There was a movement. Jamie started, about to run away, then relaxed. A single figure was walking down the lane towards him, an old man supporting himself on a stick. He looked like a monk, dressed in a brown robe with a hood folded back over his shoulders. He was still a long way away, but as he drew closer, Jamie saw that he was at least sixty years old, almost bald, with sagging skin and weeping, bloodshot eyes. The old man could barely walk. All his weight was concentrated on the stick, which he placed carefully in front of him before he took each step.
Jamie felt a huge sense of relief. He was no longer alone! The man raised a hand and waved at him. It seemed that he was friendly. Now perhaps Jamie might learn where he was and what had happened here… assuming that the man spoke his language. Jamie waited as he made his way along the track. It took him a very long time before he finally arrived.
The man stopped and spoke.
“Rag dagger a marrad hag!”
That was what the words sounded like. Jamie heard them quite distinctly and they should have made no sense at all. The man was talking gibberish. But Jamie understood exactly what he meant. Somehow his brain had tuned itself in to a foreign language which he had learnt instantly. Impossible, of course. But that was how it was.
“Good day to you, my friend!” the man had said. He had called out the greeting in a trembling, high-pitched voice. He stopped to catch his breath, then went on, the words instantly translating themselves. “A living child among so many dead! That’s very strange. Who are you, my boy? What are you doing here?”
Jamie hesitated, wondering if he could respond. “My name is Jamie,” he replied, but although they were the words he thought, they weren’t the ones that came from his lips. Without even trying, he was speaking the man’s language. He paused, then went on, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t even know where I am. Can you help me?”
“Of course I can help you.” The man laughed briefly. It was a dry, unpleasant sound. “But as to where you are, there is nothing left here so why should it even have a name? And if it did have a name, it would soon be forgotten, like everywhere else. There are no countries now. No cities, no towns. All is but ashes.” He ran an eye over Jamie and frowned. “Where have you come from?” he asked.
“I’m American,” Jamie said. “From Nevada.”
“America? Nevada? I don’t know these places.” Now he was suspicious. “How did you arrive here?”
“I don’t know.” Jamie shook his head. “I didn’t mean to come here. It just happened.”
“As if by magic?”
“Well… yes.” Jamie wasn’t sure that the old man was joking.
“Perhaps it was magic!” The old man’s hand tightened on the walking stick. “Perhaps you were brought here by the Old Ones. They might have wanted you, although I can’t think why.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do you serve the Old Ones?” he asked.
Jamie shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not a servant of the Old Ones?”
“No! I’m not anybody’s servant!”
“It is fortunate, then, that I came this way. It would seem that I’ve arrived just in time.”
“To do what?” Jamie was suddenly uneasy.
“To kill you.”
The old man lifted his walking stick and Jamie almost laughed out loud. The idea that this sixty-year-old could even hurt him was ridiculous. He half raised a hand to defend himself, then stepped back in horror, his eyes widening as the impossible happened in front of his eyes. The old man seemed to unpeel himself, the flesh falling away like pieces of discarded clothing. Another creature, some sort of giant insect, exploded out of him, ugly black scales taking the place of skin. Two huge claws, with pincers snapping open and shut, ripped through his sides and stretched out where his arms had just been. His eyes had turned yellow. His head and legs were still human, but now they were grafted onto the body of a scorpion, and as Jamie fell back a huge tail rose over its shoulders with a massive stinger pointing down at him from above. The walking stick had changed too. Now it was a spear of mouldering steel, like something recovered from a shipwreck. The end was twisted and bloodstained, shaped like a letter Y, with not one point but two.
The man-scorpion screamed at him and Jamie saw that its teeth had become silver needles and its mouth was full of blood. The yellow eyes were wide and furious. He heard something shudder through the air and fell back just as the steel rod, held in one of the claws, slashed through the air an inch from his face. If it had made contact, it would have smashed his skull – or taken his head clean off his shoulders. Jamie lost his balance and almost fell, then leapt back as the creature’s tail lashed out at him, white poison splattering the ground. A few tiny drops of the stuff sprayed onto his hand and he cried out. It was like acid. He could feel it burning through his skin. The tail lashed again and this time Jamie threw himself onto the ground, afraid of being burnt or blinded. The creature laughed and Jamie knew that he had no chance at all, that he really was going to die right now – and that he would never even find out what had happened, how he had arrived here to begin with.
The thing lumbered forward, its head twisting from side to side, its face distorted with anger and hatred, holding the two-headed spear high up above it. Jamie dragged himself backwards, looking for anything, a weapon he could use to defend himself. There was a soldier lying beside the lane, still clutching a sword that was curved like a sabre with a second, shorter blade jutting out just below the hilt. Jamie reached out and grabbed it, wrenching it out of the dead man’s hand, then rolled over and over, aware that the creature had hurled the spear towards him. The spear stabbed into the ground so close to his stomach that he felt its edge against his shirt. The man-scorpion scrabbled towards him and, at the same time, Jamie leapt to his feet, holding out the sword. Just for a second, he felt himself gripped by a sense of unreality. It almost paralysed him. He was facing something that wasn’t human. He had a sword. He was in a fight to the death.
And he wasn’t afraid.
That was the strangest thing of all. Suddenly, he knew exactly what to do, and although he had never held a sword in his life, it felt almost a part of him. It had happened the moment he had picked it up. Without even thinking, he had been aware of its weight, the length of the blade, the balance of it in his hand. It was as if he had somehow absorbed it into himself so that he and the sword were one.
The man-scorpion attacked, its tail stabbing down. Jamie stepped aside and swung the sword, grinning as the sharp edge of the blade sliced through scales and skin, hacking into the stinger and cutting it clean off. The creature screamed. Poison sprayed the air. Jamie went in low, thrusting forward. This time he felt the point bury itself in the creature’s body. Blood – dark red and sticky – gushed out of the wound. Jamie felt it splatter into his face and retched as he tasted it on his lips. But he had done it. He was still alive. He had won.
The man-scorpion reared back, taking the sword with it. Jamie could see that it was dying but, after all, it wasn’t finished yet. With its last breath, it snatched up the spear, jerking it out of the ground, and aimed a second time.
“Die!” the creature screamed and stepped towards him.
Jamie was unarmed. He stood where he was, poised on the balls of his feet with all his instincts alert, trying to decide which way to throw himself to avoid the attack.
Then something whizzed through the air, and the next thing he knew there were three metal arrows jutting out of the man-scorpion’s chest between its two claws. It was thrown back, barely able to stand up. Two more arrows hit it. One bounced off its shell but the other plunged into its throat. It screamed one last time. The light in its eyes went out and it collapsed in on itself, a twitching heap of blood and poison. At last it was still.
Jamie turned round just in time to see a girl on a horse riding up to him, with three men on horseback a short way behind. All the riders were dressed similarly to Jamie and they reminded him of Bedouin tribesmen crossing the desert – except there was no sand and no sun. The girl was holding a bow already aimed at the corpse of the man-scorpion, but seeing she had no need of it, she lowered it and returned the arrow to a wooden quiver hanging behind her back. She had a belt with a short sword dangling down to her thigh, and a black wristband. There was a tattered red scarf around her neck.
A girl. She was obviously in charge. Jamie could tell that from the way the men held back, waiting for her command. And yet they were at least ten years older than her, because – Jamie was trying to take this all in one step at a time – she could only have been about fourteen or fifteen, the same age as him. She was very small with dark eyes that were somewhere between brown and green and, he would have guessed, mixed-race… part
