The Circle Line (19 page)

The last garoul and the nandi and Jak were pushed into the line and in a moment had vanished. The force of the blast carried debris on a wall of wind around the entire circular laboratory, bringing the lights on in a blaze of neon. A few moments later a rush of dust and grit blew past Sam from behind.

He looked to Kya and Weewalk. Kya had thrown a barrier of sorts around them and she sat on the floor, cradling the kobold between her legs, his bloody arm hanging limply, his hand resting on the floor before him. At last silence filled the room.

Sam turned his head to look at the pockmarked concrete ceiling.

‘Weewalk,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘Hadan is dead. I’m sorry. I couldn’t save him.’

The kobold, his eyes shut tight, let out a wail which filled the space between them.

Sam walked the length of the circular laboratory and still found no conventional door.  The only way in or out was through a line. No wonder the place had remained hidden and untouched since the last scientists had left. The room was a disaster area. Benches lay smashed into pieces; computer equipment fizzed and sparked over the bodies of the beasts that Jak had drawn here. A few lines remained in their archways. He tested them in turn. He now had some sort of sense where each led; maps began to form in his head. He came to the last doorway and sent his presence into it to sense where the line would lead to. He stopped in amazement, finding it difficult to believe what he had just discovered. Then with a shake of his head he walked around the room again, destroying each of the other doors in turn. He could not really say why he did this. He only wanted this place to be useless. It certainly felt useless to him. Each line popped away as he blew apart the archways. Power crackled on his fingertips. Men should never have tried to create their own lines. The project had been doomed from the start.

When the last door remained Sam walked to where Weewalk and Kya sat hunched and sniffing on the floor. Gently Sam encouraged them to their feet and guided them to the last line. He opened it and ushered them through. After one final look around the room he gathered their bags, picking up the lamp that Hadan had dropped when Jak attacked, and stepped through himself. That doorway would always remain open.

As with the other man-made lines this one bucked and threw them but they landed gently enough in a dark underground room. Sam lit the lamp and led them up a short corridor to another room.

‘We can rest here.’

They unrolled their blankets on the cold floor. Sam bid each of them to lie down and, as he had before, he sent his mind into their bodies curing the hurts he found there. Finally, he turned his mind inwards and cured his own pain, soothing away the stressed muscle and flesh until his body felt strangely numb because of the absence of it.

When he had finished Weewalk shuffled over. His face pale and concerned in the light of the fire.

‘Sam, the stories of the destruction of Montauk. It was you. You were the one. You are the one.' Weewalk shook his head 'Where do we go from here?’

‘We continue.’ said Sam simply. ‘I won't let Hadan's death be in vain. Some good must come from this whole thing.’

‘But we’re back where we started.’ said Kya, ‘We're no closer to Mu than we ever were.’

‘Actually, we're very close. There is another line nearby.’ said Sam, ‘A natural one which will take us away from here, to Tongue's Scar. I know where we need to go.’

‘Where?’ Weewalk asked confused. ‘Sam, you seem different somehow.’

‘I am different. I can feel presence everywhere.’ Sam looked around at the dark featureless room around him. ‘Do you remember what you once told me, my friend? Those with power must have spent time near lines in order to have amplified their powers. Well, Weewalk, I'm going home. Back to my grandfather's house. That's where the door has been all along. Our path must take us back to the start, back to the beginning. Out path has taken us full circle. The line is a circle.’

And so, on a cold winter's evening Sam led them from the tunnels in the woods near his house. The place where Weewalk had first taken him along a line. He soon found himself standing before the rubble of his former home.

This was where it had all begun for Samuel Hain. He stood with his back to the darkening woods behind him. The air was clear and the moon was shining brightly above. With a nod to himself Sam walked towards what had once been his home.

The building had all but collapsed. A few blackened walls remained standing but the house was essentially a pile of brick and charred wood. What few possessions might have remained seemed to have been removed. Sam was surprised by how small it looked when one could only see the foundations of what it had been. Living inside, it had seemed pretty large, but as tumbled brick and mortar it was small and sad. He stopped for a moment, standing at what used to be the front door. He looked down and caught sight of the wooden plaque on which his grandfather had carved the name of the house. ‘The End of the Line.’ Sam smiled to himself as he nudged at it with his foot. Then he stepped over the threshold and followed an imaginary path through the hall and to where the door to the cellar would once have stood. After a quick look around to check that no-one but Kya and Weewalk were watching he sent his mind into the tumbled stone and blackened wood and pushed it all aside piece by piece until he had uncovered the stairs into the cellar. Once the path was clear he descended into the darkness.

Holding up Hadan's old lamp he could see that this room had escaped relatively unscathed from the storm that had raged above. A few things had fallen through but nothing had caught fire. Most of the damage seemed to have been caused by smoke and the white walls had been painted a sooty grey.

Turning to look around as Weewalk and Kya came down the steps Sam felt a funny tickle at the back of his neck and he remembered how he had felt in this house. Scared of ghosts. It seemed as though one were here now. His grandfather perhaps or Hadan. He almost laughed then. It seemed absurd that he had been scared of something as intangible and insubstantial as a ghost. He knew now that there were real monsters out there. The legends of werewolves were true. Men should be more fearful of tooth and claw than spectre and spook. The real danger was men like Ferus. That thought set his resolve and he turned towards the hole in the wall that he had grown up casting sideways glances at but had never really thought to question why it was there.

He hoisted himself up and climbed through the wall of the cellar of his childhood home. Hidden, just out of sight, he saw a ladder leading through a rough hole in the floor. He called to Kya and Weewalk to follow him as he descended, down into darkness as the hum and chime of the line below began to sing up at him, calling him towards its caress.

Tarak Everune wanted to pace his cell. He wanted to stand and walk, with his arms behind his back. It helped him think. But he didn't. He had to maintain the broken persona that he had so carefully crafted for Ferus over the last few years. He had to be a man without a presence. He had positioned all the pieces on the board as carefully as he could. Now there was just one more piece to deploy. The Polish man, Aleksy, whose mind he had been so quietly and subtly affecting. And he  was almost in position. If Aleksy didn't distract the King at just the right time, so that Ferus was acting alone without the presence of the King, then all would be for naught. The rest? Well, Tarak told himself that he just had to wait and let the game play out in the hope that he had properly predicted where the checkmate would come. And so he just sat, aware that someone could be watching through some gap in the stone wall. Besides, his cell was extremely cold and he had been given only enough food to survive. He felt weak. His stomach ached. He thought about little else other than food. And so, he continued to sit, hunched over his knees. A broken man but perhaps only in appearance.

He had fresh hope though. He could feel that something may be happening. Ferus had been to see him twice in the last two days which was an unusual amount of interest from the tyrant. Both times he had come only to check that Tarak had not moved. Tarak had not looked up on either occasion, but he knew it was Ferus. The man had seemed agitated both times and the second time Tarak had had the sense that Ferus had opened his mouth to speak before changing his mind and turning away again. Perhaps something was up. Perhaps Ferus' plans were not going quite as he wanted them. Tarak allowed himself a small smile under his lank hair.

Sam stood in front of the line beneath the floor of the cellar. Kya and Weewalk came up behind him.

‘He knew it was here all along, my granddad. I wonder if he ever knew what it was or where it went.’

Sam looked around the small space that had been carved out of the earth around the line. A table had been built here and a wooden chair too. It was like the burrow office of some man-mole. Mildewed paper and a few old pens sat on the small desk but the paper was blank apart from spots of mould. How often must his grandfather have sat here looking longingly at what lay just beyond his reach, perhaps never understanding that it was a doorway to another world?

‘Well, here we go.’ said Sam, facing the patch of darkness. He waved a hand and the line opened before him. ‘It's time to go to Mu. It’s cold there. We should put extra clothes on.’

‘Tongue's Scar, here we come.’ said Kya softly.

Once they had finished dressing they stepped through together.

They arrived in a world of deep snow and tall fir trees that looked like very much like any other pine trees from Sam's own world. The sky above was a deep clear blue. It was extremely cold but Sam noticed that his breath did not seem to fog much in front of his face. Instead it sparkled like he was blowing out glitter, as ice crystals formed in the air. Despite the cold air there was warmth in the sun.

The whole world shone and, for a moment, Sam wanted nothing more than to plant new footprints in the fresh unspoilt snow that surrounded them. The place was beautiful, the air crisp and clean.

Weewalk gave Sam a nudge and pointed up to a tree some distance away. A single ropen sat glaring at them. It hopped on the branch once, twice and then spread its wings and flew off with a caw like a crow.

‘Well,’ said Weewalk, ‘if anyone is around they’ll soon know we're here. Perhaps we should follow its lead.’ And with that he began to kick through the deep snow which immediately threatened to engulf him.

Sam and Kya pushed on too and overtook the kobold, tramping down the snow in order to make his passage easier.

‘We could presence-leap.’ said Kya.

‘Let's walk for now.’ said Sam, looking back at where their trail started in a pure white drift as if they had appeared from nowhere.

'Is now perhaps a good time to discuss how we're going to do whatever it is that we're going to do?' asked Weewalk.

'You two try to get to Tarak' said Sam 'I'll try to keep whoever is waiting for us busy.'

It was not long before the trees began to thin and they could make out a building ahead.

‘I think this is it.’ said Kya excitedly. ‘Yes, this is it. We’ve come right to it. This is Tongue's Scar.’

They stepped into a clearing surrounding a squat, grey, single-story block of a building. Although the sky above was clear now, away from the trees, Sam could see that a storm was coming. The wind picked up suddenly and towering dark clouds raced towards them. In a moment the sun was gone. A door in the building opened as they entered the space away from the trees. Out stepped a familiar figure.

‘How nice of you to visit.’ said Ferus with a mocking bow.

This was it then. Sam had come prepared for a fight, but not with the most powerful person he'd ever encountered. He tried to keep the alarm and fear out of his voice.

‘We're here for Tarak Everune, Ferus. Let him go and we'll be on our way.’

‘Ha, ha, pathetic. At least try to sound like you've got some balls, boy. Besides, what do you want him for? He's a craven coward and he's released all his secrets. The secret keepers are over. The only useful thing he's done is to bring you here.'

Sam felt movement next to him and was surprised to see Kya rush forward towards Ferus. A look of hatred on her face. But she had not taken more than a few steps before Ferus sent a huge blast of energy at the three of them. Even though Sam was prepared for it and threw up a shield he was knocked off his feet by the awesome power of it. It was like nothing else he had felt. The power that Ferus had just delivered so casually was far more than Sam was capable of.

Suddenly Sam realised he was wrong to have come here. It was a trap. He had nowhere near enough presence to beat Ferus. Besting Jak and his beasts might have even been part of the false trail. Now, he was doomed.

Ferus spoke again. ‘We just can't have people going around opposing the King. People have already been talking, boy, about your time at the Mermaid. Some think you're pretty powerful, that you could be the new leader for the rebel cause. That the prophecy is about you.’ He shook his head. ‘It isn't. I'm afraid that it won't happen.’

He sent another blast at Sam who flew backwards, landing in a crumpled heap in the snow. He could see Kya and Weewalk now. They seemed to be pinned to the spot, lying prostrate on their backs. Evidently Ferus was holding them down while he toyed with Sam.

‘The age of man is over. Your parents were easy to kill. I had hoped you might make a more worthy opponent.’ said Ferus.