The Burning Man, page 17
part #2 of Kingdom of the Serpent Series
‘Sleeping, finally – he was determined to keep going until he dropped. Bit worried about the old guy, though. Something’s eating away at him. But you know what he’s like – he won’t talk about it.’
Laura clutched at the rail as the ship crested a swell. ‘On the bright side, at least when he’s moping he’s not being a pain in the arse.’
‘What are our plans when we reach Germany?’ Shavi asked.
‘Steal a van. We can cut through the country pretty quickly on the autobahns, depending on which route Veitch takes. If we get past security, that is. I thought we’d have more trouble in Sweden.’
‘More trouble?’ Laura said. ‘It was touch and go all the way.’
‘Trust me, we’ve had it easy.’
Laura watched the sunset colours swimming on the ocean. ‘Why didn’t Veitch just kill the guy we were after? That would have stopped us dead in our tracks.’
‘He is unpredictable,’ Shavi said simply.
‘He’s smart and sly, too,’ Hunter added. ‘He’s got some sort of plan.’
Urgent activity broke out amongst the Russian crew further along the deck. They were leaning over the other side, pointing into the water. Far below the surface a dim light was visible, powerful enough that it could pierce several fathoms.
‘Is that one of those deep-sea fish, way off course?’ Laura said. ‘Or a submarine?’
Hunter questioned the sailors in Russian. ‘They’re calling it a USO – unidentified submarine object,’ he said afterwards. ‘They’ve seen one or two on this route.’
‘Wait,’ Shavi said. ‘Is it rising?’
The light grew brighter as it emerged from the depths. The crew shouted anxiously, and one man ran to inform the captain.
‘Let’s get under cover,’ Hunter urged.
In the shadows of a metal staircase, they watched the waters boil as light streamed from below. Something broke the surface, reflecting the sunset and the distant lightning. At first they thought it was a metallic craft, then some mythical sea-beast and finally realised it was a little of both.
Rising up from the swell was some kind of insectile construct, black carapace, extensions that could have been legs, and an overwhelming stink of spoiled meat. Water streamed from it as it lifted into the darkening sky to hang over the ship. They instinctively recognised it as something that had come from the Void, searching for them.
‘Shit, if it attacks here, game over,’ Laura whispered. ‘Five minutes in this water and we’re dead.’
Hunter held her back, but his touch was also calming. He weighed things neither Laura nor Shavi saw. ‘If it was ready to attack, we’d be gone already.’
Lights flared again, eyes levelling, a forensic stare. A beam fell upon the sailors and held them for a moment before moving off across the surface of the ship. Hunter, Shavi and Laura pressed back into the shadows.
When it completed a circuit, the eye winked out and the insect-ship sank slowly back beneath the waves. The crew ran about in relieved excitement, hugging each other.
‘I thought the idea was that the Void didn’t try to break the Mundane Spell,’ Laura said.
‘This’ll just be one of those fish stories that gets told in bars and then forgotten,’ Hunter said. ‘But it’s pushing at the limits of what it can get away with. These kinds of things must be patrolling everywhere, scuttling behind the scenes, trying to find us.’
‘But whatever was in the craft was not wholly intelligent,’ Shavi said. ‘It sensed we were here, you could see, but it could not work out why it could not find us. That is one thing in our favour.’
At the rail, they watched the lights growing dimmer as the vessel sank into the depths.
2
Two days later, at Rostock, Hunter bribed a sailor to stow them in crates of machine tools, who in turn bribed the customs official to let the container lorry through without scrutiny. Ten miles inland they were freed to buy a van from an unscrupulous backstreet dealer unconcerned about paperwork. They picked up the autobahn east of Hamburg and headed south.
Tom sat silently in the front, feeling the gentle tug of his ring. At the wheel, Hunter watched faces, seeing the scars of a world without magic, feeling the slow, black suffocation of the Void pressing in on all sides. He was sure it would only be a matter of time before that desolation enveloped them all and they rejoined the non-people with their non-lives. He started to beat out a rhythm on the steering wheel, but it sounded like the ticking of a clock, counting out the seconds of hope that remained.
‘There’s still hope,’ Tom said quietly, as if he could read Hunter’s mind. ‘There’s always hope. That is what the secret Gnostic knowledge tells us.’
‘Somehow that doesn’t feel like enough,’ Hunter said.
‘Ah, but it is. To understand that is to win. This world is about the base and the material. It is about struggling for money and power, about fighting for people like you against people like them. You can see it engrained in every aspect of our culture, locked in so tightly that there is no room for the opposite point of view to gain a foothold. Innocence, love, hope – these things are derided and their power diminished. And yet there is a place where they can survive even the most tumultuous attack.’
Shavi leaned forward between the two of them. ‘The human heart,’ he said.
In the back, Laura yawned loudly and pointedly. ‘Here come the hippies.’
‘The Gnostic secrets tell us that fragments of the true power of Existence, the Blue Fire, are lodged in every human, waiting to be fanned from a spark into a flame,’ Tom continued. ‘Those fragments are the basis of the Pendragon Spirit. And if that knowledge tells us one thing, it is this: that every person can make a difference. That by looking within, the outside can be altered.’
‘That’s a nice little story,’ Hunter said, ‘but nobody’s going to wake up of their own accord. They’ve got too much to keep them occupied – cash, drink, drugs, sex.’ He paused. ‘Not to be knocked, of course.’
‘That is how the Void wins,’ Shavi said. ‘It has built a prison that we love.’
‘Still doesn’t get away from my point: who’s going to start making people fan those sparks?’
‘You,’ Tom snapped. ‘Do I have to spell it out? Why am I cursed to be surrounded by thick-heads?’
While Laura launched a caustic attack on Tom, Church sat silently in the back, turning over Tom’s words, convinced they were directed at him. As always, Tom cut through to the heart of him, slicing past the encysted negativity that had grown around Ruth’s disappearance.
‘We wake them by shattering the Mundane Spell,’ he said. ‘We show them the magic that exists behind the scenes.’
As they passed Frankfurt a few hours later, they realised his words had more than metaphorical meaning. Cars veered wildly across the autobahn and came to a halt on the hard shoulder as people jumped out to stare into the sky. Overhead, a winged horse dipped and soared in the morning light. Hunter pulled the van to the side and wound down the window. The cries of the observers were filled with wonder that suggested they had been changed for ever.
‘This Great Dominion is awake,’ Tom said, ‘and the magic it contains is now unfettered. You did that, simply by passing through.’
‘So all we’ve got to do,’ Laura said, watching the horse dreamily, ‘is to wake each Great Dominion. Simple. We open the box, the weird stuff pours out and the Mundane Spell shatters.’
Tom sighed. ‘First, you have to survive each Great Dominion.’
3
The Tower of the Four Winds stood amidst minarets and flat-roofed white stone buildings, an echo of Moorish architecture that was compounded by the aroma of spices on the hot wind. It was one of a pair, an exact duplicate of one that stood in the Court of Soul’s Ease. Though all around the streets were as claustrophobically packed as any in the Court of the Soaring Spirit, Math’s tower home stood in a spacious walled garden that felt like breathing again after a prolonged period of stress.
‘So Math is some kind of sorcerer to the Tuatha Dé Danann?’ Mallory whispered as he searched the shadowy garden, a lantern hidden beneath his cloak.
‘Scary guy,’ Sophie replied. ‘He wears a mask with four different animal avatar faces that keeps rotating while he speaks.’
‘Was he a threat to Niamh? Is that why he’s missing?’ Caitlin gripped her axe tightly.
‘I’m not convinced Niamh is the threat,’ Sophie said hesitantly. ‘I don’t get any sense of that.’
‘The Tuatha Dé Danann are very good at hiding their motivations,’ Caitlin responded. ‘Did you have any trouble getting Rhiannon out of the palace?’
‘Decebalus smuggled her out.’ Mallory unsheathed Llyrwyn, which sang as the blue flames licked the warm night air. ‘He’s got rooms at the Hunter’s Moon under an assumed name. He’ll guard Virginia Dare and Rhiannon with his life.’
‘They’ll find them sooner or later,’ Caitlin said.
‘Then we’d better not waste any more time chatting.’ Mallory led the way up the path to the tower’s door.
Ivory, glass and gold combined in perfect balance, the overall aesthetic implying that it was a place dedicated to the study of higher things. But an underlying tone of menace was hidden in the architecture like a ghost of the truth.
The door hung open, the lock shattered. Cautiously they climbed a staircase running around the inside wall. Halfway up, Caitlin and Sophie shared a look of apprehension, but the only sound was the wind rushing through the space above them.
They emerged into a room at the very top of the tower with open windows at the cardinal points. In front of the windows, iron rings had been set in the wooden floorboards with a broken chain attached to each one. Purple drapes marked with magical symbols had been torn from the walls. An upturned brazier, books, charts and lanterns were scattered all around. Mallory examined deep scarring in the floorboards where it looked as if they had been hit repeatedly with an axe.
‘If he’s such a scary sorcerer, that means whoever took him down has to be even scarier,’ Caitlin noted.
Sophie picked up some of the magickal items. They made her fingers tingle as if they were calling to her. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’
‘That’d make sense if he was a threat,’ Mallory said. ‘But if he is, that means all the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons Church rescued are dead, too.’
Sophie righted the brazier and started to set the books and amulets and crystals back on the tables. The disorder was unsettling her. ‘He is a powerful sorcerer,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘They couldn’t have taken him by force alone. And they couldn’t have taken him by surprise, not here, in his own tower.’
‘Then why didn’t he run?’ Caitlin examined one of the broken chains, then looked out of the window across the jumbled rooftops of the dark city.
Mallory perched on the main altar table and slowly took in the details of the room. ‘He knew there wasn’t any point in running. They were more powerful. They saw him as a threat. They were going to get him sooner or later.’
‘So he just sat here and waited for them?’ Caitlin said.
Musing, Mallory watched intently as Sophie laid out the magickal items. ‘What would you do if you knew an enemy was coming for you and there was no escape?’
Caitlin tapped her axe rhythmically against the stone lintel of the window, lost in thought.
‘He was working on something just before they took him.’ Sophie examined two crumbling leather-bound volumes, various pages marked by hide strips. She trailed her fingers across a gold chalice studded with gems, a half-burned green candle, a polished crystal, a human skull branded with runes. ‘These … I can’t read the words, but these diagrams … and these ritual items – Math was trying to contact the Grim Lands.’
‘Why would he want to get in touch with the dead?’ Mallory asked.
‘Even the gods are banned from going there. But there’s something here about souls … What was he doing?’
‘There’s a message here somewhere,’ Caitlin interjected. ‘If I was trapped with no way out, that’s what I’d do – leave a clue for someone who might come looking for me.’
‘We have to look for patterns,’ Sophie said. ‘That’s what magic is – repeating patterns that influence the underlying patterns of the universe.’
‘Patterns,’ Mallory repeated thoughtfully. ‘You know how I feel about magic – about the same as I do about gods, God and religion. But patterns I can understand.’
Mallory returned to the entrance to get a better view of the room. His gaze fell upon the fallen drapes, the position of the brazier, his recollection of where the magickal items had been before Sophie moved them. He sheathed his sword and extinguished the lantern.
The darkness smothered them until their eyes got used to the faint light falling through the windows. The moon was high and almost full, its rays a bright beam through one window. From another, illumination came from an eternal flame that burned atop another tower nearby. One light white, one ruddy. Mallory returned the brazier to its fallen position. In the moonlight, a handle carved in a serpent shape produced a finger of shadow across the floorboards.
‘Where did the other stuff go?’ he said.
Caitlin placed the chalice on the floor, hesitated. ‘No, that’s not right.’
Sophie adjusted the chalice by a few inches, realigning it with the moonbeam. Another finger of shadow extended to bisect the first.
‘Doesn’t make sense.’ Mallory examined the point where the shadows crossed. ‘The moon wouldn’t be in the same position now as when Math laid all this out.’ Frustrated, he paced the room. ‘Maybe we’re wrong—’
‘No,’ Sophie insisted. ‘This feels right. We’re just missing something.’
‘Four winds … four windows,’ Caitlin mused. ‘The old philosophers had four elements. Wasn’t that the basis of some magic?’
‘Earth, air, fire and water,’ Mallory added, nodding.
‘Five,’ Sophie corrected. ‘Those are the four earthly elements. There was a fifth, quintessence, which was heavenly, incorruptible.’
‘Okay.’ Mallory knelt to examine what they had. ‘The brazier stands for fire, obviously. I’m betting the chalice is water. What lines up with the earth window?’
Sophie held up the skull with a shrug.
‘Mortal clay.’ Caitlin’s voice was hollow, her eyes downcast.
Sophie placed the skull where it had been when they entered. ‘I think the fourth one is supposed to stay empty, for air.’
Mallory stepped back to survey the ritual pattern. ‘And the fifth?’
Sophie picked up the polished crystal. ‘A guess. Or instinct, if you prefer. This was still on the table when we came in. I think we have to place it in the right spot to complete the pattern.’ She weighed the crystal in her hand, then went to select a position.
‘Wait,’ Caitlin cautioned. ‘It might not be wise to put it in the wrong spot.’
Sophie hesitated.
‘If it’s supposed to be heavenly,’ Caitlin began, ‘shouldn’t it be above the corruptible elements?’
Sophie looked to Mallory. He nodded. Tentatively, she held the crystal ahead of her and moved towards the middle of the room. When she was above the centre point, she felt a bodiless tug on her hand that made her shiver. Slowly, she opened her fingers and the crystal remained suspended in the air.
‘Now what?’ Caitlin said in hushed tones.
The crystal rotated slowly.
‘Light the lantern,’ Sophie whispered.
Mallory struck his flint, and the flickering lantern light made the shadows retreat. The moment it struck the crystal, the room came alive with shimmering patterns circling the walls as the crystal turned: words in an alien language, runes, diagrams.
Sophie, Caitlin and Mallory were mesmerised. Each pass reflected information on their retinas, burning it deep into their unconscious.
‘It’s a calendar,’ Sophie said dreamily. ‘What does it mean?’
The moment the words left her lips, the light winked out and the crystal fell, shattering on the floor.
‘MAT,’ Mallory mouthed as the images continued to play across his mind. ‘ANM. Those letters keep coming up. I don’t understand.’
‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face or the tower in the city,’ Caitlin said in Brigid’s throaty rumble. Mallory winced at the relapse: what had brought one of her buried personalities to the fore?
‘What are you saying?’ Sophie asked.
Caitlin/Brigid gave a chilling laugh. ‘Go to a library if you want to understand. It’s all up here!’ She tapped her temple.
A noise on the edge of his perception snapped Mallory out of his reverie. He motioned for Sophie and Caitlin to remain silent. At first there was only the wind, but then came a faint sucking sound like gas escaping from a marsh. Behind it, high and reedy and drawing closer, were childlike voices, but whatever they were saying made no sense; an idiot’s chant.
Mallory peered out of the south window. The foot of the tower was lost in the darkness, yet even so he thought he could see something moving, darker still than the shadows that concealed it.
‘Stop that noise! It’s scaring me!’ Caitlin said in her little girl’s voice. The axe slipped from her fingers and clattered on the floorboards.
Mallory ran from window to window. Waves of shadows lapped all around the tower.
‘They’re coming!’ Caitlin whined.
The grind of the tower door being dragged open. Tiny feet clattering up the steps; empty, idiot voices growing louder.
Mallory slammed and bolted the trap-door that led to the stairs.
‘What are we supposed to do now?’ Sophie said.
‘You can either let down your hair, Rapunzel, or find something we can use to get out of here.’ Mallory began to ransack the chests and cupboards.
Caitlin sat against the wall, hugging her knees and rocking gently.
The clattering of feet came right up to the trap-door, the insane voices now shrill and giggling. The bolt rattled amidst a flurry of clawing with what sounded like birds’ talons.
