Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

‘I will report it,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

Samantha wasn’t listening. ‘“Something is coming”?’ she repeated hesitantly.

‘That’s what he said. But what I don’t get is, why did he tell me? It was as if he thought I could do something about it.’

‘Maybe you can.’

‘I’m a glorified librarian, Samantha. I’m barely any use in the job I do do. I’m not like Hunter-’

‘Stop going on about Hunter,’ Samantha said sharply.

‘The Caretaker was talking about the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons as if I had some way of contacting them. They need to be brought together, he said. But one of them has already fallen.’

‘Brothers and Sisters of what?’

‘You know — the Five who fought at the Fall.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘They’ve been in all the recent intelligence reports. You should know that — it’s your department.’

‘You don’t think they actually let me read the files, do you? I have to look the other way while I stick them in a drawer.’

‘You’ve not heard Reid say anything?’ Hal drank his herbal brew, but wished he’d ordered a beer; he felt the urge to get completely drunk.

‘No, but then I’ve not been listening.’ She paused, stared at him curiously. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘You could lose your job-’

‘Do you want me to?’ she repeated.

Hal took a deep breath, then jumped straight in. ‘Only if you can find anything out without putting yourself at risk. I can’t believe I’m asking you to do this. Hunter doesn’t reckon I’ve broken a rule in my life-’

Samantha smacked his thigh so hard it stung, then laughed at his startled expression.

‘Sorry,’ he said, abashed.

‘Don’t make me do it again.’ She finished her drink. ‘I’d better get back. I’ll do what I can. Just don’t expect miracles.’

‘I never expect those,’ he said morosely. Then another thought struck him. ‘There was something else. You know all those cells in the high-security wing under Brasenose?’

‘Where they keep the prisoners?’

‘So they say.’

‘No prisoners?’

‘No human ones. I think they’ve captured a whole load of the things that came with the Fall. And they didn’t sound very happy.’

Samantha blanched. ‘God, if they got out…’

‘One of them did while I was there. Nearly killed me. But that’s not the point. It spoke to me. It said it could smell the Pendragon Spirit on me — does that mean anything to you?’

Samantha shook her head blankly.

‘I don’t know what’s going on any more,’ he said. ‘The only thing I can think of is King Arthur’s surname in the legends.’

‘King Arthur,’ she mused, before adding hesitantly, ‘Yesterday, Mister Reid asked me to pull some files. They all began with the codename Grail…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Arthur Pendragon.’ Hal turned the words over thoughtfully. Then: ‘King Arthur… the Grail. It’s got to be a coincidence.’

‘In this day and age, you can’t rule anything out, Hal,’ Samantha said.

Halfway back from Somerset, Hunter had to order one of the men to render Mallory unconscious. The knight was as strong and potentially lethal as the General had intimated during the briefing. Once he’d fought his way past the pain from his broken ribs and realised that his girlfriend had been killed, he took out two men in as many seconds, one with a chop to the larynx, another with a punch that sent his victim the length of the helicopter. The blows were delivered with a cool equanimity, but Hunter could see the familiar ice in Mallory’s eyes. Every raw emotion the knight felt had been bound up and battened down to fuel his single-minded response. It was a look Hunter had seen in many a soldier in difficult circumstances. There would be no dealing with Mallory now; the knight would be like a bear-trap — get too close and you’d lose a limb, maybe an eye, possibly your life. And he’d never be satiated. He wouldn’t deal, wouldn’t help; they might as well just lock him up until it was all over.

‘Not so smart now, is he?’ the acne-scarred Grieg said. Hunter could see that he was considering giving Mallory’s prone form a kick.

‘You won’t be so smart when I give my report to the General.’ Hunter stared out of the window, past the blizzard of white towards the glittering lights of Oxford in the sea of darkness below.

‘I had no choice-’

‘There’s always a choice. One of the targets is dead. The other is next to useless now. You’ve ruined the mission.’

‘What use is he, anyway?’

Hunter turned to him. ‘If you had a brain, Grieg, you’d be halfway to being dangerous. As it is, you’re just a psycho who shouldn’t be let near loaded weapons. You were tooled up and ready to kill something the moment you came out of the briefing.’

‘He just wanted to hit back at something, Chief.’ Porter, the one Mallory had knocked down the helicopter, sat nursing an aching jaw. ‘You can understand that, after all the losses we took during the Fall.’

Hunter nodded to Mallory. ‘He might be the only chance we’ve got to hit back. At the Fall, we lost every battle we engaged in — we didn’t even have the weapons to make it a competition. That means we have to be especially clever now, use whatever resources really work. Fight back with the new rules, not the ones we impose on ourselves. The attitude of this idiot here-’ Hunter jerked a thumb at Grieg ‘-is just going to mark us up for extinction. The new dinosaurs, lumbering around till we’re just fossils.’

Hunter turned back to the window. At times like this he was ready to quit. He’d never felt as if he really fitted in, couldn’t remember how he had ended up in the job in the first place. All his performance reviews noted his attitude problem, inability to follow orders and blatant disregard for authority. Yet somehow he kept rising through the ranks. Before the Fall it had been bad enough, with every request for a transfer refused. Now he couldn’t get out if he wanted to.

The helicopter came down in the Deer Park. Hunter climbed out beneath the thundering blades, with his men carrying Mallory on a stretcher behind. A cluster of people were silhouetted against the bright lights of Magdalen.

He motioned for the men to take Mallory straight down to a holding cell where the medics could check him over and then sauntered as nonchalantly as he could manage in the direction of the crowd. The snow was already starting to settle on the grass.

Running to meet him was Reid and two of the shifty, faceless men who populated his department. He stopped the stretcher and briefly searched Mallory before hurrying up to Hunter.

‘Weapon?’ he barked.

‘What’s this? A word-association game? If so, I’ll say “penis”. A big one.’

‘Did he have a weapon?’ There was a flush of excitement in Reid’s cheeks that made him oblivious to Hunter’s attempt to rile him. Hunter didn’t like the look of it.

‘A sword. In the chopper. There we go again with the word association. That Freud bloke really had it sorted, didn’t he?’

‘I’m taking it down to my department for tests, if you want to mark that in your report.’

‘There’s a stone in there, too. Makes pretty pictures in the air.’

Reid had dived into the chopper before Hunter had time to say anything else.

The General came up next, accompanied by a small coterie of serious-faced advisors. ‘What does he want?’ he asked suspiciously, peering after Reid.

‘Typical spook-looting.’

The General nodded. ‘Leave the chopper here. You’ve got forty-five minutes for debriefing and to grab a bite and then we’re off again.’

‘Trouble?’

‘We’ll see.’ The General marched away into the snowstorm with his coterie hurrying behind him like a gaggle of geese. Hunter watched them go, strangely unnerved; and his instincts never let him down.