Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

‘The Green Angel,’ Hunter guessed.

‘Love you, too.’

‘You did that trick with the ivy?’

‘I can’t reveal my secrets.’ She teased him in a manner that some would find irritating. ‘You’re not a local. Come for some free fruit and veg? The store’s down in town.’

‘You did all that with the plants, too. I’m impressed. Green fingers.’

‘Green everything.’ She came over, now more intrigued than entertained. ‘You’re not here for food. Who are you?’

‘I can’t reveal my secrets.’

The woman circled him slowly, looking him up and down. ‘Lean. Mean. Packing some weapons, if I’m not mistaken by the bulges under your cloak. Or are you just pleased to see me?’

‘You’re very sparky. Give it a bit of time and you might be able to develop it into a personality.’

The woman suddenly noticed a flare of blue illumination inside Hunter’s cloak as it blew aside in the wind. She yanked at the hem to pull the cloak open, revealing the Wayfinder where it had been hanging out of sight in Hunter’s hand. Her demeanour changed instantly.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘A giant gave it to me,’ Hunter said wryly, but his mind was already turning at her recognition. ‘It’s called the Wayfinder.’

‘I know what it’s called,’ she snapped. In that moment, the defences of her face were stripped away to reveal a flow of honest emotion: memories of good times, memories of sadness, hardship and suffering. It ended with a faint, contented smile as though she had just recognised an old friend.

‘I think,’ Hunter said, ‘I’m looking for you.’

She blinked away a furtive tear. ‘Come far?’

‘From the ends of the Earth.’ That’s what it felt like to him. Now that his own defences had broken down he felt a deep affinity with the odd woman, and he could see in her eyes that she felt it, too.

She put her arms around him warmly and held him in silence for a moment. When she broke away, she said, ‘I’m not usually one for hugging. So don’t tell anyone about that, all right?’

‘Sister of Dragons.’ He nodded slowly; he could see it now.

‘And you’re one of the new ones. The pale copies.’

‘I like to think you were the prototypes and we’re the definitive article.’ He held out a hand. ‘Hunter.’

‘Is that a name or some sexual role-play thing?’ The woman held his hand for a long second.

‘Are you always like this?’

‘I wouldn’t be so lovable any other way. Laura DuSantiago.’

He looked up at the towering cathedral. ‘And this is where you hang out? Nice. Bet it’s a nightmare to clean.’

‘Now there’s a thing. Wait till you see the inside. If she ever lets us in,’ she added tartly.

‘“She” being…?’

‘Ruth Gallagher. Uber-Witch of the whole fucking multiverse. And doesn’t she just know it.’

She shook her head with irritation and motioned for Hunter to follow her. This time the main door swung open easily.

‘Looks like she’s out of her sulk,’ Laura said. ‘But you still won’t be able to see her yet — she’ll be off brooding somewhere. Better come in and take the weight off for a while.’

Hunter followed Laura into the cathedral and was even more surprised than she had indicated he would be. The interior was a bizarre mix of tropical greenhouse and ice cave. Strange gargantuan ice formations almost obscured the lofty roof and curved across the nave, which entered into a series of tunnels through the permafrost. Yet tropical trees thrust up from the frozen floor, breaking through the stone to press against the ice, and creepers and vines hung down from above. It made the inside of the cathedral claustrophobic and disturbingly otherworldly.

‘So you can control nature? Make things grow, even where they shouldn’t?’ Hunter asked.

‘One of the pluses of being a plant.’

‘What?’

‘Long story. Basically, I’m an avatar of the Green, gifted — or cursed — by Cernunnos. You heard of him? He’s one of the Tuatha De Danann, a nature god, basically, or the nature god. Anyway, I’m his chosen one, and he’s given me lots of cool powers to use as I see fit. Course, I get the chlorophyll skin, but these days there aren’t many beauty parades.’

Laura led Hunter through the maze of ice tunnels to a room where a brazier glowed with hot coals. He warmed his hands over it eagerly. ‘There’s bread and fruit over there.’ She motioned to a cupboard in one corner before lounging on a hard wooden bench. ‘Now you’d better tell me why you’re here.’

Hunter told her everything, from the impending end of the world at the hands of the Void, to the attack on his troops by the Lament-Brood and their lethal generals, and the fragmented state of the current quincunx of Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. Laura listened intently, chipping in with sarcastic comments or wry asides, but beneath the patina of levity, Hunter could tell that she understood what was at stake and recognised her responsibility.

‘We need your help,’ he said finally, ‘to make up the numbers, in the hope that it might make up for one of us being dead. But we need your experience, too. To be honest, none of us knows what the hell we’re doing with this Pendragon Spirit thing.’

Hunter was taken aback by Laura’s laughter. ‘This is the best! You’re coming to us for help and advice? Listen, we were the biggest collection of fuck-ups you could ever imagine. Church — Jack Churchill — he was up to his neck in grief over the death of his girlfriend. Unhealthy? You bet. Ryan Veitch was a crook who’d killed a man, who turned out to be a relative of the Uber-Witch, but Ruth had got her own problems, one of which was a poker up her arse. Shavi, our seer, now he was cool. Not what you’d call wholly present, if you get what I mean, but a nice guy. And me? I was perfect, but you’ve got to have one or the whole thing falls apart.’

Laura was a woman who liked to play games, to distort for effect and for her own aims, and Hunter knew he couldn’t trust everything she said. Their conversation was a dance, defining boundaries, deciding status; he was impressed.

‘Two questions. First: if you were all so useless, how, out of all the possible candidates in the human race, did you get selected for the Pendragon Spirit?’

‘Maybe you get selected at random.’

‘Secondly, the Fall. Overnight, the Otherworld pumped out gods, devils, monsters, every supernatural creature that ever existed in any fairy tale anywhere. All the conventional responses failed. But you five stopped us from being wiped out. If you were so useless, how did that happen?’

‘We were just lucky.’ She smiled tightly, giving nothing away.

‘Go on,’ he pressed.

She shrugged, pretending it was old news, but the memory was carved in the tense muscles of her face. Whatever had happened to her during the Fall had shaped her character, eradicating the woman she had been before, replacing her with someone forged in the cauldron of strife.

‘How long have you got?’ As a faraway look appeared in her eyes, some of the hardness dropped from her face. ‘We made lots of mistakes, but somehow… somehow everything turned out all right in the end.’ She caught herself. ‘All right for the human race, that is. Not so great for us.’

‘You’re talking about Jack Churchill and Ryan Veitch dying.’

‘It’s more complicated than that. Things never happen in isolation. You deal with the repercussions for ever. Anyway, you can talk to Ruth about that later. You want to hear tales of swashbuckling adventure, five people beating the odds to come up with the goods for humanity? Yeah, I can do that. It was all about the Pendragon Spirit, all those myths about King Arthur that Church was always banging on about. I don’t really care about how it’s all linked together. The bottom line is, despite all the failures and the mistakes, everything came together right when it needed to. Just like it was planned. And you’re right, it was a big win. At the Battle of London…’ She closed her eyes in recall. ‘The city, burning… things swarming all over it that would give anybody nightmares…’ She drifted for a moment.