‘I’m going to take you to meet the people who gave us this miracle. They’re a great couple, really. You’ll like them. They’ve been together for a really long time, much longer than you’d think. Just like you and me can be together.’
She was quiet the rest of the way to Farrow Farm. At the gate he was a bit worried that she’d try to run away when he had to get out and open it, but she seemed to be very calm, like she was thinking over everything he’d said. He drove into the farmyard and parked. ‘First, though, I want to show you what it’s all about. So you’ll understand when you meet them.’
She let him lead her to the door of the shrine, which he unlocked and opened so that she could see. He watched her expression change as her gaze travelled over the wall with its paintings of the tusk moon, the god’s gleaming skull and the carnyx. Her eyes and her mouth were open in wonder, and he knew that this had been the right thing to do.
Then she was running off across the farmyard, screaming.
‘Help me!’ she shrieked as she ran. ‘Somebody please help me!’
‘Oh shit.’
He gave chase, thinking, ironically, that now would be a really good time for her to have an asthma attack.
Somebody did appear around a corner of one of the outbuildings, and she ran faster towards him, sobbing with relief and joy. Gar scooped her up very neatly and clamped his other hand across her mouth to stifle the noise. As he approached Matt he nodded at the squirming, kicking girl under his arm. ‘Yours?’ he said.
‘It’s a long story,’ Matt sighed.
* * *
The deserter listened to him explain what had happened, thinking that it wasn’t the end of the world as far as he was concerned, but Ardwyn was furious. He knew better than to interfere. She sat in her high-backed wooden chair at the large kitchen table, exactly copying the way Mother had in Swinley, either consciously or not, while Matt knelt before her in penitence. The girl had been secured in the half-finished dormitory conversion, which had meant that the volunteers who had been working on it at the time were hurriedly sent home because Mother still wasn’t prepared to risk their reactions to the use of human vessels. They had heard the girl’s screams and they would be asking questions. This dressing down was necessary.
‘This is not how we do things,’ she said when Matt had finished, enunciating each word like spitting splinters of glass. She was trembling with a rage that the deserter had rarely seen.
‘Well, I’m getting told pretty much fuck-all about how you do do things so you can’t blame me if I make it up as I go,’ he replied, sulky and angry.
The deserter clipped him around the back of the head. ‘Oi!’ he warned. ‘Respect your Mother.’
‘Sorry, Mother,’ he mumbled. ‘I know I fucked up.’
‘I don’t think you have the faintest clue about how monumentally you have fucked up, you stupid child,’ she snarled. ‘We’re probably going to have to leave this place now.’ She waved her arms, encompassing the farmhouse and everything around it. ‘All of this, everything we’ve spent months building. Our home. And all because you couldn’t keep it in your pants for some silly little village slut.’
‘She’s not—’
‘She’s whatever I fucking well tell you she is!’ Ardwyn yelled, leaning forward in her chair and spraying the spittle of her rage on the boy kneeling before her. The deserter stepped back a pace in shock. He’d never heard her like this. ‘Each member of the blessed that we bring into the Farrow is chosen for a reason! Do you understand that? Angie Robotham because she controls access to the allotments. David Pimblett because he can keep the police away from us. Speaking of which,’ her glare snapped onto Everett, and he flinched. ‘I rather think now might be a good time for us to know where our pet PC Plod is. Have we seen him recently?’
‘I’ll chase that up, Mother.’
‘Do so. Quickly. I want no more fuck-ups.’ The look on her face told Everett that she was holding him to blame for this as much as Matt. He’d brought the boy in, and convinced her that Matt could be one of the Farrow. This was his fuck-up too.
‘And me?’ asked Matt. ‘What about me? Why was I chosen?’
‘Honestly, I’m beginning to wonder that myself.’
‘Because you’re a born killer,’ said Everett, trying to claw something back from this. ‘A church needs its priests, its vergers, and its sextons, that’s true, but it also needs its crusaders.’
‘Those that become the vessels of Moccus’ replenishment are chosen very carefully because they will not be missed,’ Ardwyn continued, slightly calmer now, but with a steely patience. ‘This month’s vessel was selected long ago. We don’t know who this girl is, what her connections are, how soon people will begin to notice that she’s missing. We can’t possibly let her go now that she’s seen the shrine, and we have to assume that soon people will be looking for her, which is why we might have to abandon our home within weeks – weeks – of His rebirth.’
‘All the more reason to convince her to join us!’ Matt protested.
The deserter shook his head. ‘I rather think kidnapping her, smacking her in the face and then tying her up is hardly going to win her trust.’
‘No,’ Ardwyn agreed. ‘I think that boat has sailed. The best use she can be now is as a vessel.’
‘But if we tell her that’s the alternative, to be sacrificed, then she’ll have no choice!’
‘When you threaten someone’s life they’ll tell you whatever you want,’ Everett said. Sometimes it was hard to believe that the boy could be so naïve. ‘It’s not exactly conducive to
