She took a last, yearning look at the Wildwood and all its living things and prepared to travel for the final time. She heard Kate’s voice in her head. Help! Somebody help me!
One of the Hunter’s creatures, with a coat the colour of clay and huge yellow fangs, was ready to spring at her as she tried to keep it at bay while her small brother ran pell-mell for the house.
Erda needed no time to think. She stretched out to where Kate was and enveloped her and allowed as much power as was safe to flow into her. Enough at least to defeat this thing, she thought, but there was no time to do more. The Lords were coming.
She withdrew and sent herself along the arrow of her own thoughts to the Heart of the Earth.
***
David turned every lock on the front door as Kate and Ben picked themselves off the floor. Ben was crying noisily.
“I want to go back to school. That dog tried to eat me!”
Although she was absolutely white, Kate sounded quite calm. “Well, you can’t go out with that horrible stray dog around, can you? We’ll have to wait for someone to catch it. There’s lots of chocolate and biscuits in the kitchen. Do you want some while we wait?”
Ben’s cries subsided to a snuffle. “Yes. Chocolate. Where is it?”
Face to face with David over Ben’s head, Kate rolled her eyes and managed a smile. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
They disappeared into the kitchen and after a short pause, Kate emerged alone.
“We’re just going upstairs for a minute,” she called to Ben and they went up to the room from which David had been keeping watch.
From the window they looked down through the gritty air to the shapes that were emerging from the vortices of dust.
“What are they?” breathed Kate.
“Chaos creatures, I suppose …”
Out of the dust came creatures that were almost like hounds, and great hunting cats striped like silk, and things that flew, but were not birds.
There were ten altogether, including the one that Kate had already faced, dark blood still dripping from its torn ear. So far they flew and prowled aimlessly, not yet focused on the house or its occupants.
“Do you think this is all?”
“I hope so, but I doubt it, don’t you? There’s no way they could get inside. The shutters would keep them out.”
“I’d better go down and see how Ben is.”
They closed the shutters in this room too before they went out.
“Kate – something happened to you back there – when you hit the dog-thing. You’re … different. What happened?”
She paused, halfway down the stairs.
“I don’t know exactly. It was like … you know if you trip and nearly fall but you don’t? There’s that sort of whoosh goes through you; a prickling, like electricity.” David nodded. “It was like that, but more so; and it’s still there.” She held her hands out in front of her face. “Like a tingling in my fingers.”
“Some sort of power,” said David. “It must be. It made that thing stop and think anyway. Power from inside you; from the Light.”
Kate was silent as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Kate?”
She turned back to him.
“It must be from the Light: it helped you save Ben, didn’t it?”
She smiled. “Yes. Yes it did.”
Ben had forgotten his fears and was munching his way through a bar of chocolate. “What’s the adventure going to be?”
“Well …” Kate thought fast, “We have to guard the house from some of our friends who’re pretending to be baddies.”
Ben curled his lip. “That’s not an adventure. That’s just stupid.”
“Wait and see,” said David. “They’ve got to try to scare us into giving up and letting them in,” he went on, inventing madly, “and they’ve got one of these new virtual reality projectors – you must have seen the adverts on TV?” Ben nodded, open-mouthed. “They’re making up really scary things with it and trying to convince us they’re real.”
“Wow! When do they start?”
“They already did,” chimed in Kate, warming to the theme. “All that stuff on the way back from school – that was them.”
Ben narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Why were you frightened then, if it wasn’t real?”
“I was pretending, so they’d think it was going to be easy,” she replied triumphantly. “Come on, let’s go upstairs and have a look.”
As Ben eagerly led the way, Kate whispered to David, “How did you come up with that?”
David gave a quick grin. “Dad’s always telling me I read too much science fiction. I knew it would come in useful sometime.”
They opened the shutters a little and peered out. It was dim as twilight outside and in the murk they could see that there were more beasts than there had been before. There seemed to be six flying and at least a dozen on the ground, still moving in a disordered way, but all close to the house, though so far they seemed unwilling, or unable, to cross the boundary of the garden.
“We should check the back,” said David.
“Those are good,” said Ben approvingly. “They almost look real.”
They went up to Mr Flowerdew’s study and cautiously unshuttered the window. Apart from the colour of the air there seemed nothing out of the ordinary at the moment.
“Now what?” asked Kate.
“We wait, I suppose. Let’s go back to the front and keep watch.”
***
The Heart of the Earth burned with a steady, green-white fire, making no sound, consuming no fuel. Erda stared at it, the flames reflected from her eyes and from the glittering crystals in the walls of the cave. Constantly now, she had to fight to contain the power building up inside her. Soon it would become impossible; even now it bled constantly from her a little at a time, and she knew that the Lords fed on it. She could feel them trying to force a way through; soon they would have enough strength. She heard Morgan call her name and stepped out of the cave into the sunlight.
He had run more or less all the way and was breathing hard as he called her, unsure whether he was in time to stop her. His relief when she stepped out of the cave almost brought him to his knees.
“I thought I was too late,” he gasped. “Don’t do it Erda. Come back to the house with me and you can still escape.”
“I cannot.”
“Yes you can.” He paused to catch his breath. “When I found you I wanted to trap you into accepting this fate. I wanted you to merge with the Heart of the Earth and become the soul of these Worlds. I didn’t know … I didn’t even think about you. I thought it was enough that I loved the Wildwood and the other Worlds. I wanted so much to save them; but even to do that, this price is too high.”
In the background, at the edge of hearing, was a grinding noise, the sound of the Lords breaking down the barriers between the Worlds.
“I don’t want to trap you into doing this. There is still time. Go now and you can be free of all of us.”
A blast of cold air hit them like a shout and now, on the chill air, there were harsh voices.
“Go!” he shouted over the rising storm of noise.
THE STARDREAMER
In the short time that David, Kate and Ben had been in the study, things had changed. The beasts still prowled below, but now they pressed against the iron fence at the edge of the garden, their eyes constantly on the house. Beyond them, other figures began to shape themselves and step from the air.
It was hard to say what exactly they were, for they flickered, like images on a film being run at the wrong speed. Some were more or less human, but others were like the jumbled remains of animals and plants, trees and rocks and fog … nightmare figures held together by willpower alone.
Kate choked back a sound in her throat as she saw Ben stare, wide-eyed, at the emerging horrors below.
“Now those are good,” he said approvingly as Kate and David stared at him, astonished. Evidently they’d been m
ore convincing than they’d thought.
“We should check the back again,” said Kate.
They closed and locked the shutters and went back to the study. This time, as they unshuttered the window, something swooped past only a few feet away and they jumped back with a mutual gasp. Ben gave a nervous laugh.
David peered cautiously round the edge of the shutter. “There’s three of them sitting on the garden wall.”
Kate looked and as she did the three flying creatures spread leathery wings one after the other and crawled up the air towards them. They slammed the shutters closed again.
As Kate looked at David’s pale, sweaty face – much like her own, she supposed – they heard a noise from above them, from the roof; the sound of something heavy struggling to find a foothold on the steeply sloping slates, claws skidding.
They stared upwards, mesmerised. There was a pause, then a loud snapping sound, then another.
“What’s that?” Kate whispered.
“It sounds as though they’re breaking the slates,” said David, his gaze fixed on the ceiling. “That would let them into the house.”
“How can we stop them?”
“I’ve got no idea.”
In unspoken agreement, they retreated down the stairs to the hall. As they got to the foot of the steps, a terrible noise started up outside, all the beasts howling and crying out and behind it a wailing and grinding from the other figures.
In the hall, the grandfather clock chimed once and began to tick.
***
“Go while you can,” Morgan had shouted over the torrent of sound. Erda shaped herself into a handful of dust and was gone in a swirl of air. Alone, Morgan turned to face the wrath of the Lords of Chaos.
They stepped through the splintering air: Queen of Darkness, Lightning King and Hunter. It seemed to Morgan that all the noise drained out of the world as they watched him.
It was the Queen who finally broke the insupportable silence. She took a step towards him, gowned in the immeasurably dense blue of a winter dusk, diamonds wound around her throat and in her hair.
“So Morgan, we see what you truly are. A traitor, forsworn – doubly forsworn, for you have served neither us nor the Stardreamer. I only wonder that she has not struck you down herself.” The Queen looked about her. “Where is she? She has not gone into the fire. Where have you hidden her?”
“She is gone. Safe from all of you – all of us; from the Lords and the Guardians and from me.”
“You let her go?”
“Yes.”
The Queen laughed; an awful sound. “So you have found a third way to be forsworn; the Stardreamer, the Lords and now the Worlds as well. You are remarkable, Morgan.”
Morgan kept silent, for he could feel that Erda was still close by.
“But she has not yet gone, has she Morgan?” the Lightning King asked. “You feel her presence, as we do.”
Morgan said nothing. There was nothing he could deny. He was just what the Queen had said; forsworn. He had tried to betray Erda and had finished by betraying all the Worlds.
He knew that death awaited him here, on this little patch of dry grass. He would not try to evade it. How could he? All that remained to do, all that could redeem the smallest part of what he had done to everything he loved, was to give Erda a little more time to escape. He understood that it could not be long.
The sun was up and the air was full of birdsong. After all, this would not be too bad a place to make an end of things.
He brought his bow round from his back, slowly and deliberately, nocked an arrow and aimed at the place where the Queen’s heart should be. She smiled and he let the arrow fly.
A bolt of lightning like a spear snapped the arrow in mid-flight and shattered his bow into a dozen pieces, throwing him off his feet and slamming him back against the rock wall at the mouth of the cave.
The Lightning King smiled a wolf-smile of pleasure at his shot.
Morgan shook his head to try and clear it as he sat up, wiping blood from his face where one of the shards of his bow had laid his cheek open. He looked into the beautiful, deadly face of the Queen of Darkness and watched her pluck a jewelled pin from her hair and breathe on it. It rose from her hand like some elegant insect and flew towards him.
“How could you be so foolish as to think that you could stand against us? See that you die well at least.”
***
They stared at the grandfather clock for a moment, until a new sound took their attention.
“Ben? Ben I know you’re in there. What’s going on? Let me in.”
“Mum?” Ben ran for the door. David grabbed him and held him, squirming. Kate looked out of the spy hole in the front door. Outside the door stood her mother. Most of the Chaos beasts were clustered beyond the fence, but two or three had braved the garden boundary and were picking their way towards the house.
Her mother was outside, in danger, calling Ben.
“Quick, Kate, let her in,” Ben wailed.
Kate backed away from the door a little.
“No Ben, she’s part of the pretend too. Think about it – Mum doesn’t know you’re here. How could she?”
David’s father’s voice was next, angry and imploring by turns. David stood beside the grandfather clock as though its ticking could drown out the rest of the sound, shaking his head.
Kate risked another look through the spy hole. The thing that wore her mother’s face stared back, looking straight at her, while behind her and around her the beasts tore at the garden and began to push blindly at the walls of the house itself.
Suddenly her mother took a swift step forward, so that all Kate could see was an eye staring back at her from the other side of the door. Kate shot backwards and crashed into David, knocking him to the floor.
Ben stared at them. “Why are you both so scared if you know this is just a game?” From upstairs came the sound of breaking slates. “It is just a game, isn’t it? Kate?”
But Kate wasn’t listening any more. She was staring at the door as the letterbox was pushed open very slowly. A hand slid through, slowly, fingers feeling the way, and turned and moved towards the locks, the arm that supported it bending in such an un-natural way that Kate thought she was going to be sick.
Beside her, David scrambled to his feet then stood rooted with horror as the crawling hand found and turned the first lock.
***
Morgan got to his feet as the jewelled dart flew towards him. He pulled out his knife and tried to cut it down before it reached him, but it was much too fast, dodging the blade as though it was a living thing and striking him in the left side of his chest, the force spinning him round as he fell to his knees.
The dart burned like fire in his flesh, but even as he reached to pull it out, it melted away as though it had been made of ice. The wound though, was all too real, blood welling from it frighteningly fast. There would not be much more time for him.
The Hunter raised his terrible head, scenting blood.
***
Hanging as a drop of dew on the tip of a beech leaf high above, Erda watched the confrontation between Morgan and the Lords of Chaos.
It was growing more difficult to prevent the power bursting free. Below her she could sense it pulsing in the Lords of Chaos, could feel the assault on the house in Kate and David’s world increasing in ferocity.
Betrayed. Forsworn.
The words drifted up to her and crawled into her head. She already knew what Morgan had intended when he first met her. He had been prepared to use her to save the Worlds because he loved them. He loved them; and yet he had drawn back and told her what he had planned, so that she would leave and be safe, because he loved her too.
And with that thought, she saw everything and understood everything and all the words in her head made sense at last and power blossomed within her like a flame.
She was aware of everything in all the Worlds in one incredible shock of knowledge: the stones, the leaves, the black dee
r in the Wildwood, Tisian staring into her fire, Kate and David in the house at the still centre of a storm of noise; and above all, Morgan. She looked down on the scene below and saw the Lightning King’s spear fly and knew, for the first time, fear, and anger.
She dropped from the leaf to the ground below.
***
As the Hunter approached, Morgan struggled to get to his feet, but couldn’t do it. On his hands and knees he waited for the end. The Hunter drew a long knife with a blade curved like a sickle, so black it was like a gash in the universe. He fingered it thoughtfully as he looked at Morgan. He spoke in a voice as cold as bones.
“I had hoped you would prove stronger, my son. You have disappointed me.”
The Traveller appearing in the doorway of the hut …
“All my life I have worked to escape my heritage from you. I gave my life to the Light long ago.”
The Hunter spat in contempt and moved slowly towards Morgan, owl-eyes unblinking. Morgan tried to find strength from somewhere to fend him off, but it was beyond him and the Hunter caught him by the hair and threw him to the ground on his back. He set one foot on Morgan’s right arm to pin him there and knelt over him. For a few seconds they stared into each other’s faces and Morgan could feel the Hunter’s hot breath, then he looked down at the knife and poised it above Morgan’s chest, ready to cut out his heart.
***
As Kate and David stood frozen with fear, a small figure darted past them, yelling “Get out! Get out!” and Ben was at the front door before they could stop him, bringing Gordon’s second-best putter crashing down on the ghastly arm. There was a shriek and a noise like tearing cloth as it hit and the arm broke off and fell to the floor, turning back as it did so to a shower of dust and sifting down through the cracks between the floorboards.
Kate dragged Ben away from the door and together the three of them pushed the hall table against it to block the letterbox, then retreated to the bottom of the stairs.
Now the noise of attack came from all around them: blows to the roof and the shuttered windows and the walls, and most of all to the door. They could see it shaking. They clung to each other amid the buffeting noise and swirls of hot wind that rose from nowhere, waiting for the inevitable sound of splintering wood as Chaos broke down their world.
Chaos Quest Page 14
