Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

‘Just lie here,’ he said, leaving her at the top of the stone steps where she could get a good view of the battle, ‘but after they start to break through the ranks, do your best to get down and away.’ He paused. ‘What did you want earlier?’

‘Later,’ she said weakly.

Thackeray ran back to the ramparts where Harvey waited with a sickened expression. They were both armed with enormous swords that made them look like boys in comparison.

Weak, barely able to prop herself up, Sophie drifted in and out of consciousness so that the unfolding battle had all the reality of a bad dream. The little men swarmed over the ramparts, small and brown and vicious, tearing with their little knives, striking with broken nails and sharp teeth. The gods, tall and stately, responded just as savagely, though their brutality was masked behind the measured sophistication of their balletic strokes and skilful attacks. Bodies were cleaved in half by the gods’ swords, heads split in two. But though the knives and teeth of the little men had but small effect on the heavily armoured gods, it was clear they would eventually overwhelm the defence by sheer force of numbers. Sophie faded in and out, but still they came, clambering over the bodies of the fallen, attacking relentlessly, seemingly with no thought for their own safety.

But then there was a flurry of activity and the tide appeared to turn. A terrifying demon swept along the battlements, hacking and slashing in a blur of sword and knife, carnage in human form. It was Caitlin, and she was laughing and shrieking with the ecstasy of the moment, no longer human.

In her daze, Sophie thought she saw Caitlin rise up into the sky, grow larger, become the destroyer of everything; her sword came down on the city and a sea of blood rose up and washed everything away.

And then there was only darkness for ever more.

Light filtered through stained glass, flooding the whole hall with a demonic red, framed at the edges by blue and green. As Sophie gradually came back to consciousness, she had the odd feeling that she was surfacing from a dream into a dream. Colours too florid, distant sounds given uncertain solidity by odd echoes.

She had never been in the room before, but it had the ambience of a church. The stained-glass windows ranged from floor to ceiling along the vast eastern walls, presenting pictures of gods in battle and victory, and it was clearly the first rays of dawn that were turning them to fire. The floor was grey stone flags on which wooden benches stood, oriented towards a lectern, while the ceiling was cathedral-high and vaulted.

Sophie was propped up on the rear bench, flanked by Thackeray and Harvey. Lugh was at the lectern and had clearly just given a speech of some kind, for the gods who filled the remaining benches were taking their leave. Sophie had the feeling that these were the senior members of the court, for Ceridwen was there, and Math; she didn’t recognise any of the others, but they wore their gravitas like a cloak.

‘We were starting to get worried about you,’ Harvey said with some affection. Sophie had been convinced for a while now that he was starting to develop a crush on her.

‘I blacked out,’ Sophie muttered, ‘after calling up the wind and the lightning. Much good that did.’

‘Oh, it helped,’ Thackeray said. ‘But not as much as that did.’ He nodded towards the figure striding towards them.

‘We drove them back,’ Caitlin said, her eyes gleaming. ‘But they’ll return, and soon.’

‘We’ll never be able to fight them off,’ Thackeray said. ‘We surprised them this time. They never expected us to have a secret weapon that was such a killing machine.’

‘Even you won’t be able to kill all of them,’ Harvey said to Caitlin, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Lugh marched up and addressed Sophie. ‘His words are true.’

‘I didn’t hear your speech. What did you tell everyone?’ Sophie said.

A deep sadness lay just below the surface of Lugh’s composed expression. ‘The enemy is too numerous. We cannot defeat them.’

‘What are you saying?’ she asked. ‘That you’re going to surrender?’

Defiance flared in Lugh’s eyes. ‘In all our long history, the Golden Ones have never admitted defeat. We are trapped here, unable to strike back effectively. We must escape, regroup, find another haven where we can plot our next attack.’

‘How are you going to get out of here? The only exit is through the gate, straight into the enemy’s hands.’

‘I have charged my brothers and sisters with finding a solution.’

‘But what if they can’t come up with anything?’

‘Then we stand, and fight, and greet Existence with the sun in our faces and pride in our hearts.’

The small group fell silent as Lugh marched away. The air of impending doom in the room was palpable.

Sophie said quietly, ‘Whatever it takes, we’re getting out of here.’

The road west from Oxford was hard going. Mallory reasoned that the main thoroughfares would be easier to travel, but heavy snow had still built up, so deep in places that even the horse found it difficult to pick a path through. Some days he barely covered two miles. He took the A40, skirting Witney, and then when he reached Northleach turned south down the arrow-straight route of the old Fosse Way towards Cirencester. One advantage of such a route was plenty of abandoned buildings where he could seek shelter if the blizzards became too intense, and many occupied ones where he could try to beg a few moments’ warmth by a fire or a bed for the night.

But many people were suspicious of him. With the collapse of the rule of law across most of the country, there were too many rogues at large. Others refused him any food, fearing that the bizarre summer-winter would devastate the already fragile food supply; most crops would already have died, and what they had stored needed to be conserved. After the tenth shotgun pushed into his face, he decided to shun human contact altogether.

With each passing mile, Mallory had grown stronger, the pain of his wounds becoming a distant memory. But the bitter cold assailed him, and at times he wondered if he would be able to continue. Every morning he woke with a deep ache gnawing at his bones that not even the campfire outside the tent could dispel. And then there was the long day in the saddle, riding into the harsh wind, the frost building up on his chest and on the beard he had decided to grow to protect the skin from being flayed from his face. In his thermal sleeping bag at night, he dreamed of warmth, but thought he would never feel it again.

Increasingly, the harshness of the outside world drove him deep inside his own head, where memories, dreams and emotions stewed and mingled so that sometimes he found himself unable to tell what was real and what was fantasy.

But always he returned to the single image of a gunshot in the dark that was imprinted on his deep subconscious. The revelation that had come as he lay drugged and in pain had been too raw to contemplate immediately, but now it had taken on a terrible gravity that dragged him back to it constantly. Perhaps it had been a suicide attempt from which he had recovered? But if that was the case, why did he have no memory of any hospitalisation — or had that, too, been locked away from his conscious mind? No, he was sure it represented his death, but the questions that came with that recognition threatened to drive him mad.

If only Sophie had been there, she would have helped him to find a solution; she would have soothed him.

But then, as he concentrated on the blast… the fire… then darkness, a rush of other memories broke through, like ice shattering on a pond. Another life, setting up a club, music, criminal figures propelling him to a choice no one should have to make; and then some unspeakable act which he still couldn’t face that drove him to suicide. It shocked him out of his drifting state so sharply that he almost fell from the horse and had to pull back on the reins to bring it under control.