Jack of Ravens

5

Church didn’t know how long it took for the blind panic to fade, but eventually he realised he could see a faint blue light ahead. He continued to run towards it until he saw it was a lantern with a blue flame flickering inside.

‘The Wayfinder guides your path as ever, Brother of Dragons.’ The lantern was being held aloft by a giant at least eight feet tall, with a thick beard and glowering eyes beneath overhanging brows. He wore a shift made of sackcloth fastened with a leather belt.

‘Who are you?’ Church asked.

‘I am the Caretaker. I keep a light burning in the darkest night. I serve all who come to me, whether their hearts are filled with hope or tainted by despair.’

‘Do you know me?’

‘We all know you, Brother of Dragons.’ The Caretaker stepped to one side and motioned for Church to pass by. Beyond was an entrance to a cave.

Inside a cauldron bubbled over a small fire. Two figures stood around it. One was a man in old, tattered clothes, one hand clutching a long staff that had been subtly worked into a particular shape. His grey hair formed a wild halo around his head. Beside him was a woman who could have been his sister. She was painfully thin and wore a long black dress stained with treebark green and white dust. Her skin was almost grey and barely hung on her bones. Her hair was also grey and wild. But her face was smeared black with dirt or grease so that her grey eyes stared out of it with terrifying intensity.

Church realised he had seen her before, when he lay close to death on the journey to Boskawen-Un. She had come to him in what he had thought was a dream or hallucination, while Etain and the others talked nearby.

While the Caretaker felt benign, these two unsettled him. He felt they would turn on him at any moment if he said the wrong thing.

‘Draw closer.’ The woman beckoned, cackling.

‘Who are you?’ Church asked. ‘Gods, like the Tuatha De Danann?’

‘We are intermediaries,’ the Caretaker said. ‘A conduit to higher powers.’

‘What higher powers?’ Church asked.

The wild-haired man looked as if he was about to fly into a rage, and Church fell silent.

‘Look into the cauldron,’ the woman said.

Church peered into the bubbling, greasy liquid and saw an image of himself as a child asleep in bed. Niamh watched over him, fading as the young Church woke.

Church understood. While he had been sleeping in the casket of spiders, time in the real world had marched on into the seventies and he had been born. His head spun trying to encompass the possibility that he could exist in two different places at the same time: as a grown man in the casket in the Far Lands, and as a young boy growing up in the seventies on Earth.

The image changed as he watched. There was Tom, growing older as he wandered America, revelling in the hippie subculture in which he had felt so at home.

Another change: Church again, growing older. He met and fell in love with a woman, Marianne, who was killed, and he was overcome with a crippling grief. It only began to clear when he met Ruth on that misty early morning near Albert Bridge, when the great adventure began.

In a Britain isolated by the Blue Fire, Church saw Tom, and Niamh, and Lugh, and many other Tuatha De Danann. He saw Laura and Shavi and Veitch join them, and how they became the kind of friends that everyone dreamed of having, the kind you would trust with your life and your dreams.

He saw a dark power pressing in on life, the Fomorii, the monstrous race-enemy of the Tuatha De Dannan, and within it were echoes of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders. He saw battles and setbacks, victories and heartbreak. He saw himself once more wielding the sword Caledfwlch, which he had been carrying when he walked out of the mists and into the Iron Age.

But what followed was dark and mournful, and revealed to him the true depth of the scars he carried on his conscience. He watched as Tom sacrificed his own life to save Church from a brutal attack by the Enemy. He saw Niamh sacrifice herself for him, turning into a glorious cloud of golden moths as she disabled a weapon that could have destroyed all five of them. The grief he felt was compounded by the knowledge that they loved him and trusted him more than he did himself, and he had never really seen that.

And he saw that they had both known for a long time that events would culminate in their deaths, yet they had continued regardless. They were the true heroes, going to their fate with a resolute silence.

The image shifted again to an apocalyptic final battle: Church, Shavi, Ruth, Laura and Veitch against the embodiment of that dark power, a thing that Church could now see was but a minor aspect of the Void. In a black tower, they came together. The Enemy was defeated, but as it passed it tore open the fabric of Existence behind which the spiders swarmed.

And then Church saw what he had dreaded seeing for so long: the moment when he plunged a sword through Veitch, just before he was sucked into a rift and hurled back through time. He was as evil as Veitch had said. No hero at all. He bowed his head, unable to watch any more.

The Caretaker rested a hand on Church’s shoulder. ‘Things are not always as they appear.’

Filled with guilt and self-loathing, Church ignored him. The Caretaker gently urged Church to look back into the cauldron. ‘Ryan Veitch was in the grip of other powers. Both the Tuatha De Dannan and the agents of the Devourer of All Things manipulated him. The Caraprix in his head attempted to steer him towards disaster.’

‘I knew?’

‘You knew. You had no choice but to kill him.’

‘Then Veitch is a victim, too.’

‘You may say that. He does not see it so. Others might not see it so, either.’

Church looked back into the cauldron. The days moved on after he had fallen back in time. He saw Ruth mourning him, thinking he was dead. He saw the Blue Fire becoming stronger due to the events Church and the others had set in motion when they defeated the Fomorii.

But in their victory were the seeds of the crisis to come, for they had awoken a power that slept beyond the edge of the universe, and then the Void came to put the world back the way it had been. The Tuatha De Danann were destroyed. The next five Brothers and Sisters of Dragons were stifled — only Hal escaped into the medium of the Blue Fire where he would attempt to bring Church back into the fray. And then the world was remade. Magic, hope and wonder were swept aside. Money and power and violence and despair became the common currency, all the things that the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders had spent the last 2,000 years putting into place.

In America, the word of power ‘Croatoan’ echoed across the landscape and the spiders rose up from their hiding place to spread across the world, corrupting and controlling.

‘And that was when the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders began to move back through time, attempting to eradicate anything that might bring hope or change things in the modern time,’ Church said.

‘They sowed the seeds of despair wherever they went, but the power of Existence is everywhere — in a song, in laughter, in a dream, in the caress of lovers. It cannot be destroyed, only contained.’

‘But it’s so bleak,’ Church said. ‘Why does it have to be this way?’

‘It does not.’ The woman cackled as she gave the cauldron a stir.

‘Nothing is fixed in the Fixed Lands.’ The Caretaker smiled.

‘You’re saying things can be changed, even though they’ve happened?’

‘What is happened?’ The woman cackled again.

Church’s mind experienced a sudden, radical shift and he was briefly back in Timothy Leary’s study talking about the structure of reality, and the spiders moving behind the scenes to keep the world a certain way.

And then he was in the Court of the Final World with the strange globe of interconnecting blue lines in Dian Cecht’s inner sanctum, watching as one slight movement changed the position of all the other intersections without altering the globe’s integrity. And Dian Cecht was telling him that Church was the Blue Fire, one and the same: 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.

Church was back in the cave. I could still change things?’

‘He does not yet have the ability to alter much,’ the wild-haired man shouted.

‘A tug here. A push there. Little changes make big changes.’ The woman laughed hysterically.

There was a nightmarish quality to the moment that made Church queasy. The Caretaker caught his arm to steady him. ‘What would you change?’

‘I’d save Ruth and Tom and Niamh … and … and the Tuatha De Danann,’ Church said without a second thought. ‘I’d change it all.’

‘Is that a small thing?’ The woman pondered. ‘I think it is!’

‘Come, then,’ the Caretaker said. ‘Let us see the strength of your will.’

As he led Church out of the cave, the wild-haired man ranted, ‘Changes ring changes ring changes. Who knows where this will turn? Bad or good! Good or bad!’

Dreamily detached, Church followed the Caretaker and his lantern. He passed another cave inside which stood three hooded women, their faces lost in shadow. He had an overwhelming feeling that if he did see their faces he would die.

‘Beware the Daughters of the Night.’ The Caretaker urged Church onwards.

Church glanced into the cave one final time and saw that one of the women was unravelling a spindle, another measured out the thread, while the third brandished a pair of shears that reminded him oddly of the Extinction Shears.

A chill ran through him, but then the women fell from view and the Caretaker brought him to a third cave. When Church stared into its depths, his consciousness failed to grasp what he saw. His perception slid greasily across a slowly revolving crystal, then a series of flashing lights, a mandala, a Mandelbrot set. Finally it settled on a portion of some enormous machine filled with cogs and gears. The Caretaker held up his light so Church could see a lever nearby.

‘That’s all it takes?’ Church said.

‘It is more than most could manage. To push the lever is like pulling a sword from a stone.’ The Caretaker smiled.

Hesitantly, Church took the lever in his hands; it didn’t feel how it looked. He put his shoulder to it and pushed. Nothing happened.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Do you always give up so easily? It takes much to turn the axis of Existence.’

Church tried again, and again, gritting his teeth and straining. Eventually the lever shifted a fraction, and then a fraction more, and then it was moving easily. He had a sudden sense of everything shifting around him, as if he were in a theatre with a revolving stage and the scenery turning around him. The feeling was shockingly powerful, and for the briefest moment it felt as if he had been cut adrift from the universe and was spinning off into a dark chasm. He was floating, floating, and everything he saw was fake, a construct to keep him calm so he would not go insane.

The cogs and gears turned and shifted, and Church was back in the cavern, shaking with a terrible fear that he had done something that should never have been allowed. All an illusion, he told himself, knowing it wasn’t. Exhausted, he staggered back. Did that do it?’

‘Soon we will know.’

Church felt himself flagging. ‘This is all a dream, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is a dream.’

Church rubbed his hands wearily over his eyes. ‘And soon I’ll be back in the casket. With the spiders.’

‘Yes.’

‘Take me to Ruth,’ Church said. ‘One more time. Before all this fades.’

The Caretaker nodded, and this time his smile was more enigmatic. He held the lantern aloft and led the way.

Church didn’t know how he got out of the cavern, but soon they were walking along an odd corridor-like structure that was like scaffolding on one side and a wall of frosted glass on the other. After a while, the frost disappeared and Church was looking out on London. It was like being behind a two-way mirror that reached to the sky. On the other side, people shopped and chatted, cars drove by, planes flew overhead.

The Caretaker led the way through a door, up some stairs and into a flat. On the other side of the glass, Shavi sat next to Laura, staunching a wound on his head, and Veitch toyed with a knife. He looked menacing.

‘What’s going on?’ Church asked, concerned.

‘You cannot influence this,’ the Caretaker said. Reluctantly, Church moved on.

They went into the bedroom and came to a wardrobe, and then passed through the doors and into darkness.

‘I can’t see,’ Church said. ‘Raise your lantern.’

The Caretaker’s enigmatic smile grew wider.