'I might be able to help,' the Libertarian said with a tight smile.
6
At the first light of dawn, Church led the group across the rolling grassland towards Stonehenge. The landscape was still, the rumble of traffic that blighted the ancient site for most of the day not yet rising from the constricting network of main roads. The first light gave a silvery, new-minted sheen to the countryside, with a hint of the warm, golden sun that would soon follow. As they made their way down a slope, summer mist briefly turned the world back in time to the raw, poetic age when the stones were first erected. There was only the grass beneath their feet, sparkling with dew, each step muffled by the soft, drifting mist. For a while, no one spoke, their steady breathing and the gentle melody of birdsong their only accompaniment.
Shavi breathed deeply, peacefully. That moment held all the reasons for the joy he felt at being back in the world.
'Give you a bit of nature and you're in heaven, aren't you, Shavster?' Laura's tone was gently mocking, but her expression remained unusually solemn.
'There is heaven in every aspect of this world, not just in the countryside, if you look with the right eyes. In music heard from an open window on a city street. In the play of light glinting off the windshields of cars speeding down the motorway. In the rainbows of oil in puddles on a building site.'
'You're weird.'
In the long pause that followed her words, he felt she was desperately seeking something from him, though he had no idea what it was. Finally, she said, 'Are we just wasting our time here?'
'Given all I know of Church, I would trust him implicitly and follow him anywhere. What we initially see may not be the true picture.'
'That's the point exactly. Maybe we're just a bunch of deluded, woolly-headed losers and what we think we see is just us fooling ourselves. All this power-in-the-land, magic-in-the-heart bollocks. Say it out loud. Listen to it. It sounds like one of those rants you get from the cider-addled dog-on-a-string people you find sitting on the pavement begging for money in Glastonbury.'
'You have seen the evidence with your own eyes-'
'I've seen stuff, sure, but who's to say it's right? What if the Void is the right one for our world?' Her voice had a faintly glassy quality that suggested unrevealed stresses deep within.
'It is not right.'
'But what if? Just having a little peace, getting a tiny bit of enjoyment out of life before we take the dirt-nap… what's so bad about that?'
'Nothing. Except there is the potential for a lot of peace, and a great deal of enjoyment in life. The Void wins by giving people just enough to keep them content. A little less and they would all rise up and change things. A little more and they would see the true potential of what we have, and rise up and change things. The Mundane Spell is very skilful.'
'But why do we get to shake things up? Sometimes I feel like we're those revolutionaries who start out trying to make things better and end up consumed by the cause and blowing up babies on a bus.'
'We have not hurt anyone-'
'Yes, we have!' She lowered her voice and looked down when Veitch cast a suspicious glance at her. 'We've turned people's lives on their heads, all their little happinesses that everyone around here laughs at so much, we've seen people hurt and killed, and we've carried on regardless because we believed it was a necessary price to pay. Because we thought we had the moral high ground. We've not given them anything better to make up for their loss, just the promise of heaven around the corner. You could say there wouldn't have been any Fomorii invasion and world-turned-on-its-head if the Void hadn't been afraid the Pendragon Spirit and its Champions of Existence weren't going to upset the apple cart.'
'I would say you are considering things too closely. The big picture-'
'Can't be seen, yeah, yeah, that's our great get-out clause so we don't have to face up to the consequences of our actions. Think of all the misery and suffering that's followed us around. How can we be the heroes? We're not revolutionaries, we're terrorists.'
Laura wouldn't meet Shavi's eye, but she couldn't hide how close to tears she was. 'It is all right to have doubts,' he said gently, slipping an arm around her shoulders. 'All of us have doubts at some point.'
'Even you?'
'Even me. When you do not know the rules of Existence, and when you cannot see the greater patterns, all you have left is faith in yourself, and faith in your friends.'
The words were meant to be comforting, but they only upset Laura more. Stray tears ran down her cheeks and she wiped them away angrily before accepting a brief, reassuring hug, then marched off to be alone with her thoughts.
The mist turned into a dense fog as they drew towards Stonehenge. Colours glinted in droplets of moisture all around and Veitch asked uneasily, 'Are we back in the Warp Zone or what?'
'I don't know, but something's not right.' Church slowed the pace as they attempted to orient themselves.
'Someone's here,' Ruth said.
'I don't see anyone,' Veitch responded.
'I… feel it.'
'You're using the Craft?' Church asked. 'I thought it didn't work so well here when the Blue Fire is dormant.'
'I don't know… it feels stronger, somehow. I was using it instinctively, like I learned to do in the Otherworld.'
Lurching out of the dense fog, a figure brought them to a sudden halt. His long hair tied in a knot at the side of his head, he wore a fur cape over a woollen tunic that had been dyed brightly with berries. They bristled for an attack, but he grinned broadly and waved before hailing them in a musical language that only Church understood. With a flourish, he disappeared back into the fog.
'What the fuck?' Laura said.
'Iron Age Celt,' Church said, recalling with a pang his time in Carn Euny almost two thousand years ago.
'In Wiltshire, now?' Ruth said.
'Something is strange here,' Tom muttered. 'And we are still not alone.'
Footsteps circled them, ebbing and flowing through the muffling shroud of the fog so that it was impossible to pinpoint their location. But they could all tell that whoever was making them was following with caution, perhaps even a hint of threat. They drew into a tighter knot, unsettled by how fast the footsteps moved. At times they wondered if they were mistaken and it was really an animal prowling around just beyond view.
The fog folded and briefly revealed a dark shape that did not assuage their doubts; it was long and lean, moving low, so it could have been rising from all fours or falling from two feet. It loped back into the fog as soon as their gaze fell upon it.
Church drew Caledfwlch and was shocked by the whoosh! as the blue flames leaped around the blade.
'That cannot be right,' Tom said. 'In the times when the Void has been most dominant, the Blue Fire in this area has always been more dormant than at other sites. Human encroachment, the roads and the abuse bled the land of its sacred quality.'
'Maybe,' Church said thoughtfully, 'the Void isn't as dominant as we thought.'
The figure erupted from the mists in a whirl of limbs brandishing a weapon that moved too fast for them to see. A blow creased Church's forehead; another upended Veitch; and the final one came to rest at the skin of Ruth's throat.
Her gaze ran along the gnarled wooden staff to the just as gnarled figure holding it, arms and face mahogany-brown from the sun and wind, grey-black, greasy hair hanging lank around his head, a stained cheesecloth shirt and mud-spattered trousers and the fiercest eyes Ruth had ever seen.
Familiar eyes.
