Paul Finch - Dark North

Sparks flew as the blades clashed. Neither of the two monsters boasted the skill of the knights they imitated, but their blows were relentless and brutal. It was all Lucan could do to fend them off. He found himself backtracking — only for a faint cry to remind him that Alaric was in the grasp of these devils. He lunged forth in earnest, slicing the throat of the Lancelot facsimile and lopping off its left arm at the elbow. The other he disarmed with a backhand slash, before driving his dagger to the hilt in its chest. Undaunted, it reached for his throat with both hands. He struck them off at the wrists, and cut its legs from under it. And yet, as the monstrosities floundered in gore and filth, they began to reform.

The Bedivere facsimile was already reconstructed, though in horrible, disjointed fashion. As it rose to its feet, it was crooked and mangled — the way a battlefield casualty would really be had he been patched together by a butcher rather than a surgeon. Lucan cut the thing down again, striking its cranium with both hands, splitting it to the breastbone. On all sides, more gleaming tentacles slithered forth, familiar shapes blossoming like grotesque flowers on their tips. Lucan barged his way through them, reaching the top of another stair and descending.

At the bottom, the figure that greeted him stopped him in his tracks.

It was tall and slender, its youthful looks offset by its bald pate and long beard. It wore a loose robe belted at the waist, and carried a knotty staff.

“Merlin…” Lucan breathed. For near-fatal seconds, he was transfixed.

Merlin: the sage, druid and foremost counsellor of Arthur’s court. When Lucan had first arrived at Camelot, it was Merlin who had taken him aside and advised that evil was not to be found in a man’s heart as though implanted like a seed, but in his mind — where he had planted it himself, and from whence, if he had the will, he could draw it again like a weed.

“Merlin, I…”

With a corpse-like rictus, the facsimile raised its heavy staff in both hands — and Lucan glimpsed the pulsating tentacle to the rear of it. So he struck first, Heaven’s Messenger slicing the throat and neck and, with a grating crunch, the spine. Merlin’s head toppled, but the blinded abhorrence struck this way and that until Lucan skewered it through the midriff. As it dropped, quivering, into its own black innards, Lucan stepped over it to chop at the tentacle. It comprised thick scale and sinew, but Lucan cut and cut like a madman, and at last it came apart in glutinous strands. The Merlin horror, already attempting to reconstitute itself, immediately transformed into a puddle of oily slime.

There was another hoarse, and this time agonised, cry — much closer to hand.

Lucan found Alaric on the next level down, still in the grasp of the false Trelawna, though the alluring figure had melted back into something only half human. On his arrival, it sprang upright from where it was crouched over the lad, and Lucan saw that Alaric’s throat was torn open and gouting blood.

With a roar, he charged.

The half-formed horror, its face a lumpen mass, raised both hands, which again were giant talons, and a maw appeared where its mouth should be, broken snags of teeth framed on seething corruption — but Alaric, choking and gasping as his life throbbed out from him, still had the strength to draw his dagger and jam it upward into his captor’s groin. The monster was distracted in time for Heaven’s Messenger to also strike it, shearing the cords between its neck and shoulders, plunging into its festering innards.

It collapsed in a heap, and yet it again attached itself to Alaric, clawing at him, tearing at him. Lucan stepped over it to attack the tentacle. With three heavy blows, it was cloven, and the Trelawna-thing dissolved into a foul, fish-smelling unguent.

“My lord…” Alaric choked, as Lucan tried to aid him. He bled profusely; the ragged hole in his throat had exposed his windpipe.

Lucan cursed as he searched for something with which to staunch the flow. The only thing in reach was Trelawna’s scarf — still knotted around the hilt of Heaven’s Messenger . It was little more now than a rag, thick with gluey filth, though there was sufficient of it to tie around Alaric’s neck. Lucan ripped it loose, using his teeth when his gloved fingers failed him.

“Keep your hand on that,” he said, when he’d fixed it in place.

Alaric mumbled something in response. He’d turned white and his eyelids were fluttering — but he still had the strength to point at something behind Lucan’s back.

Lucan spun around. Turold was standing there, rent and torn as he had been after the baboons had finished with him. He produced a war-axe and raised it on high. Lucan catapulted himself forward, barreling headlong into the figure, knocking it backward over its own muscular tentacle. Lucan smote at this first, laying it open, then turned his sword on Turold, catching him with such a blow that he was severed in two.

Lucan spun back to Alaric, picked him up and threw him over his shoulder.

The journey to the surface was even more terrible than the journey down. Tentacles swarmed after them. From every side, familiar figures offered challenge: Bors, Kay, Lancelot again. Even Wulfstan. Lucan held back, mesmerised by the sight of his old scout, but when the thing shrieked like a bird of prey and jabbed out with a steel-headed lance, he retaliated in kind, driving his blade through the aged, once-trustworthy face, ripping it downward so that the abomination’s entire lower jaw fell off.

Lucan panted and sweated as he twisted and turned, seeking a route up to the light and yet constantly having to battle his way through the imitations of friends. Bors struck his face with a spiked club, knocking him dizzy. Benedict attempted to snatch Alaric from him. Both went down beneath Lucan’s frenzied blows, yet always it seemed the mutilated husks he reduced them to rose back to their feet, reshaping before his eyes into nightmarish parodies of what they once had been.

“Whoresons!” Lucan roared. “Hell spawn!”

The face of Sir Gareth swam into his vision. He smote it. Bedivere stepped into its place again. “They took my hand, Lucan!” he howled, holding up his gory stump.

But in the other hand he held a dagger, and he thrust it at Lucan’s eyes. Lucan shoulder-charged the figure, toppling it down a stairwell.

Now at last there was a doorway through which daylight vented. Lucan stumbled towards it, only for another figure to step into his path. This one wore a white surcoat bearing a red dragon, and a golden crown on his helm. He had a neat beard and moustache, and a sunny-brown, square-cut mane.

It was Arthur himself.

He held a shield in one hand, and in the other a battle-axe, but Lucan could not bring himself to run steel through his lord and King. Perhaps he was too exhausted to think straight. Sweat stung his eyes. Saliva and blood drooled from his mouth. He turned away as their hands reached for him, as their swords struck at him — and he spied another door, only a short distance away. He hobbled drunkenly towards it, Alaric a dead weight. But beyond the second door was a stair, which spiralled upward.

Lucan halted and looked back.

There were so many of them that they stumbled and tripped over the mass of slippery, fleshy tentacles lying back and forth across the floor. The closest was Sir Griflet; Lucan parried his blow and sundered his breastbone. The next was Wulfstan, still missing his lower jaw, what remained of his human features collapsing inward like melting wax, though he now lashed at Lucan with a morningstar. Lucan caught the chain around his forearm, and cut his friend down again, tearing him open from gullet to crotch. But always more of them stepped into the gaps, hedging the room thick with moaning, gibbering, blood- and ichor-spattered abominations. There was only one option. He commenced the arduous ascent, his back bowing beneath the burden of his unconscious friend.