Jack of Ravens

by Mark Chadbourn

  ‘Who are you sending?’

  ‘It has to be people I can … rely upon. I hoped you would lead the expedition, and that you would join us, too, Mocker.’

  ‘Travel to the Enemy fortress?’ Jerzy whimpered.

  ‘All right,’ Church said, ‘but I want to take Lucia as well – she has some abilities I could use.’

  ‘Agreed. And I will accompany you.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s wise. It could be dangerous—’

  Niamh’s eyes flashed. ‘I will not shirk my responsibilities.’

  Church held up his hands. ‘Okay, you’re the boss. When I’m back on my feet there’s a lot I need to find out, starting with Janus’s role in all this. Why was he trying to suck the Pendragon Spirit out of me? The Army of the Ten Billion Spiders clearly needed me if they were prepared to transport me halfway across Europe to Janus’s temple, and if they managed to keep Veitch at bay, because I tell you, he was ready to slit my throat at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘You must have offended him a great deal, good friend,’ Jerzy said.

  Inwardly, Church winced as he recalled what Veitch had told him on the ship. It set doubts crawling through his mind: would he really be prepared to kill a friend for the sake of Ruth’s love? He couldn’t believe it, but the nagging doubt still wouldn’t leave him.

  As she left, Niamh appeared relieved that Church had agreed to lead the expedition and that also surprised him. Why hadn’t she just ordered him, as she had when she made him visit Eboracum to search for her brother? There were mysteries everywhere he turned.

  As he recovered from his ordeal, Church felt a growing desire to see Ruth again, and to check on her safety and that of Shavi and Laura. And so, a week and a day after his return, he set off for the Court of Peaceful Days with Jerzy in tow, to view his own time through the Wish-Post. But the moment the court appeared in view, Church realised something was wrong. The martial banners that had fluttered over the red-tiled roofs were gone. Everywhere was still.

  The gate was barred with twenty spears forced through the rails to prevent it from opening. A horse skull hung from the lock with the missing banners hanging between its jaws. The constant beat of the war-drum was gone, too, and an uneasy silence lay across the entire court. It appeared deserted.

  Church recalled the court’s soldiers dying by the thousands on the moors near Eboracum, and regretted his own selfish motivation for visiting without a second thought for the tremendous sacrifice they had made.

  Silently, he turned his horse away. He would leave Queen Rhiannon to her mourning. But his unresolved desire to discover what was happening to Shavi, Laura and Ruth cast a long shadow.

  2

  A thin grey haze over London trapped the exhaust fumes and heat in a sweltering stew that had still not dissipated by the time night fell. Ruth’s clothes clung to her as she made her way from the care home to the city centre. The physical discomfort only contributed to her unease. For several nights she had been troubled by a series of dreams that had a strange psychological intensity. They all featured snakes of various kinds, some coiled around a tree whispering words she could never remember when she woke, others as big as trains, rushing across the landscape, becoming rivers before they sank beneath the surface of the earth, where they glowed like blue veins.

  Afterwards she was always left with a tremendous yearning, as if someone close to her had been lost at sea, and every day she waited for a return that never came.

  The Embankment was strangely peaceful. No cabs or buses were on the road, and only the occasional pedestrian hurried by, keen to get home out of the heat. It would have been quicker to take the Tube, but increasingly she found that the presence of too many people set her on edge. Only on her own did she find peace and the space to probe her jumbled thoughts, but finding isolation in London was a task in itself. Everywhere she turned there was someone. Watching me, was always her first instinct, but recently she had decided to take a stand against the creeping paranoia for fear it would inevitably lead to the mental illness that always felt just one step away.

  The haze muffled all sounds from the city, so when an owl hooted from a tree nearby, Ruth jumped as if a gun had been fired. It stared at her with large, intense eyes. She felt something odd tickling at the back of her mind, part memory, part an unnerving sense that it had intelligence. She would have laughed if it had not felt so eerie.

  ‘You going to spend all night looking up into the trees?’ Rourke was waiting for her beneath one of the lights not far from Blackfriars Bridge.

  ‘There’s an owl,’ she said, but when she went to point it out it was gone.

  ‘Enough with the bird-spotting. Are we going to hit the town or not?’ Rourke took her arm before she could answer and guided her towards the Tube.

  The fact that she called him Rourke instead of his first name was just one of the anomalies of their nascent relationship. She had been seeing him socially for five weeks since their random meeting in the pub. A drink here, a meal there, a cinema trip. They had held hands and kissed once, on their last date as he dropped Ruth off at her flat.

  The real anomaly was that she wasn’t wholly sure she liked him. Not that she disliked him, either – her feelings were a little like that foggy night: he passed through her life and left no impression. But he was charming and he always managed to say the right thing. It was a near-miraculous skill. He’d point out her favourite dish on the menu, or suggest they go to see one of her most-loved movies in the late-night screening at the independent cinema. Their conversation almost always seemed to be about things that were close to her heart, which was flattering, but it meant that if she had to admit it, she knew barely anything about him. He was just … there.

  ‘I noticed the strangest thing,’ she said as they reached the top of the stairs leading down into the Tube. ‘Four cars in a row had only one headlight working, and the fifth had none at all.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Rourke replied easily.

  ‘It didn’t feel like it. It was as if it meant something.’ She laughed, embarrassed. ‘That’s silly, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘The human brain is conditioned to see meaning where there isn’t any. We fill in the gaps in reality because we can’t stand chaos or the fact that there is no underlying meaning.’

  ‘No pattern, then?’

  ‘No pattern.’

  On the Tube, Ruth spent the first five minutes of their journey unburdening herself about her job, and wishing she had the time or the energy to consider a career change. But her work sucked everything out of her and left her able to do little more than head home to sleep.

  ‘Good job you’ve got me to brighten things up,’ Rourke said, and she had to admit that was true; in the bleakness that was her life, he at least provided some vibrancy and interest.

  They passed through Leicester Square Station heading towards Tottenham Court Road where they planned to change to the Central Line. Ruth had been briefly wondering why she was incapable of recalling any of her favourite songs when the train ground to a sudden halt and all the lights went out. There was a brief scream and then nervous laughter.

  Ruth fumbled in the dark and found Rourke’s hand. He gave it another reassuring squeeze. Yet she felt even more on edge; her fingertips and toes buzzed, and an odd sensation of apprehension jangled in her belly.

  She freed her fingers to brush a strand of hair from her eyes and as she did so an enormous blue spark leaped from her fingertips to the metal upright at the end of the row of seats. She exclaimed loudly as the flash briefly lit up the entire carriage.

  ‘Ruth? Are you all right?’ Rourke hissed as mutterings ran amongst the passengers.

  As her eyes cleared after the glare she noticed a similar blue light, this time outside the carriage and further along the tunnel. But this light was constant, like a torch. Underground staff working on the train, she guessed. Slowly the light began to move towards her carriage.

  Her app
rehension began to grow. As the light neared she saw it was coming from an old-fashioned lantern with a blue flame flickering inside it. From her perspective, Ruth couldn’t see who was holding the lantern.

  Just a lantern, she thought. An unusual lantern, to be sure, but nothing to concern you.

  ‘Come on – we should move down the carriage.’ Rourke had been watching the light, too, and his face was dark and concerned in the azure glow leaking through the windows.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, but he had found her hand again and was tugging her to her feet.

  They were brought to a halt by the noise of something grating on the outside of the carriage. Ruth’s heart was hammering. Now she could make out the shadowy shape holding the lantern: it was a giant.

  Rourke attempted to pull her away, but Ruth fought to free her hand – she had to see. The figure loomed closer and now she could see a man at least eight feet tall, with a bushy black beard, long, wild hair and burning eyes. He wore what looked like a sackcloth shift fastened at the waist by a broad leather belt. A thong around his left forearm was covered with small hooks, which he occasionally dragged along the carriage. Ruth’s breath caught in her throat.

  ‘Come away!’ Rourke shouted.

  The giant stopped next to Ruth and brought his face down to the glass so he could make eye contact. Ruth was jolted by what she saw there. The blue lantern light flooded the carriage, making shadows dance with every flicker. Now even Rourke was transfixed.

  ‘There you are, little sister. It is so difficult to see you in this dark world.’

  Ruth could hear the giant as clearly as if he was standing next to her.

  He held the lantern forward. ‘This is the last light in the world, and once this is gone only darkness will remain.’

  Ruth felt a surge of panic. Why was he talking to her? What did he want?

  ‘Wake up, little sister. Wake up!’ he continued insistently. ‘This is not the way things were meant to be. You must find yourself quickly … keep the light alive … before it is too late.’ He pressed the fingers of his left hand against the window and the glass changed quality and began to run like oil. Slowly his fingers began to move through it.

  Ruth stepped back into Rourke’s encircling arms.

  ‘We need to get you out of here,’ he whispered in her ear as he began to tug her gently down the aisle. This time she did not resist.

  As she moved away, she saw the giant snap his head to the left. A second later, he withdrew his fingers and he and the blue light began to move back in the direction from which they had come.

  Ruth’s attention was caught instantly by more movement in the tunnel. It appeared as if a thick black liquid was running horizontally along the wall in the direction of the receding light. But it was not a liquid; there was detail in it and too much rapid motion, and that was when Ruth realised she was seeing an army of black spiders rushing from floor to ceiling towards the giant.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ she said. ‘It’s not natural.’

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ Rourke whispered. ‘Just shadows. We need to get you home to rest. You must be a bit strung out if you’re seeing things.’

  Ruth was disoriented and shaken, and nodded queasily, but the image of the giant and the spiders wouldn’t leave her mind.

  3

  ‘I tell you, there’s no point being nice to me – I’m not going to sleep with you.’ Laura DuSantiago was enjoying the hypnotic lights and the way the bass made her stomach tumble. She’d had four vodka and Red Bulls and was letting the music take control.

  ‘I’m not asking you to sleep with me. Just take these.’ Rourke opened his hand to reveal two tabs of E.

  Laura took them and went to pop them in her mouth. Then, for the first time ever, she decided to save them for later. Rourke looked disappointed. ‘It won’t work,’ she said to him with a frosty smile.

  Before he could reply, Laura took the opportunity to dive into a swirl of dancers and dodged through them into one of the numerous tiny rooms that formed a complex around the vast central space of the abandoned warehouse where the rave was taking place.

  The ironic thing was that she’d slept with many people like Rourke before, often for much less than a couple of tabs. There was something about Rourke that always put her off, however desperate she was. But she still took his drugs, and he always had plenty of them on him to keep her happy in her never-ending quest to get caned and forget the life she had inflicted on herself. All day frying burgers; barely enough cash to keep a roof over her head. Free drugs were a godsend.

  They also helped her forget the many irritating dreams she’d been having recently and the odd feeling of being out of sorts, as if she was just a visitor in her own life.

  She ducked through one room after another, knowing Rourke would not be far behind. He was annoying like that, always around, and if not for the drugs she would definitely have told him to stay away.

  One room was filled with a group of people tripping. Laura swore at them and picked her way across the bodies to the next room where a couple were having sex. The room after that was a bare concrete shell with smashed beer bottles in one corner and an area where somebody had once lit a small fire. On the far wall was a piece of jarring graffiti: Look out for the spiders. She’d seen something like it a couple of times across town recently. The Army of the Ten Billion Spiders, one of them had read. She guessed it was a guerrilla publicity campaign for some new band, but she’d never seen any flyers for them performing.

  The familiar tread of boots came from the room behind – Rourke en route to entreat her to take her Es like a good girl. It wasn’t in Laura’s nature to do what she was told, even if it was something she wanted to do. She slipped out of a side door into the night.

  A small yard area was scattered with lumps of broken concrete. Beyond it was a sagging chain-link fence and then the comforting darkness of a wooded area where she could lose herself.

  Before she could take another step, she heard a strange sound, like wires whipping in the wind. The door through which she had just passed was now covered with a dense wall of ivy and bramble. Someone was pressing against it – Rourke, probably – but the greenery held it fast.

  In her confusion she realised her fingers were tingling peculiarly; the skin around the tips was puckered as though they had been too long in water. They gradually grew smooth before her eyes.

  You did this, a voice told her, and though it made no sense, some part of her believed it was true.

  She jogged towards the tree line, turning to look back when she reached the fence. The vegetation was still covering the door, but from her new perspective she could see the bramble curling upwards in the shape of the number 5, too well defined to be random.

  Laura was mesmerised by the figure. In the depths of her, something shifted and answered the call.

  4

  The lights across Avebury were slowly going out as the villagers turned to sleep. Shavi stood outside the pub, inhaling the scents of the Wiltshire countryside and feeling more alive than he ever remembered being. The ancient landscape of the Downs rolled away to the south beneath the vault of a sky sprinkled with a dazzling stream of stars.

  So much had changed in such a short time that he felt as if he was awakening from a deep sleep. When the strange spirit form emerged from the picture on his office desk, he had been bewildered for only a short time. That evening he had mulled over the existence of things beyond the mundane and had come to the conclusion that it made a lot more sense than his life at the offices of Gibson and Layton, Chartered Accountants. When he handed in his resignation the next day to begin his notice period and started to grow his hair longer in preparation for a new lifestyle, he wondered why he had been denying himself for so long.

  Throughout it all, he struggled with the advice of Rourke, the man who had entered his life on the same night as the revelation. Rourke was unassuming and pleasant, a sympathetic listener. Everywhere Shavi went, pub or supe
rmarket or just for a walk in the park, Rourke cropped up with a cheery wave and a line of reassuring chat. He questioned Shavi’s decision to quit his job and became quite intense during subsequent discussions about Shavi changing the direction of his life. The more Shavi grew in tune with his inner self, the more he found Rourke’s presence oppressive, and then negative. It had become a trying task to avoid Rourke and to leave London without the man being aware.

  And so Shavi stood there on the brink of – he hoped – something profound. Long black hair now framed his exquisitely handsome Asian features. His workaday suit had been consigned to a charity shop, replaced by loose-fitting cotton clothes, with sandals instead of the black leather shoes that had always made his soles ache.

  He had listened to music, lit incense and candles, and most of all thought and dreamed. He had reflected intensely on his inner rhythms and the cycles of his subconscious, becoming more complete with each passing day. After that came the dreams of serpents filled with a coruscating but redeeming power. And finally these were overlaid by one single image falling into stark relief: Avebury’s ancient stone circle. It came to him as he drifted off to sleep and was still there when he woke, night after night. It was calling to him. He answered.

  Leaving the main street, Shavi made his way through the cool shadows to where the majority of the remaining standing stones stood in a large grassy expanse, bounded on one side by a steep bank. It was peaceful and still. Shavi let his fingers drift over the surface of the megaliths as he passed, his skin tingling with the contact.

  As he walked he had the vague impression of movement away in the night near a copse of trees. It was gone the moment he registered it. A fox? he thought. Soon after, a shape flitted through a beam of moonlight to hide behind one of the stones, though whether it was man or beast Shavi couldn’t tell. He decided the safest thing to do would be to return to the van to get his torch, but before he could turn around he was hit forcefully and dragged into the lee of one of the megaliths.