by Tim Lebbon
Fleeing through trees and grass, with bushes snatching at his clothing and startled birds taking flight around him, he might have been in another world. He still carried valley mud on his boots and lower trouser legs, and the dust of drying silt was thick at the back of his throat and in his eyes. He also bore the memory of the murder he had witnessed. He had seen violence before, and perpetrated it himself from time to time, but he’d never seen anything so brutal and inhuman.
Inhuman is what it’s all about, he thought. He’d never thought of himself in such terms, because he had never allowed that strange, non-human part of him to come to the fore. He did not want that for himself.
He wasn’t sure what he wanted, other than to know his father was at peace. Now, out of the valley, he realised that he should have listened to Angela and the dead nymph, understood what they were trying to do. In killing his father and those other tortured beasts, they were seeking the same as him.
Reaching a clearing and climbing a steep rocky slope, he stood and looked back down into the valley, and realised what he had to do.
He half expected the phone signal to be ineffective. The valley looked like another world, and what he’d seen today was not of the world he knew. But the buttons beeped with a familiar sound, and the ringing at the other end was answered within three tones.
“Jordan.”
“It’s me.”
“I know who it is.”
“I’m in Longford.”
“And?”
“There’s something here,” he said. He couldn’t keep the fear from his voice, and it translated through the phone line, because her prickliness dissipated instantly.
“What have you found?”
“It’s more like what has found us,” he said.
“There was something alive under the reservoir after all? One of them?”
Bone had spent his time working for Jordan doing his best to hide the Kin from her. This turnaround was not easy, and the enthusiasm and excitement in her voice somehow made it more difficult. He felt his betrayal of the Kin biting deep, but he didn’t know what else to do. This was now far bigger than him.
“The gassing didn’t kill everything. There are three creatures, not human, and as far as I can make out they’re still infected. But they’re not the only ones we have to worry about.”
“There are more?”
“Yes.”
“How many more? And where from?”
He frowned. He wasn’t sure how to answer. The girl was Kin, that was evident, but what about the man and woman?
What about me?
“Uncertain. But one of them is... huge. Dangerous, powerful. And it came through some sort of opening, or portal.”
He heard doubt in Jordan’s silence.
“I’m telling you what I saw. Doesn’t mean I believe it any more than you.”
“So what do you suggest?” she asked.
“You have to send help before it escapes the valley,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to prevent that, but I’m not sure what I can do.”
“What do you need?” The switch was amazing. He was now the man on the ground, and Jordan was efficient and professional enough to understand that. She was still his superior, but she had placed him in charge.
“The army.”
“Be a bit more specific, Bone.”
“The army. Send all of it.”
He disconnected and stared down into the valley, at the distant remains of Longford. “And come quick,” he muttered. “Though I’m not sure that will be enough.”
22
He has always known it would come to this.
Mallian moves the burning corpse with his foot. Some of Lilou’s white-hot fat sticks to his toes and scorches his skin, but he welcomes the pain because he deserves it. He has killed his closest friend. He did not wield the fire, but he breathed its creation and sent it on its way.
He touches his neck where Lilou’s knife would have opened his skin, had the fairy not turned the keen metal blade into a feather. He feels his pumping blood, a rapid pulse because he is still fired up from his escape, his emergence back into the world, and the confrontation with Lilou.
“You should have listened to me, Lilou,” he says. Her corpse spits in response. The remains of her right hand clasp at the soil, as if trying to hold onto the world for a little while longer.
Lilou is gone, her beautiful hair sizzled to nothing, her smooth skin blackened and split, her body twisted and melted into something horrible, and dead. There are Kin who might have been able to save some of her mind, absorb her memories and fears, her dreams and desires, but none of them are here. She died in this barren human place, knowing that her best friend did the killing.
He takes some comfort knowing that she experienced only a moment of pain before her brain was fried and everything she was turned to heat, gas and fire. He does not like to contemplate that moment.
Mallian does not have many friends left, and losing one like this is a harsh lesson on his journey to Ascent.
“You could have been here with me,” he says. He looks at Grace, standing slumped and weak a few steps from him. She’s also looking at him, but her eyes are vacant and hollow, staring into a place he hopes never to see. She appears weak, but he bears the weight of her great power inside, and understands that she is stronger than even he can ever understand. She is terrifying. He has already seen and used some of her strength, and in the days to come he will use so much more.
He has to take his time. Ascent is not about him, it is about the Kin, so he needs more of them here to shoulder the burden and share the glory. He cannot rush into a future he has craved for so long.
He blinks, and in that single moment he sends a message via the fairy and her vast, complicated mind. Thorn, my old pixie friend, I’m back in the world and our time is at hand. I hope you’ve managed to fulfil your task. If you have, meet me here, and Ascent will rise from the dirt of a forgotten place. He looks down at Lilou and touches her with his foot again. His toes sink in. He feels heat from fire, not from her living, striving flesh. That part of her is cold. We will rise from the ashes.
Grace twitches once and the message is sent. Mallian smiles. He has never experienced so much power.
He sends another thought, and Grace turns her gaze on the three Kin who emerged from the buried structure. He can feel their mindless rage, the frightening violence coiled in their shrivelled limbs and coursing through their old veins. Grace opens their minds to him, and he recoils as he reads the truth.
Humans did that to them.
They were poisoned and changed, turned from gentle creatures into the monsters that humans always see. Then they were gassed, buried and forgotten.
Humans will reap what they have sown.
Grace settles again, but he can feel and see her discomfort. Good. He possesses not an ounce of pity for her, even though she is the oldest Kin he knows. Grace was here at the beginning of everything, long before the Time when Kin walked fearlessly across the land, and she has seen and known so much in her long life. What is happening to her now is just another small part of her endless story.
He didn’t even know whether the glamour would work. He is delighted. Gregor, that old human fool, did his job well.
“Shall we go to war?” he asks. Grace does not reply, and he senses that she does not understand. Whatever is left of the fairy is deep inside, and she was mad even before he took control of her mind. Perhaps she doesn’t even hear. He thinks the same phrase, and she blinks several times, fluttering her eyelids as if to shoo away a fly.
“Shall we go to war?” he asks the three mad, infected Kin. One of them, the gargoyle, slavers and drools, its muscles knotted and primed ready to launch against any foe. Mallian understands that he would be as much foe as a human. These three are machines, corrupted and unclean. They are the Kin version of human missiles. He will set them on their course.
He looks around the strange valley. He’s not sure what has happened he
re, but he can see that this used to be a human place, and now it has gone to mud, dust and ruin. He’s excited, his old heart beating faster than usual. He feels a tingle of anticipation at what is to come. For two years he has waited, never knowing if or when the chance to escape would present itself. For many years before that he schemed and planned, again not knowing for sure whether his grand plans would come to pass. He looks down at Lilou’s remains once more, and this time he does not feel sad. She is the first casualty in the battle for Ascent and will be remembered as such. A hero.
“Yes,” he says, this time speaking to no one but himself. “Let’s go to war.”
23
Thorn hears the voice of his master, and knows that his whole life has come to this. For a while he is too giddy and excited to even think about what it must mean. He’s been waiting for a long time, and even though his loyalty has never faltered, hope and expectation has. He has never been able to shake the conviction that Mallian was gone for good.
Now the Nephilim is back.
He jumps and dances and spins, filled with excitement that not only is Mallian alive, but he has advanced his cause to the point where he is calling for the Kin to join him and rise. Thorn hoped that he would see this day, but never assumed it would happen. Deep down, deeper than he would ever admit to, he has always believed the craving for Ascent to be folly.
Its reality will be something very different.
“What’s up with you?” the man beside him asks. Thorn is in a small, scruffy bar in Boston, jigging at the counter and ignoring the many strange stares. He’s used to people staring. He might be the smallest man any of them have ever seen. Usually he lets the stares slide from him, because he’s Kin and he has to blend in to survive. Used to be that he was a kind Kin, too, but the years have bled that benevolence from him, and Mallian’s outlook and cause drew him back from a precipice that might have swallowed him up in blackness and depression. Just occasionally he returns the stare loaded with the full weight of his years, and his experiences, and his deadly rage.
From time to time he lets that rage fly, but only if he knows he won’t be caught.
Now his joy and rage combine. He dances some more, kicking over bar stools, knocking tables and spilling drinks. The man stands from his own stool and brushes both hands down his front, shaking them and splashing spilled beer to the ground.
“You freaky little fuck!” he says. He grabs up a bottle from the bar, smashes its neck, and comes for Thorn.
“Max, leave the little dude alone!” the barman says. He points at Thorn. “And you. Out.”
Thorn barely hears. His old heart hammers, stuttering now and then with age and alcohol abuse and emotional misuse, but the blood pulsing through his veins feels young, and he is filled with more energy and joy than he can remember for many decades.
He takes the bottle from the man’s hand and sticks it in his assailant’s eye. The man screams and Thorn laughs, jumping to one side, snatching up a broken wine glass, shoving its snapped stem into the man’s ear. The human’s scream changes tone, catching in his throat as he drops to his knees. Thorn spins and slams the flat of his hand against the protruding glass base. It cracks against the man’s ear.
Thorn laughs again. He smells the subtle oil of a firearm. He looks around and sees some men backing away from him, a couple coming closer. There are only a few women in this bar, most of them sitting in shadowy booths. One watches in terror, another with a strange smile. There are security cameras behind the bar covering most of the room, and Thorn leaps high and settles onto a joist, spinning around several times and maintaining his balance on one foot. He grins at the nearest camera.
See me! You can all see me now.
He’s not sure this is what Mallian wants, but right now he doesn’t care. The thought of what’s to come, the anticipation of Ascent, has Thorn acting like the child he has not been for centuries.
A gun fires. He senses the bullet whip past him and bury itself in the ceiling. He hangs onto the joist and swings down, landing on a table without disturbing any of the glasses. A shadow turns and points something his way. The shadow stinks of body odour and fear, its breath fast and phlegmy, and Thorn kicks out and knocks the weapon from its hand. He snatches the spinning gun from the air and buries its barrel in the fat man’s stomach. He pulls the trigger so quickly that three shots sound like one.
Panic begins to spread and Thorn soaks it up. He dances here, slashing a man’s throat. He leaps there, shoving a broken pool cue into a woman’s eye. People scream. They run and collide with each other, fighting to reach the door first, not understanding what’s happening and struggling to flee the chaos.
Thorn is the chaos, and for a few seconds more he presents himself to the cameras, soaked in blood. He sticks up both middle fingers and grins.
“Hello, humans,” he says. “Wait ’til you get a load of us.”
* * *
A sandstorm rages in the playground of a school in Minneapolis. It’s small and confined, manifesting as a twister two metres tall and hardly wider than two spread hands. It flits and zips back and forth across the yard, and at first the teachers on duty that afternoon smile and look at it as something of an oddity. The seventh-graders watching shout and laugh, rushing back and forth to pluck blades of grass or twigs from shrubberies around the yard to throw into the miniature whirlwind. It swallows them up, rips them to shreds, and spits them out into the air above. As it moves back and forth across the ground it leaves a trail of shredded plants behind.
The teachers’ reaction turns from interest to fear when they see the face revealed in the twister’s violent sands. It looks like an image drawn onto every page in a thousand-page book, then flickered into a moving visage. There are no real features. It’s the white noise of faces, a convergence of every idea of what a face should be. Countless possibilities.
There is no sand here, one of the teachers says. The others have already thought that, but logic was displaced by fascination.
The face grins.
A child approaches to throw a handful of leaves into the tornado. The leaves are drawn from her hand, then her hand enters the swirling mass, her arm, and as she opens her mouth to scream she is swallowed away.
Every child watching screams for her.
When the red remains of the girl are spat skyward to patter down around the moving windstorm, the adults scream as well.
The children scatter in chaos, and as the teachers attempt to corral them and get them back into the building, the twister jigs back and forth, the demon within—its name is Ulb, and it ate thirteen knights and a prince during the Fourth Crusade—relishing this chance to take its fill without having to hide itself away.
Like a dog let loose in a butcher’s shop, it only stops consuming when it is fit to burst.
* * *
The three women have been friends since they were girls. One is French, one Indian, the other from San Francisco, and over the past few years they have become internet sensations. Their greatest and most daring feat so far is base-jumping the CN Tower, for which they were all arrested and lumbered with hefty fines. They’re careful to promote safety, and they always push the idea that they’re vastly experienced at what they do. It’s not just anyone who can parachute from a tall building, or kayak over waterfalls, or any number of a dozen other adventures they’ve undertaken together.
Today’s might be the most widely followed yet. The three women have their trusted friends live-streaming the attempt to a select group, and several hundred people have gathered to watch. That no rumours have reached the ears of the authorities is something of a miracle, but also testament to how dedicated and passionate their fans are.
One day we’ll end up in jail, they often say to each other. One day we’ll end up dead. But their fires burn bright, and the same flames that brought them together also keep them safe.
Today, the flames come from a different place.
As they fly through the artificial canyons of N
ew York, wing suits stretched to their limits, a shape appears and joins them in flight. At first they believe it’s another wing suit, and the three women each experience a moment of annoyance that someone else is stealing their limelight.
On the ground, onlookers—fans and bystanders alike—are the first to realise that this is not merely another thrill seeker. The way the shape moves is different. Its ease in the air, its manoeuvrability, all indicate that this is not a man or a woman in a suit.
This is something else.
High above Times Square, heading north towards Central Park, a burst of bright yellow fire envelops the woman from San Francisco. She writhes, screams, and crashes into the side of a building, smashing glass and scattering blazing parts of herself into the streets below.
A high, ululating cry echoes through the streets of New York, a call that has not been heard by this many people in a thousand years. There’s something joyous in the sound, and something terrifying. It’s so non-human that it sends the crowds below scattering, even before the burning woman’s remains strike concrete.
The Indian woman steers left to avoid the same fate, and flies straight into the boom of a crane protruding from the core of a building still under construction. Her head bounces across an intersection. Her body remains trapped aloft.
The third wing-suited shape heads for the ground as the French woman realises what has happened. Fate has caught up with her and the two women she thinks of as sisters.
She is the only one left.
Seconds later the winged creature—as big as her, but with membranous wings that stretch six metres to either side—emerges from behind a skyscraper and breathes fire into her face.