Mark Chadbourn - The Burning Man

Sophie tore at her hair. The wind around her rushed wildly in random directions. A brazier crashed over, the glowing coals igniting a tapestry. Flames rushed up the wall.

‘Soph, this isn’t you!’

Tormented, Sophie threw her head back and screamed till her throat was raw. In the face of the gale, Mallory couldn’t even get to his feet.

‘Look at that woman!’ Niamh pointed towards Caitlin. ‘She didn’t care about you. She is made of lies and deceit. She doesn’t deserve your friendship.’

‘Sophie!’ Mallory called. ‘She’s trying to get you to do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life. She’s trying to damn you.’

‘She deserves to be eradicated!’ Niamh’s voice rose above the gale.

Sophie cast a pitiful look at Mallory. ‘Why couldn’t you have saved me?’

‘Hold him back,’ Niamh insisted.

‘You can kill her,’ Mallory said, ‘but she’ll come back. That’s what we do. Death can’t hold us.’

‘This is beyond death,’ Niamh said. ‘The Devourer of All Things has allowed the universe to create a handful of weapons of power that can strike at the very heart of Existence. They are scattered, unknown, lost. They can be used only once, because of their power.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘They can wipe a being out of Existence. Not just so they are dead, but so they never existed in the first place. No one will remember them ever having been. Their words, their gestures, their caresses, their kisses — all forgotten, because they never happened. Removed from the cycle of rebirth. It is worse than the worst thing you could ever imagine for yourself, for it means that you amounted to nothing.’ From her pocket, she removed a crystal in the shape of a snowflake. It spun slowly of its own accord an inch above her palm. ‘And I have such a weapon here.’

She held her hand higher and the snowflake spun faster. Shards of light blinked off it.

‘Stop her!’ Mallory shouted at Sophie. ‘Caitlin’s one of us!’

Sophie closed her eyes, sobbing silently. The wind continued to pin Mallory against the floor.

The snowflake pulsed. Like all the other objects of power Mallory had witnessed, he knew he was not seeing its true shape. He had the sense of some enormous machine grinding into life behind the illusion of the world he saw before him. Caitlin lolled on the torture frame, defenceless, broken.

And then the wind dropped and all was still. Mallory only had a second to register this before he heard a small voice.

‘You should have saved me.’

A dagger of white light burst from the spinning snowflake towards Caitlin. Before it reached her, Sophie took the full force of the weapon in her breast, a halo of white light burning around her.

For a second, Mallory felt as if the weapon had hit him and he had winked out of existence. Desperate to hold on to the last of her, he scrambled to where Sophie had sunk to the ground.

The white light sparked and fizzed around her as it unstitched her from reality. Her skin was freezing to the touch, as though she had lain in the snow for hours, as though she was already dead.

Mallory tried to say something, but the words died in his throat.

Sophie smiled weakly, already a ghost of the smile he remembered. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a real mess of things.’

‘It wasn’t true … about Caitlin and me. I’d never do anything like that.’

She looked into his face and saw it was true.

‘I love you.’ He gripped her hands tightly. ‘You saved me. I was worthless before, and … and-’

‘Ssh. Don’t say it.’ The light gave her skin a translucent quality. ‘I love you, too.’

Her eyes flickered and closed.

Mallory closed his own eyes and thought hard. The pub in Salisbury where he had first seen her came to mind as clearly as if he was there. Sophie, with her traveller friends, wearing a faded hippie dress beneath a pink mohair sweater, a clutter of beads and necklaces around her neck, her sharp, questioning intelligence, the knowing quality around her eyes that he instantly found deeply sexy. Though he hadn’t realised it until much later, that first moment was when she had trapped him in her gravity.

He recalled the first time they kissed, every detail of the surroundings, the temperature of the air, the smell of her hair. He recalled the first time they made love. Watching her in the dealers’ room of Steelguard Securities, when he knew she was special even though the context had been stolen from him.

So many memories, every sensation, every word spoken, mundane and unique. He wanted them all, but there were too many. Desperately, he tried to hold on to her.

Then, from somewhere far away, a cold wind blew and she was gone. His hands clutched thin air. Broken, he sagged until his forehead touched the floor.

Niamh had moved to a window that had been hidden behind one of the tapestries, now flung wide open to the night. From outside came the sound of wings.

Mallory turned to her, filled with a residual hatred that was fading fast. In a second she went from the woman he would have travelled to the ends of Existence to destroy to just another enemy. There would be no revenge.

He saw in her face some kind of secret knowledge that pleased her, and then there was movement behind her. Standing on the back of a flying, bat-winged beast was the Libertarian. He held out his hand for Niamh to join him.

Grasping Llyrwyn, Mallory ran to the window, but he was too late. The beast was already moving away. The Libertarian had his arms around Niamh’s shoulders, like old lovers reunited.

‘Your new life is yours to enjoy,’ Niamh said sardonically, ‘in what little time remains.’

The leathery wings beat faster and the creature turned towards the Burning Man, soaring on thermals, out of the court and away.

Mallory raced back to where Caitlin hung on the torture frame. Her wounds were all superficial and already healing. As he cut through the barbed wire, her eyes flickered open.

‘Oh,’ she said weakly. ‘Why are you crying?’

Mallory touched his damp cheek. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

In the bright, fresh hour after dawn, the Court of the Soaring Spirit took on a new mood. In the streets — no longer dark, no longer claustrophobic — people turned their faces to the sky for the first time in many days. Music rang from the open doors and windows of the Hunter’s Moon.

In the airy, sun-drenched corridors and rooms of the Palace of Glorious Light, the old was swept out. As Mallory watched over Caitlin, asleep now and recovering from her wounds, a dark mood came over the room. He had thrown open all the curtains to allow some light into the place, yet an area of darkness was growing in the centre of the room and spreading out to drive the light back. Fearing another attack from Niamh, Mallory drew his sword, but even its flames were dimmed.

In the heart of the darkness, Mallory glimpsed piercing eyes. A potent sense of threat pervaded everything, yet it was also sexually charged. Mallory had felt it before in the Watchtower. ‘The Morrigan,’ he said.

The darkness swept towards Caitlin and disappeared inside her like smoke being sucked into a fan. Caitlin’s eyes snapped open, and in them Mallory could see no sign of the woman he knew, nor did she even appear conscious. She floated an inch or two above the surface of the bed.

‘She’s back with us now.’ The fearful voice came from Caitlin’s lips, but Mallory recognised the tone of Briony’s persona.

‘Leave her,’ Mallory said.

‘The Dark Sister has a bond with this one. They know each other, and benefit from each other’s strengths.’

‘What does the Morrigan want with Caitlin?’