Rebecca Lim - Fury

‘I still don’t get it,’ Ryan says. ‘There’s nothing here but this rock.’

Mateo points at the ground at my feet, at Uriel’s, and I see Ryan’s face change as he works out what Mateo’s trying to tell us.

Since we left Milan, the sun has barely touched my skin, or has touched it so fleetingly that I never felt its warmth. But here, upon this windswept plateau, its light finally struggles through the cloud. And as its rays move across the face of the stone called Intiwatana, across all of us standing here, I see what Mateo saw before any of us did. There are four people present, but only two cast shadows upon the ground.

Uriel and I glance at each other sharply.

‘The Inca believed this stone held the sun in the sky. If he is your brother,’ Mateo insists, ‘then he, too, is a creature of the sun, bound to this place.’

‘Superstition,’ Uriel scoffs, saying out loud exactly what I’m thinking. ‘How could he be here? I don’t feel anything —’

But then, as if in reply, the earth begins to roar, it begins to tremble, and I hear distant screams, the sound of buckling stone, of thousands of roof tiles falling and shattering in the streets. I hear Mateo’s cries, Ryan’s, as they struggle to remain on their feet in a shifting, rending world.

There’s something else, too: like the sound of steel on steel, something fleeting, but so discordant and sharp that it resonates painfully within me, makes me want to claw at my head in agony.

Uriel gasps aloud, similarly afflicted, as the brief sound recurs, then recurs again, and again. Something’s coming, something fast. A whole bunch of somethings, erupting from everywhere, but nowhere, all at once.

‘Ryan!’ I yell through the roar of the physical world being torn apart, through the searing pain in my head. ‘Mateo! Lead your people to safety! Find them, get them out.’

Mateo nods, already turning, but Ryan hesitates, crippled by his loyalty to me.

‘Every one of them could be your sister, your mother, your father!’ I cry. ‘Don’t just let the bad stuff happen, Ryan. It’s penalty time. Every action counts. We have to do what we can with the abilities we’ve got, don’t you see?’

And I see that he gets in an instant what has taken me lifetimes to figure out.

As Ryan and Mateo stumble back up the stairs, a heavy white fog rolls towards the lip of the plateau that Uriel and I occupy. Even as we watch, it begins to ascend up the terraces of Machu Picchu, blanketing everything in its path, turning the air an unnatural white that has a tinge of grey, like contagion, at its heart.

Demonsign . Uriel’s voice is like a breath of fire in my mind.

Then, without warning, out of that fog sweeps a wraith. It leaps onto the plateau, ghostly braids streaming about its skull-like face, a star-shaped stone axe raised high, mouth stretched in an undying scream. I can see the outline of the man it once was, but the face and form are indistinct, shredding and re-forming like the fog that surrounds us.

Uriel and I are between the wraith and the stone. I see the thing’s head questing from side to side as if it’s deciding which of us to take first with its ghostly axe.

Uriel puts his arm around me and pulls me close, as if he’s Gerry McEntee from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I’m Estelle Jablonski of Mississauga, Canada, and we’re lost together in the fog.

Hold your nerve , he roars in my head. Do not shift .

The creature throws itself at us, through us — like shards of glass, or a handful of nails — and is gone, subsumed forever by our peculiar energy. Daemonium of this kind are no match for us. The ones that wear faces are the ones we fear.

And then an army of wraiths comes boiling over the edge of the plateau, a legion of the violent, mindless dead. Surrounding us, momentarily, like a milling herd of shredded, shredding energy. Those that touch Uriel or me vanish like ether, but hundreds remain. Each one distinct, each one once a man.

Suddenly, as if startled, they flow away, as one, into the trembling streets of the city that once was theirs when they yet lived, mouths stretched wide in silent, ravening screams, taking the unnatural fog with them.

When Uriel releases me from his hold, the roped-off stone lies exposed beneath weak sunlight, and the earth is no longer shaking.

He and I circle the rock warily, studying it, and I tell him of what was done to Nuriel; the forms of punishment that were visited on Jegudiel and Selaphiel.

‘If he’s in there,’ I say, ‘he may be compromised. Don’t touch him until you’re sure he’s clean.’

Uriel nods grimly, then leaps lightly over the guard rope onto the upper surface of the stone. He places his right hand upon the granite, effortlessly reaching through and into it, before declaring in ringing tones, ‘ Libera eum! ’

Nothing. Nothing but storm cloud moving in from the northeast, and the lonely shriek of a hunting bird drifting through the valley below us.

Uriel withdraws his arm from the stone and I watch his forearm, the fingers of his hand re-form in an instant into apparent solidity.

‘I’ll take the western reaches,’ he says finally, ‘including the lower terraces. You take this side, and we’ll meet back in the middle, near that structure where the path of flagstones ended.’

Uriel — still in his human guise — takes the stairs at a run and is soon lost in the rolling fog above me.

I enter the fog with reluctance; it seems almost impenetrable, even to my eyes. It sucks and eddies around my ankles like a tide, draws its weblike tendrils across my face. Trapezoidal doorways and windows loom up in front of me without warning. All sound seems deadened in the roiling, cloudy atmosphere. I could be the only thing alive on this mountain.

Then the hallucinations start. Snatches of past lives, old demons, stalking me through the streets of the city. I hear Ezra’s husband’s voice calling her slut and whore , the dull sound of fist and open palm meeting flesh, a woman’s scream. A baby cries, the sound weak and thin, high from hunger and withdrawal, and I know that it’s Lucy’s baby. I can’t escape the crying, try to outrun it. But I lose my footing by a gaping building with walls stained red with earth or old blood, and Susannah’s mother roars at me from out of the darkness inside: ‘You ruined my life, you little bitch! I wish you’d never been born.’ But as I pick myself up clumsily, gripped in the cold fear of memory, I hear her sob, ‘Come back, come back! I didn’t mean it, oh, how could I? I’m sick, so sick .’

Her voice pursues me as I stumble past a row of houses with trapezoidal rooms, scrambling almost on all fours up the staircase beyond them only to hear Lauren say quietly, ‘I’ve been in hell. Am in hell. And now you are, too. You get used to it,’ she calls after me. ‘Used to it.’

Then I’m lurching uphill, struggling to get away from them all, heading on autopilot towards the place where I’m supposed to meet Uriel, trying to outrun memory. But my own sneering words come back at me in Lela’s gentle voice, and stop me in my tracks. ‘You’ll never get out of here alive, you know,’ I hear myself say.

And I hear a dead man reply bitterly, ‘I know, and neither will you.’

Then a single gunshot reverberates upon the peak of Machu Picchu, the sound so real and so immediate that when I’m momentarily hit by a hailstorm of sharp sensation — like needles of ice being flung in my face, hurled at my body — I almost fall to the ground, believing I’ve been shot all over again.

The fog is thick with wraiths. Another one hits the solid force of me and shreds into fragments, then another, and another. I could be standing in a hurricane of broken glass. I twist and flail, trying to shield myself. They’re like suicidal insects — the ghosts of this place — drawn to my energy, my warmth, dashing themselves against me in a wave.