‘To grasp the danger,’ the Angel continued, ‘you must know something of what Sulpa is attempting to do.’
‘Didn’t you say he wants to make himself more powerful by murdering good people?’
‘That is simply a means to his larger objective.’ The Angel’s beautiful voice had fallen almost to a whisper: ‘The goodness of the Neanderthals presents him with a special opportunity. If he succeeds in destroying them, as he intends, the psychic charge he draws from their life force will allow him to jump the ages and manifest in physical form in the twenty-first century as well.’
‘He already has!’ Leoni objected. ‘Manifested physically, I mean. Isn’t Jack just the name Sulpa goes by today?’
‘It is. But Jack is not a fully formed physical being. Sulpa used the entanglement of the two timelines to send him forward into the age of technology as a dark and corrupting influence, something without solidity, intangible, more like an intelligent cloud than a man. But, with each new sacrifice he performs in the age of stone, his shadow in the twenty-first century grows stronger and more physical, and followers flock to him. All that remains is the mass murder of the last Neanderthals and Jack will become a fully materialised avatar. Then Sulpa will stand astride the intersecting timelines and begin to weave the doom of all that is good.’
The Angel’s finger touched the screen again: ‘Because time is so densely entangled in this region, many other epochs lie closely superimposed. Very soon he will be able to spread his tentacles through all of them. The balance of the Totality itself stands at risk.’
‘But if we stop him massacring the Neanderthals none of this happens, right?’
‘None of it. Only in this way can he gain sufficient power for the full materialisation of Jack.’
‘I don’t ever want to see that day come,’ whispered Leoni.
‘Then will you help me prevent the massacre? This is the adventure I have chosen you for.’
‘Yes,’ said Leoni with passion. ‘Yes, with all my heart. But how will we do it? You said you can’t intervene physically. You said I’m just spirit when I go into the past.’
‘Ria stands between Sulpa and the Neanderthals and I have entangled your life with hers,’ said the Angel. ‘You are sisters in time now. Together you will find the way.’
Leoni looked down at the screen. The swirling colours were back. They seemed to draw her in and she began to fall.
Part III
Chapter Sixty-Four
When Leoni fell through the colours of the laptop’s screen she experienced a horrible moment of déjà vu. The last time she’d done this she’d been on her way to a terrifying encounter with Sulpa. Now she was in another one of those tunnels – swooping swirls and turns, long vertical drops. It seemed to go on for ever. Then WHOOMF! She emerged from the transit out of body, invisible in the midst of thousands of Illimani warriors, on the bank of the same fast-flowing river where earlier the Angel had shown her Ria with her companions fleeing on rafts.
How much earlier?
Leoni saw the position of the sun had changed. Somehow morning had become afternoon and it seemed hours must have passed here while she’d gone through the transit. It was going to be hard to find Ria now.
She took to the air and hovered twenty feet above the jostling, agitated Illimani. In the thick of the crowd was a wide circle of clear space occupied by only one man. His back was turned to her, but she would recognise Sulpa from any angle. He looked like he’d been bathing in blood again – the evil fuck – and his hair was matted thick with it. He was also talking to himself, muttering very fast in some unknown language. It was scary, the way this babble kept pouring out of him.
Leoni was fascinated and terrified at the same time.
Would Sulpa somehow be able to detect her presence, even though she was out of body and he was not?
Even though this was all happening twenty-four thousand years ago?
She kept drifting closer until she was floating right over his head.
A dirty-grey sphere nestled in each of his hands, which he held out before him, palms up, fingers flexed, as though he were juggling. The spheres were about the size of tennis balls and had a filmy soap-bubble consistency, much like her own aerial body but opaque.
Leoni risked dropping lower. There was thick smoke swirling inside the spheres in which, from moment to moment, strange hints of shape and substance threatened to appear.
Was that a wing? Was that a talon? Was that a haunch?
Just a littler closer and …
Now she had it …
Seemingly formed out of the smoke itself, a hideous little beast with muscular hind legs, clawed feet and folded leathery wings crouched within each of the spheres. The pair seemed to be identical combinations of bat, pterodactyl and gargoyle. Their gaping mouths were filled with tiny needle-sharp fangs. Their eyes, the colour of blood, were fixed adoringly on Sulpa.
Even if their master couldn’t see her while he was in his physical body, Leoni was sure his creatures could.
She had already begun to back away when they burst forth from the spheres, flapping their wings, and flew to perch on Sulpa’s shoulders. She saw them cock their heads as he whispered something to each of them. Then they leapt into the air and streaked towards the river.
Leoni knew with cold certainty they’d been sent after Ria. Keeping what she hoped was a safe distance behind them she followed.
The little monsters were flying very fast just above the midstream.
No problem. Leoni could do fast.
As she had discovered before, there was something exhilarating about being out of body, an amazing sense of freedom and boundless possibility that was almost … intoxicating. The feeling that you could do anything you turned your mind to. For an instant she thrust her consciousness thousands of feet into the sky and saw that the river ran through a fairy-tale domain of snow-capped mountains, steep green valleys, shining lakes and vast forests.
This was the land Ria called home.
Her sister in time.
Leoni swooped back to Sulpa’s little gargoyles. They were so close to the surface of the river they seemed to be sniffing the water. She settled into position a hundred feet above and behind them but they never once looked round and flew on, covering mile after mile – perhaps as many as thirty miles, she guessed. Then, without warning, they veered to their left, crossed the riverbank and began to speed across open rising country towards a distant wall of mountains.
Leoni could see nothing that would explain why they had changed direction, yet they had swerved like heat-seeking missiles locked onto their target.
She guessed Ria and her companions must have dumped their rafts here for the river to carry away and begun to trek overland, believing they’d travelled far enough from the Illimani horde to make a safe escape. They’d been careful to leave no tracks but Sulpa’s spies obviously had some other way to home in on them.
As she darted in pursuit Leoni felt a heavy responsibility. She had to help Ria somehow.
The air shivered in front of her and for a moment everything blurred, then swung back into focus.
She knew what it meant.
The Ayahuasca was wearing off. At any moment she was going to be returned to her own time and place.
She began to see the first signs – a smear of blood, a broken spear, part of a leather sandal, a pile of turds – that a large group of people had passed this way. How many had been on the rafts? Fifty? A hundred? She couldn’t be sure but the further they got from Sulpa the less care they were taking to hide their tracks.
The trail led past a lake and up a steep mountainside. There was a forest here, sprawling across the slope of the mountain. The gargoyles dived eagerly amongst the trees and within seconds, still deep in the forest, had caught up with the stragglers.
They were Neanderthals, all males, dressed in skins and rough weavings. Many were bloodied with cuts and stab wounds. Some were badly injured. But Sulpa’s creatures showed no in
terest in them. With increasing urgency and purpose, seeming more and more excited, they slalomed through the trees, shot across a broad clearing littered with corpses – had a battle been fought here? – and darted straight for a small figure being carried on an improvised stretcher in a mixed group of Neanderthals and humans.
Ria! She had been covered with wounds but fully conscious, her eyes bright and intelligent, when Leoni had glimpsed her earlier on the raft. Now she was unconscious, slumped in the stretcher, her deeply tanned skin a sickly shade of grey, her eyes ringed by huge dark circles. Most of her wounds had stopped bleeding but her leather leggings had been cut away over the outside of her right thigh to reveal an ominous dark swelling, like some frightful tumour breaking through her skin.
Leoni saw it was to this the gargoyles had been drawn.
Although it was obvious that neither the humans nor the Neanderthals could sense their presence, Sulpa’s creatures had attached themselves to Ria’s leg. Their leathery wings were folded and their snouty mouths were thrust directly into the tumour, making disgusting guzzling and slurping sounds. Oh, gross! They were in ecstasy. Their eyes had rolled up in their heads. Slurp. Suck. Suck. There was something in there they hungered for.
The air shivered again, everything turned midnight black and a vast cloud of fireworks exploded before Leoni’s eyes. For an instant she could see nothing at all, seemed to be falling, seemed to be flying. The scene came back into focus just as Ria’s stretcher-bearers stepped out of the belt of forest and back onto open mountainside, and the succubi unclamped their jaws from her leg and flew up into the sky.
Leoni was after them at once and by the time they levelled out at a hundred feet she was already far above them.
Ahead of Ria’s little group a long line of Neanderthals trekked up the steep open grassland beyond the forest. They were stretched out in single file and the leaders were already close to the massive wall of cliffs, running for miles along the ridge line of an interlinked chain of rugged mountains, that seemed to be their ultimate goal.
As Leoni watched she saw the lead group move aside a section of the thick undergrowth that lay at the base of the cliffs, revealing a hidden path.
She looked down. Sulpa’s creatures had seen it too.
The air shivered and steadied, shivered again. Only seconds now, minutes at the most, and she would be out of here. Ria and her friends would never know Sulpa’s spies had followed them and found their hiding place. Within a day he would bring his army here and slaughter them all.
Leoni was determined that must not happen. And there was a simple solution. All she had to do was kill the gargoyles.
It was tricky. Leoni was out of body, and the gargoyles were clearly some kind of aerial species too. But aerial bodies could be held, damaged, detained – the way Don Apolinar had trapped her in his net, the way she herself had fought Sulpa out of body. She remembered how it had been when she’d barrelled into him – solid resistance and a massive shock, not fog passing through fog. If the same rules applied here then she might be able to do some damage to his loathsome little monsters.
She dropped very fast, aiming for a point between them, and grabbed their scaly necks as she shot past. There was an immediate slap of contact, reassuringly solid and real, and she dragged them, shrieking and flapping their wings, towards the ground, alighting close to Ria as she was carried by on her stretcher.
It was good … to be able to do something for her sister.
Leoni tightened her grip on the creatures’ necks and felt them claw at her aerial body with their hind feet. Their wings hummed and vibrated with frantic energy, but they weren’t going anywhere.
SMACK! Just like that she smashed their snouty heads together.
SMACK! A second time for good measure.
SMACK! SMACK! They didn’t exactly have brains. Their skulls were full of smoke.
SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! SMACK!
Their aerial bodies were already disintegrating, evaporating, blowing away on the wind and soon Leoni was left holding nothing.
Another shiver of the air, very strong this time, before the image of the mountainside and the ragged column of fleeing Neanderthals came back into focus. As well as Ria, Leoni had counted only three other humans amongst the entire group, one also on a stretcher, the other two walking but with injuries.
She tried to imagine what events had led up to this moment, deep in prehistory, to which she was an invisible witness. Ria and her friends had made common cause with the Neanderthals to fight Sulpa. So much the Angel had told her. And Sulpa was in their land with his Illimani army to hunt down and kill those same Neanderthals – the last Neanderthals who would ever live on Earth – because he wanted to murder their goodness and innocence.
So there was something very special about this group of refugees fleeing up a mountainside in northern Spain. Something very precious and special. Something of great value that had to be protected.
She looked for Ria. The stretcher-bearers had already carried her hundreds of feet higher up the mountain towards the hidden path, and soon she would be safe.
Then a terrible thought struck Leoni. She had killed the little spies but whatever it was in that wound on Ria’s leg that had led them to her was still there.
It had to be extracted now or Sulpa would send more spies after her to sniff her out wherever she hid.
Leoni darted forward. Somehow she had to warn the injured unconscious girl.
The air shivered again.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Ria’s eyes snapped open and straight away she was fully conscious and aware of her surroundings. ‘Stop!’ she tried to shout, surprised at the weakness of her voice. She switched to thought-talk: ‘Stop. Please.’
Grondin was carrying the front of her stretcher. He looked around and sent her his thought-voice. ‘We have to get to Secret Place fast. Very dangerous to stop. Maybe followed.’
‘We must stop!’ Ria pulsed. ‘Sulpa shot something into my leg.’
‘Not stop now. Many need healing. All wait to get to Secret Place.’
‘NO! You don’t understand. Sulpa shot something into my leg. It’s still there. If we take it into Secret Place it’s going to lead him to us.’
‘How you know this? You been sleeping long time.’
Before she answered, Ria raised her head and looked around. They were on the mountainside beneath the cliffs that guarded Secret Place – far too close. Up ahead some of the Uglies had already reached the entrance. The mad Illimani kid Driff was carrying the rear of her stretcher. Over there were Ligar and Brindle, also on stretchers, each carried by two big Ugly braves from Grondin’s war party. Ria felt a lurch of concern to see that Brindle was still unconscious. Jergat and Oplimar were both walking, Bont, too, nursing his big axe as though it was a baby. There were cuts and bruises all over his body, but of the spear wound to his back, healed by the Uglies, there was almost no trace.
Mixing words and images Ria showed Grondin the amazing girl with golden hair who’d come to her in a dream just moments earlier. It was the same girl who’d warned her about the tree-birds in the spirit world, but now you could see through her as though she were made of water or air. She seemed hugely excited and alarmed. As before she shouted in a language that meant nothing to Ria. But this time her words were accompanied by fleeting images and emotions and a message came through with complete and awful clarity. Something lay concealed deep inside the swollen wound that Sulpa’s little dart had made in her thigh. As long as it was there he would be able to find her. Then the girl disappeared and Ria woke up.
‘Dreams not same as visions,’ said Grondin. ‘Cannot always believe them.’
‘I’ve seen this girl once before,’ Ria replied. ‘The Little Teachers brought her to me. I was in danger then and she gave me a true warning. That’s why I believe her now.’
Grondin stopped and he and Driff laid down her stretcher. Ria still couldn’t get used to the Illimani’s wild blue eyes or read the e
xpression in them – but then, how could she ever hope to know what lay in the mind of a savage such as this? As other stragglers filed past them and continued to make their way up the mountain, Grondin crouched at her side, a small sharp flensing knife in his hand. Ria looked down at the weeping swelling on her thigh. ‘Cut it open,’ she said. ‘Let’s find out what’s in there.’
The pain of Grondin’s knife exploring the wound was unlike anything Ria had ever experienced before. Even though she had braced herself, her shrieks rose to the sky, sweat drenched her brow and a stream of terrible oaths poured from her mouth. Driff knelt beside her, holding her steady as Grondin cut and cut. Then something seemed to burst and a mass of pus and blood spewed out of the wound.
Grondin probed with his fingers. There was less pain now. ‘Nothing inside,’ he reported.
‘No! There is! You have to cut deeper!’
‘You crazy,’ said Grondin.
Dripping with sweat, shaking, dizzy, Ria shrugged off Driff ’s restraining grip, sat bolt upright, grabbed the big Ugly’s jerkin and glared into his eyes: ‘You must cut deeper,’ she pulsed.
Grondin was reluctant. ‘Don’t want hurt your leg. Maybe you become lame. There is nothing inside.’
Ria gasped with frustration and snatched the flensing knife from his hands. ‘Then I’m doing it myself,’ she told him.
Grondin gently took the knife back. She could sense his conflicted feelings. ‘One more cut,’ he agreed.
As the knife went in Ria screamed again. ‘AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!’ The pain was unbelievable, but just as she was sure she could bear no more the tip of the blade snagged on something deep within her flesh.
Something that writhed.
Grondin hunched forward, peered into the wound, probed again with the knife, grunted and suddenly twisted his wrist. There came a second writhing clench within her flesh, followed by a sharp tug and Ria gasped as another huge explosion of pain hit her.
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