Marc Chadbourn - The Devil in green

Blaine was an excellent swordsman, moving with grace and strength and an eye for his opponent's weaknesses. What added to his threatening pose was an icy composure that made him a brutal machine; his features remained fixed, his arm moving with strokes timed to the millimetre and the microsecond. Mallory had learned his lessons well, but he wasn't even close to Blaine's ability.

It was all he could do to keep Blaine from driving straight through his defence into his heart. In fact, as he batted away the curt moves while backing across the room, he felt that Blaine was simply making him suffer before he decided it was time for the killing blow.

In the ward, the sounds of attack faded away.

This time, it was Mallory's turn to be distracted. Blaine saw an opening and rammed his blade through. It cracked against Mallory's shoulder blade, cutting through the skin, but Blaine whipped it back before it did any more damage; still toying.

Mallory recoiled in a brief burst of pain, but somehow managed to parry the next stroke. Cold sweat sprang up all over him.

Another blow, this time just missing Mallory's cheek but nicking his ear. Instead of defending, Mallory launched into a swift attack. It surprised Blaine, who backed off a little. Mallory kept it up, forcing Blaine to keep parrying.

Mallory knew that the Hipgrave-thing had arrived a second before a shadow fell across him, and across his soul. The monstrous gravity of it drew Blaine's gaze instantly, despite the intensity of the fight. Mallory saw the awful realisation cross his face, the ice flooding into his limbs holding him rigid. It was too late for Mallory to stop the swing of his sword. It crashed into Blaine's ribcage, sliding up to sever the artery in his armpit.

Blaine went down on his knees, clutching the wound as blood gushed out across the floor, but his face was still turned to whatever was at Mallory's back, so consumed by the horror that he wasn't even aware he was dying.

In a cold sweat, Mallory leaped forwards, casting one glance at Blaine's transfixed, final expression, not daring to look back. He could sense the thing beginning to move a step or two closer behind him. As he raced for the stairs, he heard it fall on Blaine.

More snow was falling and it was already a foot deep across the compound. As Mallory reached the edge of the cathedral, with only a short run and a few small walls to climb between him and the bishop's palace, he couldn't resist looking back. Just at that moment, the aberration emerged from Malmesbury House. At first it was Hipgrave, then something that made Mallory's mind fizz and slide, then Hipgrave again, limping, looking around deliriously as if he couldn't quite tell where he was. The ground was losing its faith-driven power under the desperate, cruel rule of Stefan. Increasingly, the beast could move freely.

Mallory ran.

Candlight glowed in one downstairs window of the bishop's palace, a faint warmth amid the darkness and silence of the cathedral compound. Stefan must have been watching, for as Mallory approached, stark against the snow, there was the crash of the front door as the bishop emerged at a run clutching an antique wooden box, his robes billowing behind him.

Mallory set off in pursuit. As they rounded the edge of the cathedral, Stefan plunged down some steps into the new buildings. Within their constantly shifting architecture, unbounded by logic, it would be easier for the bishop to evade capture. Mallory picked up his pace, but as he reached the doorway a strange winnowing, like the cry of a wounded bird, echoed eerily across the compound. He looked back to see the Hipgrave-thing sweeping across the snow towards him. Mallory slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, knowing it would offer no defence.

He sensed the change in the new buildings immediately. There was an unbearable atmosphere of potency, of a sick, crazy power leaking from every part of the fabric. Shadows were distorted; others were thrown by no obvious light source. At a distance, straight lines appeared to bend as if they were being warped by some magnetic force. This was most apparent in the long, columned corridors and the great hall, where the pillars rose to an enormous height and the roof was lost to darkness.

And the further he progressed into the building on Stefan's trail, the worse it got. Logic was cut adrift, replaced by a dreamlike chaos where nothing quite made sense. Mallory would realise that the Hipgrave-thing was behind him only intermittently, when he heard that strange bird-cry or was overwhelmed by a smell like battery acid, but mostly the corridors and rooms at his back were filled only with darkness.

After a while, time lost all meaning. It felt as if he was on a Mobius strip, passing through the same places, experiencing the same emotions. But a single thought had taken root in his mind and that was enough to drive him on: to make amends.

It was in a room lined with statues of people he didn't recognise that he met the Caretaker. Some of the statues resembled ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Celts, while others appeared vaguely non-human with pointed ears and an unusually delicate bone structure, and the Caretaker was at first lost amongst them, his giant form silent and unmoving in the shadows.

He stepped out and held up his hand, startling Mallory. 'You will never reach your prize by running, Brother of Dragons,' he said in his deep, echoing voice. You will be adrift in here for ever, never quite making up lost ground, till your time is gone or the world winds down around you. Only by going back will you achieve your aim.'

'I can't go back,' Mallory said desperately. 'There's something behind me… death…'He glanced over his shoulder.

'You know this door, Brother of Dragons.' The Caretaker motioned to a portal that hadn't been there before.

And Mallory did know it, though he tried to pretend he didn't. It had a look of the fairy-tale about it, with mysterious figures intricately carved around the stone jamb. Mallory was suddenly overwhelmed with inexplicable emotion, terrified yet trembling with an abiding sadness at the same time. 'I can't go back,' he said desolately.

Mallory took a step away from the door and found himself in front of it. 'No,' he said. He had no choice but to pass through into…

'Did you get it?' Stevens barked at Mallory the moment he stepped through the steamed-up glass door of the cafe. He was sitting at his usual table in the corner, smoking a cheap cigar, while his hard-eyed cronies sat around, laughing at his jokes.

'Yes.' Mallory was shaking. He dropped the haversack on the table.

Stevens chuckled, looking around at his dismal associates. 'The only good bitch-' He paused mid-sentence, his eyes growing wider, the familiar fury rising in his face. Suddenly he grabbed Mallory's wrist. 'Is that blood?' he snapped. Mallory snatched his hand back, letting the sleeve of his leather jacket obscure the tell-tale sign. 'Go and wash it off, you fucking idiot.'

As he headed towards the toilets at the back, Sylvie caught his eye. She was carrying a plate of egg and chips destined for a Geordie man in his eighties who always sat at the window smoking roll-ups. 'You didn't do it?' she hissed with a condemnatory expression that he'd hoped he'd never live to see. She looked tired, her face made hard by too much work for not enough money.

'I didn't have a choice.'

'Everybody has a choice, Mallory.'

She barged past him in a way that suggested she'd finally written him off.

He had to get out. Filled with despair, he stepped through the door into the toilets.

Mallory skidded down a pile of rubble from a wall that had collapsed from great age, tumbling into a vast vault whose extremities were lost to the gloom. At the bottom, yellow bones protruded from a shattered crypt.