'You should never have left the path, little girl,' Laura said to Ruth with a faint smile. From the corner of his eye, Church caught Veitch watching the two of them intently, coldly.
Church nodded to Tom. 'You tell them what you told me.'
Tom took off his spectacles and cleaned them on his shirt. Without the glasses he looked less like the sixties burn-out case and more like the erudite, thoughtful aristocrat he was. 'When the old gods have…' There was a long, jarring pause while he searched for the right word. '… adjusted someone, it is often difficult for the mind to fully fix their shape. It's as if something fundamental has been altered on a molecular level, something so in opposition to nature it seems to set up interference patterns for the senses. The first few times you see something like this, unless you're prepared, it's like a punch in the stomach. To make sense of it, the mind gives it a shape which is closest to the essence of its being-
'So it's a wolf at heart?' Ruth asked. There seemed to be a stone pressing at the back of her throat.
'Is this the origin of werewolves?' Shavi interjected.
Tom shook his head. 'The Lupinari are different. This creature was mortal once. And the ones who have been altered sometimes seem so enamoured of this inner self, they grow into it. Physically.'
'I've met a few guys like that,' Laura said. 'They don't need a full moon. Just seven pints.'
'You don't remember anything?' Church asked Ruth.
She shook her head. 'Just Laura-'
'Laura?' Veitch's voice was a whipcrack.
'Laura was around somewhere. That's all I remember.'
They sat in silence for a few moments, weighing the evidence. And then, once they had exhausted all possibilities, they were forced to turn to Ruth again, although none of them wanted to hear what she had to say.
'How was it in there?' Church asked tenderly.
She smiled weakly. 'Oh, you know… You can guess.'
He nodded. 'Do you want to talk about it?'
She shook her head. 'I just want to get back on my feet.'
'I might be able to help there.' Tom gave her a faint smile, but it was warm and honest, a rare sight. He headed off into the countryside. They watched him for a while, dipping down occasionally to pluck something from the ground.
'Hmmm, grass and weeds. You're in for a treat,' Laura said. 'What is it with the old git? He knows all about these herbs and shit like he's some old witch.' Ruth flinched, but no one noticed.
'He's had a long time to learn.' Church continued to watch Tom. Their relationship had always been abrasive, but he had respect for the Rhymer's wisdom.
'He learned it from the Culture, the people of the Bone Inspector,' Shavi said. 'It is age-old knowledge, from the time when people were close to the land.'
'We need to sort out the way forward.' Veitch cut through the small talk sharply.
'What's to sort out? I'm so hungry I could eat you.' Laura let the double- entendre hang in the air teasingly, her sunglasses obscuring her true meaning. 'Calm down, big boy. That wasn't meant in a nice way.'
'Laura is right,' Shavi said. 'Hot food first, then provisions, camping equipment, clothes. We need to replace everything we left at the hotel.'
'Yeah, because that city is not going to look very pretty after the air-raid,' Witch said sharply. 'We need to find a place to lie low while we work out what we're going to do. Somewhere the Bastards can't find us.'
Church nodded in agreement. 'We should head south.'
'Yeah, I'm sick of heather and tartan,' Veitch said. 'And all the bleedin' Jocks hate us anyway.'
Tom returned half an hour later with two handfuls of vegetation while Ruth was vainly searching the sky for her owl. He used the wheel brace in the van to pound them into two piles of pulp. One he applied as a poultice to Ruth's finger, the other he made her eat, despite her protests.
'Stop whining,' Laura said. 'As soon as you get past the gag reflex it'll be fine.'
Eventually she ate it, and she did retch noisily for a while, but nothing came back up. They helped her back into the van and she fell asleep as soon as they set off.
The journey was not easy going. They stopped at a roadside cafe for a large meal that doubled as breakfast and lunch, before they were hit by two technology failures, lasting two hours and forty-five minutes respectively. In Peebles they used their credit cards to stock up on everything they needed, but the shop assistants were wary of taking the plastic; with the failure of the phone system it was impossible to check their validity, and everyone seemed to suspect the whole system was collapsing anyway. To recognise that fact was a blow too far so the cards were swiped in the old-fashioned way, with an unspoken prayer that everything would sort itself out soon. But it was obvious to Church and the others that the balloon was on the point of going up.
As they passed through Melrose, Tom waxed lyrical about his home area until Laura yawned so loudly and repeatedly it brought him to cursing. Jedburgh passed in a blur and they crossed the border in late afternoon.
There was a heated debate about which route to pursue after that, but everyone bowed to Veitch's strategic decison to head into the wide open spaces of high hills and bleak moorland that comprised the Northumberland National Park. They swept from the rolling fields of the Scottish Lowlands into a majestic landscape of purples, browns and greens, brooding beneath a perfect blue sky. It was a place of rock and scrub, wind-torn trees standing lonely on the horizon, and a howling gale that rushed from the high places as if it had a life of its own.
The hardiness gave way to the pleasant shade of the Border Forest Park, where the play of light and dark through the leaf cover on to the windscreen made them all feel less hunted. There was a deep peace among the thick woods that was a pleasure after the omnipresent threat of Edinburgh.
While Shavi drove, Veitch took charge of the map book. He made them follow a circuitous route through the quiet villages that must have added fifty miles to their journey, but he insisted if there was any pursuit it would make their destination less apparent. Laura noted tartly that he'd already baffled the rest of them about where they were going.
They eventually came to a halt at an abandoned railway station at High Staward, eight miles southwest of Hexham. They loaded all their possessions into four rucksacks which Church, Veitch, Tom and Shavi shouldered with much protesting. Laura taunted their lack of manliness, and even Ruth tossed out a few quips, and eventually they were marching along a footpath northwards through the deserted countryside.
Veitch had selected the location after careful study of the maps, and they all had to agree it was so off the beaten track it was as good a hiding place as any. They plunged down into thick woodland where the dark lay heavy and cool and the only sound was the eerie soughing of the wind, like distant voices urging them to stray from the path. A mile later they emerged to a breathtaking sight: the Allen Gorge. Four miles long, its precipitously steep sides soared up two hundred and fifty feet, covered with so many trees it looked like an Alpine landscape. Secluded pathways wound along the riverside and away into the trees.
'We could hide here for weeks if we wanted.' Veitch's voice held a note of pride that the reality matched up to his expectations.
They followed a path into the area with the thickest tree cover and then ploughed off into the wild. They finally halted when they couldn't see the path clearly any longer. The tents went up quickly in a circle, and at the heart of it Veitch dug a pit for a fire.
In the early evening sun, Church and Shavi went exploring. They found an outcropping rock in a clearing on the side of the gorge where they had majestic views over the entire area. They were both instantly struck by the immaculate beauty of the place.
'You know, if we lose all the technology, maybe it won't be so bad,' Church mused. 'We'll still have all this.'
Before Shavi could reply, the tranquillity was shattered by the roar of two jets burning through the sky in the direction of Newcastle. 'I bet they're not test flights,' Church said. 'Looks like trouble.'
Fifteen minutes later another one followed, but before it had crossed the arc of the sky, the technology chose that moment to fail once more. They saw the jet plummet from the sky like a boulder, hitting the ground with an explosion that made their ears ring despite their distance from ground zero. They stood in silence for a long time, watching the black pall of smoke merge with the clouds. Wrapped up in that incident was the failure of everything they knew; Church found himself questioning his earlier statement. They couldn't put it into any kind of perspective, and in the end, they didn't even try. They wandered back to the camp, thinking about the poor pilot, wondering
