Jack of Ravens (19 page)

Church recalled Niamh telling him at their first meeting that he had fought in the battle between the Tuatha Dé Danann and their ancient enemies, but he had discounted it as one of her deceptions.

‘The Gravix tried its hardest to turn you, but that damnable fire burns too brightly inside you. Oh, if only we could have eliminated you at that point. Alas, it was not to be.’

‘So you control the Fomorii?’

The Libertarian laughed silently. ‘We work towards the same aims. You would not find us drinking in the same bar. Or even in the same town.’

Church saw his sheathed sword on a table across the room and weighed up whether he could reach it before the Libertarian intercepted him. The Libertarian saw his eye movement and divined his intentions.

‘Please,’ he said with world-weariness, ‘can we not have a simple conversation? It is very difficult to find in my line of business.’ He pushed Numerius out of the way and poured himself a goblet of wine. ‘Not the best I have tasted, but the best for this era.’

‘This era?’ Church repeated. He watched a spidery smile crawl across the Libertarian’s face, just as quickly removed. ‘Your language … it’s not archaic. You’re from the future, like me.’

‘The future?’ the Libertarian sneered. ‘Oh yes. The “future”. The “past”. The “present”. What a quaint way of seeing things.’

Church edged towards the sword. The Libertarian noticed, did nothing. Numerius moved his mouth in a sticky, troubled way as if he were paralysed.

‘Keep playing your games – I don’t care,’ Church said. ‘But if we are both from a different time, how can we operate here and now without changing what’s to come?’

The Libertarian mused. ‘Well, consider this, perhaps: time is a river. One may swim upstream, or downstream, if you like. Or: one throws a rock into that self-same river. The water hits it, flows around it, recovers its original course. There are eddies here and there, but it still continues to the sea.’

‘You’re saying we can make little changes around us, but nothing long-term.’

‘Or perhaps what your kind call reality changes all the time, but you are unaware of it because you change with it. You alter, and are reborn with new memories of your new reality so you presume it has always been that way. Yet ghosts invade your memories. Impressions of a different place, with a different you, fading even as they come. Dreams of other realities, so strange yet somehow real.’ His red, lidless stare grew more intense. ‘Everything is fluid. Nothing is fixed. Poor you! Poor Fragile Creatures! The curse of your existence.’

Church made his move for the sword. But instead of trying to intercept him, the Libertarian put one hand around Numerius’s throat. Church saw this from the corner of his eye and paused as he reached for the sword. Numerius’s eyes were wide and glistening beads of sweat stood out on his brow, but he did not move. The Libertarian’s jagged nails cut through soft skin, went deep and deeper still. And then, with one rapid twist of his wrist, he tore. The arterial spray of blood arced across the room. Church would always recall the sound of it hitting the marble, like a pot of paint being thrown at a canvas. One hot gush splashed against the side of his face, blinding one eye, rushing down his neck, soaking his clothes like a summer storm. In shock, he turned and saw the Libertarian gut Numerius with his other hand, letting the discorporated body slide to the floor, a discarded toy. The Libertarian was red from head to toe.

Fetch your silly little sword,’ he said. Enjoy the comfort it gives you, for now.’

Church was rooted in shock at the brutality he had witnessed.

‘You know I cannot touch you, not yet, not so far from the Source, when I am weaker and your ugly little fire burns so brightly. There is no point attempting to deny that. But we are many, and we are fanning out through all-time, all-reality, to dream things the way they should be. You will be hunted to the moment when you can no longer stem the flow.’

‘What are you?’ Church asked, sickened.

‘You ask for names, still?’ the Libertarian replied with complete contempt. ‘You expect me to tell you words of power? And Fragile Creatures are to be the next to climb the ladder to wonder? Truly the ways of Existence are baffling.’ He laughed. ‘Know this, then: we are the Army of
the Ten Billion Spiders. We nest, we scurry from the shadows, we spin webs to catch little flies! No escape, little Fragile Creature! No escape for you.’

‘So you’re the reason why the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons exist. It’s not just about keeping the gods at bay.’

‘There is some truth in that, and also a great and devastating irony that you have yet to appreciate in its entirety. But you will, and soon.’

Church sloughed off the shock and grabbed his sword, but by the time he had drawn it, the Libertarian had gone, the door stood open and the guards without lay butchered in a widening pool of blood.

6

Niamh stood at the window as she had for so long, watching the rain cascade off the rooftops into the muddy streets. Here and there lamps flickered like fireflies sheltering from the storm.

‘I can understand why so many of my kind love this world. Even amidst all the horror and the despair and the degradation, tiny beacons of beauty shine through. The way the light falls on a cold day near the ocean, or the smell of a forest at summer’s twilight. The sound here, of the rain, the clatter and splash, so many subtleties … a symphony.’ She paused uncertainly. ‘And I have been thinking of late that perhaps that quiet beauty exists within Fragile Creatures, too, for they are a part of this world. What do you say?’

Jerzy sat on the bed, cross-legged. ‘I agree with whatever you say, mistress.’

Niamh made an irritable noise in her throat. ‘I suppose I wanted a performing monkey and that is what I have. Do you have any opinions of your own left, Mocker?’

‘If that is what my mistress requires.’

‘How do you find your companion?’

Jerzy considered the question. ‘He is a man filled with so many shadows, and doubts, and such a great sadness that he barely recognises himself.’

‘Go on.’

‘He surprises me, because he does not think only of himself. Indeed, on many occasions that is the last thing of which he thinks. He does not know himself at all, and he cannot see that he is capable of great things.’

‘But you think he is?’

‘Oh yes. Undoubtedly.’

‘A good man, then?’

‘Good-hearted. Fair. True. Unaware of his strengths. Overly conscious of his weaknesses.’

‘Yet I cannot understand why he pines for that other Fragile Creature when there is little hope they will ever meet again.’

‘You would not understand, mistress.’

‘Why not?’

‘You are a Golden One. Such things are not known to you.’

‘What things?’

‘Love …’ Jerzy’s voice trailed off. He thought he had begun to sense a hardness in Niamh’s voice that signalled one of her unpredictable responses.

Yet once again he was surprised. ‘Do you think that is true?’ she asked, with a note of puzzlement. ‘We Golden Ones see ourselves as never-ending, never-changing, a fixed axis of Existence. Yet now I wonder … If all that is joined to Existence is fluid, then surely we are fluid, too? We change—’

‘Without change, there is only stagnation.’

Niamh did not appear to notice that he had spoken out of turn. ‘I fear for my brother’s safety. It is a strange, troubling emotion and I do not care to experience it again. Before the Libertarian came to my quarters it was unknown to me. If only I could return to that state again.’

‘The Libertarian showed you mortality, mistress. He revealed what it means to be a Fragile Creature.’

This time Niamh whirled, her eyes blazing. ‘Be silent, you grinning jackanape! Be still, or I’ll return you to the Court of the Final Word to have your tongue removed!’

Jerzy scampered off the bed and cowered in the corner of the room, tears stinging his eyes.

‘Where is that pathetic Fragile Creature?’ Niamh snapped. She returned to the window to search the empty streets again. ‘If he does not find my brother, if my brother has already been wiped from the face of Existence, then I will show him mortality. And I will show him such pain on the road to it!’

7

Church wiped off Numerius’s blood on the drapes and set off to find Marcus. Outside, he watched legionnaires run past in step towards the main gate. Three of them clutched sizzling torches to light their way, the flames illuminating faces fixed with concern.

It took him forty-five minutes to locate the stockade where enemies of the Empire were imprisoned. It smelled of urine and damp. Church drew his sword to meet any resistance, but in the main guardroom, three men were slumped unconscious.

Further on, a hissing woman’s voice floated to him: ‘Hush! You lumber like a bull with gout!’

‘And you screech like a damnable owl!’

Church padded round a bend in the corridor to see the burly Dacian Decebalus holding an axe as big as a ten year old, ready to attack a heavy oak door. The olive-skinned Roman Lucia was attempting to restrain him with angry frustration. ‘Barbarian!’ she snapped.

‘Witch!’

‘Be still, for the sake of our Lord. Someone will hear.’ The North African seer Secullian steadied himself against the wall. Dried blood crusted around the edge of an eye patch covering the empty socket where he had plucked out an eyeball during the throes of his vision.

‘You’re looking for Marcus?’

They all started at Church’s question and Lucia rounded on Decebalus. ‘See! The entire Sixth Legion could have crept upon us under the cover of your thunderous noise!’

Decebalus raised a meaty hand to swipe her, but Lucia ducked out of the way and skipped towards Church. ‘A fine band of heroes we are. Fighting like children. Failing on every front.’

Church could see them all looking to him as if he had the power to turn the tide of events with one sweep of his sword. ‘This is the right place?’ he said.

‘I saw it in a vision,’ Secullian replied weakly. ‘But sometimes they lie outright, and often they seek to deceive.’

‘Just break the door down,’ Church said impatiently. ‘There’s nobody around – they’ve all gone to meet the Ninth Legion.’

‘Then the rumours are true.’ Lucia looked to Secullian uneasily.

Decebalus grinned and spat on his hands. Within moments the door hung from its hinges in splinters.

The room behind it was sparsely appointed, with straw on the floor and a latrine pit in one corner. A pile of sodden rags was heaped to one side. The room was empty.

Decebalus cursed loudly. ‘I have better visions after six flagons of wine,’ he snapped at Secullian.

‘Wait.’ Church hoped against hope, knew it was futile. Lucia followed his gaze to the bundle of rags. Her face revealed two things: that she knew exactly what Church had guessed, and that her heart was breaking in two. Church knew instantly that she loved Marcus.

Decebalus plucked up a small sack resting on top of the pile of rags. Blood dripped from the bottom. Decebalus peered inside for a moment. Then he replaced the sack in silence and bowed his head, muttering a prayer to the gods.

‘I’m sorry,’ Church said, but all he could think of was Niamh’s words at Carn Euny about the ravens following him.

‘We are no longer five,’ Secullian said. ‘Our power has been broken.’

‘I’ll make up your number,’ Church said.

‘Then we fight alongside a legend,’ Decebalus said confidently. ‘The King Beyond the Water has returned. Our victory is assured.’

8

The cemetery markers and mausoleums loomed up like ghosts in the driving rain. Amongst the busts and statues, carvings of griffins and sphinxes glowered down from the tops of tombs.

Church and the others had slipped outside the city walls as the Sixth Legion marched out of the main gates to meet the Ninth head-on.

Secullian crossed himself. Decebalus’s eyes flitted nervously back and forth. ‘We should not be here after dark,’ he hissed. ‘The dead will take us into their homes.’

Only Lucia moved with confidence. ‘Hurry,’ she urged, splashing through the puddles. ‘Time is short.’

In the centre of the cemetery was a paved square where a single tree grew. Sheltering under it was Aula, her hard features almost hidden in an oversized cowl. ‘I was beginning to think I would have to wait until winter set in.’

Lucia went to her, and the tears she had managed to hold back for so long finally streamed down her cheeks. ‘Marcus is dead,’ she said simply.

Church had felt that Aula was the coldest of the group, but she hugged Lucia fiercely without a second thought. Her face revealed that the loss cut her just as deeply.

Aula broke free after a moment and said gently, ‘There will be time for grieving later. We have much to do.’

‘You have summoned him?’ Secullian asked.

‘Not yet. I await Joseph …’ Aula spied Church and said, less than deferentially, ‘We are truly honoured.’

They were distracted by a loud splashing as the shrouded figure of Joseph weaved through the tombs and graves. When he saw Church, Joseph grabbed his hand with an almost pathetic gratitude. ‘Thank Jesu. Then we have a chance.’