The Hounds of Avalon (Gollancz S.F.) (19 page)

Yet some form of comprehension began to grow deep in his subconscious. A power as big as the universe had become aware of humanity. Its nature, if that was the right word, was to oppose life, not only in its form, but also in its essence: what it meant in terms of positivity, advancement, connectivity, hope, goodness – all the things that on his better days Hunter dreamed life really was about.

This power, this Anti-Life, was a gulf of nothingness that went on for ever, yet could be constrained on the head of a pin. Trying to comprehend what it really was made Hunter feel sick. He forced his thoughts to move on, but before he left the subject he realised its motivation: the eradication of everything it was not. The Anti-Life could not rest until humanity was gone or circumscribed. A name came and went, not from the thing itself, but from somewhere without: the Void.

And so it had come to Earth, acting through agents and generals and outriders who prepared the way for its ultimate ascension. Again, Hunter discovered names that existed somewhere, but did not come from the Void itself. The zombie-things that leaked purple mist were called the Lament-Brood.

The five creatures he had come across in the forest were the Void’s generals, leading the charge against humanity. They had no form in and of themselves; they were
ideas
, nothing more, clothing themselves in the matter of the physical world, negativity given shape and identity. The Lord of Bones, the Lord of Birds, the Lord of Lizards, the Lord of Flesh. And above them all, the force that would see humanity wiped away – the King of Insects.

Hunter was not a religious man, but childhood images of Satan haunted him; here, he felt, was true evil: dispassionate, relentless, capable of causing death on a grand scale, without any meaning at all. A quote came to him from a Sunday School class: Revelation 19:19 – ‘Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army.’

The giant wasp’s message was clear: there was no hope, it really
was all over and the world was about to be remade in the image of Anti-Life. Hunter tried to imagine what that would be like, but all he kept coming back to were those self-same childhood lessons, with their talk of hell and burning souls.

The wasp was so huge that it could not take flight and so it pulled itself forward obscenely on its spindly legs, until its head filled Hunter’s vision and he could see himself reflected a thousand times in its multifaceted eyes. The wasp opened its maw wide, trailing strands of sticky acids, and lunged. The stinking, wet dark closed about Hunter hard and he was sucked in and down.

And then he was hovering in the air once more before the King of Insects, wasps and flies crawling all over his skin, across his eyes and lips, skittering legs and wings setting his nerve endings afire as revulsion filled him. It felt as if his time had come and he was pleased at how calm he felt. Those who kill for a living think about death a great deal. He had once seen a man plead, sobbing, offering to give up his girlfriend in his place, even though he knew it would do no good. Hunter had always hoped he would be brave enough to go with dignity.

But instead of delivering the killing blow, the King of Insects twisted its outstretched hand and then snapped it shut. Hunter felt a squirming in his belly, rising up his spine, growing faster until it reached the back of his head, and then he shot out of himself as if strapped to a rocket.

Hovering somehow amongst the tree branches, he looked down to see his body still hanging in the air before the King of Insects. A second later, an irresistible urge drove him up through the trees and into the grey sky. Hunter felt simultaneously detached and queasy, as though he was in a dream on the verge of turning into a nightmare. Far below in the blasted valley, hundreds of scattered enemy corpses formed fractal patterns in the thick snow. Gliding forward over the next ridge, he caught the familiar wisps of purple mist drifting in the wind. It had just started to snow again, adding to the otherworldly ambience.

But when he had a clear view of the white landscape, raw emotions broke through his detachment. It was carnage, worse than any battlefield he had ever seen. The Lament-Brood were a purple-edged wave swamping the feeble ranks of the army. Guns cut them apart, but it took at least fifty rounds, and as quickly as one fell, six
others took their place. The enemy were brutally efficient. Rusted swords cleaved heads, hacked off arms, left trails of steaming entrails in the churned, red snow. Spears rammed through flimsy skin and muscle, arrows plunged into eye sockets. The despair the Lament-Brood engendered was a weapon in itself, and many soldiers simply laid down their arms to have their bones snapped and life extinguished by dead but powerful hands.

It was a rout beyond any defeat the army could have envisioned. As fast as men fell, they were brought back to unnatural life to swell the ranks of the enemy, going on to kill their friends and colleagues with vigour. Explosions roared flames and gouts of smoke high into the air as ammunition was detonated and batteries overrun. Fire raged in several of the tanks in the front line. There were no tactics, no weapons that would make any difference. It was only a matter of time.

And just as that thought entered Hunter’s head, choppers carrying the General and other COs rose up behind the lines. A retreat had been ordered, but it was too disorganised to be effective. Men tried to pull back, but the Lament-Brood kept coming, picking them off as they fled.

It’s all over
, Hunter thought, dimly grateful for the remaining detachment that still swathed him.

One final shell was loosed into the sky before the enemy swamped the lines. It rushed towards Hunter, passed through him and came down beyond the ridge. When the explosion resonated all around, he suddenly felt as if a rope at his waist had been tied to a speeding car. Yanked backwards, he flew over the valley and down towards the forest, now blazing from the strike which had impacted right at the point where his body had been suspended.

There are times when the world feels like an irritating distraction, even when buildings are collapsing, blood is flowing and people are crying about the end of the world. Some things are more important. Hal understood that clearly as he made his way along the corridors of Queen’s College. All he could think about was the kiss Samantha had shared with Hunter, how it had been a whole conversation in a single moment, a complex communion of secret yearnings, confused romance, hope, worry, sexual attraction.

It had made him realise that those who live their lives in their heads, as he did, made it easy to deceive themselves. The imagination is a trickster, he thought, tempting with illusions to drag you off the path so he can laugh uproariously at your rude awakening.

In his mind, Samantha had always been the one who would save him from his mundane existence. And now there was no hope of that ever happening. Lost in his dreams he might have been, but he was a pragmatist when faced with harsh reality. He felt colder than the unnatural winter outside, as though every thought he had was laced with frost. So cold that he felt he would turn to ice, then slowly melt away when the thaw came.

Reid’s department filled a vast complex of rooms, all sealed, all silent; a place of unspeakable secrets that gave no hint of their
existence; of quiet suggestions that turned the mind to horror; of the brush of fingertips at midnight.

Hal was met by an underling at the entrance to the sanctum sanctorum and led into an area he had never visited before and had never thought he would. He was finally shown into a room with a security system that exceeded anything Hal had seen throughout the extremely secure offices of Government. Reid waited within, talking in hushed tones to Dennis Kirkham. With a troubled expression, the chief scientist examined a sword suspended in a holding frame.

‘Ah, here he is,’ Reid exclaimed when he saw Hal. ‘Will you excuse us, Mister Kirkham? Business.’

Kirkham disappeared in the silent manner that always characterised his comings and goings, and Reid came over to Hal with a faint swagger. To Hal, Reid always appeared to be on stage pretending to be some spy he had seen in a sixties movie; he had charisma, and cool, and a touch of arrogance, but it felt as if it was all hanging loosely over someone else entirely.

‘Look at this,’ Reid said, indicating the sword. ‘We retrieved it from the fellow brought back from Cadbury Hill.’

‘The Brother of Dragons?’

‘That’s the chap. Doesn’t look much like a champion of the human race, I must say, but that’s by the by. I believe, and certainly he believes, that this is one of the three great swords of legend—’

‘Sir?’

‘We’re frantically playing catch-up here, Mister … ?’ Reid fumbled for Hal’s name without any sign of embarrassment, even though he spoke to Hal several times a week.

‘Campbell,’ Hal said.

Reid nodded, but didn’t deign to use Hal’s name. ‘The rules have changed, as we all know,’ the spy continued. ‘We can no longer sneer at the supernatural, or magic. Those words simply define something we can’t quite understand at this moment in time. We know that myth and legend, what we thought were simply fairy stories, contain secrets coded into them. Truths. Many of them, pieced together, provide a secret history of what was going on behind the scenes of our illusion of a rational world. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Hal nodded.

‘The difficulty is deciding what is true and important to us, and what is merely embellishment to make them good stories that will carry those truths through word of mouth over generations. A lot of it is symbolism, one element representing another …’ Reid waved his hand with irritation. ‘Not my department. We have people who deal with that kind of thing. But what I can understand is that it’s a code, and we’re in the process of cracking it.’

He returned to the sword. ‘One of the great British legends is of three powerful swords. Weapons, fantastic, earth-shattering weapons. One is called Caledfwlch, or by another name, Excalibur, with which I’m sure you’re familiar. Another was believed to be consumed by, or filled with, fire, with an implication that its power was corrupted in some way. And this is the third. Our Brother of Dragons was told it’s called Llyrwyn, but that isn’t any name I’ve come across before. And he also appears to be completely unaware of its capabilities. If we can find out how to access that power, imagine what we could do. We certainly wouldn’t be on the back foot any longer.’ Reid’s eyes gleamed.

For the first time, Hal looked around the room properly. Rack upon rack of cases were lined up like a futuristic library. But they did not hold books. There were more weapons – axes, a bow and arrows that appeared to be made of gold, a spear – and artefacts that ranged from the mundane to the bizarre: odd lumps of rock, jewels that glowed eerily, a crystal ball in which fleeting images came and went, a carpet, a mirror with a carved frame of tormented figures, amulets of all shapes and sizes, caskets and boxes, some plain, some encrusted with more colourful jewels, the skull of some beast with horns, a stuffed figure of a tiny man with wings; and those were only the items in Hal’s immediate line of vision.

Reid nodded when he saw Hal’s expression. ‘We’ve amassed quite a collection, haven’t we? My men have been very busy since we received the first hints that the Fall was taking place. You remember what it was like – the failing technology, the seemingly ridiculous rumours of fantastic creatures, then the deaths …’ He shook his head in faux-sadness. ‘I’m not one to blow my own trumpet, but I put this entire project in motion right then. Don’t deny the evidence of your eyes, I told my superiors. Adapt or die. Sadly, they died. But I moved quickly, sending out agents to seize
whatever might help us when the time came to fight back. And it is a remarkable achievement. Some of these objects … well, they’d take your breath away if you saw what they could do. Some we will never take out of their security cases. Too dangerous even to touch. We’re working on the others … close to a breakthrough in some areas,’ he said proudly.

Hal’s attention was drawn to a lantern, like an old miner’s lamp, sitting on the top of one display case. A blue flame flickered inside, veering strangely at a sharp angle in one direction. ‘What’s that?’ Hal asked.

Reid examined it, puzzled. ‘I’ve never seen that before. And what’s it doing out of its case? Don’t worry, I’ll get Kirkham to secure it.’