Gantrua leaned forward so that the flames licked the metal guard at his chin. “I am counting on it.”
He stood back, acknowledging a whisper from the hooded figure who was still lurking in the shadows. Then Gantrua addressed Broonie again. “The boy will be there.”
“The boy?”
“Do not act dumb, Hogboon. I know what they talk about beyond these walls. I know they talk about the boy. They wonder if it is true, if he is real. Well, he is real. You will meet him and you will take with you two things for him. One is a message. The other is a gift. My guards will give you both.”
One of the Fomorians removed a pair of tongs from his belt and approached a cauldron. Ignoring its angry flames, the guard plunged his tongs into the fire and pulled out a long, clear crystal. He brought it over to Broonie.
“The miners work day and night to find the meager supply of these crystals,” growled Gantrua. “Each has the power to open up a path between the worlds. We need to send one to the Promised World, but it will only retain its power through a sacrifice. I suppose I should tell you that yours will be a noble one, but I doubt very much nobility would ever stoop to be an acquaintance of yours, so we shall just get on with it.”
Gantrua turned away to exit from the far side of the plinth, then paused midstep. “Which of your fingers is least precious to you, Hogboon?”
“Erm, they’re all kind of useful to me, Your Superlativeness. I’d find it hard to choose.”
“They all say that.” Gantrua snarled, then disappeared off the far side of the plinth.
The guard holding the crystal came closer. From his waist dangled a rather bloody-looking pair of pliers. The second Fomorian grabbed the Hogboon by one arm and pinned him to the ground.
Broonie had held out for this long, but he decided it was finally a good time to scream.
11
At breakfast, Finn’s father came into the kitchen and began rummaging through a drawer.
“How are you feeling this morning, Finn?” Finn had a mouth full of cereal and couldn’t quite get an answer out.
“Good stuff. Listen, I’ve been thinking about what happened yesterday,” said his father, now searching through a cupboard. “It’s a lack of live Legend practice that’s held you back. My fault really. We’ll remedy that. Get hold of a Legend for you to fight.”
Finn swallowed his cereal. “Um . . . is that what you’re looking for now?”
His father had moved to another cupboard, his head stuck in it as he searched for something. “It’s all very exciting, Finn. You becoming Complete, me joining the Council. No other family in the world has that to look forward to. It’s really something.”
He emerged empty-handed, then stood up straight while looking around intently. “That’s going to have to do,” he said, grabbing a knife and moving toward Finn, who dodged as his father made for the toaster behind him. Using the knife, Finn’s dad forced off the toaster’s handle and left the room with it.
A few seconds later, Finn’s mother arrived in the kitchen. “Hello, sunshine,” she said, grabbing a couple of slices of bread and putting them in the toaster. She paused, realizing what was missing. “Hugo!”
Finn left the house for school, and Emmie appeared just as he passed the corner where their streets met.
“What’s happening?” she asked, stepping in beside him as if the two of them had known each other forever.
“Erm, eh . . . ,” was Finn’s reply. It occurred to him that he should be a little more articulate from now on.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to worry too much because Emmie did most of the talking. She generally seemed to treat silence like an enemy. And what she mostly liked talking about was Darkmouth. While other newcomers found themselves compelled to run out of the place as fast as they could, Emmie was fascinated by almost every detail.
She had noticed there were bars on the windows of many homes and businesses. “Even the church looks like a prison. What if you had an actual prison here, would they put bars on the bars?”
Then there was the way the people greeted every drop of rain warily, as if it might be a deluge of blood, not water. “If they’re afraid of rain,” observed Emmie, “Ireland isn’t a great place to live, is it?”
She greeted every dent in a lamppost and every crack in the sidewalk as possible damage from a Legend attack, and was disappointed when Finn dismissed each one as just another dent caused by someone not watching where they were backing up their car or yet more cracks that hadn’t been fixed.
Finn hadn’t given a tour of Darkmouth to a newcomer before and he could see how much Emmie longed to hear of adventure. So, as they walked along the harbor, he pointed to the large weathered rock jutting straight up some distance offshore. “That’s called Doom’s Perch. A Legend threw it there. It’s called Doom’s Perch because, about a hundred years ago, a local man escaped a Legend attack by stealing a boat and taking it out to that rock.”
Under her bangs, Emmie’s eyes encouraged him to continue.
“He climbed to the top, assuming that it would be a good place to hide out, and waited for the Legend to pass. Once the attack was over and everything looked safe, he went to climb back down to the boat.”
“Did he get eaten on the way down?”
“No, he slipped on seaweed, fell into the sea, and was never seen again. They’ve called it Doom’s Perch ever since.”
Emmie screwed her face into a taut grin. “Yeah, nice one. Try and fool the city girl. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Finn felt a bit defeated. The story was pretty much true, although he might have made up the part about the boat being stolen.
Because they had dallied on the walk to school, they were late and Finn was again forced to take the last empty seat. As he sat down, he saw a half-melted toy car on the desk. The Savage twins were sniggering from the back, Conn Savage fiddling menacingly with his misshapen ear and Manus rubbing his knuckles beneath his eyes. Boohoo.
Over the next few days, Emmie asked Finn a lot of questions about Darkmouth and about his life, and the thing that came up most was this: she wanted to see inside his house. She was quite persistent.
“Maybe I could come to your house instead,” he suggested.
“Nah,” she responded.
She did this a lot, and it worked as a verbal weapon of sorts, a swift stab of a needle that punctured any talk she didn’t want to carry on. Finn had learned little about Emmie, other than that her father had come here to work because of a contract on the phone lines, and he planned to go back to the city once his job was done. She had met all Finn’s other inquiries with a wall of “nahs.”
“Will your friends come and visit you here?”
“Nah.”
“Do you have a nice house back in the city?”
“Nah.”
“I suppose the city was really exciting to live in.”
“Nah.”
“Do you miss your cat? I’d like to have a cat, but my dad’s not big into pets.”
“Oh, I’d love it if Silver was here, but I couldn’t bring him.”
“Is a friend minding him?”
“Nah.”
But, when it came to Finn’s house, the words poured out like water from a burst pipe.
“Why can’t I come in? I won’t touch anything I’m not supposed to. I just have to see what it’s like in your house because I can’t imagine what kind of place it is, when your father’s job is, you know, what it is, and the way everyone talks about your family and how you’ve spent, like, centuries doing this, so there must be amazing things lying around, because of all that time and all those Legends—”
“Legends?” interrupted Finn.
“What?” asked Emmie. “Isn’t that what they’re called?”
“Yes,” said Finn, frowning. “But people don’t usually get it right. They call them monsters instead. Did you know about Darkmouth before you came here?”
“Nah.”
It also be
came clear, over the following few days, that Emmie wasn’t particularly interested in getting to know anyone else in the school, only Finn. He didn’t quite know what to make of it, but he was glad she did most of the talking because it stopped him from saying anything stupid.
That Friday afternoon, as they walked home, Emmie asked yet again if she could come to see his house, and his resistance broke so suddenly he could almost hear it snap.
“Okay.”
That stopped Emmie dead on the street. Finn kept going, quietly satisfied with having said the right thing, and keeping his mouth closed in case he followed up by saying the wrong thing.
12
They walked past the derelict housefronts on Finn’s street, Emmie staying quiet the whole way. When they finally reached Finn’s front door, he opened it and walked in, Emmie close on his heels. But, as she stood in the narrow entrance hall, Finn could see her struggling to hide her massive disappointment as she realized the Legend Hunters’ home was as ordinary as any other house.
The coat hooks weren’t made of serpent skeletons.
The wallpaper wasn’t made of dragon leather.
The pictures of Finn and his family showed them sitting, having picnics, and generally doing anything but wrestling beasts from another realm.
“This is the sitting room,” Finn said as he opened its door. He could see how crestfallen Emmie was to realize that it was, indeed, a sitting room. Nothing more, nothing less. The same with the dining room, with its dining chairs and dining table. And the kitchen. And the laundry room, with its ironing board and an iron that could, at a pinch, be thrown at an onrushing Legend, although this clearly wasn’t its primary purpose.
He could almost see what Emmie was thinking. This could be any house. On any street. In any town.
Finn couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. “There is something else . . . ,” he said, going to a small door squeezed between the kitchen and dining room. A stranger might think it was a closet, because there was seemingly no space for anything larger.
The door had a handle, but Finn ignored that and instead pressed each of the door’s four panels in a practiced sequence. He made a bit of a show of it, enjoying this rare dose of power he felt from knowing he’d kept the best for last.
“Ta-da!” he said with a flourish he immediately felt silly about.
There was the clunk of a lock opening. With a little effort, he pushed the door open with his shoulder and stood back so Emmie could enter first. She stepped through, peering into the deep dark that greeted her.
Finn hit a switch and a single bulb flickered just over their heads. Then light raced along the ceiling away from them, illuminating bulb after bulb after bulb. It was not a room at all. It most certainly was not a closet.
“This corridor,” Emmie gasped. “It’s huge! It must take up a few of the houses next door.”
Finn gave her a look, and she frowned for a moment, then gasped again.
“The whole street? Your house takes up the whole street? That’s insane!” She gave him a shove in delighted disbelief.
The hallway was narrow with a high ceiling. The lights bathed the faded brickwork, which changed in color and texture every few feet, the street having been built one house at a time over many, many years. The entrance appeared to be the oldest part. “We just call it the Long Hall. It was like this way before I was even born,” explained Finn. “Our ancestors started off with our house where we still live, and over the years took over one house at a time, until we were the only ones here.”
Running along the length of the corridor’s right-hand side were closed doors, some wooden, some steel, and each marked with letters and numbers that would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t a member of the family: the first was T4; the second E1; the third S3.
The left wall was lined with large portraits, some reaching from floor to ceiling. The first few were dark and faded. In them, the people wore metal armor topped off with shoulder spikes, helmets with antlers attached, and they carried basic but fierce weapons: double-bladed swords, nets rimmed with steel, shields studded with blades.
As Finn and Emmie moved slowly along the great corridor, the armor in the portraits grew increasingly modern and sleek, and the weapons changed from sharp instruments to guns.
The paintings were mostly of men, but women began to feature as the paintings became more obviously recent. Each had a nameplate: Sean the Brave, Hugh the Stone-Headed, Ragnall Iron Trousers, Aisling the Powerful, Conor Red Skull, William the Surprised, Rachel the Stubborn, Rory the Esteemed.
Each bore a striking resemblance to Finn.
“My ancestors,” he said.
Emmie looked at the portraits. “Weird names.”
“We don’t get a last name at birth,” Finn explained. “We gain one. Each of these people is named because of something they did or their personality.”
“What’s yours then?” asked Emmie.
“I don’t have one yet.”
“So you’re just Finn?”
“Until I get my Legend Hunter name. Everyone at school thinks it’s a bit strange not to have a last name, but it would feel strange to me to have one. Finn Smith, Legend Hunter. Doesn’t quite work, does it?”
“Suppose not,” said Emmie quietly.
It occurred to Finn that he had never asked her an obvious question. “What’s your last name anyway?”
“Er, Smith.”
“Oh.” Finn felt heat flush through his face.
“Don’t worry about it. I can blame my dad for that one,” said Emmie, who didn’t seem too bothered and was already scanning paragraphs of text framed beneath each painting.
She read from one.
“‘Conor Red Skull, Darkmouth, Ireland. Active during the late seventeenth century, he once went four days without sleep while tracking down and slaying two dozen Legends who had entered through three simultaneous gateways. It is said that he was so stained with blood it never properly washed off his skin. He earned his Hunter name due to his inability to spend any time in the sun without getting burned.’”
“Each portrait has an entry like that,” said Finn. “It’s taken from The Most Great Lives, which is this book we have to read while training to become a Legend Hunter. Well, one of the books. There’s a lot of them and they’re about all of the Legend Hunters throughout history.”
“Does that mean you’ll be in a book one day?”
“Um. Yeah, maybe. When I become a proper Legend Hunter,” said Finn.
“Cool.”
Finn flushed again, the heat prickling his face. Emmie moved on, eventually stopping at the second-to-last portrait. It was of a man who looked about as furious as it was possible to get. Across his lap was a simple rifle and behind him was a row of shelves lined with jars, whose labels the artist hadn’t bothered to add detail to. On a small table beside him was a miniature tree, leaning away from him at a sharp angle.
The nameplate on the frame read Gerald the Disappointed, and the text below was particularly lengthy, going into some detail about the many adventures of his early life, including his rescue of a family of Legend Hunters hemmed in on the Scottish island of Iona; the year in which he staved off 154 Legend invasions of Darkmouth; his world-renowned bonsai collection; and how he once single-handedly felled a massive three-headed Cerberus, armed with just a single rock (“. . . albeit a very pointy rock,” The Most Great Lives clarified).
Finn hovered patiently while Emmie read. Finally, she spoke. “Nice nickname. Suits the face.”
“That was my great-grandfather,” replied Finn. “I never knew him.”
“Bet he was a barrel of laughs.”
“He trained my father. My dad says he was pretty fierce.”
“Why did he have to train your father? What happened to your grandfather?”
Finn gestured toward the last portrait. This man wore armor but no helmet, and was the only one in any of the portraits who was not holding a weapon. Instead, he was surrounded by scienti
fic instruments and scraps of paper. He didn’t look particularly confident or aggressive. His chin wasn’t held high and his eyes were pointed down, as if he was meek or maybe even a little afraid.
“That was my granddad, my dad’s father.”
“Niall Blacktongue! Excellent name.”
“Not really,” said Finn, downbeat.
Emmie read the entry aloud. “‘Niall Blacktongue was the first Legend Hunter to try and talk to the Legends, to reason with them and attempt to understand why they wanted to come into this world. He died. No one likes to talk about it.’”
That was it. Nothing else.
“I don’t get it. What happened to him?” asked Emmie.
“He died,” Finn responded haltingly. “No one likes to talk about it.”
There were two empty frames at the end of the row, with nameplates ready and waiting, but nothing engraved on them just yet.
“Who are those for?” asked Emmie.
“They are to remind us of our responsibilities to all of the Hunters who have gone before, all of these people along the wall. You only get a portrait when you’ve passed the role of Legend Hunter to someone else, or if you, eh, well, die.”
“Wow, that must be pretty scary.”
“Well, you know, it’s our way of life, I suppose. That first empty frame’s for my dad.”
“What’s your dad’s nickname then?”
Finn paused before answering. “Hugo the, erm, Great.”
“The Great?”
“Yeah,” Finn mumbled. “He did a couple of things when he was younger. Kind of great sorts of things.”
“What, like fighting Legends?”
“That. And more. He never shuts up about it.”
“So, when will you get your nickname?” asked Emmie.
Finn’s hands were rammed into his pockets, his shoulders tight. “I have to do a thing called a Completion first. It’s a big ceremony.”
“When?”
Finn didn’t respond, but instead walked on toward the very end of the long corridor, the wall now empty of portraits on one side, but with doors still lining the other (T1, A4). Emmie tried one, but it was locked. At the end of the corridor was a large steel door with a wooden sign that read “Library.” Finn hesitated for a moment and turned to head back the way they’d come. “And this concludes our tour,” he said, with forced jauntiness.
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