Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (46 page)

“A blanket,” she whispered, patting Sarah’s hand as she pushed a bowl of broth in front of her.

Sarah ate while Allie stripped off her white garments as though she were a child. She was lucky to have them, but she couldn’t bring herself to thank them. Not yet, not now. A pall of determined vigour possessed her despite her exhaustion, pushing her on to the last.

She couldn’t relax, couldn’t show weakness. Not now. Because somewhere out there, Robert was fighting for them. And elsewhere, people were fixing to raze her city to the ground.

Sarah ate and slept, and dreamt of a honeymoon that never was.

It was a crisp dewy morning, and Norman was in hell. Pain had festered in his chest since mounting up in New Canterbury. Even then he had known this trip might be the end of him, and he had come anyway.

This morning, cold woke him. He knew the Echoes were close. The farther north they rode, the stronger they seemed.

Before he could climb from his sleeping bag, the cold pulsed and thrummed in his chest, and he braced himself helplessly. This time he didn’t slip; he was hurled from his body into a blackness so uniform it seemed rich and velvety, like treacle.

He had time for one thought to bullet through his head.

Dear god, what now?

Then a terror to belittle all others shot from a mere pinprick to all-consuming enormity at impossible speed, and suddenly Norman hovered above millions of screaming, enslaved
things
, filthy and deformed.

So I’ve cracked after all. Well, at least now I’m sure.

Then he screamed. Screamed, the way children do when confronted with an experience so alien and beyond their control that their only recourse is blind terror.

Something had thrust its way into his mind, deep into the gooey bits where he, the thinking, feeling Norman, lived.

“It’s people,” said a high, sweet little voice. A tiny figure now floated beside him, a young girl with fire-red hair, the same girl who had stood over him in his dream.

“You again!” he said. “What do you want?”

“Nothing. I didn’t bring you here.”

“Then what the hell is this?”

Talking to your own delusion. Great. Keep digging that hole, Norm.

But he couldn’t shake the iron certainty that this
was
real. The horrors under them were too far beyond reckoning, but something told him the girl was a living, breathing person somewhere out there. He sensed power.

“I’m on a mission,” the girl said simply.

“Aren’t we all?”

She ignored him.

“You speak strangely,” he said.

“I came across the sea. Enger Land is a strange place, like Wonderland gone topsy-turvy.”

Wonderland gone topsy-turvy. I like that. Craziness gone crazy.

“Look, they hurt so much,” she breathed.

Norman yelled as something yanked him closer to the writhing shadows, as though his face were being pressed up against stinking mud.

God, it’s her.

She turned him over like a leaf in the wind. Maybe they were both here because of some higher power, but between them there was no contest. The ease with which she threw him around was frightening.

“You’re special,” he said.

Where had that come from?

“Lots of people say that.” Her voice was tiny, and tired—too tired to come from that sweet, young mouth. “I just want to go home.”

They hung there together and Norman shook his head. “When will all this end?”

Sick amusement trickled down those invading fingers stuck in his head, her amusement. “I gave up asking,” she said.

“So I suppose we’re on some kind of journey together? Some Abra Kadabra quest?”

“Maybe.”

He nodded. What else could he do?

“One question,” he said.

She looked at him, so alone and small it made his heart lurch in his chest.

“
Did
you bring me here?”

She blinked slowly, and those prying fingers yanked free from his head.

“See you soon,” she said.

Then the screaming people were gone, and Norman span. In the blur he caught flashes of great silvery strands, titanic legs the breadth of entire galaxies, converging on eight blinking eyes—

The spider, the Great Weaver!

—and then he was shivering, encrusted in an icy skin. By the time the spinning stopped he was back in the stables, and Robert was calling his name.

It was time to mount up.

They had been moving for over a week, and by now Norman cursed himself every other moment. Constant, jolting impacts of the horse’s hooves sent blinding pain coursing his body. As mile after mile passed by, they skirted the smouldering wreckage of towns and villages. More than a few members of the expedition erupted in frantic searches for their kin in the rubble.

In a way, Norman felt like a hypnotist, drawing his mesmerised flock towards a meat grinder. Because that was the truth of it: a lot of them were about to die, and it might be for nothing.

But he would do it, because that was what needed to be done. After all he had been through, he still spurned his Great Destiny. But he had learned that much, at least: some things just needed to be done.

The cities had all fallen behind them now and they were heading into the unknown. Nobody had ventured this far north for years. The Northlands had been respectfully left to their own devices as the South had scrabbled to form its alliances and rebuild something of what it had lost. Of what really went on here, they had little knowledge.

Apparently, not all had crumbled. If this coalition from Scotland really was real, it was possible another society like theirs was bent on re-creating the Old World, their two orders separated by a strip of no-man’s land in between.

But it could also be that nobody waited out here but thieves, trading posts, rival gangs and any lone farmsteads strong enough to hold their own. The farther north they travelled, the more it seemed the latter was the case. Norman’s hopes for finding the stranded emissaries dwindled fast.

But he couldn’t let on. He was a leader now, and that meant holding the course for the sake of everyone else.

This is what Alexander had to deal with all those years … All those years I was whining at his side.

He wished he had paid a little more attention to how Alexander had dealt with it. He had always known he would have to lead, eventually.

They had passed bodies by the roadside for as long as they had travelled north. Most were thin, beaten and desiccated. Some were whipped into bloody horrors.

Every so often they would pass a farmstead or a town or campsite, raided of food and women and children, along with anyone strong enough to walk. The rest had been either shot or driven off. A few had been burned on pyres of straw and kindling—burned at the stake like medieval witches.

Norman’s stomach turned at the sight of that calibre of barbarism. To think their countrymen had become that. He did his best to steer the group clear of those pyres, but still they all saw plenty. And there was no skirting the endless carpet of bodies that lay in the army’s wake. Even the thieves and highwaymen who had ruled this land had fallen victim to the relentless tide of anger and retribution; their bodies peppered the same ground as those they would have called their prey.

The North belonged to the sigil of the pigeon, now.

After travelling along a motorway for some miles they crested a hill and saw yet more wilderness ahead, stretching away towards a jagged collection of mountains. The land was growing rougher, sparser, and a low-lying fog was becoming ever present. Also there was simply a sense of something different, a prescient thrumming deep in his bowels. He knew they all felt it, but couldn’t describe it.

“This is the place. Radden,” Robert said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Norman said. He didn’t doubt it either.

The road ahead had something
other
about it, off-hue, as though it wasn’t quite aligned with the rest of the world. After checking the map, they found that their target was the tallest of the mountain peaks: a flat-topped shear slab of rock over two thousand feet high called Dreymont’s Peak.

By then the land was made up exclusively of heather, windswept fog-ridden moorland and dense forests older than any creation of man. Out there could be anyone, and anything, hidden amidst the ruins and the endless tracts of wilderness.

“They’re up there,” Robert said, looking toward the peak. All of them had gathered along the edge of the A590, the carriageway they had been following, their mounts shuffling restlessly.

“Maybe,” Norman said.

Faces all around them were uncertain and hesitant. Now that they were here, he sensed their apprehension. They would either find salvation or death here. Norman waited for Robert to take the lead, but for once he seemed caught up in his own thoughts, staring up at the distant slopes.

“Alright,” Norman said, clearing his throat. The closer they came to this place, the more the pain in his chest gave way to that ugly, creeping cold. It tingled in his lungs, prickled his skin. He tried to ignore the Echoes wandering from horizon to horizon.

Whatever power was playing with him like a rag doll, it lived here.

He forced himself to turn to the others and saw that even they were ready and waiting, big burly men and ruddy-faced women who looked far wiser than he could ever hope to be. He nodded and took a breath. “We best get on with it.”

They were well into Radden County’s barren foothills when they saw the smoke of the first campfires on the horizon.

“We’re here.”

James and Alex had crested a hill that gave them a panoramic view of the landscape, sloping down towards Victorian ruins and, beyond, endless miles of moorland and mountains. In the far distance, he caught the paleness of the ocean.

Close by, pigeons cooed. At first it had only been a few from the coop back home following them. But along the way they had picked up more and more, until eventually it seemed the horizon was alive with their fluttering wings in all directions.

Something had changed in the birds just as it had in him, as though they sensed the force awakening inside him.

Alex was quiet, his face taut and twitching.

“What is it?” James said.

Alex nodded. “I know this hill,” he said. “This is where I first saw it, saw the fires and the empty cars and falling planes. I came here the day of the End.” He nodded down at the huddle of cottages and townhouses ahead, dark with vines and saplings and moss. “Welcome home, James.”

The two of them remained on the hilltop for some time, taking in the sheer scale of their surroundings, dwarfed by the primal enormity of it all—the mountains and the lakes, the ancient woodlands and tortured heath clothing the moorland. James shivered despite his exhaustion and the tired slumping of his steed under him.

Yet still he itched. His calves and feet were numb, his crotch pummelled to jelly, yet all along their length, they itched to be moving forward, desperate to get wherever they were going. Still, he was being led like a goat being lured by a carrot on a stick.

Alex seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move. But now that he was here, he had no idea what to do. All he could think of was to keep moving and hope inspiration struck. But what was there to go on bar the itch itself—and what good was a feeling you had to be somewhere if you had no idea what your business was when you got there?

It was a wonder to be back at his birthplace, to know that he and Alex had come from here, right here, when the world had been bustling and alive. But now it was only another abandoned husk, rotting out in the wastes, without a single sign of life. This place was dead.

So why am I here? Why, for the love of God?

Because if he had come all this way for nothing, he would never forgive himself. He had put all they had worked for in jeopardy, and left Beth to those snivelling rats. All this had to be worth it,
had
to be.

He slapped his reins and urged his faltering mount onward, descending toward the ruins of Radden. It wasn’t until they reached the foot of the hill and they had entered the blanket of thick fog that wreathed the entire county that he got his first sign.