The Thirteen Hallows (27 page)

Ahriman Saurin always loved staying with his aunt Mildred in Madoc, the tiny village that sat on the border of Wales. Although it had no cinema, few shops, and no amusements, it held a deep fascination for the city-born-and-bred boy. He loved the silence, the clean air, the gentle lyrical accents of the people, and their open friendliness. He was also fond of his wild, eccentric aunt Mildred, his mother’s much older sister, and found the differences between her and his uptight mother both shocking and startling.

Ahriman’s mother, Eleanor, was short and stout, quite prim, easily shocked, would not allow television on a Sunday, and controlled as much of her son’s life as possible. She actively discouraged him from forming friendships with girls and supervised his friendships with boys, frowning on any lad who did not come from a respectable home. She censored his reading, did not allow him to go to the cinema, and directed his entire life toward the narrow path of a college education and the academic degree that she had never had.

His aunt was the complete opposite.

Mildred Bailey was wild, impetuous, a free spirit who had scandalized her family with almost monotonous regularity, culminating with a much publicized affair with a Member of Parliament that had almost brought down the government of the day.

Ahriman had discovered most of this later. All he knew was that the times he spent with Aunt Mildred were among the happiest of his childhood, but it was that last year, the summer that he turned fifteen, that had determined the shape of his future….

Ahriman pulled open the purse strings and peered inside. A hard crust of old bread sat in the bottom of the satchel. Legend had it that if he were to break the crust in two and take out half, and then reach in again and break the remainder of the crust in half again, and again and again, he would be able to feed a multitude. It was a simple spell, common to most of the ancient cultures, though the Christians made much of it, hailing it as a miracle, ignoring the countless times it appeared in the history of many nations.

So many things had happened that year, his fifteenth year.

His father had died, quickly, peacefully, without fuss, the way he had lived his entire life. He had simply gone to sleep one night and his body had elected not to wake up. His parents weren’t sleeping together—hadn’t for many years—and because it was a Saturday, the one morning in the week when his father slept late, his corpse wasn’t discovered until noon. Ahriman found that he could barely remember his father’s face now, and his mother’s was a shadowy mask; however, his auntie’s face was vividly clear.

No man ever forgets the person who takes his virginity.

He had known that summer was going to be different. He was
aware
of his aunt in a way that he had never been before, abruptly conscious of the revealing clothing she wore, the skintight cashmere sweaters, the muslin and cotton blouses that were almost transparent, nipples dark against the flimsy material.

The memory of that fateful morning was still crystal clear. He had awoken early and gone to the window to stare out over the orchard, when he had seen his aunt standing naked among the trees. Wisps of early morning fog twisted and coiled around her deeply tanned flesh, dew beading on her skin, plastering her silver hair close to her skull. She was standing facing the east, arms raised above her head, a black-handled knife and short club in either hand. Around her neck she wore a leather bag on a string. He was turning away from the window, suddenly aware of his own arousal, when Mildred had turned and looked directly at him, eyes bright, her expression almost mocking. And he was abruptly conscious then that his actions in the next few minutes would determine the course of his entire life. He could turn away, return to bed, pull the blankets over his head, and forget everything he’d seen, or he could…

Even today, twenty years later, walking barefoot through dew-damp grass aroused him as nothing else could.

He had walked out into the orchard in his light blue paisley-patterned pajamas, the wet ends flapping against his ankles, sticking to his skin. Halfway across the orchard, he had pulled off his clothes and approached the woman naked, stepping into the circle traced on the grass with white chalk. Mildred had opened her arms and drawn him into her heavy breasts, pressing his face against her dark nipples before pulling him down onto the grass.

They had made love as the first rays of the August summer sun had appeared over the horizon, re-creating the act of the goddess giving herself to Lugh, the god of light, the union of human and god, storing up life for the coming winter months. Later, he learned that that day was known as Lughnasagh and was sacred in the Old Religions.

Later, much later that day, she told him she was a follower of the Old Ways, and later still, as the evening drew in, she spoke to him about the Hallow, the leather bag she wore around her neck.

In the months that followed, at weekends, school holidays, and midterm breaks, Ahriman Saurin returned to Madoc, and Mildred initiated the boy’s body and spirit into the ways of a religion that had been ancient before the White Christ had been sacrificed on a wooden cross.

Suddenly his studies had direction and purpose, and he earned a scholarship to Oxford. For ten years, he devoted himself to the study of folklore and mythology, religion and metaphysics, and his Ph.D., based on the hidden lore in Frazer’s
The Golden Bough,
established his reputation. Yet while the public face of Ahriman Saurin suggested a brilliant young academic, privately his studies were leading him along darker, wilder paths as he researched the artifacts known as the Thirteen Hallows.

And on Lughnasagh, ten years to the day he had first learned about the Hallow that hung around his aunt’s neck, he had returned to the village of Madoc and coldly, brutally butchered her, using her heightened emotions to feed energy into the Hallow.

He had then found Vyvienne, a vulnerable teenager, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, blessed with the gift of Sight, and begun manipulating her special skills to help him set about finding and bringing together the Thirteen Hallows of Britain.

He needed the thirteen if he was to undo what the boy Yeshu’a had done almost two thousand years earlier. He needed them to open the portal to the Otherworld.

From below, a raw scream echoed faintly through the stones, dying to a rasping, defeated sob. It was silenced abruptly, and then he heard Vyvienne’s light footsteps pattering across the bare floor. Moments later the door opened behind him, and Ahriman turned his head.

Vyvienne’s naked flesh was spattered with blood, but the look of triumph on her face told him all he needed to know: Don Close had revealed the location.

After replacing the leather bag in its lead box, he lifted an empty casket and drew it closer, in readiness.

And now there were only two.

And they were coming.

B
eyond the limited scope of human senses, there exists a multitude of worlds undreamed by mankind. Creatures and beings that humankind have come to know as myth or legend inhabit many of these realms, as do the creatures known as demons.

Perhaps they were once of the human race, though the legends suggest that they were the offspring of the Fallen Angel, Lucifer, and a daughter of Eve. Condemned by an unforgiving god to suffer for the sins of their father, they were forever banished to a realm bordering the human kingdom. They were further tormented by being able to see in to the World of Men, though their own realm was hidden from the humankind. And the World of Men had everything that the demon realm lacked: The water was pure and clean, the air sweet and clear, and there was a profusion of fruits and foods of every description. But the greatest torment for the Demonkind was the abundance of the humans, with their soft, meaty flesh and salt blood, delicate inner organs, and that tastiest of morsels, the myriad human emotions and higher consciousness commonly known as the soul.

The Demonkind managed to gain access to the World of Men on numerous occasions, though usually it was but a single creature who stepped through from the demon landscape and occupied a weak-minded human. Their life expectancy was always short, for the raw emotions of the humankind were like a drug to the Demonkind, and soon the demons were forcing the humans into greater and greater excesses in order to feed their addiction for the drug of emotion.

The last time they managed to come in force, however, had been almost two thousand years ago.

For an entire Dark Season, when there was little to do in the Northern Climes but dream, the Fomor had worked upon a tribe of savage northern shamans, instilling them with dreams of power and limitless wealth and the ultimate prize for those questors driven to search for answers: knowledge, dark, exhilarating knowledge. With sacrifices of blood and fire, flesh and innocence, the shamans had created a rent between the worlds of men and demons and allowed the creatures to walk through. None of the shamans had survived their first encounter with the creatures, though their bodies lived on in a semblance of life, rotting on the bone, until the Demonkind chose a new fleshy host. Without the power of the shamans to fuel the gateway, it had collapsed, but not before it had allowed six hundred and sixty-six of the creatures into this realm, forever confirming the folklore of the number of The Beasts in human consciousness.

In less than thirty days, the beasts had ravaged the countryside, laying waste to all before them. Thousands died to assuage their terrible hunger, and those they did not kill immediately, they herded together in huge feeding pens. Some of the women they took and bred with, and the resultant abominations that crawled and slithered forth created the seeds of the legends that would become the vampire and werewolf.

When the Demonkind, which the humans had come to call Fomor, had devastated the land of Britain, they had sailed west on a captured Irish pirate ship and established a reign of terror on that island that would end only when the De Danann warriors, who were not entirely human themselves, destroyed them in two great pitched battles.

But the remainder of the Fomor never left Britain’s shore…because they were blocked by a terrifying man-boy who controlled a power of which even he was not fully aware. Using an elemental magic that was older than the human race, he had destroyed the last of the Fomor and sealed the gate between the worlds, locking it with thirteen Hallowed words of power and thirteen Hallowed objects. Only those thirteen words of power and the Thirteen Hallows could unlock the gate.

For two millennia, the Demonkind had gathered behind the gate, waiting in great serried ranks, and plotted their escape.

Many times they had come close to breaching the defenses, and occasionally one or more of the keys had been turned in the lock, allowing a glimpse of unseen wonders—on both sides—but the Hallows had held.

The Demonkind knew their time was close.

And they gathered. They could feel the presence of the eleven Hallows…and knew that the keys would soon be turned.

And this time they would not be denied. Yeshu’a and his kind were long gone.

This time, there would be no one to stand in their way.

Owen whimpered in his sleep, jerking Sarah awake.

There was a moment of terrifying disorientation, images from her own disturbed sleep twisting and coiling around her…until she remembered she was sitting with her face pressed against the cold, moist window of a stale-smelling bus. Owen was sitting in the aisle seat, his head resting on her shoulder, twitching and shifting, eyeballs dancing behind his eyes.

Sarah straightened carefully, wincing as her stiffened neck and shoulder muscles protested but reluctant to move too much in case she woke Owen. The bag containing the Broken Sword was on the ground between her feet, and she could actually feel the warmth of the sword seeping through the canvas bag. Rubbing a hand down the misted-up window, she squinted out into the darkened countryside, trying to work out where they were. But the coach was moving down a featureless length of motorway, sodium lamps turning the night orange.

There were few cars on the road; a Volvo cruised slowly past the bus, and Sarah caught a glimpse of a woman dozing in the passenger seat, her face green in the light reflected from the dashboard, two overtired children in the backseat, poking each other. She found herself smiling at the scene of normalcy: ordinary people in an ordinary world, unperturbed by swords and artifacts and demons…just as her world was a week ago. Almost unconsciously, she reached into the bag and touched the sword, taking solace from the warm metal.

If she accepted the existence of the Hallows and the Demonkind, then she would have to accept that the entire history of the world was wrong. She shook her head, unwilling to pursue that thought…down that road lay madness.

“Are we there yet?” Owen looked at her through sleep-dulled eyes.

“Not yet. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Owen returned his head to her shoulder, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to place her arm around his shoulders and hold him close. “Where are we?” he mumbled, his voice buzzing against her chest.

“I’m not sure.” Tilting her left arm to the light, she read the time. “It’s just half past two, so we’ve been on the road for two and a half hours. We must be more than halfway there.”

Owen mumbled a question, but before she could ask him to repeat it, she felt his shoulders slip into the gentle rhythm of sleep.

They had boarded the bus on a side street opposite Marble Arch. It was one of a line of independent tour buses parked along the street with
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL ALL HALLOWS’ EVE CELTIC FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND CULTURE
stickers in the front window. They had arrived at a quarter to twelve. The place was packed with grungy students, the pavement littered with sleeping bags and knapsacks, and in their dirty and disheveled clothes, the pair blended right in. At exactly ten minutes to twelve, the bus doors hissed open and Owen and Sarah took their place in the line. They found seats three-quarters of the way down on the right-hand side of the bus.

There had been a ragged cheer when the bus had pulled away from the station at one minute past midnight. In the first hour, there had been a halfhearted singsong, a dreary Gaelic whine that set Sarah’s teeth on edge, and someone near the front of the bus had played a hauntingly beautiful tune on a tin whistle, but the bus quickly fell quiet as the passengers drifted off to sleep, determined to conserve their energy for the festival.

From inside her bag, Sarah pulled out Judith Walker’s notes and tried to read them, looking for clues, for answers. But trying to concentrate on the spidery handwriting in the amber-and-black light made her feel slightly nauseous, and she closed the book and pushed it back into the bag.

There were so many questions and so few answers.

The old lady had been a Hallowed Keeper. Most, if not all, of the Hallowed Keepers had been killed, butchered in a ritualistic manner by someone collecting the objects. It therefore stood to reason that the same person was now after her and Owen, and they could expect to die equally horrific deaths. Or at least Owen would, since he was a Keeper; she was not.

But if she wasn’t a Keeper…then what was she?

Was her role in this more than just an innocent bystander caught up in something over which she had no control? And what about the dreams? The bizarre dreams of the boy Yeshu’a? Sometimes it seemed as if the boy were speaking directly to her, those dark eyes boring directly into her soul.

And the demons…were they real or was she simply losing her mind? Was she even now lying in a hospital bed, and was this nothing more than a drug-induced stupor?

She prayed that she was, because if she wasn’t, then the consequences were almost too terrible to contemplate.