Niamh smiled. ‘Dressed for victory.’
The flames of Llyrwyn licked towards her hungrily. ‘What happened to you? Church told us how you-’
‘How I loved him? Jack Churchill taught me many things. He ignited a fire inside me, and then chose the love of another. A Fragile Creature,’ she added contemptuously.
‘You can’t always get what you want. So is that it — you’ve caused all this misery just because of a broken heart?’
Niamh laughed. ‘How dismissive you are of the signifying quality of Fragile Creatures! Everything you do is because of love! I have observed your kind for an age. If you seek money or power, it is in a pitiful attempt to fill the gap left by an absence of love. Adult lives are corrupted and distorted by the search for love denied them as children. Love drives Fragile Creatures to achieve astonishing things, and love lies behind murder and betrayal and cruelty. Love destroys confidence and creates doubt and self-loathing. Love turns Fragile Creatures into gods. It is all and everything. To dismiss it so only shows your ignorance.’
‘So now you’ve signed up with the Void because you didn’t get the kisses you wanted.’
‘This is the twilight of the gods, foretold in all your stories since your first days. The old ways are passing, for every living being. I choose my path accordingly.’
‘It makes no sense. How can you give in to control? To a universe that denies freedom, belief, magic? You had that spider removed to escape control-’
She laughed. ‘Yes, I had the spider removed.’ She raised her arms wide. ‘And then I chose to be filled with spiders.’
Under her skin, lumps of varying sizes began to move across her hands, her face, distorting her features. She opened her mouth wide and the spiders swarmed out and over her body.
Mallory had hoped he could talk her into giving up. Now he saw there was no hope. He raised Llyrwyn and prepared to attack.
A ferocious wind blasted from a corner of the room, throwing him hard against the wall. Niamh hadn’t moved. The spiders still crawled over her, but now she wore a cruel smile.
From out of the shadows walked another woman in the same black armour and headdress as Niamh. It was Sophie, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘You bastard. You betrayed me,’ she said with devastating bitterness.
Mallory gaped. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘This.’ She gestured and the wind rushed around the room. From the corner behind her came Caitlin, strapped to a wooden frame with barbed wire, barely conscious, badly beaten and bleeding from numerous wounds. Sophie raised her hand and the torture frame floated forward, a foot above the floor.
‘What have you done?’ Mallory could barely believe what he was seeing.
‘She paid the price for being a duplicitous bitch.’
‘You did that to her?’
Sophie shifted uneasily. There was a faint glassy quality to her eyes that gave him some hope. ‘Of course not! I don’t agree with it-’
‘But you didn’t stop it-’
‘She deserved it! You and her — behind my back!’
‘What? Caitlin and me? That’s ridiculous.’
‘I saw you!’ The wind raged, tossing Mallory across the room.
His head ringing, Mallory struggled to his feet. The wind continued to rush around Sophie and there was lightning in her eyes. He’d had no idea she was capable of wielding such power, and it scared him.
He approached her cautiously, but couldn’t help glancing at Caitlin.
‘See?’ Sophie snapped. ‘You care about her.’
‘Of course I do — she’s hurt. Anybody with any compassion would care.’
His words stung her. She allowed her anger to rise up so she could ignore them. ‘I’m sick of being betrayed by everybody I ever trust!’
‘I’m not going to betray you.’
‘Shut up!’ The wind whisked around him, but this time didn’t punish him. Tears filled her eyes. ‘My mother and father betrayed me, and now you. The only people I’ve ever loved.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They killed themselves when I was nine. A suicide pact. They said they loved me and they left me all alone.’
‘You never told me that-’
‘Didn’t you ever wonder?’ she sneered. ‘The Pendragon Spirit only comes alive in us when we’ve experienced death. Didn’t you think to ask who’d died around me?’
Mallory saw her desperate hurt and suddenly so many things about her became clear. ‘I’m sorry.’
She looked away, her tears running freely.
Niamh watched with detached amusement.
‘You manipulated her,’ Mallory accused. If she had been close enough he would have killed her in an instant.
‘I only allowed what was in her to take form,’ Niamh said. ‘Now she has chosen to be with me. I will not betray her.’
‘Soph, don’t fall for this,’ he pleaded.
Sophie tore at her hair. The wind around her rushed wildly in random directions. A brazier crashed over, the glowing coals igniting a tapestry. Flames rushed up the wall.
‘Soph, this isn’t you!’
Tormented, Sophie threw her head back and screamed till her throat was raw. In the face of the gale, Mallory couldn’t even get to his feet.
‘Look at that woman!’ Niamh pointed towards Caitlin. ‘She didn’t care about you. She is made of lies and deceit. She doesn’t deserve your friendship.’
‘Sophie!’ Mallory called. ‘She’s trying to get you to do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life. She’s trying to damn you.’
‘She deserves to be eradicated!’ Niamh’s voice rose above the gale.
Sophie cast a pitiful look at Mallory. ‘Why couldn’t you have saved me?’
‘Hold him back,’ Niamh insisted.
‘You can kill her,’ Mallory said, ‘but she’ll come back. That’s what we do. Death can’t hold us.’
‘This is beyond death,’ Niamh said. ‘The Devourer of All Things has allowed the universe to create a handful of weapons of power that can strike at the very heart of Existence. They are scattered, unknown, lost. They can be used only once, because of their power.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘They can wipe a being out of Existence. Not just so they are dead, but so they never existed in the first place. No one will remember them ever having been. Their words, their gestures, their caresses, their kisses — all forgotten, because they never happened. Removed from the cycle of rebirth. It is worse than the worst thing you could ever imagine for yourself, for it means that you amounted to nothing.’ From her pocket, she removed a crystal in the shape of a snowflake. It spun slowly of its own accord an inch above her palm. ‘And I have such a weapon here.’
She held her hand higher and the snowflake spun faster. Shards of light blinked off it.
‘Stop her!’ Mallory shouted at Sophie. ‘Caitlin’s one of us!’
Sophie closed her eyes, sobbing silently. The wind continued to pin Mallory against the floor.
The snowflake pulsed. Like all the other objects of power Mallory had witnessed, he knew he was not seeing its true shape. He had the sense of some enormous machine grinding into life behind the illusion of the world he saw before him. Caitlin lolled on the torture frame, defenceless, broken.
And then the wind dropped and all was still. Mallory only had a second to register this before he heard a small voice.
‘You should have saved me.’
A dagger of white light burst from the spinning snowflake towards Caitlin. Before it reached her, Sophie took the full force of the weapon in her breast, a halo of white light burning around her.
For a second, Mallory felt as if the weapon had hit him and he had winked out of existence. Desperate to hold on to the last of her, he scrambled to where Sophie had sunk to the ground.
The white light sparked and fizzed around her as it unstitched her from reality. Her skin was freezing to the
