“It is important scientific knowledge,” said Lucien, cautious not to give too much away.
“Of course it is,” said Karl. “Of course.”
A head popped round the door, an older assistant in the same grey trouser suit that all the women in the building wore. “You got that toilet-paper order in yet, Karl?” she asked.
“Just doing it now, ma’am,” Karl replied.
“The fifth-floor bathroom is almost on its last roll. Don’t let us down again.” She left.
Axel stuck his head out of the door to see if she was gone before closing it for privacy. “What Karl is saying is what many of us are saying. We’ve been waiting a long time to see what would happen with the Legends, to see if they’d return, to see if we’d ever live up to the legacy of our ancestors.”
“But while the Council of Twelve talks about glory,” said Karl, “all I talk about is toilet paper.”
Lucien bent forward, placed his hands on the edge of Karl’s desk, pushed his face towards his. “Are you saying you’d prefer war over peace?”
Karl pulled back a bit, his uncertainty reflected in the thick lenses of Lucien’s glasses.
“Are you suggesting, in fact, that you yearn for a reason to fight?” Lucien pressed. “That we should put some sort of secret programme in place that allows us to get in on all the action denied us for so long? Is that really what you want? Really?”
Karl was sweating.
Axel was munching.
Lucien began to smile.
“I need the toilet,” said a woman deep in a darkness lit only by the low glow of mobile-phone screens.
“Hey, who’s prodding me?” asked a man. “Is that a sword? It better not be a sword.”
It was packed in here. An entire town crammed into the tight space, the evacuation having been quick and panicked. Some had been reluctant until it had been pointed out to them that if they needed persuasion, they simply had to look up at the Black Hills above the town. That glimpse of hell got them going.
“I’m hungry,” said another Darkmouth evacuee. “I was halfway through making my dinner.”
“Don’t mention dinner,” said someone beside him. “Now I’m hungry.”
“I was making a Brussels-sprout soufflé.”
“You know what, I’m not so hungry any more.”
They had since been joined by the retreating Half-Hunters and the assistants who had been left without anyone to assist. Only the bald assistant, once the proud carrier of Gerald the Disappointed’s desiccated husk, had his superior with him. Stumm was awake now. More awake than he must have been in years. His eyes were wide open, vivid in the unnatural light of tiny screens. He was clearly reliving the sight of his colleagues being desiccated into one great mess of people and steel.
The sight of so many bedraggled Half-Hunters squeezing in alongside the people of Darkmouth was not a welcome one.
“So we’re in here, and you’re in here,” a woman said to a Half-Hunter in now shredded furs. “Is that your great plan? I’d like a better one than that.”
In the middle of all this, Clara gritted her teeth. Took a deep breath. Regretted taking a deep breath because of the accumulated smell of a few thousand people all crammed into one space together. It was her own fault. This had been her idea after all. She’d had the notion of evacuating the town, but hadn’t reckoned on being the one landed with being in charge of it. Yet the logic had been annoyingly sound. She was a civilian married into a Legend Hunter family. It made her the ideal candidate to negotiate between the two.
Besides, she knew these people, had grown up with them, had stared into many of their mouths and knew the deepest secrets of their deepest cavities. The people of Darkmouth trusted her. Sort of.
“Where’s the sergeant?” asked the hungry person.
“He could be here for all we know,” said his neighbour. “He spends so much time hiding away that I don’t even know what he looks like. Or if he’s even a he at all.”
Clara tried to remain calm. And upbeat. While wondering if they were about to be invaded by rampaging Legends at any moment. Wondering if Finn and Hugo were OK out there. Wondering why she had to marry the only guy within a thousand miles with relatives who not only refused to stay dead, but also liked to complain about the miracle of resurrection.
“What’s the plan, Clara?” asked a man above her. He’d found a space on a statue plinth.
“Hugo, Finn and the others are putting their fallback plan into operation, don’t worry.”
“I don’t mean to sound, you know, downbeat, but what if the fallback plan doesn’t work?” the man asked while swinging his legs off the plinth’s edge. “Is there a fallback to the fallback?”
Clara didn’t know how to answer him, because the truth might have caused panic. There was no fallback to the fallback. There was only defeat.
There was murmuring and movement in the throng as Finn appeared through the crowd. Emmie was with him, and behind them came Gerald and Hugo. All of them out of breath.
Finn’s mum checked on him, tilting his chin to assess him for signs of damage. He let her. He felt his pulse tapping quickly at his neck. They’d had to run pretty fast to make it to a tunnel entrance before any of the Legends arrived in town.
He noticed that the Savage twins were right there, squashed in with everybody, eyeing him, one taking a picture – snap – while the other grinned.
“What are those dangly things on your shoulders?” mocked Conn Savage, spotting his epaulettes.
“I think they’re cup holders,” said Manus Savage.
“You know Legends track victims’ bad odour,” said Finn. He sniffed the air in their direction. “So you two will definitely be the first to get eaten.”
“They’re all here?” Hugo asked, no greeting preceding the question.
“Yes,” said Clara, now giving Emmie a squeeze.
“We’re all here,” said the hungry man. “But so are you. While out there—”
Out there was the sound of thumping feet, getting closer.
Gerald pointed a finger at the man. “Out there are things you don’t want to invite in here, and they don’t know about the tunnels. So, unless you want to find yourself suddenly stranded on a street full of Fomorians even angrier than me, you might want to keep your voice down.”
The hungry man kept his voice down.
Gerald tried hard not to show it, but even in the near-darkness Finn could see him fight against spasms of pain now wracking a body that didn’t have much longer to live. “Did they always moan this much?” Gerald asked Hugo, by way of a distraction. “I don’t know how you put up with that all these years.”
Hugo began to push his way through the crowd again, and Gerald followed. Together they turned to Finn and Emmie.
“Come on, you two,” said Hugo.
“Come on where?” said Emmie.
“Up there,” said Gerald. “We’re going to end this.”
“Grass,” said Gantrua.
The army had walked down the hill, into Darkmouth and on to Broken Road, without a fight.
Or rather not so much walked as snarled and snapped and pushed and drooled. At least one Fomorian had marked its territory in a most unpleasant way, leaving a stench behind that would probably take several generations to scrub out. Should Darkmouth have any humans left alive to do so, that is.
“I remember grass,” continued Gantrua, nose in the air, eyes closed. He sniffed and the wings on his back almost opened with the sensations. “I remember grass. A blade of it grew in the forest near my ancestral lands. Here it is so plentiful it grows through the cracks in the stone.”
“Their trees seem sick,” said Trom. “They have these green things growing on them.” He picked off a leaf to chew on it.
“What’s that taste like?” asked Cryf.
“Better than the nicest toenail you’ve ever bitten,” said Trom. “But not as chewy.”
Broonie watched and heard all of this, from above the Hy
dra, with his elevated position affording him a view down the town, through the roofs of buildings. Whenever it wasn’t being obstructed by snarling heads and gnashing teeth anyway. Still, two of the Hydra’s heads remained disinterested, snoozy. The others were fully enraged by their circumstances, and by each other.
Broonie tried to pull his arms free from the straps binding them, and flicked his head about to loosen the muzzle pressed tight over his mouth. Nothing budged. All that changed was that he became more exhausted, and the green of his skin flushed with the yellow of his blood.
Gantrua moved on, the curving serpent’s tooth on his grille catching the orange of the street lights as he took in this world he had long striven to enter.
“The humans live in straight lines,” he said. “They live behind glass and squares and metal.” He gently punched a small car as he passed, and it burst into a riot of flashing lights and a high-pitched beeping sound. This briefly shocked the Hydra, causing it to clip a corner of the street’s bookshop with one head, punching a chunk out of the wall and freeing books to flutter and fall to the ground.
Another head clattered an electricity pole, which bent over, snapping wires and whipping electricity about the street’s edge. A Fomorian soldier picked up a wire to see what the strange fizzing substance tasted like and was blasted across the road in a shower of sparks.
“Ssssssgguusssss,” said Broonie desperately.
Gantrua did not flinch. “This world is soft. I can feel it in every step. The black of this road is soft. The bricks are soft. The air is soft. The smells are of sweetness and luxury.”
He picked up a bunch of roses from a display at the hastily abandoned florist’s. Water dripped from its roots, ran along his arm. “They have such life here that they can afford to cut it down, display it, leave it lying around.” He dropped the flowers to the ground. Trom grabbed them, shoved them into his mouth and then made a face that suggested he wished he hadn’t.
“Not good?” asked Cryf.
“Like licking a Manticore’s tail.”
“Ssssssssggggggggssssss,” said Broonie.
The street was now wild with Fomorians pulling at car mirrors, chewing on hanging baskets, pressing their flat noses against shopfronts.
Something attracted Gantrua’s attention. He tapped a shop window, sending a crack through the pane until the glass shattered and fell about him. He reached in, yanked a mannequin from where it stood, held it out so he could examine it.
“Fake humans?” he asked. “What kind of trickery is this? And what are these thin threads on their bodies? How much softer can this world get?” He pulled the dress from the mannequin, handed it to Trom, who held the flowery green frock up against his hulking body and for a moment seemed genuinely taken with it.
Seeing the look on Gantrua’s face, he threw it aside.
“Not my colour,” he said.
“Ssssgggsssss!” Broonie kept shouting, muzzle clamping tighter every time he breathed in.
Gantrua stepped back into the street, calm amid the celebration and madness. He sniffed the air. Sniffed again. “Why did the humans run?” he asked. “They spend a hundred lifetimes squashing us into our own world, and then scurry like dung-ants when we finally break free.”
From above, Broonie saw something roll from under a car, a white, egg-like object that wobbled across the road until it nudged at Trom’s biggest big toe. Trom picked it up.
“No!” shouted Gantrua, but it was too late.
The egg popped, a purple residue spraying across Trom’s face. He pulled a finger through it, tasted it. “Spicy,” he said.
Then he burst into purple flames, a swirling plasma that first tightened his skin so that his eyeballs stuck out alarmingly. Schlloop. He was shrunk into a small lumpen square hardly bigger than Gantrua’s left foot.
“Trom!” shouted Cryf, loud enough to send a tremor through the entire street, the rest of the Legends sensing immediately that something had changed. That the celebration was over. That they were still at war, even if the battlefield was a playground to them.
Cryf cradled the uneven box that was the desiccated Trom, reassuring his old friend that everything would be OK. Behind him, a figure darted across the dark road, sprinting from one laneway to another.
“There!” said Gantrua. Three Fomorian soldiers peeled away to follow the movement, chunky legs propelling them towards the entrance to the lane. They came to a swift halt when they found a human standing stock-still, one hand on its hip, the other outstretched, holding a handbag, eyes dead, face lifeless.
“Another fake human,” Cryf said, arriving on the scene.
“A trap?” Gantrua asked.
“I don’t know,” said an upset Cryf as he cradled Trom in his hand, while pushing through the panting Fomorians. “But it’s wearing a very strange hat.”
The mannequin suddenly tilted, as if pulled over, and smacked to the ground. The many spikes of the hat fired off in every direction, embedding their tips in the ground, the cobbles, and three Fomorian backsides. It sent them instantly into jabbering craziness.
“Trap!” shouted Cryf.
Tied to the Hydra, Broonie ducked just quick enough to avoid a flying dart, which embedded itself in the neck with two heads on it. A thin blue vein rose where the dart had stabbed, creeping upwards until, as if making its choice, it diverted into the head on the right side of the neck. The mind attached to that part of the Hydra instantly went burbly, its eyes swivelling in different directions, its teeth drowning in spittle and it began to snap at its neighbour, at the other heads, at itself.
“Sssssssggggsssss!” said Broonie again, trying to get the word out that would save them all. Or make the Hydra fall over and kill them. Or do whatever, but at least just end this torment once and for all.
At the top of the street, another human ran across. Then two more. The sparking electricity of the fallen street lamp glinted off their armour. Then they were gone.
From somewhere to the right of them, there was a sound of sliding metal, of something dropping in an echoed clang.
Gantrua turned his head, the bones creaking in the wings on his back.
He walked to the phone box where the noise had come from, looked at it, pulled the phone out and listened for a moment to a strange and insistent beep-beep-beep. A voice, muffled and small, spoke to him: “Please dial the number you require.”
A dark hole opened in the floor in front of him.
“This number cannot be reached …” said the voice. Gantrua ripped the phone clean from the box. Then he tore the phone box clean from the ground and thought for a moment, looking down at the newly revealed hole.
“You,” he said to the smallest Fomorian he could see. “Get down there.”
“Of course, Your Fearsomeness,” said the loyal Legend immediately, dipping a toe into the hole, turning to find the right angle to fit his frame in. Gantrua grabbed his shoulders and pushed him roughly down, and the unfortunate Fomorian dropped in with one leg trailing the rest of his body.
Once Gantrua was satisfied that he had heard the thump of the Fomorian soldier’s hard landing, he called after him, “What do you see?”
“Stone,” replied the Fomorian, sounding somewhat winded. “Curved corridors. Strange lights stuck to the walls.”
“Tunnels,” announced Gantrua. “This is where the humans are hiding. That is where they scurried like dung-rats.” He turned to his army. “Go down there. Find them. Exterminate them. I will remain above ground with a detachment of soldiers and the Hydra. The rest of you, do not return to me until all the humans are dead.”
Fomorians began converging, shoving and elbowing their way to get into the hole.
Still furious about Trom, Cryf now began kicking at any object in the street that might possibly be another entrance into the world beneath Darkmouth. Bollards were mangled; a bench was yanked from its foundations; a water hydrant ripped clean away.
“Here,” said Cryf, holding the hydrant in his hands. Bel
ow it was another hole into the tunnels.
It was not easy to get several Fomorians into spaces designed for humans with narrow shoulders and wiggly shoulder blades. No part of a Fomorian wiggles. But they made every effort, tearing at the concrete with their hands, pulling and pushing each other into the tunnels below.
“How you spent time with these rodents, I will never know,” Gantrua called up to Broonie.
“Sssssssgggssssss,” replied Broonie uselessly.
Around them, Legends poured into the tunnels.
At the furthest edge of the town, through the slats of the church’s bell tower, with a view that carried over Darkmouth to where the town’s only phone box had stood until only moments ago, Finn, Emmie, Hugo and Gerald watched.
“They’re going into the tunnels,” said Finn.
“They’ve bought the diversion,” said Hugo. “Fair play to those Half-Hunters who acted as decoys. They did what was needed.”
“They’ve guessed the tunnels are a hiding place,” said Hugo, a switch mechanism in his hand. “But they obviously haven’t guessed they’re rigged to flood with Desiccator fluid.”
“Don’t mess this up,” said Gerald.
“You have to stop saying that,” Hugo told him. He squinted again through his binoculars.
“I want to desiccate every last one of those Legends,” said Emmie. Over the hours she had emerged from being mute and dazed to growing more and more furious at the loss of her father, determined to be a part of whatever revenge could be meted out.
Hugo pushed the switch over to her.
“You sure?” she asked, her thumb hovering over the box and its red lever.
Hugo nodded. “When I say so, you flick that on and blow open the vat. We’ll hear the Desiccations all the way up here.”
“We’ve to make sure they pay for it, Finn,” said Emmie. “Right?”
He hated to see her like this, so full of sadness and revenge. He didn’t answer her.
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