garden would have been a peaceful oasis in the crowded city, with works of great beauty dappled by the sun through a canvas of willow or yew. Tropical plants with long, spiky leaves grew here and there, some sporting strong, sweetly perfumed pink flowers, and stone benches were placed intermittently in the cool shade along the gravelled paths.
Laura scrambled over the spike-topped wall only to discover that she was not the first to gain access. Several men, women and children had managed to haul themselves in, hoping to find a cool refuge from the seething madness of the city. They had all died where they sat, huddled in blankets against the chill of the night, or fiercely protecting a morsel of food with a knife. Under the shade of one tree, a mother and two children lay as if asleep, their faces peaceful, no marks on their bodies.
Laura was not deterred by this macabre sight. She gave the bodies a cursory glance as she crunched along the path, her well-honed ability not to accept anything with which she did not agree coming into play; her ego defined her world-view specifically, a pleasant place that was always Laura-centric. She didn't even think of Hunter when she saw the images of death all around; she couldn't, for that left her mind recoiling and placed her at risk from the rising tide of guilt and self-loathing.
The sun was high overhead when she came to a quiet grove at the heart of the garden where she had been summoned. The trees were densely packed and it was impossible to see into their dark heart, but she knew instinctively that a presence waited there. Her heart beat faster as she approached, and a deep dread enveloped her so that she had to fight not to flee back to the comfort of people in the crowded streets.
Ten feet from the grove, she realised she could barely hear the once-deafening sounds of the city that droned constantly in the background from morning to night. It was as if an invisible cloak had been thrown over that part of the garden. The silence was so intense in her mind that it had a texture, soft and gluey, almost liquid. It was unpleasant and unnerving, and felt, in its own unnatural way, as if it was waiting to be filled by something terrible.
'All right,' she said, forcing the bravado into her voice as she had so many times, 'I'm here.'
There was no response. She could feel the pulse of her blood, so strong she was sure she could hear her own heartbeat growing steadily faster. Her stomach flipped queasily, the instinctive response to a hidden gaze moving slowly across her. The presence was so powerful it felt even larger than the grove hiding it, the electrical cloud of its inhuman intellect enveloping her, holding her fast. She had a mental flash of teeth, of talons, of being consumed, and she couldn't prevent a shudder.
For a long moment, she waited, too afraid to run away for fear it would pursue her, too scared to take a step closer in case it dragged her into the grove to a fate that she feared would be worse than anything she could imagine. And then, with such unbearable slowness that she felt she would faint with the dread of anticipation, a hand extended from the trees. At first she thought it was the paw of a big cat, sleek with black spots on white and orange fur, but within a flicker of her eye it changed to a desiccated, grey-skinned human hand clutching a rectangular hand mirror edged in silver with horns on each corner.
For some reason she couldn't explain, the mirror increased Laura's feelings of dread, pulling in her gaze until she couldn't tear her eyes away from it. The mirror glass didn't appear to be glass at all, but rather some kind of liquid with the silvery quality of mercury turning slowly to black as she watched; she was convinced she could plunge her hand into its depths. After a second, the mirror began to smoke.
'Sister of Dragons.' The voice rang clearly in the zone of silence, but it sounded unused to human words, each syllable ending with a hint of an animalistic growl.
Laura forced herself not to faint; hidden within the voice were hints of blood and torn, decomposing flesh, of graveyards and inhuman savagery. 'What do you want me to do?' she asked haltingly.
'The time has come for another to die,' the voice growled.
After the presence in the grove had issued its order, Laura muttered a feeble response, but her thoughts screamed in the echoing halls of her head. Before she knew it she was running back through the garden in blind terror, throwing herself at the wall, kicking and scrambling over and losing herself in the sweaty throng, desperate for human contact, devastated by what she had given up, appalled by what she would do next.
9
Whistling a jaunty tune, the Libertarian wiped the blood from his fingers on the clothes of the young man who had offered him a hand of friendship and the promise of shelter, and then slowly climbed the steps in the tallest tower of the Court of Endless Horizons.
Through his lidless eyes, the world always looked blood-red. He wore sunglasses as an affectation, one of the many he had adopted for the theatrical style he had chosen to present to the world, but they had increasingly become a necessity to prevent the unpleasant psychological side effects engendered by the constantly swimming colour. At times it was almost hallucinogenic, plundering half-memories from the never-touched depths of his mind, twisting them into what-might-have-beens, conjuring distorted faces of old friends, long-slaughtered, old emotions, long-crushed. He could not be the person he was if he was reminded of the person he had been. That was why he had created such a ludicrous public persona, pieced together from silent movies, vaudeville and comic books. He had never been theatrical in his old life, and now he was somebody else, somebody so completely different that he could believe in it implicitly.
But still the fragmentary locked-off recollections haunted him.
When they became too intense, he killed, for that was the ultimate denial of his past-life; enemies, random strangers, even those who dwelled in the daily sphere of his existence; he couldn't really call them friends for there was no room for warm emotions in his sleek, secure, granite world.
And he loved who he was with a manic desperation. There were no circumstances in which he would choose to go back. In the restrictions of his life, he was free, as were all who believed in what he believed. There was not the tyranny of choice, the sickening insecurity of hope, all the striving and failing, the never-being-content. The world under the Void was the best possible world under the circumstances of existence. Everyone had the peace to live out their brief lives as best they could, slotting into a familiar mundane rhythm that asked nothing of them; and so they too were free. And when death finally came, it made them freer still. He couldn't understand how the person he once was had never recognised the stark, comforting simplicity of that life.
Throwing open the door at the top of the tower, he stepped out into the baking midday heat. A small balcony ran around the tower providing him with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista of the entire city. The noise and the stink rose up from below in a sickening wave, but he found it rather comforting. Distress was part of the Void's way of letting people know they were alive. How could they possibly appreciate the tiny jewels they were allowed to discover if they were not surrounded by a field of ordure?
Yet for all the reassuring things he told himself, he felt increasingly uneasy, and he hated his old self for ruining the clean lines of his existence. As the time neared the point of transformation when he — and the Void — would finally be secure for ever, there were too many potential vagaries, shifting nodes of possibilities and blank spots in his memory. Events were reaching a point of flux. It was a desperate time, and as he always told himself, desperate times bred desperate men.
He'd waited long enough, a touch on the rudder here, another there, subtle manipulations and nuance to guide his sheep to the place he needed them to be. Now it was time for grandiose actions, hardness, brutality and blood. He could not risk any further deviation from the true line. It was time to be bold.
Gripping the rail, he peered into the dizzying drop, hawked up a glob of phlegm and spat before looking out across the gleaming city. His heart beat harder with anticipation.
And then it came, at first feeling like a brief shadow across the eye, growing more intense by the second. The high sun, brilliant white, dimmed as though a cloud was passing before it. The temperature dropped a degree, and a wind rushed across the rooftops.
Down below, the din reduced a level, and as the city darkened, it faded to an eerie silence, stark and unsettling. How long had it been since this vile place was quiet? he wondered. In every street, heads turned up to examine the dimming sun. People hung from windows, craning their necks to search for clouds or flocks of birds. There were none.
Darker and darker still, until finally a deep, abiding gloom settled across the entire city. No sun was visible,
