The Beauty of Destruction (68 page)

Epilogue

Ancient Britain

Tangwen went walking in the woods. The child was making noise, but that didn’t bother her. Unless the forest spirits turned on her there was little that could threaten them. She had her bow, her hatchet, and her dagger for bears, lynxes and wolves, though the land was slowly returning to normal, and the animals mostly left people alone.

All had tried to give her advice on being a mother. In the end she had decided to do what she felt was right once she had worked out how to keep them both alive, though only the girl was with her now. She had given birth to the twins that were not twins in early winter, in Gaul, where she had found the rest of her tribe. Come summer she had deemed the girl strong enough to travel. Tangwen had named her Kush. It probably wasn’t a girl’s name in the hot southern lands, but she did not care. Kush deserved to be remembered. Love of her children, well Kush anyway, did not stop her from still being very angry with Britha. The boy she had named Fachtna. A revenge against his father.

Shortly after Fachtna’s birth the brass scorpion had turned up. Tangwen had tried to get rid of it. Tried everything, including violence, but the thing would not leave the boy’s side. It at least had the sense to hide when others were present.

The scorpion was one of a number of reasons that Fachtna frightened her. She knew it was not good to feel that way about a child, but she couldn’t help it. The child never cried. He just stared. A
dryw
from one of the Gaulish tribes had advised her to drown Fachtna in the river, an offering to the gods. She had told him that she had seen the gods. The death of a child seemed of little interest to them.

When she had returned to Ynys Prydain she had gone to the lands of the Trinovantes, and visited with Anharad. The woman who had done so much to keep them together, to keep them
alive when they had fled from the spawn
of Andraste, was little more than a shell now. She
had lost so much, and the still-silent Mabon was
well on his way to becoming a warrior. He would
soon be rushing off to risk himself for honour and
glory in disputes and squabbles that seemed so petty after
she had seen the Otherworld burn. More and more the
memories came to seem little more than bad dreams. Anharad’
s one solace was Caithna. Tangwen had considered taking the
girl back north to her people, the strange and fierce
Pecht, but if what Britha had said was true then
little of her tribe was left. The girl might have
been the tribe’s only survivor. Still, she was starting
to come alive, and her presence in turn enlivened Anharad.
Despite everything Tangwen had left Anharad as a friend.

One
day I will go north,
she thought.
If Caithna is
of an age, and wishes it, she can accompany me
. I will take Kush with me and we can meet
these fierce, moonstruck northerners.
But for now, a walk
in the woods.

She had looked for her Father, but the crystal cave had been empty.

She had smelled
the bodies before she found them. They had been drained
of blood and then flayed. A warning. She smiled.

‘I know you’re there!’ she called. ‘Take me to him.’ The blood-painted, ash-covered
gwyllion
seemed to grow out of the trees like the forest ghosts they were feared to be.

She was marched through the woods
blindfolded. They had even blindfolded Kush because they knew no
better. They had taken her upriver in log dugout boats.
Finally they had removed the blindfold, and mother and child
had crawled through the tunnel and into the earthen cave
supported by the root structure of a mighty oak. It
was where she and Kush had first spoken with Guidgen.
The weapons that had been blessed by the chalice were
leant against the earthen walls, oiled and wrapped in skins.
The Red Chalice was in the centre of the fire.
She realised then how much she hated the thing. The
old
dryw
was there, sat on the other side of
the fire, Germelqart too. Both of them looked fatter and
happier than when she had last seen them. They took
turns embracing her. It was difficult in the cramped confines
of the earthen cave.

‘I had not thought to see
you again, Tangwen Serpent-Child,’ Germelqart said. He was watching
Kush wriggle in her lap.

‘It takes more than a
hill falling on top of me to kill me,’ she
said, smiling.

‘May I hold her?’ Guidgen asked. Tangwen nodded
and the old
dryw
lifted the child out of her
lap and started fussing over her, making her laugh and
smile. ‘What did you name her?’

‘Kush,’ she said quietly.
Germelqart nodded in gratitude and then had to turn away
with tears in his eyes.

‘She has the blood of
the gods in her veins,’ Guidgen said, tickling Kush’s
belly, making her laugh and kick her legs about. ‘Yes
you do! Yes you do!’

‘The boy?’ Germelqart asked. Tangwen
considered asking him how he knew.

‘Fostered by my people,’
Tangwen said, trying to suppress the guilt she felt for
baby Fachtna. ‘He will be trained as a warrior, though
if he shows aptitude he will be given the opportunity
to become a
dryw
.’ Germelqart nodded. Neither of them commented
on the fact that it sounded like Tangwen was planning
on having little to do with Fachtna.

‘But it is
Kush who has the blood of Andraste in her? Who
is the child of the goddess as much as she
was the child of Fachtna, Britha, and yourself?’ Guidgen asked.
Britha frowned. The old
dryw
had made Kush’s parentage
sound so complicated, and it was, she had been born
of magic. It was much simpler for Tangwen, however. Kush
was her daughter.

‘We need to protect your daughter and
her line,’ Germelqart said. Tangwen gritted her teeth. She did
not like the way that they were making plans for
the child already when she was but seven moons old. ‘
And the chalice, and the weapons.’

‘We need to look
to the threats against Ynys Prydain. There are other items
of great magic out there, others who carry the blood
of the gods in their veins, the unquiet dead of
the Underworld, the magics of the fair folk from the
Otherworld …’

‘The Otherworld is fallen. I saw it burn,’ Tangwen
told them. Both of them stared at her, clearly not
sure what to say to that.

‘Will you help us?’
Germelqart asked. Guidgen had drawn an iron-bladed knife and
held it against the palm of his hand, away from
the wriggling Kush. Tangwen thought on it. It could never
be harder than the winter before last had been, surely.
At
least now they knew what they faced. She nodded. The cold iron scored a line of blood on the old man’s palm.

‘We will make a Circle,’ Guidgen said.

Terminal Island, Los Angeles – Now –

Grace breathed in and held it. Her finger squeezed the trigger. The rifle kicked back into her shoulder, and the crack of the bullet echoed out across the water between the artificial islands. The Pennangalan fell over, but she would get back up. Grace had hidden herself as well as she could with the time she’d had, but the ridiculously dressed post-apocalyptic pirate marines had a good idea where she was now. They were holding off, presumably as a result of du Bois’s negotiations. She could hear the shouting.

Grace looked through the Purdey’s new scope, settling the crosshairs on Mr Brown. A bullet, even a nanite-tipped one, would do no good. She shifted the scope so it settled on du Bois. Even now it still felt like it had been him. Pretty much the ultimate betrayal, and behaviour at odds with everything she knew about du Bois since he had helped her out of the blood-soaked ruins in Spitalfields. She moved the rifle again until it settled on King Jeremy. A sociopathic little prick who used people as his playthings. It would be so easy to squeeze the trigger. Mr Brown had to die in a nuclear explosion. Had to. It would kill her, and the others, but frankly their plan was stupid and doomed to failure. They were going right into the heart of the madness. She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t think this was going to be much of a world to live in, and Brown deserved to be destroyed for what he’d done. She wasn’t quite sure how old she was, because nobody had thought to remember the date she’d been born in the rookery she’d grown up in, but she was more than a hundred-and-forty years old. It was a good innings in anybody’s book.

They were turning now, moving towards the submarine. Her throat was suddenly dry. The crosshairs were over the back of King Jeremy’s head. Her finger curled round the trigger, started to squeeze. Then she relaxed, looked up from the scope and smiled.
No
. If she died, if she further harmed her life in any other way, then he won. He’d implanted the memories to split her and du Bois up. She still wasn’t sure why he had done that, but she wanted to make sure he had failed.

Working quickly she packed the Purdey back into its case, and strapped it to her webbing, all the while looking around. Patron, du Bois, and the others had disappeared into the sub, and now she suspected that all bets were off as far as the pirate marines went. She picked up Beth’s
LMG
that she’d swapped for her carbine, checked it, and clipped it to its sling. She could see some movement, but nobody had started shooting yet. Grace had picked her position on the cargo containers not just because it provided a clear view of the kill-zone, but because it provided a straight run to the Cougar.

‘All right, boys,’ she muttered to herself. ‘You don’t shoot me, I won’t shoot you.’ She started to run, leaping from container to container. Immediately she was taking sporadic, but annoyingly accurate, fire. She felt the hammer blows of the bullets impacting her nanite-reinforced bike armour, staggering her, but she kept running. She leapt off a stack of three containers, dropping onto a stack of two. Stopping to suppress some of the heavier and more accurate fire, she aimed up at a sniper position on one of the cranes. Tracers flew upwards, sparking off superstructure or arcing off over the water. She was running again, dropping down from a stack of two to a stack of one, bullets flying past her from gunmen between the stacks. A bullet creased her armoured skull, and she almost went down. She fired on the run, inaccurately trying to suppress the most concentrated areas of fire and the sniper. She reached the end of the container and leapt, getting shot in the legs from below before landing and collapsing, with a cry of pain, on the roof of the Cougar.

‘Fuck!’ she screamed. She pulled a fragmentation grenade from her webbing, pulled the pin, let the spoon flick off, cooked it for several seconds, and then dropped it between the Cougar and the container. The explosion rocked the armoured vehicle. She saw a body bounce off the lip of the armoured truck’s roof.
This is
going to hurt
. She rolled off the top of the vehicle and dropped to the ground. She screamed out and collapsed. She was getting shot again. She sent a long, undisciplined burst of fire past the front of the vehicle, and then another past the back, just trying to keep the pirate marines’ heads down. She staggered to her feet and dragged the door of the Cougar open, swinging on it, which was the reason that the marine sitting in the driver’s seat missed her with the two rounds from the Beretta M9A1. Grace dragged him down from the vehicle and stamped on his face, sending pain lancing up her legs. She grabbed the pistol. It would replace the one she’d lost in the chase, and she could convert it to full automatic if she ever found the tools. Grace climbed into the relative armoured safety of the Cougar, slamming the door and locking it behind her. The submarine was pulling away from the dock as she drove away in a hail of gunfire.

Grace had used the weight and armour of the Cougar to bully her way through LA. The streets were filled with the dead as the inhabitants killed more and more of each other in a constant no-holds-barred riot. Closer to the sea the city had already started to warp and mutate, the result of what Grace thought was the awakened Seeders’ terraforming process. Kanamwayso had infected LA like a virus, replicating even as it killed.

She had healed as much as she could, relying on the energy bars and drinks rather than wasting any of the remaining drips. She had taken a little fire as she had driven into the castle in Laurel Canyon. Most of the gunmen had died in the chase. The fight to clear the structure was very one-sided. Then she had taken all the food, water, fuel, ammunition, and anything else useful she could find, and loaded it into the back of the Cougar.