Simon Green - Daemons Are Forever

It felt…like the end of the world. A darkling plain under an endless night. Up above, a bloodred moon hung low in the sky, where one by one the stars were going out. Already there were great dark gaps in the unfamiliar constellations. The endless plain was bare stone, marked here and there with huge craters, long jagged cracks, and deep crevices. Like the bottom of the ocean, after all the seas have boiled away. There was a crevice nearby, a long jagged line with crumbling edges. I moved over to it and stared down into the gap. It seemed to just fall away forever. I made some kind of sound, and Molly was quickly there to take my arm and pull me back from the edge. As though the sound of my voice had triggered something, strange twisting vegetation, rough creepers with huge dark leaves covered with pulsing red veins, curled slowly up out of the crevice. Molly and I backed away, and the twitching plants tried to follow us, but already they were rotting and falling apart. Alive and dying at the same time, as though they hadn’t developed enough to hold a form properly.

Other cracks and crevices held crimson magma, seething sluggishly, but even though they weren’t that deep, the magma’s heat didn’t rise up to the surface, as though the heat lacked the strength to travel that far. The air itself was thin, and disturbingly lacking in any smell. I clapped my hands sharply, and there was no echo. I was pretty sure the sound wouldn’t travel far either. We all stuck close together, looking around us, because we were the only living things in this running-down world.

“This is the place where quests fail,” Subway Sue said quietly. “Where love is always unrequited, promises are broken, and only bad dreams come true.”

“Then how the hell are we supposed to succeed in our mission?” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. He sounded like he wanted to be angry, but it was just too much of an effort.

“We brought something of our own universe with us,” said Molly. “Enough to give us a fighting chance. But the longer we stay here, the sooner that insulation will wear away. We really need to get moving.”

“This is the broken world,” said Subway Sue, almost hypnotised. “The shoddy lands, the abandoned territory…”

“All right,” I said. “You’re starting to get on my nerves now, Sue. This is a bad place; got it. Now get over it, and tell me where the hell we’re supposed to head for.”

She looked at me with big, unfocused eyes. “Say the name, Eddie Drood. Say the name of where you want to get to.”

“Just do it, Eddie,” Molly murmured in my ear. “She’s more in tune with this place than I am. She understands the hidden ways; they talk to her.”

“We need to get inside Truman’s base under Stonehenge,” I announced, speaking clearly and distinctly into the silence, and feeling just a bit silly. My words didn’t echo. They seemed to fall flat and lifeless on the still air.

“There!” said Subway Sue, pointing off to one side with a sharp finger. “There is our destination.”

Far off in the distance, a beam of light stabbed up into the dying sky like a beacon. It was bright and clear and glorious, very definitely not a natural part of this world. It shone like hope, like a promise…like a way out.

“This is a dying world,” Giles Deathstalker said unexpectedly. “Where entropy is king.”

“Don’t you start,” I said firmly.

I have no idea how long we walked, under that bloody moon and the disappearing stars, across that sere and blasted plain. The night never ended, landmarks were few and far between, and we soon discovered none of our watches worked. But it felt like forever. I did my best to set a steady pace, leading from the front, circling around the deep craters and jumping across the cracks and crevices. The ground was hard-packed and unyielding under my feet, but strangely there was hardly any impact, no matter how hard I stamped. We made no sound as we walked, and our few conversations seemed to just trail away to nothing, until even the impulse to talk faded away, set against such an overwhelming silence. So we trudged on across the endless plain, while the grinding silence wore away at our thoughts and emotions and plans. Until only slow, dogged determination kept me moving, a simple refusal to be beaten by this awful place.

At some point, we passed a long row of overpoweringly huge stone structures that might have been buildings. Tall as skyscrapers, fashioned from some faintly shimmering, unfamiliar stone. They towered over us like brooding giants, strange, disturbing shapes with deep-set caverns up the sides like so many dark, watchful eyes. The lower reaches were covered with long curling displays of unreadable glyphs. Threats, or warnings, or perhaps just Do not forget us. We lived here and built these things, despite the nature of our world .

And yet somehow these solid signs of life gave no comfort; there was in the end a feeling of cold malice about them, as though whatever ugly things had lived in these ugly shapes would have resented our presence, our purpose, our life. We kept walking, and eventually we left the stone structures behind us.

“Is this what Hell is like?” I said to Molly at some point.

“No,” she said. “Hell is more alive than this.”

As though encouraged by the sound of voices, Mr. Stab abruptly announced, “Something is watching us.”

I stopped, and the others stopped with me. We looked around. Just cracks and crevices and craters.

“Are you sure?” said Molly, frowning.

“No, he’s right,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. The more we all talked, the less of an effort it was. “I’ve been feeling watching eyes on us for ages. Haven’t seen anything, though.”

“We are definitely being observed,” said Mr. Stab. His voice was entirely calm and easy, as though proposing tea on the lawn.

“Yes,” said Subway Sue. “There’s something here with us. I can feel it… I told you something had come to live here, and prey on travellers. That’s why people stopped using the Damnation Way.”

“Maybe you should have just changed the name,” I said. “Advertising is everything these days.”

“Not now, Eddie,” said Molly.

Giles Deathstalker drew his long sword and turned slowly around in a full circle. “They’re here. Close. Close and deadly.”

“But who the hell would want to live in a place like this?” said Molly.

We moved to form a circle, shoulder to shoulder, facing outwards. I felt suddenly more awake and alert, as though shaking off a long doze. I glared out across the endless plain, the dull and sullen purple stone, but nothing moved anywhere. Whatever was here had to be pretty powerful, and decidedly dangerous. From what Subway Sue had said, some fairly major players had used this route, and never showed up at the other end. I was looking for something big and impressive and obviously deadly; I should have known better.

This was a dying world, after all. And what do dead and dying bodies attract? Scavengers, parasites, carrion eaters.

They came up out of the cracks and craters, crawling and creeping, on two legs and four, swarming across the dead ground towards us. They were all around us, running and leaping, wave after wave of them, seething like maggots in an open wound. I didn’t know if they originated in this place, or came here from somewhere else, but the nature of this place had got to them. They looked like they were aspiring to be human, but falling short. They looked rough, unfinished, the details of their bodies blurred or corrupted or missing. They didn’t even have faces, just phosphorescent, rotting eyes and sharp-toothed circular mouths, like lampreys.

They surged forward from every side, and there seemed no end to their numbers. I subvocalised my activating Words, but nothing happened. I tried them again, but my armour didn’t respond. I looked at the Sarjeant-at-Arms, and the shock in his face told me all I needed to know. He made grasping motions with his hands, trying to summon the guns that came to him by right, and nothing happened. Molly raised her arms in the stance of summoning, and then looked at me blankly as nothing happened.