Mahalia wasn't convinced, but she couldn't see another option. She pushed Jack in first, then forced her way in behind. It was cramped inside. The hard rock of the cairn jabbed into backs, ribs, heads, elbows.
With Matt's help, Mahalia rebuilt the doorway, and just as the last stone slipped into place, the bubble disappeared with a faint pooofl
Mahalia's heart instantly sprang into her throat. Through the gaps between the rocks, she saw the Baobhan Sith surge like wild animals into the space they had just vacated. Her breath caught. Would they see them hiding there, rip the cairn open and drag them out to tear out their throats with those needle-teeth?
For a second it seemed that they might. They came right up to where the opening had been, rushing round the edge of the cairn emitting that bone-chilling shriek. Yet none of them bent down to peer into the darkened cracks, or tugged at the precariously piled rocks. She could only guess that they must be predators with minimal intelligence. The thought did nothing to ease her fear.
For the long hours of the night, she remained rigid, afraid that the slightest movement would be heard; it felt as if she hadn't even taken a breath, and by the time the darkest hours had passed her chest burned with the strain.
The shrieking died down after a while, but the Baobhan Sith continued to roam in their masses, and on several occasions one came right up to the cairn, as if it had seen something within. Jack's nails dug into her shoulder more than once, but still she maintained her motionless vigil.
And for all that time Crowther stood stock-still nearby, the mask throwing off loops and warped flashes of light. The night creatures shied away from him like whipped dogs.
Finally, the sky began to lighten. In one eerie moment, the entire seething plain of night creatures stopped moving, their noises draining away, and they turned as one to look towards the point where the sun would shortly rise. After a moment that may have been fearful or perhaps even respectful, they began to slink back to their cairns.
Mahalia felt Matt flinch against her back. Everything rested on the next few moments.
All around, the Baobhan Sith started to slip into their holes, the rocks magically rolling back into place. The night creatures passed on either side, heading home, and at last one began to stalk direcdy to the entrance. It paused outside, puzzling that the opening had been filled, and then began to pluck the rocks away with its unfeasibly long, thin fingers.
Matt tapped Mahalia on the shoulder and whispered, 'Now.'
Without thinking twice, Mahalia drove forward, sending the remaining rocks flying. Jack and Matt piled out after her.
The Baobhan Sith drew back, hissing like a cat, but it didn't attack. Instead, it cast repeated menacing glances as it passed by them, easing into the cairn and replacing the rocks behind it.
More Baobhan Sith streamed by on all sides, snarling or scraping the air with their talons, but not one of them made a move towards the companions. The three of them were frozen in the face of the preternatural terror, until finally they accepted that they weren't going to be harmed. The Baobhan Sith were driven by one primal fear: of the rising sun. Matt motioned for the other two to follow him, and they quickly picked a path, continually veering away from any of the Baobhan Sith who came too close, just in case.
Mahalia was soaked in sweat. She still couldn't believe they had got out; she had resigned herself to a quick and painful death. Glancing back hopefully, she was overjoyed to see Crowther plodding relentlessly behind them. She felt a deep and surprising connection with the professor that had crept up on her; even more surprisingly, it felt good. Once they found some way to get the mask off him, she was determined to let him know that he was a good person and that she trusted him. She felt there was no higher recommendation.
By the time the sun emerged fully above the horizon, the last of the night creatures were gone, and only then did they allow themselves the chance to celebrate. Mahalia and Jack hugged each other and then they both hugged Matt.
'I thought our number was up there!' Matt gushed. 'Good old Crowther. Who'd have thought the old fool would save the day?'
Mahalia went over to thank the professor personally, but he gave no response at all. She returned to the others, undeterred.
Their survival invigorated them, wiping away the exhaustion they had felt for most of the journey. 'You know what?' Mahalia said. 'If we can get through that, we can get through anything.'
'Don't speak too soon,' Matt cautioned, but his face showed that he clearly felt the same way.
The Plain of Cairns ended in a band of lush greenery. Once they saw it, they ran as fast as they could, whooping and skipping. Just beyond, in the shade of some tall trees, lay a series of lakes. They dived in fully clothed, washing the dust from their hair and throats.
Afterwards, they lay on the banks, resting and talking quietly, but they knew it was only a brief respite. The sky overhead mutated furiously with colours and sounds.
'Close,' Matt mused as he looked up at it. He nodded to a steep, grassy rise beyond the lakes. 'Just over there, I would say.'
They steeled themselves, then set off, climbing slowly, putting off what they knew lay ahead. As they neared the top of the rise, the House of Pain loomed up in the distance. It appeared to reach right up into the sky itself, but their minds still couldn't absorb any detail. They saw it as just a black smudge on their vision, and the more they looked, the more it made their heads hurt and the queasier they felt.
Finally they reached the top of the rise. As they looked out across another massive plain of grassland and rocky outcroppings, they realised that the Baobhan Sith hadn't been the worst thing at all.
Purple haze drifted as far as the eye could see, like the smoke of some First World War battiefield. Within it and behind it lay the army of the Lament-Brood, now swelled to apocalyptic proportions. The Whisperers faced the rise, completely surrounding the House of Pain, their numbers disappearing into the misty distance.
'Jesus H. Christ,' Matt said in awe.
'It looks like they've taken over everybody in the Far Lands,' Jack gasped. 'There must be a hundred thousand of them.'
'And there's just four of us.' Mahalia turned from the terrible spectacle and faced them with glittering eyes. Inside her, passion carved its way to the surface. This was it: her time. There was no backing away, no chance of survival. It was all about going out in the best way possible and she didn't care about death. She just wanted to do it right.
She smiled tightly and said, 'Game on.'
chapter sixteen The House of Pain
'I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be LET alone." There is all the difference.'
Greta Garbo
Despair washed up from the grassy plain on the back of a hundred thousand whispers. Mahalia, Matt and Jack did their best to keep its insidious flow at bay - humming, chattering, staring deep into each other's eyes - but at some level they were still tainted.
'They're not going to let us leave, are they?' Jack said dismally. He glanced back across the massed ranks as if he hoped they'd all been magicked away while his gaze was averted. 'We should have known it would turn out like this. We never stood a chance.'
Matt's face was filled with the realisation of their failure. He looked back at the Plain of Cairns and then over the Lament-Brood. 'He's right - it's all over. We can't go back, and if we go forward we'll be wiped out in seconds ... and any minute now they're going to come and get us.' He bowed his head, attempting to come to terms with his impending death. Taking a deep breath, he looked up and forced a smile. 'No point crying about it. This is it.'
'Then we should go out in style,' Mahalia stressed. 'I don't want to be forgotten. I don't want to be some nameless loser, or if people do remember me, I don't want them calling me some selfish, spoilt little girl. I want everyone to remember me like the Culture talked about those five who stood up against the gods when they came back. They're like some myth now ... like King Arthur
and his knights or something. That's what I want.' She bit her lip hard, holding back her emotions so that she could appear defiant.
Matt shrugged. 'I don't think there's going to be anybody reporting back—'
'You don't know! Maybe the Void or whatever you want to call it will see us taking a stand here and think, If all the human race is like that, I don't stand a chance. I'm going back where I came from ...'
Matt grinned, then shook his head dismissively.
'Don't laugh! You don't know. Sometimes when you do things, they take on a life of their own. Actions have energy.' She waved him away and went to cross the rise to the downward slope.
Matt caught her arm. 'You're right - we need to do this together. It's Roarke's Drift time.' He looked from Mahalia to Jack. 'You'd better say your goodbyes.'
His words brought home to them the awful truth of what was about to happen. Jack and Mahalia fell into each other's arms with a desperation that brought tears to their eyes. Their kisses were just as hard and before they pulled apart they whispered into each other's ears the promise of what might have been.
Once Mahalia broke away, she instantly became unemotional, didn't even cast another look at Jack. 'OK,' she said. 'Let's do it.'
Before they began, she hurried back to Crowther. 'Professor, you helped us on the Plain of Cairns and we're eternally grateful for that - you saved our lives. But we need you again. And this is even worse. If there's anything you can do ... anything...' There was no response, but Mahalia was convinced that he had heard her. Against all her natural reservations, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him, just briefly, before returning to the others.
'All set?' Matt asked, as if they were going for a stroll.
As they moved down the rise, the whispering grew more intense and the urge to lie down and give up became overwhelming. 'Fight it for as long as you can,' Matt said. He glanced over at Jack. 'You're going to do the business?'
'As much as I can. Till I burn out - or blow the universe to kingdom come.'
Facing the Lament-Brood, they were struck by the eeriness of the scene. The Whisperers stood like statues, facing the four of them, with only the rusding sound of their despairing voices to indicate that they were alive. There was a sea of them, all monsters that had once had living shapes but were now twisted and broken, with bones protruding, skulls gleaming, unnatural but perversely improved, turned into killing machines. The purple mist blew back and forth in a light breeze, leaking from the orifices and the ruptures in their bodies. And as the mist hid and revealed and hid again, Matt had the impression that there was only one beast waiting for them, a massive organism with one mind and one terrible purpose.
Mahalia saw the weapons - the swords and spears and axes - and wondered how long the four of them would last: three minutes? One? Thirty seconds?
She expected Matt to give a signal, but he just pulled out the scimitar he had brought from the Court of Soul's Ease and charged down the slope. She followed, her Fomorii blade rusted and bloodstained, ready to take as many of them with her as she could manage.
Jack was at her side, but then he flexed himself and let out a small burst of the white light he kept coiled within him. It wasn't the full destructive force she had witnessed at the entrance to the Court of the Dreaming Song, but it was enough to blast five of the Lament-Brood into pieces. He was trying to eke his power out before he was struck down by the debilitating exhaustion it always left in its wake. The old, familiar Mahalia wished he would go for broke and take out the whole of Existence; she didn't want to think of it going on without her.
And then they were at the foot of the slope and into the first rank of Whisperers. Matt took a head off at the shoulders, then brought his sword down sharply to cleave another skull from temple to chin. The Lament-Brood didn't wait to be attacked. They surged forward, wielding their weapons like automata. The only thing that saved Matt from being overwhelmed was that the Whisperers were packed so tightly they could barely swing their swords.
Matt parried, ducked, tried to counter-attack, but they already had him on the back foot. Though she fought wildly herself, Mahalia was aware of what a good fighter he was, striking and defending with all the skills of a professional.
The thought was gone in an instant as the sickening whispering rose up around her and the purple mist washed into her mouth and nostrils. All she could see was a wall of bodies pressing against her. She put her weight behind her sword and drove it into a belly; the cruelty of the Fomorii design allowed the serrated edge to rip through the skin and entrails with ease. She pulled it out, soaking herself in a spout of cold blood, and rammed it up into a bared throat.
Two were down, yet already her arms were ringing from the force of her attack and her muscles stung. She wasn't strong enough to keep it up for long. She wished she'd trained more, not been so arrogant, thought ahead, but she'd always considered that in the event of any crisis she'd be away, leaving some other sucker to stand and fight.
Her concentration slipped and one of the Lament- Brood broke through to ram a spear towards her chest. Jack came in from nowhere, deflecting the weapon with his arm before releasing a concentrated blast of his explosive power that reduced the attacker to atoms. Mahalia was half-aware that Jack's eyes were smoking as if a mighty fire raged within him.
Time stretched out for ever, every second packed with cut and parry, ducking and striking, feeling every ache and pain, every scratch racked up on their bodies. But they had made hardly any inroad into the ranks.
And then an enormous roaring rose up behind them, like a jet taking off. Mahalia had a half-impression of something scarlet and gold rushing past her shoulder and then a fifty-foot square of Lament-Brood exploded ahead of them, showering body parts over a wide area and smelling like a bonfire at a landfill.
The shockwave knocked her on to her back. When her head had stopped ringing, she looked back to see Crowther striding from the slope on to the plain. From her perspective, it looked as if he had grown in size, was still growing, filling with a terrible power. Walls of light shimmered off the silver mask - red, blue, green, yellow. Things formed in the air all around him, seemingly out of the very air itself. She saw a rose fold in on itself, becoming a spectral face in agony, becoming a hawk; and nearby, a lizard, more haunting faces in various stages of torment, lightning, cloud-forms, fire. The emotional aspect of the mask made him even more terrible, and it seemed that every step shook the ground.
A Whisperer who ventured too close was taken apart, the skin, muscles, organs, bones all unpeeling to scatter on the ground. And Crowther didn't even give him an instant's attention.
Mahalia rolled away to get out of his path. He strode by, another blast of energy roaring out to devastate another section of the army. The Lament-Brood were rooted, not really understanding what they were facing. For a second, Mahalia entertained the fantasy that they might win; that Crowther could just keep walking right up to the House ofPain, blasting anything that came near him, with Mahalia, Jack and Matt hurrying in his gore-soaked wake.
But two things made her realise this would never happen. As Crowther marched on, a bolt of scarlet lightning roared from his head, twisted and crackled in the air and then rushed towards Matt. It was only his battle- heightened reactions that allowed him to throw himself out of the way at the last instant, and even then the blast threw him head over heels, the soles of his boots smoking with heat from the explosion. Crowther could no longer control the mask.
The second thing happened at the same time. The Lament-Brood regrouped and drove forward. With the luxury of the space around her, Mahalia had a better view across the plain, and there, in the midst of it all, she was overwhelmed by the weight of numbers ranged against them. A hundred thousand didn't do it justice; it was just a number. The Lament-Brood reached to hell and back. Even Crowther, with all his elemental fury, could not get through them.
And so they battled, for fifteen minutes or more, with Crowther laying waste to vast numbers of the Lament- Brood, but with more always flooding in to take their place. Mahalia, Matt and Jack took up the rear, preventing any of the Whisperers from coming up on Crowther's blind-side, but with eerie prescience he was always aware of any attack at his back, and picked off the warriors with unceasing accuracy.
Mahalia, Matt and Jack hacked and slashed, and occasionally danced out of the way of the mask's wild blasts. Some came too close for comfort, and they were all soon sporting burn marks on arms or face. The Lament- Brood replaced each fallen warrior almost instantly. The intense background noise of the constant whispering reached out with its infection of despair. On more than one occasion, Jack's sword-arm began to drop and Mahalia had to knock it back up.
It was Matt, always on guard, never missing anything, who saw the movement along the rise. He kept glancing up as he fought, unable to give it his full attention, so he couldn't be quite sure if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. Eventually he couldn't deny it.
'I think,' he shouted breathlessly, 'we've got help.'
Caitlin was the first to crest the rise. With eyes that could pick out a grain of sand a mile distant, she instantly took in Mahalia, Matt and Jack battling in the sea of swarming bodies. It was difficult to miss Crowther, who appeared, to her eyes, to be enveloped in a scarlet mist.
The vast army of the Lament-Brood had only given her a few seconds' pause - she had expected some kind of defence to prevent a frontal assault on the House of Pain, and so she had come prepared.
She felt the others appear at her back. The warriors of the Djazeem numbered no more than five hundred, but Caitlin knew the Lament-Brood would find them as difficult to fight as the desert sand. She hoped it would give them enough of an advantage.
Oddly, in that moment, her thoughts turned to Matt. She realised how close she had grown to him before she had been flung out into Birmingham and how much she had missed him. It was coupled with a dull sense of anger now that she was close to finding out who had murdered Carlton. She was convinced she knew who it was, and there would be a terrible price to pay. When she tried to picture Carlton's face, she saw only Liam's, driving the thump of blood in her head.
As if falling from a lofty peak, Caitlin plummeted into the wind-blasted Ice-Field at the back of her head and the Morrigan rushed forth. Everywhere was red. The thunder of war drums was all around. She moved forward.
She'd loosed all the arrows in her quiver in rapid fire before she was halfway down the rise. Every one had hit its target, carving out a small opening in the ranks of the Lament-Brood. They were all facing away from her, their attention focused on Crowther and the others.
As she sprinted past the first victims, Caitlin plucked up a spear and used it to pole vault over the heads of the first Whisperers. As she came down, she whipped the spear around, taking out eyes, ramming it into faces, hacking at anything in range.
Bodies fell under her. She was a blur of violence, discarding the spear and snatching up a sword when that became the best option, spraying herself with gore, moving so quickly she opened up a space around her.
And then, as the Djazeem army attacked, she drove forward, and she was terrible to behold, an engine of destruction cutting a swathe through the ranks of the Lament-Brood. Never in the history of the Far Lands had so many fallen before one Fragile Creature. Nothing could deter her. She was too quick, too brutal, darting, ducking, leaping on to shoulders and then using them as a springboard to drive forward. She turned acrobatic loops, but the sword never stopped slashing and she never tired.