Black Feathers (26 page)

The tunnel mouth came into view around a bend, marking the end of the bridleway.

Skelton reached it first and began to check the area. He stopped and stood straight when he heard Pike’s uneven gait over the rough, weed-infested ground. The man approached with his good leg taking a decent-sized, straight step, but he had to lift his wounded leg by raising his hip and swinging it forwards. Regardless of this encumbrance, Pike moved like a thing programmed. He was focussed and inexorable and it was beautiful to watch him, advancing as though he was wrought of pistons and gears and unyielding, lifeless materials. The man was terrifying. Never had a human been so much like an engine. Pike was
his
tool,
his
machine, fuelled by duty, loyalty and the desire to inflict pain. Pike would always do
exactly
as he was told. Skelton’s heart beat a little faster.

When Pike arrived, there was a tiny slick of sweat at his hairline. He looked a little nauseous but said nothing.

“So, this is where he ran to?” asked Skelton.

He watched Pike’s brain replaying the events.

“He came up this path but he was ahead of me, making ground. I lost sight of him.”

“Do you know how far he came? Did he make it to the tunnel?”

“I can’t say.”

Skelton nodded to himself, lips clamped tight. They’d come close and they’d missed a very good opportunity. If anyone else had allowed the same thing to happen, Skelton would have made sure they were disciplined. But the ferocity of the boy’s attack had taken them both by surprise. The fourteen year-old, and a puny one at that, had shown real fight. Still, they were forewarned now; Gordon Black would never surprise them again, nor would they ever be under-prepared for an encounter with him.

Skelton glanced around and noticed how a space near the tunnel’s mouth had been cleared of rocks. Looking closer, he found entry marks in the ground.

“He must have slept here,” he said, pointing. “Far enough away that he’d be out of sight but near enough to easily return.”

Pike saw the marks too.

“What did he do with his tent?” he asked.

Skelton looked around.

“What would you have done?”

Pike gestured with his chin into the darkness of the tunnel.

“Quite right. There’s nowhere else except the ditch under the hedges. But why risk getting wet gear when you’ve a perfectly dry place right beside you?”

“Then why didn’t he pitch tent in the tunnel? Safer. Drier. Out of the elements.”

“Fear, Pike. Fear of the dark. He camped here and returned to the house, leaving his gear stashed inside the tunnel. He had to come this way in order to pick up his stuff.”

Pike shook his head.

“Why lead us straight to it? Wouldn’t he have hidden somewhere else until we’d gone and then come back?”

Skelton could see the logic, but what difference did it make?

“He still had to come back here at some point, whether we were here or not. Right?”

“Right.”

“So when he came back what did he do?”

“He went into the tunnel to fetch his gear,” said Pike.

“Let’s take a look.”

The tunnel’s opening gaped like a monstrous throat, and Skelton hesitated, experiencing a moment of unease as he crossed its threshold. Chained in the flooded dungeon of his subconscious, a paralysing fear of the dark writhed like a vast eel. He’d done much to overcome his weaknesses over the years, to forget them – Ward training had eradicated almost all of them – but something about the silent, observant
life
in darkness still disturbed him. Mastering himself, lest Pike notice his nervousness, he strode into the blackness.

Only a few paces in, he stopped. The light of day plainly showed recent disturbance to the ground.

“What do you make of that, Pike?”

The giant moved in closer, his limp eliciting pride and protectiveness in Skelton – and something else he wasn’t ready to name. From his lofty vantage Pike surveyed the earth beneath their feet.

“There was a disturbance here. Not a fight. More of a struggle.” Pike’s eyes roved the shadowy tunnel mouth; he switched on his torch. “This is the print of a size ten, standard-issue Ward brogue. Over here, the prints of smaller hiking boots.” After a few more seconds he made eye contact with Skelton then looked away. He retreated towards the light. “The boy was here. He went up against one of ours. Neither was seriously hurt.”

Skelton moved after him, glad to leave the sucking darkness behind.

“Wait, Pike. What else?”

“That’s it.”

“But if neither was injured, what happened?”

Pike’s words were a flat hiss of escaping pressure.

“Someone let him go.”

“Not one of our men,” said Skelton.

“Couldn’t be,” said Pike.

“One of the Monmouth crew, then.”

Pike’s silence said it all. Skelton knew his partner believed in the Ward. It was his life. The very purpose of his existence. Even to utter an accusation toward another within its ranks was to commit some small betrayal of the whole. The Ward existed in every nation of the world, and their remit was to protect the world from the coming age of darkness at any and all costs. Now that the prophecies showed England to be the land from which the darkness would spread, the mission had fallen to Skelton and Pike. The responsibility rested squarely on their shoulders. Pike, Skelton knew, carried that burden in a very special way – it was like a power source. The idea that one among them might have made a mistake was shame enough. To think that they had a traitor in their number was far worse. Pike took it personally. Everything was personal with Pike.

“And I think I’ve an idea who it might be,” said Skelton.

Pike ignored this.

“We need to search the tunnel.”

Skelton cleared his throat.

“You and I can’t do it,” he said. “We don’t have the equipment.”

Skelton reached into his pocket and withdrew his grey mobile. One bar of reception winked in and out of existence. He dialled Knowles but the call failed three times. Instinctively, he looked into the sky. There was nothing to see, of course. He threw the phone into the hedge.

“What are you doing?” asked Pike.

“Accepting the facts,” said Skelton. “Haven’t had a signal anywhere we’ve been for a week. Christ knows what we’ll use from now on. Bloody carrier pigeons or something.”

He walked away. Pike followed, the sound of his footsteps determined but broken.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To fetch some high-power torches and a few more men,” said Skelton.

Pike grunted behind him and stopped. Skelton turned back.

“What is it?” He asked.

“Make sure Knowles is one of them,” said Pike.

The rain fell steady and hard, and soon the comfort and dryness of the previous few days was a distant memory.

Gordon tried not to think about the events which brought those dry, safe days to an end. But from time to time a flash of the strangest or most painful of those moments would enter his mind and blot everything out: the mutilation of Brooke’s hands, the sound her father made when he found her, the blood caked to her buttocks and the backs of her thighs, the smell of the earth as they dug her grave.

When he was angry, and he was angry for much of the time, he remembered how the attackers had died. Death had been almost comical: a man trying to pick a tiny pellet from the artery in his neck, a raging man speaking of love. And the one Gordon had killed. What he remembered of that was only the sensation of punching his knife blade hard and high and the disbelief at its effectiveness. He was fairly sure the tip of the knife had stopped against the man’s spine. So deep. So very, very deep. He could recall the intimate warmth of the man’s blood coating his right hand, but he didn’t even know his victim’s name.

He expected the rain to chill him, but it did not. Wherever his new power came from, it made him warm as well as strong. His pace never faltered, though he climbed both gentle and steep slopes. And though the rain slickened the rocks and turned the earth to mud, his footsteps were sure and solid. His waterproof jacket had a peaked hood, which he tightened to his head with hidden straps, and it kept most of the rain out of his face.

He chewed smoked game as he walked. Around him the world was cloaked in swirling cloud, low and grey and heavy with moisture. Sometimes the landscape emerged, to reveal moments of deep-green vegetation or glistening black rock, perhaps a distant grove of trees or glimpse into a valley, but mostly the world was shrouded and wet, and Gordon was glad not to see too far into it. He put as much distance between himself and his past as possible. Somewhere, the Ward were searching for him; on the path behind him right now, perhaps. He would walk and he would search until he found the Crowman. Only that could save his family. It was the one thing worth doing in the world.

Either that or lie down and give up.

After three days of walking with barely a break, Gordon’s newfound strength had waned and his hike became a trudge. He watched for signs of followers and other travellers but saw none. Exhaustion settled on him and when he found a decent spot, he decided to stop a while and build himself up again. He pitched his tent in the shelter of an outcropping of smooth stone. The rock formed a barrier against the wind, which was strong everywhere else on the hillside, and the overhang kept the rain off.

The view east from his camp was expansive.

Standing on the far side of his fire, approaching a ledge which gave onto a steep drop, the space between him and the horizon was abundant with England’s varied splendour, and yet the land was somehow drab and spent-looking. Immediately below the ledge were the leafless tops of trees on a steep hillside. Their canopy angled swiftly away from him – to fall from the ledge would be to break every bone long before he hit the ground. Beyond the deciduous forest there was a thicker band of pine, richly green despite the approach of winter. Beyond that, only visible in a few places, was a dark snake of river, this side wild, the other flatter and more habitable. There was a small town beyond the flood plains of the river. Gordon could see the steeple of a church and plenty of houses.

On the roads around the village no cars were moving. All seemed still. Beyond the town and its environs, the land rolled out in a patchwork of sick-looking fields. There was a dullness over the Earth and he couldn’t put it down to the cloud-filtered light. In the distance to the left and right were other villages and hamlets, and far away, almost straight ahead, there was a larger city skyline, little of which could he make out. The closer to the horizon his gaze travelled, the more low vapour was in the air and the less distinct were the features of the land. At the edge of his visible semi-circle of world, the land and sky merged in a haze.

Far to his left, which was north, and on this side of the river, a thin genie of smoke rose above the pine forest. From here it was impossible to tell if there was a house hidden by the trees or a bonfire or someone’s camp. He had the feeling it was the latter, however – the middle of a wood was a better place to hide than it was to build a home. Going to the town was too risky and unpredictable. It could be crawling with the Ward. Taking a peek at the wooded encampment seemed a far safer option.

When he’d regained his strength, he planned to investigate.

Smoke rose from the pine trees all day.

Gordon spent time climbing the smooth-skinned rocks overhanging his camp and wandering from place to place on the hillside. He found thickets laden with sloe berries and filled his pockets with the ones he didn’t eat straight away. Every now and again he would stop and scan the land around him for movement. All he ever noticed was the same thin wraith of smoke above the pines, sometimes pushed over by the wind, others rising vertically before thinning into nothingness against the ash-grey sky.

That evening he ate well on berries and dried meat, treating himself to a few strips of rook breast. He heated water over his fire and made a tea of sorrel leaves. It warmed him and cleared his head. For the first time in three nights, he slept deeply and dreamlessly, but he slept with his knife open and ready within easy reach, thinking always of the Ward.

Dawn came, and with it apprehension. In the daytime he could be seen. He crawled from the warmth and relative comfort of his sleeping bag out into a cold, clear morning. Mist covered the land on either side of the river like a thin layer of dry ice. In the evergreen forest the fire was still alive, though the ghost it threw up was pencil-fine and pure white.

He packed everything up and shouldered it easily, having scattered the remains of his fire as best he could. He knew his strength had returned as he walked away, feeling light despite the rucksack, his legs springy and renewed. He breakfasted on strips of dried meat and looked for a safe way down into the leafless hillside forest.

From there he planned to make his way into the pines.

He smelled the camp long before he saw it.

The mingled scent of grilling meat, burning fat and wood smoke led the way. Gordon’s belly responded to the smells with loud squirts and gurgles as the walls of his stomach moved against each other in anticipation. The savoury aroma reminded him of barbecues but smelling it on the cold morning air gave an edge to his hunger, making him realise he would fight for food if it ever came to that. He hoped it would not.

As he approached the smell, he slowed and then stopped. There’d been plenty of time to think of a way of announcing himself to strangers, but he hadn’t come up with something he was confident about. Now that he was nearing the camp, he felt a genuine sense of his own trespass and the danger that brought with it. His instinct was to leave other people to themselves, to respect their boundaries. Yet here he was, crossing the outer boundaries of someone else’s territory.

There was a moment in which he calmly and coolly decided it was time to turn back. He stopped and listened. He thought he could hear the crackle and spit of grease on hot ash. He imagined what it would be like to put a piece of charred meat to his lips, to bite through its heat-dried crust and into the tender, dripping flesh beneath. To chew hard and swallow a thick lump of hot nourishment. But he mastered himself and turned back, feeling a flood of relief and a release of tension in every muscle. Self-preservation was more important.

The way he’d come was blocked by two men.