Mark Chadbourn - Destroyer of Worlds

The fissure continued down a little steeper. Their body heat in the confined space eased the freezing temperatures, but water regularly dripped and ran under their fingers. Another fear: drowning in an enclosed space.

Hunter came to a halt at a sharp right turn. Jack called out in a panicked voice, worrying that Hunter had reached a dead end. It took several moments to calm him, and then a further fifteen minutes for Hunter to edge, squeeze and twist halfway around the bend. Once again he was convinced he was wedged in place, twisted at right angles, in complete darkness, with barely a chance to breathe and listening to the whimpering of a traumatised boy behind him. Heart pounding, the blood thundering through his head, he closed his eyes, thinking of Laura and the last night they had spent together. Gradually, his breathing regulated and he eased and pressed forwards a fraction of an inch at a time.

Once around the turn, the fissure broadened and the incline became steeper so he could drag himself faster, which eased Jack's anxiety. Ten minutes later it became steeper still, and before he had time to think the slope was so sheer he began to slide. He called out to Jack to hold fast, but by that time he was speeding out of control, cracking bones and tearing skin. He went over an edge and into free fall for a split second before hitting icy water. It was barely five feet deep, and his arms protected him from the worst of the impact, but he sucked in a mouthful of water before he managed to surface.

Feeling around, he discovered that the fissure continued horizontally again, but most of it was filled with water. Only a tiny air space remained, and he had no idea how long that continued in any useable form.

Jack was calling his name frantically. 'It's all right — I'm here,' he called back. 'It's only a short drop, and there's water at the bottom. Yell when you're coming and I'll try to catch you — or at least try to stop getting brained.'

When Jack was next to him, relieved at the prospect of standing upright with room to breathe, Hunter broached the news about the almost-submerged tunnel. Jack's mood changed instantly and he released a couple of wracking sobs before he calmed.

'I can't do it,' he whimpered.

'You said that about the crawling and the squeezing, but look at what you did there.'

Distantly, but unmistakably within the fissure, came the teeth-jarring rumble of the Fomorii.

'Sounds like they've found out where we went,' Hunter said. 'We can't hang around here.'

Echoes of scrabbling in the fissure, drawing rapidly closer. Hunter was unnerved by how speedily the Fomorii moved.

'You've got to trust me, Jack. We'll get through this.'

'I do trust you, Hunter.'

Hunter flinched, unsettled yet oddly moved by this new experience. 'Hold on to my jacket, and give a tug if anything's wrong.'

Taking a deep breath, he ducked under the water. Jack followed closely. In the floating dark, the claustrophobia and fear of suffocation were even more intense. Hunter measured his pace to Jack's endurance, pausing regularly to grab a breath from the tiny gap against the tunnel roof.

At one point Jack began to thrash as if he were drowning, and Hunter was forced to grab him and hold his head up tightly. In Hunter's arms, Jack relaxed, still trusting.

The journey felt as if it was taking an age, and just at the point when Hunter started to fear hypothermia would set in, they emerged from the tunnel into what felt from the air currents and echoes like a large cavern. Hunter dragged Jack from the water onto a flat rock surface and held him tightly until he had warmed.

'I never knew my father,' Jack said after a moment.

Hunter didn't know how to respond.

'The Tuatha De Danaan stole me from my mother when I was a baby and took me to the Court of the Final Word where they put the Wish-Hex inside me. They made me into a weapon. Then they kept me prisoner till Caitlin and Mahalia set me free.' He wiped the snot from his dripping nose with the back of his hand.

'Doesn't sound like you've had much of a life, mate.'

'That just makes me want to fight for it even more.'

Hunter was impressed by the determination in Jack's voice; it reminded him of himself, before the sourness took hold of his life. 'Keep hold of that thought, kid, because now we need to find a way out of here before those things pop up out of the water.'

Following the air current, they moved tentatively away from their resting place, feeling into the dark ahead of them in case there were any gaping pits or more sudden inclines. Hunter put out of his head the possibility that the breeze came from a tiny fissure and that there might be no way out of the cavern.

Progress was slow and the fear of the Fomorii emerging from the water behind them grew. But then the texture underfoot changed from hard rock to smaller items that rolled and crunched, in some areas several inches deep. Harder objects lay amongst them.

'What is that? Dry wood?' Jack asked.

'Down here?' Hunter knelt to investigate. His fingers ran over dry, fragile things, some tubular, some sharp, some curved, and what were clearly metal artefacts scattered amongst them. 'I think there's a sword here. And a… shield?' he ventured. 'A helmet?'

They continued treading tentatively over the cracking, shifting surface for several more minutes until Jack's foot caught something that clanged and bounced. He felt around for it in the dark and raised it, letting his fingers see the surface. 'A lantern!' he said.

With his flint, Hunter lit the wick. The flame was weak, but held on to life. The shadows rushed away, dancing back menacingly with each flicker of the light.

'Oh,' Jack said as he looked around with mounting uneasiness.

Hunter followed his gaze in a wide arc across the cavern. 'You can say that again.'

Human bones lay everywhere. The vast sea of dirty yellow and brown was a civilisation in essence, skulls smashed, limbs torn apart, ribs broken, the clothes that had contained them long since rotted away with only the metal remnants of weapons and armour still remaining.

'What the hell happened here?' Hunter said.

The scale of the Halls of the Drakusa spoke of grandeur. Ceilings soared cathedral-like overhead and huge chambers that could have accommodated a small army rang with their hesitant footsteps. Church led his group past pillars of marble and extensive murals that must once have gleamed with colour, but were now faded and barely visible, the most obvious symbol of the decay and great age that shrouded the Halls. A desert of white dust interspersed with piles of shattered masonry and discarded everyday objects covered the stone flags. Only darkness and shadows remained in a place that had once thronged with life.

Shavi examined some of the murals as they passed. 'Who were the Drakusa?' he asked.

'Every race has the arrogance to believe they were the first and best,' Tom said, joining him. 'The old stories hint at others who came before. Races that rose up, established civilisations and were then wiped clean and forgotten, through their own hubris or at the whims of angry gods.'

'You don't really think that could happen to us?' Ruth said. 'With all our technology, our learning-'

'You think these people didn't have their own technology, different from ours, maybe more powerful, their own wisdom?' Intrigued, Tom brushed away some of the dust and cobwebs that obscured the mural.

Shavi saw what Tom was seeing, and joined him. From beneath the grime of ages, faint images emerged of oval shapes, giant in scale compared to the human figures prostrate before them. Some of the egg shapes appeared to be spouting tentacles, or were in the process of becoming something else.

'Those,' Shavi said, puzzled, 'are Caraprix.'