Jack stared at him blankly. 'I know what I feel.'
'No, you think you know what you feel. That's what all this mess is about - everything is an illusion and the truth lies somewhere behind it. Tell me about love when you've been with someone for years, cared for them when they're ill, put up with them when they're miserable or grumpy, taken the sharp side of their tongue and still come back.' He looked away into the dark, and added quietly, 'Tell me about love when you've acted quite appallingly, and the other person has still accepted you.'
'Why are you so concerned about us, Professor Crowther?'
Crowther snorted. 'I'm not concerned. Ridiculous.'
Jack eyed the gentle rise and fall of Mahalia's chest. Occasionally, she would twitch and half-heard words would spring to her lips. His attention was caught by Crowther fumbling inside his coat, and for a second Jack thought the professor was after the mask again. Instead, he pulled out a dog-eared picture.
'What's that?' Jack asked as he shuffled closer to peer at the snap. 'A painting?'
'A photograph.' Crowther's voice was strained.
The picture showed two teenage girls, long, blonde hair, wide smiles, sparkling eyes. Anyone other than Jack would have recognised the fashions of the early nineties.
'Who are they?' Jack asked.
'My daughters.' Crowther's face was shrouded by shadows.
'What are their names?'
'Sophie. And Stacia.'
'Where are they now?'
'You ask a lot of questions,' Crowther said grumpily. He tapped the photo gently with the tip of his index finger. 'I have no idea where they are. They left home. Never really got in touch much.'
'That's not very nice.'
'No, it's not their fault,' Crowther said firmly. 'I wasn't the best of fathers. Quietly obsessed with my own life, you see. Children were a distraction.' He fell silent for a moment, then added quietly, 'It seems to be true what they say - you never really know what you've got till it's gone.' He tucked the photo away.
'Well, I know what I've got with Mahalia,' Jack said adamantly.
Crowther pulled his hat low over his face and shuffled deeper into his overcoat, ready to sleep. His mumbled words issued quietly into the dark. 'Be careful how you treat her, boy.'
'I wouldn't do anything to hurt her, ever.' Jack tried to pierce the shadows beneath the brim of the hat, but Crowther's face was lost to him. 'You care about her, don't you?'
But all that came back was a long, low snore.
They woke together, and realised some sound must have disturbed them. Matt instantly took charge, keeping them silent with a cutting motion of his hand while they listened intently. From a distance, a scraping noise came to them, faint, but in the tomblike quietness it might as well have been an alarm.
Matt grabbed the torch from the wall and they all crept out of the chamber.
The noise was intermittent and indistinct and they would often have to wait for long periods until it emerged again to guide them in the right direction. They moved along a broad corridor and eventually came to a large hall that could well have been some place of worship, for there was a strange air of sanctity present. Exquisite paintings of fantastical scenes lined the walls and in the centre of the floor was something resembling an altar - a large stone table set with objects of reverence. In that room the motion-tones took on a different texture, sombre, haunting, prickling the hairs on the backs of their necks.
The scratching sound came from the foot of the altar. As they moved closer, the torchlight set shadows dancing across the hall. The darkness unfurled to reveal a shape crumpled on the floor, and an odd fluttering movement above it.
'Don't go any closer,' Mahalia said in a weak, strained voice, tugging at Matt's sleeve. He threw her off, curious and unnerved at the same time. He had to see.
The shape fell into relief. It was one of the Golden Ones, a male, resembling Triathus with his beautiful features, faintly shimmering skin and long hair. He was twisted half on his back, occasionally clutching feebly at the altar to try to pull himself up.
Mahalia exclaimed quietly, a note of sadness in her words, for they could tell he was dying. They hurried to his side and though his throat had been slit and there were numerous other wounds in his torso, there was no blood. Instead, his body was breaking up into tiny pieces that transformed into something like moths, glowing and golden as they fluttered up to the shadows that swamped the vaulted roof. Inside him, it appeared as though he were made of nothing more than light.
Crowther pushed Matt to one side and knelt beside the dying god. At first the professor attempted to staunch the fragmenting of the body, but when it became apparent that the process was irreversible, he leaned forward and said, 'Who did this?' The god's lids snapped open to reveal shimmering eyes that ranged back and forth until they fell on Crowther's face. Then, with the last of his strength, the god reached up to grab Crowther's coat to pull him closer. His voice was a thin husk. 'They come,' he said. 'They come.'
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than his hand fell back and his eyelids fluttered shut. The deterioration of his corporeal form suddenly became intense; a cloud of fluttering golden moths soared skyward, blinding all those who watched, and when they finally cleared there was nothing left.
'That's why there's no one here,' Crowther said with horror as he stared at the space where the god had lain. 'They've all been murdered. All of them ... the entire court.'
'Over here!' Jack's voice carried from the edge of the penumbra.
The others ventured over, distracted and disturbed by what they'd seen. A powerful feeling of dread crept up on them. They found Jack looking up at a standard that had been rammed into the floor with such unnatural force that cracks radiated out across the marble from the base of the metal spur. At the top hung a flag made of some kind of shimmering but ultralight metal featuring a stylised drawing of a seashell.
In the thin torchlight, Jack's face appeared to have drained of all blood. 'It's the standard of the Court of the Yearning Heart,' he said weakly.
Matt grabbed him by the shoulders. 'What do you know?'
Jack wiped his hand across a suddenly snotty nose. 'They're one of the worst of the courts. They don't care about humans ... they don't care about anything.' He looked around, eyes blinking stupidly. 'They killed them all. Their own people!'
'We need to get out of here,' Crowther said. 'That poor soul gave us a warning—'
A deep, sonorous tolling echoed somewhere in the depths of the court, moving slowly through the thick stone walls, spreading its warning until every room and corridor was filled with the dim pounding.
'They know we're here,' Mahalia said, wide-eyed. 'How do they know?'
Matt cursed. 'Someone obviously just killed that Golden One ... a mopping-up exercise. They were probably just leaving when we arrived.' He looked around with uncertainty. 'I can't tell if the alarm is coming from ahead of us or behind.'
Their moment of paralysis was broken when they heard what appeared to be the skittering of insects. It took a second for them to grasp that it was the sound of many feet approaching from a great distance.
'An army!' Crowther said with horror. 'Bloody hell fire, there's an army of them!'
Matt propelled the other three in the direction of a large arched opening leading to an annexe dominated by a rectangular shallow pool of water. The torch sent rippling patterns of light and shade moving across the wall as they passed. Beyond lay a processional corridor lined with lush heavily patterned drapes that led on to what may have been a ballroom or a concert hall, the disturbing carvings giving way to gleaming white columns and swirling confections moving along pink walls; a raised dais lay at one end.
The pattering footsteps were louder now, coming from all sides. 'It sounds like children,' Mahalia gasped. She had drawn the Fomorii sword, ready to lash out as she ran.They emerged through an open gilded gate into an enormous indoor garden of trees and well-clipped hedges, wrought iron fences and pergolas covered with flowering creepers, beds of alien blooms of red and blue and purple that released an intoxicating perfume, sheltering boulders and gravelled areas filled with tall grasses. It was designed in such a way that the paths led through it like a maze, revealing each new section only at the last moment. The most startling thing lay at the focal point: a well of sunlight streaming down through a hole in the roof, dazzling in contrast to the gloom that lay all around. A system of mirrors were fixed here and there, so that at certain times they could be turned to give light to the whole garden.
It was only when they'd ventured deep into the complex maze that they realised their mistake. The design made it impossible for them to see the approach of attackers from any direction until they would be upon the companions.
'Let's make it to the sun. It'll be lighter there and we can make a stand,' Matt said fatalistically.
It wasn't long before they realised they were surrounded. Running feet pattered by on every side in the dark, crunching on gravel, rustling past bushes or disturbing wind chimes. The sound became intense, like rain on the window in a heavy winter storm. They could just make out bodies, flashing past gaps in the vegetation and garden architecture, not human, small, smaller even than the people of the Court of Soul's Ease.
Words from a poem kept repeating in Crowther's head: For fear of little men ... for fear of little men. And he did feel fear, and revulsion, and he could see it in the faces of the others. There was something in the size, and the way they scurried rapidly, that suggested rats, bringing up feelings buried since the earliest development of the human mind.
Their pursuers closed in rapidly, waiting for the moment when the four were completely surrounded. And that point came when the companions finally reached the column of sunlight, which centred on a raised platform of white marble. They thrust themselves into it, relishing the warmth on their faces, but all detail beyond the pillar of illumination disappeared into the dark and, reluctandy, they had to step back out of the column of light to see what awaited them.
From their vantage point, they had a view across a larger part of the garden. Small, scurrying figures were everywhere, stretching back into the deep dark, a writhing, squirming sea of rodent life. The nearest ones revealed the previously hidden forms: pale skin, long limbs, squat bodies, nasty eyes and brutish brows.
Crowther couldn't believe that these people had once appeared as the stately, graceful Golden Ones. They had regressed to some point far, far back on their path of evolution, a state that spoke of viciousness and bestial urges, scratching out an existence in the dark places beneath the earth, only emerging at night with murder on their breath and hatred in their hearts.
And as he looked, with the fear swelling like an ocean inside him, he thought he understood why. They appeared to his perception as they truly were, no longer the aloof godlike Golden Ones, but the scrabbling creatures of humanity's darkest nightmares, broken by defeat and bitterness, desperate to prevent men from reaching the next stage of spiritual evolution, filled with all the basest urges. The more they gave in to hatred and murder, the more devolved they became.
They were all carrying tiny knives that glinted in the light. Crowther guessed they could gut and dress a body in minutes, seconds if they fell on a victim in numbers. This was it, then. Mahalia, Matt and Jack braced themselves for any attack, weapons at the ready. Half-heartedly, Crowther raised his staff.
The seething throng parted as a figure moved forward from the darkness at the back. As he neared, they could see that he stood more erect than the others, though he was just as small. He had a long grey beard, but his eyes had the same black, hateful essence as his fellows'. Once he reached the front of the throng, he eyed them with cold malice. 'Fragile Creatures,' he said contemptuously. 'What do you here in the Far Lands?'
Matt stepped forward. 'We're not concerned with whatever war you've got going on amongst your people. We're not going to interfere. We just want to get on our way, and to deal with our own business.'
'Interfere?' The little man laughed hollowly. 'My name is Melliflor, first lieutenant to the Queen of the Court of the Yearning Heart,' he added, regarding them slyly. 'And we do not like Fragile Creatures here in the Far Lands. You have your own home, Son of Adam, and now you have ventured far beyond the fields you know.'
The crowd of little men behind him was like a tidal wave, waiting to break upon the four standing near the light. They surged and pressed, but Melliflor held them back by the force of his charisma while his cunning weighed the situation. He removed his own little knife from his belt and proceeded to clean his long, dirty fingernails in an ostentatiously threatening manner.
One of his army couldn't hold back any longer and darted forward, grasping towards Mahalia's foot. She lashed out savagely with the Fomorii sword and took his arm off at the elbow. He howled in pain, rolling backwards across the floor. A hiss whistled through the assembled army and they rose up as one, ready to strike. Matt, Mahalia and Jack steeled themselves.
'No more sunlight for you,' Melliflor said with false sadness. He raised one arm; the little men prepared to move.