Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (7 page)

“Spill it,” Lucian grunted. “I’ve had enough of this macabre goop. We got one mission here: get home.”

The man spread his hands in placation. “Like I said, I think a few answers are in order.”

“I don’t need any bloody answers. The time for talk is past.”

“On the contrary, talk is the flavour of the moment!”

Robert seemed to pop some spigot of self-control. “Lucian’s right. We don’t have time for this, Norman.” He nodded to the desk. “This stinks, and I can’t get distracted now. They all need us.”

Norman cut Richard off before he could join in. “
Just
… wait.”

“Norm—” Lucian hissed.

“I said, wait.” Staring down Lucian was like playing chicken with a charging horse, but Norman refused to give in.

The silverback’s jaw tightened, but he nodded and sat back.

“Your name was…,” Norman said, rounding on the desk.

The stranger tipped his head, acquiescing. “Fol, of Highcourt.”

Norman made to introduce them in turn, but Fol waved a dismissive hand. “Not necessary.” A smile crept into the corners of his mouth. “I know.”

Of course you do. You’ve been watching me for a while, haven’t you? Maybe you’ve been watching us all.

“Fine, Mr Fol. I’m going to make this really clear. Whatever’s going on, whatever you’ve got planned, forget it. We’re not interested. Billy says you know a way to get us home. I’m going to take a chance, because I can’t see any other way. But if this is some kind of trick, I promise on behalf of every man, woman, and child still free in this world”—their eyes locked in sizzling stalemate—“I’ll kill you.”

Fol’s light and easy smile drooped into a stony glare with jarring rapidity. “Good,” he said. “I hope you mean that.”

Norman blinked despite himself. “Why?”

“Because you people are among but a handful who can stop what’s coming.”

“That’s why we’re trying to get home,” Richard said. “If the Alliance falls, everything of the Old World we’re keeping alive will disintegrate, and the whole country will slide—”

Fol waved a hand. “I’m afraid you don’t understand. I’m not talking about a mere descent into anarchy. Empires rise and fall, civilisation comes and goes; such is the way of mortals. I’d never be concerned with natural order.” He stood slowly and leaned over the table. “I’m afraid that none of you, for all your threats and concern for your friends, are anywhere near scared enough. If you had known before now what the stakes really were, you’d have had me against the wall with a gun in my mouth the moment you laid eyes on me.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Lucian growled. “We said no more gab. Get to the bloody point!”

“It’s not something that I can just explain. To really understand, I’ll have to show you.” With that, he gestured for them to rise, nodding to the crest of the pendulum upon the table. “Come closer and put your hands here.”

Norman had no intention of moving. All this reeked of some gigantic waste of time; a red herring leading down some cosmic avenue of freakery, one that would leave everyone back home to die.

Billy stood without a word, stepped lightly over to the desk, and with a glance of contempt in Fol’s direction, laid her hand on the crest. The brass glyph dwarfed her, making her rosy fingers seem so very tiny and delicate.

She asked me to trust her. But can I really trust the fate of us all to some mystic trip?

Norman had no idea what he believed until he found himself standing to join Billy by the desk. He glanced at her, and any doubt ebbed under her long-suffering stare. He gave her a wink and turned to the others.

He wasn’t going to force them. He had chosen, but he wasn’t going to force this on them. If they were going in pursuit of insanity, they all had to jump together, or they wouldn’t go.

Robert was first to stand, a blazing look of mixed warning and gratitude emanating from his rounded head.

Norman knew what that meant: if they succeeded, it would be Norman who had led them to victory; but if they failed… it would be Sarah’s blood on his hands.

No, that won’t happen. We won’t let it.

Still, the mental images flashed before his eyes, an unending cascade: bullets, running feet, the quaint cobbles of New Canterbury splashed with blood.

Richard came next, shaking his head. Every step of the way, he muttered, “This is mental. Mental.”

Everyone, Fol included, waited for Lucian to make his choice. He glowered at the ground when he finally rose, not meeting a single eye until his hairy digits slapped down onto the crest, then locked onto Fol. “Like the boy said,” he glowered, “if this is a trick, you die.”

Fol gave a small bow, his stony look having once again blossomed into a light-hearted, almost facetious grin. “Understood. Now, shall we?”

The next moment, the cavern was gone, and Norman almost screamed for darkness rushed in on all sides, and he was flying. He endured a nauseating sensation of falling, but in no direction his internal compass could parse; some other flavour of
sideways
that boggled the mind. A brief instant of pain followed as the chill in his chest rushed out, pain and cold so intense he felt he might shatter, and then his entire body folded up through impossible angles like an origami swan.

Then darkness again, and the other five were before him again. They all hovered amidst nothing. Just nothing. At first he thought a black canvas had replaced the world. Then he looked down what seemed a hundred feet at least, and he saw them.

Them
.

His heart stopped. The sight was a horror to outstrip all others, but it wasn’t the sheer oddity of what he was seeing: it was that he had seen it before with Billy. In his dreams.

“Oh my God,” Richard said, his voice infantile and on the verge of tears.

There are so many of them. So many…

The floor of the strange other place undulated in constant motion, its colour a rusted palette ranging between chalk and charcoal.

People. Endless, screaming, flailing people. A carpet of human beings without end, stretching away into infinity in all directions. Blindly pressed together amongst the accumulated filth of decades, starving and agonised, yet without death; crushed face-to-face, yet entirely alone in their own personal hell.

“Is that…?” Richard stammered.

“The Vanished,” Billy said. “The people from Before.”

“Trick.” Lucian’s voice had lost its gravelly edge and seemed on the brink of snapping. “It’s a trick. I’ll… I’ll kill you. I said no tricks.” He made a loose grab for Fol, but there was no fight left in him as though he had taken twenty rounds in a boxing ring.

Fol’s voice was gentle. “It’s no trick. Nobody should ever have to see this.” A brief pause. “But you’d never believe me otherwise.”

“It can’t be,” Richard said. His voice had devolved entirely to that of a child’s, his eyes wide and staring.

“It is,” Fol said.

Richard swallowed sharply.

Norman and Billy said nothing more. It seemed outrageous and almost funny, but the truth was the two of them had seen this enough. It was horrific, gut-wrenching, sure to haunt their dreams for the rest of their lives. But he didn’t disbelieve it one iota.

Before them writhed the last generation of the Old World, brought to this torturous purgatory.

Robert swept a long stare over the carpet of Vanished, then calmly turned back to Fol. “Tell us,” he said.

Norman’s throat tightened. Somehow, seeing the determination in those frank chocolate eyes hurt more than the sight of billions of screaming innocents.

He’s getting home even if he has to punch through the devil himself.

Richard, however, had started mewling. His hands reached up to his head, and he curled into a ball, not falling in this place without gravity, only turning in free fall, scrunched into a jittering foetal position. Tears dropped from his chin. “No, this can’t be happening. No, no, no, no…”

“I-I…” Lucian scowled. “This… No. This isn’t real.”

“It is real,” Fol said. “I promise you.”

“No, this is the same trick as before,” Lucian cried. His eyes grew wilder with each word. “It was you, wasn’t it? You’ll never get me with your mumbo jumbo, not like you got him.”

Him? Don’t crack on me now, Lucian. Don’t you dare
, Norman thought desperately.

Fol sighed. Suddenly his facetious gleam had punctured yet again. An ancient fatigue shone through for an instant, and Norman’s skin rippled with some extra perception, one he had only before received from Billy.

He’s been waiting. Waiting for so long for this moment. For us.

“You have to listen to me,” he said quietly.

Lucian made another weak grab for him. “You won’t take any of us. You’ve already taken him away from me. I won’t let you do it again!”

Norman’s lips parted in shock for there were tears in Lucian’s eyes. Never, in all his life, had he seen Lucian shed a tear.

“Listen. Listen, now,” Fol said, his face draining of any remaining colour.

“No, no, no!” Richard wept without end.

“Lucian, stop,” Robert said. “There’s no time.”

“Please listen to me…” Fol uttered.

“I won’t be taken; I’ll fight you. I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” Lucian barked.

“No, no, no, no…”

“You took my brother, but you won’t take me!”

“ENOUGH!” Fol’s voice tore through them as though they were made of paper, a searing intensity so great he seemed ten times as large. For a brief moment looking at him was unbearable, like staring into the sun, and Norman glimpsed something else superimposed in Fol’s place: something elemental, beyond his comprehension. “I have waited too long for the time to be right. You people will listen to me now, or our last chance is gone.
YOU WILL LISTEN
!” His voice rose to a stentorian rumble, silencing any remnant retorts.

They all watched, waiting, hanging absurdly in mid-air. Norman had time, before the man of Highcourt spoke again, for a single errant thought:

This is just so bloody weird. Why couldn’t I have just taken a bullet to the head instead?

“I told you that you didn’t know the stakes. Now you do,” Fol said. He gestured to the millions—perhaps billions—of screaming people below. His shoulders rose and fell as he took long, slow breaths. Some great unseen fire, one that could have destroyed them all in a flash, slowly died down. He sighed. “I need you to understand. So…” Astonishingly, a thin smile graced his face. “I have to tell you a little story.”

This time, none of them interrupted. Instead, they all turned to the Vanished as though some secret magnetism drew their gaze. Fol’s voice washed over them in dulcet waves.

“In the beginning, there were two. Both were wise and fair, servants of the creator: the Pendulum that must always swing, from which pour the threads that bind our universe together. One, the Great Weaver, would for all time hang from these threads and fashion the body of reality, breathe life into the stars and oceans, creatures and lives of men. The other, the Angelic One, would watch over them, guide the ultimate fate of all towards becoming one with themselves and the Pendulum. Thus, together, they would bring the cosmos towards greatness and peace.

“This was the bargain set before them. An eternity of servitude in exchange for the knowledge that they would embody the true definition of divinity. So the Great Weaver fashioned a cosmos of myriad worlds of untold number and variety; all beside one another, yet apart, joined by threads unseen to all but a handful of Guardians, whom the Weaver charged with maintaining its creations.

“The Angelic One guided creatures great and small to their respective destinies, fortunes, and deaths. Those great and meek it nurtured to the heights of enlightenment, and across the Web the Weaver and the Angelic One were worshipped. For a time beyond timelessness, a goodness lasted as undying as the stars they had birthed. All was fair in the new realm of All Where.

“But all things come to an end. While the Angelic One guided the powerful and strong, it saw the Weaver was but a limit to its own power. All Where would forever risk ultimate ruin should the Weaver falter. So the Angelic One set out to take the Pendulum’s charge for itself, and itself alone.

“The Battle of the Elementals raged beyond the perception of mortals, yet in the Solstice Scrolls, passages speak of galaxies shattering, flinging billions of worlds into darkness, forever lost to the coldness of space. Stars dimmed in sequence as warring shadows passed by, two figures locked in desperate struggle; one manlike and winged, the other eight-legged and many-eyed. Entropy reigned supreme, sicknesses ran rife, and across the near-infinite worlds of All Where, rivers ran red with blood.

“In the end, when the dust settled, the Angelic One lay defeated. There was no demoting it, no destroying it, for the bargain had been struck: to break it would bring All Where to catastrophic collapse. The Great Weaver had but one choice: imprisonment. The darkest, most inescapable prison in all reckoning.”

Norman blinked, looking at the writhing carpet of the Vanished afresh.

It’s this place. This is that prison
.

“Yes,” Fol said. “Yes, it is this place.”

Norman started, but let it pass. No doubt the same thought had passed through all their heads.

But still, still. Billy had surely read his mind at least once. It wasn’t absurd that Fol had done the same.

Nothing’s absurd anymore…

“The Great Weaver gathered its Guardians, and together they cast the Angelic One to this place. To ensure it remained, they forever placed it in chains: the charge of maintaining the Pendulum’s swing. The task destroyed every Guardian but the Weaver itself, great beings the like of which would never pass this way again. Yet the job was done, and the Angelic One slaved alone, lost and trapped.

“That, friends, is the origin of all that is, was, and will ever be. The story of the Web of All Where.”

A long, long silence followed.

“Uh… uh,” Lucian said at last.

Norman tore his gaze from the Vanished with enormous effort. “What happened? If this is that prison, why are all these people here? Where’s the Angel?”

Fol flinched. “It may be called the Angelic One in the origin scrolls, but whatever it is, it is no angel.”