Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (2 page)

Fol’s lips quivered. The agony of seven billion, for a brief searing moment, faded in the wake of overwhelming guilt.

I did this. For all this time, our gates stood against the night, and in the end, it was the Jester who brought down the Kingdom of Highcourt.

A piece of him died then, a secret part deep in the well of his being. Something vital and good. In its place, tainted and broken, a tar-like treacle flowed and took root.

He gritted his teeth, snarling. “You tricked me.”

A long-nailed finger thrust into the air. “Ah,
tsk tsk
. We must tell no lies.”

“You tricked me!”

“Rule number one of any con artist, master Jester.” Each word came with a single booming footfall, hammering nails into Fol’s chest. “Nobody can scam a mark who isn’t greedy.”

A tiny groan escaped Fol’s throat.

I betrayed them. Betrayed them all.

“I can fix this,” he gasped. “I can fix it. We’ll stop you.”

“There is no
we
. You, great and righteous fool of the great courts upon high, are the last.” The thing swept down from its towering stature such that its snarling countenance was but an inch from Fol’s face. Breath rank with rotted meat wafted from the fetid jaws. “You are alone.”

Fol shook his head. “No, no. They still live.”

This time, not a laugh, but a disgusted snarl. “Your
creatures of destiny
can’t help you now. They don’t even know what they are themselves.”

“They will once I find them and bring them together. Once you’re back in your hole, we’ll put this right.”

“The road is longer than you can imagine, fool.”

“Lucky I’ve got no strings attached now.” They stared at one another a long moment. “Unless you’d rather kill me now and be done with it?”

The creature grinned. “Better to watch you squirm like a maggot, Jester. Better to watch you fall.”

They glowered at one another, inches apart, until it seemed time itself had stopped and they had turned to stone.

Then a clatter rang out from behind them as something moved alone under the station’s ceiling. Another voice spoke inside Fol’s head.

Even if you succeed, you will be beaten. Some things cannot be undone—

The dark thing now alive in Fol’s heart twitched.

—
and your long quest will cost you, cost all of you. I wonder if, in the end, you’ll wish you had let it all tumble down.

Fol bit down on his tongue. He would do whatever it took.

“One of these days I’m going to carve their names on your body,” Fol said. “All their names.”

The thing faded before his eyes, a floating smile from an impossible creature only half there, quickly blurring to mere echo and tricks of the light. “
Happy hunting, Jester.
”

Then Fol was alone.

Not quite alone
, he thought, watching a man stumble from the London Underground escalators. His eyes round as fog lights, suit rumpled and tear-stained, he staggered like an infant taking its first steps. He looked around at the station, which lay unharmed and yet gutted, there and yet a ghost of itself, his mouth agape in a wide O. When he tripped in a slick of melted ice cream and fell upon the tiny red dress, he screamed.

He screamed like he would never stop.

Fol looked away. These creatures were so blind to reality, so short-lived and frail. But they were bright, so very bright, shooting stars that blotted out all else. He couldn’t let them fade into nothing. He wouldn’t betray them as well.

The road before him was long, so long. From here darkness would only spread, and so few stood a chance of stalling it. But they were out there. He felt them, felt them well. Some were close, some far—so, so
far
—but he felt them all. The first was a mere step away from here, and with an internal flex he pushed his sight outwards into this world and saw fog-cloaked moorland, a sign that read
Radden Moor
. A young blond man upon a hillside, a screaming baby in a cottage crib.

It was time to pay them a visit.

Fol stood on shaky legs and watched the stumbling survivor from behind the pillar. All over the world, they would be the same as this. Alone and afraid. All their lives, these chosen few would struggle against a world winding down and going threadbare, fighting against the darkness. And if they failed, the consequences would seal the fate of every creature in All Where. Because what happened once could always happen again.

The Web took no sides.

Feeling his way across a land now strewn with jewellery and hunks of primitive electronic gadgetry, he found what he was looking for: the trail’s first breadcrumb. Fol stepped daintily from the station across a few hundred miles and landed upon a suburban street corner. Close by, a fire raged amongst a pile of crushed vehicles. Across the street, a young man was calling for help, bent over a smoking body.

Fol stared as the young man looked up at him and bellowed for help.

So this is the one
, he thought.
One to watch. One who could start us on our journey.
A black mark blighted Fol’s mind’s eye.
Or send us all to hell.

It would take time for everything to fall into place. Meanwhile, there was much to do.

Fol glimpsed another somewhere close by, just beyond his sight, and knew he had found the first creature of destiny: a chubby baby with big, bright emerald eyes.

Satisfied, he stepped away from the street corner, leaving the blond young man screaming upon the pavement, and landed back in the station. The suited commuter was still waddling back and forth among the piles of clothing across St Pancras, warbling and gasping.

Fol ignored him and approached a piano, beside which an empty pram lay adorned with tiny, empty baby booties.

Smiling to himself, he rested his fingers on the keys and started playing a tune from another world. “It begins,” he said.

“Last again, loser!” Bud cried from the ash pit.

Evian scowled, traipsing through what had once been the vegetable patch, trampling a few remaining tomato plants. “No fair, you always leave me behind.”

“One day we really will leave you if you’re not careful,” called Pepper from somewhere nearby. Her jeering laugh cut like glass.

Evian suppressed another scowl.

“You sleep in like we was lords,” Bud said, tossing aside the charred remains of a hair comb, crouched on his haunches in the burned-out living space, waiting for Pepper to probe the rest of the house. He was starting to get fur on his face like older boys, too tall to fit through the tight crawlspaces where the good treasure tended to hide. He looked good, and he knew it—but she wasn’t going to tell him that. He was getting so lazy that his chiselled jaw was losing some of its charm.

He would expect a fair share of the loot, of course, even if Evian and Pepper did all the scrambling around the hot cinders themselves.

Evian stepped carefully over the still-smoking outer wall, no more than a strip of foundation sticking a few inches out of the ground. Everything was still warm, a dry kind of heat that came only from intense fire, filling the air with a clinging acidity that etched the back of her throat. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

Bud grunted, his gaze locked fast on a small pile of debris he’d collected, filtering through it. A shadow crossed his expression.

“What is it?” She waved a hand in front of her nose, kicking idly at a blackened table leg. “Smells pretty good. Like bacon.”

“Evian.”

“I could go for some bacon right now. We haven’t had meat in so long.”

It had been a rough year. To even speak of bacon would have been heresy a short while ago when the meekest scraps of food had all but vanished. People had died, a lot of people. Even the lords of the North had starved.

A year ago, the Pepsi Squad had been over two dozen strong, Robin Hoods of the wilds, robbing from the lords and giving to those in need—and seeing as they were all orphans, who could have been more in need than themselves? Times had never been easy, and when food ran short they were the first to struggle, but they had had each other.

Then the food ran out completely.

Sunny D, Horlicks, Sprite, even Bovril. All gone now… It had been just the three of them since winter’s end.

“Seriously, where is it? You found breakfast, and you’re hiding it from me,” Evian said.

The shadow on Bud’s face deepened. “Evian…”

She whirled, stomach gurgling. “Stop holding out. I saw the barn on my way in. They had pigs. So, bacon. Gimme!”

A half-cindered book tumbled from Bud’s hand. “Evian, bloody hell, would you
think
for a moment!” he yelled.

Evian flinched. Bud never yelled. “What’s up with you?”

He just stared, his eyes big and round and—yes—tearful. Beaten into action, Evian’s mind turned anew to the burned-out house around her.

Just like all the others. They littered the landscape like tiny beacons, any free-standing inhabited structure for all the miles in the Pepsi Squad’s territory—and probably much farther beyond. A few days ago people had just showed up, swept through this place on their way north, and set fire to everything in their path. Thin, broken, mean-looking people, marching under the flag of a white bird.

The highwaymen and lords of the North had squabbled over this land since long before any of them were born. Evian would be fifteen soon—she wasn’t quite sure when, but soon—and she had never seen anything that could match them. This land belonged to them.

No longer. They had been extinguished, exterminated like a pack of wild dogs, in a single day of bloodshed.

Evian didn’t understand it. Didn’t care to. They’d got more loot out of it over the past few days than the previous six months combined.

She realised now, staring around, that she had forgotten. So busy had she been hauling away all she could, thinking only of what they could trade for, of who they could become if they stockpiled enough—the new lords of the North! People would come scrabbling to them instead of the other way around. She had forgotten what these burned-out husks really were. Homes. People’s homes.

These things had been precious to people. These were their walls, their food, their books. All set ablaze in a great string of conflagrations that had lit up the whole valley. Her nose wrinkled again, but this time it brought not hunger, but horror.

The smell of burned meat…

A hand flew to her mouth. She turned away, uttering an unladylike
urgh!
and vomited bile into the ash. It sizzled at her feet, cooking off and rising up into her face, eliciting a further bout of retching. It didn’t stop until she was on her knees, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked sheepishly at Bud, but he didn’t laugh or sneer, just offered a sympathetic blink and went back to sifting through the junk.

“Where’s Doc?” Evian muttered.

“Here,” called Pepper, screened from view by the chimney stack, the only piece of the burned-out house still standing. “This place is a dud. There’s nothing that’s not melted but a few cookbooks and pots. Nothing to actually cook,” she added bitterly.

“Let’s move on. The next one will be better,” Bud said, rising from his haunches.

“I haven’t looked!”

“Trust me, there’s nothing.”

“Nothing,” Pepper confirmed.

Evian pouted. “Fine. Let’s go.”

Bud looked over the marred paperback in his hands, wrinkled and blackened with the heat, and cast it aside on the table. He filled his pockets with a few salvageable odds and ends—nothing worth trading, the kind of useless trinkets only boys liked: a large silver coin, string, and a few stained playing cards. He gave Evian a brave smile. “We’re doing good. We just have to keep going; soon enough we’ll be back on our feet. You’ll see. We’ll be rich as any king of the Old World before long—”

A section of the chimney stack crumbled as Pepper burst over a pile of rubble, seeming almost to cleave right through it from sheer panic. Her stout body radiated alarm, and her eyes were enormous in her head. A strangled “
Ack!
” escaped her throat as she collided with them, and the trio spilled across the floor. Before they hit the ground, she was shushing them viciously, clamping her ashy fingers over their mouths hard enough to split Evian’s lip.

Suddenly a great weight seemed to have fallen over the house, an oppressive silence only enhanced by the distant crackling of remnant embers somewhere in the cellar.

Evian struggled, but Pepper held fast, tears spilling from her eyes.

Bud managed to shake her off. She feinted as though daring him to make a sound, but he held up his hands, one warding hand out in front of him, the other held to his lips to show he understood.

Pepper bared her teeth, fists bunched, snot dribbling over her lips. Her eyes darted in their sockets as she inched back towards the walls.

What?
He mouthed.

Her lips retracted completely, the snarling leer of a cornered dog.
THEM!

Evian’s stomach imploded to the size of a grape, pouring liquid fear into her abdomen. “Oh no,” she squeaked.

“
Shhh
!” Pepper abandoned silencing them and pressed against the nearest wall, huddling into a shuddering ball.