And that decided me; because it was exactly what I had in mind. I reached out with the Spear, as high as I could, and when I could reach no higher I pulled it back and threw. High into the seething smoky air that glittering spearhead rose, and out of its black glass the golden fire blazed like a beacon. I gathered my breath and yelled out, with all the strength I could summon, one word, one name.
Katjka’s.
The Spear tumbled in the air. The light faded. The hollow bestial howlings devoured my voice. The branches heaved and clutched about my throat, my chest, squeezing the breath from me more surely than any constrictor. Beside me Mall jerked, gargled; her fingers slipped from mine. The Spear fell, and I strained my fingers desperately to reach it again. Le Stryge opened his mouth to cackle.
Instead he gaped. Beyond us, up at that endless ribbon of humanity that rolled above, stooping down now, low, lower, roaring close above our heads. With the last gasp in me I whistled, shrilly, on the same high note as that keening wind. To my astonishment Le Stryge slapped his hands to his ears in sudden anguish – and the living cord lashed apart, recoiling like a snapped sinew. Out of it, tumbling, gliding along that note in the air as if it was a bridge, came a human shape, naked, torn, terrible, one eye still visible in a mask of rawness and filth; and the branches sprang and split with the force of her answering, avenging shriek. Out of the air, inches from my hand, she plucked the Spear – and with the force of her fall, unstoppably, she cannoned right into Le Stryge. His arms flew wide as the primeval weapon lanced through his breastbone and stood out a foot behind his back; and his scream was lost in the roar of the flame that enveloped them both.
Katjka recoiled and fell among smoke. The ensnaring branches vanished, spilling us to the ground in a gasping heap; they had never been there at all. What had held us half strangled in the air was the force of Le Stryge’s spell. I hurled myself into the smoke, hand outstretched, and for an
instant I touched warm living fingertips; but as my hand closed over Katjka’s it sank inwards with a feathery insubstantial touch, and a faint rustling sigh, to ash as fine and soft as talcum, and as clean, that blew away almost before it touched the ground. But Le Stryge, shrieking, struggled with the flames, beating them down only to have them billow out anew, prolonging his agony. He stumbled past us, ignoring us, arms outstretched as if he reached out for something. Looking around, we saw why.
There at the clearing’s edge stood Lutz, tall and white-haired and fleshily handsome as ever even in a bloodstained black uniform, his ridiculous monocle popping from his eye as he goggled thunderstruck at the scene. But we can’t have been much better; because beside him, at the head of a little knot of human thugs, all armed and dressed in bloodied City guard uniforms, stood Lieutenant von Albersweg. And in their hands between them, encased in a shielding cage of metal, they held the rough stone mass that was the Graal itself.
Nobody said anything; nobody needed to. The same sinking instant of cold understanding hit us all. That had been Le Stryge’s scheme from the start – to strip the Graal of its warlike, outgoing aspect, the Spear, and of most of its human defenders in searching. Normally the Graal was too strong even for him to assault; but that way, and aided by treachery from within, a small force might seize it. He would have struck at once, if I hadn’t run off with the thing; then he could never be sure the weapon wouldn’t suddenly show up somehow and devastate his attack. But the moment the captain was on his way with it, he’d ordered Lutz to launch the attack, and bring the Graal here – to where, however great its power, it would be imprisoned apart from its other half, and so weakened, altered, even destroyed. Its realm and all its aims would collapse, and into that void would step Le Stryge. And within his iron, austere will the almost infantile drives of the force that had created this revolting place, destruction and degradation. That would be the new heart of Europe.
It was a vision worthy of Hell; and he’d come within an ace of it. He hadn’t even wholly failed, perhaps; not yet. Towards the vision of the Graal the old man staggered even as the flames tore at him within and without, reaching for it, clawing for it, whether for power or for redemption no one could ever say. But Lutz and the lieutenant recoiled in terror from
the flaming, gibbering thing, and Le Stryge staggered, screamed despairingly and stiffened in a last agonized rictus. His will must have slackened then, because the fire roared out again in untrammelled triumph, and he fell backwards like a log, stiff and unresponding. The flames were out before he hit the ground; and among the smoke, untouched, the Spear struck the hillside and stood upright, quivering.
For a moment the air seemed to sing with vast energies, then—
The ground erupted. Crackling black char scattered across the slope, smoking, as the earth where the old necromancer had fallen heaved and shook, spitting stone. The slope juddered, sending everyone sprawling, and a great raw crack went racing across it between the trees, widening with every convulsive heave. Tree roots waved and writhed as the soil split like a broken shell. Another crack went popping and screeching off at right angles, flinging clouds of stinking soil into the air. A tall tree tore free from the entangled mass and collapsed near us with a jarring thud.
Alison was on her feet before me, but off them as quickly. Sailors fared better on this swaying ground; Mall was afoot and retrieving her sword, and Jyp, though lurching wildly, already held his. I staggered over to the patch of blackened debris that had once been the old enchanter, and with an effort I tore free the Spear, rejoicing in the crackle of power in my fingers. Then, without the least hesitation, I went straight for Lutz von Amerningen’s throat.
He and the lieutenant were already running. Turmoil was breaking out around us, more cracks zigzagging out in every direction, toppling tall rocks or splitting them where they stood. Out of the widest crack, higher up the mountainside, something bubbled and burst like boiling mud, and beneath it things glistened and stirred. Another fountain spewed up behind us, shrilling like a broken steam pipe, and the ground around it caved in on a pool of the stinking slime. Avalanches of scree came rattling and roaring down between the pines, fires went out or blazed up wildly and their dark frequenters screeched and scattered or were smashed down in their tracks. Suddenly we were enveloped in a fleeing mass of
creatures, humans, Children of Night in all their stages, even some of those monster shapes hobbling through the trees like blighted blendings of man and beast, lower than either.
The trees were bunching and swaying now, bending independent of the wind as if some huge unseen hand twisted and tormented them. Or as if more than tanglings and twinings linked them, as if this whole dense forest had itself been changed and united by forces beneath the soil, into one organism. I believe it was; it writhed like tendrils or tentacles in a slow-motion spasm of anguish and wrath. But, miracle of miracles, among the revolting crush of creatures it disgorged came some of our own men and women, generally by ones and twos, swept by in the flood and fighting it hard still; but those who saw us and the Spear still had the strength to cheer. We struggled to break through the black tide, but it was like fighting a moving wall now, that hurled us off at every contact.
The humans and the smaller Children seemed hardly to see us in their panic, and the main threat was in being kicked or trampled or sent slithering away down into blackness; but one or two, maddened or bloodthirsty, hewed and hacked at us at sight. The first one fell to Jyp, and another two, an instant later, to Alison, who sent them rolling among the stones before either of us could intervene. The giant Children were easier to dodge, more concerned with keeping their feet because if once they fell their less massive counterparts would swarm over them like a parade of ants; I saw it happen a couple of times. One toppled down the slope, and his own gross weight skewered him kicking upon a slanted tree. We only had to slash at them or shout, and they cleared the paths. It was the inhuman creatures, minor powers or half-incarnate spirits maybe, who were the worst danger. Even as they fled they stopped and turned to fight, as if in their malformed shells self-preservation counted for less than the eternal nagging malice in their minds. A great bowed brute with a long-horned bovine skull came slithering down the rock-face and in among us, swiping about with its huge blunt claws so that we had to duck and scatter. I slashed off one black-tipped horn; Mall’s blow cut the sinews of its neck and it crashed roaring among the heaving roots. Its feet were human, calloused and scorched but strangely ordinary; perhaps it had been as human as us once. Its fall
broke a path through the stampede, and Alison and I sprang through, towards the downhill flank. Mall and Jyp were following, when the sounds above sent warning.
That wind-blown web of bodies still whipped and flailed like a broken belt, sloughing off bodies and filth, and suddenly its severed end came lashing down against the hillside, hard, twice, where we’d been. Screaming voices were suddenly cut off, and an awful rain spattered down onto the trees. ‘
Avaunt!’
yelled Mall, and positively threw Alison out of the way as the other end came smashing down, much closer. The trees upslope flew into matchwood, spraying blood and bodies in all directions.
Alison and I, clinging together, struggled out from under that lashing mass as it thrashed the wood again where we’d been that minute earlier, skidding downhill in a mass of tumbling rocks and rotten tree-limbs. I lifted the Spear in the hope it might somehow shield us, and looked back desperately to see if there was any sign of the others, or of our quarry; but in that flickering, sparking confusion it was impossible to tell. In the wan moonlight the flanks of the mountain ran with great rippling shudders like the skin of a branded horse, the cracks oozed and bubbled. As those lashing ends slashed and struck, almost at random now, more and more soil fell away. Where there should have been rock, it exposed a glistening dark stuff beneath, not solid but churning and writhing, forms that scrabbled and heaved across one another in a sink of dark slime. It looked organic – but only when I saw the oddly misshapen limb that stuck out of it did I begin to understand.
Nothing dwelt on the mountain, or even within it. The Brocken
was
the mountain, a kind of single living creature, composed of cells like any other, like ourselves. But here the cells were not its own; they were the human bodies it had gathered to itself, and gradually degenerated and subsumed until they were no more than mindless things sliding in a morass. Somewhere beneath, at the heart of the mountain, there must lurk the centre, the queen, the directing mind that ensnared and degraded – Chernobog.
That dark intellect, that black near-Absolute from the misty margins of the Rim, had built itself a physical body from its followers, deluded and entrapped. It was a cult become a colony organism, like a giant coelenterate, and as venomous. Those swirling skeins of humanity served it like tentacles, the individuals in them of no more concern than any few cells in my fingertips were to me – except for that extra touch of malice, revelling in the things it wasted. And
naturally, like any body, it had strong defences. Now it was wounded, maybe in a vital organ, and flailing in anguish; and those defences were turning on their tormentors. This flood wasn’t as random as it looked. It was a way of getting its defence resources, as quick and thoroughly wasteful as white cells, to one place fast.
‘You’re right!’ gasped Alison. ‘They’re its immune system, and we’re the infection. Let’s spread! Any sign of the others?’
Anxiously we scanned uphill, and spotted some of our people toiling across the slopes, ducking into cover to avoid random shots and flying stones and sludge. A darting radiance still defied the shadows, Mall bounding from one little group to another, helping them against the howling flocks which fought to reject or absorb their infecting presence. I saw Jyp not far behind, daring wrath from above to slither across the hillside, evidently spying out anxiously for us. We waved, and it was Mall who saw us first; but she didn’t wave back, she pointed, again and again, with furious emphasis to the hillside below us. ‘The shelf!’ shouted Alison suddenly. ‘The landing ground! She can see it from up there!’
And she wouldn’t just tell us to get out for nothing – ‘
Lutz!
He must be headed for it!’
Jyp was gesticulating, just as urgently.
‘They’re cut off!’ snapped Alison. ‘And we aren’t – but …’
She looked at the slope below, impassable with monstrous flows. ‘It’s too far!’ she gasped. ‘Got to go around!’
‘Get him!’
came a yell from above.
‘Seize the wight! Carve the codpiece off him if a’ can – but save the Graal!’
As an angelic summons it left something to be desired, but it was far louder and clearer than it should have been over that row, even with Mall’s lungs, and it seemed to set new spring in my bruised heels. Alison went bounding down the unstable rocks with gazelle energy, after her beloved Graal; while I leaped and stumbled over them with my heart in my mouth, ready to feel the avalanche pull my aching ankles from under me any second, or be stamped flat by a horde of stinking diabolical abortions. Only one thing kept me going, the desire to get my hands on that bastard Lutz; and I grated my teeth as I heard the sound of airship engines
being warmed up below.
‘We can’t do it!’ I yelled to Alison as I caught her up. ‘There’s got to be a faster way—’
She shook me off. ‘Know where you can hire a bloody horse?’
That gave me a jolt. I looked down vaguely at the Spear in my hand; and then I leapt about six feet as something warm and wet snuffled in my ear. The white horse looked at me as if I was a total idiot, the way horses do. Giddily I beckoned him, and he came, snuffling at my pockets. ‘Later, chum,’ I told him, and swung myself into the stirrups, the same perfect fit. I seized the reins, and prodded him gently with my heels. ‘Watch your footing – and follow the lady!’