‘We still haven’t found the girl.’
Mark pursed his lips at Sergei’s words. ‘Keep trying. What about Autumn?’
‘Not yet.’
Mark changed gear and overtook a BMW. The Corvette’s engine roared as it sped past. Restless and unhappy, Mark had been unable to stay in the house, so he had taken the car and driven towards Manchester. He wanted to be close when Sergei’s team found Sam Autumn. The black sword was on what passed for a back seat.
‘Are there any other addresses where he could be?’
‘We have them all watched.’
‘His bank accounts?’
‘Those too. I will call you as soon as we know something. What do you want to do about the girl when we find her?’
‘Contact me immediately, but just keep her under observation. I want to be there when we bring her in – I can’t do that until I have dealt with Autumn.’
‘Did the portfolio help?’
‘Not really.’ Mark had read through the information Sergei had on Autumn. To all intents and purposes, he was a normal human being. He had been living as a human for decades and had a complete history including school, and more importantly, medical. Everything said he was human. Mark could not understand how Autumn had got away with his subterfuge for so long.
All his previous targets had been shadowy things, living as much off the grid as possible. Autumn seemed to embrace humanity. It was only when he had been attacked and his powers of healing were revealed, that he had shown his true nature.
What was truly disturbing was the timing and the creature’s proximity to the girl. It was too much of a coincidence, and Mark was certain that this was all some elaborate game designed to cause him more pain. The malice of the fairy creatures could not be underestimated – they had proved that to him.
After his first attempt at suicide, Marcus regained consciousness still swinging from the tree. He could only have blacked out for a second, but a figure stood beneath him. He tried to call her name but the rope cut deep into his throat, leaving him unable to speak.
Instead, he reached out a plaintive hand towards her and hope burst in his chest. It was Annaea, standing there without a mark on her, a smile on her face. Marcus struggled to get down. He reached up and attempted to pull himself out of the noose; he was not strong enough, and the pain was enormous.
Annaea watched him for a moment. Something about her was wrong – something in her eyes. As Marcus watched, the edges of her form became hazy and indistinct. It was as if she were covered in a fine dust and a wind had sprung up to blow it away. Tendrils of matter brushed off her, flowing away from her face and body. Marcus swung helplessly from the rope and watched as another form appeared beneath that of his wife.
For a moment, the haze of dust hung in the air next to the woman it had sloughed from. It left a ghostly image hanging in the winter sun. Marcus felt the wrench of heartbreak as he watched that ethereal image of Annaea slowly disappear.
With the Glamour relinquished, Marcus saw the creature that had been masquerading as Annaea. It was the woman from the stone circle – the woman who had called herself the Maiden of Earth and Water. She gestured lazily at the noose and the knot unravelled, pitching Marcus to the ground. Almost immediately, he felt a jarring rasp as the bones reset themselves, and his crushed windpipe crunched back into shape. A brief tingling sensation washed over the flesh of his neck as the rope burns healed.
Marcus stood up and faced the Maiden of Earth and Water. Annaea’s corpse was still propped against the tree, her eyes staring, her greying face shocked. He looked away instantly, the gorge rising at the back of his throat. ‘You made me kill my wife,’ he said, the hatred in his voice almost tangible.
‘I made you do nothing,’ she replied in the beautiful voice Marcus remembered. ‘You could have spoken to Octavius. You could have had him arrested and tried, according to your laws, and in doing so the truth would have become clear. Instead you sought instant retribution.’
‘You tricked me!’ he cried. She just smiled. ‘Why? Why have you done this to me?’
She cocked her head to one side. Her green eyes glimmered. ‘I told you there would be a price. Power always comes with a price. Now you have begun to pay … It is not for you to understand why I ask this price – not yet. Not now. For now, simply understand that your wish has been granted.’
‘Wish? What wish?’
‘For immortality. I think you’ll agree that I kept my promise. Your recent suicide proves that.’
Marcus massaged his neck. It was true, he had heard his neck snap. He had felt death wash over him. Why was he still standing there, breathing and arguing with a crazed fairy woman? ‘I can’t die?’
‘No,’ she said happily. ‘You will live forever, just as you wanted.’
‘I don’t want this! I don’t want to live with what I have done. I don’t want to live without her.’ His voice broke as he spoke.
Tears ran down his cheeks, and misery settled over him like a shroud. He remembered the blood seeping from between Annaea’s lips. He remembered the laughter as they sat beneath the oak he had tried to hang himself from. He remembered her smile, and it shattered his soul. The knowledge that she was gone was a physical blow, a sucker punch that he didn’t think he would ever recover from. A hole bored itself into his heart. It could never be filled.
‘You are so much more than you realise,’ the Maiden of Earth and Water said quietly, contemplatively.
Something in her words cut through his grief. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
She did not answer immediately. When she spoke again, it appeared that she had decided not to answer him. ‘Unfortunately, the price I demand is death.’ Carefully, she explained the full cruelty of the torture she had planned for him, and his screams brought the guards running. By the time they arrived, the Maiden of Earth and Water had disappeared.
‘Mr. Jones?’ The voice snapped him back out of the past.
‘What?’ he demanded briskly.
‘I’m sorry, I thought we had lost the connection.’
‘Once you find her, don’t let the girl out of your sight, Sergei. I will come as soon as Autumn has been put down.’ He cancelled the connection and concentrated on driving.
Cam checked his watch. It was midnight in the real world. Here on The Tower, it was still dawn. Buttery sunlight splashed over the balustrade and through the hundred feet of arches that dominated the eastern wall of the room. Beyond the arches there was a balcony. Cam could see hazy bubbles of cloud floating indolently in front of a broader ice cream curl that diffused the rising sun.
Huge stone tables cluttered the room, each with a granite bench on both sides. He reasoned that this must have once been a banqueting hall, where his ancestors had feasted and cavorted and done all the other things fairies do.
The friezes and carvings along the walls showed forest scenes and beautiful creatures hunting with bows and spears. The floor was a huge mosaic, portraying herds of deer at a distance. In the centre of the room was a massive hearth with a rusting spit thrown across it. The entire room was the purest white, except for the green of the mosaic. The dawn sun glittered off the pale surfaces, casting a weird shine across the room.
This hall was at the edge of The Tower, and as such, sunlight streamed into it. They had kept to the edge so far, lingering in the light, but as soon as they made their way into the interior of The Tower where there were no windows, Cam knew they would be in complete darkness. He shuddered and looked to his companions for encouragement. Grímnir stood by a throne at the end of the room. It was big and white and looked very uncomfortable. ‘This is where she sat when she blessed me for my quest,’ he said. Grímnir didn’t have to raise his deep voice for his words to carry through the still silence, to where Cam was standing across the hall. The big man sounded melancholy – it suited this place.
He did not have to ask who Grímnir meant. The Maiden of Earth and Water’s presence could still be felt, like the scent
of lavender after a warm summer rain. The way the roiling sun hit the edges of the empty hall gave the room a sense of quiet desolation, completely at odds with the tidiness of the place.
It was the quiet, Cam decided, not just in this hall but in the whole Tower. The only sounds were his heavy breathing and the occasional scrape of his boots. The other two made no noise at all. It made his flesh crawl, and he longed for his hip flask of vodka. He had put it down in the armoury and forgotten to pick it back up again. Cam wished they were back there now.
As soon as they had entered the armoury, Dow had removed his thick wet-weather coat. Beneath it, he wore a white vest, which left his lean muscular arms bare and his hard pectorals clearly defined. Cam thought he looked a bit of a ponce – like a young kid, overly proud of his physique. Then he tugged on a pair of heavy steel gauntlets, with knuckles that were edged with nasty-looking barbed spikes. Dow stretched his hands in the gloves, and they glinted silver and wicked. Black leather, sullen and dark like an insect’s carapace, swallowed the light between the metal plates. With those vicious things encasing his hands, Dow seemed a lot less like the fifth wheel in a manufactured boy band.
Grímnir removed the expensive leather jacket and t-shirt that Cam had stolen for him and casually dropped them to the floor, causing Cam a moment of irritation. Grímnir picked up a leather jerkin, big enough to fit over his enormous frame. His huge arms were bare and so were the writhing tattoos that covered his body. He kept the jeans, but removed his trainers and pulled on a pair of leather boots in their place. Then he spent several minutes looking for a sheath that was roughly the same shape and size as the chainsaw. He found a single-bladed battleaxe with a crescent moon edge and pulled it out of its protective covering.
The chainsaw blade settled into it easily, but the motor was too heavy to be supported. After a bit of messing about, Grímnir rigged a strap and buckle arrangement that supported the chainsaw satisfactorily. It was too cumbersome to go on his back, so he strapped it to his left hip.
Cam didn’t bother changing out of his trainers and jeans. He took off his jacket – there was no need for one here – which left his lithe frame covered only by a black t-shirt with a picture of the TARDIS on the front. Feeling exposed, Cam picked up a light but incredibly strong chain mail shirt. After a moment, he strapped some steel thigh guards on as well. Then he picked up a huge double-headed axe and swung it around a couple of times.
Deciding that it was too big, he moved over to another rack and found a straight sword that fit his hand perfectly. The hilt was plain and unadorned as was the wooden sheath. Cam liked its simplicity. He slung it over his back. He then went looking for some gauntlets like the ones Dow had, but he was disappointed.
As the others got kitted out, Cam wandered through a door at the end of the room. His eyes lit up when he saw what was on the other side. Guns. Cam moved over to a table of lethal-looking weapons and picked one up.
‘Shotguns,’ Dow said from behind him. Cam turned around, cradling the matte black stock.
‘I thought the Courts frowned on these things,’ Cam said as he traced a finger up the thirty-inch barrel.
‘Personally, I do not trust a weapon that can run out of ammunition.’ Dow sniffed. ‘Besides, they are inelegant.’
Cam pumped the empty breach, enjoying the evil snick-snick noise it made. ‘So why are they here?’
‘When The Transmogrification occurred, we needed weapons that could kill from a distance. These are the only ones that proved at all effective. Still, each round had to remove an enemy’s head completely, and we are not good with these … objects. We tried flamethrowers, but in close confines they proved a liability. The weapons of man are not for us: swords and decent armour are much more effective.’
‘Can I take this?’
Dow shrugged as if he didn’t care. ‘It’s a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. It is just over fifty inches long and weighs three point six kilograms. As far as I’m concerned, it’s dead weight, but you are the one who will have to carry it.’
‘Where’re the shells?’
Dow showed him where the ammunition was stored and how to load and fire the gun. Cam packed eighty shells into a shoulder bag that reminded him of the one Indiana Jones carried. ‘Silver twelve-gauge,’ Dow stated as Cam counted them out. He also loaded the Remington with eight rounds, giving him eighty-eight rounds in all. Another sheath went across his back over the sword. Cam slotted the firearm home; he felt much more confident.
‘You know a lot about these things, considering you don’t like them,’ he said to Dow when the shotgun was secure.
‘It is a weapon,’ Dow said, as if that explained everything.
Once they were equipped and Cam had stowed a big, sturdy-looking flashlight, spare batteries, and his share of field rations, they followed Dow through a series of rooms where Elves worked and talked quietly. These were not the first signs of life they had seen – when they traversed the various mezzanine levels to get to the armoury, the travellers spied slim men and women working at desks or standing at their doorways. The residents watched them pass with expressionless eyes. Cam stared at the Elf women. He had forgotten how beautiful they were: tall and lithe, with full breasts and perfect features. He found himself gulping a couple of times when he gazed at their ageless faces.
The ground floor, beyond the entrance hall, was the exclusive domain of fighting men and women. Whereas on the mezzanine levels the staid robes of scholars were predominant, down there were the armour and weapons of a guard unit. Cam was not so alienated from The Tower at Dawn that he did not know its recent history. He was born sixty-five years after the horror of The Transmogrification, and remembered the stories he heard as he grew up. Don’t go down below, his elders had warned him; don’t go down below, or the Twisted will get you.
As they had prepared to go in search of the Maiden of Earth and Water, Creachmhaoil told them that the first ten levels were a no man’s land. Cam had expected them to be deserted, and so they proved to be. It took hours of cautious movement to traverse those levels, searching for booby traps lain long ago by the retreating Elves and scouting silently for any stray monsters. Now they stood eleven floors down, in the domain of the horror. Cam looked around nervously and squeezed the shotgun he had acquired.
‘What are these Twisted?’ Grímnir asked from where he stood, staring at the throne.
‘You know, the Twisted … ORCs!’ Cam blurted.
‘I think that Grímnir was … absent during The Transmogrification,’ Dow supplied wryly.
‘Oh, right,’ Cam said. Absent, he thought. What the Elf had meant was ‘dead’.
‘The word “Twisted” is a recent colloquialism,’ Dow continued. ‘The official term is ORC. These creatures are the product of the worst kind of necromancy.’
‘Occultly-Reanimated Corpse … ORC, you see?’ Cam asked.
‘Actually, the name derives from Orcus, the Roman god of death. The acronym is a recent affectation.’
‘Potato, tomato, whatever.’
‘They were of the Court, once,’ Dow said quietly. ‘They were my comrades. There have always been zombies – voodoo killing machines – but these are different. Something happened, nobody knows what, and they changed. A bite was enough to kill a loved one and turn them into a feral cannibal within twelve hours. Twelve hours. If somebody was injured – bitten, scratched – twelve hours was the longest they could hope for. Often, they died sooner than that. Then they changed. As soon as they died, they came back. If they died straight away, The Transmogrification took them instantly. I saw friends mauled to death … and get back up within seconds. But they weren’t my friends anymore. They were empty. Hungry ghosts. Monsters. It was bloody chaos; brother turning on brother, mother on child, husband on wife.
‘Eventually, the remnants of the Elves and Jötnar rallied and pushed them back into the lower levels. At the end, only a fraction of the Seelie Court survived. But there are still millions of ORCs left down there
. They are very difficult to kill. They don’t feel pain, nor do they fight with any honour. They come on until you cut them down, and then they still come. They are terrible enemies. The most worrying thing is that one bite will render you as vicious and insensible as them. It is a fate worse than death.’
‘What of silver?’
‘It affects them as us, but again, they don’t feel the pain. They just keep coming. They are vulnerable to fire. It will kill them. Brain trauma or decapitation too – it’s the only way to be sure.’
‘What caused this?’ Grímnir asked.
‘Nobody knows. One moment The Tower was at peace, the next, a wave of violence ran through it.’
‘Like a zombie movie,’ Cam added. ‘Just like a zombie movie. I bet you a hundred quid there was a single point of origin,’ he added sagely.
‘Nonsense. More likely it was an attack by the Unseelie Court – some kind of magic we had never seen before.’ Dow sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter. It wiped us out. The Twisted live below, we live above. We aren’t strong enough to exterminate them, they aren’t organised enough to overwhelm us. It’s a stalemate.’
‘What of the Maiden of Earth and Water?’ Grímnir asked.
‘She came down here searching for answers. She never came back.’
‘She’s probably dead,’ Cam said.
Grímnir actually laughed. ‘She is a god. She is vulnerable, certainly, but I do not think she can be killed.’
‘You’ve never seen an ORC,’ Cam said sulkily.
‘Neither have you, boy,’ Dow snapped. ‘No, she isn’t dead. But she is missing.’
‘We will find her,’ Grímnir said with absolute certainty.
‘Have you any idea how big this place is?’ Cam asked.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then how can you expect us to find her? I don’t even know what we’re doing down here.’
‘We will find her,’ Grímnir said again. Cam didn’t bother to argue.
‘We won’t if we stay here bickering.’ Dow took another look around the hall. The fresh sunlight lit up his face, turning his long white hair a deep vermilion and causing his green eyes to glitter. There, facing the light, he looked truly immortal. Cam envied him his poise. Compared to Dow, Cam felt like a child. ‘From here, we leave the circumference and with it, the light. It’s time to move into darkness.’
Immortals' Requiem Page 17
