He was bruised and dishevelled. His clothes were torn but there was plenty of fight in his roguish gaze. He wanted to make mischief and plenty of it.
“That tremor I felt. That was… what? Some portal between here and Hell opening up?”
Faustus nodded. “Close enough. The ancient word for the place is Kurnugi. It’s built from the dream-flesh of the Anunnaki. The asakku are preparing the way for their masters.”
Billi pointed to a corner and the moss-covered steps leading down. “It’s the only place they could be.”
Faustus nodded, and patted her on the back. “Lead on, MacDuff.”
Another tremor hit. This one came harder and faster than before and the sense of wrongness, of dimensions warping and reality itself fracturing, surrounded and penetrated Billi. She felt as if spiders were clawing inside her, scuttling through her body and under her skin. She thought she could feel them climbing up through her throat, trying to get out, of long, spindly legs prodding at her cheeks…
No. No. No.
“Billi?”
The tremor passed. She wiped the sweat off her brow. “That was bad. What’s going on?”
“The Anunnaki are coming through. They don’t belong in this universe, and the universe is being bent out of shape to suit them. This is only going to get worse.”
“I can hardly stand up, Faustus. Is the ground real? It doesn’t feel real. I don’t know what is.” She looked at her own hands. Were they hers anymore?
“Reality is perception, Billi. Don’t let them distort yours so much that you don’t trust yourself. We need to hang on, just for a while longer.”
“You don’t feel it? Blimey, Faustus, I’m being turned inside out right now.”
He took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “I’ll be right beside you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The whole castle was shaking. The countless dimensions battled each other, expanding and collapsing with no pattern, warping reality second by second, time and space being the least significant, and thus the most malleable. Billi focused on Faustus, her one point of sanity, but from the corners of her eyes she glimpsed the uncontrollable transformations happening all around her. The house rising up, the times before it had existed, the waves of emotion rippling through from its previous inhabitants, when it had been a living entity of its own. She winced at the flares of horror that had happened within its walls, how its own spirit had been corrupted by the plague of evil that had been spread by Reginald FitzRoy.
“Erin’s the key to all this. She’s opened the door to let the Anunnaki come through,” said Faustus. His eyes hardened. “We have to stop her.”
“Whatever it takes.” Billi closed her eyes briefly to fight down the nausea, but the weight of the Templar sword anchored her to her dreadful duty.
Poor Erin. Had she ever had a chance? Any hope in her sad, broken life? What a monstrous thing she’d been forced to become through a lifetime of abuse.
“You actually killed anyone before?” asked Faustus. “Because I haven’t.”
“You do your job and I’ll do mine.”
“Hey, we may survive this,” his brow wrinkled. “Maybe?”
She kissed him fiercely, hooking her arm around his neck so she could give him all the passion she felt at the moment. There was so much to life, despite what she’d been shown. What did the Anunnaki understand about being human? We knew we were small, that our lives were over in less than a blink of an eye, our deeds minuscule compared to the galaxy-spanning schemes of the primal beings. We touched few people in our brief, fragile lives, but every single one of them counted for something.
“We have to make it, Billi,” he said, eyes twinkling with that familiar roguish charm. “A kiss like that needs to be savoured over a long, long time.”
“Will you get over yourself?” Billi laughed. “Now would be the time for you to unleash that fireball spell you’ve been saving all your life.”
“For the millionth time I am not a wizard. It wasn’t funny the first time, and it still isn’t.”
“Which way?” said Billi. “I can’t even tell which way is up.”
“We’re falling into a pan-dimensional space, spatial coordinates are meaningless. We need to go to the heart of the pain. That’s where Erin will be, or what’s left of her.”
“What does that mean?” asked Billi.
Faustus began tugging at his sleeve. “Look what’s happening around us, Billi. Now just imagine what’s going on at the epicentre of it all.” Then he ripped his shirt sleeve off, all the way down from the shoulder. He gave it another solid pull and dragged the cloth over his wrist, revealing all his tattoos. The history of magic was literally written upon Faustus’s skin.
“You’ve never explained what any of those actually mean,” said Billi.
“Sometimes you’ve got to fight darkness with darkness.”
“Ah. Maybe best I don’t know, eh?
Billi worked on steadying her breath, focusing on the intimate things, Faustus’s fingers slipping through her own, one by one taking hold, his soft skin against her callused palms. She wished she could be soft but the time for that had never existed in her life. One hand held his, the other heavy, cold steel.
There was a howling light coming from below. It crackled along the stones and sparked upon the sword blade. They were surrounded by a deafening thunder, a heart-beat of some titanic being. Then, piercing the pandemonium, Billi heard a cry, a cry that jumped straight into her heart.
Ivan!
CHAPTER 30
Centuries of erosion had brought the catacombs to the verge of total collapse. Huge cracks ran jaggedly along the walls and the floor was torn by deep crevasses creating a jigsaw of broken islands of stone. Many of the columns had collapsed, some tumbling down the rents into the sea
