‘Are you coming with us? This is your chance to see wonders of which you have only ever dreamed.’
‘I am returning to my home, and I will never speak of these events again,’ Fayed replied.
‘But you wished to see the gods.’
‘I have a wife and a child and another on the way. I have a job that is slow and laborious and dusty. I am human, only human. These things I have seen — these wonders and horrors — will haunt my thoughts for the rest of my days. I can never go back to being the man I was. You were meant to experience these things. I was not.’
‘We’re only human, too,’ Church said.
‘Perhaps you were once. But your experiences have changed you. You stand against the gods with impunity. You wield weapons that were not meant for men. You are as far beyond me now as the gods are beyond you.’
He turned without another word and trudged towards Cairo. Church watched him go, desperately afraid that what he had said was true, for if it was, the lives they knew, and to which they hoped to return, were over.
8
The cauldron of the southern Sahara was beginning to heat up. The first curve of the sun wavered in the haze on the horizon, but the moon and a scattering of stars still glowed ghostly in the lightening sky.
‘Hard drive.’ Church was swathed in a scarf wrapped tightly around his head to keep the biting sand at bay.
‘I do not know how Laura continues to hang on, neither alive nor dead,’ Shavi said.
‘I hope you’re both satisfied,’ Tom said harshly. ‘Three days we’ve wasted on this wild-goose chase. Veitch must be halfway to China by now.’
‘You really think we could just let her die?’ Church replied.
Before them lay a complex of standing stones that stretched for miles: a circle of flat stones surrounded by four pairs of tall stones, and further afield megaliths that rose up ten feet above the desolate landscape.
Shavi indicated some of the stones. ‘You can still see the solstice and cardinal alignments. Here in Nabta, this circle was used six thousand years ago, and probably earlier. At least a millennium before Stonehenge. Is that not amazing?’
‘Wonderful,’ Tom said tartly.
‘Religion, science and human society, all coming together at one point. The Egyptian civilization started here.’
‘Is there enough Blue Fire left in the sand?’ Church asked.
Shavi scanned the ground. ‘Thin currents, but I believe it will do.’ He shielded his eyes from the sun. ‘The Blue Fire is starting to dry up now that it has been cut off from the source. Soon we will not be able to travel between here and Tir n’a n’Og. We will be trapped on Earth.’
‘That’s what the Enemy wants,’ Church said. ‘To cut us off from the universe.’
Hunter emerged from the truck with Laura in his arms. ‘Are we ready to do this?’
‘Are you?’
‘Why haven’t I got a sword like yours? That would make things so much easier.’
‘You think?’
‘A warrior without a weapon? Not good.’
‘Stop moaning and find something,’ Tom snapped. ‘You’ve been complaining about that ever since I met you. Anyone would think you didn’t want a weapon.’
Hunter laughed quietly, and then made his way into the centre of the circle. ‘All right, throw the switch. Press the button. Say the magic word. A whole new world in which to indulge myself. I like the sound of that. And nobody knows my reputation.’
‘Good luck,’ Church called.
Tom and Shavi moved to the tall menhirs on either side of the circle. When the rising sun clipped the top of the stones, they placed their right hands firmly on the rock. The earth energy pulsed beneath their fingertips, increasing in force with each beat of their hearts until it rushed upwards to form a blazing azure structure high over the circle. Discharges crackled amongst the stones.
Church had one last sight of Hunter, cocky and grinning, with Laura in his arms, and then there was a flash of blue light and they were gone.
9
Even in the first light the interior of the truck baked as they drove north along the empty desert road. Shavi had remained silent ever since they had set off, staring through the open passenger window across the bleak expanse of sand. Without any warning his head pitched forward and then back, and he gave a low moan.
‘You all right?’ Church asked.
After a moment, Shavi replied weakly, ‘I saw … I saw …’ One hand made a claw over his alien eye, as if he was about to pluck it out. ‘I saw death.’
‘No surprise there.’ Tom sniffed. He turned the ring on his finger with repressed anxiety.
‘For the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. It follows us closely, like your ravens, Church, and not all of us will survive what is to come.’ He sighed. ‘One of us will die soon.’
‘Laura?’ Shavi was only confirming what Church had felt instinctively since the ravens had started to follow him.
‘I do not know. It is not clear. But I fear for her, Church, and for Hunter.’ Tears rimmed his eyes. He looked back out through the window, and no one spoke for the next hour.
Chapter Ten
1
What is the Burning Man? The question was whispered throughout the claustrophobic, labyrinthine streets and alleys of the Court of the Soaring Spirit, and in the back rooms of the Hunter’s Moon, and in the coffee houses and grocery stores and anywhere people passed, quickly, for no one gathered long in a place. It was as if every resident instinctively felt they were being pursued by forces unknown. There was no rest in the courts and little hope, for the distant sound of the Enemy’s war drums never ceased, and there were ashes in the wind, and whenever they raised their eyes from the gutter, the Burning Man was there, in the sky on the horizon, hanging over them, a mystery and a threat.
In the secret network of rooms tucked away at the back of the Hunter’s Moon, the goddess Rhiannon still lay in the Sleep Like Death. Decebalus cared for her around the clock, with assistance from the young Virginia Dare, but it was not work for a barbarian and he was growing irritable with the constraints of his small existence.
‘She’s not improving?’ Mallory paced by the fire. He had barely rested since they had returned from Ogma’s library.
‘She muttered one word in the throes of a fever dream, but it made no sense to me.’ Decebalus slurped noisily on mutton broth. ‘How much longer must I wait here? She will not awaken.’
