Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

Hannah fired.

  Mikey Ness was blown off his feet, his body crashing to the pavement by the memorial, bucking in shock.

  A second later - shattered now - the cardinal crystal fully released the energy Brand had known it contained. A brilliant wash of light burst from its inside and flashed out in a rapidly expanding radius, flooding down The Mall and into the heart of London. At Lambeth Palace, at Tower Bridge and at Cleopatra's Needle, bursts of light identical but for their colour suddenly radiated through Southwark, King's Reach, and across from the Thames Embankment. These blue, white, orange and golden brown flares raced through and above the streets, blanking everything in their path with their intensity, and continued inexorably towards a central point.

  They met above the Capek Construction site and London vanished in a mushroom-cloud detonation of brilliance.

  Wherever the brilliance touched, the grey pall of the Unformed seethed and roiled before it dissipated into the air.

  Shielding his eyes, Brand stared up into the sky. The giant maw beneath which he had flown earlier opened wide, and for a second threatened to consume everything below it, and the Lord of Chaos roared.

  As it roared, it, too, dissipated and was gone.

  All across London, the golems stopped in their tracks.

  The helicopter touched down amidst the suddenly immobile behemoths, and its passengers stepped out to stare out at a capital that seemed to have returned to normality.

  "Wou' someone let me know," a voice said, "wha' the fook jus' happened?"

  Hannah stared at Ness as he achingly picked himself up from where the shot crystal's initial energy discharge had blown him off his feet. She didn't really know what had made her swap targets at the very last moment, but maybe it was the fact that out of all of them it was Ness who had protected his cardinal the longest, and, what was more, in all of that time he hadn't run. It was that that had bought him another chance.

  "Yer gonna tell me or no'?" the Scot persisted.

  Brand turned to him. "Moths to a flame," he explained, smiling. "The original Konterman knew that the Unformed was too powerful a force to be eradicated without first being weakened, and he knew also that it would use the golems to attempt to spread its influence across London, carrying a little bit of itself in each one of them. What he had to consider was how best to stop it before it became too strong, hence the cardinals. They were located to the north, south, east and west so that they would draw out the golems in as wide a pattern as possible, effectively weakening the cohesiveness of the Unformed."

  "Stretchin' it ta breakin' point," Ness said. "So the cardinals were traps all along?"

  Brand nodded. "Always meant to be destroyed, because each of them held a concentrated charge of one of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, or in other words the basic building blocks of our physical world. Konterman made sure they contained the very antithesis of what the Unformed was."

  "So it's gone, reet? Along with this new Lord o' Chaos that came wi' it?"

  Brand nodded again. "Probably diffused country-wide, and so harmless."

  "Aye, well, ye seem know wha' you're talkin' aboot," the Scotsman said, nodding over his shoulder. "Only ah were jus' wonderin' why these big bastards are still starin' at us like that."

  Brand turned, rather quickly. He had to admit that in concentrating on the destruction of the last cardinal he had forgotten that though the controlling intelligence of the Lord of Chaos had departed, its army, the golems themselves remained just that. They stared dully now from their deep set eyes, and as they seemed to darken Brand got the impression that from somewhere within them the original reason for their creation was starting to reassert itself.

  The defence of London against an invasion of strangers.

  A question struck him suddenly.

  Would the golems, Brand wondered with scientific detachment, consider the sons and daughters - the descendants of the original population - to, in fact, be strangers?

  Oh God.

  Slowly, the golems began to move.

  "Shit," Hannah said. The American stepped back and aimed her gun. "Brainiac?"

  "This could be a problem, doctor," Verse added.

  "Oops," Jenny Simmons joined in, unhelpfully.

  Brand stared. For the moment at least the golems seemed sluggish, and he raised a calming hand. "It's all right," he said in an attempt to reassure the others. "They're just normal golems now."

  Hannah stared at him, and blinked. "Oh, that's all right, then!" she declared, all grinning and bouncy. "Did you hear that everybody? They're just normal golems now." She turned to Verse and shook her head, and while the three fast jerks of her half-open fist could have been construed as combat tic-tac, everybody but Brand knew that it wasn't.

  "What I mean," Brand went on, "is that now all we have to do is identify the deactivation word."

  There was silence.

  "Tha' would be the same deactivation word ye havenae go' a clue aboot?" Ness offered.

  "Yes," Brand said defensively. "But..."

  "Actually," another voice interjected, "I do not believe that their deactivation word will be necessary."

  Brand and the others turned, surprised to see Solomon Ravne standing there.

  "The golems," he said, "will be returning to the pit." Amazingly, as he spoke, the giants began to move off.

  Only Brand realised what was happening. "The ritual?" he asked.

  Ravne nodded. "A transfer of the reanimates' gestalt consciousness to replace the golem ruah, the animal soul. The Dead of London now control the creatures as the Lord of Chaos did."

  Brand felt staggered, thinking particularly of Mary. "Is this permanent?"

  Ravne actually smiled, obviously proud of his achievement. "No, but it will grant sufficient time for me to be able to reverse the necrosis in their actual bodies. All of the necrosis."

  The academic could hardly believe what he was hearing. This was Ravne, after all. "Are you telling me you're going to help them live again?"

  "It is the least I can do," the arcane expert said, and with that, he turned and walked away.

  The old woman, Meg, Brand thought. Obviously she'd had more of an effect on Ravne than even he, perhaps, realised.

  Maybe there was hope for the bastard yet.

  "So wha' now?" Ness asked those who remained. "We gonna go after Capek an' his bleedin' homunculus, or what?"

  Verse let out a long breath and placed a hand on his wounded torso. "Oh, I think we've done enough for one day, don't you?"

  Hannah flexed her unbroken arm. "Far as I'm concerned, I've got a bottle o' Jack and a bottle o' black waiting for me back home. Gonna curl up with a bloody good book."

  "Aye, aboot that..." Ness said.

  "You haven't forgotten that this lunatic blew the priory to bits, have you?" Jenny pointed out.

  "We've rebuilt before and we'll rebuild again," Brand replied, staring out over a smoking London skyline. "Besides, now that the Accord's back up and running, why don't we let Harry Absolam and his friends do some of the work for a change."

  Hannah smiled grimly. "Conrad Capek, watch out wherever you are," she warned. "The rippers are coming."

  Coming, William McKenzie thought, though the image he saw in his mind was not of rippers. The reanimate walked the dark cellars of Exham Priory and frowned as he thought back on the events of the past few days. He was not worried that he had revealed his existence to Jonathan Brand - he was certain that Ravne would soon make the doctor forget that - but of the consequences of his very last action.

  What had happened was not the doctor's fault. It was nobody's fault.

  But the Unformed had not gone away. Not quite.

  How could it when something that waited in the earth was so hungry for its power?

  McKenzie stared at the cellar floor. On this very spot in 1934 Malcolm Critchley had fallen to the bullets fired from Alex Nestor's gun, and his bloody handprint had remained there ever since.

  McKenzie puffed on hi
s pipe, contemplatively.

  He continued to stare, his eyebrows raised.

  The handprint had begun to bleed.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mike Wild is neither a golem, homunculus nor uberclone, and has not been sculpted, regrown or enhanced in any way. The results of this show, which is why most people agree that one of him is quite enough, thank you very much. Instead, they let him bimble along in the belief that he has written Doctor Who, K9 And Company, Masters of the Universe and the ABC Warriors, when actually he sits in pubs, his mood shifting between delusional and betwattled, talking toot with friends who are probably Pookas.