pulse coldly against his heart.
Veitch returned soon after with two swords which he had stolen from a display at the end of the entrance hall. Church examined them apprehensively. They would be as much use against the Fomorii as a pair of dinner knives, but there was no point stating the obvious.
They took directions for the bridge from Tom and had just set off when Ruth called Church back. She ran forward and gave him a hug of surprising warmth. 'Don't be stupid,' she said. 'I don't want to lose my best friend.'
'Don't I get a hug and a kiss?' Veitch called to Laura, who seemed to be avoiding Church's gaze.
She blew him one theatrically. 'Throw yourself at them. It might buy us a minute.'
He mumbled something, then they turned and hurried across the moat to the winding road that led away from the castle.
'Where's this flag, then?' Laura asked as they began to trawl through the castle's many rooms. Their footsteps echoed dismally in the empty chambers.
'It has always been kept in the drawing room,' Tom replied. 'Wherever that might be.'
'What I don't understand is why beings as terrifying as the Danann provided the basis for faery tales,' Ruth said. 'You know, cuddly, mischievous little men and women with wings sitting on toadstools.'
'In the old days faeries were frightening. Their reputation has been watered down over the years.' Tom paused at a junction in a corridor, irritated by the maze of rooms. 'People would not venture near sidh-the fairy mounds-at night and would not take their name in vain for fear of their reputation. Their memories of when the Danann walked the earth were too strong.' He chose the lefthand path at random and strode away without checking that they were behind him. 'When the Age of Reason came around, the fear generated by the gods was too much to bear in the brave new world, and so the people set about diminishing them-not only in stature-to make them less of a threat to their way of life.'
Ruth wondered if the others recognised that they were making small talk to avoid thinking about what might be happening to Church. 'And the Fairy Bridge has that name because the locals dimly recollected there was some doorway to Otherworld nearby?' she continued.
'Not so dimly recollected. The Danann had connections with the Celts long after they left other parts of the country alone. In Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland they are always felt strongly nearby. They may be unknowable in their actions, but they seem to feel loyalty for the people who first accepted them.' He cursed as they came to another dead end, then swung on his heel and carried on marching forcibly. 'The Fairy Bridge is so called because of an old tale about a MacLeod clan chieftain who married a woman of the Danann-'
'What? Inter-species romance?' Ruth exclaimed.
Tom sighed. 'You know very well some of the Danann are not so far removed from us. And those nearest seem to feel a kinship which isn't evident in the higher gods. May I continue?' She nodded. 'After twenty years of marriage, the Danann wife felt driven to return to Otherworld-she couldn't bear to be separated from her people for any longer. The husband was heartbroken, but as a gift to show her love for their long-in human terms-romance, she gave him the Bratach Sith, the Fairy Flag, so he could call on her people for help if the MacLeods ever faced defeat in battle. And the Fairy Bridge was the place of the giving and the place of the parting.'
'What a sad story.'
'Over here.' Laura was standing near an open doorway, motioning to them.
Once they entered, Ruth could tell it was the drawing room, but there was no sign of a flag. 'Where is it?'
Tom pointed to a picture on the wall. 'That's all that's left of it.' Behind the glass was the remnant of what once had been a proud flag of brown silk, intricately darned in red.
'It looks like it will fall apart if we touch it,' Ruth said, not knowing what she had expected.
'It isn't how it appears.' Tom dropped the crate on the floor and Laura carefully removed the talismans while he took the flag down. With trembling hands, he cracked the back from the frame, then laid the glass on one side. Once the flag was freed, he took a step back and bowed before it. Then, with an obsessive attention to angles and distances, he laid out the artefacts around the flag so they made the four points of a star.
From his breathing and his body language, Ruth could tell he was gripped with a curious anxiety, but it didn't seem the time to ask what was on his mind.
'Now,' he said tremulously, 'it is time for the ritual of summoning.'
Tom stood before the artefacts, head bowed, and muttered something under his breath. There was an instant change in the quality of the atmosphere in the room; Ruth and Laura backed anxiously to the wall.
Above the talismans, light appeared to be folding out of nowhere, like white cloth being forced through a hole. There was a sucking sound, a smell like cardamom, and then the air tore apart and they saw something terrible rushing towards them.
Ruth felt her head start to spin. 'Oh Lord,' she whispered.
The road from the castle was bleak, the trees disappearing the further they got from the loch to leave a heartless landscape of rock and sheep-clipped grass. They were thankful for the faint, late-afternoon sun which at least provided a vague patina of colour to the desolation.
Church and Veitch rarely spoke; the oppressive weight of what lay ahead made any conversation seem too trivial. And for Church, the cold had become almost more than he could bear. There was a part of him demanding that he throw away the flower, tell Veitch that he was far from his peak, but a stronger and more worrying part suppressed it easily. Worse, the cold now seemed to be affecting his vision; he could see what appeared to be little dustings of frost appearing round the edges of his sight, sparkling in the sunlight.
But the rose was a gift from Marianne, the suppressing part of him said. How could it he anything but good?
They heard the babbling of water before they saw the bridge, but once they crested a slight incline it was before them: just a single arch in a mediaeval construction of stone. Yet the moment Church took in its style and setting in the rocks and grassy banks, he felt like his heart was being crushed. It was exactly the image he had seen in the Watchtower when he had received the premonition of his death.
His sudden terror must have played out on his face, for Veitch turned to him with concern. 'What's wrong?'
'Nothing.' But he was transfixed by the sight and he couldn't have moved if he had wanted to.
The spell was broken when Veitch clapped a supportive hand on his shoulder. 'Yeah, I'm scared too. But we've just got to do our best. No point worrying about what's going to happen.'
Church sucked in a juddering breath to calm himself. 'You're right.' Before he drove all fatalistic thoughts from his head, he had one fleeting wish that he had properly said goodbye to Laura, and then it was replaced with the unsettling certainty that soon he would be with Marianne again.
They took up position on their side of the bridge, ready for their last stand. The sword felt awkward in Church's hand; more than useless after wielding the Otherworld weapon. He wondered how long they would last. A minute? Two?
For a long time there was nothing but the tinkling of the brook and the smell of damp grass, constants that made the subtle changes which came next seem like the blaring of an alarm. First there was a stink like a hot generator and burnt diesel, then a sound that reminded Church of a long-closed door being wrenched open. Then, some time between his eye blinking shut and opening again, the entire world slipped into horror.
They seemed to rise from the grass and heather like twisted blackthorn in time-lapse photography, filling the banks and road ahead of them, bristling with hatred, eyes burning in faces too terrible to consider, dark skin that seemed to suck up the sunlight and corrupt it. Eerily silent, motionless, a tidal wave poised at the moment before it suddenly crashed forward.
Veitch stifled some faint noise in his throat. Church was so frozen he had barely been able to feel anything, but even the iciness could not contain the hot blast of fear that roared through him.
'Is it like staring into the face of death?' The voice floated out from the serried ranks. Church recognised it instantly. A second later Calatin limped from the mass, a fey, malignant smile on his lips. He held a rusty sword with darkly stained teeth along one edge like a saw.
Church gripped his own sword tightly, though he could barely feel it in his grasp. Veitch was saying something to him, but the words seemed to be breaking up like a badly tuned radio. He turned, saw Witch's concerned face through a haze of hoar frost. He realised the iciness was starting to reach his brain.
