The Power of Five Oblivion (73 page)

At the same time, the forces of the Old Ones began to appear, swarming out of the far tower. They poured out of the doors, over the battlements, down the stairs, across the courtyard … shape-changers, fire-riders, fly-soldiers, slaves. They were coming from every direction, gaining speed, while outside the fortress, the giant monkey bounded across the ice, the condor and the humming bird swooping down behind. Still on his knees, cradling Scott, with the tears freezing on his cheeks, Jamie knew that the end had arrived – but he no longer cared. His brother had died in his arms. He had arrived too late. Everything he had endured had been for nothing.

Chaos, the King of the Old Ones, finally appeared, bursting into the sky, black rubble cascading around him. To Scarlett and the others, it was as if the mountain had turned into a volcano with molten lava and smoke pouring out. At first, Chaos was nothing more than an enormous fog, dark and shapeless. There was the glimpse of an eye, yellow and lizard-like. Something like a claw seemed to take hold of the edge of the crater, pushing him free, as if he were being born. He might have had horns, the skin of a snake. It was impossible to say. Chaos was too huge, too unfathomable. He could take any shape he wanted and even now he was changing…

In front of their eyes, all the different pieces were drawn together and formed the perfect figure of a man, human-sized, walking down the side of the mountain towards them. Except he wasn’t a man. He was a black cut-out of a man, a silhouette. Scarlett was reminded of the paper figures she had once made as a child. But it was as if Chaos had been cut out of the very fabric of the world. He was a black hole. He was nothing. The mountain and the sky rippled around him but he was pure energy, pure evil, faceless and lifeless, sucking everything into him.

“The Five…” he whispered and his voice seemed to belong to the beginning of time, before light had first come to the world. The flames twisted and writhed above him. His army stood back, waiting for his command.

But he was going to finish this himself. He continued to walk down.

Scarlett closed her eyes and prepared to die.

Richard Cole had also expected to die.

He knew that he had cheated the chairman and the Old Ones, taking their greatest prize from them. Matt was slumped in front of him, still on his feet – the frame that he was tied to kept him upright – but Richard could see that he was at peace. His head had dropped forward, his eyes were closed and he wasn’t breathing. Richard felt as if he was being torn in half. Right then, he was consumed by more grief than he had ever known in his life. But at the same time he was glad that, at least for Matt, it was over.

He had fully expected the chairman to kill him. The entire arena had gone silent, the spectators – row after row of them – staring at him in shocked silence like children who had just had a toy snatched away. The guards who had brought him here and the two torturers whose work he had seen were holding back, waiting to be told what to do. And the chairman himself was furious and frightened at the same time. This was his fault. He had brought the journalist here and somehow, inexplicably, he had failed to see that he was carrying some sort of antique knife. He had allowed him to kill the boy – the one thing that couldn’t happen. What would the Old Ones do now. What would they do to him?

All the blood had drained out of his face. There was a pulse beating at the front of his bald head and a hollow had formed in his throat as he struggled for breath. His arm shot out and he pointed a trembling finger in Richard’s direction.

“Kill him!” he screamed, in a high-pitched voice. “Kill him now!”

Nobody moved. Who was the order aimed at? Richard thought of fighting back, of trying to escape, but he was too exhausted. He didn’t care any more. After what he had been forced to do, it didn’t matter to him if he lived or died. Matt still hung in front him, his head shaved, his almost naked body covered with injuries that would cause him no more pain. Richard just wanted to stay here with him. He wasn’t going to run any more.

He was aware of something moving under his feet and fought for balance. He thought he was imagining it, until one of the guards tumbled against the other. It wasn’t the platform. The entire cavern had begun to tremble. The audience was feeling it too. Some of them stood up. Panic began to spread even as the first rocks and stones came loose. The vibrations were getting worse, more severe. The blue light was flickering on and off so that there were moments when everyone was plunged into darkness. Richard’s vision was blurred. He had the extraordinary sensation of being sucked into a hole that didn’t exist.

“Kill him!” the chairman shouted again but the guards weren’t listening, afraid that the ceiling was about to collapse in on them. The audience was panicking, staggering in every direction, making for the exits. To Richard, they were invisible one moment and then seemed frozen in panic and desperation when the light returned. Larger boulders had begun to fall. At the very back of the auditorium, one of the ledges suddenly gave way, sending twenty people plunging to their deaths in a cascade of rubble. The side wall had cracked and, impossibly, Richard saw fire on the other side. But it wasn’t the building that was ablaze. It was the very sky.

The chairman didn’t seem to have noticed what was happening. All he cared about was Richard. He glanced at the trolley with its array of knives and scalpels and snatched one up, then lumbered forward, meaning to do the job himself. Richard reacted instinctively. If he was going to die, it wasn’t going to be at the hands of this madman. As the chairman swung the knife towards him, he reached up and caught hold of the old man’s wrist, wrenching it aside. He heard the bone break. The chairman howled and reeled back, dropping the knife.

The two of them stood face-to-face. The lines of spectators had become a sprawling, fighting mass. Richard heard a cracking sound and looked up just as one of the stalactites separated from the ceiling. He saw it shoot down. The chairman looked up and at that same moment the stalactite hit him, the sharpened point piercing his throat just under his chin and continuing all the way through his body, finally pinning him to the boxing ring. The chairman’s hands flailed. His legs kicked out. Then he went still.

Nobody cared about Richard any more. The walls were falling in, the floor heaving. Everywhere, people were dying, crushed by falling rocks, or trampled, slashed and battered by other people trying to get past them. He ignored them. Somehow he managed to force all the noise out of his head and found himself alone, in a quiet place. He stepped forward and took hold of Matt, trying not to look at the golden
tumi
that still protruded from his chest. Very gently, he untangled the barbed wire from around his neck. Then he released him from the frame. Matt’s body tumbled forward into his arms. Richard laid him on the ground and, reaching out with one hand, closed his eyes one final time.

Outside, he heard two words whispered. They seemed to come from the bowels of the earth.

“The Five…”

And suddenly he got the sense, without knowing how or why, that this was what Matt had wanted and indeed that he had expected it and that somehow, despite everything, they had won after all.

Pedro could only watch as the black emptiness that was Chaos walked towards them, one step at a time, the whole world shifting around him. Jamie was kneeling on the snow, holding his brother, with Lohan standing over them. Scarlett was beside the cave. And all around them the human and non-human forces of the Old Ones were poised, waiting for the order that would finally end it all.

It happened with no warning.

The two doors at the front of the fortress disintegrated. It wasn’t quite an explosion. It was as if they had somehow chosen to tear themselves apart, turning in an instant from solid planks of wood into a vaporous cloud of splinters. Scarlett opened her eyes and saw a single, open-top vehicle speeding towards them across the ice shelf, one figure driving, another standing beside him.

Matt and Scott.

Except it couldn’t be Scott because Scott was here. And how had Matt escaped from the fortress? But even as the jeep burst into the courtyard and skidded to a halt, she saw that it
was
them. And it seemed to her that the army of the Old Ones hesitated and drew back, and that there was suddenly a sense of uncertainty that began with Chaos and rapidly spread throughout his forces.

Jamie knew at once. He had met Flint when he had gone back in time to replace Flint’s twin brother, Sapling, who had been killed at the battle of Scathack Hill. Sapling was the earlier version of himself, because – as he had learnt – he had lived twice, ten thousand years apart. Now he realized that, at the very moment Scott had died, Flint had travelled forward in time, repaying the debt. And Matt – the old Matt – had come with him.

So the Matt he knew in the modern world was dead. Jamie understood that but he wasn’t sad. Perhaps it was because he was beyond sadness, that there was nothing more he could feel. At the same time, he was certain that all this was meant to happen. Impossibly, after being separated and flung all over the world, after enduring so much, the Five had come together again, here, at Oblivion. And it didn’t matter that they were outnumbered by a factor of a thousand to one. There was nothing anyone could do.

Matt was driving. Both the boys were dressed in the grey tunics with the blue star that was the insignia of the first rebel army that had defeated the Old Ones. As Flint leapt down, Jamie saw that he had two swords – one in his belt, the other in his hand.

He saw Jamie and hailed him. “Jamie … this is yours!” he shouted and, turning the first sword around, he threw it towards him, the thin blade glittering as it travelled the short distance through the air. Jamie caught it by the hilt and recognized the five-pointed star in the middle of the crosspiece, made out of precious stones. Once again he felt the weight and fine balance of the blade, tapering to a point.

It was Frost, the sword he had fought with at that first battle. It had been returned to him.

There was a series of gunshots.

Everyone had forgotten Holly. But she had been standing at the entrance to the cave, trying to make sense of the insanity around her. She had seen Chaos as he reached the foot of the mountain and swept towards her, and without knowing who he was, without understanding anything really, she had finally found the strength to use her gun and had emptied it into him.

The bullets passed straight through him. He ignored her. But it was as if the noise of the detonations were a signal for everything to happen at once.

Matt and Flint ran forward from the jeep. As they went, one of the fire-riders galloped forward, trying to intercept them. Matt swung his sword and the blade sliced through the fluttering black robes, cutting the creature in half. A great cry went up from the battlements as a tangled mass of shape-changers, fly-soldiers and hideous deformities that had once been people surged towards them. Scarlett turned and faced them and at once a blast of wind rushed into them with such force that they were thrown off their feet, sent spinning away. She had never felt like this before and knew that it was because they were all there together. Her powers had multiplied by five.

Jamie felt the same. It was wonderful having Frost in his hand again, the return of an old friend, but he almost didn’t need it. Nobody could come near him. He only had to think a command and it happened. Two of the knights who were utterly covered in black spikes, fell back, their horses panicking, and collided with a fire rider. All three of them disappeared in flames. A shape-changer with two lizard heads turned its sword on itself. Jamie couldn’t bring himself to look at the body of his brother. As long as he was close to Flint, it was almost as if Scott had come back to him again.

Pedro snatched up the swords dropped by the two knights that Jamie had just killed. He passed one of them to Scarlett and kept the other himself. He no longer felt the cold. He wasn’t afraid of anything. Everything he had been through, the suffering of his whole life, was worth it for this moment.

“It’s over!” Matt shouted. “Let’s finish it.”

They all knew what to do. Chaos was between them, all-powerful and powerless at the same time. He had been in total command. Scott had belonged to him. Matt had been his prisoner. Jamie and Pedro had been thousands of miles away. But somehow, in the space of just a few minutes, everything had changed. Even as he had made his way down the mountain, the Five had finally come together. The fire in the sky was going out. The light was returning.

Matt was first, plunging his sword into the King of the Old Ones so that it disappeared all the way up to the hilt. Jamie followed, crying out in exaltation as he once again tested the power of Frost. Scarlett, Pedro and finally Flint all struck together and somewhere, deep inside Chaos, the five points touched.

Chaos screamed, a sound that was heard not just all over the world but to the very end of the universe. He was pinned to the spot, his own shape distorting and breaking up as if it were a reflection on the surface of a stormy sea. Finally he turned back into smoke and was whisked away, and Matt, Pedro, Jamie, Scarlett and Flint were facing each other with their five swords extended.

The circle was complete.

Right then, they all knew that it was over, that nobody could touch them and there was no need to be afraid any more. It was like being trapped inside a glass dome, except they were the ones who had created it and it was keeping everything else outside. One of the giant birds had appeared, far too late, and tried to dive-bomb them, hurtling down, but it was bounced away again, turned into a spiralling ball of broken bone and feather. Slowly, the world began to turn around them. There was no sign of Lohan or Holly. At that moment, there were only the Five, the Gatekeepers, brought together at last.

Faster and faster the wheel turned. The fortress spun round. The Old Ones. Oblivion. The mountain. The sky. It was all becoming a blur. There was an ear-splitting crack and the ice field disappeared, replaced by a gigantic hole that revealed another world beneath, a universe of black space and glittering stars. A torrent of wind chased around it, sucking everything in. The soldiers and horses were unable to resist it. There were thousands of them and a moment before they had seemed unstoppable but suddenly they were little more than a handful of soot thrown into the breeze. All of them were dragged in. The fortress itself fell apart, turning into a vortex, a million pieces of brick and stone. The giant birds were pulled out of the sky. The giant monkey, arms outstretched, slithered backwards across the edge of the ice and disappeared into the black hole. The fire-riders were smashed into each other, exploding into flames. It was impossible to say which was man and which was horse. Every last sword and shield, every knife and gun was swept away.