Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (13 page)

“I remember!” James breathed. “This is different.
Malverston’s
different. He’s not just another land grabber, he’s … he’s evil, Alex!”

Alex’s face flickered, but before he could answer, they were being hailed.

“Mr Cain, Master Chadwick!” Malverston called from the platform. “What chat requires such serious faces? Perhaps you’re keen to leave our company?” His voice was facetious, but laced with suspicion.

“Our friends are in need of us,” Alex called.

“Nonsense!” Malverston boomed. He spread his arms wide. “Now is the time for celebration. Certainly you’ll stay! Or else all this was but a sham, don’t you think? What say you?” A direct challenge. There was no mistaking it.

Alexander looked torn for a moment, his eyes searching his sockets, and for a second James thought he would decline. But then his shoulders sagged. “We would be delighted, Mayor.”

“Excellent! Aha, prepare the hall immediately,” he barked to his advisors. The townspeople began milling and making preparations, fear and uncertainty festering about them already.

Alexander lowered his head and turned back to James. “We’ll leave tonight, as soon as he’s assuaged. He’s a dangerous man. We have to leave him happy, or this is all for nothing.”

“I can’t believe we’re teaming up with that slime. What did you promise him?”

Alex squeezed his wrist. “Tonight.”

Norman hurried along the hallway, breathing in rapid bursts.

So much rode on this one meeting between the remaining powers of the South, but somehow he had fallen asleep leaning against the wall. He had dreamed the very same dream that had plagued him since Jason, the knife-wielding madman, vanguard of the enemy, had stolen into his home in New Canterbury and left his body a broken wreck.

In the dream, he had been lying upon his back in a rainstorm in the pitch dark of night, flanked by illuminated skyscrapers shining like beacons under myriad lightning flashes. Younger versions of Alexander and Lucian, and several others he didn’t recognise, stood over him, yelling words that were muffled as if a pillow had been placed over his head. And once again, between their shoulders, peering down at him with a preternatural leer, a pallid young man with the face of a wolf, dark streaks under his eyes. And his words echoed back to him as though from the distant past. “
Remember, Norman. You were all there. Remember.
”

He woke shivering. For the briefest of moments, he had been sure a thin layer of frost had covered his skin, evaporating as he leaped to his feet in fright. The dream seemed more real each time, as though it were merging with reality, and reality was slipping further towards the illogical blur of dreamscape. The figures he had seen on the lobby stairs kept coming back to him. Had they really been there? How could that be possible?

They had worn suits, had carried working smartphones—the Old World relics that stood proud in Alexander’s office, beneath in New Canterbury’s vaults, and peppered the ruins of almost all the Old World. There had been live electricity in those things, and he swore he had heard tiny scratching voices emerging from them, voices from across the sea.

What’s happening to me?

He checked his watch, saw that the council was due to convene any moment, and any thought of his dream vanished from his mind. A few other stragglers trudged around him. As a group they lumbered towards a set of large, wooden doors ahead. A great buzzing wafted from within, thousands of voices. There was no mistaking the excitement and apprehension.

The air was heavy, humid and yet lacking in warmth. It made the already laborious task of breathing almost impossible.

“The cheek of it,” a nearby man muttered to himself, his heavy green overcoat masking his features and contrasting against his twisted white hair. “Holding this meeting now, of all times.”

He spoke to nobody in particular, but seemed to speak for the collective, as several others around him grumbled in unanimous agreement.

“We’re about to be slaughtered, and they want to play politics. How about putting some effort into getting some food? Forget this rabble playing arsonist; we’re all still bloody starvin’.”

More murmuring.

So discontented were they that they failed to notice Norman beside them, for which he was grateful. It had been many hours since he had gone unnoticed. The buzz grew closer, the blending of a thousand different conversations, mixed with the racket of chairs scraping and the clapping of shoes on wooden floorboards.

Norman rubbed his chest absently, and they passed from the hall into an enormous room, the council chambers. During the Early Years, when the empty shell of London had first been surveyed by those looking to rebuild, Canary Wharf had become a meeting place, and the tower had been in service since then as the coalition had formed under Alexander’s hand. This room had seen every major negotiation between every power in the South since the End.

“So few. So few have come,” the farmer said. His gruff grumble had given way to an awed tremble at the back of his throat.

So few are left
.

The chambers were housed in a hollow that had formed of its own accord as the tower decayed in the first years; support struts close to the glassy pyramidal structure at the tower’s peak had given way and carved a path of destruction through the spire’s heart, cutting a channel dozens of floors deep before reaching the twentieth floor, where they had come to rest, along with many tonnes of debris. Under its weight, three whole floors had collapsed, leaving a cavern that filled almost the whole width and depth of the tower.

When they had found it, the cavern had been unstable and ready to collapse further, but they had cleared the rubble, strengthened the floors, and converted it into what it was today.

The result was a true wonder. There was no need for artificial light in here. Golden shafts of light lanced down a pyramid of glass hundreds of feet above and pooled before a parabolic bench that housed over two dozen elevated seats. Though these seats were closer in appearance to thrones.

Positioned upon each of the three floors in the chamber were thousands of chairs: designer stools, executive swivel chairs, ergonomic recliners, and unwieldy chic things of leather luxury, all poached from the tower’s many derelict offices. The overall layout was that of an amphitheatre, centred on a large oval of open space, a polished concrete dais upon which the sunbeams glittered.

It was an embodiment of what they truly were: the dregs of the civilised world, fizzing lights in the dark, brought together under one spire for mutual warmth and comfort.

Despite any humble truths, Norman could never get over the fact that Alexander had a penchant for the grandiose. The chambers reminded Norman of Olympus.

There had been a time when the space had been so crammed with bustling bodies that the floor and walls seemed alive with endless beds of insects. Now, the council chambers seemed enormous in comparison to the paltry numbers in attendance, which barely filled the lower stalls, leaving at least five thousand empty seats in the higher tiers.

Nevertheless, he felt a swell in his chest at the sight of such numbers. To know that, no matter the odds, they were not alone, was worth taking a moment to appreciate. He thought for a moment of all of the hundreds who remained in Canterbury, missing out on such a spectacle. Without power, surrounded by the enemy, with their leaders all missing in action, the situation must by now have been grim indeed.

An unexpected desire to be back there with them washed over him.

Conversation was rife, still, and council was not yet in session. Around half the council members sat at the bench, all dressed in white robes, all shrivelled old relics of a world that had moved on. Some seats would never be filled. Their owners’ bodies were spoiling under the sun upon the streets beyond their walls, but a few that should have been filled, were not. Including Alexander’s.

The other stragglers made their way to their seats, and Norman craned his neck in search of someone he recognised until he spotted a familiar face beckoning him. Richard, apprentice to the master scholar John DeGray, raised his head above the sea of hair and sunburned necks.

“Where have you been?” Richard said as Norman squeezed in beside him.

“I …” Norman made to reply, but in the next moment his mind thrummed with a ringing scream. A nauseating wave overwhelmed him; suddenly, the room was full of people, hundreds of bristling figures in expensive business suits. They were at once there and not there, sitting upon non-existent chairs and at invisible desks. In the moment he saw them many walked right through the seated council crowd.

The same things he’d seen on the stairs.

Echoes, he thought. Echoes of Before.

How did he know that? He had no idea. But he knew.

“Norman?” Alexander said.

Norman jerked and took a breath, and the Echoes were gone. In their place were all those expectant faces once more. He felt cold all over, a bone-deep shiver deep in his chest.

Just broken ribs huh? What the hell is happening to me?

“Norman?” Richard hissed.

“Huh? Uh, sleeping. I was sleeping.” Norman leaned forward to peer down the row. The others who had travelled from New Canterbury in their convoy were bunched together; surrounded them were similar islands from the other settlements. Previous summits had seen a general mixing throughout, with no order to the seating. But that was not so today. Everyone huddled close to their own clans, those on the edges hunching their shoulders as though to ward off attack even from their last remaining allies.

Allie was sitting on Richard’s other side. “Hi, stranger,” she said.

“Hi, yourself.”

Her face looked as though she had questions, but he shook his head minutely, and she held her tongue.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“The infirmary,” Richard said. “Doing my best with the wounded.”

“Where’s Dr Abernathy?”

“Gone. The doc went out to Surrey a week ago, just before it went dark. Nobody’s heard from there since.” He shrugged. “I studied medicine from my master’s texts. We even used New Canterbury’s models to practice a few procedures. But I’m no expert. And”—he gave a wry laugh devoid of humour—“it’s a little different working on a live patient.”

Norman nodded. It was difficult to be heard or to hear over the noise, but he persisted. “It would be a lot easier if Heather were here,” he said. New Canterbury’s doctor had stayed back home to help the sick and frightened.

“She’s best staying where she is,” Richard said. “All the same, some people up there are going to die of eighteenth-century illnesses. Blood infection, gangrene, pneumonia, good old-fashioned shock …” He shook his head. “We’ve got no shortage of people willing to pitch in and help, but I’m surrounded by poultices and herbs up there. A lot of apothecary merchants, nurses and midwives … nobody who could use a scalpel.” He sighed. “We’ve even tumbled back to the brink of chanting. Sometimes I wonder what’s going on out there … whether they’ve started bathing in fox piss and hunting witches …”

His young face, peaky and pale from too little sunlight and too many years spent alone in DeGray’s classroom, looked far older than Norman remembered it. Like Allie, the last year had changed him. Alexander’s web of fluffy, artificial safety had been swept from under them all. The harshness of the world had rubbed the puppy fat from their skin and the wool from over their eyes.

Norman and Allie shared a look.

“Where’s DeGray?” Norman said.

“My master was called away on urgent business with the council members. From what I hear, he’s preparing a presentation.”

“About what?”

“I try not to make a habit of prying. His temper …”

Norman couldn’t help smiling. “Beat him at chess yet?”

Master and apprentice had played a score-and-ten times every day for as long as Norman could remember. To his knowledge, Richard had never come close to defeating John DeGray.

The shadow of a smile touched Richard’s lips. “I have faith,” he said.

“There are worse things to hold onto right now.”

The buzzing was suddenly cut short by the groaning of the iron hinges set into the door at the rear of the chambers, behind the council bench. For a moment there was silence, then there was movement. Alexander Cain strode in, dressed in the full ceremonial white robes of New Canterbury, complete with a sweeping cape billowing out behind him. With an unreadable face, he approached the bench, his footfalls echoing in the terse silence that now hung heavy over the room.

Everyone stood. The sound of their feet clapping the white floor sent a deep reverberating boom through the tower’s heart.

Alexander stepped up to his chair, the largest and most throne-like of them all, set a foot higher than the others, and sat while staring directly ahead. His eyes had become jewels that sucked all the light from the room bar that around his own body; when he inhaled, it was easy to believe that hats and crops of hair wobbled, as though drawn towards him.

In those few scant moments, the fibres of each isolated clan were gathered up by his gaze and twisted into a single rope. Suddenly the thousands of empty chairs seemed invisible. Before, they had been fragmented, a broken remnant. Now, they were one, united under the one most of them had bowed to upon altars, sworn fealty to, even prayed to at bedtime since birth: the Messiah. The one who would bring them back to dignity, their loved ones, and all they had lost.