'I never knew my father,' Jack said after a moment.
Hunter didn't know how to respond.
'The Tuatha De Danaan stole me from my mother when I was a baby and took me to the Court of the Final Word where they put the Wish-Hex inside me. They made me into a weapon. Then they kept me prisoner till Caitlin and Mahalia set me free.' He wiped the snot from his dripping nose with the back of his hand.
'Doesn't sound like you've had much of a life, mate.'
'That just makes me want to fight for it even more.'
Hunter was impressed by the determination in Jack's voice; it reminded him of himself, before the sourness took hold of his life. 'Keep hold of that thought, kid, because now we need to find a way out of here before those things pop up out of the water.'
Following the air current, they moved tentatively away from their resting place, feeling into the dark ahead of them in case there were any gaping pits or more sudden inclines. Hunter put out of his head the possibility that the breeze came from a tiny fissure and that there might be no way out of the cavern.
Progress was slow and the fear of the Fomorii emerging from the water behind them grew. But then the texture underfoot changed from hard rock to smaller items that rolled and crunched, in some areas several inches deep. Harder objects lay amongst them.
'What is that? Dry wood?' Jack asked.
'Down here?' Hunter knelt to investigate. His fingers ran over dry, fragile things, some tubular, some sharp, some curved, and what were clearly metal artefacts scattered amongst them. 'I think there's a sword here. And a… shield?' he ventured. 'A helmet?'
They continued treading tentatively over the cracking, shifting surface for several more minutes until Jack's foot caught something that clanged and bounced. He felt around for it in the dark and raised it, letting his fingers see the surface. 'A lantern!' he said.
With his flint, Hunter lit the wick. The flame was weak, but held on to life. The shadows rushed away, dancing back menacingly with each flicker of the light.
'Oh,' Jack said as he looked around with mounting uneasiness.
Hunter followed his gaze in a wide arc across the cavern. 'You can say that again.'
Human bones lay everywhere. The vast sea of dirty yellow and brown was a civilisation in essence, skulls smashed, limbs torn apart, ribs broken, the clothes that had contained them long since rotted away with only the metal remnants of weapons and armour still remaining.
'What the hell happened here?' Hunter said.
6
The scale of the Halls of the Drakusa spoke of grandeur. Ceilings soared cathedral-like overhead and huge chambers that could have accommodated a small army rang with their hesitant footsteps. Church led his group past pillars of marble and extensive murals that must once have gleamed with colour, but were now faded and barely visible, the most obvious symbol of the decay and great age that shrouded the Halls. A desert of white dust interspersed with piles of shattered masonry and discarded everyday objects covered the stone flags. Only darkness and shadows remained in a place that had once thronged with life.
Shavi examined some of the murals as they passed. 'Who were the Drakusa?' he asked.
'Every race has the arrogance to believe they were the first and best,' Tom said, joining him. 'The old stories hint at others who came before. Races that rose up, established civilisations and were then wiped clean and forgotten, through their own hubris or at the whims of angry gods.'
'You don't really think that could happen to us?' Ruth said. 'With all our technology, our learning-'
'You think these people didn't have their own technology, different from ours, maybe more powerful, their own wisdom?' Intrigued, Tom brushed away some of the dust and cobwebs that obscured the mural.
Shavi saw what Tom was seeing, and joined him. From beneath the grime of ages, faint images emerged of oval shapes, giant in scale compared to the human figures prostrate before them. Some of the egg shapes appeared to be spouting tentacles, or were in the process of becoming something else.
'Those,' Shavi said, puzzled, 'are Caraprix.'
His expression troubled, Tom studied the mural.
'Never seen any that big,' Laura said.
'It's symbolic,' Tom muttered.
'So the Drakusa knew of the Caraprix, long before the Tuatha De Danaan.' Raising the lantern, Church looked around the walls in a new light. Images of Caraprix were visible everywhere, on the walls behind the dust, in mosaics on the floor and carvings on the marble pillars, emerging in part here and there, barely recognisable in isolation but taken together presenting a temple to the shape-shifting creatures. 'This place implies that they're gods or something.'
'Whoever did all these pictures… why are they making such a big deal out of them?' Veitch asked. 'The Caraprix are just pets, right? Those golden-skinned bastards have them around for entertainment.'
'I think we have been a little blind and stupid,' Tom began. 'All the time the Caraprix have been before our eyes, and we have misjudged them. We have not seen their true nature.'
A flicker of Blue Fire sizzled randomly at the tip of Ruth's spear and they all jumped. 'What do you mean?' Ruth asked.
'We have been told many, many times that the closer things are to the heart of Existence, the more fluid they are,' Tom replied. 'And these are the most fluid things of all. They have no fixed shape, no definable purpose. They can be anything they want. What, I wonder, are the limits of that? What could they really be?'
Church indicated another image, a figure with arms outstretched, strings connecting his fingers to a row of dancing marionettes. 'The Puppeteer,' he said. 'I've seen him before. In Venice, back in Elizabethan times. And in the court. So he existed before the current Age, before the Tuatha De Danaan? Why would he be painted here?'
'It's not that I don't find your noodling and navel-gazing so, so fascinating, ' Laura snapped, 'but what say we forget all this and move on before those Fomorii find a way in here and hunt us down like rabbits.'
'She's right,' Veitch said. 'This isn't important. We need to find the gate to Summer-side, and this place is so big we could be searching for years.'
Tom glared at Veitch, about to launch an angry comment, when Church dropped a hand on his shoulder. 'This isn't the place for a fight.' He nodded towards Miller and Virginia, who were sitting together on a piece of fallen pillar. Miller had a reassuring arm around the frightened girl's shoulders, but his fixed expression revealed his own repressed terror. 'We forget they're not like us,' Church continued. 'They've not seen the things we've seen, and they're not built to deal with what they've found here.'
'They're not like you,' Tom said pointedly.
Their unease mounted as they continued through the empty, ringing halls. The scale of the place, the silence, the darkness, the decay combined to create a thick, oppressive atmosphere that was profoundly unsettling. Though none of them gave voice to it, they all felt as if they were being watched by hateful eyes from the shadows just beyond the extent of the thin lantern light.
The stillness was so intense that even the slightest sound was magnified, and all their senses were heightened. After an hour, they heard a short, dull grind that could have been a door opening. It was so faint and distant that they would have dismissed it at any other time, but in that place it sounded like a tolling bell.
'I don't think we're alone in here,' Church said.
'They're coming.'
They all turned to look at Virginia, who had thrown off her hood and was smiling. It added a macabre cast to the desperate terror glittering in her eyes.
'The Fomorii?' Church asked.
Virginia shook her head. 'Worse than that.'
