Walkers (57 page)

‘Supposing you were told that, if
you lost, the whole of the human race would die out?’

John said, with a frown, ‘What is
this, one of your peculiar Oriental riddles?’

Henry shook his head. ‘What would
you do? How would you feel? Would you fight, or would you funk it?’

John very slowly stirred his cup of
coffee, and then helped himself to another spoonful of brown sugar. ‘I’d
fight,’ he said. ‘But I’d be scared.’

‘Exactly,’ said Henry.

‘You mean that you – ?’ asked John,
unable to get to grips with what Henry was telling him.

‘Me,’ said Henry. ‘Me and the sumo
wrestler and the whole human race. Only it’s not a sumo wrestler.’

‘May I ask what it is?’ asked John,
in mystification. He had heard Henry talking sober nonsense, and he had heard
Henry talking drunk sense, but he had never heard Henry talking like this before.

Henry leaned forward, and grasped
the coarse linen shoulder of John’s coat. ‘It’s the Devil,’ he whispered; and
of course John smiled, and sat back, and shook his head, and smugly crossed his
legs, and didn’t believe him for a moment.

They all arrived well before eleven,
serious and eager. Springer was there, too, a man this time, dressed in a
strange suit of grey and black that rustled like tissue paper when he walked.
He touched the hands of each of them, and looked into their eyes one after the
other with his own eyes that were like slanted windows into outer space.
Absolute emptiness, and distant stars, and meanings that you could only dream
about.

‘I knew you would be here tonight,’
said Springer. ‘You have interpreted Yaomauitl’s manoeuvres well.’

Kasyx lifted one crimson gauntlet
and slowly parted his fingers. Sparkling blue electricity jumped from one
fingertip to the next. He had never before absorbed so much of Ashapola’s
energy, and he knew that one accidental discharge would be catastrophic. But
tonight, if they were to encounter Yaomauitl yet again, they would need all the
power they could possibly muster.

Springer said, ‘Tonight will be your
greatest adventure. Tonight you will know the true power of being Night
Warriors. In the name of Ashapola, and of all the sacred Warriors of ancient
times, may you be protected from evil, and may your light cleave the darkness
for the liberation of the world of men.’

These words were plainly words that
Springer had repeated time and time again, in years gone by. Words from the
greatest days of the Night Warriors, when scores of Devils had walked the
earth, and those who had fought them in dreams and nightmares could be counted
in their thousands. A dark company, who had brought the virtues of peace and understanding
to every corner of the world, no matter how uneasy that peace and understanding
may have been.

The Night Warriors rose up into the
evening air. Springer had alerted Samena that he felt cold vibrations somewhere
to the east, so they glided over the golf courses and condominiums around the
Fairbanks ranch and headed up into the hills, where the night air was pungent
with the aroma of eucalyptus, and lights sparkled from expensive Spanish-style
homes, hidden among the lemon groves and the yucca.

‘Any feelings?’ Kasyx asked Samena,
as they sailed silently over Rancho Santa Fe, where light from the windows of
the white-painted Inn cast bright green patterns across the croquet pitches
that surrounded it. Then they were back into the darkness again, searching the
hills for the slightest sensation that would warn them that Yaomauitl was
close.

Xaxxa said, ‘Maybe we were wrong,
man. Maybe he isn’t ready to fight yet.’

‘He’s ready,’ Kasyx affirmed. ‘He
wouldn’t have allowed those embryos of his to be born so publicly, if he wasn’t
ready to fight. He knows we know about it, and he knows we’re out here looking
for him.’

‘Well, any time, man, any time,’
said Xaxxa.

Tebulot said nothing. He was too
deeply in thought about the problems he was having with his parents, and about
the dangers that the Night Warriors were going to be facing tonight. He hadn’t
lost his nerve. Far from it. But he wanted the fighting to start, and start
soon, so that he could be given some respite from his endless wrangling
anxieties. He loved his father and mother. He didn’t want to be alienated from
them. But until they had found and vanquished Yaomauitl, there was nothing he
could say to them that would bring them closer together.

They were almost ready to turn back
towards the coast when Samena said, quietly,

‘He’s here. He’s quite close by. I
can feel him.’

The three other Night Warriors moved
in closer to Samena, gliding together in ghostly formation between the hills.
They followed every turn and dip she made like an acrobatic team coming in to
land in total darkness, using only Samena’s abstract senses to guide them to
their target.

‘Right a little, right,’ said
Samena, and they banked towards the right, until at last they were rustling
through a thick grove of fan palms, and into the grounds of a large
ochre-painted house that stood by itself on a bend in the highway.

‘This is it, he’s here,’ said
Samena, and without hesitation she penetrated the clay-tiled roof, and entered
one of the bedrooms.

An Oriental-looking man lay asleep
with his wife on a wide brass bed covered with a black satin sheet. The rug was
white, the furniture was white, and there was a large stylised painting by
Sotaro Yasui on the wall. The Night Warriors stood at the foot of the bed and
looked at the sleepers with caution. ‘Which one of them is it? The man or the
woman?’ asked Tebulot.

‘The man,’ said Samena. ‘The feeling
is really strong; stronger than it’s ever been before.’

‘Are we ready for this?’ asked
Kasyx.

They nodded. Kasyx lifted his hands,
and drew the octagon. When he divided the night air in between it, he saw
whiteness, and snow falling.

‘Looks like this is going to be a
cold one,’ he said, but without hesitation he raised the octagon over their
heads. As it slowly descended all around them, he gripped the hands of each of
them in turn, giving them encouragement and extra strength. ‘We’re going to win
this time,’ he assured them. ‘This time, we’re going to send Yaomauitl back to
Mexico, and on a permanent basis, too.’

The octagon reached the floor, and immediately
they were engulfed in utter silence, a silence so complete that none of them
moved, none of them spoke. All they did was lift their heads and listen.

They were knee-deep in the softest
of snow, and more snow was falling thickly all around them, without a whisper.
There was no wind blowing whatsoever, and so the air was surprisingly warm.
They looked all around them, but as far as they could see in every direction
there was nothing but snow.

Tebulot came wading over to Kasyx,
his machine slung over his shoulder. ‘I never saw snow like this before,’ he
remarked, his eyes darting uneasily from one side to the other.

‘Maybe it’s Japanese snow,’ said
Kasyx. ‘Samena? Do you have any ideas where our Devil might be?’

Samena cupped her hands over her
face and was silent for almost a minute. The snow dropped silently on to the
feathers of her hat, turning them white. Xaxxa meanwhile was walking around in
circles, holding out his hands and watching the snowflakes melt in his palms.
‘Do you know something?’ he grinned. ‘I never saw snow before in my whole life,
not ever. Isn’t it weird?’

Samena at last pointed vaguely to
the right. ‘Over there, I think. It’s difficult to tell. I can feel something,
but the feeling doesn’t seem quite right.’

‘All the same, we’d better give it a
try,’ said Kasyx, and the four of them began to trudge in the direction that
Samena had indicated, leaving wide deep tracks in the fluffy white surface.

‘I wonder if this is a nightmare or
a dream?’ asked Tebulot, still looking around suspiciously.

‘It feels like a nightmare,’ said
Samena. There’s something not quite balanced about it, like it’s peaceful, but
that’s only a sham. I keep picking up the idea that somebody’s died, and that
they’re holding a funeral nearby.’

‘For many Orientals, white is the
colour of mourning,’ said Kasyx. ‘Maybe this whole dream is some kind of a
funeral.’

They continued to push their way
through the snow. Where the ground dipped, it had drifted, and they found
themselves buried almost up to their waists. But the soil beneath the snow
seemed firm and hard packed, and so they managed to make quite good progress.
The snow kept on falling all around them, densely and noiselessly, out of a sky
that was dark red with cold; and still there was no sign of Yaomauitl.

‘Do you think we’re making a
mistake?’ asked Tebulot, as they paused for a rest.

Samena shook her head. ‘There’s no
mistake. He’s here someplace. But he’s probably trying to disorient us and tire
us out.’

‘He’s not making too bad a job of
it, either,’ said Tebulot.

Xaxxa said, ‘It’s going to take more
than snow to put me off, man.’ Kasyx placed his hand over his forehead, and
examined their surroundings with infra-red, to see if there were any tell-tale
traces of heat – either Devilish or human. But all he could register were the
glowing yellow-and-blue bodies of Tebulot, Samena, and Xaxxa, and the golden
pulsing of Tebulot’s highly charged machine.

‘You still think we’re heading in
the right direction?’ he asked Samena.

‘As far as I can tell,’ said Samena.
‘It’s stronger than it was, but it keeps breaking up and dividing, and
sometimes it’s hard to say exactly where it is.’

Kasyx said, ‘All right. We’ll keep
on going for another couple of miles. If we haven’t located anything by then,
we’ll leave this dream and see if we can’t find Yaomauitl someplace else.’

Samena told him, ‘He’s here, Kasyx,
I promise you.’ ‘Come on,’ said Kasyx, and they began to march slowly through
the snowdrifts once more, four small figures in a huge whirling landscape of
white. As he marched, it struck Tebulot as totally amazing that this entire
world could exist inside one man’s sleeping mind; and that this one man would
only have to turn over in bed, and he could start dreaming about another world
altogether, quite different, but just as vast. That was one thing that his
experiences as a Night Warrior had taught him: that inner space was just as
infinite as outer space, but far more complicated, because it obeyed none of
the laws of the material world. In inner space a building could float in the
sky, an animal could talk, a dead husband could come to life again. In inner
space, snow could fall in the hottest month of the summer, and Devils could
hide like Arctic wolves.

It was then that they heard a sudden
and terrible clashing. The snow shuddered as it fell, and began to spin around
in wild eddies. They heard whoops, and cries, and the shaking of dozens of
small bells, and out of the snowstorm a huge sledge appeared, as large as a
truck, drawn by over a hundred harnessed Polar bears. The sledge passed by them
only fifty feet away, its wooden runners sliding over the snow with a chilling
hiss. It was constructed entirely of yew, articulated in the middle so that it
could turn quickly. The front section was three stories high, and heaped with
hundreds of animal furs. The rear section was crowded with masked soldiers in
breastplates and winged helmets that reminded the Night Warriors of the hordes
of Genghis Khan and each soldier carried a strange wide-barrelled rifle. At the
very back of the sledge there was a wooden tower, sixty or seventy feet high,
whose sides were clustered with silver bells and ribbons, as well as the
carcasses of dead wolves and snowshoe rabbits, and the flowing black scalps of
human beings.

At the very top of the tower, in
midnight-black armour that resembled a beetle’s carapace, stood a being whose
eyes gleamed yellow and malevolent: the lord of all darkness, Yaomauitl.

Tebulot yelled,
‘Hit the deck!’
and the four Night Warriors plunged face down into
the snow. The jangling sledge wheeled around them in a wide circle, and they
could hear the harsh cries of the Tartar soldiers screeching through the
snowstorm like strangled crows. Kasyx lifted his head, and immediately the snow
all around them exploded into hundreds of powdery white plumes. He ducked down
again, and glanced across at Samena, and said, ‘I think we take it all back.
You found them all right.’

Tebulot eased back the T-bar of his
machine. ‘If I can hit Yaomauitl himself, maybe we can get this over with.’

They heard the terrible sledge
sliding closer. The paws of a hundred bears made the snow shake as if an
earth-tremor were impending. Tebulot made a confident circle of finger and
thumb and gave Kasyx a wink from behind his face-mask. ‘Here goes nothing,’ he
said, and lifted himself up out of the snow.

Instantly, there was an
ear-splitting barrage of fire from the soldiers at the rear of the sledge. Each
shot made a sharp, breathy shriek, like a bicycle-pump drawing in air, only
twenty times louder. As the sledge thundered past them, towering high above
their hiding-place, Kasyx saw three soldiers lean over the sides of it and fire
at them, and then he realised what the whistling noise was all about.