Old, old lands.
Zhongguo.
These days, the legacy of Homo erectus was the museum at the foot of the hill where, for a small fee, one could enter and enjoy all the plaques and the lifelike statues. At this hour, the museum was closed. The museum square, later to welcome the meagre footfall of low-season tourists, skirled with leaves, some dancing around a large bronze bust of Neanderthal man that gazed solemnly in the still.
Look how you’ve grown, the figure before the cave thought. Look what you have done.
For all its importance, Zhoukoudian was a grave, the stone having offered up an ancient bounty, hints and clues of human evolution. But a more recent tomb rested here too, one built by chance and necessity. For eight hundred years, the makeshift tomb—or perhaps a cell—had lain dark, silent and undisturbed.
Until today.
As the sun touched the cave mouth, only animals were present to hear the violation. A strain of music drifted on the air, a silvery plucking of strings, strummed by the figure’s hand. The notes, rich and sweet, full of yearning, echoed down the hillside, reverberating between the trees. In the grass, snakes raised their heads, tongues flickering as if to scent the sound. Rodents froze, their whiskers twitching. Monkeys screeched and fled, a volley of icicles falling from the branches. This was a song they had no wish to hear. In an instant, the music was everywhere, shattering the still.
And then, as if it hadn’t happened at all, the music stopped, a hand held over the strings. The hillside returned to silence, winter smoothing out her cloak. The figure standing before the cave knew better than to risk a repeat, to let the music rise to a crescendo. The instrument was broken—a memory in itself—and it would not do to summon the ghosts who haunted the Dark Frontier, drawn to the walls of Creation by the heady lure of magic.
Not here. Not now.
But the echoes were enough. The notes reverberated into the cave, blending with the shrinking shadows. Like burrowing worms, the short refrain bled through stone, resounding through the fissures and cracks, past bones and baubles yet undiscovered.
In minutes, the echoes seeped into a vault, a vast subterranean cavern, the obsidian bowels of the hill. The cavern—in truth a prison, bound and sealed by charms—stretched a hundred and fifty feet in length and fifty in diameter, ample space for the one who slept here, his dreams deep and dark.
Flames roared in his dreams. Distant screams echoed in his memory, a fugue of blood and war. The walls ran slick from his slumbering breaths, his heart pounding like thunder in the deep. Moisture dripped from stalactites that had lengthened an inch in each century of the dreamer’s entombment, splashing on scale, horn and claw. Scars riddled his recumbent flanks, the griffonage of a thousand swords, arrowhead, axe and lance. In the damp and the dark, his scars remained a secret language, speaking of battles lost and won. The dreamer breathed in, the steam swirling. Breathed out in a rumbling snore. Condensation trickled from his skull, dripping from eyelids the size of a city clock.
The echoes rang from one end of the cavern to the other, a brief, glittering symphony.
And with the sound: memory.
In his dreams, Mauntgraul grunted, scenting the memory of the feast, a banquet of fire, panic and meat. He shifted his bulk and then stiffened, the glossy black barb on the end of his tail quivering. The echoes of the music faded, leaving a bitter taste.
Some had come to interrupt his feast. Some had stolen his freedom.
Pain followed on the heels of memory. A silvery light burned in his skull, building to blinding anguish.
He remembered the pale fairy and his harp, the rock face closing around him.
He remembered Red Ben.
In the deep and the dark of eight hundred years, the dreamer’s eyes flew open, blazing like the blackest suns.
SEVEN
Considering their recent argument, Ben Garston told himself he’d rather call up the Whispering Chapter than chat with his dwarf accountant in London. That aside, he needed a plane ticket pronto and Delvin Blain, CEO of the Blain Trust, could provide him with one from any airport desk in the world, along with a passport and visa, both undetectable forgeries. Flying east in dragon form wasn’t advisable, not when human agents were watching. Hunting. The Sister was no doubt hot on his tail. The fear, a quiet swarm in the pit of his stomach, made the receiver tremble in his hand as he placed the call from a phone booth in the Couronnes Métro station.
“You,” grumbled the dwarf down the line, in a grumpier tone than usual. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Yeah. Late. For all of us if I don’t catch a flight to China like yesterday.”
“China? Nudd’s bells! Why do you—”
“Something is up, Blain. Something bad. It’s to do with the mnemonic harp. I have to find Von Hart …” And he did, didn’t he? It was his duty, no matter what. Plus there was the fear, bubbling away in the background, a suspicion so ominous he couldn’t quite look at it directly. Not yet. “There’s been an earthquake in Beijing.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve taken an interest in seismology …”
Ben swallowed, hard. “The news says the epicentre was at Zhoukoudian. Do you remember what we put in those hills, Blain?”
Silence for a good long minute. Ben let the memory sink in. Then he heard rustling, coughing, a brief murmuring to one side of the receiver in London, the striking of a match. Ben could picture the scene easily enough. Having sat up, dismissed his latest secretary for the sake of discretion and sparked up a cigar, the CEO was all ears.
“I’d say you were starting at shadows, Mr. Garston. But all that business last year … it isn’t over, is it?”
“Take a lucky guess.”
A sigh. “And I thought all I had to worry about was smuggling gold.”
“Blain, can we put the jousting on hold right now? If there’s been another breach, then—”
“You’ll get your plane ticket. Have I ever let you down? All the same, it sounds relevant, after a fashion. I was going to call you first thing in the morning.”
“Problem?”
“More of an … irregularity. My dealings with certain bodies on the black market turned up a matter of interest. I hope you’re sitting down.”
“When do I get time to sit down? Just spit it out.”
“Suit yourself. I was talking to Bolgoth Clave last night. You know the goblin racketeer down Whitechapel? Looking into new fencing avenues for you. Hell, what’s a few more laws?” Another cough. “Sorry. In passing, I mentioned the Lambton armour falling into the possession of House Fitzwarren—we were chatting about all the shit last year—and Clave … well, he told me that the suit had been up for auction in Newcastle the year before last. The latest heir of the Lambton estate wanted nothing to do with the damn thing.”
I don’t blame them.
“So?” But the lump was back in Ben’s throat. “House Fitzwarren had to have acquired it from somewhere.”
“That’s just it. The Fitzwarrens didn’t. They weren’t even at the auction. The suit sold to the highest bidder for almost twice the asking price. Quite a fierce battle, if one can credit a goblin.”
“Cut to the chase. I have a plane to catch.”
“Ben. The name of the buyer was Herr Von Hart.”
More silence. Ben remembered the suit with its bristling array of spikes, jagging from the greaves, gauntlets and hinges. The helmet, beaked and vulturine. He wasn’t likely to forget it. What the fuck had the envoy wanted with the Lambton armour? Last year, House Fitzwarren had sent the suit as a gift to Paladin’s Court and the latest Fulk had been wearing it at the time. And inside Fulk—the worst kind of Trojan horse—a lost soul hungry for power, hungry to conquer death …
Never trust the Fay, Ben …
“Out of curiosity, I tracked the sale of the item,” Blain went on. “Not much of a paper chase, to be honest. It seems that our envoy extraordinary gave the suit to the Fitzwarrens as a gift of some kind.”
Ben’s h
and fell from the side of the booth, balling into a fist at his side. And the swarm in his belly exploded into frenzy.
“He did what?”
Fear isn’t a good travelling companion.
Ben started awake, gripping the arms of his seat. Dreams were fleeing his skull, a retreating billow of flame, an echo of a scream … Slowly, he relaxed. As much as he could, anyway. The fear had sat next to him on the flight out of Charles de Gaulle, the jet veering south above the City of Light while he stared numbly out of the aeroplane window. The dawn crept through the streets below, a map of the cold creeping through his veins. Fear swirled in his plastic cup as the plane roared into the morning sky, the sweet Jack warming his bones, but failing to soothe him. Fear muffled the in-flight movie and the landing gear dropping and the sands of the Middle East stretching off to the horizon. In the lounge, waiting for his connecting flight, the fear paced around between the rows of seats, footsteps measuring out his disquiet.
He was travelling incognito, of course. Crowds churned around him, a sea of suitcases, people heading from who knows where to any place. Departure boards trickled in digital amber. Tannoy systems pinged. Anodyne music wafted from speakers. Ben had no way of knowing if he was followed, if anyone watched. A man in a grey suit passing him on the escalator. A woman pretending to look at postcards in a gift shop, peering at him over her sunglasses. A teenager kicking the back of his seat. How could he know the reach of the Whispering Chapter, the extent of the order’s network? The Sister had rocked up on an oil rig. What was to stop her rocking up in an airport, manacle in hand? OK, so the Chapter had used a fragment of the harp to lure him, but if she happened to appear, it could still spell the end of him. In a leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans—the clothes snatched from the first open store in the Quartier Asiatique—Ben looked like an everyday traveller, clothes rumpled from the plane’s tiny seats, eyes puffy with jet lag. His straggling beard was far from stylish and his hair was starting to creep towards the middle of his back, so red that some might mistake it for dye.
What did it matter? Considering the Chapter’s sentence of execution, there was nothing he could do to worsen his predicament, no crime he could commit, no fate worse than death. Was there? Either way, he had slipped through the net. He was on the run, a fugitive from the Lore. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself.
Besides, to risk the miles ahead in true form was to court exhaustion as well as exposure.
This isn’t 1215. They’ve had telescopes since the seventeenth century and radar operators won’t think you’re a sign from God.
Ben shuddered. Memory of his first long journey to China, all those centuries ago, added to his unease. The end of that journey was a stone cast into the pool of history, and how strange that he should feel the ripples now, after all this time. How unsettling. He tapped his fingers on the arms of his seat, reminding himself that keeping his head low was now a secondary concern. Hiding was far from a new thing. Neither were earthquakes in China, but when the news had cut to the site of the tremors, Ben was out the door of the restaurant and in the back of a cab before his dim sum could climb up his throat.
Fear joined him again on his next flight into the Asian night. A man across the aisle attempted conversation, but Ben only managed a weak smile and the man returned to his magazine with a “Don’t like flying, huh?” He dozed for a while and all his dreams rang with screams, a city burning beneath the shadow of vast white wings …
It had all been so long ago. The memory faded. When he’d last travelled this way, eight hundred years ago, he’d had the envoy to guide him, Von Hart’s robes fluttering in the wind as he’d sat in the saddle of Ben’s withers, muttering this or that spell to protect him from the cold. The good old days. Now the past came swimming into focus, a sequence of reluctant tasks flashing across his mind.
In that distant summer of 1215, Von Hart had come to him in the Royal Forest, finding him in the Hedgehog and Viper. The envoy had told him about the great council taking place on Thorney Island, the knights and the priests who had gathered to form the Curia Occultus. The Hidden Court, as the envoy dubbed it, was discussing the future of Remnants, their continued existence in these lands. Or the end of it. Ben, growling over his tankard, had asked the stick-thin man in the starry red robes what the fuck he wanted. Hadn’t Ben done enough for King John by taking down Rakegoyle? Von Hart had smiled his smile.
Oh, it isn’t what I want. Ben vaguely recalled his reply, plucking his words from the mists of time. And the threat is far from over. News comes from the east of a screaming horde, an empire in flames. The King would ask another boon of you, mein freund. A sign of good faith …
And so they had flown east, he and Von Hart, to challenge Mauntgraul, the White Dog. High up in the hills of the Hebei Plain—a place that the map called Zhoukoudian—the envoy and the soon-to-be Sola Ignis had confronted the renegade dragon, a terrifying breed with a barbed sting on the end of his tail and a battle cry to level trees. That battle hadn’t gone as planned. Mauntgraul, gorged on blood, enraged, had wounded the both of them.
Tail lashing, his deadly sting aimed at Ben’s heart, the White Dog had been moments from triumph. In a desperate attempt to salvage their mission, Von Hart had strummed his fragment of the harp, making a dangerous compromise. Unable to slay Mauntgraul, the envoy had imprisoned the beast in the hill instead, managing to send him into the Sleep. A matter, Ben had argued at the time, that was likely to come back and bite them on the arse, if the Fay (it had still been when back then) returned to the earth. Then the times had progressed. Ben had forgotten. All of them had forgotten. And in the forgetting, a false comfort, a false sense of security, an illusion as deep as an enchanted slumber …
He awoke to the sound of the captain making an announcement in a language he recognised as Mandarin. The news had finally caught up with him. Due to the earthquake, Beijing International was diverting all flights to Xian, a city a thousand klicks to the south. The jet landed and Ben found himself in a queue for the ticket desk, passports waving, complaints snapping in his ears like firecrackers.
When his turn came, a beleaguered stewardess in a skewed little hat yelled into his face.
“No flights! No flights!”
Ben regarded the woman with red-ringed eyes.
“Wanna bet?”
He made the change behind some trucks in the terminal car park. Dawn was coming around on this side of the globe and he shrugged off his human guise like a cloak, his wings climbing into the fading dark, heading north-east.
Into the fear.
Dragon Bone Hill—what was left of it, anyway—rose from the pine forest swathing the lower slopes. Fog shrouded the valley. And smoke, coiling from the maw in the rock face where the upper cave had sundered, collapsing into a fissure that split the hill from summit to foot. The ruptured peak jagged at the sky like a broken tooth. The exposed chasm was a smouldering doorway framing Ben as he stood atop the strewn boulders, the rubble that had hurtled down the hillside. Something large and strong had burst from the hill, a pale horror breaking from a shell.
With keen eyes, Ben gazed into the sepulchral depths, making out the obsidian gleam of the cavern, and he needed all his strength to stay on his feet. His flight from Xian had taken three hours, with only dread to drive him on. With the rock warm under his feet, he couldn’t even muster a snort. His journey to China had taken a day and a night and he’d lost his way twice since leaving Xian, painfully aware of the time slipping through his fingers and his jet-lagged state.
I’m not up to this shit.
He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the hillside, the open wound of disaster. That was what it was, disaster, and he couldn’t kid himself otherwise. He could barely hear the noise from the valley floor, the grumbling of military trucks and fire engines around the museum, the occasional bark of a soldier at the sneaking approach of journalists. The building lay in ruins, every pane of glass shattered, the roof collapsed, the road leading into t
he hills a cracked river of tarmac. The large bronze bust in the square had rolled off its plinth and lay in several pieces on the churned-up flagstones, a random Dali-esque sculpture. The authorities were turning their efforts to searching for people buried in the rubble, staff and tourists alike, although the quake had struck just after dawn and the digging was more likely a salvage operation for the relics housed inside the building. In the fog and the smoke, no one noticed the sixty-foot-long red-scaled beast that swung down out of the sky, rippling and dwindling as he descended, a man in a glossy black suit landing on the rocks.
As what he was seeing sank in, Ben covered his mouth. No. Jesus, no. He wanted to tell himself that the breach was impossible, the Lore inviolate, but of course it was much too late for that. But whatever, whoever, had awoken the sleeper in the cavern, they could only have done so with a fragment of the harp. Why did he find that fact the most terrifying of all?
History. Because you know what’s coming.
“You re-forged the harp, didn’t you?” Ben murmured, speaking to the hill and the absent envoy. “You told the Curia Occultus that you had the means to enforce peace. And once the Remnants went into the Sleep …”
The harp had been dismantled, yes. A fragment given to each of the branches of the Curia Occultus for protection, the Guild of the Broken Lance, the Whispering Chapter (a typically cowardly act by King John) and the envoy extraordinary himself, the latter swearing to guard and restrict all magic and remain hidden from society until the Fay returned or …
“Yeah. Until hell froze over.”
Re-forged, the mnemonic harp held the power to lull every Remnant into the Long Sleep—or awaken them from it—the magic as complex as any fairy spell. Dismantled, a single fragment of the harp held the power to rouse or sedate one Remnant. One Remnant every time a hand strummed the instrument, striking up the lullaby in a certain way—not to lure, not to summon, but a specific sequence of strings to resonate with the ancient enchantment. Of course, no one but a madman would think that wise. This was surely what had happened at Zhoukoudian, someone in possession of a piece of the harp, rousing the beast that Von Hart had foolishly put to sleep …
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