2
Two days later, at Rostock, Hunter bribed a sailor to stow them in crates of machine tools, who in turn bribed the customs official to let the container lorry through without scrutiny. Ten miles inland they were freed to buy a van from an unscrupulous backstreet dealer unconcerned about paperwork. They picked up the autobahn east of Hamburg and headed south.
Tom sat silently in the front, feeling the gentle tug of his ring. At the wheel, Hunter watched faces, seeing the scars of a world without magic, feeling the slow, black suffocation of the Void pressing in on all sides. He was sure it would only be a matter of time before that desolation enveloped them all and they rejoined the non-people with their non-lives. He started to beat out a rhythm on the steering wheel, but it sounded like the ticking of a clock, counting out the seconds of hope that remained.
‘There’s still hope,’ Tom said quietly, as if he could read Hunter’s mind. ‘There’s always hope. That is what the secret Gnostic knowledge tells us.’
‘Somehow that doesn’t feel like enough,’ Hunter said.
‘Ah, but it is. To understand that is to win. This world is about the base and the material. It is about struggling for money and power, about fighting for
Shavi leaned forward between the two of them. ‘The human heart,’ he said.
In the back, Laura yawned loudly and pointedly. ‘Here come the hippies.’
‘The Gnostic secrets tell us that fragments of the true power of Existence, the Blue Fire, are lodged in every human, waiting to be fanned from a spark into a flame,’ Tom continued. ‘Those fragments are the basis of the Pendragon Spirit. And if that knowledge tells us one thing, it is this: that every person can make a difference. That by looking within, the outside can be altered.’
‘That’s a nice little story,’ Hunter said, ‘but nobody’s going to wake up of their own accord. They’ve got too much to keep them occupied — cash, drink, drugs, sex.’ He paused. ‘Not to be knocked, of course.’
‘That is how the Void wins,’ Shavi said. ‘It has built a prison that we love.’
‘Still doesn’t get away from my point: who’s going to start making people fan those sparks?’
‘You,’ Tom snapped. ‘Do I have to spell it out? Why am I cursed to be surrounded by thick-heads?’
While Laura launched a caustic attack on Tom, Church sat silently in the back, turning over Tom’s words, convinced they were directed at him. As always, Tom cut through to the heart of him, slicing past the encysted negativity that had grown around Ruth’s disappearance.
‘We wake them by shattering the Mundane Spell,’ he said. ‘We show them the magic that exists behind the scenes.’
As they passed Frankfurt a few hours later, they realised his words had more than metaphorical meaning. Cars veered wildly across the autobahn and came to a halt on the hard shoulder as people jumped out to stare into the sky. Overhead, a winged horse dipped and soared in the morning light. Hunter pulled the van to the side and wound down the window. The cries of the observers were filled with wonder that suggested they had been changed for ever.
‘This Great Dominion is awake,’ Tom said, ‘and the magic it contains is now unfettered. You did that, simply by passing through.’
‘So all we’ve got to do,’ Laura said, watching the horse dreamily, ‘is to wake each Great Dominion. Simple. We open the box, the weird stuff pours out and the Mundane Spell shatters.’
Tom sighed. ‘First, you have to survive each Great Dominion.’
3
The Tower of the Four Winds stood amidst minarets and flat-roofed white stone buildings, an echo of Moorish architecture that was compounded by the aroma of spices on the hot wind. It was one of a pair, an exact duplicate of one that stood in the Court of Soul’s Ease. Though all around the streets were as claustrophobically packed as any in the Court of the Soaring Spirit, Math’s tower home stood in a spacious walled garden that felt like breathing again after a prolonged period of stress.
‘So Math is some kind of sorcerer to the Tuatha De Danann?’ Mallory whispered as he searched the shadowy garden, a lantern hidden beneath his cloak.
‘Scary guy,’ Sophie replied. ‘He wears a mask with four different animal avatar faces that keeps rotating while he speaks.’
‘Was he a threat to Niamh? Is that why he’s missing?’ Caitlin gripped her axe tightly.
‘I’m not convinced Niamh is the threat,’ Sophie said hesitantly. ‘I don’t get any sense of that.’
‘The Tuatha De Danann are very good at hiding their motivations,’ Caitlin responded. ‘Did you have any trouble getting Rhiannon out of the palace?’
‘Decebalus smuggled her out.’ Mallory unsheathed Llyrwyn, which sang as the blue flames licked the warm night air. ‘He’s got rooms at the Hunter’s Moon under an assumed name. He’ll guard Virginia Dare and Rhiannon with his life.’
‘They’ll find them sooner or later,’ Caitlin said.
‘Then we’d better not waste any more time chatting.’ Mallory led the way up the path to the tower’s door.
Ivory, glass and gold combined in perfect balance, the overall aesthetic implying that it was a place dedicated to the study of higher things. But an underlying tone of menace was hidden in the architecture like a ghost of the truth.
The door hung open, the lock shattered. Cautiously they climbed a staircase running around the inside wall. Halfway up, Caitlin and Sophie shared a look of apprehension, but the only sound was the wind rushing through the space above them.
They emerged into a room at the very top of the tower with open windows at the cardinal points. In front of the windows, iron rings had been set in the wooden floorboards with a broken chain attached to each one. Purple drapes marked with magical symbols had been torn from the walls. An upturned brazier, books, charts and lanterns were scattered all around. Mallory examined deep scarring in the floorboards where it looked as if they had been hit repeatedly with an axe.
‘If he’s such a scary sorcerer, that means whoever took him down has to be even scarier,’ Caitlin noted.
Sophie picked up some of the magickal items. They made her fingers tingle as if they were calling to her. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’
‘That’d make sense if he was a threat,’ Mallory said. ‘But if he is, that means all the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons Church rescued are dead, too.’
Sophie righted the brazier and started to set the books and amulets and crystals back on the tables. The disorder was unsettling her. ‘He is a powerful sorcerer,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘They couldn’t have taken him by force alone. And they couldn’t have taken him by surprise, not here, in his own tower.’
‘Then why didn’t he run?’ Caitlin examined one of the broken chains, then looked out of the window across the jumbled rooftops of the dark city.
Mallory perched on the main altar table and slowly took in the details of the room. ‘He knew there wasn’t any point in running. They were more powerful. They saw him as a threat. They were going to get him sooner or later.’
‘So he just sat here and waited for them?’ Caitlin said.
Musing, Mallory watched intently as Sophie laid out the magickal items. ‘What would you do if you knew an enemy was coming for you and there was no escape?’
