by Caro King
Glancing around, Nin saw that night was settling in and the ruined forest was wrapped in darkness. There was a faint glow coming from around her forearm where the spell had settled, its shadowy colours giving off a gleam like moonlight. She could hear it whispering softly, but couldn’t make out any words. Overhead, lingering smoke hung in great clouds, hiding the stars.
It wasn’t good. Even with the birds and bears and wolves gone, even as devastated as it was, Nin had a bad feeling that the Savage Forest was determined not to be friendly. And now there were two ash-things, curling around each other, both glaring at her.
She blinked. No, it was three. She hadn’t even seen the third arrive; it had just slipped into view from the night shadows. She wondered if her fear was giving them strength to multiply. How afraid was she? One or two of the things she could manage, but what about twenty? A hundred? Panic began to uncurl in her chest. She looked around, but there was nowhere to go. No shelter from the night.
What she needed, what she really really needed, was Nemus Sturdy.
Picking up the blackened remains of a long branch, Nin leaned forward to prod the closest of the creatures, trying to push it away. Its hiss was loud enough to make her yelp. Sparks flew from its eyes and the branch she was holding sprang into instant, furious life, the flames leaping inches at a time, racing up the wood towards her hand. Nin screamed and dropped the branch, but a spark had already jumped to the sleeve of her jacket and caught.
Flames began to spread on her sleeve, forcing the spell to slither rapidly up her arm and around her neck, murmuring anxiously as it went. Wrenching her jacket off, she dropped it to the ground and kicked it away, pulling her rucksack free as she did so. Shaking and gasping, she watched the garment burn as the ash-stoats swarmed over it.
Backing away from the gaggle of spark-filled eyes, Nin found that she was almost standing on the remains of Nemus Sturdy. The ash-stoats watched her, hissing. Their number had grown. Now, there were too many to count.
Nin sank to the ground, huddling closer to the stump that once was Sturdy’s Oak. Thinking of him made her feel a little better and she lay for a while, still trembling but somehow comforted, while the ash-stoats seethed beyond the reach of her feet. One or two of them lunged for her, but they always fell back just short of her boots. She wondered why and the answer came quickly.
The Seven Sorcerers’ spells depended on Quick dreads and desires for the power to keep their sorcerers hanging on to existence. Nemus Sturdy had made a spell to give Quick shelter from all the dread things that the Savage Forest held at night. His Oak, the centre of his ring of protection, had been burned back to almost nothing, but now Nin was here. Needing his protection desperately.
Maybe even the need of one Quick was enough to save him?
And there was more than that. Nin eyed the ashstoats, thinking over what Enid Lockheart had told her about the nature of spells and how they worked. With the Forest burned, there was not so much of a reason for Quick to need Sturdy’s protection. So, if there was not enough danger around, then maybe his spell was making sure there was more. Maybe it was taking her fear and turning it into the ash-stoats.
One of the stoats hissed at her and sparks flashed from its body. Nin imagined it growing, getting bigger with the fear from each passing Quick who saw it. Or the bones of its victims. And they would wish Nemus Sturdy was there to protect them. And the more there were, the more the oak would grow.
Always provided the Drift didn’t go completely to the Raw before it got the chance. She sighed. It all came back to Strood and what he was doing and whether or not she could stop him.
Her face still wet with tears, Nin put her arms around the foot of the stump, laying her head amid its rough, cindery, still-warm roots, making the most of the little protection that still remained. And after a while, she fell asleep.
13
The Killing of Hilary Jones
Not far away but in a whole different world, Hilary Jones was reaching the end of the worst day of her life. Inside her small flat in the Widdern, unaware that two sets of fiery red eyes were watching over her (three sets if you counted Strood’s assassin hiding in the garden under a lilac tree), she was sitting in the dark in front of the TV, watching the late news about Britain’s Blowtorch Butchery and crying quietly into a mug of hot milk.
She was crying because earlier today she had been called on to identify three bodies. Well, one body actually, because the others were in too many pieces to be called bodies as such. The whole one had been her sister and had been removed from a car just before dawn as Hilary was coming home from working a night shift at the local hospital, a car that had inexplicably turned itself into a smashed-up wreck without even going off the road.
Hilary shuddered and put down the hot milk – by now getting cold and rather salty – and rubbed her left wrist. At 4:15:23 that morning, the exact time of her sister’s death, a white ring had appeared around Hilary’s wrist. It looked just like the trace of an old scar. It also looked just like a mark that her aunt used to have around her wrist.
Something has been transferred, Hilary thought fuzzily. Inside her head, pieces clicked together to form a picture. The scar (and whatever went with it) had belonged to her aunt. When her aunt died, it had gone to Hilary’s sister, because Hilary’s aunt had no children and Hilary’s mother was already dead. It had belonged to Hilary’s sister for barely two hours and then … then it had come to Hilary.
She felt her skin crawl, suddenly aware of a whispering in her head, like a distant voice calling her.
‘Hiiillary …’
‘I need to sleep,’ she told herself firmly. ‘I need to stop thinking about all this for just a little while or I’ll go mad with it.’
Leaving the television to babble, because she didn’t want to be alone right now, Hilary went to lie down on the bed. She kicked off her shoes, but was too worn out to get undressed and fell asleep the moment her eyes closed.
While she slept, nightmares tumbled about in her head like clothes in a washing machine, mixed up and running into one another as they churned. There were flowers that ate people, a mansion so tall it touched the heavens, houses that burned in towering flames against a sky of thunderclouds and a beautiful golden-eyed woman surrounded by lightning that danced in the air around her like snakes of fire. Hilary cried out in her sleep when she saw that the woman’s left hand was just a stump.
‘Hiillary!’
The woman leaned forward and suddenly she was close, eye to eye with Hilary, her face filled with something dark and powerful. From nowhere, a name arrived in Hilary’s head. Senta Melana.
‘The spell, Hilary,’ Senta whispered, and even though Hilary knew she was dreaming, the woman’s voice was real. ‘The spell will keep you alive. It can’t offer you magical power, but it has knowledge that will help you survive. And it WILL help you, because you are the last, and you must live. For all the lives to come. For me.’
Hilary sprang awake with a gasp. The bedroom was silent and dark but she knew, she just knew that whatever had killed the rest of her family was here, in the flat with her.
‘Go,’ said the soft voice in her head. Only now it was no longer just whispering but clear as a bell. ‘GO NOW!’
Barefoot, Hilary crept silently to the bedroom door and peered through. The hallway was empty. Nothing stirred. Through the half-open door to the sitting room she could see the flicker of a late-night game show on the television. And then, down the hall, in between her and the front door, she heard a noise. The fridge door opened and there was a sound of rustling. Hilary raised her eyebrows in amazement. Her assassin was stopping for a snack before he got on with the job!
Swiftly, she slipped around the bedroom door, crossed the hallway and went into the living room, thankful that the chattering TV would cover any small sounds. She picked up her car keys and headed back into the hall. The kitchen was silent. Alarm bells rang in her head and she looked up and down the hall. There was nothing there.
‘Look!’ hissed the voice in her head.
Hilary blinked. She felt a change inside, as if something had re-arranged her vision to show her what was really there. She drew in a horrified gasp.
Standing outside the kitchen, in between Hilary and the way out, was a scaly green, hunch-backed, one-eyed monster with fanged teeth, huge talons and bulging muscles that looked designed for tearing people apart. Its eye glowed redly and it was clutching a chicken leg in one hand and a lemonade bottle in the other. It was wearing a pair of torn red trousers held up with rope.
It snarled.
Hilary screamed and dived into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
The Thing in red trousers threw the chicken leg and the lemonade bottle after her, and lurched into motion.
Running to the window, Hilary pushed it open. Outside, the night was quiet. The bedroom looked out at the back of the flats and below Hilary was a paved path that ran across the lawn and over to the car park. At her back the door juddered and split and Hilary screamed again as Red Trousers smashed through it, tearing the wood into splinters. It opened a mouth fringed with knives and gave a screeching roar that froze her blood. It leapt, and that one bound should have brought it down on top of Hilary, where it could shred her tender Quick body like paper and scatter her bloody remains around the room. A bit like her aunt. And her mother.
But then a miracle happened.
There was a sound like a thunderclap as the front door exploded into splinters and something tore through, setting fire to the wallpaper as it went. It hurtled into the bedroom, moving so fast it made the air spin. Just before it whacked into Red Trousers – right in the middle of its leap – and sent it smashing against the wall, Hilary caught a glimpse of something wearing a fancy waistcoat.
In a bundle of claws and teeth, Red Trousers and Fancy Waistcoat slithered down the wall and rolled on Hilary’s bedroom floor, snarling and screeching as they slashed at one another. There was a sound of splintering wood and claw marks appeared in the wardrobe. Then the bedside lamp crashed to the floor and the duvet caught fire. The racket was horrible.
Hilary didn’t wait to see any more. She scrambled out on to the window ledge and took a breath.
Just as she was about to jump to the paving stones way below, hoping she wouldn’t break any bones, her eyes focused on something standing there, lit up by the garden lights. It looked like some kind of weird, glittery mud-statue and it was holding out its arms as if to catch her. She blinked, hesitating for just a moment.
‘You have friends,’ said the voice in her head, and Hilary knew now that it was the voice of the spell cast by her sorceress ancestor, Senta Melana. She also knew that it was trying to help. So she went.
The night whirled around her as she fell, glad that she had put on a pair of trousers that morning instead of a skirt. It only lasted a second, but it was still long enough for Hilary to feel the dewy air slipping past her, and to see the lawn and the path rushing up to meet her. And then it was over and she was hanging safely a couple of feet off the ground, held in the arms of the weird mud-thing.
‘Jik!’ it said, and to Hilary it sounded pleased at a job well done. It dropped her gently to the ground. ‘Bikik gik qwik!’
Hilary scrambled to her feet as some horrible earsplitting howls rained down from her window, closely followed by most of her wardrobe.
She ran for her car and the mud-thing followed. Behind them, flames licked the walls, billowing out of the ragged hole where the window had been. Glancing back, Hilary saw Red Trousers, bursting through the flames as it leapt to the ground after them. Only, as it hurtled through the air, it changed shape.
‘Going back to Natural Bogeyman,’ murmured Senta’s spell. ‘Now we’ve got trouble!’
Red Trousers hit the ground running, moving so fast it was just a streak of blurred air. Hilary yelled as it hurtled past her, knocking her to the ground, then fizzed back into view, landing on top of her car with a loud crump. It stood there, scanning the area for any sign of Fancy Waistcoat. The car began to buckle under its weight. With a snort of satisfaction, it decided it had won the fight and turned its attention back to Hilary. It grinned horribly and drew in a long, deep breath. The mud-creature threw itself over Hilary, flattening her to the ground.
‘Firebreath,’ hissed Senta’s spell, ‘keep down!’
But before Red Trousers could breathe out, Fancy Waistcoat got in first.
A tornado of fire ripped over Hilary’s head and caught Red Trousers full on. It gave a last furious howl and exploded, along with the car. For a long moment the air was filled with nothing but the sound of roaring flames and the stink of oily smoke.
When Hilary finally peered out from behind her hands, the night sky was filled with black smoke and red flames. As well as the burning wreckage of the car, the fire in her bedroom had spread to the rest of the block and people were milling about outside, dressed in their nightclothes or wrapped in a blanket. Sirens echoed through the air, growing steadily louder, and flashing lights fought with the glare from the fire.
Hilary got to her feet. Her blue eyes were wide in her heart-shaped face, what you could see of it under the dirt. She was battered, bruised and not a little scorched, and her hair looked like a pale gold bird’s nest. Her clothes were torn and covered in mud and oily smuts and she badly needed a wash; and on top of the loss of her aunt, her mother and her sister she had just lost her home and all her worldly goods. But through it all her beauty shone like a beacon.
She stood looking thoughtfully at the two strange creatures in front of her. In the background, someone from a neighbouring building was handing out tea in chipped mugs to the refugees. Fire engines and police cars pulled up. People in helmets began running about and shouting.
‘You know,’ Hilary said at last, ‘I think Hilary Jones died today, killed in that burning building. And I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I do know,’ she pointed a finger, ‘that you two have got some explaining to do. So let’s get on our way, shall we? You can fill me in as we go. And it had better be good!’
A broad smile stretched across Thing number two’s face, revealing a row of mismatched and very jagged teeth. His red eyes glowed.
‘It will be,’ he said. ‘Don’chew worry about that!’
Skerridge was getting more and more bad-tempered as the night wore on. It was something to do with the way they kept running across new patches of Raw. It gave him a doomy feeling inside and he didn’t like it one bit. Without Jik, who instinctively knew the lie of the land, they would have been hopelessly lost by now.
‘Blimmin’ Strood,’ muttered Skerridge. ‘Rippin’ the Drift up like a piece o’ paper.’
‘Wik gik sik-sik-wik,’ said Jik, studying the Land ahead.
Skerridge gave him a look that would have cooked a steak in seconds. ‘Whadya mean, souf-souf-west? Wha’s that when it’s at ’ome? We jus’ wanna get ter ’Ilfian!’
‘He’s taking us to Hilfian,’ said Hilary patiently, ‘we just have to go round all this freezing misty stuff.’
Jik set off, leading them on through a patch of dense woodland. Hilary followed, with Skerridge coming last and grumbling busily. He was finding the journey hard going. Not just the strange zigzag path they were having to take to avoid the Raw, but also having to do it all at the painfully slow pace that Quick always used. He kept having to remind himself not to break into superspeed. He grinned and brightened up a little. At least there was something he could do about that.
‘So,’ asked Hilary, wanting to get things straight in her mind, ‘this weird mist that keeps sending us out of our way is the Raw, the basic stuff of magic that the Land was made from and is now going back to?’
‘That’s it,’ said Skerridge. ‘It’s lethal to Fabulous because they too are made from raw magic and it dissolves them on contact, taking all that they are back into itself so that they cease to be. It’s also lethal to Quick, because its sub-zero temperatures freeze their
socks off in next to no time. That’s why we all have to go round it, not through.’
Hilary spun around. Behind her an evil-looking kid in a duffel coat stared back from the depths of a hood, pulled forward over its pale dead-looking face. Its eyes glittered menacingly.
‘You changed shape,’ she said accusingly.
‘I’m entitled. It goes with the territory, it’s what bogeymen do. And this way I won’t miss superspeed so much.’ Skerridge grinned, showing a neat row of small, pointed teeth.
‘Even your voice changed.’
Skerridge giggled horribly. ‘Evil Kid With Duffel Coat doesn’t speak the same as Natural Bogeyman, see,’ he said with exaggerated patience. ‘You have to be consistent to change shape properly. Anyfin’ else just ain’t done.’ He blinked. ‘Oops.’
Hilary shook her head and turned back to the path. ‘I wish we could all superspeed.’ She glanced up at the sky where the moon hung, half covered by clouds like giant crows circling around its pale globe. ‘If I’ve gathered anything at all about the Drift, I’m betting that night in the open isn’t recommended.’
‘Not recommended at all,’ said Skerridge. ‘But then you’ve got us to protect –
The air blurred. There was a brief yelp from Hilary, then silence.
‘– you.’
The two Fabulous stopped dead in their tracks. They swapped a glance.
‘Erm … where’d she go?’
Jik shrugged.
Skerridge sighed. ‘Blimmin’ BMs,’ he muttered, swapping back into Natural Bogeyman. He brightened up. ‘Still, time fer a bitta superspeed, I’m guessin’. Did ya see which way ’e went?’
