“Where’s Luc?” she managed to say.
“Don’t know,” Sam answered, breathless. “Couldn’t see Dad either.”
They stumbled downhill, bending low like swimmers against a current. Roof slates flew. The sky was full of thunderheads that glowed reddish black like plumes from a volcano. Rosie felt energy rushing up from the ground, heat haze or invisible flames. The wind screamed. It was a terrible noise, like machinery—trains roaring and the zing of overhead cables strained to breaking.
By the time they entered the tree line they’d lost everyone. Rosie fought snagging branches in a state of pure panic. The look on Sam’s face, she’d seen before only when they began to cross the Causeway; blank, suppressed terror. Pain knifed her skull. With it came fear, psychic certainty that the vast, unseen enemy was in pursuit. They were running in slow motion as it crossed the sky to claim them. Brawth, the great ice shadow whose destruction helped create the Aetherial race . . . who now came again to unmake them.
The moment Lucas felt the Gates open—felt all that massive resistance give in to his will—the wrath of the universe fell on him. A bolt of lightning flung his mind into Asru. He saw a huge basalt statue poised on a black mountain above the Abyss; saw it come to life, raising its head to hear Lawrence’s summons. He saw it rise up and come half-striding, half-flying along the Causeway, ponderous with menace yet weightless, as black as space and as blinding as multiple suns—a paradox that turned his mind inside out.
He saw the spectral ancients of the Spiral Court fleeing in panic, Estel in owl form perched on a branch of the World Tree, simply watching the end of the world as she’d watched the beginning, and Albin a streak of white on the darkness, head thrown back, screaming . . .
The scream was coming from Luc’s own throat. He came back to reality amid howling wind and thunder, to find his father pinning him to the ground. Lawrence’s face was contorted with anguish, his eyes crazed. Luc’s blind instinct was to run, but powerful arms held him rigid.
“It’s here.” Lawrence’s voice was a rasp of torment. “Now do I throw you into its path as a sacrifice, my dearest son? Will that appease it? A loss great enough to lay it to rest? If it consumes the last Gatekeeper, will that bring us peace? Can I do it?”
Lucas opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. Lawrence’s questions were unanswerable. He thought he was about to take the last plunge into the Abyss after all—and he rejected it. Screaming soundlessly, he fought with every atom of his will, but his body was pinioned. Pain racked his limbs as the madman that used to be Lawrence twisted him to face the Shadow in the sky, offering him up . . .
“No,” choked Lawrence. The words were savage sobs. “I can’t. Not you, never. I won’t let it take you! Go, Lucas. Run!”
He was released, almost thrown onto his feet. The sensory assault overwhelmed him. He fled, struggling through a sea of people, all stripped of identity by terror. For a few moments Lawrence was running beside him—then the writhing chaos separated them, and Lucas was fleeing alone, lost. It was the last he saw of Lawrence.
On the hillside, Sapphire had been squeezed to the edge of the crowd, no Aetherial caring that she was there. Well, they’d done it, forced Lawrence to his knees. Strange, she felt no sense of triumph after all. Her head ached. She heard the voices of Luc and Lawrence—the latter’s words raising the hairs on her neck, “Let them have their way”—but Freya’s Crown appeared only as a plug of sheared rock to her. What did they see that she could not?
Pressure built in the air, so powerful that even a human sensed it. She felt the static tension of thunder rising. She caught her breath on a thrill of terror as reality deformed around her and suddenly she saw. The landscape was bathed in reddish storm-light. In a rush of exhilaration she knew that Lawrence had misled her; a human could enter other realms, if only for a heartbeat.
The rock split, the storm broke. The effect upon the Vaethyr was astounding. They were crying out, clawing at their heads and eyes. Fleeing, they scattered in all directions as if a bomb had exploded among them.
Sapphire was almost knocked over in the rush. She dropped behind a rock and clung there, while lightning tongued the clouds and a humid gale snatched her hair. Although she couldn’t see what had panicked them, she felt something—an invisible freezing veil brushing over her, almost unraveling her sanity in a single touch—then gone.
Within seconds the hill was deserted. Between dazzling light and darkness, she couldn’t see, couldn’t stand up against the gale. The air whirled with flying debris. The creaking and ripping of sapwood sounded horrific. She sat tight, waiting for the storm to subside. This was what it came to, dealing with Aetherials. Disaster.
She was looking straight at the pleated face of Freya’s Crown when she saw movement in the dip below. In dark intervals, she lost it, but when eerie light bleached the landscape she saw it again, each time closer to her, as if stop-frame animated. A big man, skin burnished red-brown, heavy eyebrows quirking up like goat horns, scruffy khaki shirt and shorts . . .
She stared at this impossible creature moving towards her. Where could he have appeared from . . . except the Gates? Time froze. She knew him. No.
He staggered the last few steps towards her, hands raised as if to propitiate the storm. She saw the bleeding bullet hole in his chest. Then he collapsed. Sapphire tried to shout, but no sound came.
When she reached him he was near death, eyelids flickering, a groan issuing from his lips. “Papa,” she whispered.
“My Maria Clara.” His voice was rusty. “My princess.”
“It’s all right, Papa.” She stumbled over the words in her urgency, knowing this was her one chance. “I did everything we planned. Ruined Lawrence, destroyed his family, draped myself head to foot in his wretched jewels. He killed you, but you took him with you. We won. We won!”
He was too weak to answer, but a smile broke on the dying face. He pawed at her arm, as if to say he understood. “Papa,” she said, her tears falling onto him.
With the next blaze of lightning, he was a corpse—no, a carcass, flesh vanishing from his bones as she watched. Lawrence’s monstrous enemy Barada, emissary of the implacable ice giant Brawth—meat for wild animals. When the lightning flared again, he was gone.
“Rest, Papa,” whispered Sapphire. She bent forward over her knees with her arms around herself to hold in the grief, hold his spirit to her. “We can rest now.”
Sam and Rosie broke from the trees and covered the last stretch of garden towards sanctuary. They glimpsed distant figures fleeing down the drive. Gaining the rear corner of Stonegate, they folded themselves into the back wall to find some protection from the wind. Rosie gasped for breath. Her mouth tasted of metal.
“Did you see where Luc went?” she said, when she could speak.
“No.” Sam spat out a leaf, wiped his mouth. “Everyone was yelling and running. The shock wave from the Gates was incredible. All I could think of was hanging on to you.”
“Did you see my parents?”
“No, love. Sorry. It was chaos.” He rubbed his forehead. “Feels like someone cracked a rock on my head. Can’t see properly.”
“Me too, and the spiral brand’s burning like hell.”
“I saw Brawth come out,” he said. “A moving darkness—like a piece of the Abyss that had torn itself loose. Now we know that my father wasn’t mad or paranoid. He was right all along.”
Red lightning cracked, making them duck into the shelter of each other’s arms. Surfacing, Rosie gasped, “I can’t believe Lawrence would do this just to tell Comyn, ‘I told you so.’ ”
“I’m sure he didn’t,” said Sam. “He wouldn’t. I think he was exhausted from keeping it back and this was the end of the road.”
“And where is . . . Brawth?” she said. Ragged cloud layers raced like smoke over their heads, swollen thunderheads towering thousands of feet above them. Around the edge of the garden, vegetation thrashed madly as if caught in a hurricane. A couple of deer burst fro
m cover and bounded across the lawn, ears flat in terror. “I’m scared, Sam. I feel like we’re being hunted. I can’t shake it off.”
“Storms create an electromagnetic field that messes with your brain. Makes you feel ghostly presences and irrational terror.”
“I saw that documentary, too,” she retorted. “This is more than a storm.”
“I know,” he answered. “I’m saying that Brawth has the same effect. That doesn’t mean it’s not real. It means it’s making us very aware that we can’t escape, wherever we go. So it’s everywhere, like a hologram image, or a quantum field, or something.”
“We should get inside.” Rosie felt her way along the wall towards the kitchen door. The sense of imminent danger almost paralyzed her. She found the cold slickness of the door handle, but it snapped back into place, unyielding. “Damn, it’s locked.”
“Knowing Stonegate, it will be worse inside,” he said, grimacing. “We’ll wait it out.” They crouched against the wall, the force of the gale sucking their breath away. Sam’s warmth against her was the only reality. Even at the Abyss she hadn’t been petrified like this. When she closed her eyes, she could sense Brawth coming for them, a wavering, dazzling blackness. As mindless and deadly as a missile. She jumped, eyes flying open.
“What if it doesn’t stop? What if Lawrence has unleashed the end of the world a little sooner than expected?”
“At least we’ll go together, Foxy,” he said seriously. “We have to find Lawrence. This won’t stop unless we find him—but that’s the catch, we can’t look until it stops. And even if we find him, then what?”
“Sam . . .” She pulled his sleeve. There was a figure moving beyond the end of the lawn, half-concealed in thrashing undergrowth. He ran like a drunk; staggering, panicking, getting nowhere.
“Holy fuck, it’s him,” said Sam. He rose to his feet, against his own warnings, and yelled, “Dad!”
Lucas had no idea where he was going. His mind was blank, like a panicked animal’s. Anything to escape Brawth. Blood rushed in his ears as he ran. Instinct took him to Stonegate.
By the time he reached the front door, reason was returning. His lungs were bursting, but at least he knew where he was and realized he’d been utterly out of his mind for a few minutes. How could he be so astonished that Brawth had burst through? He’d seen it in a dozen visions.
His first clear thought was of Iola. He forgot that she’d vanished; he could only think that she was alone and terrified in the house at Brawth’s mercy.
There was a figure slumped beside the step, half-covered by stag skin. Lucas bent down and shook his shoulder. “Jon.” No response. “Jon. Come on, wake up!”
Jon groaned. He was unconscious; mouth slack, eyes closed. Lucas made an attempt to drag him towards the door, but fear had drained his strength and he couldn’t do it. He gave Jon a rougher shake. “Wake up, damn it!”
Nothing. Summoning a desperate reserve of strength, Lucas grabbed him, dragged him like a sack of wet sand across the threshold and dumped him in the hall. Panting, he forced the door shut and bolted it, left Jon where he lay and plunged into the great hall. The lights were off, the power gone. The air was shockingly cold, and the walls shifted as if full of ghosts trying to come to life. He shivered as the atmosphere frosted through his clothes.
Iola was in the center of the great hall. Lightning filled the tall leaded windows and she was caught in its strobing glare, an ethereal figure cloaked in the bronze ripples of her hair. She’d put on a long dress, one of Sapphire’s, endearingly too big for her. She resembled a bewildered dryad, wincing at the hard floor beneath her feet. He ran to her. She felt real in his arms, solid and warm as any human.
“Where were you?” she said, her slender arms strong around him.
“Where were you? You vanished!”
“I thought it was you, not me . . . I don’t know. The world isn’t stable for me, Lucas. I went into Dumannios without realizing.”
“And now we’re both there,” he whispered, understanding that the manifestations around them were just that; the fabric of Dumannios searing away the gentle surface of Vaeth and Dusklands. “This is my fault,” Lucas choked. “I’ve done this.”
“No,” said Iola. “It had to happen.”
“Brawth is coming. I couldn’t stop it.”
“It’s the darkness Lawrence always feared,” she said. “I might have helped him, but he pushed me away, and let it grow more powerful until it was too late . . .” She looked up at the high ceiling, which swirled with moving shadows. “It’s coming for you. For all of us, but especially for you, his son.”
When Lucas looked up, he saw it. A blinding silhouette; the Devil itself, roaring towards him from a very great distance. Cold pain pierced his head. He heard Albin’s voice, Its cold will sear the flesh from your bones . . . “What can we do?”
Iola’s golden eyes opened wide with despair. “Only Lawrence can stop it.” The house trembled as lightning clawed the windows. “All we can do is make a shield.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Oh my god, my parents, Rosie . . .”
“You can’t help them,” she said, and called out a string of words he didn’t understand. He saw the four dysir appear as if from nowhere, darkening and growing in size. At Iola’s command, they went to each of the great hall’s four corners and took up position like four guardian lions, huge, glowing like hot coals. “We can only protect ourselves.”
She made him think of a goddess, standing in the center with four dark familiars at her command. Their defiance spun a fragile shield of protection. The amorphous power of Brawth surged towards the house only to be continuously repelled, like a stream of flaming oil pouring onto thin glass. The shield must crack eventually; but while it endured, Iola would not give up. And because she was so brave Lucas stood with her, resisting Brawth, refusing to let the burning arctic coldness or the fear take him down. The storm raged, shaking the chimneys. The fabric of Stonegate trembled, and all around them the world shuddered and crashed and dissolved like a nightmare ocean.
Dusklands narcotics had carried Jon far away from himself; he’d observed the pantomime of the stag hunt as if from a great distance before collapsing. Even the storm didn’t rouse him. It intruded upon his stupor, however, turning uncomfortable dreams into nightmares. Voices washed in and out like the tide. There was something wrong, horribly wrong with the universe. It came to him that he must run for his life, but his body wouldn’t respond.
A ghostly half-human gargoyle appeared before him, and its arrival was no great surprise amid the chaos. It fired a glowing arrow at him. Piercing white pain struck his hip. He thought he’d been hit by lightning and he tried again to rise, but a weight held him down.
There was a creature sitting on his chest. He saw it clearly against a vague landscape of pale grey stone; a beautiful youth with white skin, black hair, a huge pair of soot-black angel wings curving above his shoulders. He looked down at Jon with entirely jet-black, liquid eyes.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the youth.
“No,” said Jon.
“Everyone knows Eros.” The voice had a cruel edge.
Jon laughed, as best he could with this weight upon him. “I thought your voice would be more beautiful.”
“The voice of Eros is said to be lovely, it’s true. However, I am his brother, Anteros. The god of unrequited love.” The youth leaned down and covered Jon’s mouth with his. “This is what you could have had,” he whispered.
He spread his wings and covered Jon with soft feathers. At first the kiss and caress were delicious; a moment later they began to suffocate him. He was being crushed, choked. He was dying.
Gasping for his life, Jon came back to the real world lying in the entrance hall of Stonegate Manor, slumped in a pool of congealing animal blood, covered in a stinking deerskin, entirely alone.
Bruised and bleeding, lungs heaving for breath, Auberon and Jessica had fled home, but even Oakholme did not feel saf
e. They’d found it by blind instinct; wherever Auberon looked, all he could see was the migraine-dazzle of Brawth. Comyn and Phyllida followed, and Matthew was there too—he’d been already in the house when the storm broke. Auberon bundled them all into the front room and slammed the door. The walls, though, were like cobwebs. Intangible shapes tried to form in the ether. Wind and thunder deafened them, and through it all Brawth attacked without mercy, driving spears of black ice into their skulls . . .
Comyn stumbled and fell, lay on the floor with his face contorted in terror. “Lawrence did this,” he rasped. “He brought this on us.”
“And he warned us!” cried Phyll. “And you swore we could defeat it, but we can’t!”
“You can’t fight it physically,” Auberon gasped, holding Jessica to him, “because it cuts straight into our minds.”
Helpless against pain, terror and sensory assault, they couldn’t fight at all. If it did not stop, Auberon knew, Brawth would burn them to nothing, as it had already ripped away the surface world and Dusklands and stranded them in Dumannios. He convulsed with cold, trying to keep Jessica warm against him.
“I won’t let it take you,” said Matthew, his voice gruff and strange. Auberon felt himself being dragged to a corner, Jess and Phyll and Comyn being pushed in with him. Around the moving edges of the blind Brawth-spot in his vision he saw Matthew, transformed: seven feet high, a leonine beast with a heavy mane and thick black claws. And Matthew placed himself in front of his family like a bodyguard, as if to absorb all the horror of Brawth into himself.
Sam and Rosie fought the push of the wind to cross the sloping lawn. An airborne twig glanced viciously off Rosie’s forehead, drawing blood. Entering the rhododendrons at the other side was like plunging into a river torrent.
Lawrence, on folded knees, raised a ghastly colorless face to Sam. Rosie was horrified. She’d never expected to see Lawrence Wilder like this, broken. She’d never thought he would be even more frightened than she was.
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