The Burning Man, page 42
part #2 of Kingdom of the Serpent Series
Mallory felt briefly sorry for him. But then Evgen raised his sword and for five minutes they battled ferociously until Evgen misjudged a strike and Mallory ran through his open defence.
Dropping his weapon, Evgen crashed back against the wall. ‘How can Fragile Creatures defeat the Golden Ones?’ he said in disbelief.
‘This is a new age.’
Once the moths had dissipated, Mallory entered the reception hall. The stifling heat made him choke. The fire in the great hearth roared as if driven by bellows, and all around the room braziers glowed. There was no other light source, and a claustrophobic gloom clustered in the corners.
Niamh stood before the fire. She wore tight-fitting ebony armour etched with silver filigree and a black ceremonial headdress with six horns that resembled the arms of Shiva.
‘Dressed for a funeral?’ Mallory said.
Niamh smiled. ‘Dressed for victory.’
The flames of Llyrwyn licked towards her hungrily. ‘What happened to you? Church told us how you—’
‘How I loved him? Jack Churchill taught me many things. He ignited a fire inside me, and then chose the love of another. A Fragile Creature,’ she added contemptuously.
‘You can’t always get what you want. So is that it – you’ve caused all this misery just because of a broken heart?’
Niamh laughed. ‘How dismissive you are of the signifying quality of Fragile Creatures! Everything you do is because of love! I have observed your kind for an age. If you seek money or power, it is in a pitiful attempt to fill the gap left by an absence of love. Adult lives are corrupted and distorted by the search for love denied them as children. Love drives Fragile Creatures to achieve astonishing things, and love lies behind murder and betrayal and cruelty. Love destroys confidence and creates doubt and self-loathing. Love turns Fragile Creatures into gods. It is all and everything. To dismiss it so only shows your ignorance.’
‘So now you’ve signed up with the Void because you didn’t get the kisses you wanted.’
‘This is the twilight of the gods, foretold in all your stories since your first days. The old ways are passing, for every living being. I choose my path accordingly.’
‘It makes no sense. How can you give in to control? To a universe that denies freedom, belief, magic? You had that spider removed to escape control—’
She laughed. ‘Yes, I had the spider removed.’ She raised her arms wide. ‘And then I chose to be filled with spiders.’
Under her skin, lumps of varying sizes began to move across her hands, her face, distorting her features. She opened her mouth wide and the spiders swarmed out and over her body.
Mallory had hoped he could talk her into giving up. Now he saw there was no hope. He raised Llyrwyn and prepared to attack.
A ferocious wind blasted from a corner of the room, throwing him hard against the wall. Niamh hadn’t moved. The spiders still crawled over her, but now she wore a cruel smile.
From out of the shadows walked another woman in the same black armour and headdress as Niamh. It was Sophie, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘You bastard. You betrayed me,’ she said with devastating bitterness.
Mallory gaped. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘This.’ She gestured and the wind rushed around the room. From the corner behind her came Caitlin, strapped to a wooden frame with barbed wire, barely conscious, badly beaten and bleeding from numerous wounds. Sophie raised her hand and the torture frame floated forward, a foot above the floor.
‘What have you done?’ Mallory could barely believe what he was seeing.
‘She paid the price for being a duplicitous bitch.’
‘You did that to her?’
Sophie shifted uneasily. There was a faint glassy quality to her eyes that gave him some hope. ‘Of course not! I don’t agree with it—’
‘But you didn’t stop it—’
‘She deserved it! You and her – behind my back!’
‘What? Caitlin and me? That’s ridiculous.’
‘I saw you!’ The wind raged, tossing Mallory across the room.
His head ringing, Mallory struggled to his feet. The wind continued to rush around Sophie and there was lightning in her eyes. He’d had no idea she was capable of wielding such power, and it scared him.
He approached her cautiously, but couldn’t help glancing at Caitlin.
‘See?’ Sophie snapped. ‘You care about her.’
‘Of course I do – she’s hurt. Anybody with any compassion would care.’
His words stung her. She allowed her anger to rise up so she could ignore them. ‘I’m sick of being betrayed by everybody I ever trust!’
‘I’m not going to betray you.’
‘Shut up!’ The wind whisked around him, but this time didn’t punish him. Tears filled her eyes. ‘My mother and father betrayed me, and now you. The only people I’ve ever loved.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They killed themselves when I was nine. A suicide pact. They said they loved me and they left me all alone.’
‘You never told me that—’
‘Didn’t you ever wonder?’ she sneered. ‘The Pendragon Spirit only comes alive in us when we’ve experienced death. Didn’t you think to ask who’d died around me?’
Mallory saw her desperate hurt and suddenly so many things about her became clear. ‘I’m sorry.’
She looked away, her tears running freely.
Niamh watched with detached amusement.
‘You manipulated her,’ Mallory accused. If she had been close enough he would have killed her in an instant.
‘I only allowed what was in her to take form,’ Niamh said. ‘Now she has chosen to be with me. I will not betray her.’
‘Soph, don’t fall for this,’ he pleaded.
Sophie tore at her hair. The wind around her rushed wildly in random directions. A brazier crashed over, the glowing coals igniting a tapestry. Flames rushed up the wall.
‘Soph, this isn’t you!’
Tormented, Sophie threw her head back and screamed till her throat was raw. In the face of the gale, Mallory couldn’t even get to his feet.
‘Look at that woman!’ Niamh pointed towards Caitlin. ‘She didn’t care about you. She is made of lies and deceit. She doesn’t deserve your friendship.’
‘Sophie!’ Mallory called. ‘She’s trying to get you to do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life. She’s trying to damn you.’
‘She deserves to be eradicated!’ Niamh’s voice rose above the gale.
Sophie cast a pitiful look at Mallory. ‘Why couldn’t you have saved me?’
‘Hold him back,’ Niamh insisted.
‘You can kill her,’ Mallory said, ‘but she’ll come back. That’s what we do. Death can’t hold us.’
‘This is beyond death,’ Niamh said. ‘The Devourer of All Things has allowed the universe to create a handful of weapons of power that can strike at the very heart of Existence. They are scattered, unknown, lost. They can be used only once, because of their power.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘They can wipe a being out of Existence. Not just so they are dead, but so they never existed in the first place. No one will remember them ever having been. Their words, their gestures, their caresses, their kisses – all forgotten, because they never happened. Removed from the cycle of rebirth. It is worse than the worst thing you could ever imagine for yourself, for it means that you amounted to nothing.’ From her pocket, she removed a crystal in the shape of a snowflake. It spun slowly of its own accord an inch above her palm. ‘And I have such a weapon here.’
She held her hand higher and the snowflake spun faster. Shards of light blinked off it.
‘Stop her!’ Mallory shouted at Sophie. ‘Caitlin’s one of us!’
Sophie closed her eyes, sobbing silently. The wind continued to pin Mallory against the floor.
The snowflake pulsed. Like all the other objects of power Mallory had witnessed, he knew he was not seeing its true shape. He had the sense of some enormous machine grinding into life behind the illusion of the world he saw before him. Caitlin lolled on the torture frame, defenceless, broken.
And then the wind dropped and all was still. Mallory only had a second to register this before he heard a small voice.
‘You should have saved me.’
A dagger of white light burst from the spinning snowflake towards Caitlin. Before it reached her, Sophie took the full force of the weapon in her breast, a halo of white light burning around her.
For a second, Mallory felt as if the weapon had hit him and he had winked out of existence. Desperate to hold on to the last of her, he scrambled to where Sophie had sunk to the ground.
The white light sparked and fizzed around her as it unstitched her from reality. Her skin was freezing to the touch, as though she had lain in the snow for hours, as though she was already dead.
Mallory tried to say something, but the words died in his throat.
Sophie smiled weakly, already a ghost of the smile he remembered. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a real mess of things.’
‘It wasn’t true … about Caitlin and me. I’d never do anything like that.’
She looked into his face and saw it was true.
‘I love you.’ He gripped her hands tightly. ‘You saved me. I was worthless before, and … and—’
‘Ssh. Don’t say it.’ The light gave her skin a translucent quality. ‘I love you, too.’
Her eyes flickered and closed.
Mallory closed his own eyes and thought hard. The pub in Salisbury where he had first seen her came to mind as clearly as if he was there. Sophie, with her traveller friends, wearing a faded hippie dress beneath a pink mohair sweater, a clutter of beads and necklaces around her neck, her sharp, questioning intelligence, the knowing quality around her eyes that he instantly found deeply sexy. Though he hadn’t realised it until much later, that first moment was when she had trapped him in her gravity.
He recalled the first time they kissed, every detail of the surroundings, the temperature of the air, the smell of her hair. He recalled the first time they made love. Watching her in the dealers’ room of Steelguard Securities, when he knew she was special even though the context had been stolen from him.
So many memories, every sensation, every word spoken, mundane and unique. He wanted them all, but there were too many. Desperately, he tried to hold on to her.
Then, from somewhere far away, a cold wind blew and she was gone. His hands clutched thin air. Broken, he sagged until his forehead touched the floor.
Niamh had moved to a window that had been hidden behind one of the tapestries, now flung wide open to the night. From outside came the sound of wings.
Mallory turned to her, filled with a residual hatred that was fading fast. In a second she went from the woman he would have travelled to the ends of Existence to destroy to just another enemy. There would be no revenge.
He saw in her face some kind of secret knowledge that pleased her, and then there was movement behind her. Standing on the back of a flying, bat-winged beast was the Libertarian. He held out his hand for Niamh to join him.
Grasping Llyrwyn, Mallory ran to the window, but he was too late. The beast was already moving away. The Libertarian had his arms around Niamh’s shoulders, like old lovers reunited.
‘Your new life is yours to enjoy,’ Niamh said sardonically, ‘in what little time remains.’
The leathery wings beat faster and the creature turned towards the Burning Man, soaring on thermals, out of the court and away.
Mallory raced back to where Caitlin hung on the torture frame. Her wounds were all superficial and already healing. As he cut through the barbed wire, her eyes flickered open.
‘Oh,’ she said weakly. ‘Why are you crying?’
Mallory touched his damp cheek. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
3
In the bright, fresh hour after dawn, the Court of the Soaring Spirit took on a new mood. In the streets – no longer dark, no longer claustrophobic – people turned their faces to the sky for the first time in many days. Music rang from the open doors and windows of the Hunter’s Moon.
In the airy, sun-drenched corridors and rooms of the Palace of Glorious Light, the old was swept out. As Mallory watched over Caitlin, asleep now and recovering from her wounds, a dark mood came over the room. He had thrown open all the curtains to allow some light into the place, yet an area of darkness was growing in the centre of the room and spreading out to drive the light back. Fearing another attack from Niamh, Mallory drew his sword, but even its flames were dimmed.
In the heart of the darkness, Mallory glimpsed piercing eyes. A potent sense of threat pervaded everything, yet it was also sexually charged. Mallory had felt it before in the Watchtower. ‘The Morrigan,’ he said.
The darkness swept towards Caitlin and disappeared inside her like smoke being sucked into a fan. Caitlin’s eyes snapped open, and in them Mallory could see no sign of the woman he knew, nor did she even appear conscious. She floated an inch or two above the surface of the bed.
‘She’s back with us now.’ The fearful voice came from Caitlin’s lips, but Mallory recognised the tone of Briony’s persona.
‘Leave her,’ Mallory said.
‘The Dark Sister has a bond with this one. They know each other, and benefit from each other’s strengths.’
‘What does the Morrigan want with Caitlin?’
‘Revenge. For the indignities heaped upon her in the Watchtower by the queen of this court. She will ride this Sister until the debt has been paid, in blood. And it will be paid in full soon.’
Caitlin floated back to the bed, sleeping peacefully once more. No response came to Mallory’s further questions, and there was no sign that the Morrigan waited inside his friend.
Troubled, he returned to the charred royal reception hall. Open windows along one wall now flooded the room with sunlight. He felt a strange connection to the place as he looked out over the shimmering rooftops, yet also inexplicably sad.
Decebalus boomed a greeting. He was covered in cuts and a jagged, badly stitched wound now ran diagonally across his face, but he was in high spirits.
‘You have a visitor,’ he said.
The barbarian gestured towards the door behind him and Hunter entered, looking around curiously. ‘I like what you’ve done with the place.’
‘I thought you’d walked out on us.’
‘I’m nothing if not capricious.’
‘The Brothers and Sisters of Dragons are resting after the battle,’ Decebalus said, ‘but to a man and a woman they are ready to take the war to the Enemy.’
‘We’d just be sending them to their deaths. I was tasked with finding the Extinction Shears – that’s the only thing that’ll stop the Void,’ Mallory said. ‘And we’re no closer to achieving that.’
Flopping into a chair, Hunter draped his legs over one arm. ‘Don’t worry. You’ve got me now.’
‘Is that supposed to encourage me?’
‘You haven’t heard my plan yet.’
‘All right. First we need to get you a sword.’
Hunter grinned. ‘Oh, I’ve already got a weapon.’
‘Then it’s the three of us – you, me and Caitlin.’ Mallory was suddenly overcome with a devastating pang of loneliness. He turned back to the bright, new day, searching for an answer he would never find.
4
The high winds gusting along the chasms of New York City threatened to tear Church from the few square feet on top of the Empire State Building. Clutching onto the mooring mast to save himself, the world spun far below.
Don’t look down, he repeated like a mantra, and focused instead on the blue sky of a new day. But he couldn’t help himself. His stomach churned and his head whirled, and he dropped to his knees, fighting to keep control. The wind continued to pull him back and forth.
This is insane, he told himself. An invisible maze up in the clouds, where one wrong step meant plummeting to the ground far below?
Crawling to the edge of the platform, he peered around. There was no sign of where the maze began. Leaning out, eyes screwed shut, he flailed about but felt only thin air.
From his jacket, he pulled the can of spray paint he had bought in a convenience store on the way from Grand Central Terminal. He had no idea if it would work. Reaching out again, he sprayed a small amount. The paint particles were caught by the wind.
Edging along the platform, he tried again. When he was near the end of the second side, some paint remained, frozen in the air. With relief, he sprayed a strip extending out from the platform. The first steps of the maze were revealed.
That was the easy part. Steeling himself, Church stood up and stepped into the gulf. His heart flipped and his knees buckled, but the maze held his weight.
Away from the platform, the vertigo was even more debilitating. He felt as if he was suspended in the air, with nothing beneath his feet but the street far below. An overwhelming sensation of falling made him spasm from side to side, or pitch forward. Only his willpower stopped him going over the edge. Every step he had to steady himself, shut his eyes and fight the rushing fear that threatened to paralyse him, and, he thought, drive him mad. Gradually, he established a kind of control by keeping his eyes fixed as much as possible on the horizon or the sticky paint at his feet.
He discovered the maze was barely two feet wide. He sprayed a section, edged forward, desperately holding on to his stomach, and then sprayed some more. But the paint wouldn’t last for ever, and if the maze was extensive, what would he do then?
Thirty feet out the wind blew even more fiercely. It came in intermittent high gusts, and each time he had to crouch down and brace himself to resist being blown off. It felt like only a matter of time until a gust took him unawares.
Every now and then he would stop and close his eyes, and breathe deeply, pretending he was on solid ground. And that was when he heard the sound of clapping. Wobbling as he looked over his shoulder, he saw Veitch sitting on the platform at the top of the Empire State Building.
Rage exploded in Church with a ferocity that shocked him. He thought of all the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons Veitch had slaughtered over the years, the agonising wound he had inflicted on Church in Beijing, the spell that had sucked at Church’s Pendragon Spirit and driven a wedge between him and the woman he loved. But most of all he thought about how Veitch had stolen Ruth from him.
Dropping his weapon, Evgen crashed back against the wall. ‘How can Fragile Creatures defeat the Golden Ones?’ he said in disbelief.
‘This is a new age.’
Once the moths had dissipated, Mallory entered the reception hall. The stifling heat made him choke. The fire in the great hearth roared as if driven by bellows, and all around the room braziers glowed. There was no other light source, and a claustrophobic gloom clustered in the corners.
Niamh stood before the fire. She wore tight-fitting ebony armour etched with silver filigree and a black ceremonial headdress with six horns that resembled the arms of Shiva.
‘Dressed for a funeral?’ Mallory said.
Niamh smiled. ‘Dressed for victory.’
The flames of Llyrwyn licked towards her hungrily. ‘What happened to you? Church told us how you—’
‘How I loved him? Jack Churchill taught me many things. He ignited a fire inside me, and then chose the love of another. A Fragile Creature,’ she added contemptuously.
‘You can’t always get what you want. So is that it – you’ve caused all this misery just because of a broken heart?’
Niamh laughed. ‘How dismissive you are of the signifying quality of Fragile Creatures! Everything you do is because of love! I have observed your kind for an age. If you seek money or power, it is in a pitiful attempt to fill the gap left by an absence of love. Adult lives are corrupted and distorted by the search for love denied them as children. Love drives Fragile Creatures to achieve astonishing things, and love lies behind murder and betrayal and cruelty. Love destroys confidence and creates doubt and self-loathing. Love turns Fragile Creatures into gods. It is all and everything. To dismiss it so only shows your ignorance.’
‘So now you’ve signed up with the Void because you didn’t get the kisses you wanted.’
‘This is the twilight of the gods, foretold in all your stories since your first days. The old ways are passing, for every living being. I choose my path accordingly.’
‘It makes no sense. How can you give in to control? To a universe that denies freedom, belief, magic? You had that spider removed to escape control—’
She laughed. ‘Yes, I had the spider removed.’ She raised her arms wide. ‘And then I chose to be filled with spiders.’
Under her skin, lumps of varying sizes began to move across her hands, her face, distorting her features. She opened her mouth wide and the spiders swarmed out and over her body.
Mallory had hoped he could talk her into giving up. Now he saw there was no hope. He raised Llyrwyn and prepared to attack.
A ferocious wind blasted from a corner of the room, throwing him hard against the wall. Niamh hadn’t moved. The spiders still crawled over her, but now she wore a cruel smile.
From out of the shadows walked another woman in the same black armour and headdress as Niamh. It was Sophie, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘You bastard. You betrayed me,’ she said with devastating bitterness.
Mallory gaped. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘This.’ She gestured and the wind rushed around the room. From the corner behind her came Caitlin, strapped to a wooden frame with barbed wire, barely conscious, badly beaten and bleeding from numerous wounds. Sophie raised her hand and the torture frame floated forward, a foot above the floor.
‘What have you done?’ Mallory could barely believe what he was seeing.
‘She paid the price for being a duplicitous bitch.’
‘You did that to her?’
Sophie shifted uneasily. There was a faint glassy quality to her eyes that gave him some hope. ‘Of course not! I don’t agree with it—’
‘But you didn’t stop it—’
‘She deserved it! You and her – behind my back!’
‘What? Caitlin and me? That’s ridiculous.’
‘I saw you!’ The wind raged, tossing Mallory across the room.
His head ringing, Mallory struggled to his feet. The wind continued to rush around Sophie and there was lightning in her eyes. He’d had no idea she was capable of wielding such power, and it scared him.
He approached her cautiously, but couldn’t help glancing at Caitlin.
‘See?’ Sophie snapped. ‘You care about her.’
‘Of course I do – she’s hurt. Anybody with any compassion would care.’
His words stung her. She allowed her anger to rise up so she could ignore them. ‘I’m sick of being betrayed by everybody I ever trust!’
‘I’m not going to betray you.’
‘Shut up!’ The wind whisked around him, but this time didn’t punish him. Tears filled her eyes. ‘My mother and father betrayed me, and now you. The only people I’ve ever loved.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They killed themselves when I was nine. A suicide pact. They said they loved me and they left me all alone.’
‘You never told me that—’
‘Didn’t you ever wonder?’ she sneered. ‘The Pendragon Spirit only comes alive in us when we’ve experienced death. Didn’t you think to ask who’d died around me?’
Mallory saw her desperate hurt and suddenly so many things about her became clear. ‘I’m sorry.’
She looked away, her tears running freely.
Niamh watched with detached amusement.
‘You manipulated her,’ Mallory accused. If she had been close enough he would have killed her in an instant.
‘I only allowed what was in her to take form,’ Niamh said. ‘Now she has chosen to be with me. I will not betray her.’
‘Soph, don’t fall for this,’ he pleaded.
Sophie tore at her hair. The wind around her rushed wildly in random directions. A brazier crashed over, the glowing coals igniting a tapestry. Flames rushed up the wall.
‘Soph, this isn’t you!’
Tormented, Sophie threw her head back and screamed till her throat was raw. In the face of the gale, Mallory couldn’t even get to his feet.
‘Look at that woman!’ Niamh pointed towards Caitlin. ‘She didn’t care about you. She is made of lies and deceit. She doesn’t deserve your friendship.’
‘Sophie!’ Mallory called. ‘She’s trying to get you to do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life. She’s trying to damn you.’
‘She deserves to be eradicated!’ Niamh’s voice rose above the gale.
Sophie cast a pitiful look at Mallory. ‘Why couldn’t you have saved me?’
‘Hold him back,’ Niamh insisted.
‘You can kill her,’ Mallory said, ‘but she’ll come back. That’s what we do. Death can’t hold us.’
‘This is beyond death,’ Niamh said. ‘The Devourer of All Things has allowed the universe to create a handful of weapons of power that can strike at the very heart of Existence. They are scattered, unknown, lost. They can be used only once, because of their power.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘They can wipe a being out of Existence. Not just so they are dead, but so they never existed in the first place. No one will remember them ever having been. Their words, their gestures, their caresses, their kisses – all forgotten, because they never happened. Removed from the cycle of rebirth. It is worse than the worst thing you could ever imagine for yourself, for it means that you amounted to nothing.’ From her pocket, she removed a crystal in the shape of a snowflake. It spun slowly of its own accord an inch above her palm. ‘And I have such a weapon here.’
She held her hand higher and the snowflake spun faster. Shards of light blinked off it.
‘Stop her!’ Mallory shouted at Sophie. ‘Caitlin’s one of us!’
Sophie closed her eyes, sobbing silently. The wind continued to pin Mallory against the floor.
The snowflake pulsed. Like all the other objects of power Mallory had witnessed, he knew he was not seeing its true shape. He had the sense of some enormous machine grinding into life behind the illusion of the world he saw before him. Caitlin lolled on the torture frame, defenceless, broken.
And then the wind dropped and all was still. Mallory only had a second to register this before he heard a small voice.
‘You should have saved me.’
A dagger of white light burst from the spinning snowflake towards Caitlin. Before it reached her, Sophie took the full force of the weapon in her breast, a halo of white light burning around her.
For a second, Mallory felt as if the weapon had hit him and he had winked out of existence. Desperate to hold on to the last of her, he scrambled to where Sophie had sunk to the ground.
The white light sparked and fizzed around her as it unstitched her from reality. Her skin was freezing to the touch, as though she had lain in the snow for hours, as though she was already dead.
Mallory tried to say something, but the words died in his throat.
Sophie smiled weakly, already a ghost of the smile he remembered. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a real mess of things.’
‘It wasn’t true … about Caitlin and me. I’d never do anything like that.’
She looked into his face and saw it was true.
‘I love you.’ He gripped her hands tightly. ‘You saved me. I was worthless before, and … and—’
‘Ssh. Don’t say it.’ The light gave her skin a translucent quality. ‘I love you, too.’
Her eyes flickered and closed.
Mallory closed his own eyes and thought hard. The pub in Salisbury where he had first seen her came to mind as clearly as if he was there. Sophie, with her traveller friends, wearing a faded hippie dress beneath a pink mohair sweater, a clutter of beads and necklaces around her neck, her sharp, questioning intelligence, the knowing quality around her eyes that he instantly found deeply sexy. Though he hadn’t realised it until much later, that first moment was when she had trapped him in her gravity.
He recalled the first time they kissed, every detail of the surroundings, the temperature of the air, the smell of her hair. He recalled the first time they made love. Watching her in the dealers’ room of Steelguard Securities, when he knew she was special even though the context had been stolen from him.
So many memories, every sensation, every word spoken, mundane and unique. He wanted them all, but there were too many. Desperately, he tried to hold on to her.
Then, from somewhere far away, a cold wind blew and she was gone. His hands clutched thin air. Broken, he sagged until his forehead touched the floor.
Niamh had moved to a window that had been hidden behind one of the tapestries, now flung wide open to the night. From outside came the sound of wings.
Mallory turned to her, filled with a residual hatred that was fading fast. In a second she went from the woman he would have travelled to the ends of Existence to destroy to just another enemy. There would be no revenge.
He saw in her face some kind of secret knowledge that pleased her, and then there was movement behind her. Standing on the back of a flying, bat-winged beast was the Libertarian. He held out his hand for Niamh to join him.
Grasping Llyrwyn, Mallory ran to the window, but he was too late. The beast was already moving away. The Libertarian had his arms around Niamh’s shoulders, like old lovers reunited.
‘Your new life is yours to enjoy,’ Niamh said sardonically, ‘in what little time remains.’
The leathery wings beat faster and the creature turned towards the Burning Man, soaring on thermals, out of the court and away.
Mallory raced back to where Caitlin hung on the torture frame. Her wounds were all superficial and already healing. As he cut through the barbed wire, her eyes flickered open.
‘Oh,’ she said weakly. ‘Why are you crying?’
Mallory touched his damp cheek. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
3
In the bright, fresh hour after dawn, the Court of the Soaring Spirit took on a new mood. In the streets – no longer dark, no longer claustrophobic – people turned their faces to the sky for the first time in many days. Music rang from the open doors and windows of the Hunter’s Moon.
In the airy, sun-drenched corridors and rooms of the Palace of Glorious Light, the old was swept out. As Mallory watched over Caitlin, asleep now and recovering from her wounds, a dark mood came over the room. He had thrown open all the curtains to allow some light into the place, yet an area of darkness was growing in the centre of the room and spreading out to drive the light back. Fearing another attack from Niamh, Mallory drew his sword, but even its flames were dimmed.
In the heart of the darkness, Mallory glimpsed piercing eyes. A potent sense of threat pervaded everything, yet it was also sexually charged. Mallory had felt it before in the Watchtower. ‘The Morrigan,’ he said.
The darkness swept towards Caitlin and disappeared inside her like smoke being sucked into a fan. Caitlin’s eyes snapped open, and in them Mallory could see no sign of the woman he knew, nor did she even appear conscious. She floated an inch or two above the surface of the bed.
‘She’s back with us now.’ The fearful voice came from Caitlin’s lips, but Mallory recognised the tone of Briony’s persona.
‘Leave her,’ Mallory said.
‘The Dark Sister has a bond with this one. They know each other, and benefit from each other’s strengths.’
‘What does the Morrigan want with Caitlin?’
‘Revenge. For the indignities heaped upon her in the Watchtower by the queen of this court. She will ride this Sister until the debt has been paid, in blood. And it will be paid in full soon.’
Caitlin floated back to the bed, sleeping peacefully once more. No response came to Mallory’s further questions, and there was no sign that the Morrigan waited inside his friend.
Troubled, he returned to the charred royal reception hall. Open windows along one wall now flooded the room with sunlight. He felt a strange connection to the place as he looked out over the shimmering rooftops, yet also inexplicably sad.
Decebalus boomed a greeting. He was covered in cuts and a jagged, badly stitched wound now ran diagonally across his face, but he was in high spirits.
‘You have a visitor,’ he said.
The barbarian gestured towards the door behind him and Hunter entered, looking around curiously. ‘I like what you’ve done with the place.’
‘I thought you’d walked out on us.’
‘I’m nothing if not capricious.’
‘The Brothers and Sisters of Dragons are resting after the battle,’ Decebalus said, ‘but to a man and a woman they are ready to take the war to the Enemy.’
‘We’d just be sending them to their deaths. I was tasked with finding the Extinction Shears – that’s the only thing that’ll stop the Void,’ Mallory said. ‘And we’re no closer to achieving that.’
Flopping into a chair, Hunter draped his legs over one arm. ‘Don’t worry. You’ve got me now.’
‘Is that supposed to encourage me?’
‘You haven’t heard my plan yet.’
‘All right. First we need to get you a sword.’
Hunter grinned. ‘Oh, I’ve already got a weapon.’
‘Then it’s the three of us – you, me and Caitlin.’ Mallory was suddenly overcome with a devastating pang of loneliness. He turned back to the bright, new day, searching for an answer he would never find.
4
The high winds gusting along the chasms of New York City threatened to tear Church from the few square feet on top of the Empire State Building. Clutching onto the mooring mast to save himself, the world spun far below.
Don’t look down, he repeated like a mantra, and focused instead on the blue sky of a new day. But he couldn’t help himself. His stomach churned and his head whirled, and he dropped to his knees, fighting to keep control. The wind continued to pull him back and forth.
This is insane, he told himself. An invisible maze up in the clouds, where one wrong step meant plummeting to the ground far below?
Crawling to the edge of the platform, he peered around. There was no sign of where the maze began. Leaning out, eyes screwed shut, he flailed about but felt only thin air.
From his jacket, he pulled the can of spray paint he had bought in a convenience store on the way from Grand Central Terminal. He had no idea if it would work. Reaching out again, he sprayed a small amount. The paint particles were caught by the wind.
Edging along the platform, he tried again. When he was near the end of the second side, some paint remained, frozen in the air. With relief, he sprayed a strip extending out from the platform. The first steps of the maze were revealed.
That was the easy part. Steeling himself, Church stood up and stepped into the gulf. His heart flipped and his knees buckled, but the maze held his weight.
Away from the platform, the vertigo was even more debilitating. He felt as if he was suspended in the air, with nothing beneath his feet but the street far below. An overwhelming sensation of falling made him spasm from side to side, or pitch forward. Only his willpower stopped him going over the edge. Every step he had to steady himself, shut his eyes and fight the rushing fear that threatened to paralyse him, and, he thought, drive him mad. Gradually, he established a kind of control by keeping his eyes fixed as much as possible on the horizon or the sticky paint at his feet.
He discovered the maze was barely two feet wide. He sprayed a section, edged forward, desperately holding on to his stomach, and then sprayed some more. But the paint wouldn’t last for ever, and if the maze was extensive, what would he do then?
Thirty feet out the wind blew even more fiercely. It came in intermittent high gusts, and each time he had to crouch down and brace himself to resist being blown off. It felt like only a matter of time until a gust took him unawares.
Every now and then he would stop and close his eyes, and breathe deeply, pretending he was on solid ground. And that was when he heard the sound of clapping. Wobbling as he looked over his shoulder, he saw Veitch sitting on the platform at the top of the Empire State Building.
Rage exploded in Church with a ferocity that shocked him. He thought of all the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons Veitch had slaughtered over the years, the agonising wound he had inflicted on Church in Beijing, the spell that had sucked at Church’s Pendragon Spirit and driven a wedge between him and the woman he loved. But most of all he thought about how Veitch had stolen Ruth from him.
