Mark Chadbourn - The Burning Man

‘He is unpredictable,’ Shavi said simply.

‘He’s smart and sly, too,’ Hunter added. ‘He’s got some sort of plan.’

Urgent activity broke out amongst the Russian crew further along the deck. They were leaning over the other side, pointing into the water. Far below the surface a dim light was visible, powerful enough that it could pierce several fathoms.

‘Is that one of those deep-sea fish, way off course?’ Laura said. ‘Or a submarine?’

Hunter questioned the sailors in Russian. ‘They’re calling it a USO — unidentified submarine object,’ he said afterwards. ‘They’ve seen one or two on this route.’

‘Wait,’ Shavi said. ‘Is it rising?’

The light grew brighter as it emerged from the depths. The crew shouted anxiously, and one man ran to inform the captain.

‘Let’s get under cover,’ Hunter urged.

In the shadows of a metal staircase, they watched the waters boil as light streamed from below. Something broke the surface, reflecting the sunset and the distant lightning. At first they thought it was a metallic craft, then some mythical sea-beast and finally realised it was a little of both.

Rising up from the swell was some kind of insectile construct, black carapace, extensions that could have been legs, and an overwhelming stink of spoiled meat. Water streamed from it as it lifted into the darkening sky to hang over the ship. They instinctively recognised it as something that had come from the Void, searching for them.

‘Shit, if it attacks here, game over,’ Laura whispered. ‘Five minutes in this water and we’re dead.’

Hunter held her back, but his touch was also calming. He weighed things neither Laura nor Shavi saw. ‘If it was ready to attack, we’d be gone already.’

Lights flared again, eyes levelling, a forensic stare. A beam fell upon the sailors and held them for a moment before moving off across the surface of the ship. Hunter, Shavi and Laura pressed back into the shadows.

When it completed a circuit, the eye winked out and the insect-ship sank slowly back beneath the waves. The crew ran about in relieved excitement, hugging each other.

‘I thought the idea was that the Void didn’t try to break the Mundane Spell,’ Laura said.

‘This’ll just be one of those fish stories that gets told in bars and then forgotten,’ Hunter said. ‘But it’s pushing at the limits of what it can get away with. These kinds of things must be patrolling everywhere, scuttling behind the scenes, trying to find us.’

‘But whatever was in the craft was not wholly intelligent,’ Shavi said. ‘It sensed we were here, you could see, but it could not work out why it could not find us. That is one thing in our favour.’

At the rail, they watched the lights growing dimmer as the vessel sank into the depths.

Two days later, at Rostock, Hunter bribed a sailor to stow them in crates of machine tools, who in turn bribed the customs official to let the container lorry through without scrutiny. Ten miles inland they were freed to buy a van from an unscrupulous backstreet dealer unconcerned about paperwork. They picked up the autobahn east of Hamburg and headed south.

Tom sat silently in the front, feeling the gentle tug of his ring. At the wheel, Hunter watched faces, seeing the scars of a world without magic, feeling the slow, black suffocation of the Void pressing in on all sides. He was sure it would only be a matter of time before that desolation enveloped them all and they rejoined the non-people with their non-lives. He started to beat out a rhythm on the steering wheel, but it sounded like the ticking of a clock, counting out the seconds of hope that remained.

‘There’s still hope,’ Tom said quietly, as if he could read Hunter’s mind. ‘There’s always hope. That is what the secret Gnostic knowledge tells us.’

‘Somehow that doesn’t feel like enough,’ Hunter said.

‘Ah, but it is. To understand that is to win. This world is about the base and the material. It is about struggling for money and power, about fighting for people like you against people like them . You can see it engrained in every aspect of our culture, locked in so tightly that there is no room for the opposite point of view to gain a foothold. Innocence, love, hope — these things are derided and their power diminished. And yet there is a place where they can survive even the most tumultuous attack.’

Shavi leaned forward between the two of them. ‘The human heart,’ he said.

In the back, Laura yawned loudly and pointedly. ‘Here come the hippies.’

‘The Gnostic secrets tell us that fragments of the true power of Existence, the Blue Fire, are lodged in every human, waiting to be fanned from a spark into a flame,’ Tom continued. ‘Those fragments are the basis of the Pendragon Spirit. And if that knowledge tells us one thing, it is this: that every person can make a difference. That by looking within, the outside can be altered.’

‘That’s a nice little story,’ Hunter said, ‘but nobody’s going to wake up of their own accord. They’ve got too much to keep them occupied — cash, drink, drugs, sex.’ He paused. ‘Not to be knocked, of course.’

‘That is how the Void wins,’ Shavi said. ‘It has built a prison that we love.’

‘Still doesn’t get away from my point: who’s going to start making people fan those sparks?’

‘You,’ Tom snapped. ‘Do I have to spell it out? Why am I cursed to be surrounded by thick-heads?’

While Laura launched a caustic attack on Tom, Church sat silently in the back, turning over Tom’s words, convinced they were directed at him. As always, Tom cut through to the heart of him, slicing past the encysted negativity that had grown around Ruth’s disappearance.

‘We wake them by shattering the Mundane Spell,’ he said. ‘We show them the magic that exists behind the scenes.’

As they passed Frankfurt a few hours later, they realised his words had more than metaphorical meaning. Cars veered wildly across the autobahn and came to a halt on the hard shoulder as people jumped out to stare into the sky. Overhead, a winged horse dipped and soared in the morning light. Hunter pulled the van to the side and wound down the window. The cries of the observers were filled with wonder that suggested they had been changed for ever.

‘This Great Dominion is awake,’ Tom said, ‘and the magic it contains is now unfettered. You did that, simply by passing through.’

‘So all we’ve got to do,’ Laura said, watching the horse dreamily, ‘is to wake each Great Dominion. Simple. We open the box, the weird stuff pours out and the Mundane Spell shatters.’

Tom sighed. ‘First, you have to survive each Great Dominion.’

The Tower of the Four Winds stood amidst minarets and flat-roofed white stone buildings, an echo of Moorish architecture that was compounded by the aroma of spices on the hot wind. It was one of a pair, an exact duplicate of one that stood in the Court of Soul’s Ease. Though all around the streets were as claustrophobically packed as any in the Court of the Soaring Spirit, Math’s tower home stood in a spacious walled garden that felt like breathing again after a prolonged period of stress.

‘So Math is some kind of sorcerer to the Tuatha De Danann?’ Mallory whispered as he searched the shadowy garden, a lantern hidden beneath his cloak.

‘Scary guy,’ Sophie replied. ‘He wears a mask with four different animal avatar faces that keeps rotating while he speaks.’

‘Was he a threat to Niamh? Is that why he’s missing?’ Caitlin gripped her axe tightly.

‘I’m not convinced Niamh is the threat,’ Sophie said hesitantly. ‘I don’t get any sense of that.’