Without missing a beat, Hunter replied, ‘In the former Yugoslavia, I was buried alive in a mass grave. About one hundred dead Muslim villagers on top of me. I had to work my way through the bodies and then dig myself out with my bare hands. I rate this as slightly better odds.’
Jack’s terrible fears fought on his face. After one brief glance back at the Fomorii, he nodded. ‘All right.’
‘Good lad. I’ll go first. It’s going to be pitch black in there, but if you can feel my boots ahead of you, you’ll be okay.’
Hunter manoeuvred himself and then wriggled his head into the hole. The air smelled of deep, wet places. He forced his shoulders in. The granite above dug deep into his back, and for a moment he feared he was wedged. Jack was right: there would be no coming back out the same way. Pressing hard, he constricted his breathing and ignored the burning compression in his back and chest. After a second, he had forced his way under the lip of rock into an area that allowed him little more than an inch on every side. Jack wriggled in close behind him, occasionally reaching out to his boot-heel for reassurance. Hunter was overwhelmed by the boy’s bravery; few others would have been able to suppress such a basic human fear for the greater good.
There was only room to reach out ahead and use his fingers to drag him down the slight incline, with a gentle push from his boot-tips for a little extra thrust; it was going to take a long time to get wherever they were going - and he refused to entertain any other thought than that there was a definite destination ahead.
Breathing was difficult and increasingly painful. He had to take small, regulated gasps to prevent hyperventilation; in between gulps, he instructed Jack to do the same. His fingers were numb, but he was convinced they were tearing from the exertion against the hard rock; he was sure he could smell blood.
The fissure continued down a little steeper. Their body heat in the confined space eased the freezing temperatures, but water regularly dripped and ran under their fingers. Another fear: drowning in an enclosed space.
Hunter came to a halt at a sharp right turn. Jack called out in a panicked voice, worrying that Hunter had reached a dead end. It took several moments to calm him, and then a further fifteen minutes for Hunter to edge, squeeze and twist halfway around the bend. Once again he was convinced he was wedged in place, twisted at right angles, in complete darkness, with barely a chance to breathe and listening to the whimpering of a traumatised boy behind him. Heart pounding, the blood thundering through his head, he closed his eyes, thinking of Laura and the last night they had spent together. Gradually, his breathing regulated and he eased and pressed forwards a fraction of an inch at a time.
Once around the turn, the fissure broadened and the incline became steeper so he could drag himself faster, which eased Jack’s anxiety. Ten minutes later it became steeper still, and before he had time to think the slope was so sheer he began to slide. He called out to Jack to hold fast, but by that time he was speeding out of control, cracking bones and tearing skin. He went over an edge and into free fall for a split second before hitting icy water. It was barely five feet deep, and his arms protected him from the worst of the impact, but he sucked in a mouthful of water before he managed to surface.
Feeling around, he discovered that the fissure continued horizontally again, but most of it was filled with water. Only a tiny air space remained, and he had no idea how long that continued in any useable form.
Jack was calling his name frantically. ‘It’s all right - I’m here,’ he called back. ‘It’s only a short drop, and there’s water at the bottom. Yell when you’re coming and I’ll try to catch you - or at least try to stop getting brained.’
When Jack was next to him, relieved at the prospect of standing upright with room to breathe, Hunter broached the news about the almost-submerged tunnel. Jack’s mood changed instantly and he released a couple of wracking sobs before he calmed.
‘I can’t do it,’ he whimpered.
‘You said that about the crawling and the squeezing, but look at what you did there.’
Distantly, but unmistakably within the fissure, came the teeth-jarring rumble of the Fomorii.
‘Sounds like they’ve found out where we went,’ Hunter said. ‘We can’t hang around here.’
Echoes of scrabbling in the fissure, drawing rapidly closer. Hunter was unnerved by how speedily the Fomorii moved.
‘You’ve got to trust me, Jack. We’ll get through this.’
‘I do trust you, Hunter.’
Hunter flinched, unsettled yet oddly moved by this new experience. ‘Hold on to my jacket, and give a tug if anything’s wrong.’
Taking a deep breath, he ducked under the water. Jack followed closely. In the floating dark, the claustrophobia and fear of suffocation were even more intense. Hunter measured his pace to Jack’s endurance, pausing regularly to grab a breath from the tiny gap against the tunnel roof.
At one point Jack began to thrash as if he were drowning, and Hunter was forced to grab him and hold his head up tightly. In Hunter’s arms, Jack relaxed, still trusting.
The journey felt as if it was taking an age, and just at the point when Hunter started to fear hypothermia would set in, they emerged from the tunnel into what felt from the air currents and echoes like a large cavern. Hunter dragged Jack from the water onto a flat rock surface and held him tightly until he had warmed.
‘I never knew my father,’ Jack said after a moment.
Hunter didn’t know how to respond.
‘The Tuatha Dé Danaan stole me from my mother when I was a baby and took me to the Court of the Final Word where they put the Wish-Hex inside me. They made me into a weapon. Then they kept me prisoner till Caitlin and Mahalia set me free.’ He wiped the snot from his dripping nose with the back of his hand.
‘Doesn’t sound like you’ve had much of a life, mate.’
‘That just makes me want to fight for it even more.’
Hunter was impressed by the determination in Jack’s voice; it reminded him of himself, before the sourness took hold of his life. ‘Keep hold of that thought, kid, because now we need to find a way out of here before those things pop up out of the water.’
Following the air current, they moved tentatively away from their resting place, feeling into the dark ahead of them in case there were any gaping pits or more sudden inclines. Hunter put out of his head the possibility that the breeze came from a tiny fissure and that there might be no way out of the cavern.
Progress was slow and the fear of the Fomorii emerging from the water behind them grew. But then the texture underfoot changed from hard rock to smaller items that rolled and crunched, in some areas several inches deep. Harder objects lay amongst them.
‘What is that? Dry wood?’ Jack asked.
‘Down here?’ Hunter knelt to investigate. His fingers ran over dry, fragile things, some tubular, some sharp, some curved, and what were clearly metal artefacts scattered amongst them. ‘I think there’s a sword here. And a . . . shield?’ he ventured. ‘A helmet?’
They continued treading tentatively over the cracking, shifting surface for several more minutes until Jack’s foot caught something that clanged and bounced. He felt around for it in the dark and raised it, letting his fingers see the surface. ‘A lantern!’ he said.
With his flint, Hunter lit the wick. The flame was weak, but held on to life. The shadows rushed away, dancing back menacingly with each flicker of the light.
‘Oh,’ Jack said as he looked around with mounting uneasiness.
Hunter followed his gaze in a wide arc across the cavern. ‘You can say that again.’
Human bones lay everywhere. The vast sea of dirty yellow and brown was a civilisation in essence, skulls smashed, limbs torn apart, ribs broken, the clothes that had contained them long since rotted away with only the metal remnants of weapons and armour still remaining.
‘What the hell happened here?’ Hunter said.
6
The scale of the Halls of the Drakusa spoke of gr
andeur. Ceilings soared cathedral-like overhead and huge chambers that could have accommodated a small army rang with their hesitant footsteps. Church led his group past pillars of marble and extensive murals that must once have gleamed with colour, but were now faded and barely visible, the most obvious symbol of the decay and great age that shrouded the Halls. A desert of white dust interspersed with piles of shattered masonry and discarded everyday objects covered the stone flags. Only darkness and shadows remained in a place that had once thronged with life.
Shavi examined some of the murals as they passed. ‘Who were the Drakusa?’ he asked.
‘Every race has the arrogance to believe they were the first and best,’ Tom said, joining him. ‘The old stories hint at others who came before. Races that rose up, established civilisations and were then wiped clean and forgotten, through their own hubris or at the whims of angry gods.’
‘You don’t really think that could happen to us?’ Ruth said. ‘With all our technology, our learning—’
‘You think these people didn’t have their own technology, different from ours, maybe more powerful, their own wisdom?’ Intrigued, Tom brushed away some of the dust and cobwebs that obscured the mural.
Shavi saw what Tom was seeing, and joined him. From beneath the grime of ages, faint images emerged of oval shapes, giant in scale compared to the human figures prostrate before them. Some of the egg shapes appeared to be spouting tentacles, or were in the process of becoming something else.
‘Those,’ Shavi said, puzzled, ‘are Caraprix.’
His expression troubled, Tom studied the mural.
‘Never seen any that big,’ Laura said.
‘It’s symbolic,’ Tom muttered.
‘So the Drakusa knew of the Caraprix, long before the Tuatha Dé Danaan.’ Raising the lantern, Church looked around the walls in a new light. Images of Caraprix were visible everywhere, on the walls behind the dust, in mosaics on the floor and carvings on the marble pillars, emerging in part here and there, barely recognisable in isolation but taken together presenting a temple to the shape-shifting creatures. ‘This place implies that they’re gods or something.’
‘Whoever did all these pictures . . . why are they making such a big deal out of them?’ Veitch asked. ‘The Caraprix are just pets, right? Those golden-skinned bastards have them around for entertainment.’
‘I think we have been a little blind and stupid,’ Tom began. ‘All the time the Caraprix have been before our eyes, and we have misjudged them. We have not seen their true nature.’
A flicker of Blue Fire sizzled randomly at the tip of Ruth’s spear and they all jumped. ‘What do you mean?’ Ruth asked.
‘We have been told many, many times that the closer things are to the heart of Existence, the more fluid they are,’ Tom replied. ‘And these are the most fluid things of all. They have no fixed shape, no definable purpose. They can be anything they want. What, I wonder, are the limits of that? What could they really be?’
Church indicated another image, a figure with arms outstretched, strings connecting his fingers to a row of dancing marionettes. ‘The Puppeteer,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen him before. In Venice, back in Elizabethan times. And in the court. So he existed before the current Age, before the Tuatha Dé Danaan? Why would he be painted here?’
‘It’s not that I don’t find your noodling and navel-gazing so, so fascinating, ’ Laura snapped, ‘but what say we forget all this and move on before those Fomorii find a way in here and hunt us down like rabbits.’
‘She’s right,’ Veitch said. ‘This isn’t important. We need to find the gate to Summer-side, and this place is so big we could be searching for years.’
Tom glared at Veitch, about to launch an angry comment, when Church dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘This isn’t the place for a fight.’ He nodded towards Miller and Virginia, who were sitting together on a piece of fallen pillar. Miller had a reassuring arm around the frightened girl’s shoulders, but his fixed expression revealed his own repressed terror. ‘We forget they’re not like us,’ Church continued. ‘They’ve not seen the things we’ve seen, and they’re not built to deal with what they’ve found here.’
‘They’re not like you,’ Tom said pointedly.
Their unease mounted as they continued through the empty, ringing halls. The scale of the place, the silence, the darkness, the decay combined to create a thick, oppressive atmosphere that was profoundly unsettling. Though none of them gave voice to it, they all felt as if they were being watched by hateful eyes from the shadows just beyond the extent of the thin lantern light.
The stillness was so intense that even the slightest sound was magnified, and all their senses were heightened. After an hour, they heard a short, dull grind that could have been a door opening. It was so faint and distant that they would have dismissed it at any other time, but in that place it sounded like a tolling bell.
‘I don’t think we’re alone in here,’ Church said.
‘They’re coming.’
They all turned to look at Virginia, who had thrown off her hood and was smiling. It added a macabre cast to the desperate terror glittering in her eyes.
‘The Fomorii?’ Church asked.
Virginia shook her head. ‘Worse than that.’
7
Claustrophobic darkness, and hard stone all around. The ragged heat of his breath. Pain, fading quickly, flashes of images in his memory so terrifying that his consciousness recoiled at their touch. Thankfully, the images subsided as Mallory came round.
He choked back bile at the abiding recollection of the touch of hard steel at his throat, the sensation of what followed and the scream of his mind as it wound down into darkness, and knew that it would haunt him for as long as he lived.
But he was alive. The ritual had worked. Everything was subsumed beneath the rush of wonder and relief, and he began frantically to feel around his environment. He was in a stone box, as Veitch had told him to expect.
Pressing his hands against the lid, he lifted. The lid ground to one side and flickering torchlight added another level of relief. Dank air rushed into the dry, dusty interior of the box.
Once he had clambered out, he found another stone box on a plinth next to him. Scuffling sounds came from within. He eased the lid off and helped Caitlin out. She clutched the Wayfinder to her chest, the blue flame providing welcome relief in that gloomy place.
‘Look after me,’ Caitlin said in the fragile voice of her Amy personality.
Mallory hugged her to him. ‘Course I will.’
He held her until she released herself. ‘It’s okay - she’s gone back to Brigid and Briony now.’ She forced a wan smile, her eyes dark and limpid.
‘The Morrigan?’
‘Is waiting.’ She stared into his eyes for a moment longer, and her gaze was briefly filled with all the powerful emotions she kept repressed. She broke off when she realised what she was revealing, although she knew he understood. ‘Come on - we’ve got a job to do.’
When she held the lantern aloft, it revealed a huge chamber built from cyclopean stone blocks beyond the ability of any human to carve or move. Wall paintings also beyond human scale soared up into the shadows, incomprehensible and troubling, and here and there were effigies of squat, misshapen figures or tall, spindly beings. Not human.
‘A temple,’ Mallory said.
‘Here? What do the dead worship?’
Mallory couldn’t answer.
With a shudder, Caitlin turned her attention to the lamp’s flame, which was bending unnaturally to point away from them. ‘So Hal’s in there somewhere? How do we talk to him?’
‘If we call on him, he’ll come,’ Mallory said. ‘But we’ve got to protect that lamp with our lives. Hal can die here, though die might not be the right word.’
‘He’ll be fine. We just put our heads down, follow the flame and we’ll be at the Market in no time.’
‘I like your optimism.’
As they searched for an exit, they f
ound an area where a foot-high egg of swirling sapphire and emerald stood on a waist-high stone column. Every instinct told them to move on, but it drew them in nonetheless.
‘What is that?’ Caitlin said. ‘It feels electric. Is it pulsing?’
Mesmerised, they stepped onto the dais surrounding the column; when they got within three feet of the egg they passed through some invisible boundary where everything became green-tinged and all sounds from the chamber beyond were muffled.
Cautiously, Caitlin reached out towards the egg, every warning instinct suppressed. When her fingers came within an inch of its surface, there was a shimmer and they found themselves standing in a three-dimensional view of a dark hall where Church and the others stood around Virginia.
Destroyer of Worlds Page 14
