His hand went to his sword for comfort, though he knew it would be useless in that place. He tried not to get distracted; head down, keep going, a mantra he repeated over and over.
And then, as if they had been commanded, the mists parted and a figure emerged from them. It was a woman, her face blank, her skin a pallid grey, clad in an ankle-length, colourless dress of some harsh material. Long blonde hair hung limply around her face. Her head was held uncomfortably towards one shoulder and she moved awkwardly, as if her limbs were not used to any activity. She paused a few feet away from Veitch, swaying slightly.
'Hello?' he said tentatively. A beat had started to pulse deep in his brain.
Instead of turning her head, she inched her whole body round until she was facing him. He expected to see some kind of terror, some severe intelligence in her eyes, but they were cold and dead and that was even worse. Slowly, she beckoned for him to follow her.
For a second or two, Veitch hesitated as Tom's words briefly tapped a warning: the dead hate the living. They were jealous and bitter. Yet he could see no threat in her, and following her was preferable to wandering aimlessly; any presence, however strange, was a respite from the awful sense of foreboding gathering all around.
'I'm looking for someone.' His voice, so vibrant and full of life, sounded jarringly out of place. He modulated it so it sounded less expressive. 'A friend.'
She turned towards him with those eyes that showed no glimmer of thought, gave nothing away, then shuffled back round silently and continued slowly on her way.
'So, are you ignoring me? Or can you talk? Who knows what the bleedin' rules are in this place?' He eased a little as the minutes passed without event and slowly he warmed to the sound of his voice, like a flame in the deep, dark night. 'I hope this isn't a wild goose chase. For all I know, you've got no sense left at all. You're just a shape or something. And I'm acting like a right twat talking to you. No change there, then.' He smiled to himself. 'This isn't as bad as I thought. The old bastard built it up into some big, bleedin' fright. Thought I'd be fighting for my life the moment I crossed over here. And look at us. Having a nice stroll. Shame about the scenery.' He paused thoughtfully. 'Still better than Greenwich, though.' His chuckle rolled out through the mists, eventually coming back to him distorted into the growl of a wild beast.
They continued until the ground sloped downwards and became littered at first with stones, and then with large boulders. Veitch had to pick his way through them carefully, but the woman moved effortlessly, almost oblivious to the obstacles.
'You really better not be taking me for a ride.' He clambered over a rock with lethal-looking fractured edges, as sharp as razors.
Beyond the rocks, passage became even steeper and it was necessary to take a winding route down to avoid careering out of control. Veitch was disturbed to realise his journey was like a distorted analogue of the landscape he had left behind in the real world: the flat summit, the thickly forested rim, the sweeping hillside; instead of lush vegetation there were only dead land and dead people. He wasn't taken with many thoughts of reasoning or perception, but at that moment one came to him that excited him with its novelty. Perhaps all the words-T'ir n'a n'Og, the Grim Lands, and whatever lay beyond-were just like his own world in layout, only altered to fit whatever rules of the place abided. It was a big notion, and there were too many questions building up behind it to consider it for too long, but he felt a remarkable sense of achievement that he had thought it in the first place.
As he made his way down the hillside, the mist cleared a little. What he saw wasn't as disturbing as on the summit, but it still brought troubling questions. At one juncture, he seemed to be looking out over London, only it was transformed by shadows shifting along the streets with a life of their own. Later he saw a Spitfire sweeping across the sky, and then a tribe of fierce men and women in furs and leather.
And in one particularly upsetting moment, he even saw himself, or thought he did, but it was so fleeting he couldn't be sure. Yet in that half moment, he was overcome with a consuming horror. The expression he saw on his face had the look of a man who had peered into the depths of Hell and saw it was even worse than he could possibly imagine; broken, filled with despair, and more, an almost inhuman self-loathing. It made him sick to his stomach at the thought of what that vision meant, but try as he might, he couldn't put it out of his head.
It troubled him enough to lose his common sense briefly. Suddenly overcome by doubt that his guide was taking him no closer to Shavi, he hurried forward and grabbed her arm. He regretted it instantly. The flesh felt as dry and lifeless as sandpaper. At his touch, a tremor ran through the woman and she turned once again to fix that blank gaze on him. Once more he tried to see some meaning in those implacable eyes, but there was only a defiant idiocy there. He retreated quickly and didn't speak to her again for the next half hour.
By then his thoughts had started to move on to more questions about his surroundings. Did all the dead stay in that place? If so, why was it so empty after the long spread of human existence? Or was it like a waiting room before the departed moved on to somewhere else?
'Maybe this is it, just you and me, and everyone else has already passed on,' he mused. 'The only living boy in the Grim Lands and his dead girlfriend.'
'Oh, there are more.' He jerked in shock at the sound of her voice, like a file on metal.
'You can talk.' All his carefully constructed conceptions were shifting under his feet. His mind raced to get back on track; he was thinking, If she can talk, what else can she do? but by then it was too late.
The remaining mist swept away, although he could not feel any breeze. It was an eerie sight, billowing across the bleak landscape like a reversed film. As it did so, she was turning to face him once again, only this time she was fundamentally changed. Her posture had become more upright, but it was most evident in her eyes, no longer dead, no longer stupid.
He thought: She tricked nze.
The tinge of a cruel smile appeared. 'Welcome to the Grey Lands. May you never leave.'
She made an expansive gesture. Hesitantly, he turned to look, although every fibre of him was screaming that he didn't want to see.
They were behind him. Dead people, as far as the eye could see, line upon line, column upon column, stretched across the grey stone land beneath the grey sky. Figures leeched of colour, of expression, of body language, bereft of life in all its signifiers. But not bereft of emotion. Although their faces were impassive, he could see it in their hateful eyes. A thousand, thousand unblinking stares radiating darkness, silently roaring that they wanted to tear him limb from limb; to punish him for the crime of living. The planetary weight of their gaze made him feel sick.
As he scanned them slowly, he began to understand. Here were the ones who had not yet moved on, but also the ones who could not move on; those trapped by hatred or fear or shock. He came across the face of Ruth's uncle, whom he had shot down in cold blood, and felt a terrible, crushing guilt. To understand the awful repercussions of the murder had been traumatic enough, but to be faced with the cold, accusing eyes of his victim was infinitely worse. He quickly looked away, knowing he would never forget what he had seen in that face. But there were others he had seen slain during the long, hard days of his youth, when he first started to move with the wrong kind. The ones nearest were unknown to him, but he could still read the harshness of their existence in the lines on their faces, the sour turn of their mouths.
It was a strange, hanging moment of complete silence; he was looking up at a tidal wave the instant before it crashed down. And then they moved.
Veitch launched himself across the rocky ground as the wave broke. In the instant of his turning he had glimpsed them all shifting as one, a single grey beast of hatred and retribution bearing down on him with outstretched arms, wide, staring eyes and silently screaming mouths. A million dead, hunting. If he survived, he knew it was a sight that would haunt him for as long as he lived.
As he passed the treacherous spirit that had guided him to that spot, she spat like a wildcat and lashed out with sharp nails that raked open the side of his face. Without breaking his stride, he cursed and returned the blow with his sword. Her bloodless arm fell to the ground.
The fear and adrenalin took conscious thought from his head. Instinctively he recognised his only hope was to run faster and longer. But could the dead tire? And he had already been pushed to his limits by the Night Rider.
The ground passed in a blur beneath his feet, the featureless, rocky landscape streamed on either side; he was locked into the beat of his heart, the surge of his blood, the pump of his muscles. Through it all he could feel the weight of them pressing at his back, just a hand's-width from him, constantly reaching. One wrong step and
