Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (38 page)

Norman scowled. “Fine. Get out of here.”

Alexander laid a hand on his shoulder. His grip was hard, painful. “Radden is a strange place, Norman.” Suddenly, Norman sensed fear in him.

Is that why he’s really leaving? Because of that place?

In that moment, Norman could have believed it. Alexander’s haunted eyes shuddered in their sockets.

Alexander grunted. “Get the job done, and bring them all back safe.”

Norman swallowed. “Go.” He had no idea a single word could taste so bitter.

Alexander Cain’s gaze lingered on him a final moment, then the Messiah turned, and left his kingdom in his wake.

The early hours of that morning were the longest of James’s life. As the moon slunk behind the gnarled branches of the skeletal forests, and dark of night gave way to the pale blue of coming dawn, all thought abandoned him, and the floor warmed with his pacing steps. So many times did he pass back and forth over the same diagonal stretch of his room that he began to feel like a caged animal, some feral feline trussed up in the gloom, afraid and confused and alone.

Eventually, the sky grew pale, and all manner of twittering songbirds that roosted in the farmstead’s eaves were in the full swing of their morning chorus. Dew nestled on the flourishing crop-heads, and the troops of hired hands that were fast becoming family were already appearing along the long gravelled road.

Yet to James, it was all a bad joke—a pretty, membranous shawl pulled over a nightmarish ghoul. The tug of the visions plaguing his every waking thought was visceral, almost painful, as though at any moment it might disembowel him.

He had almost immediately come to regret letting Alex talk him out of leaving in the night. He had returned to his room on legs itching to be in the saddle, and flashes of torchlit catacombs and great expanses of weather-beaten moorland tortured him from the shadows.

He made for the kitchen once the flagstones of his diagonal path had reached body temperature from his pacing, and he spent what might have been another hour striding back and forth before the long farmhouse table before Alex made his appearance.

James wasted no time at the sight of him. “Well?”

Alex held up a hand to hush him. He looked no less tired than James felt himself, skin drawn and translucent, hair ruffled, and clothes creased in great folds. “
Just
… hear me out.”

James felt that he might explode, but through enormous effort brought himself to the table and took a deep breath. Fingers drumming the planks, he nodded jerkily and gestured for Alex to go on.

Christ, I’m like an addict. All twitches and nervous laughter.

Alex took some time before speaking. His eyes wandered the walls as though seeing through to the bedrooms of the others and reading their slumbering faces. “We’ll both go. But they can’t know about this. They won’t believe it.”

“But you do?”

I’m not sure I believe it, myself. Why the hell hasn’t he beaten me over the head and put me in a straitjacket already?

Alex looked disturbed, as though angry at himself. “It’s crazy, James.”

“But you do believe me, don’t you?”

Alex licked his lips, his unkempt golden beard catching stray winks of refracted morning light. His eyes searched him up and down. “Yes,” he said finally.

“Why?”

“Radden.” He looked shaken, as though giving voice to his thoughts had given them power and reality. “You can’t know about that place. I know you can’t.” His eyes flashed with something haunted. “You were just a baby.”

James let him stew a moment, but then the pull of the will infecting him took over. “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m afraid, Alex. But I know I have to go.” He hesitated, then stammered. “It can’t wait. Will you come with me?”

“I will, but you have to give me—”

“I can’t. I can’t wait.”

Their eyes met across the silent kitchen, and Alex nodded slowly. “God damn it all,” he muttered. “Alright.”

They were almost saddled up when the procession of mounted riders passed the farmstead gates and came trotting up the mile-long road. James cursed aloud and heard Alex groan in annoyance.

“Perfect,” Alex spat.

“What is it?”

“They’re here.”

It took James a moment to realise who he was talking about.

Malverston’s lot
, he thought. A thousand trilling alarms were tripped inside his head.

That meant waking the others. That meant their clean getaway was marred beyond repair. What could have been a clean break into the heart of the macabre was about to become an awkward, sticky dance.

James swore continuously as the group approaching covered the last hundred yards to the central square. He hadn’t known anyone could hold so many curses within them.

Then everything fell through the floor, and a nest of butterflies was loosed upon James’s insides. Because though the riders were mostly those he expected—vapid, fox-faced men with puckered eyes and yellowed skin—sandwiched between them was the last person on Earth he would have bet on.

Riding with an iron stare and straight-backed dignity was Beth Tarbuck.

James didn’t think; he reacted in the only way befitting the situation. He hid. He hid badly, scurrying behind his mount, ignoring the fact his own legs would still be visible amongst the horse’s.

No. Nobody’s luck can be that bad. No, no, no …

Alex cursed under his breath, his hand raised in welcome, face drawn into a plastic grin. “James,” he said in a perfect calm monotone.

“What?”

“Get the others, now. Full alert. I want as many guns on them as we’ve got.”

James didn’t wait another beat. With a twisted retinal ghost of Beth shimmering before his eyes, he scrambled away towards the stable door and dove for cover, slinking into the nook between the stables and the utility shed, spluttering cobwebs from his lips and pushing through slicks of leaf-mulch and accrued detritus.

Behind him, diplomatic greetings were exchanged from afar. The rumble of hooves upon packed earth rattled the stable wall, amplified by the hollow space inside so it sounded as though a hundred riders approached instead of a dozen. Then he sprinted around the back of the compound, keeping low to the ground, ignoring the cold bite of dew quickly soaking into his trousers and shirtsleeves.

He scrambled through his own bedroom window and burst into the corridor, picked up his own rifle from the umbrella stand beside the door, and pounded upon the door frame with the butt. The brass fixings sang a high-pitched ditty, and he heard the others burst from their beds throughout the farmhouse.

He called out one word, and it was enough to bring them running: “Malverston!”

Lincoln appeared first, brandishing his old hunting rifle, hair askance in a nest of salt-and-pepper thickets. His eyes were foggy with sleep, but they had all been drilling for attack so long that his body was moving on automatic, taking him away along the corridor at a tactical creep, pressed fast to the wall, finger ready on the trigger, disappearing away toward the roof space.

Agatha and Lucian were next, both fully awake and poised for action, their eyes darting amongst the shadows before looking on James and demanding to know the situation with the strength of their gazes.

“They’re here,” James breathed. Their eyes hardened across the hall from one another, and they slunk back out of sight for a moment before reappearing simultaneously, clad in boots and slickers, .9mm pistols at the ready.

James listened hard, straining against the roar of the background silence, and picked out distant voices outside. They sounded calm enough. He nodded to the others, and they in turn headed off to their own defence posts, vanishing into the stone and hardwood of the house.

Voices outside were growing louder. They should all be in position by now.

Last to appear were the Creeks.

No surprises there, he thought. Then he checked himself. It wasn’t fair to expect too much of them. It was no secret that Helen and Hector weren’t cut out for this world; they needed a little hand-holding. If he hadn’t been sure they needed the cover of an extra gun, he would have preferred they stay out of it.

But things might be about to get ugly, and never mind how jovial Malverston had been last time they had met. The man was sharp, and he’d had time to think—the biggest danger to them of all. He could always have changed his mind about gathering the Old World’s treasures by playing nice.

But why Beth? What could be the purpose of sending her?

His stomach crawled as a thought far worse occurred to him: maybe she had
requested
it, wheeled her way here, for him. Could she have been so stupid, just to be near him?

He had to think it might be so.

Embarrassment and unreasoning feckless anger burned his cheeks as Hector peered around the door at the end of the hall and caught his eye. James waved him on impatiently, and Hector fawningly dragged his way out in the direction of the library.

Where he won’t get in the way, James thought, fighting a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.

Hector had left the door ajar. James cursed and made to dive back for his own window, but a frightened whimper rippled along the corridor, and he hesitated, gazing at the Creeks’ bedroom door. Cursing the man, he crept along the corridor and peered in, pushing his finger to his lips. He caught sight of Helen upon the bed, doe-eyed, with her arms locked fast around the black shock of hair upon Norman’s head.

The boy looked afraid—an unreasoning kind of fear, aligning with his mother’s trembling. It was obvious he knew nothing of what was going on.

James did his best to inject as much calm and assurance as he could muster into a single nod, ignoring the unbroken, glassy sheen to Helen’s eyes, and closed the door.

He hurried back to his room, slithered out through the window, and returned to the crawlspace beside the stables, the acrid odour of fear crawling into his nostrils, wafting up from the folds under his shirt.

Alex’s voice had grown louder, but was still peaceable enough. He was standing his ground, just where James had left him, that same plastic, diplomatic smile on his face.

The band of mounted Mooners had come to a halt before the first cobbles of the square, lining up along the border between dirt and stone as though they had piled up against a solid wall.

James took a moment to pick out the others in their hiding places: Lincoln in the roof space just below the thatch-line, Lucian in the recess in the floor leading to the cellar, and Agatha amongst the water tank’s maze of pipes. Then he took a steadying breath, settling down to listen.

“What difference does it make if we’re early?” the closest of the Mooners bawled. He had a nasal, simpering voice; James guessed from having his nose broken a few times, probably from being such a greasy little worm.

He pulled a wide smile that was more like a silent snarl, showing a mouthful of yellow misaligned teeth.

“No problem, traveller,” Alex called. “You surprised us is all. Surely you know we can’t have just anyone approach our home without raising the alarm.”

“Don’t think me a fool, Cain. I see the guns pointed at us. I see them well.”

Alex was unperturbed. “Just as I see the revolver you have under your duffel there, traveller.” He let that sit for a moment, and James was satisfied to see the sneer drop from the man’s face. Then Alex said, “What do you say we get a little friendlier?”

The gathering of Mooners shifted upon their mounts, each puckered face squinting at the golden-haired man, calm as a monk before them, so effortlessly in command of the situation.

“Come now, surely Mayor Malverston would hate to hear our first meeting ended with any unpleasantness.”

“We’re here to learn, Cain. Learn the Old Ways. But don’t think for a second any one of us wants anything to do with you or your ilk,” the lead rider said, sneering.

Not the most diplomatic right-hand man.

This idiot was bound to start a firefight wherever he went.

Something of what Alex had said before came back to him now: Malverston was a cruel and greedy man, but Newquay’s Moon could have had far worse. Swathes of towns in the North that otherwise might have flourished had met sticky ends because of a handful of barbaric leaders. And it seemed that amongst Malverston’s inner circle of slithering serpents, there was no shortage of would-be tyrants.

What had Alex agreed to? They were getting involved in a situation that could get bad fast. When Malverston met his end—and he would, soon—these were the men who would fight over his corpse. And the worst part of it was that none of them were the kind to fight tooth and nail; that would have been over in seconds, and a single victor would emerge to claim his prize, if only to play King of the Hill.

But these men were of the weasel variety, pale-faced and insidious. Their battle would be one of backhanded politics, multi-layered schemes, and subterfuge. In their bid for power, these men would poison that quaint little town like an oil slick poured over an ocean reef.

“To learn the Old Ways you’ll need a civil tongue for starters. Any leader worth his salt doesn’t ride up to an ally’s—nay, a teacher’s—home with a loaded gun pointed at him. I’m sure you’re not one of those people, are you, traveller?”