Then, the light.
White, splitting into multi-coloured shards at the edges, it was a light he’d seen before with Julian in a warehouse in Birmingham. A light he knew as portal light. It had flared around them, blinding, disorienting. When it faded they stood on snow between two aluminium-walled buildings in near-darkness. They were only a short distance from the car hire place Julian had selected.
Just like that. Rob gaped like a schoolboy.
The hire car thrummed with a new car’s efficiency as they passed the northern outskirts of Reykjavik. The hills and the suburban homes set into them were all covered by a thick layer of snow. The sky was mostly black, but for a faint yellow glow in the south-east. The sea was a dark and shifting plane off to the west.
“What was that bit of magic you did when you got in the car?” Rob asked.
“One spell to improve my night sight, the other was a luck charm,” Julian said, “to help keep us on the road. I want to go as fast as possible.”
“Safer driving through magic – I’m all for it.”
Rob tried the lever that let his chair slide back again. He just fitted in the front, but his knees were close to the plastic dashboard. “Did you know they have a phallus museum in Reykjavik?”
Julian blinked. “No.” He blinked again. “Why do you know that?”
“I looked it up. Icelandic tourist info. They’ve got a cock there from pretty much every animal that’s ever lived in Iceland or the ocean around it.”
Julian wore one of the most perplexed expressions Rob had ever seen on him. Rob waited, letting him consider his next words.
“This is a business trip,” he said. “We’re not here to be tourists.”
“Yeah I know. I’m just saying, if we get everything done today, we could always hang about an extra day. They’ve got these hot springs you can swim in out near the airport too. Sounds pretty cool.”
“Outdoors?” Julian asked. Rob nodded. “In winter?”
“The water’s really hot. You’ll be in it up to your neck.”
“And above my neck I’ll be enjoying blizzard conditions.”
Rob raised his hands. “Hey, I’m just tossing a few ideas out there.”
“Well,” Julian said. He stopped and shook his head. “Well, I’ll keep that in mind.” He returned his attention to the road as they approached a roundabout.
Rob’s phone buzzed with a message. Evelyn. He guessed she thought him more likely to respond than Julian. You need to come here. We need to practise these capture protocols.
Rob sighed and typed with his thumbs. Put a Reverend Protocols reminder in the calendar for one night next week.
Even text managed to carry her irritation. CAPTURE protocols Rob.
He’d started thinking of them as ‘the Reverend Protocols’ in his head. Too late to change now. He let Evelyn have the last word and put his phone away.
The soft-lit houses fell behind them. Rob could see hills crossing the horizon ahead. With his night-sight, the snow that covered them was a faint glow. It was nine in the morning and there wasn’t a hint of pre-dawn light in the sky. He marvelled at it.
“Things good with you and Alice?” Rob asked.
“No,” Julian said. “Yes. I mean yes. Everything’s fine.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Nothing. I said everything’s fine.”
A coach passed them, heading back towards Reykjavik. Its headlights were on high beam and Rob had to squint.
“Not trouble in bed, is it?” Rob asked.
Julian’s shoulders and arms went rigid. “What? No. No, everything’s fine on that front.”
Rob stretched his legs as much as he was able. Which wasn’t much. “Always front-ways? Because you know, if you want some variety in your love-life, there are other positions I could tell you–”
“No. No Rob, I’m getting no complaints on that fron- in that department.”
“Well, if you want some advice on–”
“God damn it. Fine. We had a fight. Okay? Please stop asking me questions about my sex life.”
Rob hid a smile. Julian had had a frustrated scent about him the whole day, like a problem was nagging at him. “What was it about?”
Julian sighed and stretched his fingers on the steering wheel. “I wouldn’t tell her why we’re going to Iceland.”
Rob’s brow wrinkled. “You didn’t tell her our cover story?”
“Of course I told her the cover story. She saw right through it. She can tell when I lie.” His left hand moved from the steering wheel to the hand brake to the gear stick, a light touch of each only, before returning to the steering wheel. “So we had a fight.”
“Well, you are a lousy liar. She probably doesn’t have to work that hard to spot you doing it.”
Julian glowered at him. “Thank you, that’s very helpful.”
A family car overtook them. Rob wondered how anyone could drive so fast in such conditions.
“She loves this sort of stuff, doesn’t she?” Rob asked. “Secret knowledge, ancient mysteries and all that. You’re like a treasure chest of this stuff. You holding back probably made her extra angry.”
“She knows perfectly well I have things I can’t tell her,” Julian replied, missing the hint.
Rob shrugged. “Well, you know the old saying. Men love women no matter how angry they get and women love men no matter how angry they make them.”
“These things are a secret for good reasons, Rob. They’re the kind of secrets that get a lot of people killed when they fall into the wrong hands.”
“Sure, sure.” Rob figured he’d let Julian stew on the conversation for a while. He’d done his best. He couldn’t bring himself to get along with Alice, but she made Julian happy and that was the important thing in his mind.
He tried to settle back in his seat and wished they’d been able to afford a bigger car.
They stopped at a roadside coffee house below hills covered in white snow. Rob almost cleared their stock of muffins and devoured them while sitting across a small table from Julian, on a seat that was welded to the floor. Julian ate a pastry with his coffee, but spent most of the break working with post-it notes and a new London A-Z street atlas.
“What are you doing there, anyway?” Rob asked as he tore open the plastic around his second muffin.
“Marking useful locations.” Julian peeled off another post-it and applied it to an open page. “As teleport targets. It’s much easier to teleport when I can use something to help me visualise the destination.”
“Haven’t you got a map on your phone?”
“A phone doesn’t always have signal. Remember how I got us out of that chaos zone? We were very lucky I’d tampered with my bandwidth earlier. I’m not sure I could have got us out otherwise.”
“Oh. Good idea, I guess.”
“I thought so.”
They were on the road again within twenty minutes. They drove for more than three hours, through long valleys of black rock and white snow shaped by volcanoes and glaciers, past homes and towns, their lights gleaming in the night. Rob took advantage of being a passenger to stare at the country as it rolled by.
The sunrise was slow. It made Rob feel far away from places he knew, a sense he hadn’t had since his gap year travels. He smiled as he watched the landscape appear.
“Really different here,” he said. “Really different to England. Kind of reminds me of Australia.”
“Does it?”
Rob grinned. “Yeah well, except for the snow and the freezing cold and the lack of sunlight and the black rock that looks like it got heaved up out of the earth yesterday.” He turned back to the window. “I remember this park I saw outside of Sydney. It was like they’d cleared away a patch of tropical rainforest and put a sign up in front and called it a park. Except it looked like it was about to swarm over the bare grass and turn into rainforest again overnight. Like they could barely keep it in check. And the outback? It felt like it went on forever. T
he days tried to burn you to death and the nights wanted to swallow you in the emptiness.” He shot a look at Julian. “You laughing at me?”
“I’m not laughing at you Rob.” He was smiling just a bit, but it wasn’t that scornful smile Rob had seen cutting his face from time to time. “Go on.”
Out the window, Rob could still see houses occasionally, set well back from the road. None appeared old or run-down. He didn’t think they would let that happen in this country. “This place is like a rock in a stormy sea, you know? Like the people here are just clinging to it. Trying to make a place to live on stone. Not like England. That’s what I noticed when I left. England is settled. The countryside is tamed. People own it. This place? Not so much.”
The hire car automatically downshifted as they started up a hill. The ground opened to a field of black volcanic rock, covered here and there with a thick layer of snow.
“Haven’t seen any of those funny little horses they’ve got here,” Rob said. “You seen them? They’re shaggy, like they met sheep and thought, hey, good thinking.”
“Not something I imagine happens often with sheep.”
“So you came here four years ago?”
Rob had been putting his questions off ever since he’d found out Julian’s plans. Not just because he respected Julian’s decision to keep some of his secrets to himself, but because these were bad old memories for Julian. By Rob’s reckoning, they were retracing the journey Julian had made between being betrayed by his best friend Mitch and almost being sacrificed by Mitch to that creature of chains in the dream prison.
But he judged it was time to find out what Julian would tell. “Did you drive then too?”
“I did,” Julian replied.
“Did you have a license? Or did you do that ‘you don’t need to see my license’ trick you do?”
“The latter.”
He didn’t smell angry and the ghost of a smile Rob could see was the self-mocking one. Good signs, Rob figured. “So what happened then?”
“Not until we’re in the maze.” He lifted one hand from the wheel and gestured ahead. “We can talk more once we’re inside.”
“Fair enough.” Rob settled back and resumed staring out the window. He hadn’t grown tired of the strange countryside and didn’t think he would. Not on this short trip, anyway.
Julian spoke again, surprising Rob. “It’s funny. I was such a straight arrow before. I always played by the rules. That’s how it all worked, I thought. If everyone played by the rules, everything worked as it should.” He shook his head. “And then I broke into the Whitlocks’ house. And then I came here and charmed, cheated and otherwise magicked by way through to what we’re going to see. And then I tricked my way into–”
He bit back whatever he’d been about to say.
“When we’re in the maze?” Rob said.
Julian nodded, not smiling at all this time. “When we’re in the maze.”
They pulled over late in the afternoon. The sun was below the horizon, though the long sunset lingered in the western sky. They pulled on the cold weather gear they’d bundled into the back of the car.
“Got to admit,” Rob said, zipping up his parka, “it’s a bit chilly here, even for me.”
“This close to the Arctic Circle, I should hope so.”
Julian had brought along a strange set of clothes. He wore a heavy, dark blue coat that Rob thought only thick enough for a British winter, not an Icelandic one. He’d pulled a hood up from the coat’s high collar.
“That going to do you?” Rob asked. “I know you really feel the cold.”
“It’s my soldier’s coat. It can handle worse conditions than this.” He strapped his power gauntlet onto his left hand. It was a leather glove set with ribbons of silver metal. A small crystal gleamed on the back of the hand and a metal ring was set into the palm. Once he had the gauntlet on, to Rob’s bemusement, he wrapped a belt around his waist. He attached a sword to his left hip and a holstered pistol to his right.
“Loaded for bear, huh?”
“It’s not bears I’m worried about. Let’s go.”
Mountains of primordial rock stood to one side of the road. Julian faced away from them and led them onto the descending open slope opposite. The icy ground rippled with gullies that had been carved by old glaciers and springtime snow-melt. A light snowfall greyed the air. Rob could smell the sea and knew they must be moving towards it, though it was beyond even his sight. Nothing living was within range of Rob’s senses, not even holed up for the winter.
He and Julian clambered over the uneven ground, their boots crunching on hard-packed snow and loose gravel. The air was crisp and fresh in Rob’s nose, purged of the odours of human bodies and human civilisation. The only sound apart from their own steps was the almost-heard hiss of falling snow.
It felt like a place no human had ever been.
“When do we get to the maze?” Rob asked.
“We’re already in it. It isn’t a physical maze. Its walls are made of magic and confusion.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “What happens if we get separated?”
“You’ll wander for a while and eventually find yourself on the edge of it. Don’t worry, I’ll find you if it comes to that. The maze is old and strong, but it knows a Blackwood, even if I’m not wearing my warlock ring.”
“Your family made this?”
“We had a part in it.”
They were going further back into Julian’s past than Rob had thought. In the time they’d been friends, Julian had always actively avoided anything to do with his family, making it easy to forget just how much history the Blackwoods had. The place through which they walked felt older than anything Rob had ever known.
“You’ve got the stuff you need for this, right?” Rob asked. “Didn’t leave it in the car?”
Julian patted his satchel. “The spell is written on paper strips. They’ll burn up when I invoke them. We go in, blast the site with psychic static and get out. We shouldn’t even encounter Crispin Chalk and his friends.”
“And then they can’t – what, read whatever psychic stuff is written there?”
“Exactly. For them, the trail goes cold.” With a grunt of effort, Julian jumped across a small gully.
“And what is here, anyway? What do they want? What did you want?”
“I needed to figure out what Mitch meant to sacrifice me to.” He tried to say it casually, but there was a catch in his voice. “The Lord of Chains.”
“I remember.” He’d seen it, through a portal in Bromley-by-Bow that led into a dream prison. “The bastard wrapped me in one of those chains.” The metal had reeked of ancient malevolence. “What’s this place got to do with that old monster?”
“Back in the nineteenth century, Cuthbert Whitlock discovered one of them buried here.”
Rob almost stumbled. “One of them? There’s more than one of those things?”
“There were a few.” He sounded tired as he said it. “I don’t know how many, not even roughly, but I’d guess not many. Just two of them were enough to destroy two civilisations, and that while dead. More than that and I don’t think there’d be any life left on earth.”
Rob mulled over that as they followed the course of an iced-over stream. “Two civilisations? You mean those old ones you said came before ours?”
“One we call Atlantis, though it had its own name back then. The other goes by a few names. Usually Lemuria or Mu, depending on who you ask.”
Rob laughed. He flinched at how loud and intrusive it sounded in the hush of the maze. “Uh, did you really say Moo?”
Julian smiled. “M-U. There are other sites like this one around the world. Precious few of them, fortunately, all well-guarded now. But Atlantis and Mu found one each. They accessed that power and destroyed each other so thoroughly that it’s taken ten thousand years for magic to start really coming back.”
“I get why you’re so uptight about it. Why not destroy this place before, then?
”
Julian shook his head. “Beyond even my family’s abilities. Beyond mine too, for that matter. Even what I’m doing won’t be permanent. It just buys us time to find another way to stop Crispin.”
“So Crispin and that, they’re trying to read something off the corpse? What could–” He stopped. Instinct dropped him into a crouch. Julian dived down beside him. He lifted his gauntlet-clad hand and little sparks of electricity danced around the ring on his palm.
“Got a scent,” Rob said. The edge of his voice roughened into a growl. “Weird one. Not totally human.”
“Not a werewolf?” Julian wasn’t watching him. His gaze moved across the land around them.
“Dunno what he is.” He lifted his head and tested the air. “That way, I reckon.”
Julian nodded and Rob took the lead.
He found that because he was on guard, some instinct kicked in and his footsteps were much quieter. He felt the urge to pull his boots off. He thought he could move silently barefoot. Julian murmured some words Rob couldn’t make out. He caught an electric whiff of magic and then Julian’s footsteps were quiet too.
Rob guided them. He took it easy. Julian didn’t have much information about what Crispin Chalk’s people were like. If they could burn down the house of a powerful magician family, Rob figured it best not to underestimate them.
He found the source of the scent in a hollow. A man lying on the ground, settled where he could look in the direction Rob thought he and Julian had been travelling. His cold weather gear and even his shoes were black. Though his clothes were modern, he had the rough features of the kind of man who charged off a Viking longboat centuries ago.
He checked on Julian. Julian flexed the fingers of his gauntlet-clad hand and gave him a sharp nod. Rob crouched down, judged the distance. He leapt.
He landed with one foot on either side of the man. Before the man had let out more than a gasp of surprise, Rob had his arm around the man’s throat. He hauled him back and clamped his hand over the man’s mouth.
The man changed.
Rob held nothing. Sharp black feathers snapped in his face. He reeled backwards. He heard a rough cawing sound, heard the flap of wings.
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