As the Culture trailed back through the marsh to begin the ritual that would return the First to the human world, Sunchaser moved back into the stream. The mists disappeared so quickly, it became apparent they were part of the peculiar defences of the Culture's home, and soon the sun was beating down hard on a savannah that reached up to a range of snow-topped mountains in the east, and disappeared towards the horizon in the west. Occasionally the yellow grass shifted violently as if large beasts were tracking the boat, but they saw no other sign of life.
'He's off again,' Matt noted to Mahalia and Jack.
At the aft rail, Crowther sat rigidly while the mask began to tune into its psychedelic displays.
'It started the minute we left the mist,' Matt noted.
'Perhaps we should have left him with the Culture,' Jack suggested.
'No,' Mahalia said firmly. 'He's one of us.'
'You say that now.' Matt pulled his sweaty shirt away from the skin of his chest; it was growing hotter. 'You saw how bad it was getting. If he spins out of control, we're in trouble.'
'We'll think of something,' Mahalia said.
Matt thought for a moment and then said, 'You know we'll have to kill him. We can't risk failing the mission.'
Mahalia fixed a cold eye on Matt that made him feel instantly uncomfortable. 'This leadership thing is going to your head,' she said. 'You sound like some stupid army man. Or,' she added as she started to walk towards the professor, 'like me.'
She approached Crowther cautiously. It was impossible to tell exactly how the mask would react, but the nascent light displays moved away from her enough for her to conclude that she was seen as safe.
She sat next to him and said gently, 'Professor, can you hear me?' There was no reply, but she thought she saw the silver mask move a little in her direction. 'I saw you in the clearing last night. Something had changed. I think you're aware in there. Can you hear me?'
It seemed as if he wasn't going to answer, but then his muffled voice sounded. 'Yes.'
She felt honest relief. 'If you're yourself again, why don't you take the mask off?'
‘I can’t.’
'Won't it let you?'
'No. I won't let me.' He turned his head away.
'Professor, you know what the mask can do. You told us yourself. It's getting out of control out here.' She glanced back to Matt who was watching her, arms folded. 'They won't let you stop us getting to the cure.'
'I know what you're saying.'
'Then take the mask off, for all our sakes.'
'Go away,' he said bluntly. 'Don't ask me again ... for your sake.'
She waited for a moment or two to see if he would soften, but his head remained turned away and the intensity of the mask's display increased, as if responding to Crowther's emotions.
'So are we going to have to kill him?' Matt asked when she returned.
She walked straight past him to the prow. 'We'll probably all be dead long before we have to make that decision.'
The mood on the boat was grim, and they all settled down in separate areas, conserving their strength in the growing heat; Mahalia told Jack she needed some time to think, and while it upset him, he acceded to her wishes.
The savannah gradually gave way to a scrubby wasteland and then to an arid rock-strewn landscape that resembled the surface of Mars. The river had grown much narrower and it was apparent that they would soon have difficulty following its dwindling course. Before they had to make any decision, the boat drifted over to a wooden jetty. It was rickety and treacherous, with missing planks, some broken; it looked barely used.
'Terminus,' Matt said.
They collected their things and disembarked, sorry to be leaving the relative security of Sunchaser.
'Which way now?' Jack asked.
Matt pointed towards the northern horizon where the sky shifted with colours like a kaleidoscope. There was an area of darkness that hinted at some kind of structure, but it made their eyes hurt to stare at it for too long.
'The House of Pain,' he said redundantly.
'So all we have to do is cross this dusty old plain with all those piles of rocks,' Jack said, peering from beneath a shading hand.
'Cairns,' Mahalia said. 'They're called cairns.'
Across hills and fields she came, down long roads filled with shadows, under nights of sparkling stars, through dappled forests, across windswept plains where the echoes of ancient voices could be heard, over crystal streams and the summer-drenched meadows of wild barley and poppy. At times, Mary thought the journey would never end. It was a quest that left the path and went deep into the heart of her, where dark caverns loomed like cathedrals, unexplored throughout her long life, the terrors they contained shrinking from the lamps of her eyes.
When she finally emerged from the lanes leading out of Bradford-on-Avon on a sparkling morning of blue sky and hot sun, she was finally reborn into a new life, though she still hadn't truly understood that fact. Death continued to track her relentlessly, and it had drawn closer; on several occasions she had seen the twisted form jerking its way across the landscape and she had been forced to pick up her pace. But it no longer frightened her; it was simply there, as it always would be.
And now she had reached her final destination. Bath was spread out before her, home of her spiritual ancestors for ten thousand years, since the first Neolithic hunter- gatherers had left their simple offerings at the gushing hot springs. Mary knew her history and she knew her Craft, and everything had pointed her towards this place as the solution to the questions that gripped her.
Yet this was not the Bath she remembered. Vegetation swarmed over it, almost obscuring the grand Georgian buildings, the classical Royal Crescent, Pulteney Bridge with its echoes of the Ponte Vecchio. A wall of blackthorn the height of three men, softened by climbing honeysuckle and clematis, circled the entire city. Mature trees sprouted through the hard asphalt of the city centre's roads. Ivy draped from chimneys and gorse clustered in bushes, wild roses like small explosions of colour bloomed in every direction.
Though nature had started to reclaim many aspects of civilisation since the Fall, the density and maturity of the flora was too advanced. Magic was all around, in more ways than one: the vision of the works of humanity and nature in harmony was undeniably uplifting.
Yet the city was eerily still. No smoke drifted up from the many chimneys, nothing moved on the winding, ancient streets, neither human nor animal. Yet something was there; Mary could feel it, like a tremendous weight pressing outwards.
Desperately hoping she had made the right decision, she set off down the slope towards the city.She walked for almost a mile around the perimeter before she found an opening. It was barely wide enough for one person to pass through, and the vicious blackthorns were so dense and so close that one misstep would have raised blood. As she moved cautiously along the winding path, she realised it had been carefully designed to allow only one person to enter at a time, either for defence or as a processional route to some sacred inner sanctum; perhaps both.
The wall of blackthorn must have been fifty feet thick, and when she emerged once more into the sunlight, she felt as if she was being born into a new world. The city no longer had the feel of any human place; it was otherworldly, heavy with mystery and a profound sense of sanctity. As Mary moved out into the sun-kissed streets, now filled only with the rustling of leaves and the perfume of wild flowers, she felt she was on the verge of some tremendous transcendent revelation. Everything around her, even the air itself, was heavy with meaning.
Feeling humbled, she made her way through the city slowly, drinking in the incredible peace, reaching out every now and then to trail her fingers through the leaves or to caress the petals of a flower. The old tourist signs still remained to guide her way, an irony that was not lost on her.
Bath had always had a time-lost quality, with its ancient sites pressed up close against modern developments, but now it was even more affecting. And as Mary moved through it, s
he realised the flashes she had seen from the corners of her eyes were not simply sunlight breaking through branches. There was movement, but not life.
Ghostly men and women moved thoughtfully amongst the foliage. She saw strangely attired figures she took to be the Celts who had erected the first shrine at the city's springs in 700 bc, and Romans who had come after, and others in the clothes of later ages, drifting in a tranquil state, barely seen but their presence felt. They weren't frightening; rather, they gave Mary an odd feeling of comfort.Finally she came to her destination. Twin fires burned furiously in braziers on either side of the path, though there was no sign of anyone who could possibly have tended them. Beyond, the modern entrance hall to the site of the Roman baths was almost hidden beneath a thick covering of vegetation. But the doors stood open, the interior impenetrably dark.
Mary summoned up the reserves of her character. It was the time of reckoning.
'This water isn't going to last long.' Mahalia moistened her lips from the canteen they had brought from Sunchaser.
Matt shielded his eyes from the sun to peer across the dusty plain, where only crabgrass and rocky outcroppings broke the monotony of the cairns, so regularly spaced on the sweeping uplands that they resembled some geometric design intended to be viewed from the heavens. 'I don't know - it's hard to tell from this perspective, but it shouldn't be too long before we reach the other side.'
'What if there's no water there, either?' Jack asked. 'Not that I... really need it.' He cast a worried look at Mahalia.
'I think that's the least of our problems,' Matt replied.
Though the sun was low on the horizon, the sky was a mass of shifting colours, purple folding into gold, bubbles of red bursting into green shimmers. The sense that the Borderlands was now close was also evident in the surging eerie noises that occasionally materialised out of the wind, like the effects of some psychedelic garage band. Flavours burst on their tongues - strawberries, burned iron, cardamom and lime. The aroma of rose petals and incense filled the air.
Crowther followed them, his own twisting of reality more muted in comparison but still disturbing, windows on to other worlds opening here and there when they least expected it.
They had been walking all day across the unrelenting landscape, the river now lost far behind them. Their clothes and hair were white with the dust that worked its way into everywhere, stinging their eyes and choking their throats.
Jack eyed one of the cairns as they passed. 'What are they?'
'Just piles of rock.' Weariness was evident in Matt's voice. 'Someone had too much time on their hands.'
'That shows how much you know,' Mahalia said sullenly. 'They're memorials. In some cultures, they're burial mounds.'
Matt shrugged as if the distinction was unimportant, but Mahalia's words struck a chord with Jack.
He stopped and scanned the wide plain uneasily, taking in the countless cairns that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. 'Burial mounds?' he repeated.
'That's a heck of a lot of dead bodies,' Matt commented.
Mahalia saw the thoughts flickering across Jack's face; he looked ghostly in the fading light. 'What is it?' she asked gently.
'I heard something,' he began, struggling to pluck information from his memory's depths, 'in the Court of the Final Word. About a place of the dead ... like an annexe of the Grey Lands, that's what they said. It had another name—'
'We don't need a history lesson,' Matt snapped, with irritation born of too much trudging. 'Just keep walking or we'll never get to the other side.'
Jack did as he was told, but kept searching for the information niggling at him. Crowther's warping of what passed for reality was setting them all on edge; it was impossible to concentrate on anything.
Yet even through the mask's weird effects, something unusual caught Mahalia's eye. 'Did you see that?' she asked. 'One of the rocks rolled off that cairn over there.'
'It's all that stuff the prof is causing,' Matt said. He picked up his pace, eager to get through this area before dark. They could all sense something in the air, though they had been putting it down to the unusual atmosphere in the proximity of the Borderlands.
'That's just light and sound,' Mahalia snapped at his dismissive attitude. 'The mask isn't generating any vibrations.'
A rock rolled off another cairn to her left, and another directly ahead. This time Matt saw it, too. The stones appeared to have moved of their own accord.
'See!' Mahalia said with a note of triumph.
Matt paused, then slowly turned, scanning the area. Rocks were rolling off cairns all over the place, one after the other, opening up gaps into their interiors. He glanced up at the sky. The psychedelic warping offered a deceptive illumination; the sun was almost down. On the other horizon, a full butterscotch moon was rising.
A jolt transformed Jack's face. 'The Land of the Sleeping Dead!'
More rocks fell. Every cairn was coming alive. Movement was visible in the cracks splitting open the ones near at hand.
'There are things inside!' Mahalia gasped.
A ghostly white hand began to emerge from one of the openings.
'Jesus!' Matt said under his breath. He grabbed Mahalia and Jack, and yanked them forward.
'The professor!' Mahalia exclaimed.
'Leave him.' Matt began to run, then looked at the innumerable cairns stretching out into the distance and realised the futility of trying to escape.
'The Baobhan Sith!' Jack said, his face as white as death.
'What are they?' Mahalia asked. She began to move forward, saw another figure begin to emerge and turned back, only to be confronted by yet more.
'They lie in wait to suck the blood of travellers ... you can't escape them.. .' Jack said breathlessly.
Matt noticed the cairns in the distance were unmoving. 'They're waking up as the moon's rays fall on them!' he said. 'If we run, we might be able to outpace them.' He sprinted from a standing start.
'You can't escape them!' Jack yelled. Nonetheless, he grabbed Mahalia's hand and ran, too.
The white dust rose in clouds under their pounding feet. Across their field of vision, shimmering shapes emerged from the cairns. There would be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands; and Matt, Jack and Mahalia were right in the centre of the vampiric creatures' homeland.
Matt's greater strength pulled him ahead, but he fell back when he saw Jack and Mahalia floundering. The Baobhan Sith drew slowly from their dark holes, hair long and wild, faces as inexpressive as dolls', dressed in tattered shrouds.
The shadows retreated before the moon's rays at a remarkable rate; there was no way Matt, Jack and Mahalia could keep up. One night creature pulled itself out near their feet as they ran, its dumb expression flickering at their passing. Hands reached out of the cairns ahead of them. At their backs, Matt, Jack and Mahalia could feel the weight of the massing ranks of the Baobhan Sith.
And then a terrible shriek cut through the dusty twilight air. Mahalia felt as if she'd been stabbed in the heart. It was an alarm. Matt glanced back, as more reverberating shrieks picked up the call, the look on his face revealing the horror they all felt.
And then the shrieks were all around. From the corners of her eyes, Mahalia could see masses of wretched figures sweeping towards them, a tidal wave of teeth and clutching hands. The cairns ahead were almost exploding as yet more bloodsuckers emerged rapidly in answer to the call.
And suddenly they had nowhere to run. Mahalia dropped to the ground, huddling into a ball. Jack threw himself over her to protect her. They couldn't see Matt.
All around, the Baobhan Sith rushed towards the small circle of dust where they lay; it felt like the only tiny area in the vast plain not covered by bloodthirsty bodies.
And just as they screwed their eyes shut ready for the creatures to fall on them, something very strange happened. A powerful scent of roses descended, followed by the most intense silence Mahalia had ever heard; in a fraction of a second, there was no shr
ieking, no wind, nothing. She opened her eyes to see a glistening bubble all around them; Matt was sprawled in the dust nearby, blood streaming from the rake-marks of talons across his forehead.
Beyond the bubble, Mahalia could see the Baobhan Sith swarming like roaches, slipping around the edge of the bubble, unable to see it or Mahalia, Jack and Matt within.
'What's going on?' Jack asked, dazed.
Matt pointed through the bubble along the route they had come. Crowther stood there, the mask staring blankly at them. The Baobhan Sith were keeping well away from him, fearful of the power he was exhibiting.
Mahalia jumped to her feet. 'See! He is looking out for us!'
The bubble fizzed and faded in parts before strengthening again.
'I don't think he can keep it up for long,' Matt said. He looked around frantically for an option, then inspiration lighted on his face. Scrambling on his knees, he dived into one of the cairns and began to pull the rocks towards the entrance. 'Come on!' he shouted to the other two.
'You're crazy!' Mahalia said. 'What happens when they go back in there? We'll be trapped!'
'Any better ideas?' Matt snapped. 'I'm betting they won't return until sun-up. If they really are like Jack said, they probably can't stand the rays. So when this one starts coming in, we bolt out. If day's coming, they won't be able to follow us.'
Mahalia wasn't convinced, but she couldn't see another option. She pushed Jack in first, then forced her way in behind. It was cramped inside. The hard rock of the cairn jabbed into backs, ribs, heads, elbows.
With Matt's help, Mahalia rebuilt the doorway, and just as the last stone slipped into place, the bubble disappeared with a faint pooofl
Mahalia's heart instantly sprang into her throat. Through the gaps between the rocks, she saw the Baobhan Sith surge like wild animals into the space they had just vacated. Her breath caught. Would they see them hiding there, rip the cairn open and drag them out to tear out their throats with those needle-teeth?
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