Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

There are times when the world feels like an irritating distraction, even when buildings are collapsing, blood is flowing and people are crying about the end of the world. Some things are more important. Hal understood that clearly as he made his way along the corridors of Queen’s College. All he could think about was the kiss Samantha had shared with Hunter, how it had been a whole conversation in a single moment, a complex communion of secret yearnings, confused romance, hope, worry, sexual attraction.

It had made him realise that those who live their lives in their heads, as he did, made it easy to deceive themselves. The imagination is a trickster, he thought, tempting with illusions to drag you off the path so he can laugh uproariously at your rude awakening.

In his mind, Samantha had always been the one who would save him from his mundane existence. And now there was no hope of that ever happening. Lost in his dreams he might have been, but he was a pragmatist when faced with harsh reality. He felt colder than the unnatural winter outside, as though every thought he had was laced with frost. So cold that he felt he would turn to ice, then slowly melt away when the thaw came.

Reid’s department filled a vast complex of rooms, all sealed, all silent; a place of unspeakable secrets that gave no hint of their existence; of quiet suggestions that turned the mind to horror; of the brush of fingertips at midnight.

Hal was met by an underling at the entrance to the sanctum sanctorum and led into an area he had never visited before and had never thought he would. He was finally shown into a room with a security system that exceeded anything Hal had seen throughout the extremely secure offices of Government. Reid waited within, talking in hushed tones to Dennis Kirkham. With a troubled expression, the chief scientist examined a sword suspended in a holding frame.

‘Ah, here he is,’ Reid exclaimed when he saw Hal. ‘Will you excuse us, Mister Kirkham? Business.’

Kirkham disappeared in the silent manner that always characterised his comings and goings, and Reid came over to Hal with a faint swagger. To Hal, Reid always appeared to be on stage pretending to be some spy he had seen in a sixties movie; he had charisma, and cool, and a touch of arrogance, but it felt as if it was all hanging loosely over someone else entirely.

‘Look at this,’ Reid said, indicating the sword. ‘We retrieved it from the fellow brought back from Cadbury Hill.’

‘The Brother of Dragons?’

‘That’s the chap. Doesn’t look much like a champion of the human race, I must say, but that’s by the by. I believe, and certainly he believes, that this is one of the three great swords of legend-’

‘Sir?’

‘We’re frantically playing catch-up here, Mister…?’ Reid fumbled for Hal’s name without any sign of embarrassment, even though he spoke to Hal several times a week.

‘Campbell,’ Hal said.

Reid nodded, but didn’t deign to use Hal’s name. ‘The rules have changed, as we all know,’ the spy continued. ‘We can no longer sneer at the supernatural, or magic. Those words simply define something we can’t quite understand at this moment in time. We know that myth and legend, what we thought were simply fairy stories, contain secrets coded into them. Truths. Many of them, pieced together, provide a secret history of what was going on behind the scenes of our illusion of a rational world. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Hal nodded.

‘The difficulty is deciding what is true and important to us, and what is merely embellishment to make them good stories that will carry those truths through word of mouth over generations. A lot of it is symbolism, one element representing another…’ Reid waved his hand with irritation. ‘Not my department. We have people who deal with that kind of thing. But what I can understand is that it’s a code, and we’re in the process of cracking it.’

He returned to the sword. ‘One of the great British legends is of three powerful swords. Weapons, fantastic, earth-shattering weapons. One is called Caledfwlch, or by another name, Excalibur, with which I’m sure you’re familiar. Another was believed to be consumed by, or filled with, fire, with an implication that its power was corrupted in some way. And this is the third. Our Brother of Dragons was told it’s called Llyrwyn, but that isn’t any name I’ve come across before. And he also appears to be completely unaware of its capabilities. If we can find out how to access that power, imagine what we could do. We certainly wouldn’t be on the back foot any longer.’ Reid’s eyes gleamed.

For the first time, Hal looked around the room properly. Rack upon rack of cases were lined up like a futuristic library. But they did not hold books. There were more weapons — axes, a bow and arrows that appeared to be made of gold, a spear — and artefacts that ranged from the mundane to the bizarre: odd lumps of rock, jewels that glowed eerily, a crystal ball in which fleeting images came and went, a carpet, a mirror with a carved frame of tormented figures, amulets of all shapes and sizes, caskets and boxes, some plain, some encrusted with more colourful jewels, the skull of some beast with horns, a stuffed figure of a tiny man with wings; and those were only the items in Hal’s immediate line of vision.

Reid nodded when he saw Hal’s expression. ‘We’ve amassed quite a collection, haven’t we? My men have been very busy since we received the first hints that the Fall was taking place. You remember what it was like — the failing technology, the seemingly ridiculous rumours of fantastic creatures, then the deaths…’ He shook his head in faux-sadness. ‘I’m not one to blow my own trumpet, but I put this entire project in motion right then. Don’t deny the evidence of your eyes, I told my superiors. Adapt or die. Sadly, they died. But I moved quickly, sending out agents to seize whatever might help us when the time came to fight back. And it is a remarkable achievement. Some of these objects… well, they’d take your breath away if you saw what they could do. Some we will never take out of their security cases. Too dangerous even to touch. We’re working on the others… close to a breakthrough in some areas,’ he said proudly.

Hal’s attention was drawn to a lantern, like an old miner’s lamp, sitting on the top of one display case. A blue flame flickered inside, veering strangely at a sharp angle in one direction. ‘What’s that?’ Hal asked.

Reid examined it, puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen that before. And what’s it doing out of its case? Don’t worry, I’ll get Kirkham to secure it.’

Reid was dismissive, but there was something about the lantern that resonated with Hal. Even as Reid led him away to a case on the far side of the room, Hal couldn’t help but look back. The lantern made his skin tingle, and he felt as if there were feathery fingers probing gently into his mind.

‘You’re probably wondering why I brought you down here,’ Reid said as he came to a halt before a case that contained an eight-pointed silver star next to a stone — Hal assumed it must be the Wish Stone that the Brother of Dragons had retrieved from Cadbury Hill. Reid slipped on a pair of plastic evidence gloves and went for the Wish Stone before diverting to the star. He plucked it out and handed it to Hal. ‘This is an unusual item. What do you think of it?’

Hal was surprised that Reid was canvassing his opinion on anything. He held the star up to the light, which revealed an almost invisible gold filigree covering the star with strange symbols and runes. The object felt oddly warm to his touch, and while his eyes told him that it was an eight-pointed star, his hand suggested a different shape.