The Sword of Feimhin (49 page)

‘Oh, Shaami!'

Shaami wept, as did all the children. Kate nodded, unable to speak, her eyes filling up with tears.

Looking around, Mark and Nan attempted to figure out what was really going on. The so-called arena was more makeshift than they had anticipated. An entire congested oblong of the old city stretching westwards from Moorgate had been cleared, seemingly deliberately, to allow for this singular celebration. Ruthless razzamatazzing, followed by wholesale demolition, had eliminated venerable buildings, blocks and streets. An army of diggers were still scattered around the periphery, under the shadows of the two enormous cranes that had guided the Resistance there. Giant bonfires were still burning throughout the derelict wilderness to the east, and through the rising smoke they could make out the surviving shadowy outlines of the monoliths of the financial district.

Mark said: ‘My God – it's incredible.'

They were only just coming to realise the size of the cleared space, which covered at least a square mile, over
which sprawled groups of ramshackle caravans, stalls and tents teeming with Razzers.

Nan murmured. ‘There's a whole army of Skulls and paramilitaries gathering around the arena.'

Mark shook his head, focused on an oblong of heavy vehicles immediately opposite the car park. His apprehension grew.

‘I think we should take a closer look.'

Nan looked across to where a gathering of generator trucks screened off the central oval, where the thunderous activity of hammering and drilling pointed to continuing construction. She squeezed his arm. ‘This does not make sense. Something is very wrong!'

‘Just about everything here feels wrong.'

Cal's voice came through the plug in Mark's left ear. ‘I hope you're happy, now you're here.'

‘Happy isn't the word for it.'

‘Shit, man! No chance we're going to get out of here alive.'

‘Let's just see about that.'

‘All for the sake of one old man, who might, or might not, be here.'

‘Padraig is here.'

‘You sure of that?'

‘Yeah – I'm sure.' Mark wished he was half as confident as he pretended to be. Nan was tugging at his arm. ‘Look around, through your oraculum.'

Mark closed his eyes and looked through his oraculum
into the surrounding landscape. The cleared area with its vans and tents and the oval where they were still cobbling together a makeshift amphitheatre, was etched with the same sickly phosphorescent green light he recalled from his earlier walk with Henriette.

He opened his eyes, gritting his teeth.

Snow was gusting again. They had gained entry at the gates with surprising ease, their false tickets arousing no suspicion. Cal assumed it was the trouble they had taken with their appearance, and the camouflage decoration of the Pig, but Mark wasn't so sure. He had left the Fir Bolg battleaxe in Cogwheel's cab, with instructions for Cogwheel to release it if it showed evidence of his calling it. And now, barely twenty feet from where they had parted from the crew, a mockery of the Union Jack flapped over an unrecognisable stubble of a monument. It felt ten degrees colder here; a fierce cold that felt alien for an English winter. Mark looked down at his hands. The hairs on his fingers were frozen erect.

‘You sense it?' Nan asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Grimstone knows we're here.'

‘I think you're right.'

‘Then it is a trap.'

He sighed. ‘Yeah.'

He recalled the feeling that had overwhelmed him when he last saw Grimstone, and recalled Nan's words,
‘A furnace, like a black sun, burns inside him.'

‘I'm afraid, Mark.'

He hugged her fiercely and kissed her frozen lips.

‘It's too late to change our minds. I know Padraig is a prisoner here. I sense it. If there's the slightest chance of rescuing him, we have to take it.'

Brave words, but had Grimstone used his concern for Padraig to bring him and Nan here to their deaths? Mark's left hand had risen to touch the oraculum, burning now, reacting against the suffocating sense of evil that surrounded him.

Something was happening. Crowds were beginning to mill around them. They tried to force their way though a crush of Skulls arriving through a pedestrian access from the main car park, but the crowds were so dense they were carried along with them. A swell of panic brought a lump to Mark's throat. The weight of vicious enthusiasm pressed in on them. There was a sudden deafening roar of military music – a band practising. Mark fought to stay close to Nan. The crush took them into the oval arena with its concentric tiers of rough-hewn wood.

The oppressive sense of malice was much stronger closer to the arena. Mark was struggling to think clearly. Then they were clattering up a wooden staircase and entering the arena through a tunnel leading part way up the seating. The oval was already filling up. Mark gauged that the theatre as a whole was about eighty yards in diameter. There was seating for 30,000 or more, sloping down into a central pit covered with sawdust under a spreading layer of snow.
Even as he glanced around, the atmosphere became expectant.

Mark cast the thought through the force in his brow. No answer. Yet his instincts said otherwise. He was certain that Padraig was there and that he was really close.

*

Two young warriors swaggered into the pit. They were armed with short Roman-style swords and circular metal shields. Their heads were covered in steel helmets, with face-guards and flaps over the back of their necks, and their right arms, from shoulder to gauntleted hand, were covered in overlapping strips of leather, making the armour resemble the segmented carapace of a lobster. Their upper torsos were bare, oblivious to the cold. Their left legs, from knee to sandal, were also armoured with steel and tethered by leather straps, but otherwise, they wore no more than a loincloth under a broad leather belt. Two men dressed in togas and sandals stood back towards the periphery. One held a huge wooden mallet; the other stood by a brazier in which an iron bar glowed red.

The gladiators stood to attention and waited in the swirling snow.

There was a wild cheering and a thunderous stamping of feet on the hollow plank floor of the tiers as a group of figures entered at a measured pace from an opening in the eastern wing.

One of them took his place on a raised platform protruding
over the rim of the pit. He resembled a Roman emperor presiding over the Coliseum. The man must have been forty yards from where they sat, but even from this distance Mark wilted under power that radiated from him. He smiled in their direction, a full-lipped cruel smile, as if he were fixing his eyes on Mark amongst the screaming adulation of the crowd. Then he took his seat on the rostrum.

Grimstone had arrived.

At his signal the men within the circle began fierce hand-to-hand combat. Mark had hoped it would turn out to be ceremonial, but it took barely a few minutes of thrusting and parrying before one of the combatants took a wound to his right shoulder. Blood ran down in a thick stream over his sword arm and onto the snow-carpeted sawdust. The fighting did not halt. The victor struck home a second wound, deep into his adversary's chest. Mark stared at the young man who had gone down onto one knee, his sword fallen and his shield-arm trembling. His opponent struck him with the boss of his shield so that he fell, then placed his foot against his back between the man's shoulder blades. The victor raised his sword aloft, looking in the direction of Grimstone. There was a rolling of drums and a blare of trumpets, during which Mark could see the cold expression on Grimstone's face, then recoiled in horror at the earth-directed thumb. The victor plunged his sword into the back of the neck of his defeated opponent and twisted it, with a grisly snap. The crowd roared, hungry for more blood.

Nan whispered, ‘It is rumoured to be the manner in which the Tyrant chooses his Legionary soldiers on Tír.'

As the body was dragged unceremoniously out of the pit, Mark searched the entrances for any sign of Padraig, but he detected nothing. While he was searching, another pair of gladiators entered the pit and stood facing one another, awaiting the signal to fight. In only a few minutes the horror of ritualised murder was re-enacted before their eyes. There was another roll of drums and a baleful trumpeting, and a third combat began. The two winners, already bloodied from the earlier combat, were now facing one another. The pattern had a horrible inevitability about it: the ruthlessness of the killing, the celebratory trumpets, the howling of the mob. There was no prospect of mercy for the loser. Only one of the fighters, all presumably their bravest and hardiest men, would emerge victorious.

Mark stared incredulously as the final victor knelt before the figure on the platform and raised his bloodied weapon into the air.

Grimstone stood. In his two hands was the Sword of Feimhin. The blade was glowing with power. The gathering was on its feet, chanting a hymn-like dirge in an eerily harmonised baritone that was frighteningly familiar. He remembered it from the ritualised combat between the Storm Wolves and the Shee back on Tír: the battle hymn of the Death Legion. Shock froze Mark rigid.

‘Look through your oraculum,' Nan whispered.

Mark closed his eyes, and opened the senses of the stone
in his brow. The landscape had turned into a nightmare world of wraiths and goblins with shining eyes, razor-like teeth and gauzy smoke for hair. It was the hidden London he had witnessed in the company of Henriette. He heard her chuckling voice, ‘
All drawn to de Sword
.'

Mark heard another throaty roar from the crowd. He saw every face turned towards Grimstone, who was raising the Sword of Feimhin with its long black blade aloft to kiss the sigil of the triple infinity in the hilt.

He spoke, his voice calm and deep. Mark could see no microphones and no loudspeakers, yet that quiet voice penetrated the large gathering through the blustering snow. How did his voice carry that far in such a large arena? With a sudden conviction borne from his experiences in Tír, Mark realised that Grimstone's voice was not exterior, but interior. He was addressing them through the power of an oraculum – which had to be the Sword. Every head in the arena was turned towards him, every mind laid bare to his words.

Nan was right. Grimstone was no longer human. He had to be a Legun. And he wasn't alone on the platform, he had
been joined by two additional presences – a small, slight man, with a vaguely Asian face and a neat white beard, and a girl, tall and slender, with a wild mop of tawny hair. Both faces were a little blurry, as if out of focus.

Mark heard Nan's exclamation of shock. The girl was Penny – and the man …

‘Oh, Mark!'

‘Yeah …'

The small man had to be the Tyrant of the Wastelands. How calm and undemonstrative he appeared.
The Tyrant
– Mark thought –
he has come to London!

Bewildered by shock, his mind racing with the realisation of the new danger facing the crew, Mark also thought to ask himself why the Tyrant would see this pathetic, brutal circus as important. Even as he thought about it, he sensed how, with the new arrivals, a numinous explosion of power now filled the arena.

There was a movement in one of the narrow tunnels that led into the pit. A captive was being carried into the arena by a cluster of white-garbed acolytes; a lean, emaciated figure, battered and bloody. He was clearly unconscious and tethered by the wrists and ankles to a crude X-shaped wooden stretcher.

Padraig!

He felt Nan take his hand in hers.

‘Is it definitely him?'

‘Yes.'

They saw the acolytes sprinkle the unconscious body
with petrol. They stood by with what looked like flame-throwers.

Mark spoke into the intercom to Tajh. ‘They're about to sacrifice Padraig. We need the Mamma Pig – now!'

A power of darkness was invading his mind. He felt a stiffening paralysis in his muscles and a dulling of thought. Turning, he saw that Grimstone had lifted the Sword of Feimhin aloft again. He was directing it into the encroaching darkness of the late afternoon sky. Grimstone's face glowed with a greenish light, as if it were reflecting moonlight. Their oracula pulsing, Mark and Nan forced a passage through the crowds, heading down into the pit. An ocean of unshaven faces turned to glare at them. The Skulls and paramilitaries tried to block them with their bodies. Mark was filled with horror at the massed stupidity of so many bald and tattooed heads, the mindless obstruction of their physical presence.

Grimstone's words continued to insinuate themselves into his mind.

The multitude was on its feet, their eyes rapacious with hunger, every mouth agape.

Mark felt his mind reel under the persuasiveness coming from that figure on the platform. His oraculum was blazing,
but even with its help it took all of his will and strength to resist the suggestibility of the Sword. Where were Cal and the Mamma Pig? Had his radio signal been received? That horrible roll of drums sounded out again, the strident trumpeting insinuating itself deep into every mind. The power of the Legun gathered force from the idolatry of the multitude under its power. The malignant spell was utterly overwhelming. Mark sensed it coursing through his own heart and spirit.

A false sun of white-green fire came into being in the swirl of snow in the air above them. It grew rapidly until it was a circle, covering the centre of the arena. Every eye was staring up at it, unblinking. The Skulls were chanting in an orgasmic slow motion, a sound that was eerily in harmony with the light. As Mark and Nan neared it, the circle extended four tangents that moved out, twisting and spiralling as they grew and evolved.