The Sword of Feimhin (23 page)

Shaking with fright, Penny lowered the backpack to the floor. She took a firmer hold of the unlit torch, forcing her unwilling hands to point it out into the tunnel. Her thumb refused to press the switch. She felt spasms crabbing in her hands.

What if the monster was real?

Don't be ridiculous
.

She pressed the switch.

A face was staring back at her. It was a man's face, long and grey, poking out of a thick vaporous cloud. The face appeared to be detached from any body, as if floating on the cloud. There were horn-rimmed spectacles askew on its nose. Two brown eyes, behind the spectacles, were staring back at her.

‘Hello there!' The lips moved as it spoke. ‘What you up to? Come for a little nibble?'

As Penny froze, paralysed with fear, the cloud turned and she was suddenly looking at a very different face, the face of a fox. Its amber eyes reflected the light back at her, its whiskers twitching. Then the cloud began to roll, with one human face after another coming into view to stare back at her in the light of the torch.

One of Penny's legs was juddering like a drumstick against the floor. Both her arms were trembling, her fingers going numb.

She had no idea where the voice came from, other than it was inside her head. She wanted to run, but she had to lean against the steel mesh to stop herself from fainting.

‘Yes,' she whispered. ‘I should take one step …'

Even in her panic she had the presence of mind to pick up the backpack, awkwardly, by one shoulder strap. Then, with her throat as dry as the dust under her feet, she was slipping and sliding back along the filthy tunnels. One step, then another step, then step, by step, by step. She didn't know how she would find the courage and strength to climb back out of the ghost Tube station and return to the sanctuary of the City Above, to find her way back to Our Place, to her one true friend, Gully.

A driving rain spattered the visor of his helmet as Mark stared to the west where, no more than three hundred yards away, a gasometer was exploding. He blinked in amazement as great arcs of blue and orange flames erupted into the evening sky, curling back on themselves like the flares surrounding sunspots.

They had extinguished the lights on the bikes, but such was the glare from the distant blaze that Mark could read the CLOSED sign on the door of the defunct filling station where they had gathered for a final evaluation. They had swung in there assuming they would find some concealment as well as a respite from the rain before heading deeper into central London. But the roof of the overhang where the pumps had once stood had been largely ripped away, and what little cover they had was spoiled by copious leaks.

‘Razzers,' Cal said, kicking in the glazed door to the reception.

Like the others, Cal was dressed as a patrolman, wearing a Scorpion helmet, yellow heavy-weather jacket with glow strips and black trousers. Mark, Nan and Sharkey followed him into the reception area, which stank of piss, leaving the four bikes outside on the forecourt. With their blue on yellow, hatched Battenberg markings, they remained easily visible beyond the grimy glass. They sat down on the floor in the driest corner, removing the heavy helmets and unbuttoning the flak jackets to expose the Kevlar vests.

Cal's face was briefly lit up as he checked his mobile phone.

Mark's eyes found Nan's. He'd have preferred her riding pillion on his bike, but she would have none of it. He'd forgotten her love of horse riding from back in her own world, even if that had been two thousand years ago. And now, given the chance of riding again, albeit a machine rather than a horse, she was in her element. Already there was nothing anybody could have taught her about what she now called ‘her favourite mount', the Harley FLHTP sitting next to the three BMW R1200s outside.

Disappointed, Cal slammed the phone down on the floor then took to fiddling with the safety on the MK-5.

Mark tried to relax. He and Nan had been hard-pressed to take in two days of instruction and practice on how to ride the heavy bikes. Sharkey had worked them hard over the rough terrain around the seaside camp, then out onto the narrow country roads at night until, like the knights of old, they were expected to become one fighting machine
with the steed between their legs. Nan had undoubtedly been the star of the show, a natural rider.

And now Nan was comforting him, protecting his injured pride. He could smell her soaped-clean skin under the smell of rain-soaked leather.

Cal growled. ‘Knock it off, love birds.'

‘Ignore him,' Nan grinned. ‘He's just jealous.'

Mark was reminded of his first meeting with her: the conjured-up image of the girl in the nemeton brought into life by Kate and her crystal. What a different person she was today from that vision of the dark queen in the battle for Ossierel. He had been on the threshold of death at the moment of consummation with Mórígán. The way he recalled it, it was hardly a romantic high. They had become one in the embrace of Mórígán's dark power, the power of death. The experience had been so overwhelming, so extraordinary, that he had never really understood it. And yet, from such a terrible first meeting, their love for one another had been born.

He pressed his lips to her ear. ‘You rode as if you were born to that saddle.'

‘Is this a prelude to tonight?' she whispered back.

They were all a bit high with pre-battle anticipation. The potential for violence exuded from Cal's sweating face. Mark couldn't deny that he sensed it growing within himself, like a contagious fever. Nan hardly needed the warrior-to-warrior contagion. Violence was an integral part of her nature. Ossierel had been proof enough of that.

Mark didn't know how they had come through the journey from the camp in one piece. It had been a continuous nightmare, particularly the M25, littered as it was with wrecks and abandoned vehicles, some still burning. The hard shoulder and slow lanes had run with filthy streams of water in which rainbow-hued reflections told of spilled petrol and the potential for conflagration. The havoc of the Razzamatazzers was worsening day by day, with nobody interested in towing the wrecks away. Emergency vehicles had streamed by them on both sides of the central reservation: ambulances, police, the grey-with-camouflage uniformed paramilitaries, heading for who-knew-what trouble. The cop uniforms had probably saved them. They had been Tajh's contribution, though it was a mystery to Mark how she had found what looked like real police leathers, helmets and vests.

More evidence, perhaps, of a link to an organised central authority? It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed Mark's mind.

The uniforms, coupled with the heavily customised bikes, made them look like they were on some kind of emergency duty. Plus they drove fast enough, but not so recklessly as to attract attention to themselves.

They had prepared throughout the day, checking every step of their plan and, keeping to it, had come off the M25 after just fifteen miles or so, heading into a sector of the outer city that was only scantily lit with a few surviving street lights. The road surface had been treacherous in the downpour,
with water-filled holes and murky and silent buildings. Twenty-foot high mounds of black rubbish bags littered the streets, spilling out into the roads, uncollected in months, and the stink permeated everything. The noxious reek of leaking sewage penetrated even now into the junk-scattered reception of the filling station. The sun was setting somewhere behind those rain-laden skies, making the air smoggy and dank. Headlights gleamed sickly on the road.

Now, as they were waiting to set out, Mark recalled the earlier conversation they had held with the group about the mission the Resistance had been given.

‘This woman we're looking to protect.'

‘She's called Jo – Joanne Derby.'

‘Okay – these people are planning to kill her.'

Tajh shook her head. ‘I wouldn't imagine they'd just kill her. That would be too overt. It's more likely they'll arrest her under some ruse.'

‘Don't kid yourself. They'll kill her on the spot if they bloodywell feel like it,' Cal said. ‘Even if they take her alive they'll just grill her somewhere else, and then kill her. These guys are not interested in hostages.'

‘I hope they're interested at least in one,' said Cogwheel.

‘You can hope, pal.'

‘You saying they don't even care about witnesses?'

‘Not a jot – not any more.'

‘What do you think, Tajh? Up to now, Grimstone's people wouldn't do something as brazen as that, surely. Not murder a respectable woman right out there in the open.'

Tajh had lifted her eyebrows in Cal's direction, shrugged.

Now Mark glanced over at Cal, hearing the mobile chime. Cal pressed it against his ear, his eyes narrowed. He gave them the thumbs up.

‘That's it. She's arrived.'

*

Joanne – Jo – Derby hitched her spectacles a half inch higher on her long, narrow nose, gathering herself before the lectern in the theatre at King's College. A tall figure, close to six feet in her sensible one inch heels, her copper-red hair was fixed in a coil on the back of her head with a green enamelled clasp – a family heirloom inherited from her Scottish grandmother. Her audience, maybe sixty souls in a theatre that would have accommodated three times as many, shuffled in silence, giving her the impression her own tension might have been catching. It was rare these days that she was invited to lecture, and she had hesitated for a week or more before she had accepted. It had been eleven months since she had taken part in any function relating to her senior lectureship in sociology and politics at the LSE.

Before setting out she had glanced at herself in the hallway mirror. Her face had startled her with its haunted look. Make-up had become essential, even if kept to a minimum, and jewellery to plain gold studs in her ears. She was still in two minds about whether to go or not when the door com sounded and she heard the driver's firm but courteous voice. ‘Miss Derby – we're running late.'

And now, after an unsettling journey through rain-battered streets, she felt so jittery it threatened to freeze her mind. She worried that it was a mistake to come. Had it not been for the name on the invitational letter – Will Johnstone – she wouldn't have dared to respond. She had never met him, but he represented an opportunity to make a point with a senior university authority. There was a craggy, bearded man with sticking out ears sitting in the second row – he resembled Abraham Lincoln – who might've been him. But if it was Johnstone, why hadn't he welcomed her on her arrival?

She exercised her jaw to try to wriggle loose the stiffening muscles, covering it with one. She took a deep breath before she could bring herself to speak, then began, a little too hurriedly, as if her haste was capable of banishing the fears that preyed upon her mind.

‘Nobody could have foreseen the anarchy we face today on the streets of this city. I know that London is not unique, but it is the worst affected in terms of riot and violence.

‘Over the course of the last year or two we have seen how this … this miasma has spread, undermining the stratagems of weak government. For reasons that are utterly incomprehensible, we have witnessed the wanton neglect of the infrastructure that maintains a city of this size and complexity.'

She didn't want to deliver some preachy sermon on morality. At the same time she desperately wanted her audience to grasp what was happening, to understand the
nightmares that were disturbing her sleep and very likely theirs.

And yet their faces remained blank as sirens sounded loudly in the streets beyond the domed glass windows. Their curious lack of affect baffled her. What was the matter with these people? Did they want her to rant and shout that the world around them was going to the dogs? Not just in London, but all of Britain's big cities.

‘Water and electricity have come to be regarded as luxuries. There are many streets, just a few hundred yards from here, that are too dangerous to walk by night – and some even by day. The collapse of public services has resulted in a wave of anarchy and consequential overreaction from those who feel themselves threatened. The response of the authorities has been increasingly disordered, increasingly brutal. There is little in the way of organised health care any more, and a progressive atrophy of public education. It's an anguish to witness society degenerate into the naked expression of Darwinian survival of the fittest. Middle class residents in wealthy neighbourhoods hire armed garrisons to make fortresses out of their apartment blocks. Criminal gangs roam the streets, provoking a mushrooming of private security forces, with sickening reputations for brutality.'

Her words were provoking some kind of reaction. There was a murmuring, perhaps an intake of breath.

‘I … I'm afraid that it has been, at least in part, the predictable response to such predation that sections of the
working class have fought back, forming guerrilla groups and arming themselves as best they can.'

She looked over the scattered pond of bland faces, trying to figure out the strange, somewhat sullen, expression most of them were sporting.

‘You don't need me to tell you that this is a desperate situation. All that a decent human being can do is struggle to hold onto an increasingly tenuous thread of normality. Tolerance and caring about the society in which you live, work and worship, is slowly disappearing. People inevitably look to the authorities. And their answer, increasingly, has been the paramilitaries.'

It was then that the bearded man stood up and stared at her in a thoughtful silence.

‘You disagree?' She asked finally.

‘Chaos certainly reigns on our streets. It's popular in some quarters, Doctor Derby, to blame those who are attempting to return the city to order, but the paramilitaries did not create the disorder.'

‘Perhaps you will tell us what did?'

‘The evil that is prevalent in the hearts of men and women.'

A chorus of ‘Amens' rippled through the audience.

‘Evil is a rather abstract concept in this modern world.'

‘Do you think so?'

‘My goodness – who could blame you if you are frightened?'

‘We're not frightened.'

She stared at him, then returned her attention to the increasingly restless audience. She had come across doom-laden assessments before, even from sociologists – as if a profound worry buried deep in the collective subconscious were surfacing. Warnings of apocalypse were popping up even in professional circles.

The bearded man spoke again. ‘Oh, there's nothing abstract about evil. And I very much doubt that I am alone here in believing this. Cruelty – sadism – has for years been promoted on television as entertainment.'

She was surprised to hear laughs throughout the audience.

Jo Derby had the strangest sense of dislocation, as if the perceptions and reactions within the hall were decidedly off-kilter. She peered down at the man's face, wondering if perhaps she recognised him after all. He looked vaguely familiar but she wasn't sure where from. She noticed that he was wearing a pin with the triple loop logo in his lapel.

‘I see that you are a member of Grimstone's church?'

‘I am.'

There was the sound of raised voices somewhere else within the building. Jo struggled to regain her focus. ‘I can't agree on such an abstract explanation, though I readily understand the fears that provoke you to say it.' She nodded towards the audience. ‘I have serious concerns about the paramilitaries. They are not answerable to the electorate. Just who are they answerable to?'

There was a noise she didn't recognise at first, perhaps
because it was so incongruous, so shocking. Her audience were rapping their feet against the floor. It had begun with one, but soon many were following, all rapping in unison, so the noise became as regular and loud as drums.