Destroyer of Worlds

7

In the Grim Lands there was little to mark the passage of time. Sometimes the quality of light would be a shade darker, sometimes it would have a silvery glint, as though night and day were coming and going beyond the constantly rolling mists. Everywhere was grey, all the time. It left the spirits dampened, and gradually leached the energy from both Mallory and Caitlin. Each incline became a little harder to climb, each graveyard navigated with an increasing number of rest stops, until they started to fear that the mood of the place would eventually bring a critical lethargy that would leave them drifting and aimless like the land's regular inhabitants.

Sitting on the dusty gravel with her back to a tomb marked with the legend Et In Arcadia Ego, Caitlin examined the flickering blue flame of the Wayfinder and tried to ignore the feeling that if she closed her eyes she would sleep for ever.

'I wonder if Hal is aware of what's happening,' she mused.

Sitting beneath a carved skull on an adjoining tomb, Mallory lazily drew a cross in the dust with the heel of his boot. 'That was quite a sacrifice he made. Imagine being a part of the Blue Fire — a part of everything there is and was — and then giving it all up to lock yourself in that little lantern to guide our way. It must have been like being God, and then quitting to become an ant.'

'You wouldn't expect anything less. He's always been one of us… of our Five.' She winced and corrected herself: 'Our Four. I wish we'd got a chance to know him better.'

'It's even more of a sacrifice than that,' Mallory continued. 'He can be destroyed while he's in the Wayfinder. He'd escaped from death, and now he's put himself back in the game. That's brave.'

The flame continued to point the way across the last few yards of the graveyard and out into the wilderness beyond, where Callow was on reconnaissance.

'Does this place make you think of your husband and boy?' Mallory asked.

'I've never stopped thinking of them. Not in a morbid way. I remember the good times, and what they meant to me, and I know we're going to be together again some day. Have you ever lost someone you love?'

'Yeah.' He paused before realising, 'I just don't know who.'

The thought clearly troubled him so much that Caitlin didn't press. Chewing on his lip absently, he slipped back into a deep reflection.

In the silence that followed, Caitlin became aware of the presence of her other selves deep in the back of her head. Their whispering always ebbed and flowed like the pulse of her blood, but now she could hear Brigid's voice growing more insistent. Listening intently, she absently spoke the words the second they came to her: 'He's coming! Run!'

Mallory started. 'Who's coming?'

'I… I don't know.'

They were surprised to see Callow watching them from the shelter of a nearby mausoleum. 'How long have you been there?' Mallory snapped.

'No time for that now,' Callow replied obsequiously. 'Listen carefully and I think you'll hear to whom the little miss is referring.'

Dimly, the scrape of feet on gravel filtered through the blanketing mist. Moving quickly and silently, Mallory and Caitlin kept low, using the tombs and mausoleums for cover. As the mist shifted across a wide expanse of statuary, they saw the Hortha stalking steadily in their direction.

'What does it take to stop him?' Mallory said incredulously.

'He doesn't look like he's been hurt at all. Yet that thing in the mausoleum was…' Caitlin's words dried up as she considered the implications of her notion. 'How are we going to stop him, Mallory?'

'There's no point thinking about it now. We just need to keep a few steps ahead of him.'

'But we'll have to rest some time.'

'Maybe we'll think up a brilliant idea on the way.'

Returning silently to Callow, they motioned for him to follow as they left the graveyard behind, heading down the rough shale into a bleak landscape of boulders and stones that reminded them of photos they'd seen of the surface of Mars.

After what they estimated to have been an hour, but may only have been a quarter of that time, the going became harder with sheets of shattered slate underfoot that they had to travel over carefully to avoid turning an ankle or cutting themselves on the razor-sharp edges.

This sloped down to an area of towering rock formations that merged until they were moving along the bottom of a deep chasm over large fallen rocks. Through the mist, they could just make out holes cut into the walls above their heads — more tombs, Mallory guessed.

Caitlin thought she glimpsed a head looking down at them out of one of the holes, but the mist closed over it before she was sure. A little further on she definitely did see a figure pulling itself out of one of the dark spaces to watch them pass.

'Yeah, I see them too,' Mallory whispered to her before she could warn him.

'The dead are an inquisitive bunch,' Callow said. 'They half-remember what it was like to be alive and always want to recall more.' He glanced at the soaring rock walls. 'Probably best not to get caught by them down here. They're not at all like me — witty, vivacious company. They can be a little jealous of what you have, and they have lost.'

'How long till we get out of here, then?' Mallory asked sharply.

'Only forwards, just a little way now. If we are lucky,' he added.

'I'm starting to question your value as a guide,' Mallory said.

A thud resonated behind them, and another: the dead dropping to the rocks from their resting places. Soon the steady tramp of feet followed them. Now whenever Caitlin glanced up she saw the grey, desiccated bodies of the dead levering themselves out of their holes on skeletal arms, some plummeting directly down, others climbing slowly and steadily on near-invisible handholds.

'Let's pick up the pace,' Mallory said.

By then the footsteps behind them suggested a small crowd. Others loomed out of the mists on either side as they passed, their hands grasping for the mercurial life. Men, women, children, some naked, others in rags or shrouds or worm-eaten funeral suits. Caitlin was most disturbed by their gaze, heavy, unblinking, not intelligent, but not stupid either — they were the eyes of animals, with instincts for survival, some quicker than others.

She started to wonder about the mythology of the place. Did everyone pass through when they died? The dead she saw around her didn't appear pleasant. Was this instead some kind of purgatory? If so, what did that imply for a system of judgement, for God? The religious teachings of her childhood came back, haunting her with the mystery, troubling her as much as they comforted her. Could Grant and Liam be somewhere in this world? If not, where were they?

As the dead began to crowd along the walls on either side of the chasm, Caitlin grew more anxious. They had the look of wary dogs about them, docile to all appearances but capable of turning savage at any moment.

Mallory kept them moving at a rapid pace, but increasingly she felt hands on her clothes, fingers flexing as if preparing to grab, the dry-wood touch of dead skin brushing her arms. Goosebumps ran up her back. The path between the rows of the dead was growing narrower as they drew in on either side.

And what then? Would they move in on all sides, driving those fingers through her pink skin to investigate the mysteries that lay beneath?

One woman with lank brown hair and a head that lolled onto her chest lunged suddenly and grabbed Caitlin's wrist, but the grip was weak and she shook it off easily. Yet it was a warning sign.

'Mallory, I think we have a problem,' she said.

'How much further, Callow?' Mallory barked.

'Oh, not far now. A hundred yards, perhaps,' Callow said without looking back. Caitlin wondered why that was: he usually underpinned every line with a studied expression demanding sympathy.

Pushing through a flurry of mist, they came up hard against a dead end. Trapped in a cleft as the rock walls converged, Caitlin looked back fearfully at the dead slowly advancing.

'Oh dear,' Callow said. 'I appear to have missed a turning.'

'You idiot.' Mallory faced the shambling figures. As he drew Llyrwyn, they stopped and stared dumbly at the faint blues flames sputtering and fizzing along the blade.

'Back off,' Mallory said. 'Is there any point talking to them?'

'Oh, yes,' Callow replied. 'They hear. They understand, though it might take a while for their long-dulled senses to flicker into life. See, here.' Callow edged behind Caitlin and shouted, 'Look at them, pink and alive! They make a mockery of you! Stop them!'

Mallory rounded on Callow, but by then he had one arm around Caitlin's throat and a razor blade plucked from the turn-up of his dirty trousers gripped between the fingers of his other hand.

Deep in her head, Caitlin felt the Morrigan unfurl her wings and a surge of darkness sweep forwards. Caitlin elbowed Callow in his gut. He let out a pained gasp of air, but instantly slashed her cheek with the razor and then pressed it to her jugular.

Caitlin cried out as blood washed down from the wound, but Callow only dug the razor deeper. 'You'll be dead before you can release what's inside you,' he whispered in her ear. 'I cut one of your kind before, and I am quite prepared to do so again. My shiny friend here can conduct a nice dance across your face and still slit that white throat before you have time to move. You will die ugly, and that thought will eat away at you in this dismal afterlife.'

'Let her go.' Mallory ignored the dead gathering at his back. He raised the sword towards Callow's throat.

'Oh, the bravado of the heroic man. So false. What can you do? I am already dead. Make me more dead? It is the fault of your sickening brotherhood that I am here, and I have nurtured the desire for the dish best served cold for a long, long time. Give me the lantern.'

'Don't, Mallory!' Caitlin cried. She saw him waver. 'You need it to carry on. You don't need me.'

'Oh, but he does,' Callow said slyly. 'I've seen it in his eyes as we journeyed together, knights of the road, shoulder to shoulder. He loves you. Perhaps not with the romance of a sexual partner, but with the deeper love of a kindred spirit, a friend you would support to the end. And this, most certainly, is the end.'

'Mallory, no!' Caitlin could now see in his eyes the same thing as Callow, and she recognised the same rich depth of feeling in herself. A friend to the end. A deep and complex love. Why did that have to be the weapon that ruined them?

Mallory slowly held out the Wayfinder for Callow to snatch with his free hand. 'My little ears hear all sorts of things,' he said. 'About the genie inside this thing, for one. A vulnerable genie, whose destruction would strike to the heart of the sickening Brothers and Sisters of Dragons.'

Caitlin winced at the devastation in Mallory's face. In a cold, murderous tone, Mallory said: 'If you hurt him I'll find some way to make you suffer.'

'Of course you will.' He smiled mockingly. 'Now, I know how sly you people are, and I see that pigsticker you're waving around, so…' With a flourish, he slashed Caitlin again, missing the vein more by accident than design, but cutting her deeply enough that the blood gushed. Thrusting her towards Mallory, he gripped the handle of the lantern between his teeth and leaped up the wall, clutching on to barely visible handholds before propelling himself through a tunnel that lay half-hidden in the mists just above their heads.

Catching Caitlin in his arms, Mallory desperately tried to staunch the flow of blood. 'Not again,' he muttered, without really knowing why.

The dead shuffled forwards, their eyes gleaming at the sight of Caitlin's lifeblood. Mallory levelled Llyrwyn at them. 'I'll cut you to pieces,' he said, trying to keep the emotion from his voice. 'Do you understand that? I'll cut you to pieces!'

'I understand.'

The voice echoed from further along the floor of the chasm, though Mallory knew who it was before the mist unfurled. A wall of the dead separated the two of them, but the Hortha simply grabbed the one nearest to him, extended his finger of blackthorn and rammed it through the temple into whatever remained of the brain. The dead man slumped to his knees, and the Hortha moved on to the next.

Caitlin found herself slipping to the edge of consciousness as the Morrigan fell back into the dark, but she could see Mallory fighting with his dilemma: the Hortha was unbeatable, but too close for them to make an adequate escape in her severely wounded condition.

'Leave me,' she croaked.

'No. Never, ever again.'

As he searched around for a solution while trying to hold the dead back and keep Caitlin from bleeding out, his eyes gleamed with a dawning notion. 'See him — he's destroying you!' he yelled at the dead. 'He hates you. He laughs at what you've lost. He's going to make you suffer even more than you already have. Is that fair? You have to stop him.'

The dead paused and turned as one, fixing their unblinking stare on the Hortha as he punctured another head and discarded what remained, not caring whether they saw him.

'He wants to make you suffer more!' Mallory shouted.

The dead moved, tentatively at first but with gathering speed as Mallory's words lit up their sluggish minds. With grasping hands, they pressed towards the Hortha and although the creature tried to drive through the flow, there were too many of them. They began to tear at his form, ripping away the blackthorn as fast as it could regrow, searching for the mystery of his life. Finally, the Hortha went down under a frenzy of tearing.

Mallory tied a handkerchief across Caitlin's wounds and slung her over his shoulder. Grunting with strain and exhaustion, he clambered up the rock wall and stepped into the tunnel, sparing one quick backward glance at the churning pool of grey, dead flesh.

The tunnel was only short, the pearly mist gleaming at the end.

'You love me, and I love you,' Caitlin said dreamily. 'Platonic. Deep. You're a sensitive soul, Mallory, a good man-'

'Save your strength,' he said, embarrassed.

'That's why I love you.'

He shifted her weight into his arms to carry her more easily, and she could see the worry in his face. 'Am I dying?'

'Not yet. I'm going to sort out that wound when we get out of here. But after that…' Shaking his head, he looked away. She knew what he was thinking: how could they find Callow and save Hal in this terrible, bleak land? How could they find the Extinction Shears?

Stumbling out of the tunnel mouth, Mallory came to a sudden halt. Her head spinning, Caitlin craned her neck to see what had brought him up so sharply. Waiting a little way down the slope on the backs of their strange mounts were the Brothers and Sisters of Spiders, their dead expressions grim.

'We've been waiting for you,' Etain said coldly.