Always Forever taom-3

by Mark Chadbourn

  After a few moments, Callow returned, loping like a wolf. "The arrangements have been made." His eyes slithered from side to side while he rubbed his hands oleaginously. "Once this filthy little skiff has fallen, then it's the turn of your happy little palace of dreams."

  Church felt Baccharus stiffen beside him at the news that the Fomorii had not yet moved on the High Court of the Tuatha De Danann. Still hope. Always hope. "What now, Callow?" he said. "Is this where you get your kicks?"

  Callow slipped his hand into his threadbare jacket and pulled out a knife whose blade was smeared with dried, brown blood. Church tried not to look at it, but he knew it was the blood of his friends. Callow weighed it in his hand, smiled.

  His bonds gave suddenly. He kept his face emotionless, his arm muscles taut. Pace yourself, he thought. Wait until he bends forward. His eyes flickered towards the Malignos; they were too far away to stop him if he was quick enough.

  Callow struck like a snake. Church didn't even see the blow, but he felt his forehead rip open and hot blood bubble down into his eyes. He cursed, threw his head back, but Callow, in his crazed state, was sweeping in with eager blows. Church dodged one, but another took his cheek open. The next one might hit his jugular.

  He threw himself forward at the same time as did Baccharus, whose own bonds had been sliced. They piled into Callow, who folded up like a sheet on a line, and then their impetus carried him with them as they drove towards the door. The Malignos exploded into a frenzied activity of snapping jaws and flashing limbs. One of their talons caught Church's other cheek and it burst open as cleanly as if it had been sliced with Callow's knife. Their speed was frightening. With reptilian sinuousness they had swept round to attack Church's and Baccharus's exposed backs, but by that time the two of them had reached the door. Baccharus shouted a word, twisted his left hand and the wall shimmered into the waterfall.

  They rolled into the corridor with Callow screaming before them, his face contorted with rage. Church silenced him with a sharp headbutt; not wholly necessary, but it made him feel good. Then he grabbed Callow by the collar and hurled him into the path of the approaching Malignos. They fell backwards in time for Baccharus to seal the door.

  "That will not keep them for long," he said.

  "Doesn't matter." Church fingered the sword that Callow, in his arrogance had failed to remove. "We need to raise the alarm-"

  The words died in his throat as the ship came to a sudden, lurching stop. Baccharus's expression told him all he needed to know. The Fomorii had seized control.

  Chapter Eleven

  Grim Lands, Grey hearts

  It was a graveyard, though why there should be a graveyard in the land of the dead made no sense to Veitch at all. It stretched as far as the eye could see: stone crosses, gleaming white like fresh-picked bones, or chipped and mildewed, some standing proud, others bowed and broken as if they had been forced from the earth; single standing stones and ancient cairns; mausoleums styled with fine carvings of angels; rough built stone tombs. Mist drifted languorously at knee height. The sheer weight of the monuments brought an air of severe melancholy.

  As he emerged from the tunnel into the city of the dead, the view triggered all his primal fear of death. His more immediate fears were more prosaic: what if each of those graves and tombs and mausoleums contained one of the dead, ready to rise up the moment he walked amongst them? His heart beat faster.

  There was no alternative. He placed a foot next to the first grave and waited for a hand to grab his ankle. Nothing. He proceeded to the next one.

  After several minutes the tension was starting to tell. It felt like walking through a minefield. He couldn't let his concentration slide for a moment: if the dead were present, they would choose the moment he least expected to strike, when he was in the midst of the graves with nowhere to turn. He looked around slowly; there was nowhere to run. A million graves, packed so tight he could barely move amongst them.

  The direction he had chosen-from the view presented to him by the eggproceeded past one of the largest mausoleums in the vicinity. It haunted the edges of his vision and he found himself drawn back to it continually. Its size made it out of place in the surroundings, but there was another aspect that did not feel right. As he approached it, his gaze snapped back, and back again, on the heavy, marbled door, waiting for a crack to appear, on the way the mist appeared to be drawn towards it. A few feet away he was convinced he could hear something dimly scrabbling within, like an animal, but not.

  When he was parallel with it, a small droplet of sweat trickled down his back, like water off a glacier. Even when he had passed by, his anxiety did not diminish, and he could feel it on his back for many moments after.

  Eventually, his attention was drawn by what appeared to be a giant crow, sitting on a low, stone box. Shavi had his eyes fixed on the horizon, as Veitch had seen him in the vision presented by the egg. It didn't seem right that he was so still. He wanted to call out to his friend, but the thought of his voice, loud and hard in that place of whispers, filled him with dread.

  And so he hurried on, his heart beginning to soar, hardly daring to raise his expectations. His mate, his pal, his buddy, his best friend; alive.

  As he neared the unmoving form, he finally found the courage to speak. Shavi's name drifted across the final feet between them, as dry and insubstantial as the spindly trees that poked up amongst the graves. At first there was no response. Veitch's heart started to beat faster: it was all another stupid game, dangle the prize, then snatch it away at the last minute, laughing at how foolish the Fragile Creatures were.

  But then a shiver ran through the hunched, dark form, as subtle as wind on long grass.

  "Shavi?" Veitch repeated hopefully.

  Another tremor. Slowly Shavi's head began to turn. Veitch caught his breath. Would he see something terrible in that face? The eyes of someone driven insane by the experience of dying?

  Shavi's limbs moved with the gradual adjustment of a man waking from a deep sleep, and when he did look round, Veitch was relieved to see his old friend as he had always looked. Shavi blinked long and slowly, squinting slightly as he focused on Veitch.

  "I was having the strangest dream." His voice was strained, as if he hadn't spoken for a long time.

  Veitch ran forward, beating down his surging emotions, and awkwardly put a celebratory arm round Shavi's shoulders before quickly pulling back. "You're all right, mate. It's all going to be all right now."

  Shavi smiled faintly, brushed a lock of hair from Veitch's forehead. Veitch didn't flinch. As his waking became sharper, his attention was drawn to his surroundings. "Where are we?"

  "Don't worry about it," Veitch said hastily. "I know it looks like the biggest bleedin' graveyard you've ever seen, but you're not dead, all right?"

  Shavi's brow furrowed. "A graveyard? Is that what you are seeing?"

  Now it was Witch's turn to be puzzled. "Don't you?"

  Shavi covered his eyes, then slowly ran his fingers through his long, black hair before letting them drop cautiously to his chest. He tentatively probed the area around his heart. "Callow. He stabbed me." He examined his fingers for any sign of blood. "The pain was… intense. Like needles being forced through my veins." He looked up at Veitch with panic flaring in his eyes. "He killed me."

  "Calm down, mate-"

  "Lee was here." He looked around wildly. "He brought me into the land of the dead-"

  Veitch took his shoulders roughly. "Pull yourself together, pal. You're not dead. One of the freaks-the big, horny-headed bastard-he saved you. Well, not quite, but he kept you sort of half alive and half dead. I'm here to take you back."

  "This is not still a dream?"

  "I'm here. Hit me if you want. But I'll hit you back, you dim bastard."

  Shavi smiled, calmed. "Just a different kind of dream, then."

  "You can't wait to start talking bollocks, can you?" He helped Shavi to his feet. "We've got to get you back to your body-" Shavi stiffened.
"Your body's not here."

  Shavi thought about this for a moment, then nodded in understanding. "My essence has created this form to house it. There is so much to assimilate. You need to rejoin my essence to my body."

  "We don't know how much longer you can carry on like this before you really do peg out."

  Shavi took a few shaky steps, his legs quickly regaining their poise. "The others?"

  "Tom's with me. Don't know where the others are exactly. I think they're fine."

  "Ruth?"

  "She's okay."

  They looked at each other for a moment, then broke out in broad grins, the telepathy of old friends replacing the need for talk.

  "Then," Shavi mused, "the question is, how do we return?"

  Unsure, Veitch surveyed the cluttered landscape of cold stone. "I reckon we head back to the place where I came in, if we can find it. We'll find it," he added positively.

  They had to walk single file to pick their way amongst the grave markers, but Veitch could still tell Shavi was distracted. "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "I was thinking about Lee."

  "Your boyfriend."

  "When he died that night in Clapham, I thought I had seen the last of him. My heart was broken, but also I was consumed with guilt because I was sure I could have done something to save his life. When the spirits in Edinburgh sent him back to haunt me as the price I had to pay for gaining their secret knowl edge… I was almost pleased." Veitch turned to stare at him, surprised by this new information. "It was terrible-psychologically, emotionally-but I felt I deserved it. And even at the point of my death, he was there, ushering me across the boundary for more suffering."

  "So where is he now?"

  "That is exactly what I was thinking. I do not really know what happened to me in the period that followed my death, but I do know that in some way I have come to terms with Lee's death, and my involvement in it. And now he is not here. It is almost as if the way I felt about myself turned him sour." He paused thoughtfully. "We make our own Hell, Ryan. In many ways, many times a day."

  Veitch continued his measured pace. "You just be thankful you're shot of him."

  The hand closed round his ankle with the speed of a striking snake. It took him a second or two to realise what was happening, his gaze running up and down the pale limb protruding from the rough, pebbly soil of the grave, and by then movement had erupted all around.

  "Shavi!" he yelled, but the word choked in his throat at the shock of what he was seeing.

  The ground was opening up in a million small upheavals, mini volcanoes of showering earth and stone. Across the vast graveyard, bodies were thrusting out on locked elbows, alien trees growing in time-lapse photography. Witch, as brave as any man alive, felt his blood run cold.

  In sickening silence they surged from every side. Hands clutched his arms, his hair, pulled at his jaw, slipped into his mouth. Odourless, stiff and dry, they dragged him down to the hard ground. He tried to see Shavi, but his friend had already been washed away in the tidal wave of bodies.

  Even that thought was eradicated when he saw where they were dragging him: to the mausoleum that had haunted him from the moment he saw it.

  It loomed up among the mists, only now its door hung agape and the interior was darker than anything he had ever seen before.

  Tom smoked a joint as he watched the sun come up over Wandlebury Camp, but even the drugs couldn't take the edge off his anxiety. Veitch was sharp, a strategist, a warrior: there was no one else he could have despatched into the Grim Lands. Yet the decision was still a crushing weight on his heart. Despite his constant ferocity, Veitch was, to all intents and purposes, a child and the Grim Lands was the worst battlefield in the worst war in the history of the world. Tom winced at how he had fooled himself that his protege was operating under free will. Veitch had no capacity to make a rational choice.

  Some people have to see the big picture. Tom had utilised that mantra many times during his long life and it had kept the beast locked up on most occasions. But increasingly his guilt was getting out of the cage. He'd been around the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons too long. Why did they have to humanise him? How could he be a general sending the innocents off to war if he felt every death, every scratch?

  Some people have to see the big picture. All of existence is at stake. Against that, no individual matters.

  He sucked on the joint, then let out the draught without inhaling, spat and tamped out the hot end. He had taken on the role of teacher, an archetype demanded by the universe, but he didn't feel up to it at all. The others might see him as all-knowing, but in his heart he was the same romantic fool who had fallen asleep under the hawthorn tree in the Eildon Hills. Whenever anyone described him as a mythic hero, he felt faintly sick. A man. Weak and pathetic like all men, crippled by insecurities, guilts and fears. Not up to the task at all. But like all men he put on a brave face and pretended to the world he was the one for the job; it was a man thing, as old as time, and it involved pretending to yourself as much as everyone else.

  But still, in his quiet moments, when he dared look into his heart, he knew. Not up to the job, Thomas. Not up to it at all. Smoke some more hashish.

  He stood up just as Robertson was approaching fearfully from the shade of the house. A bruise marred his cheek from Veitch's attack. He glanced at the sun now beating down on the lawns before he dared speak, "Your friend-"

  "I haven't got time for that now," Tom snapped. "Show me the stable block. I need some horse dung, some straw where a mare has slept, and then I need you to leave me alone for the next hour."

  Robertson stared at him blankly.

  "Don't ask any questions." Tom pushed by him. "Or I'll do to you what my good friend did."

  Veitch was fighting like a berserker within seconds of being swamped by the wave of dead, a few limbs lopped off here, a skull or two split there. By the time the sword was knocked away from him, he was already aware how worthless it was.

  He tried to yell Shavi's name to check his friend was okay, but dead fingers drove into his mouth like sticks blown off an old tree. Sandpapery hands crushed tight around his wrists and his legs, pulled at his head until he feared they were going to rip it off. He choked, saw stars, but still fought like a wild animal.

  And the gaping black mouth of the mausoleum drew closer.

  Dead hands passed Shavi from one to the other across the angry sea. It was impossible to get his bearings, or even to call out, and any retaliation was quickly stifled. From his occasional glimpses of Veitch he knew the dead were not treating him as roughly as his friend. Perhaps they considered him one of their own.

  Veitch was thrown roughly into the mausoleum first. Shavi was pitched at head height into the dark after him. He skidded across the floor, knocking over Veitch, who was clambering to his feet in a daze.

  Before he could say anything, Shavi noticed his pale hand was slowly turning grey. At the entrance only a thin crack of white mist and grey sky remained. As he threw himself forward, the door slammed shut with a resounding clang.

  "Are you okay?" Veitch whispered.

  Shavi felt a searching arm grab his sleeve, hauling the two of them together. "Bruised."

  "Bastards." A pause. "Is this the best they can do? We'll be out of here in no time."

  "How?"

  A long silence. "How solid can this thing be?" Another pause. "It's not like it's meant to keep things in. We could jemmy the door-"

  "Wait."

  "What?"

  "We are not in here alone."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Hush."

  There came the sound of a large, slow-moving bulk dragging itself at the far end of the mausoleum.

  "What the hell's that?" Unease strained Veitch's voice.

  Shavi felt the hand leave his sleeve as Veitch scurried in the direction of the door. Several moments of scrabbling and grunting followed before he crawled back, panting and cursing.

  Whatever else was in there was shifti
ng towards them. Shavi had an image of something with only arms, dragging what remained of its body across the floor. He couldn't help but think it was hungry, probably hadn't been fed for a long time.

  "I've still got my crossbow." The note of futility in Veitch's voice suggested he wasn't about to use it. "I thought this was just the land of the bleedin' dead."

  "Ryan. Hush."

  After several minutes, the dragging noise died away. From the echoes, Shavi estimated it had halted about fifteen feet away. All that remained was the sound of breathing, slow, rhythmic and rough. Although there wasn't even the faintest glimmer of light, he couldn't shake the feeling it was watching them with a contemptuous, heavy gaze; sizing them up, dissecting them.

  At his side, Witch's body was taut. Neither of them knew what to do next.

  "The rules of this place were formed long before your kind emerged from the long night." The voice sounded like bones rattling across stone. Its bass notes vibrated deep in Shavi's chest; he felt instantly queasy, not just from the tone of the voice, but from the very feel of whatever squatted away in the gloom. "No warm bodies, no beating hearts, no words or thoughts or ideas."

  "No. There's a deal. I was allowed to come here," Veitch protested cautiously.

  "You were allowed to cross over, but the rules of this place can never be transgressed. The living are not wanted. The dead rule here. And they will have no warm bodies spoiling the cold days of this land. They will have punishment."

  Shavi waited for it to attack, but there was only silence. He pictured it savouring its taunting before the inevitable. Here was not only intelligence, but also cruelty, and hatred.

  "What are you?" Shavi asked. The hairs on the back of his neck had snapped alert.

  "This is a place without hope for those who do not leave. Where behind is too terrible to consider, and ahead is an unwanted distraction. This is desolation, and despair. Misery and pain."

  "A land for those who prey on those things," Shavi said.

  "Here, the dead have their own existence, their own rules and rhythms, their own hierarchies and mythologies, fears and desires."