Red Rain (The Circle Book 3)
Page 11
None of the magickians wanted to celebrate as that thought went out across the collective, it was too soon to jump to conclusions, especially after all they had seen. But for the first time since they discovered their enemy's ability to adapt, it felt as though they might be close to an upper hand.
Tali did not want to interfere with the spirit of positivity that was making its way across those on the ground. But as her eyes darted to the news feeds, there was no other choice but to rain on the parade.
Tsunamis had hit every damn coast in the world, and there were several sightings of something massive heading towards Cape Town.
She sent the message out that they were going to teleport everyone to the closest beach: all the magickians, and the giant monsters they had made. . . If this thing was as big as the reports were suggesting, then they were definitely going to need something on their side that was just as big, if they were going to take the damn thing down. . .
36
A silent prayer
DIAS BEACH, SOUTH AFRICA
The magickians stood on the sands, the behemoths they had created on either side of the assembled group, all eyes fixed out to sea.
For half an hour they had been watching a dot on the horizon as it got bigger and bigger, closer and closer, and every single one of them was terrified.
The direction it was coming from was the same direction as the location of the incursion, the place where they had faced The Knowledge.
This was not it. They had believe it, and had to remind themselves of that over and over, as it continued to come towards them. That thing was not only dead and locked once again in the Outer Realms, it had also been the size of a damn moon, disappearing high into the clouds above, and it moved at the speed of a snail. The thing that was approaching them was a gnat in comparison, and it was coming fast. It looked as though it had traversed a thousand miles or more in that half hour.
Faith was concerned by the vibes he was picking up from those that surrounded him. He moved away from the others to have a private conversation with Tali.
“They're freaking out here. . . not saying it outright, but I can tell,” he growled.
“I wish there was something I could do to ease their concerns. . . but I can't send my point of view to that many people, it'll blow my bloody visual cortex out. . .”
“But it's not it, The Knowledge, you can tell them that, you've got it on bloody scrying pools.”
“You could show them their own damn scrying pools, and they still probably wouldn't believe it. . . they're going to have to see it with their own eyes.”
Faith thought for a moment,. She was right.
He killed the call and turned to his troops, enchanting his voice-box to increase the volume exponentially.
“Alright you lot, I can feel your trepidation at that bugger coming over the hill, and y'ain't got nothing to worry about.”
They were not convinced.
“Any of you that are thinking it's you-know-what, do me a favour and have a proper gander. Change your focal length if you so bloody wish, and as soon as you see it's just another one of them blighters from below, you can chill the hell out, okay?”
Glances were exchanged between the assembled magickians, none of them were willing to be the first to admit they had their doubts.
Faith rolled his eyes and performed the casting on himself. It might have looked to a layman as if he was miming to grab his eyes and literally pull them from the sockets―but his gestures were narrowing the field of vision, zooming in, and looking out over the water until he could see the creature as if he were just a few metres away.
One by one, others copied his gesture and saw the thing for themselves. And one by one, they adopted the same expression that Faith had, his jaw dropped, a tingle at the base of the spine. As much as this was―as he said―just another one of the creatures they had already faced, it was considerably larger than those. Larger than even the monsters they had made to fight it. This beast, that swam with the propulsion of a hundred or more tentacles whipping through the water, looked to be a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty metres tall.
As the fear rang out across the troops, Tali tried to ignore it. It was not just those with views of the Atlantic that had reported sights of the creature heading towards Cape Town. The reports were coming in from every coast. There were close to a hundred of these gargantuan brothers of the things they had killed. And each of them was bigger and meaner than those that had been slain.
Tali swallowed over a lump in her throat, and sent out a silent prayer to the universe, to the Fates, to any deity that might be out there and listening. . . If there was ever a time that the Natural World needed Shaman Kahgo, it was now.
37
The Fates
The Fates did not answer prayers. That was not their task. They conspired towards much greater goals that the mere desires of individual beings.
There were so many individual beings, not just in the Natural World, but in all the other realms that they resided over, and every single one of them―whether they admitted it or not―would send out prayers, hopes, desperate bids and begs for the winds of change to come their way, to usher in a new and bright and beautiful happening.
The Fates were not Santa Claus, they did not care who was good or bad, and they certainly did not bestow gifts. But they did have lists.
Lists that were checked neither once or twice, but hundreds of thousands of times over. There was a grand bureaucracy involved in fating, and the lists were an integral part of that. Lists and flow charts and maps were the foundation of discerning and diverting events so that the intended outcome came to be.
Whilst the Natural World was in disarray, and the Circle struggled to contain what they perceived as a threat to the natural order, the Fates continued to operate, unobstructed by such futile concerns.
The boat they had expected to set sail from Bermuda was still in the harbour. The captain was still drunk from the night before, and was concerned that the wind was not strong enough to carry them to where he wished to fish. The Fates aided in sobering him up, then increased the might of the wind.
The captain was exhausted, and observed that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. Once again they intervened, and saw to it that it flowed as he required it to.
A half hour after the boat finally left the harbour, the waters were rough, choppy, and the rain was pelting down. The captain was considering packing it in and going back to the bar―but the Fates had an agenda to keep, and so the seas calmed.
The currents had already been amended, the flow and strength of water exactly as it needed to be, as the captain ordered his men to cast their nets, the cry went out. There was a man floating in the water.
The curious thing about this man―something that none of the crew would discuss until much later―was that each of them saw him differently. One thought he was tall, the other short. One thought he was black, another white, another saw him as Asian. Whatever they would find most pleasing for their eyes and racial bias was what he was to them. And they found themselves compelled to pull him from the calm waters and bring him on board, even though none of them could imagine how he had survived at sea amidst the storm that had passed. There was no sign of a boat or a wreck, nor sign of any vessels on the horizon.
One leaned in to attempt CPR, and discovered that the man was already breathing. Not from the mouth or nose, but his chest was certainly rising and falling, his lungs inflating.
The crew exchanged glances. This was most certainly a curious occurrence. They found it even more curious when the man's eyes shot open and he darted up, skittering across the deck as he looked around with confusion. He squinted in the light, his hands ran over his body, as if it were the first time he experienced having arms and legs, a chest and facial features and hair. He looked confused, as if he had not expected to wake up at all, let alone with a human body.
“You alright?” one of the crew asked. “How'd you get out here?”
“Can you understand me?”
The man glanced away as he desperately attempted to recall the simplistic language. It used just a single tongue, a handful of phonemes.
He had spent so long without language, and before that, so long with languages that were intensely more complex, where everything from a quiver of a lip or flare of a nostril, to the underlying intent deep in the back of the mind could change absolutely everything about the meaning of that which was spoken out loud.
The crew member turned to the others. “Don't think he speaks English.”
“I. . .” the man said, as he learned once again how to make the frail sounds of man. “I. . . do.”
“Do you know where you are?”
He looked around, water in every direction, the sun high above, and nodded. “Off. . . Bermuda. . .”
“We're gonna take you back to land, get you fixed up, okay?”
The man's eyes shot to those of the crewman's.
He shook his head. “Somewhere. . .I need to. . . be. . .”
“Where?”
He looked out at the calm ocean ahead of him, desperately trying to recall where it was that he had intended to go, a vague memory from a time before the pain, before the darkness, before the light, before he found himself on the deck of the boat.
“I. . . do not know.”
38
Another battle
DIAS BEACH, SOUTH AFRICA
A mighty tidal wave washed upon the shore to herald the arrival of the gargantuan beast that was about to storm upon the land.
Despite being perturbed by its massive bulk, the assembled magickians would not allow themselves to be overcome, they could not, not with so many of its kin of this size to defeat if they were to safeguard the Natural World from this scourge.
They took hold of the great tsunami, and held it in the air. Its structure changed, turning it into a solid sheet of ice, a physical barrier between them and the monster that had emerged from the ocean. It pounded colossal tentacles upon it, shattering the frozen wall―but they were prepared for the onslaught and let it strike again, changing the structure to allow the appendages to slip through liquid water―freezing it once again to hold its arms in place. It tugged for freedom, sent more tendrils to slam against it, and attempt to pull itself away, but they too were caught in the icy grasp.
Behind the struggling creature, silt rose from under the water's surface. Their man of mud had been waiting, and with all the sands of the beach to add to its mass, it was able to grow taller and wider than the tenticular beast it was to face off against.
It pounded solid stone fists into the trapped creature, tore into it with diamond teeth, whilst the man of metal leaped over the wall of ice and drove white-hot girders into the slimy leviathan's core.
The screams sounded out across all of Cape Town. But the creature did not die. It did not fall. It was injured, but not enough take it down.
A thrash of tentacles ripped through the silt manifestation, tearing it apart. But that was how they had hoped the beast would react, it was the intention behind having a mindless golem at the rear.
Faith called out for the heat on the girder creation to increase, not just to the automaton's arms, but to its entire body. The fifty feet of metal shone out, blinding all those that dared look directly upon it, and its flesh sizzled with a satisfying hiss as the metal man melted into the beast's body, ripping through it from the inside as their muddy creation continued to batter it from behind.
With one final scream, the colossus fell. Its body collapsed onto the icy wall and it left streaks of its slimy black blood on the way down to the sands.
But the death of this creature did not feel like a win. There were many more of this size, let alone its smaller brethren that still needed to be vanquished, and with a flash of light, once again the magickians of the Circle were relocated for another battle.
39
A contingency
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Waves of exhaustion rippled through the ranks as the light of the teleportation faded from view. The battle so far had been long and hard, and there was no end in sight. Even though they had yet to truly fail, dissent was starting to make itself known. It was beginning to feel as though this fight was going to continue for the rest of their damn lives. Every little win was marred by the scale of the conflict that lay ahead across the damn world.
Faith's growl sounded out across the battlefield of Sydney. The beast was only just crawling out of the ocean, and with their automaton left as molten metal inside the dead colossus of South Africa, they would have to make a new one. . . assuming that would even work again.
He decided on yet another change of tack, and as the creature emerged from the waters, the magickians took hold of the waves and made them solid, sharp, cutting the thing down as it tried to raise its mighty body from the ocean. He took a concept from a previous assault, and they summoned great serpents of water―but rather than turn them to ice spears to assault its hide, these were sent into the creature's mouths, and once some of them had been swallowed, their heads shifted into spears and blades that cut the beast down from the inside out.
It collapsed into the bay, just as its brother in South Africa had, and its blood slicked up against the shore as the Circle operatives were sent off to attack the next of the great beasts.
But the blood did not simply saturate into the sands. It curdled in the sun, large pustules forming upon its surface that bubbled up and popped, spitting dark spores into the air that danced around one another in an elegant microbial ballet.
Their master had known that even her goliaths would be no match for the combined might of the Circle. . . and she had prepared a contingency deep within their biology that would make her victory a certainty.
40
Sights of death
SPANISH WELLS, BAHAMAS
The crew darted into action as they came towards port, grabbing ropes in preparation of tying the boat up and bringing their bounty on to land. But as they approached the town, it was clear that something was wrong.
The streets were desolate, clear of pedestrians. A wreck of a car gently smoked in the hole it had made in the pastel pink building it had rammed into. There was no sign of the driver, the door ajar, glass glittering across the seats, and a trail of blood marked along the street.
“We should go back. . .” One of the crew members muttered. “This doesn't feel right. . .”
The captain disagreed, and ordered that the boat continue its path onwards. Reluctantly, the crew acquiesced.
The man they had brought aboard stared blankly as he took in more sights of death and destruction on the land. There were other bodies strewn about―or at least the remains of other bodies. They looked as though they had been thoroughly devoured, torn asunder, blood drunk and meat consumed. But there was no sign of what had done this to them.
As the crew tied the boat up, he attempted to rise to his feet, and found his legs unsteady to walk upon, but he had to walk, had to get to the land, he was compelled to move towards the sites of these horrific slayings, and see what had befallen the poor souls of this village.
The crew watched from afar as the man they had pulled from the ocean staggered on unfamiliar appendages towards the corpses. There was something curious about them, not just the teeth marks on the bones, that looked as though they were coming from several directions at once. It was the slime that had been spewed up onto what was left of the bodies, thick and glutinous, bubbling and pulsating, as if it had a heat source boiling it. . . or a life of its own.
With much effort, he lowered himself to his knees to get a better look at the sludge that had been slathered upon the corpses. He found himself compelled to reach for it, and did so, with a finger that shook in the air―not from fear, but from unfamilia
rity of such a simple and delicate motion.
He prodded at one of the slimy bubbles, and it shifted around, as if reacting to his touch. Something moved under the surface, a life within the death. He prodded again, and the bubble popped―along with all the other bubbles across the body. A loud snap rang out across the deathly silent shoreline. A small puff of darkness burst out from each of the disgusting pustules, and they whipped into the air, dancing around one another with little buzzes and squeals. It looked to him as though it were some kind of intricate and mystical choreography, as if these gaseous creatures were embarking upon a courting or mating ritual. He did not know how it was possible, but somehow he was about to see deep into the clouds of darkness, d that it was truly hideous. But aesthetically, when seen as just balletic dance of sentient smoke, he had to admit that there was something quite beautiful about it.
A beauty that he truly admired. A beauty that felt familiar in some way, as if he had seen it before, or knew it in some capacity. But how that was possible, he could not say.
Nonetheless, he found himself transfixed by the elegance of these creatures, and relished in the majesty of such a spectacular poetry: from the end of one life, another was born. Death unto rebirth.
And something about that felt familiar, as if he had been reborn in a similar state, from death. . . But still, his memory refused to bestow him with the knowledge he required to complete whatever task he was meant to be accomplishing in this place―and he knew there was something he had returned to do, but could not say what it might be.
He sat on the dusty road, staring in wonder at the beauty of the dance that played out ahead of him. In that dance, he hoped he would find some kind of tranquillity. And with that moment of peace, perhaps an answer might come to him as to who he was―and more importantly―where he needed to be, and why it felt as though it was pressing that he get there as soon as humanly possible. . .