Strangely she found she was lying on a bed of ivy that had not been there before, and when she squinted she thought she could make out snakes of blue fire like the ones she had seen earlier sinuously weaving across the ground.
‘
The voice was deep and resonant like the call of an animal and she couldn’t tell if it was real or in her head. She pulled herself to her feet and moved into the trees. A shape circled her, and another, and a third, but however much she looked she could only catch impressions, like the flash of a shadow on a summer wall.
Lost in her dream, Ruth hurried through the trees until she eventually stopped and turned, and was confronted by a face that made her black out for an instant. She saw red eyes and fur and horns, but the rest was lost to shadow.
‘Do you know my name?’ it said in the deep, throaty rumble she had heard before.
Ruth tried to see who was talking to her, but every time she focused her head swam. ‘No,’ she replied in a voice that appeared to be coming from somewhere else.
‘I am a lover of peace and a lover of madness. On the boundary between the living and the dead, you will find me. I am of the trees, and of fertility, and of destruction. I was ancient even when the Greeks worshipped me in the grove of Simila, strange and alien to them. In Mycenae, they knew me as DI-WO-NI-SO-JO, and many other names were mine in the time before that time. I am not the oldest thing, but I am one of them.’
‘What do you want with me?’ The god terrified and entranced her at the same time.
‘You are favoured by the oldest things — the mark of my kin is upon you.’ Ruth realised he was talking about the brand of Cernunnos she carried. ‘You have a part to play in the great, unfolding pattern. But first you must give in to the madness and the ecstasy to unleash your hidden self.’
Ruth tried to back away. It felt as if there was a field of electricity around the god that made her heart pound and her anxiety and excitement rise in equal measures.
‘Drink.’
A wine sack was thrust into her hands. Though she fought it, she was unable to resist and when the warm, powerfully intoxicating liquid ran down her throat it felt more like a drug than wine. Her vision fractured; colours shifted, glowing with heat and life; sounds boomed and echoed in unnatural ways. Music swelled around her and she felt instantly aroused.
‘What’s happening to me?’ Her hands went to her belly where a heat was rising.
‘See my little brother? He brings the fear of wild places and the joy of congress.’
Ruth caught sight of a distorted image, goat legs, human torso, animal horns, an erect phallus. ‘The horned one,’ she gasped, recalling her Craft. ‘Pan …’
Another figure slipped by furtively, sleek, seal-skinned, with a dangerous grin and glowing eyes, gone before she could comprehend more.
‘The oldest thing in the land,’ the god growled. ‘We three stand beside and behind you as the pattern unfolds. Know you this, and act accordingly.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Ruth asked desperately. ‘I don’t understand any of this!’
The god cocked his head, listening. ‘Too late now!’ he boomed. ‘Great danger approaches. Run. Run!’
2
Darkness so intense, Veitch could see nothing. Thin air, cold and dusty-dry and filled with the stench of decay. With an effort he overcame the slowly fading paralysis that had infected him since he had been dragged down into the Underworld, and tore off the shroud that was clinging to the lower half of his face.
Tentatively, he felt around. Bones rattled next to him, along with some minor grave goods. Stone was hard against his back, on either side, just above his face. Breathing slowly to remain calm, he realised he was in a box, perhaps a tomb. The sword was still with him — he could feel its dark whispers in his head — but there was not enough room to use it.
‘Miller!’ he called out. Then: ‘Etain?’ There was no response. ‘All right. You’re on your own.’
An image of being buried far underground crashed into his mind and claustrophobia swelled in his chest. ‘Stay calm, you wanker,’ he snarled. He rammed the balls of his fists against the stone over him. The pain reduced the constriction growing in his throat, but there was no movement from the lid of the box. The dull thud told him that there was no space above him, and despair curled in his stomach.
Quickly, he hit out at the four sides. The wall to his left rang hollow. With relief, he felt along the edge and was convinced there was a join: a door of some kind.
Forty minutes later, the stone burst outwards and a thin, icy light leached in. His fists were torn and bloodied and the mess that had been his left elbow protruded from his tattered shirt. But the pain was already lost beneath his fierce determination to get to Ruth before the Libertarian did; the possibility that he might already be too late was instantly rejected.
Letting his eyes grow accustomed to the light, he swung his legs out of the shattered door before a rush of vertigo forced him to grip onto the edge. The ground was at least fifty feet below, at the foot of a wall of coffin- sized tombs that reached another hundred feet above his head. Stretching out before him in the vast cavern was a monumental necropolis of tombs and mausoleums constructed of dull, grey stone or set into the rocky walls, slumbering under an oppressive atmosphere of dust and age and uneasy stillness. Yet for all its enormity, Veitch knew it was only the suburbs of the Grim Lands. What lay beyond this crumbling fringe of the Underworld was a place as immeasurable and unknowable as death.
On the crepuscular limits of the cavern, he could just make out the tunnel that led to those Grey Lands, now sealed by iron gates that reached from floor to roof. No chance of hiding away amongst the vast ranks of the silent dead, who had accepted him in a way he had never wholly experienced in the living world.
‘Miller!’ he called out. ‘Etain?’ The way his words dropped like stones across those silent buildings unsettled him, and he recalled the dry, grasping hands that had pulled him into the Underworld; not the dead, but something stronger and more dangerous. He resolved to remain as quiet and silent as that place.
With an effort, he found handholds and deep cracks in the tomb-wall that would allow him to climb down. Pausing to check the tombs on either side, above and below for signs of movement, he began his descent without looking down.
The cracked, ancient flagstones of the street between the towering mausoleums were covered with a fine layer of dust. Most of it was undisturbed, but there was a trail where he had been brought to the tomb-wall. Following it, he came to a large area of tracks and scuffs on the edge of a frozen river that bisected the cavern. One trail led up a slope towards the tunnel where he had been brought in. Another went to the river’s edge.
Cautiously, Veitch approached the ice, white with hoar-frost, and wondered why it was frozen when the air temperature was well above freezing. The query came and went as he put one tentative boot on the ice. It took his weight without cracking, and he strode out a few feet, noticing that he left footprints in the frost. There were no other prints, so Miller had not been taken across to the far bank.
As he scuffed the ice with his boot, he noticed something glimmering in the dark depths beneath. Dropping to his knees, he frantically scrubbed the frost away to reveal a surface like glass. And just beneath it lay Miller, floating, his body unmoving but his eyes wide and alive and pleading.
The ice flew up in diamond-hard shards as Veitch repeatedly rammed the sword down, the black flames hissing as they met the cold. After ten minutes he was slick with sweat, but he had broken through almost six inches and the water beneath had begun to seep through the ice. Miller continued to drift around mysteriously in one spot, not drowning, un-moving, alert and awake. An almost pathetic gratitude was etched in his features.
Gentler strokes shattered the final half-inch, and Veitch carved a big enough hole to drag Miller out. When Veitch immersed his hands in the water, a dreamy lethargy came over him. He fought its seduction and it faded when he had Miller lying on the ice.
Veitch shook him roughly. ‘Come on, you fuck-wit. We haven’t got time for this.’
Life gradually returned to Miller’s limp body. A smile spread across his face. ‘You saved me. Thank you.’
‘Stop talking. Don’t do anything but follow me. We’re going to find Etain and the others and get to
