Arthur Quinn and Hell's Keeper (17 page)

‘That's OK,' the boy said dejectedly. He put out his hand for the photo and Arthur gave it to him. ‘I just thought you might have.'

The boy turned away, putting the photo back in his pocket for safekeeping. Arthur wanted to tell him that it'd be all right, that they'd get his brother back, that they'd get them all back. But that might not be true; it could all be a lie. He would definitely try to get them back. And he knew there might be comfort in telling the boy that, but he couldn't lie to him. At the end of the day, there would be no comfort in lies.

Arthur spent the next while rounding up all the spiders in the main area and taking them out to the candlelit corridor. It was the one promise he could keep to the boy.

‘Sleep well?'

Ash was standing in the doorway to his cell, leaning against the jamb. She was still wearing the many-pocketed coat that she'd had on the day before. Her hair was tied back but tendrils of it had escaped and she looked a tired mess.

After spending a couple of hours spider-hunting, Arthur had found a box with paperback books in one storage cell. He borrowed one and returned to his mattress. It was a fairly straightforward murder mystery and he'd read half of it already, although he hadn't been concentrating on the words. He wouldn't have been able to concentrate on much besides the most menial tasks, but at least the very act of reading seemed to make the time move quicker. He hadn't even heard any kerfuffle down below to let him know that Ash and the others had returned.

‘I slept great, thanks.' He shut the book and left it on the ground next to him, then nodded to her dishevelled appearance. ‘You guys have trouble out there?'

‘Not much,' she said, coming into the room to sit on the end of the mattress. She twanged the loose spring with a finger. ‘We just had to make a quick get-away and then came the long way home so no Wolfsguard would follow us. But we got a good haul.'

‘Great.' He sat up and tucked his feet underneath him. He knew he needed to talk to Ash. He hadn't been here long, but every hour he stayed quiet was another hour that his dad and his friends could be tortured by Loki. He'd been planning what he would say, while his eyes had read about a private detective and the dame that walked into his life. But now that Ash was here, giving him her time, the words got stuck in his throat.

‘Listen, Ash,' he started finally. ‘I've been thinking.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘Yeah.'

‘And what have you been thinking about?'

‘It's just that …' He took a breath. ‘How long can life go on like this?'

She raised her eyebrows but Arthur continued before she could say anything.

‘Taking what you need and moving from place to place when the wolves come … I mean, eventually you're going to run out of places to go and stashes of food.'

‘So what do you suggest, Arthur?' She crossed her arms, almost petulantly. ‘That we stop moving? That we give up?'

‘No! Of course not.'

‘What then?'

‘Well …' Here goes. ‘Attack.'

‘Attack?'

‘Attack Loki.'

‘Are you serious, Arthur?'

‘Of course.'

She stood up, looking at him as if he was nuts. ‘We can't attack him! We can't attack any of them!'

‘But we have to!' Arthur got to his feet. ‘We can't just sit here, barely getting by, living from day to day. The only thing that will ever change is that our luck will run out. It's inevitable. But there's one way to make things better. And that's to stop Loki.'

‘Arthur, we're just a bunch of kids. We're not an army. Any attempt to take on Loki will get us all killed.'

‘We stopped him before.'

‘You keep saying that, but it's not true, Arthur. It's not true! And the sooner you realise that, the better. He's a god, an all-powerful magical being. If he couldn't be stopped by the army, what chance do we have? I don't even think a god
can
be stopped by mere mortals.' She spat the last two words out in disgust. ‘If you think I'm going to help you in some hare-brained scheme that could lead him here and bring his anger down on all of us, on all of
them
,' she gestured violently out the door, ‘then maybe you'd better leave.' She turned and stormed out of his cell, almost running along the gangway. Arthur followed. He grabbed her shoulder and swivelled her around to face him.

‘What happened to you, Ash? When I knew you before you were so brave, so full of courage–'

Angrily she brushed his hand from her shoulder, cutting him off mid-sentence. ‘There's a difference between courage and stupidity, Arthur, and what you're talking about is stupidity.'

‘Ash, you have no idea–'

‘No!
You
have no idea. You have no idea what it feels like to be me,' she said in a low, breaking voice. ‘To be the one who started all of this. To be the one left behind. To know that your family are locked up somewhere because of you. To know that all these people –
all the people down there
– rely on me. To know that I have to make it better for them. I can't fail in that, Arthur, and I won't.'

‘You're right,' he said softly. ‘I don't know what it's like. I can guess, though. I can guess because, in another world, I was the one who freed the serpent. And it all fell on my shoulders. But that time, we got through it together: you and me. And we can do it again. We just have to–'

‘We're
safe
here, Arthur.' She waved her arm over the people below. They'd already started queuing for supper. ‘We're alive here. That's all that matters.'

‘But for how long?'

Ash gave a loud, exasperated sigh and strode off.

‘The girl I knew wouldn't be afraid!' Arthur called after her. ‘The girl I knew wouldn't give up. The girl I knew would do whatever it takes to save those people in the camps.' He knew what he was about to say and he knew how it would push Ash's buttons, how it would hurt her to hear the words. But he had to say it; it was the only way he might get through to her. ‘The girl I knew and loved wouldn't
abandon
her family to who-knows-what
cruelty
! To the
agony
that a god can inflict!'

She stopped suddenly, caught by his callous words. Red-hot guilt surged through Arthur and he instantly regretted what he'd said. The words had carried more of a sting than he'd imagined.

Ash turned on him, her face red with rage and tears pouring down her cheeks. She stomped back to him and, before he could react, slapped him across the face, hard. The smack echoed throughout the cavernous room and a sudden silence fell. They looked at each other, both equally shocked. Arthur found he couldn't move, not even to rub the red welt he felt rising on his cheek; and neither, it seemed, could Ash.

As Arthur opened his mouth to apologise, the earth suddenly started to shake. The whole building shuddered: metal grinding against metal, stone crunching against stone. Screams rose from the ground floor as the children below clung on to anything they could find. When they realised that nothing was stable, they just held on to each other. One teenage girl toppled down the stairs, tumbling head over heels down the narrow steps.

All over the city, buildings quaked. The waters of the flood churned and boiled, smashing against the sides of the structures, then receding like an angry sea, revealing cars and vehicles underneath. And beyond the city, beyond even the country, the world shook, quaking to its very core. In every corner of the Earth, frightened people huddled, clinging on to each other, certain that the end had finally come, that Loki had decided to destroy the world completely.

The gangway Arthur and Ash were standing on had been constructed in sections. When the quake had started, Ash had been thrown backwards onto a different section and, as Arthur hugged the railing for dear life, he realised with horror that the bolts holding Ash's section to the ceiling were coming loose. As the earthquake continued, a single end of her section came away from the ceiling completely. It swivelled outwards and one side was now hanging over the terrible drop to the ground floor. Arthur watched with dread as she lost her footing and slid towards the precipice. Quick as he could, he reached out to her, about to yell her name when–

The tree Yggdrasill is dying. The rot has spread over its bark, from the root to the tip. The wind lashes its side, tearing weaker branches as if they are as insubstantial as the wing of a moth. With a groan heard in all the worlds, the tree splits in two, straight down the middle, exposing–

‘Ash!' Arthur shook his head to clear it, blinking the vision out of his eye and concentrating on his friend. Sliding rapidly towards the edge she looked up at him, saw his outstretched hand and grabbed it just as–

–sick timber within. It is not the healthy, creamy colour that a tree should be, but rather a noxious blue. The timber is soft and crumbling, not strong and unyielding as it should be. The left half of Yggdrasill falls away, over the cliff edge, while the other half, miraculously, stays standing. But it cannot last much longer–