Clive Barker - Weave World

Then:

‘There!' she said, pointing through the curtain of hail and dust. ‘I see a light.'

They set off again, as fast as the suppurating earth would allow. With every step, their feet sank deeper into a swamp of decaying matter, in which the remnants of life still moved; the inheritors of this Eden: worms and cockroaches.

But there was a distinct light at the end of the tunnel; she glimpsed it again through the thick air.

‘Look up, Cal,' she said.

He did just that, though only with effort.

‘Not far now. A few more steps.'

He was becoming heavier by the moment; but the tear in the Mantle was sufficient to spur them on over the last few yards of treacherous earth.

And finally they stepped out into the light, almost spat from the entrails of the Gyre as it went into its final convulsions.

They stumbled away from the Mantle, but not far before Cal said:

‘I can't' and fell to the ground.

She knelt beside him, cradling his head, then looked around for help. Only then did she see the consequences of events in the Gyre.

Wonderland had gone.

The glories of the Fugue had been shredded and torn, their tatters evaporating even as she watched. Water, wood and stone; living animal tissue and dead Seerkind: all gone, as though it had never been. A few remnants lingered, but not for long. As the Gyre thundered and shook, these last signs of the Fugue's terrain became smoke and threads, then empty air. It was horribly quick.

Suzanna looked behind her. The Mantle was receding too, now that it had nothing left to conceal, its retreat uncovering a wasteland of dirt and fractured rock. Even its thunder was diminishing.

‘Suzanna!'

She looked back to see de Bono coming towards her.

‘What happened in there?'

‘Later,' she said. ‘First, we have to get help for Cal. He's been shot.'

‘I'll fetch a car.'

Cal's eyes flickered open.

‘Is it gone?' he murmured.

‘Don't think about it now,' she said.

‘I want to know,' he demanded, with surprising vehemence, and struggled to sit up. Knowing he wouldn't be placated, Suzanna helped him.

He moaned, seeing the desolation before them.

Groups of Seerkind, with a few of Hobart's people scattered

amongst them, stood in the valley and up the slopes of the surrounding hills, neither speaking nor moving. They were all that remained.

‘What about Shadwell?' said Cal.

Suzanna shrugged. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘He escaped the Temple before me.'

The din of a revved car-engine cancelled further conversation, as de Bono drove one of the invaders' vehicles across the dead grass, bringing it to a halt a few feet from where Cal lay.

‘I'll drive,' said Suzanna, once Cal had been laid on the back seat.

‘What do we tell the doctors?' Cal said, his voice getting fainter. ‘I've got a bullet in me.'

‘We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,' said Suzanna. As she got into the driver's seat, which de Bono had only reluctantly vacated, somebody called her name. Nimrod was running towards the car.

‘Where are you going?' he said to her.

She directed his attention to the passenger.

‘My friend,' he said, seeing Cal, ‘you look the worse for wear.' He tried a smile of welcome, but tears came instead.

‘It's over,' he said, sobbing. ‘Destroyed. Our sweet land ...' He wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. ‘What do we do now?' he said to Suzanna.

‘We get out of harm's way,' she told him. ‘As quickly as we can. We still have enemies -'

‘It doesn't matter any more,' he said. ‘The Fugue's gone. Everything we ever possessed, lost.'

‘We're alive, aren't we?' she said. ‘As long as we're alive ...'

‘Where will we go?'

‘We'll find a place.'

‘You have to lead us now,' said Nimrod. ‘There's only you.'

‘Later. First, we have to help Cal -'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Of course.' He'd taken hold of her arm, and was loath to let her go. ‘You will come back?'

‘Of course,' she said.

Til take the rest of them North,' he told her. ‘Two valleys from here. We'll wait for you there.'

Then move,' she said. "Time's wasting.'

‘You will remember?' he said.

She would have laughed his doubts off, but that remembering was all. Instead she touched his wet face, letting him feel the menstruum in her fingers.

It was only as she drove away that she realized she'd probably blessed him.

IV

SHADWELL

The Salesman had fled the Gyre as the first dissolution began in the Fugue outside. His escape had therefore not only gone unchallenged, but unseen. With the fabric of their homeland corning apart on every side, nobody paid the least attention to the shabby, blood-stained figure that stumbled away through the mayhem.

Once only was he obliged to stop, and find a place in the chaos where he could give vent to his nausea. The vomit splattered his once-fine shoes, and he spent a further moment cleaning them with a handful of leaves, which began to evaporate in his hands even as he put them to the task.

Magic! How it revolted him now! The Fugue had enticed him with its promises. It had flaunted its so-called enchantments in front of him until he - poor Cuckoo that he was - had been blinded to all sense. Then it had led him a merry dance. Made him dress in borrowed skin; made him deceive and manipulate: all for love of its lies. And lies they were; he saw that now. Even as he'd reached to embrace his prize it had evaporated, denying him ownership, and leaving him to look like the guilty party.

The fact that it had taken him so long to see how he'd been used, however, was proof positive of his innocence in all of this. He'd intended no harm to any living thing; he'd wanted only to bring truth and stability into a place sorely deficient in both. For his pains, he'd been cheated and connived against.

What could history accuse him of then, other than naivete: a forgivable sin. No, the true villains in this tragedy were the Seerkind, the wielders of rapture and unreason. They it was who'd twisted his benign ambition out of true, and so invited these horrors upon them all. A grim spiral of destruction that had ended in the Gyre - with him — a victim of circumstance - driven to murder.

He made his way out through the decaying Fugue, and began to climb up from the valley. The wind was cleaner on the slopes, and it shamed him. He stank of fear and frustration, while it smelt of the sea. Inhaling it, he knew that in such cleanliness lay his only hope for sanity.

Disgusted by his condition, he pulled off his bloodied jacket. It was excrement: corrupted and corrupting. In accepting it from the Incantatrix he'd made his first error: from that all subsequent misdirections had sprung. In his repugnance he tried to tear at the lining, but it resisted his strength, so he simply bundled the jacket up and threw it, high into the air. It rose a little way, then fell again, tumbling down a rocky slope, its passage starting a minor avalanche of pebbles, and came to rest spreadeagled like a legless suicide. At last it was where it had belonged from the start: in the dirt.

The Seerkind belonged with it, he thought. But they were survivors. Deception was in their blood. Though their territories had been destroyed, he didn't put it past them to have another trick or two up their sleeves. As long as they lived, these defilers, he would not rest easy in his bed. They'd made a fool and a butcher of him, and there was no health for him now until every last one of them was laid low.

Standing on the hill, looking down into the valley below, he felt a breath of new purpose. He'd been tricked and humiliated, but he was at least alive. The battle was not yet over.

They had an enemy, these monsters. Immacolata had dreamt of it often, and spoken of the wilderness where it resided.