Jack of Ravens

8

‘You don’t really expect me to get in there?’ Church stared with disgust into the ruby-red waters flowing out from under the Court of the Final Word.

‘I think you’re insane even to consider venturing inside. Given that, this is just a baby step.’ Tom smoked to make himself forget. He wouldn’t look in the direction of the court, which lay further along the valley floor.

‘It’s disgusting. I think I just saw some clots.’ The river gurgled and spat.

The sky was also the colour of an opened artery. The bloated red sun sinking behind the distant mountains cast the featureless landscape in hellish tones.

‘You’ve got time to turn back.’ Tom’s voice cracked, and Church glimpsed tears in his eyes.

‘You know I don’t have a choice-’

‘You always have a choice!’

‘Tom, this needs to be done. I have to reclaim the lamp. I need the strength it will give me to deal with what lies ahead. And if the gods in there are as bad as you say, we can’t leave the Pendragon Spirit in their hands.’

Tom finished his smoke and stamped the butt underfoot. ‘Don’t forget, the one you need to watch out for is Dian Cecht. It’s his court.’

‘In the old stories he was the god of healing, right?’

Tom laughed bitterly.

‘I thought he was in charge of some kind of spring that restored dying gods to life.’

‘A metaphor,’ Tom said. ‘But you’ll find all that out when you’re in there. Just watch your back. Never relax your guard, not even for a moment. The court is vast, but sparsely populated. With any luck you stand a … reasonable chance …’ His voice faltered at the lie in his words. ‘Just take care.’

Tom walked away before Church could respond. Church called goodbye, but Tom did not turn or even acknowledge Church’s presence.

Church looked one last time at the gleaming white marble of the Court of the Final Word caught between the bloody landscape and the bloody sky and then he stepped into the red river.

It was warmer than he had anticipated and had the sickening consistency of oil. The butcher’s shop smell made him gag. Keeping as close to the bank as he could, he waded towards the court.

It took him fifteen minutes to reach the complex. The river emerged from the dark mouth of a culvert under the external wall. Church mentally prepared himself for what lay ahead and then plunged into the shadows.

It was warmer still in the enclosed space. Through the walls Church could hear a deep throbbing that sounded like machinery. There were other noises, too — sharp staccato bursts and the crackle of energy discharges, along with others that Church didn’t want to consider.

As he progressed slowly in the dark, trailing one hand along the sticky wall, he felt the movement of swimming creatures brush his legs and wondered what could survive in that foul stew.

When he thought his stomach could bear no more of the gruesome atmosphere, he saw a shaft of light ahead. Positioning himself beneath it, he looked up at a grille at the top of a short shaft in the roof — some kind of drain for sluicing down the detritus from the room above. An iron ladder ran down the wall of the drain, for cleaning, probably. Standing on his tiptoes, Church could just reach the lowest rung. He hauled himself up and began to climb until he heard muffled voices in the room above. He clung to the ladder and waited, glad to be out of the river.

After five minutes, footsteps approached the drain. Church held his breath and looked up at the grille. But instead of seeing the occupant he was suddenly deluged with hot, sticky liquid, rushing across his face and drenching what little of him remained dry after the journey along the river. It was only when the torrent stopped a minute later that Church realised it was blood.

Fighting the urge to be sick, he held on, dripping, eyes shut tight. No more sounds came from the room and he decided to continue. He pushed upwards against the grille and it raised easily.

The chamber was empty. It was about twenty-one feet square with walls, floor and ceiling of the whitest marble that gleamed unbearably brightly after the dark of the culvert. There were two vats in one corner that Church chose not to investigate, and nothing else apart from a channel in the floor down which the discarded blood had flowed.

Church pulled himself into the chamber and headed towards the doorway, leaving a telltale trail of sticky red footprints. He tried to wipe off as much residue as he could and hoped the remainder would dry quickly.

The doorway opened onto a long corridor with many other doors leading off it. Everywhere was brilliant white, distorting perspective. His heart beating uncomfortably fast, Church edged along the corridor. The constant machine thrum hung in the background, occasionally punctuated by a distant high-pitched whine like an electric saw.

Tom had suggested that the lamp with the Pendragon Spirit would be kept somewhere in the heart of the complex, where the Tuatha De Danann conducted their most important experiments into the nature of Existence.

He had no way to get his bearings, and so he had no choice but to explore randomly and hope he would find something that would lead him in the right direction.

After a while he came across the first signs of life. An archway provided a view across three adjoining chambers, and in the furthest one he saw six people wearing robes of the deepest scarlet. They wore matching masks and hats that reminded Church of surgeons. He guessed that was a good analogy, for they were gathered around a table involved in some kind of operation. Church could see no instruments in use, but something lay on the table twitching and jumping as they went about their business. He watched for a moment, but what little detail he could garner hinted at something that disturbed him immensely and he moved on.

As he stood at the junction of three corridors, he realised that the constant thrum was louder down one corridor and he selected that route. At one point he had to slip into a room to hide from a young male and female wearing white togas with gold braid at the edges and a gold brooch at the shoulder. They had the air of clerical assistants about them.

Beyond that was a door through which Church could hear a faint whimpering. It would have been wiser to ignore it, but some quality to the sound drew him inside. A central aisle stretched for as far as the eye could see. On either side were cells containing people sitting on marble benches. There were no bars, and any of them could have walked out at any time, but they had a beatific, slightly dazed appearance that suggested sedation. As far as Church could see, all of the inmates were humans and from their clothes appeared to have been brought from many different periods. Church saw a woad-painted Celt, a wild-bearded Viking, a monk in brown robes, a Victorian woman in an extravagant dress who looked as though she had been plucked straight from a ball. There were scabby-kneed guttersnipes and other children in smart school uniforms, and Church was disturbed to see a number of babies sleeping peacefully in cribs.

Church stopped at one cell in which a man in his twenties wearing the rough clothes of a Tudor peasant hummed gently to himself.

‘Are you all right?’ Church asked.

The man smiled and nodded.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Robert, the miller’s son.’

‘How did you get here, Robert?’

‘I fell asleep in the fields one night,’ he said dreamily, ‘and I awoke to the most beautiful music I had ever heard. The Fair Folk were dancing around their mound to a fiddle and pipe tune. I tried to hide, but they saw me. And the girls … the beautiful girls … asked me if I wanted to dance with them. How could I refuse? We whirled around and around beneath the light of the moon, and then afterwards they invited me back to partake of their … food and drink … beneath the hills …’ His voice trailed away to be replaced by a satisfied smile. His out-of-focus eyes replayed the scene of wonder over and over in his mind.

Church asked several others, but the story was always some variation on the same theme: of people enticed from their homes and villages by the Fair Folk with promises of wonders beyond measure. And the babies? Undoubtedly stolen from their cribs, as the old stories always said, with a changeling or a corn dolly left in their place.

Church looked up and down the aisle. Hundreds of cells, perhaps thousands, lined up like the pens at an animal-research lab. Church vowed to himself that he would find some way to return to free them.

Filled with mounting dread, Church continued towards the thrumming sound, which grew louder by the minute. What he encountered next dwarfed all his feelings about the horrors of the court.

He passed through a door that was larger than all the rest, set in a wall at least nine feet thick. There was a sense that he had also passed into an area of greater importance. Though everywhere was still white, an oppressive gloom lay heavily on the rooms and corridors. The tiles were dirtier, the grouting thick with black grease. This was an area of industrial labour, not philosophic thought. The machine sounds were now loud and resonant, like enormous hearts beating just behind the walls. Church found himself holding his breath.

More of the Tuatha De Danann moved around this section, their scarlet robes like pools of blood in the gloom, their masks depersonalising them until they became machine-like sentries. Church slipped stealthily through doors and behind vats or cupboards, or strange, lathe-like machines of indiscernible purpose.

Eventually he came to rows of windows that looked onto a large area of interconnecting rooms. The first thing he noticed were the numerous drainage channels crisscrossing the floor, all of them running with blood. Here the machine-noises were so loud they almost drowned out all other sound, but gradually his ears became attuned to what lay beneath: screaming, hundreds of voices rising up, mingling, different pitches, different timbres, an orchestration of agony.

There was movement in each of the rooms. As his eyes grew accustomed to the subdued lighting he saw teams of red-garbed figures busy over tables on which lay humans. At least, Church presumed they were human, for they were all in various stages of dissection, and all of them were conscious. The surgeons did not use scalpels or saws. To Church, it appeared as though they passed their hands through flesh and bone, peeling open faces, delving into organs, investigating to the very atomic structure of their subjects. Here and there, where some procedure became particularly difficult, a Caraprix would be introduced to the operation, changing its shape as it delved deeper into the bodies.

On some tables the people were being put back together, but not always the way they had started out. Some lay shaking, on the surface quite normal, but Church had seen objects introduced into brains and hearts and lungs and eyes. Others woke to find themselves with scales or wings or fiery breath. Many died in the process and their bodies were quickly removed. Others suffered terribly. On one table a pile of component parts made a sickening mewling sound.

In that moment Church understood why Tom was the way he was, and what Jerzy had also suffered. And that vista over atrocity told Church what the gods thought of humans and why his role was so important: it was a battle for survival, species against species. But it also fanned into life the first black spark of despair, small but growing, for how could he or any other human combat a race that was capable of such things, that was not even the true Enemy but which simply considered humans so far beneath them that they were accorded the same degree of concern that an abattoir worker showed to the cattle trooping past his work-station?

Sickened and reeling, Church moved away from the windows, desperate to complete his task and escape. The further he moved into the heart of the complex, the stranger and more puzzling the experiments became. Here there were no operations on humans, for which he was thankful, but what he did see troubled him on a different level.

On a crystal as big as he was, every facet revealed a different view of reality — in his own world, in the Far Lands, and in other places he did not recognise. An orb contained within it a tiny boiling galaxy. A machine cut a door shape in the air, and then opened the door a minute fraction before it slammed shut. Then the process would begin all over again. There were arcs of coruscating energy, and shimmering beams of light, and whirring blades. A system of mirrors filled Church with a devastating dread when he glanced into it, but he blacked out before his mind would reveal what it had seen. When he came around, he moved quickly away, no longer sure whether he could complete his mission.

But then he came to a long corridor with windows on either side and the mood became profoundly different. The queasy sense of dread diminished and he felt oddly uplifted, almost heady. When he glanced out of the window, he realised why: it was like looking into starless space, with crackling bursts of Blue Fire illuminating holes darker than the surrounding space. And from these holes Fabulous Beasts appeared to be birthing. Their sinuous forms rolled and turned joyously as they soared on their leathery wings, their scales glimmering like miniature suns. At times they appeared to be made entirely of the blue energy.

Church watched them for a while, mesmerised. For those moments he felt an abiding peace that he had not experienced since childhood. It was with great reluctance that he continued to the door at the end of the corridor.

This new room was dark, and unlike the rest of the court had walls of studded iron. In the centre hovered a globe formed from interconnecting blue lines, which shifted every now and then so that the globe took on new dimensions and warped perspectives. After Church had studied it for a while, he decided it was a representation of how the Blue Fire ran through reality.

And there, on a platform scattered with instruments whose use Church couldn’t divine, sat the lamp. Church felt an ache in his heart as it tugged him towards it.

‘You may take it.’

Church started at the voice. Behind him stood a red-robed figure with aristocratic features, a high forehead, piercing grey eyes and a Roman nose. His long, grey hair was tied in a ponytail. Church could sense his authority.

‘You’re Dian Cecht.’ Church cautiously lowered his hand to Llyrwyn, knowing that if he chose to fight he would not escape the court alive.

‘That is the name by which I was known by the tribes of your people.’ He smiled warmly. It was difficult to reconcile his benign appearance with the horrors Church had witnessed.

‘You can’t be allowed to carry on with what you’re doing here,’ Church said.

‘And how far would your kind go if you were faced with the annihilation of your race?’

‘Don’t tell me this is all a response to the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders. You’ve been doing this for a long time.’

‘A race can die in many ways. By annihilation in one devastating attack or by the slow attrition of stagnation.’ He motioned to the lamp. ‘Your kind were chosen to be the receptacle of the Pendragon Spirit, not mine. We, who have always been at the heart of Existence, were not considered to be champions of Existence. At the moment you are Fragile Creatures, but soon you will supplant us. And what then for the Golden Ones?’

‘So you’re going to torture us? Try to stop us reaching our potential, is that it?’

‘Here in the Court of the Final Word we try to understand what makes a Fragile Creature so valuable to Existence. What is Existence? And can we shape it to our will?’

‘The simple fact of what you’re doing here shows you will never understand.’

Dian Cecht considered this for a moment as he searched Church’s face.

‘There is a more pressing problem. The Enemy has changed everything that lies ahead — nothing now is fixed. Soon, very soon, your people will be enslaved, the rising and advancing of their spirit halted. And my own people will be eradicated. That cannot be allowed to happen.’

‘Then you have to find a way to work with us.’

‘Perhaps.’ Dian Cecht smiled. ‘Take the lamp. I had hoped to plumb the depths of the Pendragon Spirit, but its mysteries still elude me.’

Keeping a wary eye on Dian Cecht, Church took the lamp. It felt warm and soothing to his touch.

‘You still do not trust me. That is understandable.’ The god went over to a stone column that reminded Church of the Wish-Post in the Court of Peaceful Days, but this one glowed with capillaries of blue energy. The Blue Fire lies behind everything we know … behind time and space, which are but the thin skin stretched across it,’ Dian Cecht continued. By moving into the medium of the blue energy, it is possible to alter everything. To reconstruct reality from the smallest particle.’

‘Who could do that?’

‘Why, someone in whom the Pendragon Spirit burns strongly. Fire and fire, one within, one without, one and the same. You are the Blue Fire. I believe that locked inside you is the very thing for which I have been searching, and which I have failed so completely to find.’

Church felt uneasy at the way Dian Cecht was looking at him.

‘You are the key. Once you discover how to turn the lock, anything is possible. You could save my people by altering what is to come.’ Dian Cecht shook his head, bemused. ‘The Golden Ones, in the hands of Fragile Creatures.’ The god turned to the stone column. ‘This Wish-Post is unusual. It is one of my small successes. It allows you to see what your heart desires across the spread of Existence. But for anyone whose will is strong enough it allows travel to that time and place.’

More trickery, Church thought — Dian Cecht knew exactly what Church wanted and was tempting him. Yet he wanted it so badly, he couldn’t hide it. He could join Ruth immediately. He could save her, help the others.

‘Will you try?’ Dian Cecht said.

Church stepped forward, knowing he could not pass up the opportunity, whatever his doubts.

‘Be warned — when the opportunity arises you must step through the doorway swiftly, for it will not maintain its integrity long. Do not waste time on thought.’

Church looked into the Wish-Post and felt it shift and look back. ‘Go on.’

Blue energy burst briefly like a camera flash, and when his vision cleared he was looking at a reflection of himself in a blue mirror. The reflection faded to be replaced by Shavi, only now he wore an eye patch and his face was spattered with blood. He looked disoriented and anxious.

‘Shavi?’ Shavi looked startled. ‘I’m Jack Churchill … Church.’

Shavi’s eyes widened. Church? You must come quickly. You are the only one who can help-’

‘I’m coming.’ He prepared to walk into the blue rectangle.

‘Laura is dead,’ Shavi continued. ‘Ruth, too. They are going to bring him back, Church. They are-’

‘Ruth’s dead?’ The words hit Church like a hammer blow. Reeling, he staggered back. The blue light faded, the moment lost. ‘Ruth’s dead?’ he repeated. It felt as if everything inside him was crumbling to dust.

Dian Cecht stood impassively, his hands behind his back. ‘Love is the source of all hope,’ he said, ‘the absence of love the source of all despair.’