Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Page 6

  “The Angelic One guided creatures great and small to their respective destinies, fortunes, and deaths. Those great and meek it nurtured to the heights of enlightenment, and across the Web the Weaver and the Angelic One were worshipped. For a time beyond timelessness, a goodness lasted as undying as the stars they had birthed. All was fair in the new realm of All Where.

  “But all things come to an end. While the Angelic One guided the powerful and strong, it saw the Weaver was but a limit to its own power. All Where would forever risk ultimate ruin should the Weaver falter. So the Angelic One set out to take the Pendulum’s charge for itself, and itself alone.

  “The Battle of the Elementals raged beyond the perception of mortals, yet in the Solstice Scrolls, passages speak of galaxies shattering, flinging billions of worlds into darkness, forever lost to the coldness of space. Stars dimmed in sequence as warring shadows passed by, two figures locked in desperate struggle; one manlike and winged, the other eight-legged and many-eyed. Entropy reigned supreme, sicknesses ran rife, and across the near-infinite worlds of All Where, rivers ran red with blood.

  “In the end, when the dust settled, the Angelic One lay defeated. There was no demoting it, no destroying it, for the bargain had been struck: to break it would bring All Where to catastrophic collapse. The Great Weaver had but one choice: imprisonment. The darkest, most inescapable prison in all reckoning.”

  Norman blinked, looking at the writhing carpet of the Vanished afresh.

  It’s this place. This is that prison.

  “Yes,” Fol said. “Yes, it is this place.”

  Norman started, but let it pass. No doubt the same thought had passed through all their heads.

  But still, still. Billy had surely read his mind at least once. It wasn’t absurd that Fol had done the same.

  Nothing’s absurd anymore…

  “The Great Weaver gathered its Guardians, and together they cast the Angelic One to this place. To ensure it remained, they forever placed it in chains: the charge of maintaining the Pendulum’s swing. The task destroyed every Guardian but the Weaver itself, great beings the like of which would never pass this way again. Yet the job was done, and the Angelic One slaved alone, lost and trapped.

  “That, friends, is the origin of all that is, was, and will ever be. The story of the Web of All Where.”

  A long, long silence followed.

  “Uh… uh,” Lucian said at last.

  Norman tore his gaze from the Vanished with enormous effort. “What happened? If this is that prison, why are all these people here? Where’s the Angel?”

  Fol flinched. “It may be called the Angelic One in the origin scrolls, but whatever it is, it is no angel.”

  Norman waited.

  Fol went on. “All things come to an end. All things. For another age, All Where has endured; a shadow of its golden years, but fair. I hail from Highcourt, home to those who follow the ways of the old Guardians.”

  Richard, who had finally unravelled from his foetal ball, shook his head wearily, his face red and tear-stained. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t expect you to. The world is a strange place.”

  “It can’t be true. It’s just illogical. This is the stuff of fantasy.” He looked around at the rest of them. “Think about it. It’s just as likely all this is the raving delusion of any one of us.”

  “Don’t, my head’s spinning enough!” Lucian spat.

  “But that’s the truth. There’s no way for us to know.” He looked sheepish, ready to recoil from Fol, but defiant.

  Fol shrugged. “There’s no arguing. But how is that different from any day you have lived your lives? Your world ended. Billions of people vanished. Does that sound logical to you?”

  Silence.

  Billy hadn’t turned away from the Vanished. Norman touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  She blinked, long and slow. “Daddy and Ma might be down there with Grandpa,” she said quietly.

  “No. They’re dead. And dead is dead,” Fol said shortly. Then he added with a touch of softness, “They’re safe from this place.”

  “Fine,” Richard said. “Fine. If this place, this Highcourt, has power, how could you let this happen?”

  Fol’s face slowly fell, his jowls sinking—the face of an aged and frail man; translucent skin around milky eyes. “My home is gone. Highcourt fell, just before… before”—he gestured to the Vanished—“everything changed.”

  A beat of silence.

  Then Robert said, “I don’t care. I don’t. None of this has anything to do with us. It doesn’t matter what brought the End. All we need to know is how to get home. If you can get us there, do it.”

  “It does matter,” Fol muttered. “It may be the only thing that still matters.”

  “We’re waiting,” Lucian said.

  Fol’s mouth worked as though searching for the right words, then he said, “Frost.”

  “Frost?” Norman said.

  He nodded. His gaze lingered on Lucian and Robert. “You lived before the End?”

  They nodded.

  “Then you felt it, didn’t you? The moment they all went away: the pain, the cold, like you could never be warm again, would never see anything but darkness.”

  Their faces paled. Norman wasn’t sure whether he felt what they felt through empathy or in his own chest: a nugget of that very same cold nestled there, as much a part of him as his beating heart. He swallowed. “What is it?”

  “It is life, and death, a conduit and an entity all of its own. It is the stuff that drives All Where, the threads of the Pendulum incarnate.”

  “And?” Robert urged.

  Norman spoke without thinking. “And it’s coming back.”

  They all turned to him.

  “I’ve felt it. It’s shown me things.” From nowhere Billy’s fingers gripped his, and he squeezed them tight. “Before we left home, I could barely stand. Now… Now I feel it inside me, driving me like I’m some wind-up clock. It was all over Radden. It’s spreading, isn’t it?”

  Fol stared for what seemed an age. “Yes.”

  “And if it spreads too far?”

  Fol gestured to the dark place beneath them. “Then this place will consume all that remains of your world, and the End will at last be total.”

  “The End will come again?”

  “The End will come again.” Fol nodded. “And this time, there will be no survivors.”

  “Why? Why now?” Lucian grated. “After all this bloody time?”

  “Even trapped slaving under such incredible strain, the Angelic One can never be silenced. Its influence is built into everything spun. While we have slaved to keep the balance, it has whispered into the dark, and the things that lurk there have gone over to its will. There may be an army marching on your home, but there is one so much grander and more terrifying out there, set against us all. They swept Highcourt aside in a single day.” A twisted grin spread over his face, threaded with sick malice. “We grew blind, weak, and ignorant. We dared to believe things had settled and that the Web had found its peace. We were so wrong. Now they’re all gone. Without Highcourt, they can tear it all down, break the bonds that tie worlds together, and deal the final blow that will bring All Where to an apocalypse upon every level of existence.”

  “Why?” Norman said.

  “Once the playing field is levelled, the Pendulum’s swing may stop, and the Angelic One will be unburdened… free. Whichever universe it plans to spawn, be thankful you’d be long dead before it started.”

  “How is that related to our world? Why take us if there are so many worlds?”

  “Because yours is one of a few that lie at the nodes of all the connected strings. Like a handful of balloons: cut the central string, and they all fly apart, drifting forever away to die alone. Wiping your world clean got the ball rolling. Now decay eats at every corner of All Where.”

  “And them?” Norman motioned to the Vanished.

  “They have taken the b
urden. Some of it, anyway. They labour under the Pendulum’s swing. The Angelic One is still bound to this place, but without the strain, without its shackles, it grows more powerful. Soon its shadow will spill from this place, weaving its fingers into every fragile mind and tortured soul. And when that happens, the last great war will begin. One we could never win.”

  “So we stop this, stop the Frost, and what? We stop the Angel—whatever it is?”

  “We stall it, maybe. For a while. The rest comes later.” He glanced at Billy. “But if we fail now, it’ll all coming crashing down. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to put things right. The first time, I failed. I forgot how… fragile, you creatures can be. In fact, I made things a hell of a lot worse.” Fol winked, ever mercurial, now even grinning. “Sorry, folks, but you’re my do-over.”

  Norman cut his hand through the air. “The others are right. This doesn’t help us. We don’t need to know. The End is past. Our friends need us now—”

  Fol held up a hand. “I needed you to know all that so that you can understand why this is so important. The End will come again, but there is no magic doomsday button, no horde of monsters to burst from the ground and drag you down. It will come from inside you all, from your own fears, from want of hope. If this army destroys your home, you won’t just lose your friends; it will be the spark upon the kindling. The End will wash over the whole world.”

  “What about them down there?”

  The spark in Fol’s smile flickered. “You can’t help them.” Again, he seemed to have eyes only for Billy, who still stared down into the writhing masses, her back to them all. “But maybe you can help yourselves.”

  Norman nodded slowly. “Now we know.”

  Fol seemed pleased. “Now you know. Time to get going.”

  Norman glanced between Fol and Billy, then cleared his throat. “She’s special, isn’t she?”

  Fol said nothing, his eyes glittering.

  “Can she save them?”

  A long measured pause. “Maybe. One day.”

  Norman touched Billy’s shoulder. “Billy, it’s time,” he said. “We have to go.”

  “I know.” She sounded far, far away. “They’re out there, you know, Norm. The others. I can feel them.”

  “Uh huh, that’s great,” Norman said, turning her around to face him. “But we have to go. Are you with me?”

  Her eyes remained glazed for a moment, but then she seemed to return to him from a great distance. “Yes.”

  “Good. Let’s go then,” he said to Fol.

  Lucian wheezed, “If you really can work up some magic voodoo to get us back.”

  “I can get you close enough. Maybe.”

  “We’ll take it. Show-and-tell’s over.” Robert’s voice was dead, unyielding. “We’re going now, or you lose your spine.”

  Fol’s inveterate grin sharpened. “I like you.” He held out his hands. “Group huddle!” he cried, giving a little titter.

  Norman offered Billy a weak smile. With what seemed enormous effort, she returned the sentiment.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Lucian growled as he floated closer, linking hands with Norman and Richard. “You got a screw loose? How can you laugh at a time like this?”

  “Because,” Fol said, winking, “back home, I was the Jester. Let one hell of an old fella tell you: most times, laughter is all we have.”

  Then Norman tumbled through space again, turning backwards through the same impossible angles, leaving the dark prison and the Vanished behind, a long wailing echo ringing in his ears.

  V

  The spiky-haired woman gripped the rakish young man by the shoulder so hard he grunted. “Shh, they’ll hear you!”

  “Nobody’s listening. You know I’m tellin’ the truth,” he said.

  “I said shut up!”

  He threw her off. “What’s the plan once we’re through? Say we burn everything there is to be burned, what then? What’s the point?”

  “Gettin’ even. They starved us out of house and home and left us to die.”

  He beat her across the mouth. “Don’t be a damn fool, woman!”

  She cried out and slapped him back. The two of them sneered at one another, half-crouched like cats in the dying afternoon light. “Don’t you fuckin’ touch me.”

  “I just trying to beat some sense into you. I want to get even as much as anyone, but I didn’t sign up for this. This is just bloody murder. They’re going to destroy everything they touch and they won’t stop until there’s nothing left to torch but themselves.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m tellin’ you, we’ll turn on each other when the last of the Alliance folk are in the ground.”

  The woman said nothing.

  Charlie watched from behind the rocky bluff where his campfire flickered. He cringed inwardly.

  Why do the damn fools have to have their little secret meeting here?

  If only they knew the lion’s den lay a few feet away.

  The two idiots had crept away quietly for their little collusion. On Charlie’s right, through a thin screening of trees, the main encampment lay sprawled across a square mile of open prairie. Thin tendrils of smoke trailed skywards from enough campfires to boggle his mind, even now. He had grown up with only his father for company. The towns they had visited had numbered in the dozens at most.

  He would never get used to these numbers: thousands, all looking for blood.

  Over a day, they had been marching. The land had been scoured clean on their way to rendezvous in Radden Moor. Anybody left had either taken up and scattered, been cut down where they stood, or been absorbed into the marching ranks.

  We’re all broken. Some of these people were highwaymen and bandits, but most of them might have broken bread with strangers not long ago. Now look at them. They’re so thirsty for blood they’re a hair’s breadth from taking chunks out of one another.

  The weak were being left in the army’s dust, sloughed off like dead skin. It was almost as though the army was an organism unto itself, a relentless carnivore bent on mindless killing, growing ever more terrible as those with conscience were stripped away, leaving only the true killers to carry on.

  The arguing pair had already sealed their fate. Presently, Jason crept from the fireside, his wolfish chops greasy with juices from the squirrel he had been devouring. His long curved knife was already unsheathed and ready.

  The man implored the woman, wringing his hands. “Let’s just go now.”

  She hissed into his face, mere inches from his nose. “I buried a husband by the road. My two boys. Am I just supposed to forget about them? I won’t let them get away with what they’ve done. They think they’re better than all of us, that they can take what they want, that protecting rubbish from before the End is more important than us right here and now. They all deserve to die!”

  The man’s voice broke. “I don’t want to kill anymore, Kelly. I just wanna go home.”

  She said nothing.

  Charlie looked to the green-eyed figure sat across the fire from him, the face thankfully veiled by a balaclava. A pigeon rested on his shoulder, and he fed it breadcrumbs with pensive tenderness. He didn’t glance up at Jason.

  “James,” Charlie said. “They’re just idiots.”

  James Chadwick said nothing, just kept feeding his pigeon one breadcrumb at a time.

  “Flog them, cut them, beat them bloody, and leave them as an example.”

  James stroked the bird’s head with his index finger, and it gave a contented little coo in response.

  Charlie glanced to Jason, now only feet away from the woman. She had her back to him. The fronds would screen him entirely from view. Not that they would have stood a chance if he had been in full view.

  “They don’t have to die,” Charlie said.

  James let the remaining breadcrumbs fall to the dirt and looked at the scene playing out behind the bluff. Nothing registered in his eyes, not a glimmer of joy nor note of i
nterest.

  “If I have to punch you out and drag you, you’re coming with me, you stupid bitch,” the man said. He held the woman by the hair, grunting as she clawed at his fist. “I know you don’t want it to end like this.”

  “Let me go.” She was weeping, snot dripping down her chin. “Let me go, you bastard, let me go.” She collapsed onto him and sobbed, beating weakly at his chest.

  Suddenly they were in a gentle embrace, the man no longer yanking her hair, but caressing it.

  “They’re all gone,” she said.

  “I know. We can’t change that. All the killing, it won’t change anything.” He held her tight. “We have to go.”

  She nodded tearfully and sobbed yet again.

  Jason left the fronds and stepped into view, twirling his knife with a carnivorous snarl on his face.

  The man and woman closed their eyes, swaying to and fro.

  Charlie glanced between James and Jason. The childish part of him that believed in good and bad, black and white, light and dark, screamed for him to call out. His own father’s face floated before him, one he knew was now rotting somewhere far south of here in the forest, shot full of holes. His father’s voice, a beseeching whisper: Don’t let this happen. You’re a good boy, son.

  Maybe once, Dad, he thought.

  Charlie sent no warning. He watched Jason take the last step towards the couple swaying in each other’s grasp, and then he turned back to face the fire. A wet splatter rang out, followed by the briefest shrill scream.

  All the while, Charlie kept his eyes on James Chadwick, who stared into the fire, each flame mirrored in the vast emptiness of those emerald eyes.

  FIRST INTERLUDE

  1

  “It’s a strange thing, beauty. Men have spent fortunes, entire lifetimes, chasing it. Whole empires have knelt before it.”