Devastation

by Jane Dougherty

  Jack’s face grew suddenly animated. “Maybe there’s more travelers from old Earth on their way.”

  But Jeff remembered the quiet woodland spot and the creeping sensation that had filled it, the evil that had entered there. “The Bre Iarth was one of the first places the darkness possessed,” he said uneasily. “Who knows what’s still lurking there, trying to get back out again.”

  “Let’s go find out then! If it’s those kids we heard…” Jack said.

  Jeff knew he was trying to cover up his disappointment with a massive burst of activity that would have been seriously irritating if he hadn’t known what was behind it. He glanced quickly at Kat and sighed.

  “Remind me what that hill looked like,” Jack said, waving his arms about in preparation for opening up a tunnel.

  Yvain tapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll do it. I know the place, after all. But perhaps it would be prudent to take a look first. Jeff, can you see it?”

  Jeff placed a hand on Dusty’s head, using the hound’s memories as well as his own to find the place. She, after all, had seen the evil on that first day, long before he had been aware of the creeping of his flesh. Uneasily he cast his vision wide. Between the Poll Ifrinn and the hill overlooking Lutecia lay a countryside devastated by the souleaters and their prey. As Jeff searched his way back to the sunny glade of so few days ago, a nightmare landscape of rags of darkness and pools of dark slime, piles of rotting corpses and bloated cattle presented itself to his inner eye. The dead things gave off a sickly green glow, lighting the lowering cloud in a vision of hell.

  He forced his gaze back over the smoldering ruins of the forest of Retz, the blasted fields and pastureland of the plain beyond, to the ring of hills around Lutecia. The Bre Iarth had erupted from within and the debris lay strewn about in a radius of a mile or more. On the crest of the hill, on the edge of the wreckage, a small group huddled.

  “Make a tunnel, Yvain,” he said. “The dark things have gone.”

  * * * *

  Erelah was the first to step through the vortex of swirling green and blue. Her tall, slender form strode out of the shifting mist of the tunnel without a trace of fear. Her head was held high, her piercing blue eyes fixed straight ahead. When her focus shifted to the shining couple standing beneath a huge ash tree, he holding a bronze trumpet, she a silvery lance, her serious features were transformed by a broad smile.

  “We made it,” she whispered, her eyes still on the tall couple, and she turned to Rajeev and Sanjay, who stumbled into the open behind her. “I told you we would!”

  “I’m Erelah,” she said, making for the boy with the trumpet. “I dreamed of you.”

  Rajeev picked out some of the mud and leaf litter from his hair and moved to her side, his arm around Sanjay’s shoulders.

  “My name is Rajeev,” he said. “Thank you for not being just a dream.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Partings

  The sky above their heads was broad and clear by the time the refugees from the dead world had told their story. Lucio was still unconscious, but his breathing was deep and regular. The terrible scars that covered half his face had faded, and the skin had grown to cover the exposed bone. Only a single livid mark remained, which ran the length of his left cheek.

  Archangel ruined… Tully murmured to himself.

  Garance held her husband’s hand, her face a composition in serenity, waiting for his eyes to open. They all waited for his eyes to open, because that would be the signal, Erelah had told them. She’d brought the message, though she had not realized it immediately. It was her name, Jeff had said. It meant angel messenger.

  “You’ll find yourself soon,” he said. “We all did, when we got used to being in a different world.”

  Erelah frowned, as if trying to remember something important

  “Think of all the worlds layer on layer like the skins of an onion,” Jeff said.

  Erelah nodded slowly. “There are more worlds than this one. It is right that some of us should stay here, I think,” she mused at last, “but the others have a different destiny.” Beneath the grime, her face shone, and she smiled at Carla then longer at Tully. “It was you, wasn’t it? You blew the trumpet and became Israfel.”

  “I blew the trumpet.”

  Erelah nodded to herself as if this piece of information confirmed something important. She sat in silence for a moment, her eyes unfocused. Tully understood that she was searching along a path that she was the only one to see. Finally, she shook herself, like an elegant, golden gazehound and went to sit down beside Garance, waiting, like the others, for Lucio to wake.

  “Tully?”

  Tully turned, and the eyes that looked into his were beautiful and serene. He waited for Carla to tell him what he already knew.

  “We have to go on, you know. This isn’t our place. When we first arrived, I thought it could have been, but now…”

  “Traveling changed us more than we knew,” he said quietly. “Our place is different, farther on. Who knows what we’ll find there.”

  Carla shook her head. “This is completely crazy. If anybody had tried to convince me a month ago a fraction of this was real—”

  “You’d have told them to go and get themselves buggered. I know.”

  Carla threw back her head and laughed.

  The sun was low now, but the air was mild, a pleasant spring day with a nip in it at evening. Tully stroked the grass beside him and pulled away the brown withered stalks. The first stirrings of happiness rippled through him as he opened his fingers and let the dead threads blow away. In the dark earth beneath, green shoots were pushing through, and the tight buds of tiny daisies were beginning to unfurl.

  At the same moment, Garance bent her head and her lips brushed Lucio’s.

  “Now,” she whispered.

  Erelah placed a hand on Lucio’s brow and his eyes opened slowly. He turned his head slightly, looking not at the shining girl, but into the eyes of the wife who had dragged him back from Hell, and he smiled.

  “Ciao, bella.”

  Garance held his hand tighter. “How corny can you get?” she said, and she burst into tears.

  “Welcome back, Babbo,” Carla whispered.

  * * * *

  Tully stood like a tower next to Carla with her shining lance. Their choice was made. Yvain clasped them both to him in an unexpected burst of affection.

  “Don’t leave it too long before you come back to us. We don’t all have the life expectancy of angels, you know.”

  “We won’t forget you,” Carla replied. But Yvain couldn’t help wondering as he looked from one to the other shining, faraway face, whether it was true.

  “My place is back in Lutecia, Jack,” Kat was saying. “They’ll need all the healers they can find.”

  “Kat has a wonderful gift. She will do great good,” Eirian put in.

  “They’ll need modelers too.” Jim looked slightly abashed and ran his fingers through his unruly curls.

  “To look after the healers, you mean,” Jack teased.

  “And I’m going to school.” Jeff looked suddenly no more than his eleven years. “Morgaine said I could.”

  Dusty barked.

  “And you’re going to have your voice trained at the conservatoire, I suppose,” Jack said, and Kat burst into laughter for the first time in half a lifetime.

  “Sanjay and I don’t want to go any farther. If that’s all right with you, sir?” There was a hint of anxiety in Rajeev’s face, as if he dreaded being told to move on again. “Sanjay has found a strange gift that he could use here. He sees visions!”

  Yvain smiled and patted him on the back. “You are both very welcome to stay.”

  Rajeev still looked a little unsure. “I don’t know what I can do. I still have to find myself, as you say.”

  “You will,” Kat said. “We all do in the end.” And she looked tenderly at Tancred.

  Yvain watched as Jack gave Kat a wry smile. Jack was getting over it, he thou
ght. He was letting go of the princess he had awoken with his daft stories, about pubs and uncles and a world that was dead.

  “You look after yourself, you hear?” Jack nudged Kat affectionately. “And if that big girl’s blouse doesn’t take his responsibilities seriously? Well, just remind him I’ll be back one day to sort him out. I’m a traveler, remember!”

  Garance helped Lucio to his feet. “Together we will bring light to the world,” she said, beaming at her husband. “It would be a terrible crime to let the artistic heritage of humanity be forgotten in the ruins of Earth. I always had a small knowledge of our achievement, and since I have been here, my knowledge has grown, too large for my limited brain to hold, too heavy a burden. I need to lay it down somewhere, where it will be appreciated and used. And I have a promise to keep to a lot of dear shooting stars,” she added.

  Yvain watched Lucio take his wife’s arm. “We will return to the happy realms of light and eternal splendors. The rest, the falling headlong flaming from the ethereal sky to bottomless perdition, is but a nightmare that belongs in the infernal pit.” He beamed in astonishment and shook his head. “I don’t know where I got that from, but it sounds pretty good, huh?”

  Jack took his eyes from Kat and his face, as he turned to the path ahead, was strangely serene. “Well, now that that’s settled, I suppose we’d best be off. Molly always said she’d wait for me, and there’s only one place she can be.”

  Tully took Carla’s hand, the trumpet balanced on his shoulder. “Mother would like to meet Israfel. He was her idea, after all.” He kissed Carla tenderly on the cheek. “And she would want to know you, most of all.”

  Carla didn’t answer, but her face shone with the same silvery light as the spear she carried in her right hand, and she smiled.

  Erelah put her arms around Rajeev and Sanjay in a last embrace. “Messengers travel about, you know. So, behave yourselves. You never know when I’ll turn up again.” Then she placed herself at the head of the group. “The Tree will open for me,” she said proudly. “It was in the message. I know the way.”

  Jack put his arm around Tully’s shoulder and turned to wave goodbye to the group waiting for Yvain to open a tunnel back to Lutecia. Erelah led the way to the strange opening in the World Tree, a glossy darkness that seemed to glitter and throw out sparks of light in the sunshine. The shimmering light swallowed her up, then Carla and Tully, Garance and Lucio as they followed. Jack lingered a second with one hand resting on the tree trunk, tall and straight, the expression of melancholy gone, replaced by one of resolute optimism. He raised his hand in farewell to Yvain and the rest, then he too crossed the curtain of brilliant darkness to join his companions on the other side and the path that led onward.

  Yvain watched in silence as the tall, shining figures departed in a golden halo, and the door into the World Tree closed behind them. He would miss them, he thought, infuriating as some of them were. Dusty barked and raised her ears in an expression of puzzlement. A tear pearled in the corner of Kat’s eye.

  Tancred put a protective arm around her and whispered, “They are not far away.”

  Yvain smiled. “Only in another world. In Paradisio.”

  Epilogue

  In the stillness of space, the great rock spun in a spiraling orbit that flung it farther and farther to the edge of the universe. In the tide of energy that pushed the edge ever farther into infinity, the rock was carried like a piece of flotsam. There was no shore to mark the end of the rock’s journey, no end, only the cold of the void that cracked the rock and pulverized it to its cold, dead core. No stars looked down as it hurtled into nothingness, nothing marked its passage, because nothing was left to remember.

  In another universe, a blue sphere spun in a dance, weaving a pattern with the planets and the stars. The sphere was covered in a mantle of light and life folded in many layers, each layer a different world with different memories. From its many depths rose a song that mingled with the songs of the stars, and in the song were the birds and the rivers, the courage and the tenderness, the beauty and the splendor, and everything that had ever been worthwhile.

  It was the song of the Earth, and it would never be done.

  Also available from Finch Books:

  Abomination

  Jane Dougherty

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  Tully raked his fingers through his thick black hair, an expression of disgust on his face. Even his head was sweating! The window blinds stuck out like stubby black wings, keeping off the glare, but doing nothing to prevent the scorching heat radiating up from the bare asphalt outside the building. The air throbbed with the same rhythm as the whirring fan on the teacher’s desk. Teacher? Yeah, right, he was in school. He almost remembered it was a physics class, but it was too tiring to drag out the information, so he let it fall back into the pit of magma that the heat had made of his brain.

  A crash and the sound of brittle laughter from the building site of the new sports complex nudged at his attention. Men in hardhats wiped streams of sweat from their faces and glared up at the searing brilliance of the sky before scuttling into the relative cool of their portacabins for lunch. The crane operator had already knocked off, and the metal monster was still, steel against pewter, pulsing in the dull heat.

  Tully shifted in his chair as an oppressive feeling formed and squirmed in the pit of his stomach. Had he forgotten something important? Homework? Had he locked one of the cats in his room? Couldn’t remember—too damn hot. His unease focused on the silent metallic struts of the crane that hung practically overhead, like a giant predator, waiting.

  The interminable lesson ended, and Tully rocked back in his chair, stretching arms and legs. A pen jabbed him in the back. He winced and turned his head. Carla grinned at him from the desk behind, and the nagging unease in his gut curled up and went to sleep.

  “You are awake then. I couldn’t decide if you were asleep or you’d had a stroke.”

  “Whose warped brain did it come out of anyway, the idea to have classes on a Saturday morning?” he asked, stifling a yawn.

  “Somebody-or-other Stalin,” Carla replied. “Benito, I think.”

  Together they walked out onto the quadrangle, the rather pretentious name given to the tree-bordered lawn that formed the geographical center of the school. The heat hit them like a blast from a baker’s oven as soon as the doors slid open.

  Tully cringed. “We could stay inside.”

  Carla raised her eyebrows. “It’s traditional.”

  “Traditionally, it’s not like the Gobi Desert out here,” Tully muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Honestly, though, this weather is getting weirder. Don’t you think?” He looked at Carla. “It isn’t just me, is it? I mean, you remember summers that were just sorta normal hot, don’t you? There’s something funny going on. Something they’re not telling us.”

  Carla raised an amused eyebrow again. “They? Is this one of your conspiracy theories?”

  “Yeah, how about this one—all those billions of Chinese leaping about for the New Year celebrations have knocked the world off its axis, and we’re falling into the sun?”

  “It could just be a global conspiracy of soda manufacturers to boost sales,” Carla said brightly.

  Tully grinned back. Carla was probably right. She usually was. Usually.

  * * * *

  The lawn of the quadrangle was as brown and dry as a Middle Eastern hillside after a tribe of desert nomads had pastured their goats on it. Groups of students picnicked in the shade of the wilted plane trees that cast welcome shadows and shed a faint leafy odor that was almost healthy, unlike the less attractive city smells of car exhaust and junk food.

  Sitting with his back resting more or less comfortably against a mottled tree trunk, Tully unwrapped his lunch. He spread the greaseproof paper package on the grass and, with a soft sigh that was mainly affection and only a tiny bit exasperation, picked up the large wedge of leek quiche. As he fl
icked his dark hair out of his eyes, he caught Carla looking at him. She grinned. She was always grinning. Tully had never met anyone else of such unflappable good humor.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Carla laughed. “Are you sure that’s your lunch you picked up and not something your dad was planning to fix the bathroom ceiling with?”

  Tully pretended to inspect the quiche suspiciously. “Now you mention it, I think it might be part of his relief model of the Paris Basin,” he said sarcastically. “But what the hell? I’m hungry enough to eat his Taj Mahal made out of matchsticks or his life size reconstruction of Champion the Wonder Horse.” He took a large bite—too large—and chewed energetically.

  “I’m sorry.” Carla touched his hand contritely, and Tully forgave the grin she couldn’t quite suppress. “I know you don’t like people poking fun at your dad. I love him too. He’s one of the best. But even you can’t pretend he can cook, and don’t be so spiky.”

  Carla had put on her most beguiling expression. Her whole face, chestnut hair, golden skin, teeth and bright eyes glowed. Tully could almost hear her purring.

  “Prickly.”

  “Prickly then. If you give me a piece of that quiche, I’ll share this focaccia with you. Gabriella made a ton of it yesterday in a fit of homesickness, and she’ll be mortally offended if there’s any left by the weekend.”

  “As long as you’ve got a good dentist.” Tully broke off a chunk of pastry, and rounds of undercooked leek detached themselves and dropped into the grass. “I think a couple of my premolars have come loose. Sausages he can manage, but Dad’s pastry is the ultimate deterrent. ”

  They both laughed, thinking of Jack, Tully’s big, easygoing father, who never wore anything smarter than his best jeans and a clean T-shirt, with his massive hands and farm worker’s arms, his bright blue eyes and dark hair, grizzled at the temples. He imagined him in the untidy kitchen, throwing flour and butter about, searching for the salt, swearing when there weren’t enough eggs.