sun rises through this stone. On the morn of a summer’s eve, the sun rises through its eye.
What did that mean? She didn’t know. But the thought had arrived fully formed, just popped into her head like somebody else had spoken in her ear, only in her own voice.
But there was something else about this stone. She was looking at the grassy plain through its centre, but it was blurred, shimmering as though she was looking at its reflection in the surface of a running brook.
Another door.
“Radden Express, all aboard!” the Panda Man hollered. She hated that laugh, hated him and his ever-flipping mood.
She bunched her fists, wanting for all the world to mill her arms in a barrage of punching blows and beat him into the ground. But it wouldn’t do any good. She would do what he wanted, then she would go home.
And maybe, just maybe, she and Daddy would be alright.
“What do I do?” she said.
“I think you know.”
Step through.
She sighed, looked once more at him, and then stepped forward towards the ringstone. She paused and turned back to look at him over her shoulder. “Who are you?” she whispered.
He smiled, and for the first time, there was nothing scary or troubled about it. It was just a smile. “Call me Fol,” he said.
She blinked.
Is that a weirder name than Panda Man or not?
She decided she didn’t know as she stepped forward through the ringstone. A sensation of being bent through an impossible angle, and she was appalled to realise it was, by now, a familiar feeling. Then the plain, the sun and the sky, the grass, the pigeons, Fol, and the ringstones were gone, and she was flying once more. But this time, it wasn’t through darkness, and the moment of terror that filled her up at the thought that she had been tricked, that the Panda Man—or Fol—had sent her back to that void of torture, was replaced by open-mouthed wonder. She was flying. Flying over the world like a birdie. But she was moving faster than any bird; the ground was zipping past so fast it was only a blur of green and brown, mixed in with spots of grey and twinkling glass she guessed were cities.
Her stomach exploded with butterflies, and she was falling. She tumbled head over heels with a burst of that strange cold biting at her fingers and toes, and crackling in her hair. A rugged landscape of heathland, old broken towns, lakes and mountains rushed up to strike her in the face.
Then came a jolting impact. She saw stars, her head swam with soup-thick nausea, her back sang with pain against a hard floor, and a puff of dried leaves leapt into the air around her. She saw blue sky through a thick layer of fog hanging over her head and felt moist soil under her fingers. Thick ancient petrichor filled her nose.
She had landed.
But where?
CHAPTER 16
Lucian took another lash of the whip across his shoulders with a resigned grunt, ignoring the burn in his hamstrings, and pushed his way over the lip of the sharp incline. Uneven ground pockmarked with rabbit holes passed underfoot, and a high wind was kicking up, turning to an unforgiving gale. They had been climbing for almost an hour, trudging uphill on legs barely strong enough to hold them on even ground.
He dropped back aways, hoping the rear security would be more lax and he’d have a chance at escaping. But they weren’t fools, and a line of sentinels on horseback trawled at the very tail of the mile-long ant trail of prisoners, waiting to pick up any stragglers who weren’t yet too weak to abandon on the wayside.
He thought for a while that feigning exhaustion would get him left behind. All he had to do was wait until they were out of sight, then run for the treeline, and make his way back south.
But those who keeled over were trampled by their fellow prisoners, many of whom were lost to catatonic stupors of hunger and fatigue. Worse, the guards rode their mounts’ sharp hooves right over the torsos of the fallen, maybe to make an example, maybe for their own amusement.
Probably both.
Hundreds had been left behind on their journey. They were close to their destination—they had no clue where they were going, but a sense of closeness, of finality, pervaded them all. It seemed the guards wanted the rest of them alive.
And now, Lucian could see why. The ridge he had just crested overlooked a slight rolling valley, more of a dimple in the carpet of black rock and withered heather. He was looking along the furrow lengthways. Nestled within was a sprawling huddle of rawhide tents, interspersed with open fires and surrounded by palisade wooden fences.
Amongst it all were those already interned at the prison camp. He had never imagined there could be so many people in all the land. There were endless masses of them, an oozing myriad filling every inch between the tents, clustering in lumbering stoop-backed huddles around the glow of the fires. Filthy, stick-thin, harrow-eyed people marked by red welts from the lash.
A hand closed on his upper arm. “Come on, McKay,” Vandeborn said, tugging him forward. He was still in the game, his barrel chest not yet hollowed by the long trek, and Lucian was glad to have at least one ally. And, unlike Lucian, Max had learned to keep his eyes on the ground and follow the flow of the convoy. He was a big, proud man, but he wasn’t an idiot, and he wanted to live.
And here, everyone had a role to play. Theirs were grovelling simpleton number 1000, and whipped dog number umpteen-and-one, respectively.
Lucian couldn’t bring himself to do that. A self-destructive itch poked its head up every time he lowered his gaze and tried surrendering to his captors’ will. He was marking himself a prime candidate for public execution—plenty of examples had been made on the road, and there was still plenty of time for another—and he sensed that notoriety was something altogether a bad idea for another reason: Charlie had remained close to him all the while, within sight and earshot. He was a prized, secret cargo for the boy, at least in his mind; a morsel wrapped up in his handkerchief to savour later.
“Keep your head down. Keep moving,” Vandeborn hissed. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re there, alright.” Lucian took up the plodding pace once more, and together, they made their way from the ridge and descended into the prison camp.
As they grew closer, he began to pick out more detail: the fires were in fact open-air smithing kilns, and the milling droves weren’t clustering around them for warmth, but rather to heat old, blunted blades and sharp implements, readying them for reshaping. Farther away, showers of sparks coughed up above the tent posts where he guessed they were being hammered by others strong enough to wield a hammer.
They were forging weapons of war. Thousands of hunting knives, machetes, axes, pitchforks, even rough-hewn scaffolding poles whittled to sharp spears. And these were only the hand-to-hand weapons. He sensed that elsewhere, close by, were a great many firearms. The guards posted all around carried theirs with careless ease, indicating a plentiful supply.
Yet, peeking above all this, the thing that grabbed his attention the most was Charlie’s gaze. He could feel it moving over him, as it so often had since they had started the long walk, pressing into the nape of his neck as though searching out the perfect spot to put a bullet.
The boy had plans to make him suffer, and he meant to make good on his promise for revenge.
But he wasn’t
up to it. Not yet, anyway. Anger had carried him this far, led him to this dangerous place—holding a secret captive amongst myriad others. Lucian was more valuable to them than any of these others by a mile-long stretch, a potential political prisoner.
Lucian would never have negotiated to save the life of another if it were him back home and someone else out here. But he knew fools back in New Canterbury and Canary Wharf who would. He couldn’t live with himself, knowing they might have to sacrifice some vital strategic advantage in exchange for his sorry arse.
“I don’t get it,” Vandeborn said. “They’re up in a fit about you all hogging food when the famine hit the hardest. They started the burning and killing to stop all that happening again. Sons of bitches would still get a bullet in the face from me, but I can wrap my head around where they’d be coming from.” He grunted and glanced up momentarily from his feet, frowning at the camp ahead. “But I don’t get this. None of these people are part of this. None of them wanted it. They’re just ordinary folk.” He paused as they passed under the nose of a skull-faced guard of almost seven feet, his skin a sickly yellow, a cruel soul if Lucian had ever seen one.
“No,” Lucian said. “It’s them that are behind all this. The ones holding the guns, and the keys.” He grunted, not quite managing a laugh. “But the real kicker is that I’m betting bastards like that don’t even know why they’re here. This is just what they do. In the Old World, they would have been the rapists, the murderers, the psychopaths and the autocrats. But here, after the End, they’re the perfect engine to blow this all out of proportion. I’m betting it all started amicable enough, with a real heart and message. But now …”
“Snowballed. That pigeon banner, the sob story about the starving women and children who died because of your mission, it’s become just some vehicle to let the mental cases kill for the sake of killing. All these monkeys would have been rejects their whole lives, cut loose by their families and neighbours, turned away by every place they came by. Crazy breeds crazy, and nobody wants a madman around. But here, they’re somebodies. Gods, even. They have power, and they take what they want and nobody can stop them.”
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 25