Merion felt a cold chill run up his spine, independent of the rainfall or the adrenalin of the recent fight. ‘What’s he talking about, Rhin?’ asked Merion.
The lightning flashed, and even in its bleaching light, Merion saw it. There was a colour in the faerie’s face the like of which Merion had never seen before, and it was not from the glow of the burning riverboat roaring behind them, nor his rain-soaked stubble, born of frantic days. Merion felt the chill climb his spine.
‘You don’t know, Tonmerion Hark?’ The Wit asked, smirking again. Merion wanted to drive his foot into his face, to see if he could boot him over the rise. He let the bobcat burn and roil inside him.
‘Spit it out, damn you,’ Merion cursed at him, and the Wit shrugged. ‘Whatever you have to say, just say it and be done with the theatrics.’
The Wit bowed sardonically. ‘As you wish, Lordling,’ he said, and then cleared his throat, as if he were a bard in a tavern.
‘“I asked again. And again he told me it was impossible. He ignored my pleas, my reminders of our bargain. His face was like stone. I see why Merion fears him the way he does. I saw then why they call him the Bulldog.”’ Here the Wit paused, flicking his eyes up to linger on Rhin and Merion.
‘Keep reading,’ Merion ground the words out. His aunt reached up to touch his hand, and he seized it.
‘“I told him of Sift and the Black Fingers’ visit, told him of the White Wit and who he’d threatened. His fucking son, I told him. And if that wasn’t a reason to pay them, I didn’t know what was.” It really does have a ring to it, doesn’t it?’ the Wit snapped his fingers.
Rhin felt Merion’s eyes upon him. He spat in the mud and pointed his sword at the Wit once more. ‘How fucking dare you!’ the faerie growled, his voice like a landslide of gravel.
‘“I raged for days. He is a stubborn fuck, and I knew there was only one way to make him listen to me. It didn’t take much to get into his study … nor to find that little pistol of his. When I took the gun from the closet, I only meant to threaten him. To see how he liked it …” And here it becomes a little scribbly, Merion, my apologies. “It was bastard of a thing. Like lugging a cannon, but the magick held strong. When I met him on the stairs as I had the day before, he seemed surprised. I had never seen him surprised before.’
‘You shut your mouth, Wit! Stop reading these lies!’ Rhin blurted. ‘He’s taken bits out!’
‘You keep fucking reading,’ Merion hissed, hands shaking. His eyes were locked on Rhin, and the faerie could feel the heat of them.
The Wit tugged the top of his hood. ‘Be delighted to. “I held the gun and pointed it up at him, but he just crossed his arms. ‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ he told me, as if he were scolding Merion. ‘Give me the Hoard,’ I demanded of him, but he shook his head. ‘It’s spent, don’t you understand? Put to good use. Bought half the tribes in Indus with that little bounty.’ I couldn’t breathe. The bastard had spent it all, after agreeing to take his cut for sanctuary, and to keep the rest safe, until I was. Until Merion was older.”’
Here the Wit began to pace forward, first towards Rhin, then at Merion. His voice dropped, and his tone was sickeningly earnest. He even had the gall to wave a hand around in the air as he read, as if he were flicking each syllable at them. Merion felt sick to his core. He didn’t know which faerie he wanted to kill first, but he knew it had to happen. His fists clenched so hard that his knuckles popped. He felt the blood rushing to his head. The Wit read on.
‘“I couldn’t believe it, but I did all the same. I didn’t remind him of our agreement. I didn’t shout and curse. I didn’t march away and hand myself in. I just gripped that trigger with my hand and I pul—”’
‘Now Lurker!’ Rhin bellowed, cutting right through Finrig’s performance. As he shouted, he pulsed with a blinding blue light. It was so bright, Merion had to cover his eyes, and reeled backwards. Before he could cry out, the gunshot rang out through the roar of rain and shouting faeries. When he took his hands away, he saw the Wit.
There was a vacant look in his eye, almost as though he were in the midst of deciding whether he had left the stove on. He looked up, shaking, and raised his arms. Merion blinked, and saw two halves of the diary, one in each hand, and strangely far apart. There was a hole where its spine had been, and when Merion looked closer, there was a hole where Finrig’s should have been too. He was staring right through him at the mud beyond. Lightning flickered, and drew the edges of the oozing hole. The Wit was being held together by his armour alone.
If he’d had lungs to speak with, he might have finished his sentence, not that Merion needed to hear it. He already knew the truth, but sadly, it would have to wait. The Fingers had realised why their leader had stopped talking, and why his armour smoked and glowed. As one, they began to hiss, rattling almost like snakes. They crept forward, low and dangerous, wings flickering and weapons held low.
‘Enough,’ Merion grunted, as the pure rage swept through every orifice of his body, chased by the ferocious blood. He’d had enough, he said again, in his spinning head. He didn’t want to be lied to any more. He didn’t want to deal with traitorous lords any more. He didn’t want to see faeries any more. He just wanted to go home.
Through bloodshot eyes, Merion watched himself go to work. Punching, kicking, even biting at one point, whirling, and screaming … the young Hark let the rage drive him. That rage that had been building up ever since he had stared down at the gun in the impossibly clean tray. It had been building with every twist and turn he had taken through this cursed town and its desert. With every lie, and disappointment, it had grown. It surged through him now in equal parts to the rushing blood, and together they boiled into something altogether monstrous—monstrous, and magickal.
Limbs were torn from sockets, swords and spears knocked aside and shattered. The cuts and gashes did not matter. Bodies flew through the air, only to be grabbed and hurled into the mud, stamped until the armour bent inwards. The spears bothered him not. Rhin was in trouble, a blade at his throat and a snarling face in his. One kick saw him saved. Then his fingers found the rock, and the others’ black steel did not matter under the furious boy’s raging swings.
After the rock in his hand had taken the head clean off the last Finger, he collapsed into a breathless heap. His chest pulsated like the bellows of a forge, and anybody looking would forever remember the sparks of electricity flitting through his matted, drenched hair. He was completely covered in mud, he and Rhin. The only surviving faerie breathed in ragged gasps, staring around him at the battered and crushed bodies of the thirteen finest mercenaries known to the Buried Kingdoms, despatched by a thirteen-year-old boy.
Merion wasn’t done yet. With a half-roar, half-sob, the boy rolled over and brought the rock down, aiming for Rhin’s head. The faerie rolled to the side, just in time to see the rock plunge into the muddy earth with a bang. ‘Merion, stop!’ he gasped, suddenly wordless after all these months of practising under the bed, of pinching himself so he wouldn’t scream though the middle of the night. ‘I never meant …’ he croaked.
‘YOU DON’T GET TO SPEAK!’ Merion bellowed raggedly. His words made him pant. ‘You don’t get to talk to me … ever … again.’
‘I would hold your tongue, if I were you, faerie,’ Lilain muttered from behind them. She had only just shaken the carnage out of her swollen eyes. Now they shot daggers at Rhin.
Rhin bowed his head, and walked away, to stand at the edge of the carnage, and hold his head in his rain-soaked hands.
‘Maker’s balls, Merion!’ Lurker shouted as he ran up, coming to a sloshing halt just short of a faerie corpse. Its head was either buried in the mud, or it was missing altogether. Lurker looked up at the boy with a desperate look in his rain-soaked eyes, as if he were trying to find a sliver of humanity in the boy’s face, a trace of sanity in those mad eyes.
It was a long while before the boy found himself. Nobody said a thing. Not a sound, save for the tumbling sky and the wet slapping of the hammering rain. Slowly, the human in Merion fought back against the animal. With it his face took on a grave pallor, so Lurker took off his hat and held it over the boy’s head, to shield him from the rain.
‘How on earth, boy?’ Lurker asked, words failing him.
‘My blood boiled,’ Merion whispered, before reaching up to take the hat. He pulled it down, over his soaking hair. His eyes were closed and his lips trembling.
With equally unsteady legs, he forced himself to his feet and stumbled a few steps down the slope. Lurker reached for him, but Merion waved him away, grunting. Without another sound, he stomped his way towards the inferno that was the riverboat. The shell of the vessel was a skeleton, engulfed in flames. Flames ruled the riverboat, bursting in great towers of red and swirling orange from its windows and funnels. The firestorm paid the rain no mind. It hissed and steamed, but the storm was no match for it. On and on it stubbornly raged, so hot it could have blistered skin at a hundred paces.
When Merion could take no more of the heat, he let his knees kiss the mud, and there he slumped. Every inch of him ached to be closer to the sodden ground. He stared up at the fire and let the light force his eyes to narrow slits.
Real men cannot be seen to cry
, he told himself as the first sob wracked his body. Then came the second, and Merion shook his head. He spoke to the roaring inferno as if it were burning just for him. ‘I’m sorry, father,’ he choked. ‘But I have to let you down.’
Merion watched one of the funnels crash down onto the deck in an explosion of white-hot flame, sparks, and screeching metal. It was almost like an answer.
‘I said I was sorry,’ he whispered, tears springing to his eyes. ‘It’s time for me to stop listening to you, and listen to myself instead.’
A dull boom came from the innards of the riverboat, and Merion hung his head, his chest convulsing with every deep sob. The tears came in rivers. Merion would have been powerless, even if he had wanted to stop them. It was a purge, like a phoenix throwing itself into the flames. Merion welcomed every single one of them. When the sobbing became too much for his crumpled lungs to bear, he sagged onto his side. The cold mud sucked at his ear while the rain pelted his cheek. His eyes scrunched up into narrow slits, and through the tears he watched the riverboat burn until it was just a smoking wreck, and a wretched one at that.
WHATEVER IT TAKES
‘America, we are headed for America.’
7th June, 1867
T
he rain stopped as dawn broke. There was no sun, no glowing firebrand in the east, just a gradual lightening of the sky, bruised as it was by the thick and angry clouds. The storm must have feared the sun, for it was soon moving on, skittering away to pastures new and dry, breaking up in its hasty retreat. The dawn light sliced through the storm’s scattered limbs and threw strange shadows on the ground. Several thick columns of black, ominous smoke dared to spear the morning sky, leaking from the town to the north.
Lurker took a sip of his water, sniffed, and flicked Lilain on the arm.
‘What?’ she whispered dazedly, as though she had been half asleep.
‘Shall we wake him?’ Lurker asked.
Lilain shook her head. ‘He’ll come when he’s ready. He needs every scrap of sleep he can get, after last night.’
Lurker sniffed again. ‘What did he do?’
‘Slew a nest of vipers is what he did. Pretty much with his bare hands. The boy is …’ Lilain paused to yawn and scratch her head. ‘I don’t know
what
he is.’
Lurker grunted. ‘Hmph. Better than his father?’
Lilain’s eyes widened as she slowly nodded. ‘If he isn’t now, then he will be.’
Lurker sniffed once more, and looked up at the sky. ‘Going to be a hot day.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘You heard the guns, right?’
Lilain took a sip of her water, wincing as she lifted her bloodied arm. She had no idea how she was still even conscious, but she wasn’t about to question it. ‘Ever since the thunder stopped, a few hours ago.’ She turned to look him in the eye. ‘I know the sound of guns when I hear ’em.’
It was Lurker’s turn to nod, and he did so whilst Lilain looked him over. His rippled, shaven scalp still glistened with raindrops, making the ridges of his scars even more pronounced. She watched him sniff, his nose twitching to one side as it always did. She marvelled at how hunched his shoulders were, and yet how somehow it still felt like a giant sat beside her.
Lilain reached out, wincing again, and patted his gloved hand. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank Rhin. He’s the one who broke me out. Though, it doesn’t look like I was needed.’
‘Yes you were. Hell of a shot, by the way.’
‘Ma’am,’ Lurker said, reaching up to tug at a non-existent hat. He frowned and shrugged.
‘I can’t believe it’s all over,’ Lilain sighed.
‘What?’
‘This,’ she said, looking around. ‘Fell Falls. The Serpeds. My house.’
‘What happened to the house?’
‘Castor’s men burnt it down. Everything’s gone.’
Lurker cast a glance at the burnt-out riverboat, lying awkwardly in the grey, oily water. ‘Seems to be a lot of that goin’ round,’ he replied, scratching his nose. ‘What’ll you do?’
‘Move on. Back east, maybe. Or north. And there’s always him to consider,’ Lilain sighed again, nodding to her nephew, still curled like a foetus in the mud, thirty paces or so away. ‘I can’t imagine what he’s got in his mind right now, after what he heard uttered last night.’ Lilain turned her gaze on the small black figure who was also curled up in the mud, over to the left, head resting on a stone. She wasn’t surprised to see Rhin’s eyes open. They had been like that most of the night. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought him dead, slain by guilt.
‘We’ll just have to see,’ Lurker sniffed.
Half an hour later, the boy moved—slowly at first, a curl of a finger there, a shrug of a shoulder here, then a tottering to the knees, weak and cold. Merion painted a bedraggled figure, lost in all ways. And yet his eyes, staring out from under his tangled mop of muddied hair, spoke differently. They had in them a fearsome glint, hardened by both storm and cold revelation. He stalked through the mud towards them.