The Sword of Feimhin (34 page)

Gully talked to himself as he searched through the maze of West End streets leading eastwards of the Razzed-out St Martin's Lane. ‘Hellfire, Penny, even the weather's gone bonkers on us. 'Ail stoning down thick as snot one minute and then rainin' like a bleedin' river.'

He stopped himself, peering down at paving stones slick with filthy water. He had slipped already and his knees were bruised. He sniffed, screwing up his face. ‘This rain ain't for stoppin'. Them kerbs is runnin' like Ol' Man Thames!'

Crowds jostled him in Piccadilly Circus, their hats pulled down and collars pulled up, causing him to blink owlishly through his rain-spattered spectacles, avoiding any kind of eye contact. He sloshed though icy streams.

‘Listen to me, Gully Doughty. Listen to me, will you? You don't do nuffink wot makes you stand out from the crowd.'

Turning left off the Circus, he hurried along rubble-strewn back lanes heading for the market.

‘I got to find somefink to eat!'

He had to sacrifice a few minutes at the wheelie-cart market haggling over two sausages at ridiculous prices. Stuffing the greasy package into Pocket 2, he patted at the shapes in Pocket 5, comforted by the feel of a nylon climbing rope he had acquired. He pulled each of his sleeves in turn so he could check out the watches.
Twenty-five minutes to four o'clock, the same on each – perfick!
Give it half an hour, it'd be falling dark. He sniffed again, thinking hard, and wiped his nose on his left sleeve.

He counted to twenty, listening to the pouring rain beating down on his hood. There was that bleedin' noise again, like a roaring inside of his brain. ‘Now look wot you done to me, gel! Where ya hidin', Penny?'

He had lost track of where he was exactly, scurrying through the downpour in a frantic rush. Taking his rain-spattered glasses off his nose he wiped them on a snotrag, staring ahead into the boarded-up Kingsley Court. He slid the glasses back on and slunk along in the shadows up the narrow Beak Street, looking to find Oggy's Café. That was where it had all begun: where Penny had seen them aliens. What he saw there stopped him dead in his tracks and caused him to slide into the shadow of a doorway. Gully squinted his eyes and tried to make out what was going on. Yellow light from the wire-screened window of the café was spilling out onto the pavement, illuminating two bikers, dressed in leathers, sitting there in the rain. They was watching the café like they was waiting for someone.

‘Blimey!' he said. He had this real strong feeling about it.

‘Got to be that geezer wot done for the Scalpie! An' the woman wot done for the Grimlings!'

He needed to get closer to them, close enough to see if they had the things stuck in their heads, but he didn't dare move any closer. Gully was pressing himself so hard against the doorway the powdery plaster was coming off onto his shoulder and sleeve.

‘You got to check it out, mate,' he said to himself.

One of the leather-clad riders had to be a woman – he could make out tit bumps. He couldn't make out her hair or face, what with the helmet. And them Skulls, they didn't take no women. Yeah, for sure, the two of 'em was just sitting there in the pouring rain like they was waiting for somebody to come along.

Somebody like Penny …

He drew back into the crumbly doorway, sniffling the snot back up into his nose, trying to get his brain to work through the panic in his head.

He recalled Penny looking really scared. He recalled her whisper, ‘
I know that this is the sign, Gully. This is the sign I've been waiting for
.'

He had seen how she was trembling. Her eyes was all over the place. His hand reached out, just like it had with the cuppa in it. ‘
There you go, gel!
' He handed her the cuppa he had made for her. An' the poached egg on a bit of toast.

She had told him about the man and the woman. Them bleedin' aliens with the triangles stuck in their heads.

‘
They tangled with my mind, Gully!
'

‘
Where'd this 'appen?
'

‘
At Oggy's place
.'

‘
How come you're so sure they was aliens?
'

He remembered Penny looking up at him, her grey eyes wide. She'd told him about the black triangles, stuck into their heads.

He stuck his head out to peer at the riders again.

‘Yeah – them's tit bumps all right.'

But it was impossible, what with the helmet, to see if she had something stuck in her head or if she didn't. He felt a prickling in the skin at the back of his neck. He was still trying to figure it out when a voice caught him unawares.

‘Hey, Pockets! Where's that crazy gel a yours?'

Gully squinted behind him at a rat-faced kid with a ponytail. He knew him from a knick-knack stand further down the street. Only a year ago he had been on nodding acquaintance with Sadiq Khan, the man who had owned the stand. Sadiq had always moaned about the fortunes of Millwall football club. Gully didn't know if Sadiq had been murdered or what, only that he hadn't seen him around for a while.

‘You got somefink to say?'

‘That gel – you got more'n one?'

Gully looked into the pasty-white face of a crack-head.
Gully knew he had also been dealing drugs from the stand to his fellow crack-heads and sofa surfers. Right now, though, he was dialling a number with his thumb, mouthing the numbers to himself. Gully heard him refer to ‘Cat', which was what the street dross called Penny. At the top of the street Gully caught a glimpse of two new figures wearing black leather jackets. Rain was running over the tattoos on their half-shaved heads. They were looking in his direction.

‘That Cat – she done for a Skull, mate.'

‘Wot?'

‘You 'eard me. The Skulls is lookin' for 'er.'

‘Shi-it!'

Gully ran.

He tore right past the figures waiting on their bikes. A glimpse – it was all his panic would allow him – but he saw how sharp they looked at him. They watched him run by, water from the puddles sloshing around his trainers as he skidded and bumped into some old basket case standing there wearing ‘Rapture' boards, proclaiming the coming of Judgement Day.

Gully shoved past the old man. He kicked in the flimsy door of what looked like an abandoned office and ran through the debris-strewn building, finding a rear door standing ajar. He emerged, in the falling dusk, into a tiny closed-off yard.

‘Arseholes!'

This wasn't familiar territory to Gully. He clambered up
onto a hillock of rubbish piled in sacks, hauling himself up a red-brick wall. He vaulted the wall to find himself in a second, bigger yard, crammed with skips the Razzers must have set fire to at some point. Everything was ashes and soot. The cindered remains of twin loading doors gaped onto a concrete loading bay. Gully stumbled awkwardly through, fell, then rose again, already running. He picked out the wreckage of a staircase leading into the gloom of the floor above and headed for it. He didn't need to look behind him to know his pursers had followed him into the yard. He heard at least one of them stumble at the same awkward space between the loading doors. He heard the metallic click of what sounded like a weapon.

‘Shit, shit, shiiit!'

He took the darkened staircase two treads at a time, learning, after he had taken several splinters, to avoid hand contact with the banister. This situation was bad. Gully was afraid of the Skulls chasing him, but he was even more afraid for Penny. It was Penny they were really looking for. He had to find her. His head was so agitated he couldn't get it to work. He counted to twenty.

Pockets – Pocket 6!

On a turn, three-quarters the way up to the first floor, he found the double sided Sellotape roll and stuck lengths of it over two successive treads, close to the edge. It didn't matter that his glasses were smudged to shit, since the staircase was pitch dark anyways. From the same pocket, Pocket 6 – T for Traps – he extracted a fistful of marbles.
He did it all in the dark by feel and touch, pressing the marbles down onto the sticky tape, covering the treads. Didn't matter that two or three of the marbles went pattering down, tapping their way down every step. The operation was done and dusted in thirty seconds. He barely had time to hop awkwardly over the trap before he heard the clatter of boots on the treads at the bottom of the staircase.

Gully hurried on up into a cave of charcoal – a big open space now razzed to rubble. He moved in a zigzag over the space, feeling his way past broken shelves, putting what distance he could between himself and the landing. He halted before a plate glass window, three quarters shattered, with rain gusting in.

A howl from the stairs told him that one of them had found the marbles. He heard the tumbling and cursing that meant he had a few more seconds. The glow of a torch was now leaching out from the head of the stairs. The torchlight flickered on and off in spurts, illuminating first one area then another. His hunters were taking their time now. They had figured that he had no place to run.

Gully peered out of the big gap in the glass and saw the woman on the bike down below. She must have followed him from Oggy's. And there she was – just sitting on her bike and waiting. But how had she figured out he was right above her?

‘
They tangled with my mind, Gully
.'

The hunters were so close, he had to trust his instincts.
Pocket 5! Gully opened his jacket, released the nylon climbing rope and ran it out through his fingers. There was a problem with the broken glass in the lower edge of the window frame.

You ain't got no time for dithering, mate – ya got to take your chances
.

Alan had been observing how the aides made use of the plentiful flat pieces of rock on far side of the summit; fashioning them into horseshoe-shaped shelters of stone as breaks against the icy wind. The continuous clattering of stone against stone was rhythmical. The sky overhead was a jade green. All the while, the cold was searing through their clothes. Alan's breath emerged as white fog to be torn away by the wind, which howled between the soaring fangs of the mountain tops. Two-thirds of the huge army had already managed to cross over the razor-like mountain crest; their numbers were so large that the aides could not construct the shelters fast enough. Huge numbers of Shee hung about with little to do, blowing into their furry hands in the freezing air. It was so icy Alan had long lost any feeling in his face, and a numbing chill was seeping deeper into his nostrils and airways with every breath.

They were about halfway there, in their march on the
Tyrant's city of Ghork Mega, and if the aides could rig sufficient shelters, they would be able to rest their exhausted limbs overnight before beginning the descent.

The way he looked forward to the smallest pleasures was laughable. He longed to just fall asleep and dream ordinary dreams, especially his favourite dream about Kate.

He had enjoyed that same wonderful dream, over and over, a hundred times or more. It was actually a memory that had become a dream. In it, he was waiting for her to emerge from the gates of the Doctor's House in the small Irish town of Clonmel on a beautiful Sunday morning. He saw the small door built into one of the two gates opening and then, as if in slow motion, her bike roll through as she held onto its handlebars. He saw the excitement in her eyes – the excitement that mirrored his own. He had kissed her on the lips for the first time. After that, it seemed as if his heartbeat had never quite managed to slow down again. More than anything he longed for the realisation of that dream, when Kate would come back to him and his heart would beat crazily again in that impossible, unstoppable tide of love that made everything else hollow and meaningless.

The sound of a drawn-out animal scream woke him from his reverie. He spun around, his breath caught in his frozen airways.

It was another of the onkkh in trouble. The enormous bird was twisting and tearing at the retaining ropes, its panic threatening the security of the aides and Shee to either side of it.

‘Damn.'

They had lost something like a hundred Shee in the climb, and perhaps half as many aides. He didn't want to lose any more, not when they were so close to finishing the ascent. Alan peered down into the convoluted lattice of mountain ranges that fell away below them. The furnace black of the rock gave the mountains their name – the Flamestrucks. The drop was immense, more than ten thousand feet. The zigzagging shoulders and peaks rolled away, becoming lost in the cloud that swirled and eddied around the panorama of peaks and valleys, a hundred and fifty leagues distant from the Eastern Ocean, where their climb had begun in the arid beauty of the deserts and islands of the Garg Kingdom.

Alan thought,
No – no more losses
. And Mo! Mo was not yet across – and nor was Qwenqwo.

The steep escarpment was crawling with figures, thousands hauling themselves across a carefully constructed framework of ropes, the makeshift spider's web spanning several-dozen strata of treacherous ledges, perhaps a hundred yards or so across and only a few hundred yards below the wind-buffeted summit. It was the last step in what had proved to be a tortuous crossing through the moraine traps of narrow valleys. They had been devoid of any natural path or easy climb and the army had struggled for days to negotiate a few miles of passage. The rolling pebbles had broken ankles, and traps of quicksand had swallowed up at least half a dozen of the burdened beasts, their screaming beaks
the last to disappear as their desperate struggles just hastened the end. And it had all been accompanied by a flaying chill that cut through furs and skin, and bit deep into bones. The Tyrant had no need for defensive ramparts here: the treacherous mountains, and the inclement elements, would have been more than enough to defeat any ordinary army. But this was no ordinary army. This was an army of battle-hardened Shee. Still, even the Shee would have struggled had they not benefited from the advice of both Qwenqwo and Magtokk and the Garg scouts braving the icy climate and perilous winds to help them negotiate the hazards. And here was the final hurdle in a march that had looked impossible – the passage of an army of a hundred thousand Shee, with aides, assistants, cooks and baggage train, across an almost sheer cliff face in temperatures twenty degrees below zero.

It had taken them several days just to plan and organise the crossing. Gargs had carried the first light ropes to straddle the mountainside and axes had broken the cliff face to create a series of ledges, and then more lines of ropes and iron tethers had been slung between the lines, creating the handholds and toeholds for ten horizontal columns of Shee and aides to make the crossing. The scourging wind had torn at ropes and ties, handholds and footholds, ripping garments out of belts and fastenings and cracking the frozen coverings like whips. Alan could feel his hair blowing horizontally as he shouted encouragement and warnings.

The screaming of the troubled onkkh was being taken up by others. Alan looked across at the agitated bird, which was snapping its powerful beak at everything and anyone in its vicinity. Its clawed legs, strong enough to break a Shee's arm, were kicking out at the ropes, threatening to rip the tethers and guidelines out of the rock face. Alan could see no way out of the situation other than to ask the Gargs to risk flying out into the tempestuous air and cut the bewildered beast free. Within moments, Iyezzz had volunteered to do so.

With the warning of Zelnesakkk about his younger son's safety uppermost in Alan's mind, he watched with trepidation as Iyezzz made several attempts to cut the rope, each time being caught up by the tempestuous wind and hurled towards the abyss. But on the fourth attempt Iyezzz managed to grab hold of the rope with one of his feet and, with the razor-sharp claws on the other, cut the beast free. Alan watched the unfortunate bird plummet away into the distance, its limbs clutching at the air and its vestigial wings flapping, until it had dwindled to a speck above the clouds wheeling over the lower slopes and ridges.

But it was too late to prevent the panic from affecting the remaining onkkh. Alan heard a call from the Kyra, mind-to-mind, and he turned to witness the sacrifice of several-dozen Shee who had severed sections of rope where the panic was no longer containable. With horrified eyes Alan watched the falling figures, many still tethered to beasts or to one another by stretches of rope, until they too became flailing dots against the moiling clouds far below.

He was joined by the Kyra, who looked at him, her cat-eyes slitted against the wind. No words were exchanged, but her look was sufficient: the danger had not gone away. A third of the army still needed to cross the treacherous cliff. What could they possibly do to prevent more losses?

He was worried that any attempt to use the First Power in this hazardous environment might put the trapped warriors in danger. He recalled what had happened when he had used it to save them from the Forest of Harrow: it had destroyed everything, turning the landscape to ash.
What if I turn it against the elements here and destroy the entire mountain face?

He struggled to come up with a solution. Where was Iyezzz? Could he possibly work with the Gargs in some way? But he had already seen how difficult it had been for the Garg prince to sever a single section of rope. The ferocious winds would blow the Gargs about like rags tossed into a maelstrom.

Mo –
Mo!
He guessed that Mo was somewhere out there with Turkeya. He could communicate with Mo, mind to mind.

Mo's companion?

Alan had forgotten the magician, Magtokk, who was keeping his existence a secret. An orang-utan might have held his ground better in the ropewalk crossing than most.
But why would he suggest the stones might be useful?

Alan turned around to where those aides that had already managed the crossing were constructing the horseshoe-shaped shelters out of flat stones. He looked down the slope onto the extensive scree of similar stones. The screams of panicking onkkh were rising even above the screech of the wind behind him.

He had to shout to Ainé, who was only twenty yards away, so he could be heard beyond the screeching of wind and beasts. ‘Have the Shee and aides collect together big flat stones that would make a path.'

She stared at him. ‘A path?'

‘I have an idea. I may be able to use the First Power to lay a path leading out across the cliff face. I don't have time to explain.'

As the Shee and aides laid out the first half-dozen flat stones, each perhaps a yard or more in length and width, Alan put all of his concentration into the oraculum of the First Power, the Power of the Land. He willed the path to shift until it was under the feet of the nearest struggling group, straddling the cliff face of the mountain. As he did so, the stones moved and assembled, with no visible support against gravity.

‘Get them to test them,' he shouted to the Kyra.

She issued the command to the threatened Shee through her oraculum. Alan saw the panicking group discover the steadying stone path beneath their feet. He watched them test the firmness, the reliability, of what should have been impossible. The tiny section of path held.

The Kyra's order alerted large numbers of Shee and aides already watching from the scree-covered ground. More and more figures began to haul big flat stones into the path before Alan, and as quickly as they laid them he shifted them, with a command through his oraculum, to construct a gravity-defying path along the most troubled sections of rope guides extending across the mountain face.

He passed his message to Ainé. ‘Get the people gathering the stones to hurry.'

Already the first of the rescued Shee, aides and beasts, were being assisted off the makeshift path, which floated on thin air and was impervious to the wind. The panicky cries of the onkkh were quieting and the columns stabilising. Alan built a second path across the mountain, and then a third and a fourth, until all eight of the rope crossings had been underpinned with stone paths, snaking around the irregular buttress of the cliff face, all suspended above the drop by the power of his oraculum.

For the remainder of what would prove the most intractable day of the entire climb, Alan worked tirelessly, extending and strengthening what he had already constructed, while the Kyra and the growing army of Shee now
ferried to solid ground helped the rest of the army and the baggage train across. All day, and even through dusk into night, the excruciating effort continued, with no possibility of rest until the entire army and their beasts of burden were safely escorted onto the rock-strewn ground, and then led to the shelters. As he saw the final stragglers safe, such was his exhaustion that Alan could hardly stand. He was glad of the steadying arm and shoulders of Qwenqwo as he allowed the First Power to release the stones, watching in a numbed awe as the strange paths of his own construction lost their anchorage on nothingness to clatter and tumble away into the abyss.

At last, with small central fires to warm them against the cold, the army bedded down for the night in the thousands of horseshoe shelters that had proliferated over the mountain top. While trying to find some comfortable position for his many aches and pains, Alan sat among his friends in one of the larger shelters, ignoring the wind that still shrieked around its stony walls. He was grateful to the aides who massaged his aching muscles. He was also very glad of the flask of healwell pressed against his numbed lips, and although it was difficult to persuade his reluctant throat to swallow the burning liquid he appreciated its comforting warmth as it spread out into his belly and heart.

Most of the Shee had adopted the body forms of great cats for the night, their pelts better suited to the cold and wind than bare skin. The Gargs had also settled into their own shelters. Though many in the camp must have welcomed
the chance of sleep, others remained awake and busy: aides released burdens of tents and provisions from the onkkh, others were already at work on a nourishing and sustaining breakfast for the coming morning. The bedlam of the settling camp was, in itself, a cheering sound and, with the healwell coursing through his blood stream, Alan could already feel his spirits rising. Qwenqwo was sitting to his left in a contemplative mood, nursing a flagon of drink, his jaws were clamped around his unlit pipe; he was forbidden to smoke in such an enclosed space.

‘Magtokk – are you here?'

There was a rising cacophony of grumbles as the bulky body manifested among the crowded company, taking up the space of three, his arms extending around the shoulders of Mo and Qwenqwo, between whose shuffling bodies he squeezed his shaggy bulk with a grin.

Alan smiled across the fire at the orang-utan. Magtokk's dark irises reflected the flames, the lids drooping as if he, too, was longing for sleep.

‘Thanks – for the idea.' Alan said.

A nut was flipped into the air by a grey thumb and caught by the cavernous mouth. ‘Think nothing of it.'

Mo was snuggling down inside the cosy cradle of Magtokk's right arm. Sleepily she said, ‘Alan's right. It was brilliant to think of the stones.'

‘Mine was a mere thought – the power and deed were Alan's.'

Mo's eyes drifted closed. She looked dead to the world.

Alan was close to dropping into an exhausted stupor himself, but he was already thinking of the next day. ‘What,' he asked Qwenqwo, ‘can we expect up ahead?'