The Return of the Arinn Read online

  As she stood there, paralysed by indecision, she felt gooseflesh all over her skin.

 

  ‘Yes, you did. Oh, Driftwood, I am a foolish girl-thing. I’m everything you said of me.’

 

  ‘You did.’

 

  ‘Yes – we talked.’

 

  ‘I remember telling you of my first meeting with the Momu. I described our meeting, in her chamber in Ulla Quemar, the birthing pool amid the roots of the One Tree.’

  The dragon’s voice deepened to what sounded like a rock-splitting roar.

  ‘What is it?’

 

  ‘Yes. He was trapped there, being starved of its sap, wasted to a ruin.’

 

  ‘Yes. I—’

 

  ‘Yes.’

 

  She remembered calling on Driftwood in a moment of the greatest peril. She recalled her very words on his arrival. ‘Oh, Driftwood – if you are really here, please help me. The Tree of Life is being sucked dry by these horrible worms. I must stop them, but it’s beyond my ability. I need to revive Nidhoggr.’

  he had said,

  ‘Life, it seems to me, is nothing other than chaos – and that’s certainly true if what I saw in the black cathedral is the Tyrant’s vision of order.’

 

  ‘There is danger everywhere I turn. But there’s so much at stake – not just the Momu. These black worms are vast and there are millions upon millions of them. They’re sapping the life out of the Tree. I dread to think . . .’

  Kate hesitated now, in a very different and yet equally perilous landscape. She sensed how even Driftwood shuddered.

 

  Kate nodded. Her heart thudded so forcefully it was nauseating. Before her a cart track twisted and turned, insisting that she took it even though it was in a state of disrepair. She walked past a gnarled old oak and on into a coppice of evergreens. She sank her bare feet into its carpet of leaves. Her footsteps excited a musical tinkling from the crunching icy needles. The cold had contracted to a patina of grey over her skin.

 

  There was a flash of memory – the destruction of the Cathedral of the Dead by Nidhoggr; the screaming motes that were the souls of millions of dead. The experience had been terrifying, the most frightening scene that Kate had ever witnessed, and she could no longer bear the memory. She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them she was standing on the bank of the lake. The night was silent.

  Something glittered below the surface of the water. When she peered more closely, she thought she could make out something twinkling golden, like an eye opening and closing where the penetrating moonlight ended and darkness began.

  The ring . . .

  A clawed finger was beckoning her. A pallid hand extended towards her, the ring of Ree Nashee in its open palm.

  Kate froze with terror.

  Now the silence was fractured. The water of the lake began to ripple with waves, washing against the shore, as if it were the edge of an ocean. There was still the same dreamy quality, as if time worked differently here. Her feet were exposed to the lapping waves. Her ears were filled by the sounds of the night: the hooting of owls, the liquid hiss as creatures broke the surface, the lapping of the waves. The cold was numbing her feet and hands. That same numbness was spreading, like a mask, over her face, beginning at her upper lip and cheeks. She felt dazed by the growing effects of the cold inside her mind, and spellbound by more subtle sensations: the symphony of the water, the attenuated reflections of moon on surface and the glimpse of bats fluttering across her vision.

  I let Alan down.

  How she loved him – a very special kind of love, the love that time and pain had not been able to destroy.

  ‘Please – please let me go to him.’

 

  ‘I don’t want the ring any more. I can’t go into the water to get it. You know I’m afraid of water now – I’m afraid of drowning in it.’

 

  Who was speaking to her now, mind-to-mind? Was this truly the voice of her friend Driftwood, the dragon? Was she still blundering on within the dragon tale – her own special tale? Her numbed feet no longer registered the shore on which she was standing. It created an impression of dizziness, of floating on a cushion of air. She heard the screech of some hunting creature from the dark landscape behind her.

  ‘I’m feeling breathless!’

  Driftwood did not speak.

  How could you feel breathless in a dream? Yet she had to breathe: she had to fill up her lungs with air. She swallowed past difficulty, looking down at the iridescent reflections of moonlight on the water’s surface. She summoned up all of what remained of her courage and stared down once more into the rippling water. The hand was still there, the golden ring twinkling within its palm.

 

  Whose voice . . .?

  She had to press her hands against her thighs to stand erect. As she took her first tentative steps into the shallow water, a roaring invaded her ears. Nervously, as carefully as she could manage with her tingling fingers, she pulled off her nightdress. She began to wade out over the unstable shingle. For a fraction of a moment, she couldn’t feel the water through her numbed skin. She reached out her hand for the ring. The cold ate into her, burning like a flame. Her nostrils stung with the sharp tang of ozone. The flesh on her legs tightened so violently that every hair jerked erect, above and below the water, and neuralgic spasms locked her knees and cramped the muscles in the small of her back. Her feet, instantly losing all feeling, began to slip on the scummy stones and the sharp edges cut through her socks like broken glass.

  She stopped, the water now halfway up her thighs. The moonlight danced on the coruscating surface as the wide lake rippled with hidden movement. It was as if a solid mass of tiny creatures were beckoning her with a strange wild hunger, impatient for her to join them in the water.

 

  ‘Who are you?’

 

  And then dread rose in her, paralysing her. ‘I – I don’t want to be here.’

 

  ‘Take me away. If you are still here, Driftwood – take me out of here.’

  In the next moment she was back, her heart beating in her throat, within the safety of the dragon’s ruff.

  ‘I don’t ever want to go there again.’

 

  ‘Oh, please don’t say that. You were right. I am the most stupid and stubborn of girls.’

 

  ‘How on earth can I sleep? I’m too terrified.’

  Yet sleep she did. When she roused again, Kate saw that they were crossing over the tops of a great mountain range, its razor-sharp summits high above the clouds.

  ‘Where are we?’

 

  The Wastelands into which Alan had taken his
Shee army! Kate couldn’t imagine how they would have crossed these immensely high and treacherous-looking slopes. While asleep, frost had formed in her eyelashes and her nostrils were rimed in ice where her breath had frozen. She had never felt so cold in her life. She curled her body up and snuggled deeper, closer to the inner furnace of that monumental dragon’s heart and the hillocks of pounding muscles where the warmth of their circulation would protect and comfort her.

  ‘Can’t you forgive me my stupid curiosity? You are, after all, supposed to be my friend.’

  Silence other than the wailing of the wind.

  ‘I did wake you from the dead.’

  Still no answer.

  ‘What are you scared of – you, Dragon King?’

  Driftwood issued such a deep groan that it reverberated through the pounding muscles of his wings, folding around Kate’s being like thunder.

 

  A Threat in the Dark

  Mark’s eyes lifted from the blazing barrier that blocked the road ahead and looked towards the small town beyond it, and the pitch black night sky above. He thought he’d heard the drone of an engine. Then he heard it again high overhead, above the blanket of clouds from which two days of spindrift snow had been falling. The snowflakes hitting his upturned face felt hard and sharp, like tiny icicles. He couldn’t help shivering.

  ‘What is it?’ Cal’s voice sounded behind Mark.

  ‘A plane, sounds like an airliner.’

  ‘What’s it doing?’

  ‘Circling, maybe. Looking for an airport?’

  Cal clicked the safety on and off on the belt-driven Minimi machine gun he carried. ‘Don’t they know the grid’s down? There are no lights to guide them in. No radar. Nothing!’

  ‘Poor beggers,’ Mark replied, then looked down again. He had needed a break from the interior of the Mamma Pig where Padraig lay, deeply unconscious. The old man’s breathing was rasping and his temperature was so high his skin felt like it was on fire. They were heading north in a desperate attempt to get him to Resistance HQ hidden away in the hills of Derbyshire, where he could be treated by military doctors. But they couldn’t follow the obvious route: the M1, which would have taken them there in a matter of hours, as the motorways were traps. Field Marshall Seebox had taken them over under martial law and the Resistance were now fighting elements of what had formerly been the regular armed forces; those blinkered enough to follow Seebox. Armoured soldiers were patrolling all major roads. Seebox’s forces had also taken control of the ports, power stations and the major towns and cities. But it was unlikely that he had managed to extend this control to the smaller towns and villages – as yet.

  Despite this, the burning barrier up ahead was no regular army checkpoint. Several buildings, maybe whole streets, were already burning in the town behind it. That suggested Razzamatazzers – and likely irregulars like Paramilitaries and Skulls. Mark knew there would be some manning the barrier, while others would attempt to block the Mamma Pig from passing through the town, and he had no idea what weapons, if any, they might possess.

  Mark looked up at the sky again. It was difficult to ignore the drone of the aircraft still circling overhead in the dark. He wondered if it had been a good idea to leave Gully back at Tudor Farm. Gully knew things about the now ravaged London. He might have been a useful source of intelligence for the people at Resistance HQ. Besides, Mark had taken a liking to the streetwise kid. He regretted the fact that they had failed to rescue Gully’s friend, Penny, when they had seen her at the arena. All they had of her was her extraordinary mural. What was the word Cogwheel had used to describe it?

  A palimpsest!

  A medieval word to describe one picture superimposed on another. But according to Gully it was about more than just pictures; Penny had been seeing visions in which creatures from some dark world were rising up and invading the famous streets and squares of London. The layers in the mural showed exactly that. They showed what Penny called the City Above, which was the normal world of the city, being invaded by another more alien world that Penny called the City Below.

  Mark had his own reasons for finding Penny’s vision deeply disturbing. He had been shown a similar vision by the strange Belizean woman, Henriette, and had witnessed wraith-like beings invading the normal streets of central London, drawn by the Sword of Feimhin. From what little Henriette had explained, they were coming out of the strange in-between-world called Dromenon. And, if he understood her correctly, they were possessing the young Razzamatazzers, driving them insane.

  Now he examined the sky not with his eyes, but through the black glossy triangle of crystal that was embedded in his brow: the oraculum of the Third Power. It held magic that derived from another world called Tír, and a goddess of that world, Mórígán, the third member of the Holy Trídédana, and goddess of death and the battlefield. Through this power he could see beyond the falling snow and the clouds above to gaze into the starry heavens, where brilliant flares of colour rent the air. The vision resembled an explosive aurora borealis, but Mark knew that it had nothing to do with the beautiful northern lights.

  He thought back to what they had witnessed in London. A black rose, a colossus of crystalline darkness a mile high, had enveloped the old city. From this a spectral image had been projected into the sky: a triple infinity, pulsating with enormous energy and constantly reforming; darkly magnificent and utterly terrifying. The obscene invasion of spectres, the Sword of Feimhin and the Black Rose were all somehow linked. Mark was in awe of the Rose even now, some thirty-odd miles northeast of the M25. He felt its malignant power reach out and overwhelm him with a presentiment of dread.

  Nan emerged from behind the rear doors of the Mamma Pig to put an arm around Mark’s neck. She must have been sharing his worries through their common oracula.

  ‘How’s Padraig?’ Mark asked.

  ‘The same.’

  ‘He’s stubborn. I know there’s a surviving consciousness inside there still. If only he can hold on until we can get him medical help.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  He kissed her lightly on the lips.

  Nan turned towards the blazing barrier. ‘There’s something else there – something more than just Razzers. You must sense it too.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Cal picked up on their conversation: ‘What is it?’

  Nan said: ‘I don’t know, but I sense an alien danger.’

  ‘Mark?’ Cal said.

  Mark looked ahead, using his oraculum to penetrate the flaming barrier and see into the main street beyond. Illuminated by the fires, the buildings were a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of different frontages and sizes, some two- and some three-storied, some abutting the road. They had no idea what town it was since any helpful signs had been removed. An old Bedfordshire town they had to assume, that had grown in an unplanned organic way over the centuries.

  ‘You see it?’

  ‘Like Nan, I sense something. It feels a good deal more malignant than Razzamatazzers. It doesn’t feel human.’

  ‘But it knows we’re coming. It’ll be waiting for us,’ Nan said. ‘You think we should turn back? Find a way around it?’

  ‘We don’t have the time. Not with Padraig’s condition.’

  *

  Mark had felt a mixture of exhaustion and elation as the mechanical bulk of the Mamma Pig had made it back in through the stone gateposts of the Tudor farm the previous evening. The return from London had not been easy. They had been forced to abandon their bikes at the arena and their escape from the city had been interrupted by roadblocks and machine gun battles. Luckily, the armoured walls of the Pig had guaranteed that nobody was hurt. Nan had fallen into an exhausted asleep against his shoulder and Mark had been obliged to wake her so she could look after Padraig while they looked for medical help. He’d joined Cal as he’d
emerged from the Pig into squalling snow. It had been too soon for the snow to coat the ground to any extent, but it had blown into their faces as they’d run towards and entered through the big oak door into the main farm building. The moment they had walked in, they had encountered Resistance troops in camouflage uniforms dashing around the place. Cal had spoken to a guard:

  ‘What’s going on, mate?’

  ‘An evacuation.’

  As Cal hurried away to find an officer, Mark headed towards the ground floor chamber that had been put aside as an infirmary for the wounded. He discovered an empty shambles and the single, stressed-out figure of Sharkey, who was sitting on a camp bed with his denim shirt wide open at the front, his injured left shoulder and arm inside the body of the shirt.

  ‘Hey mate – Good to see you!’

  ‘Thought my friends had abandoned me.’

  ‘No chance of that.’ Mark sat down on the bed next to his friend. ‘Where are the fighters headed?’

  ‘Who knows? Most are heading for Resistance HQ – at least that’s as much as I’ve been able to gather.’