Mark Chadbourn - Destroyer of Worlds

Laura sighed loudly, eliciting a cautionary glare from Church.

Veitch joined Church shortly after, his gaze fixed firmly on the horizon. 'You sure this is the best plan?'

'Have you been talking to Ruth?'

'It's just, none of us can see where this is going.'

'You could trust me.'

A pause. 'I do. Course I do. But everything that's happened since we got here has pushed us all to the limit. I know I'm not thinking straight.'

'I hear what you're saying, Ryan. So did you draw the short straw to come and get me back on the rails?'

'It's not like that.'

'Because that's a little funny. Not so long ago they were all afraid you'd kill them in their sleep. Now you're the voice of reason, and I'm the bad guy.'

'That's not fair.'

Church regretted his words instantly. Veitch had been trying his best to make up for his past actions when he had been destabilised by the Void; he deserved better than that, and Church had to do better if he was to be the leader they needed.

'You're right, I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't want to tell any of you what I'm planning. In the Halls of the Drakusa, when we discovered that one of us is helping the enemy, that really hit hard. Once we got back together, I never thought we'd have to deal with a traitor in the group again, even after Tom got his warning from the boy on the train. Now I'm not taking any chances.'

'Even though Virginia's dead?'

'I'm not sure it was her.' Veitch's silence was pointed. 'I'm not saying it was you. I'm not saying it's anybody. I'm just thinking it's wise not to allow any opportunities for our plans to leak out to the enemy.' He added, 'I don't like to think this way. Mistrust is corrosive. Maybe that's all part of the Enemy's plan — letting it eat away at our relationships and the ties that make us stronger as a group. But I can't see another way to deal with it.'

Veitch appeared satisfied with this, and they fell silent again as the heat began to take its toll. Skidding down deep dunes and then climbing up through the shifting sands on the other side made their leg muscles burn and for a long while the rock formation appeared to be drawing no closer. But then they crested a steep incline onto a hardpan plateau scattered with boulders where a stronger wind blew and they saw colours shimmering in the sky like the aurora borealis. Here and there drifted strands of the pearly mist that Rachel had described.

'This is it,' Rachel said, turning slowly.

'What now?' Laura asked. Everyone looked to Church.

'We go home,' he replied.

From a distant dune, the Libertarian watched them make their way across the plateau into the mist. With the Morvren swirling overhead, they had been easy to follow, but with each step his anxiety had grown. More than anything he didn't want them to pass through those mists, although he did not know why: another of those annoying blank spots in his memory. He had been so sure that his manipulation of Tezcatlipoca and Church would reap the final rewards he desired, but now his control of events was slipping through his fingers like sand.

When the heat haze shimmered and Church and the others disappeared from view, he broke into a desperate run, stumbling and sliding down the dunes. Cursing, he vowed to let them know that the more desperate they made him, the more he would make them pay.

On the plateau, he didn't slow his pace and plunged into the mists after them.

'Stay close together,' Church ordered as they moved through an area of bright, swirling colours.

'Wow, trippy,' Laura said. 'This reminds me of… okay, you had to be there.'

Aware of the fear in Rachel's eyes, Shavi took her arm reassuringly. 'Is this how you remember it?'

'I don't remember much at all, but it feels familiar.'

'Do not fight the sensations you are experiencing,' Shavi said. 'If you allow yourself to go with them, it is not unpleasant.'

'That's easy for you to say.'

'Tom, what are you thinking?' Ruth asked, seeing Tom's serious expression.

'I'm finding this both familiar and unfamiliar too,' he replied, anxiously twisting the ring Freyja had given him. 'I have moved through the medium of the Blue Fire many times, across our own world between nodes of power, and between the worlds, but this is different. Yet the same.'

'Yep, you lived through the sixties, old man,' Laura said.

For once, Tom ignored her. 'I've heard talk of this. Somewhere that bleeds around reality, around all the worlds and the connective tissue of the Blue Fire that joins them. Some occultists I encountered in San Francisco believed if you could find a way to this place you could access all places and all times.'

'You could run away for ever,' Ruth said, eyeing Church askance.

'Or you could fight a constant guerrilla war,' Church countered. 'No one would know when or where you'd pop up.'

'What's that?' Veitch pointed to a place where the colours appeared to have thinned so that it felt as if they were looking through a gauze onto the world. The sun was just disappearing below the horizon, casting its dying golden rays on a stone circle surrounded by trees. Beyond were well-tended fields. Figures moved in the circle, hazily coming into view.

'That's Caitlin!' Ruth exclaimed. 'But she looks younger. More… innocent?'

'And that teenage thug Mahalia,' Veitch noted. 'And Crowther.'

'The past,' Shavi said. 'Perhaps when she was just beginning as a Sister of Dragons?'

Tom and Rachel hung back, but he flinched and stepped forward when he glimpsed the young boy he had encountered on the Last Train who Mahalia had sworn was dead. Eerily, the boy appeared to be looking directly at him, and smiling knowingly, as if he was aware of all that was to transpire.

Caitlin looked directly at them too, but didn't recognise them, and then the colours swirled back in and the scene was lost.

'I have a feeling we could have gone right there if we'd carried on walking,' Church said.

'Caitlin wouldn't need us,' Ruth said confidently. 'Whatever happened back then, I bet she dealt with it, no problem.'

They moved on through an environment that felt both timeless and placeless, the hallucinogenic colours giving the sensation that they were floating. For the briefest moment, Church once again felt as if he was lying on a table, locked inside his own mind, with the odd belief that a group of people were observing him.

'Don't investigate that notion,' a voice deep in his head told him. 'What you have is better. It will always be better.'

Scenes came and went: Celts fighting a furious battle, a World War II pilot standing beside his downed Spitfire, a thick, semi-tropical jungle through which barely glimpsed beasts moved, a castle under siege, a Victorian funeral.

Several times Veitch witnessed himself committing some atrocity in service to the Void and turned away, unable to look. Once he had to be restrained by Church from leaping through the veil to right the wrongs he saw there.

When Laura glimpsed Hunter fighting a furious battle with the Lament-Brood in a past time, she broke down in long, juddering sobs. Nothing the others did could console her.

'I'm concerned we might get lost in here for ever,' Tom said.

The Rhymer's voice sounded oddly distant and when Church turned, Tom was fading into the swirling colours. It felt like only a step or two away, but when Church dashed back, Tom and the others were nowhere to be found.

There was little point searching in a place that appeared to have no dimension. Putting his trust in fortune, Church continued to walk in the direction he had been following; if they were meant to reunite in the world, he was sure it would happen. If this was a road he had to walk alone, that was fine too. Go with the flow, Tom would have said, followed by some rambling tale of the West Coast in the sixties, but Church felt it was an important lesson he had been taught many times during his long journey.