Devastation

by Jane Dougherty

  The light was now so feeble that the horses were beginning to stumble. The pack animals in particular were finding the going difficult. Tancred peered about him.

  “It’s…different,” he murmured uneasily. “The forest has changed since the last time I traveled through it. It seems so silent and cold.”

  “It’s as if the trees are holding their breath,” Carla agreed. They carried on for almost another half hour before Tancred found a suitable campsite, a glade that must have been pleasant once, a gentle hollow ringed about by beech and oaks. Most of the trees were bare now, and their branches plunged and twisted as if warped by a season of violent gales, but the furze was still deep and green, and gorse bushes clustered thick and pungent around two sides of the hollow, giving an illusion, at least, of security.

  “Tonight we must be extra wary,” Tancred said, as they unloaded the packhorses. “We have no modeler to place a barrier around the camp, and our weapons are not much use in the forest.”

  With that reminder, Tully’s spirits sank even lower. The evening seemed suddenly colder and the silence more menacing.

  “Can you see anything around here, Jeff?” he asked, peering into the trees. “Like wormholes, for instance. I mean, if we’re walking into a golem ambush, I think I’d like to know.”

  “I’ll try. Dusty’s had a good poke around, and she hasn’t found anything in particular.” They all looked at the hound. Everything about her was on the alert—ears pricked, tail raised, her eyes darted from one shadow to the next. Jeff placed a hand on Dusty’s head. His eyes glazed over and the hound stood stock still, only the tip of her nose quivering slightly. The cold deepened. A network of black branches and sad tufts of leaves obscured the sky. Tully tried to peer between the branches, but he knew that even if there had been no leaves at all, he would have seen few stars in the night sky. The gazehound whimpered. Jeff heaved a great sigh then shook his head.

  “The forest is waiting. Something’s coming. We can both feel it, me and Dusty, but I can’t see what it is.” He shook his head again and blinked his eyes. “It’s no good. The trees seem to have closed ranks. I can’t see anything moving.”

  He screwed up his eyes but Tully knew it wasn’t to see anything visible. Jeff saw things behind his eyes. He frowned. If Jeff couldn’t see what was ahead, it was because the darkness had got inside his head. “Nothing?” he asked. “Not even golems?”

  Jeff sighed. “Nothing. I think the forest is our last line of defense.” He shivered and turned his face away. “Beyond is…”

  “You can see something,” Tully said.

  “Beyond is Briga Mór, the wilderness,” Tancred whispered.

  “It ripples and boils with corruption.” Jeff’s light, child’s voice was grave beyond his years. “Nothing lives. The dead march. The eaters of souls pour like the liquid from a bloated corpse across the desolation, looking for nourishment.” His voice died away.

  “Excuse me for interrupting your flow,” Tully said, “but isn’t that where we’re headed?”

  Tancred nodded.

  “You remember what Jim said about needing a few antitank guided missiles, grenade launchers, tank units and suchlike?” Tully asked. “Well, I think he might have had a point.”

  Tancred frowned, and Carla shot Tully a look that said, ‘Porca miseria, Tully, just shut the fuck up!’

  “That is exactly what Wormwood wants you to think,” Tancred said sternly. “Have you forgotten who it was encouraged your ancestors to make weapons of war in the first place? We have to use different tactics.”

  Tully couldn’t help but look meaningfully at Tancred’s longbow. Tancred followed his gaze and smiled.

  “Force is of no use. You know that. You cannot dam up the black tide streaming out of Pandemonium with any of your deadly toys.”

  “I think,” Carla said, “that this is where the girls take over.”

  The worried lines on Tancred’s brow smoothed, and he forced a grim smile. “Tonight, if luck is with us, you will find your mother. Then we will make our way to Mount Ardar and Poll Ifrinn. And wait.”

  Jeff gave him a sharp look. “Wait? There? I don’t think you realize what the wilderness has become.”

  Tancred smiled through gritted teeth. “We have no other plan.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  To the Lighthouse

  The gentle breeze scarcely ruffled the calm of the sea, and the waves that broke on the narrow pebble beach were small and tame. Jim and Eirian sat together, watching the ocean rise and swell and letting the heavy salt air fill their lungs. Jack paced up and down, kicking out at the pebbles. He was so angry that he wouldn’t have been surprised to find smoke coming out of his ears.

  “I don’t believe it!” he fumed. “I suppose the buckets and spades are inside, are they? And the shrimp nets?” Jack gripped his staff with half a mind to land it in the middle of Yvain’s skull. “No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. This thing isn’t really a lighthouse. It’s an interstellar transmitter, and we’re sending a distress call to the Starship Enterprise?”

  “Will you just listen, Jack?” Yvain looked faintly embarrassed. “There is a reason for coming here, even though, I admit, it isn’t exactly on our route.”

  “Not on our route! Are we even in the same universe?” Jack bellowed.

  “But this is the only place I could think of on the spur of the moment, where I could be sure there would be no demons.” Yvain’s voice was calm and reasonable. “They don’t like crossing water, you see. This might well be the only place from where messages can still be sent. The souleaters stifle and absorb everything they come in contact with.”

  “So we just abandon the girls and my Tully to that…scoutmaster, while we enjoy the bracing sea air and get a bit of a tan?” Jack was seething.

  Yvain sighed. “What good would it do them if we traveled into a charnel house of souleaters? For all we know, the whole of the north is swallowed up by the darkness. Lutecia is besieged and could fall any hour. Alinor has no contact with any of the other cities, and the world is seething with the evil that is pouring out of the wormholes. We’ll stay here just as long as it takes to make contact with Tancred, agree on a time to meet at the World Tree and in a second, we can be there.”

  “But we should have stuck together!” Jack knew that was a stupid thing to say, but he clenched his fists and stuck out his chin belligerently.

  Yvain’s calm tone didn’t change. “It was impossible to predict that we would be attacked like that, with golems on one side and dead souls on the other. Our camp was split. We had no choice.”

  “Funny, it splitting like that, though,” Jack said through his teeth. Yvain raised his eyebrows. “I mean, me on one side of the barrier and Kat and the scoutmaster on the other.”

  “Now you’re just being ridiculous.” Angrily, Jim turned away from his contemplation of nature. “I made that barrier, remember? To keep the…those…dead things from grabbing Eirian. And if Tancred hadn’t shouted to Kat to get out of it, she’d have been caught by them too.”

  Jack’s expression turned from dark to thunderous as he let out all the bile he had accumulated over the last days. “Of course he did, the cute hoor! Profiting from the situation, me with me hands full with those mad animals and him sitting there on his horse, directing operations like a bloody traffic policeman. Of course he called Kat over to him, and him just raring to get away.”

  “You’re not ridiculous, Jack, you’re raving paranoid.” Jim threw up his hands in exasperation.

  Eirian took over. She placed a hand on Jack’s arm. He let her lead him to a flattish rock in the sun where they sat down next to one another. He wanted to resist. Something dark and tentacular seethed inside him, preventing him seeing straight. Eirian increased her grip on his arm and made him look at her.

  “Do you want this enterprise to succeed or not?”

  Jack tried to look away but some quality in Eirian’s eyes wouldn’t let him.

  “Well?�
�

  He swung his head around and glared at her. He had no quarrel with Eirian, but the real problem boiled up and burst.

  “I want that gimp to keep his nose out of my business, and his hands off—”

  “Yes?”

  Jack clenched his fists then reached down for a pebble and chucked it into the waves.

  “You know what I mean,” he said quietly, suddenly unable to go any further.

  “And you know that Tancred is just following the plan,” Eirian said gently. “All the rest of it—the suspicions and the jealousy—it’s all in your head. And it’s out of character.”

  “You think I’m, like…possessed?” The idea hit him like a poleaxe.

  Eirian shook her head and smiled. “I think you’re a father who cares about his son and still loves his dead wife. Just stop feeling guilty about your feelings. Tully wants you to be happy, and I imagine your wife would too.”

  Jack put his head in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what my feelings are. Not really.” He glanced quickly at Eirian to see whether she still had that infuriating Gaulish smile on her face. “It started off as just a bit of fun, you know? Kat has a great character, and she likes a laugh too. But now… I don’t know.” His let his voice tail off as his feelings muddled.

  Eirian patted his arm. “Don’t try and force things. Just give it time. And meanwhile, just get off Tancred’s back, will you?”

  Jack snapped, “It’s not his back I’m worried about!”

  Eirian’s face contorted as she struggled in vain to suppress an explosion of laughter. An angry retort flew to the tip of Jack’s tongue, and like a bubble bursting, it was gone.

  “So, you don’t think I’m possessed then?” He grinned.

  Eirian shook her head and wiped away the tears of laughter. “There are some cases even Wormwood wouldn’t get involved with.”

  A cough made Jack and Eirian turn around. Yvain was standing behind them.

  “I think you should both come inside. Something strange seems to be happening.”

  * * * *

  “What in the name of feck are they doing in a lighthouse?” Tully was almost more intrigued by the source of the message than its content.

  “It’s possibly the only place messages can still be sent from and received. Demons hate crossing water. The souleaters won’t have been able to pollute the atmosphere around it,” Tancred explained.

  “It couldn’t be a hoax, could it?” Kat asked. “You know, Wormwood trying to lure us to the place before the others arrive?”

  “It was certainly Yvain’s voice, before it was crowded out, and I lost it.” A frown creased Tancred’s forehead. “It seemed to be coming through a sort of flock of other messages.” He shook his head. “I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”

  “You mean like radio interference?” Tully asked. “Dad had an ancient radio at home—must have belonged to Moses or somebody—and you had to tune it manually. He used to try to get Radio Merseyside, some terrible station out of his childhood memories, and it always sounded like they were transmitting from Mars, with little green men twittering in the background.”

  “Like thousands of voices speaking all at once? Speaking either too low to pick out the words or in a foreign language?” Carla leaned forward eagerly. Tancred nodded. “Because it’s like that when you dream! What you heard was maybe people trying to get in touch, sending messages or even speaking to one another. Doesn’t that ever happen when you send your thought messages?”

  “Never!” Tancred was emphatic. “It would be like traveling and bits of you ending up in different places. You open a tunnel in time or space, and you, or the thought, travels along it, alone. This was like stepping through a door into a huge party, with hundreds of people having hundreds of different conversations all around me, and me not being able to hear any of them properly.”

  “Maybe it’s the effect of the lighthouse,” Jeff said, throwing a piece of bread to Dusty. “Since the darkness smothers all the messages we try to send, and only the lighthouse is outside of their reach. It probably attracts messages from all over the place.”

  “Perhaps even from outside this world. You can go anywhere in a dream.” Carla glanced at Tully. “Who’s to say there aren’t thousands of survivors on our Earth sending out messages?”

  “How many would know how?” Tully wanted to grasp this thread of hope, but he was skeptical. “Even we didn’t know about traveling and dreaming and all that until we came here.”

  “Those with a powerful gift would know,” Tancred said. “Wormwood and the scourges have so changed your world that many things that were hidden will now be clear.”

  “Bit bloody late,” Tully muttered.

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps we can catch some of them yet.” Carla’s face wore its most determined expression and Tully knew she was preparing a new campaign.

  “Let’s just concentrate on finding Garance, shall we?” he said. “If Yvain really is giving us just two days to get to this World Tree in the Briga Mór with your mother, we’d better get to sleep early.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Messages

  Night fell early beneath the dense cloud and the overarching trees, but the usual night noises were absent. No small rodents rummaged among the drifts of dead leaves, no predators stalked, no day birds fussed as they settled, no night birds called. Though Jeff strained his ears, the only sound he could hear was the cold wind moaning in the dead branches. The horses, huddled together for protection and warmth, were still except for the occasional swish of a tail. If the daytime temperatures were abnormally low, the nights were freezing. Jeff ran a finger along a tree branch, scraping off a furry frosting of rime, and he shivered.

  Tancred volunteered to take the first watch, but with no modeler to build a barrier around the campsite, he said it wasn’t safe to rely on a single pair of eyes and ears.

  “I’ll watch with you,” Jeff said.

  “No, you won’t.” Kat wagged a finger at him. “You’ll get your beauty sleep first.”

  She tried to appear firm and reasonable, but Jeff spotted her nervousness. He knew that it wasn’t simply fear of what might be lurking in the forest. He sighed to himself as he snuggled up to Dusty, who lay curled in a ball, her nose tucked beneath her tail. This was a purely adult problem. He was old enough to know that. Nothing to do with scourges and souleaters and wormholes. Kat and Tancred just had to sort it out for themselves.

  Carla and Tully were already asleep and dreaming, lying in one another’s arms, wrapped in the thick blankets from Lutecia and wearing their sheepskin jackets and ski bonnets.

  It must be cold up there, among the stars, Jeff considered, just before he drifted off to sleep.

  * * * *

  At the top of the lighthouse, they stood in an uneasy group in the middle of the circular room. Great crystal storm panes, faceted like gemstones, ran all about it, filling it with a blinding light that even dark glasses had difficulty occulting. The storm panes were modeled to throb with a powerful beam that required no maintenance, so it was rare anyone ever needed to climb up to the lantern room. Anyone who did was obliged to wear protective goggles because of the intensity of the light. But it wasn’t so much the luminosity that bothered Jim.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “Where’s it coming from?”

  The air was filled with a breathless whispering, faint screams of terror or despair, urgent, earnest phrases, endlessly repeated, enunciated carefully, but too indistinct to be understood.

  Deep lines of distress formed on Eirian’s brow as she listened. “They are desperate! So many people close to the point of death, and nothing we can do. Yvain, can you tell where they are?”

  Yvain rubbed the side of his nose then raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “They could be anywhere. They could be in any world. The eaters of souls and the darkness that accompanies them absorb all the messages we send. Only the lightho
use is beyond their control, for the moment anyway. It’s likely that all the messages sent anywhere, to anybody, find their way here.”

  The chaotic noise that filled his head worried Jim intensely. “If Tancred got our message to meet at the World Tree, he’d send back a message to confirm, wouldn’t he?”

  “And if he did, we’d have to wade through all this to pick it out, wouldn’t we?” Jack followed Jim’s line of thinking. “But would we even be able to hear it?”

  Yvain gave the same helpless gesture. “You have good ears. Listen!”

  Jim could almost feel Jack’s concentration. He held his own breath and screwed up his eyes to listen better, trying to latch onto a single sound and make sense of it. He frowned, his tongue between his teeth, but he gave in. There was nothing in the cacophony that he recognized as a language he understood. Tears filled Eirian’s eyes and she shook her head, giving in too. Jim watched Jack intently. He couldn’t see his eyes, but he imagined they would be far away and unfocused, oblivious to all his senses but one.

  “I can’t hear…Tancred. But there’s kids out there,” Jack said finally in a low voice. “On our Earth, the old one. And that shagging black slime is all around them. They haven’t a hope.”

  * * * *

  The last stretch of the journey had been a nightmare. The part of the city they had crossed had once been a solid, wealthy neighborhood of tall, well-constructed buildings. It seemed to Rajeev that the buildings of the rich had put up more of a resistance to the elements and the souleaters than the shops and cheaper houses around the Rue de Rivoli. They had fallen in gray chunks of stone, entire walls and roof sections blocked the streets, and big SUVs still sprawled across hidden roadways. It made picking their way over the ruins more difficult than it had been in their old neighborhood, where everything was brick dust and broken glass.

  The Abomination had reduced the rich neighborhood to the same soulless rubble as the rest of the city, but the cellars were deep and had been well maintained. Even if they found nothing else, Rajeev had thought, they would be better protected against the wind and…other things. Even if he could go no farther… He had found himself looking out for possible ways into a cellar or a cave formed by fallen masonry. He had been on the verge of sinking to the ground and burrowing like an animal, anywhere to get out of the wind, when Erelah had given an excited, hoarse shout.