extended his finger of blackthorn and rammed it through the temple into whatever remained of the brain. The dead man slumped to his knees, and the Hortha moved on to the next.
Caitlin found herself slipping to the edge of consciousness as the Morrigan fell back into the dark, but she could see Mallory fighting with his dilemma: the Hortha was unbeatable, but too close for them to make an adequate escape in her severely wounded condition.
'Leave me,' she croaked.
'No. Never, ever again.'
As he searched around for a solution while trying to hold the dead back and keep Caitlin from bleeding out, his eyes gleamed with a dawning notion. 'See him — he's destroying you!' he yelled at the dead. 'He hates you. He laughs at what you've lost. He's going to make you suffer even more than you already have. Is that fair? You have to stop him.'
The dead paused and turned as one, fixing their unblinking stare on the Hortha as he punctured another head and discarded what remained, not caring whether they saw him.
'He wants to make you suffer more!' Mallory shouted.
The dead moved, tentatively at first but with gathering speed as Mallory's words lit up their sluggish minds. With grasping hands, they pressed towards the Hortha and although the creature tried to drive through the flow, there were too many of them. They began to tear at his form, ripping away the blackthorn as fast as it could regrow, searching for the mystery of his life. Finally, the Hortha went down under a frenzy of tearing.
Mallory tied a handkerchief across Caitlin's wounds and slung her over his shoulder. Grunting with strain and exhaustion, he clambered up the rock wall and stepped into the tunnel, sparing one quick backward glance at the churning pool of grey, dead flesh.
The tunnel was only short, the pearly mist gleaming at the end.
'You love me, and I love you,' Caitlin said dreamily. 'Platonic. Deep. You're a sensitive soul, Mallory, a good man-'
'Save your strength,' he said, embarrassed.
'That's why I love you.'
He shifted her weight into his arms to carry her more easily, and she could see the worry in his face. 'Am I dying?'
'Not yet. I'm going to sort out that wound when we get out of here. But after that…' Shaking his head, he looked away. She knew what he was thinking: how could they find Callow and save Hal in this terrible, bleak land? How could they find the Extinction Shears?
Stumbling out of the tunnel mouth, Mallory came to a sudden halt. Her head spinning, Caitlin craned her neck to see what had brought him up so sharply. Waiting a little way down the slope on the backs of their strange mounts were the Brothers and Sisters of Spiders, their dead expressions grim.
'We've been waiting for you,' Etain said coldly.
Chapter Seven
1
Caitlin had slipped into unconsciousness. Laying her still form on the rocky ground in the tunnel mouth, Mallory prepared for what he fully expected to be his last fight. He had heard enough about the ferocity of the Brothers and Sisters of Spiders to know he stood little chance of defeating the four of them on horseback.
'Sheathe your sword,' Etain said in a low, grating voice. 'Ryan Veitch sent us back to this dismal place to give you whatever aid we could.'
Mallory tried to read her dead face, but even looking beneath two thousand years of scars and burning it was impossible to read any emotion in her features. 'I thought you couldn't talk,' he said.
'Here, in the Grim Lands, amongst our own kind, we are at home.' Her voice suddenly came alive with a shocking bitterness. 'We are allowed some small comforts to endure this place.'
Branwen climbed down from her mount and approached in a jerky manner, as if consciously forcing her limbs to move. 'Let me help the Sister of Dragons.'
Reluctant at first, Mallory eventually allowed her to treat Caitlin's wounds with herbal creams from a bag at her waist, which she applied liberally until the blood flow stopped. 'I tended Ryan Veitch's wounds many times across the great gulf of the years,' she said. 'He cared for us when we were abandoned by all, and we cared for him.' She swivelled her head creakily towards Etain. 'Some more than others.'
'I don't trust you,' Mallory said. 'I heard how you helped Veitch kill all those Brothers and Sisters of Dragons-'
'We were Brothers and Sisters of Dragons before we sided with the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders,' Etain interrupted. 'Indeed, we were the very first to carry the Pendragon Spirit into your lineage.'
'We followed Ryan Veitch wherever he led, even into the ranks of the Devourer of All Things,' said Owein, his muscular, thick-set frame badly scarred. 'He would have died for us. We were his only friends.'
Mallory didn't think it wise to point out how tragically pathetic it was that a man could only count a bunch of dead things as friends. Instead, he searched for some sign of the direction Callow had taken. 'If you're here to help, we need, firstly, to get away from here as quickly as possible because I have this sickening feeling that even a collection of George Romero extras are not going to be able to stop the thing on our trail. And secondly, to find the bastard who did that to Caitlin and took the Wayfinder. '
How long would Callow wait before he decided to destroy the lamp and Hal? A while, he guessed. Callow was cowardly and would want to put a lot of distance between himself and Mallory in case the dead were only a temporary setback.
Tannis, who had a warrior's build and a leader's demeanour, said chillingly, 'Nothing escapes us.'
'Then let's get moving. I want my hands around Callow's throat and I want it now.'
With Caitlin's arms tied around Tannis's chest to prevent her slipping, and with Mallory behind Etain, they set off into the mist. After a mile or so, a gentle, stony incline gave way to a steaming, foul-smelling marsh, the brackish water gleaming with oily rainbows. Here Etain slowed her mount to pick a careful course along grassy ridges bordered by thick yellow reeds. Occasionally lights glimmered briefly away in the mists.
'What are they?' Mallory asked. The mood had become even more oppressive.
'Ignore them,' Etain responded. 'Trapped here are the spirits of those who dedicated themselves to work instead of humanity. They are as jealous and bitter as anything else in the Grim Lands, and they would like nothing more than to entice you into the sucking bog.'
Bubbles burst intermittently on the surface of the pools. 'Deep?'
'Bottomless. And filled with razor-worms that will feed on your flesh and bones for eternity.'
Mallory studied her for a while and tried to imagine what she had been like when she was alive. 'I'm betting you'd rather be with Veitch than here with me.'
'His affections have turned to another. And why should he not find interest in one of his own rather than a dead thing?' she added pointedly. 'Here he was king, worshipped by the inhabitants of the Grim Lands because he understood them. And he cared. Because he has died, and returned.'
'That's not as rare as you might think.'
'He understands what it is like to be an outsider.'
'You're saying that's a good enough motivation to follow him into a life…' He paused, couldn't think of a better phrase: 'Of mass-murder?'
'I would follow him to the end of the world.'
'Which is pretty much where we are.'
'He is a good man, whatever you might think of him. But he is as flawed as all mortal beings, and sometimes
