Mark Chadbourn - Destroyer of Worlds

Veitch opened his mouth to account for himself, but Cathy pricked the knife deeper into his flesh. 'No lies,' she hissed. 'Just a quick cut and you won't be hurting any more of us.'

Before she could thrust, there was a shift in the quality of the light and shadows appeared, source unknown. A background drone swelled, like the hum of a generator, a charge to the very air itself.

Ruth rounded the corner, eyes crackling with an unearthly power, hair snaking around her head as if it was alive. From her outstretched hands whirled a storm of blue light. Veitch had seen her like that once before, during the Battle of London when her Craft had consumed her and she had become a lethal weapon that could destroy friend and foe alike.

Cathy's knife slipped from trembling fingers as a gale flung her and her three helpers across the flags. The knife whisked up and embedded itself to the hilt in the thin join between two wall-stones.

'You're protecting him?' Cathy raged.

Ruth's appearance slowly normalised. 'He's working with us now. No one forgets all the people he's killed, but we need him.'

'We don't need him!' Cathy shouted. 'He'll always be a danger. At the end, he'll turn, you'll see.'

Veitch winced when Ruth cast an unguarded glance his way.

'See? He knows it himself!' The three men helped Cathy to her feet, their expressions no less murderous. 'We owe it to all the others to kill him before he destroys everything. Never forget, never forgive!' Tears of anger streaming down Cathy's face, she ran back along the corridor, with the others close behind.

'Thanks,' Veitch said. 'I should have expected that.'

'Probably best if you don't go wandering off on your own from now on.'

Veitch tried to put out of his mind how much he had thrown away, the camaraderie, the sense of being on the side of right, respect, love, all for some immature desire for revenge that had become more undefined with each passing day. He felt pathetic. He hated himself.

Seeing some of this in his face, Ruth's expression softened with pity, and that made him feel even worse. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'It's going to be tough, but people will come around.'

'You know what? I don't care. I've got a job to do — that's the important thing. The sooner I can start using this blade to cut things down, the better.'

A window framed the distant shape of the Burning Man, hazy in the mid-morning sky, and for the briefest instant, Veitch thought it was looking deep into his very heart.

Fiddles and pipes and voices created an exuberant music that rippled out from the Palace of Glorious Light across the rooftops of the night-shrouded city and raised the spirits of everyone who heard it. The celebration centred on the great hall of feasting, though the thronging revellers spilled out into corridors and antechambers. Musicians from the Court of the Yearning Heart and the Seelie Court took it in turns to play. The former chose long, rich, dense reels that exuded eroticism and could ignite passion with a simple run of notes, while the latter selected uplifting melodies that exhorted the listener to love life and focus on higher purpose. Dancers whirled continually, collapsing in corners when exhausted for new couples to take their place.

The sprawling kitchens at the heart of the palace had been working all day to prepare the feast, in clouds of steam and ferocious heat from the ovens that left every worker stripped to their underclothes. Pies and roasts and delicately spiced dishes, stews and soups, fruits and cakes and sweetmeats were piled high on the tables around the edge of the hall. Goblets were never empty; a small army of servants moved steadfastly around with flagons of wine and ale.

The atmosphere was one of wild abandon, from the dancers to the staggering drunks to the couples who made love in the shadows, not caring who saw them. The festivities had been called to celebrate the reunion of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons as they prepared for the next and final stage of the campaign, but it was also a statement: that even in the sight of the Burning Man, life was a powerful driving force.

Shavi, mildly drunk and happy, watched the proceedings with one foot on a beer-washed table and a goblet clutched tightly to his chest. 'This is the reason why we do what we do,' he said.

Sipping his ale, Mallory watched Laura grab Hunter by the hand and drag him behind a pillar. 'Free booze?'

Shavi laughed. 'We lived in a world where strange and wonderful things happened on a daily basis, yet we barely raised our eyes from our work to see them. We were truly blessed to exist in the Fixed Lands. Everything that is writ bold here in the Far Lands was there, moving quietly on the edge of our vision, just waiting to be discovered.'

'I never saw that much of it.'

'Then you never looked. Every magical thing is invisible until you find the right eyes to see it, whether it be love, or joy, or friendship, or a small flying pixie.'

'Do you ever get depressed?'

'If you saw the world as I did, you would not. Yes, there is hardship. Yes, there is pain and suffering, and if you focus on each instance in detail then the only thing you will find is pointless misery. But the mysteries of cause and effect are far beyond our abilities to understand them. Because we love science so much we believe there is a process where a simple action has a straightforward reaction. But the system in which we operate is massively complex, and what may have started at the beginning of time caused a billion, billion connecting reactions that are only now bearing fruit. Pick any point along that chain and you would not see what came before or what the final result would be, only that instant, good or bad in and of itself.'

'Oh, yeah, the Butterfly Effect. Flap, flap, big storm a world away.'

'Indeed. We fool ourselves into believing we understand cause and effect, but we see nothing, we know nothing. That is why you cannot plan to influence the world, for good or bad, in the same way that the butterfly cannot plan to create the storm. No one can predict the repercussions in a complex system. In the end, all you can do is trust your heart and hope.'

'Then why are you so upbeat? It could all be trending towards misery.'

'Because if you examine your own life, you will see that the universe is kindly and that it does its best to help you.'

'Laura's right. You really are an old hippy.' Mallory sipped his ale, thoughtfully. 'So nobody knows anything, and we just trust our instincts?'

'Our hearts.'

'I wish I'd had somebody like you on our team to keep the morale up.'

'Hal would have fulfilled that role if he had not become part of the Blue Fire.'

'Be kind of good to get him back.' Mallory stirred uneasily. 'I still don't understand why there's only four of us. Every other team gets five, but us…' He shrugged. 'I keep expecting somebody new to walk through the door. I can't shake the feeling that something's missing.'

'Perhaps it was simply meant to be that your team has only four members.'

'Why? I don't get it.'

'That is my point. We cannot see the patterns. We can only trust that things will work out for the best.'

'I really wish I could see the world like you do, Shavi. I just feel… sad.'

'We all have our pain, Mallory, because in the vast, indecipherable pattern we are all insignificant, while at the same time we are each and every one hugely significant, for our actions, small and large, make up that very pattern. We are threads in the warp and the weft.'

In the centre of the room, Caitlin danced alone, lost to herself, the Morrigan's love of sex and life evident in each seductive movement.

Loading his plate with roast meat, Veitch ignored the pointed stares of the other Brothers and Sisters of Dragons from across the ages. They milled around the hall as they tried to avoid being dragged into Decebalus's ribald revelry as he stalked back and forth, swilling ale by the flagon while indulging in outrageous flirting to make Aula jealous.