Always Forever taom-3

by Mark Chadbourn

  "The St. Michael Line," Shavi noted. "A ley running from Carn Les Boel at Land's End to St. Margaret's Church at Hopton on the east coast in Norfolk."

  "Along that line are many of those powerpoints. They feed the whole network. For the land to come alive with the earth energy, the St. Michael Line must be vibrant and powerful. But it is fractured in part, sluggish in others, a trickle in many places."

  "And to wake it?" Shavi asked.

  "On the tip of Cornwall there is an ancient and mysterious place known as St. Michael's Mount. It is the lynchpin of the entire line. I have spoken in the past about the Celts and the other ancient races encoding great secrets in the earth itself. At St. Michael's Mount is the greatest secret of all. Locked under that place, Church-and Church alone-will uncover the key to bringing the line, and the land, back to life. Or he will find death."

  Veitch tapped out a monotonous beat on the kitchen table with a teaspoon. "They'll have the place well defended," he said, staring into space. "Those tricks and traps they lined up to guard the spear, sword and the rest of it were bad enough. If this is their biggest secret-"

  "Exactly," Tom said.

  "Then," Shavi said, "we need to get Church to St. Michael's Mount as soon as we can."

  In a quiet orchard at the back of the farmhouse, with the yellowing, autumn leaves glowing spectrally in the moonlight, Shavi sat cross-legged and listened to the sound of the night. Amongst the surrounding vegetation, eyes glittered-a fox, a rabbit, a badger, several stray cats-all of whom had come to see the shaman at work. The ritual, his first since leaving the Grim Lands, had been wearying, necessitating some of the tricks of concentration he thought he had become too experienced to need. But it had worked.

  A few feet above the ground, the air was boiling as what appeared to be liquid metal bubbled out and drifted down; it was accompanied by the familiar smell of burnt iron. Behind it came one of the bone-white, featureless creatures Shavi had summoned before, a human-shaped construct used by one of the denizens of the Invisible World. It pulled itself forward and hung half in and half out of the hole in space.

  "Who brings me to this place?" Its voice was like the wind on a winter sea.

  "It is I, Brother of Dragons."

  "I know you, Brother of Dragons. Have you not learned your lesson, of reaching out to the worlds beyond your own?"

  "I know my place, and I know yours. I seek guidance."

  "You did not heed our words before." The creature put its head on one side in a faintly mocking style.

  Shavi recalled the prophetic message one of these creatures had given him about his murder at Callow's hands, but it had been couched in such cryptic terms he had not realised its meaning until it was too late to do anything about it. "I chose my path. And I am here to hear your words again."

  "There is a price."

  Shavi ran a thumb over the rough pad of his left hand, now crisscrossed with a score of tiny scars, chose a spot, then slit it with a knife. The blood dripped on to the damp grass.

  "You give freely of your essence, Brother of Dragons." An underlying note of warning.

  "Another Brother of Dragons, our leader, known as Church, is currently abroad in the Far Lands. Firstly, how does he fare?"

  "He fares well. You have achieved all that you desire, but what you desire may do more harm than good."

  Shavi noted this subtle warning, knowing there was no point attempting to get the construct to elucidate. "Then he will be back shortly. My second question: where will he arrive?"

  "He will return to the Fixed Lands at the point from which he departed, where Merlin's Rock marks a doorway between worlds."

  Shavi didn't recognise the name, but he guessed Tom probably would. "Then I thank you for your guidance. Return safely to the Invisible World." He paused. "No final words of warning?"

  Although the construct had no features, Shavi was convinced it was smiling. "No warning would ever do justice to what lies ahead for you and your Brothers and Sisters."

  And then it was gone.

  Tom and Veitch sat around the range in the candlelight, drinking homemade beer. They were used to Shavi's ragged appearance after making contact with the Invisible World, but were eager to discover what he had learned. As he had expected, Tom knew the location instantly.

  "Mousehole," the Rhymer said gruffly. "Then he joined Manannan's sick crew."

  "Where's that, then?" Veitch swilled the beer down rapidly; six large mugs in a quarter of an hour.

  "Cornwall." Tom stared at the red coals in the open door of the range. "In the furthest tip. The part of the country where the Celts buried their greatest secrets, and subsequently the most spiritual part of the land."

  "Bloody hell, it's going to take us ages to get down there." Veitch took another swig, then looked up suddenly. "You could make another jump."

  Tom waved him silent, his eyes still fixed on the fire, deep in thought. Shavi asked what Veitch meant and the Londoner spent the next five minutes attempting to explain how they had slipped into the energy flow between Scotland and Wandlebury Camp. Shavi was enthused by the entire concept and excitedly questioned Tom about it.

  "Didn't you hear me say the St. Michael Line is fractured?" he snapped. "If we attempt to travel along it and hit a dead spot we will be unceremoniously spewed out into the world. Perhaps over a gorge or a cliff face or above a river in torrent. Now what good will that do?"

  Veitch examined the deep lines of Tom's face, the fix of his eyes, until Tom could no longer pretend he hadn't seen him. "What?"

  "You're thinking about it."

  "No, I'm not."

  "Yes, you are. I can see it in your face, you old bastard. And I know exactly what you're thinking. You're thinking it's too much of a risk for all three of us, but one of us needs to try it because we're running out of time."

  Tom was particularly irritated at Veitch's sudden insight.

  "I'm right, aren't I?"

  "Oh, shut up." Tom rose from his chair and went over to the window to peer out into the dark. "It has to be me because only I can give Church the guidance he needs. Only I can point him towards St. Michael's Mount." A few beats of silence. "And the two of you are too valuable to risk. Five of you are needed to put this square. Any less… if any of you don't make it through the next two weeks…" He made a dismissive gesture.

  "Then what should we do?" Shavi asked.

  Tom was already gathering his things together in his haversack. "You must make your way to a meeting place, somewhere just beyond the reach of the Fomorii influence on the outskirts of London. I would suggest the west-"

  The door crashed open and Davenport lurched in, his face pale and drawn. Shavi helped the farmer to a chair. Veitch's eyes went instantly to the door and window; the farmhouse was sprawling, impossible to defend.

  "Down at the pub," Davenport gasped between juddering breaths. "I was talking to some bloke about you lot. Never seen him before. He was asking a lot of questions. I thought he'd just heard the stories, like the rest of us-"

  "What happened?" Veitch gripped Davenport's shoulders and had to be prised off by Shavi.

  "After I told him you were up here, his face started to change… melt… I thought I was going mad. Then I thought I was going to black out. One of the other blokes down there was sharp. Chucked a pint glass at him. I got away, still thought I was going to puke my guts up."

  "Fomorii," Shavi snapped.

  "There were more of them," Davenport continued. "I saw as I ran up here. They were following me-"

  His sentence was cut off by a crashing at the front door.

  "No time," Tom said. "We will find each other in the west, along the M4 between Reading and London." He nodded to them all, then darted through the back door where he snatched Davenport's bicycle from its resting place against the wall.

  "Hide," Shavi said to the farmer. "They are after us. They will leave you alone." He saw Veitch's fixed expression and knew he was considering a fight. "This is not the time. We
cannot afford to fail now."

  Veitch backed down, and then they were both out of the door, running across the orchard and into the fields beyond.

  His joints aching, Tom pedalled as fast as he could. The evening was alive with monkey shrieks, dark shapes flitting across the fields towards the farmhouse, the candlelit rooms surprisingly bright in the sea of night. He desperately hoped Witch and Shavi would escape-if anyone could, they could-but he had his doubts for Davenport and his wife.

  That the Fomorii were still looking for them had taken him by surprise. He had thought that in the aftermath of their great success at bringing back Balor, the Night Walkers would have little time for failed insurrectionists.

  He narrowed his eyes and concentrated until the thin tracings of Blue Fire rose from the shadowy background, like silver filigree glinting off the blades of grass in the fields. It was not strong in that area, but he could still pick out the ebb and flow. Driving himself on as fast as he could, he searched for a confluence on the St. Michael's Line.

  An hour later he found himself in the Hertfordshire town of Royston, at a point where the ancient Royal Roads of Britain, the Icknield Way and Ermine Street, crossed. The town was still, although candles glowed in many windows. The moment he saw the town name, he knew where he was heading. The old stories enshrined the mythic power of certain locations so they would never be forgotten by the adepts, however much locals became inured to their mystery.

  A grating in the pavement showed his destination, but it took him a while longer to raise one of the residents to point him in the direction of an old wooden door. Taking a candle, he made his way along a tunnel to a thirty-foothigh, bell-shaped chamber cut into the solid chalk lying just beneath the street. He remembered how one of the Culture had told him of its rediscovery in the eighteenth century when a group of workmen digging a hole found a millstone sunk in the earth; beneath it was a shaft that led into the cave.

  Tom held up the candle and the walls came alive; carved pictures swelled and receded in the flickering light. Here Sheela-na-Gig, one of the old fertility goddesses, there Christian images of the crucifixion, and then a mix of the two, with St. Catherine holding the symbolic eight-spoked wheel of the sun disc. It had the same resonances as Rosslyn Chapel, where Shavi and Laura had freed the mad god Maponus, and like that place, it had also been a haunt of the Knights Templar, the old guardians of secret mysteries and the last people to truly understand the earth energy.

  Cautiously he set down the candle and sat cross-legged in the centre of the chill cave, allowing its symbolism to work its magic on his subconscious. The shape of an inverted womb and the female images on the wall showed it was a place where the Earth Goddess was honoured by the ancients; more, it was a place where the life-giving power of the earth was celebrated.

  The atmosphere was already crackling, setting the hairs alive across his arms and neck. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and prepared for his trip.

  The deep dark of predawn clustered along the coastline as Wave Sweeper sailed in to the sleeping land. The waves crashed in bursts of white along the rocky coast and the salty scent of seaweed filled the air. Church stood at the rail, filled with excitement at the prospect of returning home after too long in the strangest of strange lands. Behind it, though, was apprehension at what lay ahead.

  Ruth gave the back of his hand a squeeze with a reassuring smile. Her hair had been tied back, but the force of the wind still lashed it around. "Ready for the final act?"

  "I don't like the way that sounds." He slipped an arm round her shoulders, comforted by her warmth.

  All around them the deck milled with the Tuatha De Danann readying the ship for landing. The decks below were crammed with even more of the force: horses, and strange, gleaming chariots with spiked wheels, an entire deck of armaments prepared by Goibhniu and his brothers, plus tents and supplies and all the other minutiae needed by an army on the move.

  "I wonder if we'll see the others?" he mused.

  "When. It's only a matter of time. We were drawn together in the first place, and it'll happen again." Her thoughts turned to Veitch; she quickly drove them out.

  "It's funny that it's going to end in London." The spray flew up around him. "We've come full circle."

  "The Universe speaks to us in symbols, that's what Tom would say. I still can't get over how much we've all changed. If the stakes weren't so high, that would be… an achievement in itself."

  "You feel better for it all?" He gently touched the space where her finger had been.

  She only had to think for an instant. "As stupid as it seems, I do. Between this and the rest of my days stretching out in a safe but mundane legal world, there's no contest. It's such an obvious thing, but we never, ever grasp it: life's short, so why spend it bumping along in a secure existence that stops you feeling anything? Life should be about snatching as many great experiences as you can before you die, trading them in for wisdom. But if you want that, you've got to take the risk of great lows as well. Any sane person would say there's no contest, but we keep doing it."

  "It's society. Conditioning. That's what we all need to break."

  She laughed. "Life in the Age of Reason isn't all the brochures say."

  "Reminds me of an old song."

  "One nobody else has heard of, I suppose."

  "I guess." As they neared the coast, he picked out a few lights in Mousehole; either early risers or the night watch.

  Ruth watched the shadow of thoughts play on his face. "What's wrong?"

  `Just wishing the Walpurgis hadn't died before he could tell me what he knew."

  "About the one of us who's going to sell all the others down the river?" She kept her eyes fixed on the shoreline.

  "I just hope that wasn't a turning point, the one moment when we could have saved everything, only to lose out by a hair's breadth. And Callow's treachery."

  "No point worrying about it now." Her face was dark, unreadable. "We've just got to play the cards as they fall. That, and other cliches."

  If the residents of Mousehole knew an alien ship was disgorging some of the most powerful beings of all existence in their midst, they never showed it. Doors and windows remained resolutely closed, despite the clatter of metal and the grind of wheels on stone and the whinnying of horses that looked like any other until one saw the unnaturally intelligent gleam in their eye.

  Yet there was one figure, waiting near the pub where they had stayed on their arrival. He was wrapped in a voluminous, extreme-weather anorak, the snorkel hood pulled far forward against the chill so his features were lost to shadow. Even so, Church recognised him in an instant from the stance, at once relaxed, yet, conversely, taut.

  He ran across the road and threw his arms around the figure. "Tom!"

  The Rhymer pulled back his hood to reveal a face worn by exhaustion, the edge taken off it by the flicker of a smile. "If you knew the trouble I'd had to get here-"

  "We wondered if you were dead!"

  "If only." He blushed as Ruth bowled up and planted a large kiss on his cheek before throwing her arms around him. "Enough of that." He tried to recapture his grizzly demeanour, but they could both see his true feelings. "We have serious business ahead."

  He filled them in quickly before motioning towards three horses he had tied up at the side of the pub. "We can be at St. Michael's Mount soon after dawn, if we hurry."

  "And what do I get to do while Mr. Hero goes off and does all his testosterone business?" Despite her tone, Church knew Ruth wasn't offended that she had to sit it out; she was afraid for him and wanted to help.

  "It'll be okay," he said. "I have to do it alone. It's a destiny thing. You know, like the old stories. Except this time they've got me instead of King Arthur. Bummer, eh?"

  Baccharus sauntered over when he saw the three of them conversing. "Greetings, True Thomas. I knew you would not let hardship come between us meeting again."

  "Baccharus. So your people have finally decided to stir themselve
s into action, I see."

  "The Golden Ones like to conserve their energy so they are more effective when the time is ripe."

  Tom tried to read his face, but the god gave nothing away. "You better watch yourself, Baccharus. Humour? What's next: laughter, tears and broken hearts? They'll be drumming you out of the Arrogance Club for good behaviour."

  "Oh, I can still be arrogant, True Thomas. When one is highborn, one does not lose that trait."

  Tom shook his head, stifling a grin. They told Baccharus that they would have to take their leave, without giving him details of their mission, in case news leaked out to those of the Tuatha De Danann not sympathetic to humanity.

  Baccharus shook their hands in turn. "Then I wish you all well, for you have been the best of companions. We shall meet again before battle is joined."

  As the three horses left the melee behind, Church felt sad. Baccharus had proved both a good comrade-in-arms and a friend, despite his difficulty in expressing emotion. But soon the night closed in around them and all thoughts turned to the dangers that lurked beyond the black hedgerows.

  The village of Marazion was peaceful in the pale, early morning sunlight. Tom, who had amassed several lifetimes of knowledge, gave them a potted history of the oldest chartered town in Cornwall, its great age marked by the twisty-turny thirteenth-century streets running down to the wide stretch of sandy beach.

  Ahead of them, St. Michael's Mount rose up majestically, a throne of stone in the bay bearing the crumbling castle and ancient chapel silhouetted against the sky; it had been the source of dreams for generations. Legends clustered hard around the bulky island, hazy in the morning mist; stories of giants and angels, lovers and redeemers.