The Sword of Feimhin (11 page)

‘I'll stop it. I'll stop Nidhoggr. I won't allow it.'

‘You cannot stop it – not even with your blessed power. Go – go now! Leave this chamber while there is yet time.'

‘I will not go. I came to save you and your people. I won't abandon the Momu or the Cill. Where you go, I go.'

Under a whitewashed gothic archway in Christ's Church Hall in Spitalfields – a space twice the size of the entire nave of the Church of the English Martyrs – Mark sipped at a mug of tea while watching a queue of hungry people move across the galley. At the head of the queue there were four women doling out food, all wearing baseball caps. The homeless, numbering well over a hundred, each picked up a tray and then collected their bread, chicken, vegetables and finally milky tea poured from huge aluminium teapots into plastic cartons. Once the food had been collected, the figures shuffled away to an assortment of tables. There was little talking and even fewer smiles, and there were so many hungry that they crowded the space, overfilling the tables so that a small oblong meant to accommodate four was made to fit seven or eight.

They called it The Refuge, but as far as Mark could see that was just a euphemism for a soup kitchen. Soup
kitchens were hardly a novelty in London, where there had always been homeless people, penniless and desperate, eking out a troubled survival on the streets with little or no privacy and even less protection. But the expression on these faces reflected more than hunger. Mark had seen the streets where they lived. He understood the desperation, the sullen fear in their eyes. At least Father Touhey would be well looked after here.

They had accompanied the elderly priest across the mews and into a small terraced house. Henriette had helped him to the kitchenette where she washed most of him free of the Scalpie's blood and the scum that had sprayed everywhere from Nan's extermination of the Grimlings. Henriette had also discovered the telephone number for Christ's Church and had helped Father Touhey into a change of clothes while Mark and Nan had a few minutes alone. They had also washed their hands and faces in the kitchen sink, but they could find no towel to dry themselves off. They just looked at one another and laughed. Nan put her arms about Mark's neck. She lifted up her face and kissed him. ‘You were the real target – you know that?' she said.

‘Maybe.'

‘We were a team.'

‘A pretty good team at that.'

‘The Grimlings were just a distraction.'

‘Some distraction!'

‘The Scalpie would have killed you.'

‘We were lucky – we had Penny's help.'

‘Yes.'

She kissed him again. ‘Oh, Mark, I sensed … If you had died …'

‘We both would have died?'

She nodded. She hugged him fiercely, protectively.

It was a strange feeling, wonderful but also strange, to be kissed after fighting off an attempt at his life. As if the singleness, the oneness, of being had changed to something bigger, a duality of hearts and minds.

His fingers brushed her cheek. ‘Did it frighten you?'

‘Half to death.'

It was a joke. He chuckled, gazed into her dark eyes.

He had felt it exactly as Nan had. If one had died, the other would not have wanted to live anyway. That was as uplifting as it was disturbing, but it was also a thrilling discovery – an empowering one. Somehow it had everything to do with the fact that, unlike Alan and his First Power, they really did share the Third Power. This led them to a union of being; a oneness, that made them different. Mark didn't pretend to fully understand it, or what it was capable of, but it had certainly proved useful in fighting the Scalpie and the Grimlings. What else might it be capable of when they understood it better?

And now, studying the activities of the soup kitchen, he felt less than comfortable in a borrowed coat and baggy trousers in lieu of his leather jacket and jeans, which were
being cleaned of the Scalpie's blood. He was beginning to wonder about the patterns of events in London.

From a brief conversation he had had with one of the pastors, it would appear that a legion of homeless – estimates suggested as many as half a million – lived on the streets. You couldn't walk a block without tripping over them, or being exposed to the begging hands or pans. And a more menacing legion of people – those Henriette had named Razzamatazzers – prowled the streets after dark.

Somehow, while he had been away on Tír, law and order in London had gone to pot. From what little he had been able to gather from talking to people, it had happened with surprising speed. Over no more than a year or two, Razzamatazzers were everywhere – addicted to looting and burning. Nobody really understood how, or why it had happened, only that normal policing had failed, leading to the rise of paramilitaries funded by big business. The role of the paramilitaries had mushroomed as the anarchy had spread, to the extent that they now provided a semi-official protective army. More sinister still was the rise of the leather-clad ‘Skulls', who were little better than professional thugs. Rumour had it they were exterminating the homeless and Razzers after dark and disposing of them like garbage. It was hardly surprising that many of the respectable population had fled the city for the Home Counties, or further beyond.

Patterns!

Mark also found himself questioning the hostility they
had encountered. Was it a coincidence that the aggression shown by the homeless in the alleyways they had fled through, had progressed to a more calculated violence from the two thugs? Then, finally, on to the Razzers attacking the church and the attack by the Scalpie and his swarm of Grimlings? It seemed to Mark that there had been a definite pattern there. And patterns suggested organisation.

Somebody had put on cheerful background music – some ancient Bob Marley number – and the words ‘Everything's gonna be all right,' floated through the space.

A loud chuckle and a voice came from behind him: ‘You t'ink everyt'ing gonna be all right, Mark Grimstone?'

Mark turned to face the towering black woman, Henriette. Back at the priest's lodgings, Father Touhey's housekeeper had acquired an ebony walking cane and changed her dress to something ankle length and coloured with all the shades of the rainbow.

‘Hey – you were a great support back there.'

‘An' you haven't answered me question.'

‘No, Henriette. I don't think everything is going to be all right.'

‘Hah! No more I.'

Her inflection, though it had the ring of a Jamaican accent, wasn't like any he had ever heard before.

‘Where does your accent come from?'

‘Belize.'

Mark had to think a moment to place Belize in his memory – another West Indian island? Then he corrected
himself. A tiny place in Central America. ‘Boleyn, is that a Belizean name?'

‘Boleyn,' she pronounced it Bow-laine, ‘French, originally, but now it belong to de Kriol people of Belize.'

‘How long have you been living in London?'

‘One year, maybe two.'

‘Perhaps I should introduce myself properly.'

‘Dahlin', dere ain't no need. My question is not who, but what in de world you might be. Like de bwai, Robin Hood?'

Mark laughed. ‘I'm hardly Robin Hood.' He was looking around for Nan, but he saw no sign of her.

‘Your friend, she be okay. She washin' her hair.'

‘She'll be wondering where I've gone.'

‘She enjoyin' a cuppa comfortin' herbal tea.'

Something deep within her laughing eyes alerted him. When he probed her mind, it proved unreadable. ‘What are you? Some kind of white witch?'

‘Oh, hardly white!' She roared with laughter. ‘Not wid dese teeth.' She grinned ear to ear. ‘But you hardly white yourself, despite appearances. You more of a piebald, like de black eye hidin' under your quiff.'

He laughed at the thought of a piebald witch.

‘Show me – let me see it – dis oder eye.'

He let her examine his oraculum, her eyebrows raised, a slight frown showing her fascination.

‘Ha! It like de window into your mind.'

‘I think it's meant to work the other way round.'

Mark had the impression she was probing him, probing
his loyalties as much as his story, for some reason of her own.

‘What you say, we go out now, Mark Grimstone? We have a nice little stroll an' a chat.'

‘A chat about what?'

She chuckled, from deep in her belly. ‘About de Sword an' de Razzamatazz going on in dese streets.'

‘You've been talking to Father Touhey.'

‘Uh-huh.'

Mark studied Henriette for a long moment. Who, and what, was she exactly? She looked both elegant and exceptionally fit, robustly built and not far off six feet tall in her flat-heeled shoes.

‘How much do you know of what's going on?'

‘I know de Reverend Grimstone's your fadah.'

‘I'm not really his son.'

‘Why den you claim to be?'

‘He adopted me when I was a child – if adopted is the right term for what I've come to suspect was some kind of abduction.'

‘Dahlin', dat wouldn't surprise me.'

‘Really?'

‘All dese people t'inkin dis de end of de world.'

‘Is that what you think?'

‘More like de beginning of somet'in'.'

He thought about that. He also thought about the fact that Father Touhey was Bridey's uncle. ‘What else did Father Touhey tell you?'

‘He told me you have some great adventure in another world an' come back with a powerful weapon on your back. I'd like to hear more of dem adventures.'

‘You're unlikely to credit them.'

She laughed again, from that place at the deep core of herself. ‘Let me make dis suggestion. You not ready to trust me an' I'm certainly not ready to trust you. So what you say, we take a stroll an' maybe we see some action?'

Mark still resisted her, gazing bemusedly at the growing mass of homeless people. ‘What kind of action?'

She lowered her voice, her eyes exactly opposite his own. ‘You askin' dese people about de Razzamatazz? You come wid me for your education. You ready to go find out what's really goin' on here in London through dat black eye in your pretty boy head?'

Entertaining as Father Touhey's Belizean housekeeper was proving to be, Mark was reluctant to leave Nan alone at the refuge, but he was intrigued enough to want to know more about the Razzamatazz, especially since Henriette had hinted that it had something to do with the Sword of Feimhin. Maybe he would even discover something about Padraig?

In the end, he acquiesced, resolving that their walk wouldn't take very long, and they exited the refuge into a neon-lit thoroughfare. Almost immediately, Henriette diverted him into a warren of unlit streets. A fine mist of rain was falling, but the rain did not trouble his companion. She had long legs and a surprising litheness and covered
the ground with effortless strides. Within minutes Mark felt absolutely lost. Then, abruptly, she halted, with her hand on his shoulder.

‘It is time you closed your blue eyes an' opened up de other one.'

When Mark closed his eyes and looked out onto the same streets through his oraculum, he had entered a nightmare landscape. The lines and curves that made up the blocks and buildings were etched with a phosphorescent green light.

‘Don't just scratch you bum. Look good.'

He looked again, harder, deeper. Limned in that same phosphorescent light, the nightmare cityscape was inhabited by wraith-like beings, with shining eyes and smoke for hair.

‘What in the world?'

‘Clean your system out, Dahlin'. Look real careful at dis shit.'

Mark refused to credit what he was seeing. Somehow Henriette had seduced him into a hallucinatory hell in which spectres of every shade and shape were creeping and darting everywhere within nib-scratched green lines that sketched the outlines of real streets. He and Nan had been surprised, reassuringly so, that their oracula worked on Earth, but there was something very different, something deeply disturbing, about the vision here. A biblical phrase crept into his mind:
like seeing through a glass darkly
.

‘What are they – what am I seeing?'

‘Like de boll weevil, lookin' for a home.'

He thought about that. ‘What do you mean – they're parasites?'

‘All drawn to de Sword.'

A chill invaded Mark's being. ‘What did you say?'

‘Not'in' wrong wid your ears.'

Mark's eyes sprang open. But the strange visions pouring in through the oraculum refused to go away. It was as if the unearthly landscape were overwhelming his normal view of the shadowy streets. Henriette was in the act of turning around to face him. The tall black woman had been replaced by a wraith-like being, her own features limned by the green light, as if drawn by a green pen on a charcoal nothingness.

‘My God – you're not human?'

‘Mebbe I was once. De year 1633 comes into me head. De world was supposed to end den. But mebbe that too was just anoder beginin'.'

Nothing seemed logical any more. Mark's senses were drowning in the vision. It was sucking him into its world, a world in which everything was curves and lines, and the disturbing limning green was the natural order.

‘What are these? What are they doing here?'

‘Huntin', of course.'

‘Hunting for what?'

‘Dey have many appetites. Blood, meat, dreams … hopes.'

Mark stared, horrified. ‘I see pinpoints of light everywhere. I think they're eyes.'

‘De Razzamatazzers.'

‘What are you implying? They've infested?'

‘You remember – I told you. Like de boll weevil.'

He saw something fly close by, a spectre the size of a cat, with wings. It resembled the Grimlings that had guarded the Scalpie, but it had a disgustingly insectile face with a human-type body. As he watched it, it pounced on something skulking in a drain – a rat or maybe a small cat. There was a loud screeching, then silence, punctuated by liquid sounds – the noises of feeding. The more closely he looked, the more horrific it became. Sinewy things, unlike anything he had ever seen, were crawling out of holes in the ground, insectile bodies with side-to-side jaws.