by Tim Lebbon
“You damage my cruiser and I’ll ram this inside you,” Dane said, swinging the shotgun up and holding it across his chest.
The figure that rose behind him blocked the headlamps and cast a huge shadow, a towering, shimmering shape that danced across the valley as it stepped closer.
“Holy fucking—” the sheriff said, voice cut off as she was swatted to one side.
Mallian came himself, Bone thought. Of course he did. He wants to be on camera as much as I want him to be seen.
Mallian stood tall and proud as Dane turned around to see what stood behind him. The Nephilim glanced down at the sheriff as she struggled to rise, then took three quick steps and snatched Dane off his feet. Even such a big man looked toylike in the Nephilim’s hands.
The shotgun fired into the night, then Mallian plucked it from the officer’s hands and snapped it in half. Still holding Dane beneath the arms in his other hand, he held onto his legs around the thighs, raised him high above his head, and pulled. Muscles stood knotted in his arms, shoulders and chest, and Mallian roared with effort as he twisted and pulled the big cop in two.
If Dane made a sound, Bone didn’t hear it.
Blood and fluids splashed down on Mallian’s upturned face, and he opened his mouth to swallow them down.
The sheriff was on her feet fumbling for her sidearm, eyes wide and disbelieving.
Mallian stood bathed in light, a bloody, living sculpture holding two torn halves of the same man aloft. His head and upper body glimmered as he moved, and it shook everything he knew of the world, even though he had known of Kin since he was a little boy. It made everything darker.
He couldn’t imagine what reaction the sheriff was fighting through.
She’d pulled her gun and was trying to aim, but her hands shook, her right leg quivering as she tried to keep her footing.
Mallian threw the upper portion of Dane’s corpse at her. His head struck her right hip and she went down, and Bone thought, Now he leaps on her and tears her to pieces.
But the Nephilim was relishing this moment. He held the dead cop’s lower torso and legs high and roared, remaining in the light. He knew what he was doing. This was Mallian’s moment, a time he must have dreamt about for years, decades, centuries. This was the beginning of his personal revelation to humanity, and Bone knew that what the cops’ body-cam and dash-cam images recorded would become the founding, early images of Ascent.
The sheriff had gone. Bone hadn’t seen her run, and he felt a momentary fury at her cowardice. She’d left him here, alone, locked away and at the mercy of this beast. Seconds later, he realised he’d have done the same. She couldn’t be thinking straight, and running blindly into the woods would be her first and only reaction.
Bone shrank down, peering between the front seats at Mallian as he turned a slow circle. The headlamps would prevent him seeing into the cruiser, and perhaps he’d simply leave now that his job was done. Slipping lower, holding his breath, he wasn’t ready for the object that slammed against the driver’s door.
Of course, the shape we saw just before, one of the infected Kin sent by Mallian to distract the cops, make his revelation even more mind-blowing, and now it’ll rip the doors off and come inside and there’s nothing I can do. All my fault. I let them out. I let my father out when I should have killed him.
The driver’s door opened and the sheriff dropped into the seat, her breathing short and panicked, hands shaking as she reached for the keys. She didn’t seem to remember Bone was in the back. He said nothing.
Starting the car drew Mallian’s attention again, and he heaved the other half of the corpse at the vehicle. It slammed into the windscreen and slid down, leaving a slick trail on the glass.
The sheriff crunched her foot on the gas and reversed, twisting in her seat, catching Bone’s eye then looking past him as she steered the car backwards away from the blood-soaked giant. Dane’s body dropped from the bonnet and Mallian stepped on it as he came for them.
He didn’t run. He took long, loping steps, grinning, and Bone couldn’t help thinking he was performing for the dash-cam. He won’t stop us, he thought. I’m not going to die at his hands just yet.
Maybe tomorrow.
The sheriff was a good driver. She slid the car into a spin, pushed it into drive and then powered away, keeping her eyes on the road and only on the road. Not on the beast that had stopped downhill, a few huge steps out of the grey and into the green.
Bone turned in his seat and watched Mallian recede behind them, his daunting shape revealed by the bloody dusk. He couldn’t help feeling that the two of them locked eyes.
In the front, the sheriff began to groan with each breath.
“Can you send images from this thing?” Bone asked.
“Huh?”
“Can you send dash-cam images from the cruiser? To phone or email or something else?”
“Huh?”
“Pictures of Mallian.”
“What’s a Mallian?”
“That thing.”
“It has a name?”
“Can you do it?”
She drove, weaving between trees and bouncing along abandoned tracks. The cruiser’s suspension creaked and cracked, and Bone pressed one hand against the ceiling to prevent smacking his head.
“Sheriff! Lily!”
“Huh?”
He let her drive. She was still groaning, an exhalation with each breath that might have been disbelief, or fear, or grief, but was probably all three. A couple of minutes later they hit a smoother road and she turned left, towards the valley crest and the long road to the nearest town beyond. She was driving too fast. Blood smeared the windscreen, forced into cracks in the glass from the impact of half of Dane’s corpse.
“Sheriff, I need to send those images to my superior,” Bone said. “She’ll send help.”
“Help. Against that.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Bone lied, because anything else would take too long to explain. After decades he still sometimes didn’t understand himself.
“The images,” he said.
“Yeah. I can send. But not here, and not yet. I’m getting the fuck out of this valley first.”
Bone sighed and sat back into the cruiser’s rear seat, every part of him in agreement.
* * *
“Holy fuck.”
“I told you.”
“What is it?” Jordan asked.
“I’m not sure.” The same lie, for the same reason.
“I didn’t believe you.”
“I know. So, the army? You’ll send them? It’s not the only one, and some of the others... they’re different. Worse.”
“Worse than that?”
“Worse.”
The phone line crackled, and Bone wasn’t sure if some of it was Jordan holding her phone away from her head and taking deep breaths.
“Of course,” she said. “They’ll be there by dawn. I didn’t believe you, but I couldn’t take the risk. Longford already had a red mark against it, a watch notice, and the army mobilised when you first called.”
“Thank fuck for that,” Bone said.
“Will it do any good? Will they help?”
I don’t know, he wanted to say. I don’t think so, he thought. Instead he said nothing, and after a period of uncomfortable silence Jordan said, “Keep in touch,” and ended the call.
The dead air sounded deep, dark, and filled with terrible futures.
26
Angela and Fer stayed behind with Sammi, and Vince accompanied Dastion across the hillside and down through one of the many hidden entrances to the mines he had been working on beneath the surface of the Folded Land. Shashahanna went with them, moving like mist, mysterious and silent.
Vince couldn’t help feeling that they were working against time. The Fold was failing, its edges shredding, a tempestuous creation angry at its creator for leaving. Rain fell heavier as they entered the mines, wind blew har
der. The ground itself shook with minor quakes. There was no telling how long it would hold together, nor what would happen once the edges began to give way.
Sammi was still struggling with the glamour cast over the relics, and her own burgeoning and confusing powers. Vince could see the pain she was suffering, and knew that Angela saw it too. It was awful to behold, but something they had to ignore, because they both knew that Sammi was doing her best. She was their only hope, and they had no choice but to let her do whatever was needed to break the spell.
Beyond the Fold, Mallian was marshalling his forces. What would happen once Ascent began, no one could know. Vince imagined terrible things—cities laid waste, Kin fighting humans, modern warfare tangling with powerful fairy magic in the valleys and hills of eastern America and the wide skies above. Much of it was beyond imagining, but he knew that the death toll would be catastrophic.
No version of Mallian’s Ascent would be peaceful.
The clock ticked, and with every step that Vince took, he felt an uncertain ending drawing closer.
Dastion had been busy beneath the ground. His mines were deep, the tunnels twisting left and right, up and down. Larger galleries had been carved from the rock of the land, with columns left standing to support the curved ceilings. Here and there he’d taken time to carve images into the stone walls, strange glyphs telling tales Vince had no time to understand. It must have been difficult for Dastion to adjust to his new life. As well as leaving his human existence behind, it appeared that a deep, complex race memory had been carried in his Kin bloodlines, and he was telling his own story through digging, tunnelling, mining and carving.
The dwarf moved with confidence, handing them torches stored at regular intervals. The brands blazed with a rich yellow light, pushing back the shadows, filling the space around them. Here and there side tunnels headed off into the depths, and Dastion glanced at some of them with a strange longing.
All he wants to do is dig, Vince thought.
Every now and then the tunnels shook. Dust fell around them, and grit, and occasionally larger stones and rocks broke away from walls and ceiling.
“Built to last,” Dastion said, slapping a heavy timber bracing propped across the tunnel above Vince’s head. He sounded confident, but looked less so. Or maybe it was the way torchlight reflected in his eyes.
Dastion led them deeper, down a series of spiralling staircases and across several narrow rock bridges that spanned cracks in the land. Vince was drawn by the dark spaces beneath these bridges, and he found himself pausing and looking down. On the third crossing he glanced up to see Dastion and Shashahanna watching him, his eyes full of understanding, hers unreadable. Vince looked back to the depths and dropped his burning torch.
It fell, turning slowly end over end and shedding sparks. Its light splashed across crevasse walls and fell with it, a ball of illumination that grew smaller as it went deeper. Vince expected the torch to strike bottom, break apart on a rocky floor or extinguish in an underground stream, but it simply kept falling until it was little more than a speck of light, a descending star that then became something he wasn’t sure he could see at all.
“How far?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Dastion said. “I’ve gone deeper than we are now, and that’s where I found what I have to show you. But down there...” He shrugged. “I’m fascinated by it, but afraid as well.”
“You don’t seem like someone who’d be afraid,” Shashahanna said, her deep voice echoing.
“You don’t know me,” Dastion said. “Neither of you do. Come on, we’re almost there.”
They left the crevasse behind and entered another series of tunnels. Skirting an underground pool, Shashahanna handed Vince her torch and slipped into the waters with hardly a ripple. He and Dastion edged around the pool, and as she emerged on the far side, water slipping from her body, her eyes were wide. She breathed in a chestful of air and exhaled slowly.
“So old,” she said. “Older than anywhere I’ve swum before.”
“How can this place be older than anywhere else?” Vince asked.
“I didn’t dig all these tunnels, human,” Dastion said. “I find the way, but sometimes the way is here before me.”
“So old,” Shashahanna whispered again, moving ahead of them away from the pool. She did not once look back.
During Vince’s time here days and seasons had seemed to change at random. Down in the darkness it was even harder to follow the passage of time. He wondered how Dastion managed, but then realised he did not need to. For the dwarf, being down here was time on his own, and day or night, winter or summer, did not matter.
“We’re close,” Dastion said. “We’ll wait here. Just for a while.”
Vince couldn’t tell if the dwarf was tired or scared, or maybe both.
“We don’t have time to wait,” he said.
“Just while I tell you what I found, because if I’m right, what’s around the corner might be dangerous.”
“So tell us,” Shashahanna said.
“I found... a crack in the world.”
Vince thought back to the crevasse, a few minutes or an hour earlier. He wondered if his torch was still falling.
“Not like that one back there,” Dastion said. “This is something different. That crevasse is deeper than it ever should be. When I found it, I threw rocks in and never heard them hit bottom, but I’ve done nothing since. I’m worried I’ll disturb whatever might be down there. But this place I’ve brought you to is more of an edge than a crack. An end.”
“Of the world?” Vince asked.
“Of this world. You’ve tried walking out of the valley, I’m sure.”
“Countless times,” Vince said. “I get turned around without feeling it. A weird sensation. As if I’ve rebounded from a wall, but there’s no wall there and no sense of changing direction.”
“I’ve tried down here, too,” Dastion said. “I’ve mined in a straight line for weeks on end, and eventually end up back in the cavern where I began. Here, I’ve found the edge of the Fold, and it’s visible. It’s dark, like infinity. Like nothing.”
“What good is that?” Shashahanna asked. “You’ve brought us all the way down here to see a wall?”
“I think the edge might be open,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Vince asked.
“Grace has formed one opening out of the Fold.”
“And you think it might be mirrored down here?”
“We’ve come down here on a supposition?” Shashahanna asked.
“I know the ground,” Dastion said. “I know the rocks and the soils, the cracks between rocks, and the way it all holds together. There’s a poetry to it, and a form. I haven’t been living the life I was meant to for very long, but it’s been a part of me forever. I think this is a place she forgot about, or maybe never knew about in the first place. And now that she’s formed her portal up there, this down here might be another way out of the Fold.”
“So let’s go and see,” Vince said. He nodded past Dastion and the dwarf turned and led the way.
The tunnel ahead of Dastion suddenly opened up wide, swallowing torchlight and giving nothing back. The blackness was deeper than any Vince had ever seen, a thick, physical presence rather than an absence, and he experienced a moment of dread that prickled sweat across his skin and shrivelled his balls. The tunnel was narrow, but this consuming darkness was suddenly wide, stretching across his whole field of vision.
“You didn’t say how fucking scary it was,” Vince said.
“Yeah.”
Shashahanna crept forward and approached the endless darkness, reaching out her hand. “It’s like the depths I’ve always sought,” she said.
“I’ve tried touching it,” Dastion said. “Took a while to pluck up the courage, but when I eventually did my hand just—”
Shashahanna reached forward and her hand pressed into the black wall. She exhaled softly, as if from pleasure, and pressed in deeper.
“There’s no telling where it emerges, is there?” Vince asked. “There’s no saying whether it mirrors the portal Grace made up above. We might walk through into Mallian’s hands.”
“One way to find out,” Shashahanna said, and she took three quick steps forward and vanished.
Vince gasped. There one second, gone the next, without any shimmer in the black curtain, no sound, and no evidence that she had ever existed at all.
“I guess the mermaid’s gone,” Dastion said.
“We came down here for a reason,” Vince said. He slipped his belt off. “How about you hang on to one end while I take a peek?”
“And I’ll pull you back from the dark depths of infinity if it’s too scary for you,” Dastion said. He nodded. “Plan.”
Vince let Dastion tie the belt through one of his belt loops and the dwarf held the buckle end in one of his big hands. He was strong, Vince had no doubt of that, but strength might count for nothing. The darkness was cool, sucking the heat from his body. It was silent. It gave the impression that it was indifferent to them, yet Vince thought he felt the regard of a great, unknowable consciousness.
He hated the idea that he was leaving Angela again, but events seemed to conspire to force them apart.
With a nod to Dastion he followed Shashahanna.
It was different from passing through Grace’s portal. There was more pull and pressure here, his skin compressed from every angle, air forced from his lungs, muscles crushed into his bones as he walked, and his broken arm was shifted and tweaked so much that he opened his mouth to scream.
The darkness rushed in and put pressure on his insides, pushing out. He felt trapped, yet somehow he kept walking, two more steps, three, and then he fell to his knees on soft ground and he was out. The relief was immense. He drew in a startled breath, feeling lighter than he ever had before. He thought if he breathed too deeply he might drift up from the ground into the air, and maybe if that happened he’d never come back down.
“Quite a rush,” Shashahanna said. She was standing beside him, and when he reached towards her took his hand and pulled him up.
Vince noticed that his belt hung limp from his jeans.