‘Goodbye, Sergei,’ Mark said, and the phone went dead. Mark made his way back to the gym, his sandwich forgotten.
Rage burned in him at the most basic level of his soul. Mark stripped and took his practice sword from its red sheath. He started running through some exercises, the blade whistling about his head and shoulders in sweeping arcs that got faster and faster. His mind was elsewhere as he let his body work out the anger and frustration that filled him.
Muscle memory took over, thousands of years of practice allowing his lithe frame to move through the forms effortlessly.
In his head, he was in a different time. He first realised that he was immortal, four months after his meeting with the fairy woman.
Married to Annaea, he settled into bliss. The wedding was necessarily basic, due to the barbarous conditions of the Mamucium fort. They had a small ceremony in the meadow outside the walls, followed by a feast that lasted early into the next morning. Marcus saw nothing of it, retiring with his new wife to their private rooms as soon as possible.
Annaea blushed with excitement and joy, her giggles joining his own laughs as they fumbled through their first coupling. Later, as they lay together, Annaea made him promise that he would never leave her. He looked into her eyes and then kissed her deeply, the gesture saying more than words ever could. She snuggled into his shoulder and slept. Marcus felt a level of contentment that evening that he would never feel again. He fell asleep inhaling the scent of the woman he loved, with a smile on his face.
Four months passed and his happiness remained. Together, he and Annaea made their plans for the long journey back to Rome. They were happy days, but Marcus would only remember snippets of them: stolen moments beneath an oak tree near the stables, a shared picnic near the river, a silly cushion fight as they packed one of the huge trunks they would carry with them. What he would remember was Annaea’s beautiful face, and the smile that she held for him alone.
His curse began three days before they were due to leave for Rome. Marcus was in the kitchen, directing the packing of several barrels of salted beef for the journey. Annaea found him there; his smile of happy welcome slipped from his face at the sight of her. There was a deep bruise beneath her left eye, and the strap of her white dress had been snapped.
‘What has happened?’ he demanded. A red tide of fury rose in him.
Annaea began to cry and he enfolded her in his arms, burying her face in his shoulder and shushing her gently. Her legs gave out, and she collapsed to the stone floor. Marcus fell with her. They sat there together, Marcus cradling her racked body. The kitchen staff stood around, staring dumbly, and he screamed at them to get out. They ran, filled with fear that their young Master might lash out at them in his anger.
‘What has happened? Who did this?’ he demanded again.
Slowly, Annaea’s sobs petered out. ‘Octavius,’ she whispered. ‘He came to me, demanded things of me. I … I told him no, but he became angry. His face, Marcus, it was so full of hatred. He tried … he tried to …’ she began crying again.
Marcus whispered quiet words of comfort until she was calm.
‘When I refused, he hit me. I managed to get away, and I ran straight here.’
‘He will die for this,’ Marcus said. He carried her to their bedroom. Marcus found a guard and told him to stay outside the door and let nobody pass. Then he gathered up his sword and went in search of his friend, Octavius.
In the gym, Mark threw a different sword to the floor and fell to his knees. The memories were too painful; he shut them away. Tears ran down his face, and he scrubbed at them angrily.
Retrieving his sword, he placed it back on the stand and moved over to the other sword. The black sword. He didn’t pick it up, he just stared at it. He knew the blade intimately. He had used it more times than he could count, could feel the weight in his hands – the balance – just by looking at it.
Closing his eyes, he could hear the sound it made as he swung it: a banshee whistle that came from a notch towards the tip of the blade, which no amount of sharpening could remove. The damage had happened on the neck guard of a Jötnar’s armour, somewhere in Norway a long, long time ago. Mark could remember how cold it was that day. He could still smell the crisp air and feel the wooden planks of the bridge beneath his feet. The fjord had been frozen and the branches of the firs on either bank had creaked under the weight of fresh snowfall. Birdsong. There was birdsong until their blades had clashed together.
That had been a hard fight, but he had killed the Jötnar, just as he had killed everything else he went against. He was an engine of death, and the sword was a part of him. He had forged it himself, crafting it from the purest metals, folding it a thousand times.
There was nothing magical about it – it was simply another tool he had created to pursue his vengeance. They died hard. He killed them with silver or fire or decapitation. Separating a head from a body was quick and reliable, and the black sword was sharp and familiar. He killed them: that was his purpose. His eyes snapped open as he came back to the present and the business at hand.
‘Phone: Jason,’ he said.
The connection was made, and Jason picked up. ‘Mr. Jones?’ he asked in confusion. ‘I didn’t expect to hear from you today.’
‘Tell me about the targets,’ Mark said, without preamble.
‘Er, I have a man following them. Just a second …’ The sound of a few keystrokes came through the speaker. ‘Yes, according to the GPS, they are currently in an area in Cheshire … near to Lyme Park. Just let me check the last report.’ There were a few more clicks of a keyboard. ‘Half an hour ago, my operative followed them out to a hill near Lyme Park. Some animals followed them for a while, which he thought was odd, obviously, but he puts it down to them carrying food or some such …’
‘What are they doing?’ Mark interrupted impatiently. He reached out and gently stroked the black sword.
‘According to the last report, they were just waiting. Would you like me to find out what their current status is, Sir?’
‘Yes. Call me back in five minutes. Goodbye, Jason.’
Mark was in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water, when the phone rang again. ‘Go on,’ he snapped when the call connected.
‘Er, you aren’t going to like this, Sir, but they’ve vanished.’
‘What do you mean, “vanished”? You mean your man lost them?’
‘No, I’ve spoken to him in quite a lot of detail about this. They met two more men, and they had a conversation. My man, Zacharias, was too far away to hear anything, but from the way Target One acted, he wasn’t happy with what was said. One of the newcomers walked away down the hill. My man stayed with Targets One and Two, as instructed. Then they walked around the hill a couple of times and just … vanished. Right in front of his eyes. It happened seconds before I phoned him.’
‘God damn it!’ Mark snapped in a rare burst of anger. ‘What about the other one – has he found him?’
‘No. Zacharias is a skilled tracker, but whoever it was left no sign. He disappeared into the woods. I stayed on the line while Zacharias looked for him.’
‘Tell him to wait there until they return.’
‘What if they don’t come back?’
‘Then he can die there from exposure for all I care. Goodbye, Jason.’ The phone went dead. Mark threw his glass across the kitchen, and it smashed against the wall.
Damp and cold didn’t bother her anymore. Neither did the awful darkness, nor the rancid smell of mould and urine. Sarah cupped one arm under her swollen belly and smiled to herself. She was going to be a mum.
The pregnancy had been so swift that she had felt the life growing in her. It had been a wonderful feeling. She was nearing her full term now. Soon the baby would be born. She hummed a happy little lullaby under her breath.
Other sounds filled the room: sobbing and cursing, and the occasional wail. Sarah heard it all but did not let it concern her. More girls had been dragged in here and thrown into ne
ighbouring pits. Soon they would feel the miracle inside of them, and they would be happy too.
As the pregnancy advanced, she had been forced to take off her denim skirt because it was far too tight. The swelling had also pushed her top up around her armpits, and her stomach lay exposed to the air. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was huge now. The baby would be big.
Somewhere at the back of her mind, a part of her was wondering how it had gestated so incredibly quickly – nine months of development in a day. Or how she could possibly give birth to such a massive child. The baby inside her was so big that she was unable to move. Her gigantic belly was now so heavy, it pinned her to the floor. When she ran her hand across the tight, thin flesh, she could feel where the skin had ruptured, and pus was slopping out from the tear wounds.
It didn’t matter, though – she was going to be a mum. That was the important thing. The baby kicked, and she felt the flesh above her bellybutton bulge outwards. The pain was awful, but she bore it with a smile. ‘You’re going to be such a big boy,’ she said quietly to her stomach as she stroked it tenderly.
One of the other girls was moaning close by. She ignored it and began to sing her lullaby again.
Passing through a Fairy-Ring was a simple thing. If you wanted to go to The Tower at Dusk, you went around the Ring nine times, anticlockwise. If you wanted to get to The Tower at Dawn, you went around nine times, clockwise. To get from one Tower to the other, you had to pass back through the world. The only other rule was that the traveller had to go willingly – nobody, fairy or human, could be forced to pass through a Ring. Once, passage had been as safe as taking a stroll through a park. Years before, the Courts had built illusions within the Fairy-Rings. Anybody traversing them saw only the hill, and magical boundaries kept wayfarers to the path. On the ninth circuit a marble archway would appear. Stepping through the arch deposited the traveller safely at The Tower. Now, with the magic dying and the boundaries gone, it was a much riskier affair.
‘This is really stupid,’ Cam said to Dow and Grímnir. Neither of them bothered to answer him. They kept walking. On the second turn, the sky above them was still bright and blue. By the third, it had faded into a muddy brown, and by the fifth, there was only darkness around them. The blackness of the void stretched out infinitely on all sides, as well as above and below them. The Ring was lit by a series of white lights – the mushrooms from the crown of the hill – and they followed them doggedly.
If they stepped off the path between the fifth rotation and the last, they would be lost. It might not have been much of a problem if it weren’t for the tremors. Every now and again the ground shook, and if you weren’t ready, it was easy to lose your balance and fall from the narrow path.
Nobody knew what caused the tremors; the prevailing thought was that the ley-lines that bound the Fairy-Rings to The Towers were slowly being torn apart, like a frayed piece of string being pulled by some unknown force, and that one day the Rings would stop working altogether. It would have been a worrying thought, but by the time that happened, all the fairy folk would be dead anyway.
Once there had been a Ring in Manchester itself – somewhere around the Gartside Street area – but the ravages of modern man, and the necessity of building in a rapidly expanding economy, meant that it had been torn up and built over, around two hundred and fifty years ago. Cam’s father had tried to protect it, apparently, but in the end, he had been unable to stop progress. It was a grim metaphor for the inevitable extinction of the fairy folk. Cam felt a familiar surge of disgust.
On the eighth circuit, Cam began to relax. Then they were through, and Cam stood in another reality.
Golden light shone all around him. The sky above was clear, and a scattering of cotton-bud clouds hung in the air; the vibrant oranges and reds of the rising sun made them glow in the burnished sky.
They were in a clearing surrounded by raw, untouched forest. Massive oaks, with great branches that swept out to brush the heavens, towered around them. Amongst the trees, all manner of bushes and flowers grew in bewildering profusion. Green leaves were everywhere, and the fresh scent of the flowers’ morning perfume hung in the air to tickle at the nose.
Daffodils and bluebells, ferns and thorns, daisies and roses of all colours grew beside each other in healthy abundance. To Cam’s left, a deep but narrow stream gurgled from beneath the trees and curved merrily around the clearing. Two huge white swans glided sedately along it.
The noise of the brook was lost beneath a glorious dawn chorus of birdsong that was almost deafening. Below Cam’s feet, lush grass formed a springy cushion, and the warmth of the place was already sucking the cold moisture from his socks.
A trail laid out by a boundary of pebbles led from the hill, into the forest. Hanging in the path were a hundred fireflies, not yet ready to give in to the burgeoning day. Their dance of pinpoint lights was a ballet of stars, spinning and pirouetting to the music of the songbirds. Dow began walking towards them.
Grímnir raised his face to the dawn sky and inhaled. ‘Ah, can you not feel it, my friend?’ he asked Cam.
‘Feel what?’ the Elf asked.
‘It is welcoming us home. The Tower has missed us.’
‘Is that what it is?’ Cam said dourly as he slapped away an inquisitive bee. ‘I thought I had hay fever.’ They set off after Dow, who had already disappeared into the forest.
They had eaten and then had sex for a second time. Sam lay on the bed watching Annalise mess with the television remote, when somebody knocked on the door again. Without much thought, he stood and went to answer it.
As soon as Sam turned the handle, the door hit him with enough force to send him sprawling onto the plush carpet. Two men surged into the room, one carrying a baseball bat, the other a machete. One of the men kicked Sam savagely in the face. Annalise screamed. Another man walked in and closed the door behind him.
The third man was tall and thin, with a beak of a nose and swarthy skin. Two dark eyes stared down at Sam as if he were an insect. Sam craned his neck and saw the man with the baseball bat – a huge, Slavic-looking thug with close-cropped hair and a blunt scarred face – reach for Annalise.
‘No,’ said the tall man in a sharp European accent. ‘She can go.’ Sam watched as Annalise gratefully pulled her clothing to her and ran out into the corridor naked. The tall man turned his attention back to Sam. ‘Get up,’ he said coldly.
The man with the machete tucked the weapon disconcertingly beneath Sam’s chin and hauled him to his feet by his hair. He moved behind Sam and clamped a meaty forearm around his neck. Then he moved the machete down so that it caressed Sam’s naked testicles.
‘Whoa there,’ Sam gurgled. ‘Watch the goods.’ His voice was light, but anger bubbled up in him. He could smell sweat and halitosis from the man holding him. His eyes quickly scanned the room. The tall man, who wore an immaculately tailored grey business suit with a white shirt and a blood red tie, stood in front of Sam with his narrow back to the door. He could not see Baseball Bat. ‘Who the hell are you people?’ he choked. ‘What do you want?’
‘Who we are is immaterial,’ said Business Suit. ‘What we want is very simple. You fucked with the wrong woman, and I have been ordered to punish you in such a manner that you will never consider fucking with her again.’
Sam’s eyes narrowed. Annalise: the bitch could have told him she was dating a sociopathic Antoine de Caunes. ‘Listen,’ he coughed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking …’
Business Suit nodded, and Machete used his huge knife to nick the flesh of Sam’s scrotum. Sam stopped speaking and went rigid. There was fear in him, but it was not the all-consuming terror he had expected.
Instead, it was a fuel that banked up the fires of rage and hatred, that had been gently swelling in him over the last day and a half. Now, they flared up in a blast of bloodlust. Sam’s eyes narrowed, but that was the only sign of the maelstrom within him.
‘You will not speak, or your punishment will be subs
tantially more painful,’ Business Suit said, unaware of the violent miasma that was spilling from the naked man in front of him. ‘Nod if you understand.’ Sam nodded his head forwards and then brought it back with all the force he could muster.
The back of his head slammed into the bridge of Machete’s nose with a sickening crunch. The knife chopped down into Sam’s thigh, its razor-sharp edge easily cutting through skin and muscle. Sam felt blood spurt from the wound, but something inside him had broken out. He let it have control.
Naked and covered in his own blood, Sam’s face screwed up in a savage parody of his usually gentle features. He threw himself over the groaning figure of Machete and cannoned into Baseball Bat. The man was broader and several stone heavier, but Sam knocked him backwards onto a sofa. Blood covered them both, making Sam’s naked body slick and difficult to hold. At such close quarters the bat was useless. The bigger man dropped it to the floor and tried to catch Sam in a bear hug.
Ignoring the crushing pressure around his chest, Sam latched both hands around Baseball Bat’s throat. He choked him with a strength he hadn’t known he possessed. Baseball Bat’s face went bright red and his mouth opened wide, his swollen tongue lolling out. Sam was just about to finish him off when there was a fantastic blow to the side of his head, and he was catapulted off the sofa and onto a glass coffee table, which shattered with a crash.
Raising a hand to his right temple, he felt hot liquid gushing out. A flap of skin hung down to his ear, and when he pushed at the bone, it grated like a broken eggshell. Getting to his feet, he stared around the room. Baseball Bat was sprawled on the sofa, gasping for breath, and Machete stood near him, still holding the weapon he had used to fracture Sam’s skull. Business Suit still stood at the door, watching the proceedings with narrowed eyes.
Sam glimpsed his reflection in a large mirror set above the sofa, and for a moment his old self surfaced. He was aghast at what he saw.
Immortals' Requiem Page 13
