The Dreamer Stones (66 page)

“This is
crazy.”

“How does it
feel, son, to be on the receiving end?”

“There’s no
time for small talk.”

Torrullin
smiled. “How right you are. Stay here. Track Agnimus.”

“Where …?”

The space was
unoccupied. A whiff of aftershave.

Tymall found
himself praying, something he discarded at age five, and hoping his
father would succeed, something he had not wished for since his
Coming-of-Age. Shaking, but bolstered, he turned his attention to
Agnimus.

The evil
creature was staying well back.

Coward.

“I need to
think first!” Saska snarled at Declan.

“No time,
Saska! Once Agnimus is in we’ll be trapped here!” He gripped her
upper arm.

“You take me
away now and I’ll never forgive you!”

“So be it, my
lady,” Declan muttered and dragged her with him through the
atmosphere, through the seal and beyond.

Open palms
lifted heavenward, accompanied by a low-pitched murmur.

Prayer.
Someone remembered how prayer aided the Enchanter when he battled
the Darak Or at the Pillars of Fire and the memory spread like
wildfire. Maybe they simply could not stop an involuntary reaction
to danger. Faith and prayer.

There was no
fear.

Torrke
responded.

Agnimus flung
his draithen into the barrier. Shouting a warbling cry, they
came.

Screaming, the
first wave faltered.

Wielding the
staff as an ancient rod of power, which it was, Agnimus sent his
draithen again.

Again, the war
cry warbled out, a hair-raising, ugly sound, and this time the
barrier wobbled.

Again!

With a
sustained roar, they came again. Some faltered, some hurtled into
the valley, disintegrating before they could sully holy ground, and
the barrier wobbled more.

Beleaguer!
Imperil! Murder! Revenge! Genocide! Again! GO!

In effect
there was little difference between war and ancient sacrifice, and
Agnimus was willing to sacrifice every soldier, to the last, to
tear down the valley’s protective barrier. He wanted in. He had a
million in reserve.

GO
!

They hurled,
kicked, punched, pierced, stabbed, flung against the invisible wall
of power, screaming, swearing, shouting, cursing, grunting, and
dying, falling, and they did not stop.

The barrier
shook as if in fever and was in fact ill to its deepest sense of
intelligence.

Sensing
victory, Agnimus roared through the spaces,
Now! Call on the
Warlock power! No more fear! No more waiting! Own your
revenge!

Wide eyes
watched the strangeness up on the peaks.

Dark, cloaked
forms hurled against nothing and were flung back. Palms stretched
up higher and prayers gathered volume and intensity, infused with
blind faith.

Torrke,
weeping inside, gave all it had.

“It won’t hold
much longer,” Caballa murmured to Lowen at her side.

The two women
stood in the Dragon doors, both pale, both frightened.

“He’ll do
something,” Lowen returned. “He must. Please, Lord God, let him do
something.” In times of severe tension, she returned to the ancient
God of her people.

The two women
joined hands, gripping tight.

The barrier
tumbled of a sudden, and shattered.

A wild shriek
of immense suffering shook the mountains. It was an epic
earthquake.

Torrke had
succumbed.

The peaks
crumbled, crushing tens of thousands, crevasses deep and dark
opened and closed, sealing away thousands more. Others went
flailing backwards to their deaths down shaking slopes, shattered
to bloody bits on the rough ground outside the valley. Yet others
tumbled forward screaming, smashed to shapeless pulp on the valley
floor. They did not disintegrate. They fouled the holy earth.

Torrke had
retreated.

Gusts of wind
tore through the defile, uprooting trees, crushing hundreds at
prayer. Boulders rolled unstoppable taking life and limb
indiscriminately.

Then came the
silence.

Deep, terrible
silence, as if all things had come to an end. The shoreless deep
where only imagination could live. Sometimes.

Ice.

Then an
incomprehensible warming.

It went
unnoticed in the stillness.

Agnimus lost a
hundred thousand, thereabouts.

The barrier
was down, broken, shattered, nothing. The Enchanter had nowhere to
hide.

He lifted his
staff …

A
reverberation, like a warning.

Step
aside
, it said. No one moved. Agnimus froze, staff aloft, words
stillborn on his lips.

Lowen and
Caballa glanced at each other and dared hope anew.

Tymall tore
his gaze from the bloody lumps far below, unable to accept the
reality of the breech, and stared at his booted feet.
Earthquake?

Step
aside
, it said. The muscles in his face stiffened.

He stepped
aside with alacrity, abandoning his post on the rocky spur,
alighting on the path not far from the two women. He looked up
intently.

Caballa and
Lowen glanced at each other and then they, too, looked
heavenward.

A flake,
downy-soft, cotton-damp, plopped onto the back of Lowen’s free
hand.

She stared at
it.

“Snow.”

The word was
barely uttered when it came. Snow in thick clumps, icy, wet,
suffocating. In seconds, visibility shrank to a foot. Torrke was a
thick, white impenetrable world where breathing was survival. Never
had such a fall been experienced in the valley, not even when the
planet waited for the first inhabitants.

Sound was not
only muffled, but absent.

Agnimus roared
out. “
Advance!
” He shouted, throwing his voice with the aid
of cloak and staff. It emerged a mouse’s squeak, ineffectual,
unheard.

Communication
was sundered.

His draithen
were expectant, awaiting the command that could not now come. They
waited and the white stuff piled in drifts about their ankles,
knees, their thighs, weighing down cloaks, dragging spines
askew.

A number were
dragged under by the weight, suffocating there.

Then came the
dark.

A complete
absence of light. The black blindness in the night where no candle
flickered, where nothing existed.

No light, no
sound, and suffocation.

Lowen and
Caballa held onto each other, both thinking they may already be
dead and in another realm. Grateful for each other’s warmth -
life
- they clung.

For draithen,
human and Valleur alike, their world now belonged to the senses …
and those were removed also.

Moments.

Minutes. More
minutes. An hour? A day? Time lost all meaning, lost importance.
What mattered was that final thought, a farewell in silence, to
make right with one’s maker or ask forgiveness of a loved one.
Death drew nigh. Exposure to the extreme elements beckoned closer
the mythical figure cloaked and hooded, he who carried the dreaded,
lightless sickle.

An almighty
thunder rose, the clash of titans, the war of storms.

Sound, sight,
taste,
breath
, fell into that vortex of great and terrible
drums, rolling, turning, falling.

It was the end
of everything.

Chapter
Fifty-Three

Why? Can
anyone answer that?

Universal
question

Hunger drove
Marcus Campian out of the basement.

Feverish and
dirty, he cautiously clambered his way up to the ground floor,
stair by excruciatingly slow stair. Sounds came to him as he neared
the narrow door, but hard as he listened all he heard was wind and
the banging of an open window. It gave him pause until he concluded
it was simply open and the wind got to it.

He sat for a
long time on the uppermost stair in the dark, hand shielding the
key to fit the lock in front of him. What lay beyond? Was there
anything left? Then he thought of Byron and how his friend would
laugh at him finding him sitting like a scared schoolboy in the
dark. He slid the key in and before he lost his nerve, twisted it.
The door gaped open and he rolled through.

The key
rattled behind him and he almost suffered a massive coronary. Wind.
Only wind … the door moved in the wind, coming through the open
window … all windows were shattered.

Struggling to
breathe normally, he managed to sit. He stared around him. Carnage.
Furniture smashed and pictures stabbed - sword point. Carpeting
ripped from the floors, torn as if by feral teeth, his precious
plants trampled, their containers in splinters, soil
everywhere.

He was alone
when those creatures came, and fled into the basement. He heard
them go insane and dared not make a sound. Alone, and yet there
were four bodies in the cook’s little sitting room, the one off the
kitchen, the one that led to the basement …
get a hold of
yourself, Marcus.

Tears pricked.
Tina loved his plants, always rotating them, for tender, loving
care, she said, but he knew she wanted to enjoy them in the privacy
of her little domain, and now she was dead. Hacked to pieces -
sword again - and he knew her only by her dyed red hair and a scrap
of yellow apron stuck to a decaying thigh. How had she been here
when he gave her the day off? Why had he not heard her? Why had she
not come to the door? She must have seen the key was missing.

Forcing his
thoughts into order, he attempted to identify the remains at her
side. Perhaps Lenny, the beau she mentioned.

Swallowing a
dry heave, Marcus clambered to his feet. The other two he did not
know, could not know. They could be male or female, young or old;
there was no way to tell. Black blood splashed everywhere. Trying
not to breathe the stinking air and feeling guilty for wanting to
seek out fresh, he managed to leave the little room and into the
kitchen. More carnage, everything trashed, but no bodies. Thank
god, no bodies.

His hunger
overcame him and he rushed, a stumbling run, to the solar fridge he
installed two years ago. Tina begged, he said no, the old ways
worked, and she begged more until he bought the thing off a trader
from Beacon. An exorbitant price, too. Aaru, what rubbish to think
of at a time like this, but he felt better.

His hand was
almost steady as he reached for the handle. It would probably be
rotten, spoiled or deliberately destroyed or, worse, empty. He
jerked the door wide and sank before the fridge like a man in
prayer.

The milk was
off, but there was coldish water - the power receptacle had given
in - and there was fruit, a haunch of beef, those little crackers
Tina stored in the fridge to keep them fresh, and there was even a
cake she baked for his birthday.

His birthday
was … was it the day before yesterday or yesterday? How long had he
been in that basement?

Tears pricking
again, he reverently touched the cake. Thank you, Tina. He drew his
hand away. He could not eat any of it, not without succumbing to
grief and hopelessness.

Drawing a
breath, he took the meat and fruit, the crackers and two bottles of
water. Finding a canvas bag in the drawers under the cutlery rack,
he wrapped the meat and fruit, placed it and two containers of
crackers within, ending with the water. Then he found two knives, a
fork, an enamel dish, mug, and a small pot that could take the heat
of a fire, which put him in mind of coffee makings.

He searched
around until he had airtight containers of coffee, tea and sugar,
adding a couple of spoons to his collection. A kitchen towel went
on top of everything and he drew the drawstring tight. He was
hungry, but could not eat in this house of death.

It was time to
go.

He headed for
the front door and then had second thoughts. He had to check for
others, and he needed fresh clothes, warmer gear. Laying his bag in
the shadows beside the door, he turned and headed first for his
office.

It was the
same. Nothing remained whole. Debris and sand howled in through the
shattered window. Even his books were torn from their spines. He
tested the lights. Nothing. The television behind the locked doors,
when he had them open, proved dead also, whether from lack of power
or lack of communication he could not tell. He stared at the grey
screen and reflected how useless technology was in the grand
scheme. When things went wrong it was the first to go, always. He
lifted the handset of the telephone and heard only static. He had
not expected anything else, but it proved communication was
gone.

We’re on
our own, each of us, and the only communication is through the
farspeakers; how right the Valleur are.
Rely on the mind, not
on things, things that will now litter the continent in their
uselessness.

Marcus found
the essentials to writing. He also found the solar torch in the
hidden bracket under his desk and took that. There was a handgun
there, illegal, but he left it, not needing the responsibility.

Going
upstairs, the stairs creaking and swaying, he entered his
bedchamber. Again, trashed.

It no longer
upset him or caused surprise - it simply was. Placing the torch and
writing essentials on the torn and broken bed, he began pulling
from his wardrobe.

The damage
there was not so bad, a sword or two made a few passes over the
hanging clothes, and he discovered his rucksack, a holdover from
younger days when he and Byron went hiking and fishing. Inside was
a first aid kit and hiking boots. Leaving the kit in place, he took
the boots out and, finding his dark green uniform from a stint in
the law enforcement services, donned clothes and boots. His other
clothes, as Tina would put to him on a bad day, were no more than
fancy pyjamas.