Burning Ashes Page 4

  This was the Lore under which they all lived.

  “Or had.” Ben spat the words and damn the echoes. “Gods help us. Except there are no gods left.”

  Gods. Prophecies. Promises and Pacts.

  Bloody fools, the lot of us.

  Cut to today. The Lore was broken. The Long Sleep undone. This morning’s bout of fisticuffs over the Thames had made that fact painfully clear. And what, Ben wondered with the opposite of relish, did he have to look forward to now? A resurrected goddess and a battle dragon had been bad enough. Was he honestly facing the rousing of all Remnants? If so, he was staring down the barrel of another war. The Big One. Because most of the Sleepers weren’t going to be happy when they came to learn of their imprisonment. Most of them, he expected, would blame the humans. They’d blame Von Hart, the envoy extraordinary.

  And him. There’d be no sense in pointing fingers. Ben had been wrapped up in this from the start. Once upon a time, Von Hart had put a dragon to sleep in the Zhoukoudian Hills, China. Ben had been there at the time, their failure to slay the beast fermenting ages of enmity. Earlier this year, the fairy had woken the dragon up, unleashing terror and destruction on an unsuspecting world. Ben, of course, had been the one to face Mauntgraul down, to put an end to the venom and the screams that followed in his wake. Later, Von Hart had gone on to destroy the harp completely, breaking the enchantment of centuries. There were some, Ben reckoned, who might thank the envoy for releasing them into this brave new world of smog and selfie sticks and melting ice caps, where the human population had swollen to disastrous levels and millions starved. Where Remnants had become no more than a myth, a tale that grew ever less frightening in the face of reality: a future so grim it was hard to compete with.

  Most would not.

  Why? Why had the envoy done this?

  The Fay are coming!

  Yeah. That’s what Von Hart had said, minutes after they’d escaped from the nether, tumbling onto the southernmost tip of the Fan Lau peninsula, below the smouldering ruins of the temple. Those had been his last words, before he’d slumped, unconscious, in Ben’s arms.

  Ben looked at his palms, discomforted, as he recalled the triumph in the envoy’s voice. Von Hart’s betrayal, Jia’s bogus mission, well, they’d made him question the truth of everything. Had it all been wishful thinking? Denial? The Remnants’ refusal to accept their abandonment? Was the prophecy, the Queen’s Troth, simply a myth, an ember stoked by King John to ensure the suppression of the “devils” in his kingdom, the banishment of Remnants from the world?

  Take a wild guess.

  Over the centuries, Ben’s hope had rotted, of course, leaving bitter seeds. Seeds that curdled and burned in the belly. Seeds that he’d finally spat out. The price of that was the loss of comfort. The loss of his trust in his friends. Because in the end, it turned out that the Lore was a lie.

  As for Jia Jing, the Remnant who had brought him to this stark revelation? Well, it had cost Jia her life.

  You couldn’t catch her. Save her from herself.

  Standing here in the cavern, in the bosom of his vanished creators, Ben wanted to feel something other than shame, just for a change. He didn’t like it down here. Didn’t like the reminder. The last time he’d come here, he’d led Jia into the crypt on reluctant feet, pretending that the place was his lair, for all the good it did him. True to her kind, she’d seen right through him and he’d opened up his home to her, his sanctuary. It didn’t last. Thanks to the Sister, an assassin of the Whispering Chapter, his home was a sanctuary no more. His treasure trove might still be secure, but the townhouse above it remained a heap of blackened bricks.

  It wasn’t as if he was fond of the place. In its own way, 9 Barrow Hill Road had been a tomb too. Half-heartedly, he’d shelled out for some scaffolding and tarpaulin to cover the shattered Victorian façade, creating the semblance of restoration. He’d blamed the explosion on a dodgy boiler to a sceptical police force and two or three nosy parker neighbours. Delvin Blain of the Blain Trust, his dwarf accountant in Belgrave, had posed as his insurance company, answering all enquiries in his usual cantankerous manner. Investigations were ongoing, and it was obvious that nobody really believed him. Terrorist attacks in the capital had long since wiped out the benefit of the doubt (plus even an idiot could see that the explosion had occurred from the street inwards, not the basement out). But bigger problems than a dodgy boiler and a dodgier story had taken up the news channels since then. Like two-hundred-foot giants, say. In the rising panic, it was easy to forget the man going by the name of Ben Garston.

  Suits me.

  It didn’t matter. He was too vexed to feel relief. Who knew what remained of the Chapter, what ragged band of disciples still roamed Britain and the Continent, clinging to righteous scraps of power? He didn’t even know if the Cardinal, Evangelista de Gori, had survived the collapse of the Alpine monastery. All he knew was that the Lore was over.

  So here he stood in the decadent crypt, forced to confront the silence of the Fay, the long rejection of his kind.

  And the silence of Blaise Von Hart, his prisoner.

  “Is this meant to be funny?” Ben strode across the gleaming floor to the foot of one of the tombs, an orgiastic eyesore stretching up into the gloom. A hooded statue peered down from the monument, gigantic marble arms emerging from the folds of an exquisitely carved robe. Cupped by a pair of polished stone hands, the fingers laced at the level of Ben’s chest, Von Hart, the envoy extraordinary, lay cold and comatose. Chained. Ben had bound him in heavy iron, the chains rifled from Ben’s hoard and threaded through the writhing sculptures on the tomb. Fairies, he’d read, weren’t big fans of iron. He didn’t know whether the stories were true, coming as they did down the tangled vine of folklore, and he doubted that the earthly metal would have the same effect on the Fay as lunewrought had on him, but he needed all the help he could get. Still, heavy chains were heavy chains. Von Hart wasn’t going to vanish so easily next time. His chest, a pale lattice of bone, rose and fell with his shallow breaths, a faint frost misting his lips like a memory of the nether. “Thanks to you, the whole damn world is waking up.” Ben jabbed a thumb at the cavern roof. “Meanwhile, you go and take a six-month nap.”

  Frustration informed all these one-way conversations with the envoy. Not to mention a quiet rage. Ben, a creature of passion, had lost count of the times he’d had to turn away, fists clenched and shaking, from the fairy’s recumbent form. From his peaceful, blissfully ignorant face. Von Hart might be safely locked up, but his lips remained locked too, denying Ben his secrets, a confession of his (no doubt long and intricate) plan that had seen Jia Jing, a supposed champion of truth and justice, betray her very nature to steal the fragments of the harp. In silver, in fire, Von Hart had reforged the artefact only to break it, finally showing his hand. His treachery. In the depths of the nether, the fairy had damned them all …

  A sad necessity. A choice of evils.

  What choice? Extinction or war? Did Ben honestly believe that? He breathed in, trying to quell the flames inside. Sure, the Long Sleep was coming undone, the enchantment dispelled and unravelling, but so far, the consequences had been thankfully slow. It shouldn’t have surprised him; spells, for all their magic, cleaved to certain rules like all equations. Eight hundred years ago, the lullaby had spilled out from Westminster Palace and gradually circled the globe—a process, as Ben understood it, that had taken nigh on a century …

  Another faint hope. A two-hundred-foot-tall giant in the Thames … well, it kind of implied that the breaking of the harp had a sporadic influence, rather than a localised one, considering that Cormoran had risen from an English bed, not somewhere near Hong Kong. He guessed that some creatures slept more deeply than others … Or was it down to the souring magic, he wondered, the souring song? The harp had shattered beyond the world. It made sense that its echoes should scatter in kind, like shards of glass from a broken—

  Ben snorted again, this time at himself. He could
examine the disaster as much as he liked; there was no way to undo it. Even if Von Hart somehow miraculously woke up, a Sleeping Beauty he’d love to kiss with a punch, it was unlikely that the fairy would restore the spell or even help him if he could. Besides, he wasn’t that lucky.

  It struck him now that the coming of Queen Atiya and Mauntgraul last year had been mere holes in the dam, the Lore shaking, the floodgates about to burst. The best he could hope for now was damage limitation. But that would grow old soon enough. He couldn’t take on every last Remnant single-handedly.

  “How long have we got?” he asked the unconscious fairy. “A year? A decade? You’ve started a war, you bloodless bastard. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you sleep through it.”

  But threats aside, what could he do? He turned away, his jaw clenched. The damp air filled his lungs, the mildew and dust of despair. Helplessly, he crossed his arms, gripping himself. The subterranean chill couldn’t touch him, but fear could. A six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered figure of a man, he shuddered in the shadow of the tombs, his crimson hair a torch, guttering in the dark. Had he ever felt more alone?

  And by sundown, the city will be empty.

  He knew it was true. Apart from the cautious presence of the British Army, perhaps a handful of tanks and the odd surveillance drone, no one was going to stick around in the city after this morning. OK, so he only had monster movies to go by, but he could imagine the fallout easily enough. Barricades placed across the main arteries of the metropolis, the M1, A2, M4 and A10. All the planes at Heathrow grounded. The Eurostar suspended. Waterloo, Victoria, Paddington and Charing Cross stretching abandoned and silent. Cars and trucks crawling along the roads through hastily erected checkpoints, men in white vans cursing and thumping the horn as all the vehicles sat bumper to bumper in their rush to escape. Even access to the internet might be limited, the networks down, the phone lines jammed. Then the National Grid would switch everything off come midnight, plunging London into darkness. Roll down the shutters. Leave the key under the mat. Game over. Thanks for playing.

  No one in their right mind was going to stay in the capital when a giant could come along and crush them underfoot at any moment. Or a dragon like the one on the Beijing news, swooping down from the sky and scooping up clawfuls of shoppers. No thanks. In the past two years, reluctantly, painfully, the breaches in the Lore had woken Ben up too, each one seismic, shattering his world. And now these events went tremoring across the human world, unbelievable, undeniable. And unstoppable.

  There is no going back.

  The military, presumably on red alert, would find itself swamped by refugees. The government, true to form, would have decamped already, leaving the Houses of Parliament to the statues and the pigeons. The Royal Family wouldn’t sit and cower behind the gates of Buckingham Palace either, taking to this or that countryside estate. Ben could see it now. The populace heading out into the country, thousands of people on foot, lines that stretched from Westminster to Watford, from Camberwell to Crawley and beyond, seeking the safety of the Chilterns and the Downs. Wailing babies. Hobbling pensioners. Slinking dogs. Ben felt for them, these imagined denizens of London, all of them huddled together, clutching the few possessions they could carry, rucksacks stuffed with food and blankets, the old family clock. The market stall holder from Portobello Road. The imam from the Regent’s Park mosque. The Jews of Stamford Hill. The Afro-Caribbean folk from Brixton. The Polish students. The American tourists. The gentry and the tramps. The multitude all one in their terror, with the great city smouldering at their back, dark and deserted.

  Come nightfall, London, the dragon city, would be his and his alone. But for how long, exactly? Ben shook off the thought, focusing on practical matters instead. By now, the Prime Minister must’ve declared a State of Emergency, surely. He had no radio down here and it wouldn’t work even if he did, deep as he was in the earth.

  With a shake of his head and a funny sound in his throat, Ben accepted that he’d failed them, the people of London. The Lone Fire standing guard? Watching the gates? Right. Those gates, seven of them, were nothing much to look at these days. Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate, all of which had sported the heads of countless traitors, were little more than tarmac and pavement lost in the urban sprawl. Today, the people he’d sworn to protect swarmed and jostled over their memory, running for the hills. Nor could he guarantee their safety in the lands beyond. Who knew what was waiting out there? Strange marsh lights and hungry goblins? Men who inexplicably turned into wolves? Trees with eyes and weaving branches? Witches, ogres and headless ghosts? Who knew which Sleepers were stirring …?

  He swore, finding no comfort in practical matters either.

  “Jia died because of you.” Reining in his temper, Ben muttered at the envoy over his shoulder. “I want to know why.”

  There was no answer in the edifices soaring around him, in the spiralling towers of marble. Bestial figures brayed down at him, laughing, screaming as spread-legged sprites filled their chalices with wine. Nor could he find comfort in his memories; the sin-you and he hadn’t exactly been friends. Allies, perhaps, and that was a push. Lost in grief and indecision, he’d been too late to stop her, turn her back from her quest to see the harp reforged, to awaken the Remnants.

  I can save them, she’d told him. Don’t you see? I can save them all!

  Leaping through the Eight Hand Mirror, out on the very brink of existence, Ben had faced the Ghost Emperor, the architect of rebellion, and he had watched Jia Jing fall. Even now, standing in the shadow of the eldritch tombs, he couldn’t say for sure whether he disagreed with her or not, her longing to liberate Remnants, to reveal the truth of Creation, that Remnants lived and breathed among humans. For all that, he’d dreaded the consequences, the catastrophe awaiting them all. Freedom, he knew, would come at a price.

  “And she paid it, didn’t she? She paid it for you.”

  We must all make sacrifices.

  Scowling, he realised that he was talking to rock, nothing more. The fairy couldn’t answer him. Heat flared under his skin, tiny scales rippling up and down his suit, black blushing to red. Blood pulsed, hot, at his temples. This always seemed like a good time to leave Von Hart and go outside, make a flyby of the city, check that will-o’-the-wisps weren’t luring lines of refugees into a bog or that dwarves weren’t plundering the Crown Jewels. Regardless of his failings, he was watching over them still.

  He’d taken three steps when he noticed his shadow on the cavern floor, lengthening out before him. The line of his shoulders, bubbling with impatient horns, cast a silhouette as grotesque as the tombs around him. The earth tremored, rumbling. A growing illumination, he realised, a cold, crystalline blue, was filling the subterranean space. The radiance, eerie in the dark, slid like satin over buttock, hoof and tail, the sculptures writhing in a distorted embrace, a clinch of shadow and stone. The light rose from the chamber floor to challenge the vaults above, its progress slow yet deliberate, before rippling out, its source withdrawing, defeated by the enfolding darkness.

  Ben couldn’t see that source. After recent adventures, he could guess that the light wasn’t coming from anywhere earthly. Looking up, his mouth wide, he heard a whisper of music the second that the light began to fade, a tinkle of bells that caused his balls to draw in close to his body and vomit to rise in his throat.

  The lullaby …

  Or what was left of it. He spun on his heel, chasing the echoes—and found Von Hart spasming on the cupped stone hands, his chains clanking around him. His eyes remained shut, darting back and forth behind their lids, tracing the progress of some nightmare or other. Froth bubbling on his lips, limbs beating on stone, Von Hart struggled in his sleep, his brow creased with anguish. Or hope. A frantic mutter issued from the envoy’s throat and Ben had to draw closer across the shuddering floor to make out the words.

  “She comes,” he was saying in a ragged whisper. “She comes. She comes …”


  Ben didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit. He reached forward, meaning to shake the envoy awake, but he didn’t get the chance. With a rush of displaced air, a great black cloud came bursting from the tunnel mouth behind him, flurrying through the entrance to the crypt. The echoes exploded, a mighty ricochet causing him to flinch, an arm held over his head. Turning from the tomb, he bellowed in shock as darkness poured into the chamber, a wave crashing over the sombre peace, gyring around the stalactites and scattering across the cavern roof. At first, he took the creatures for bats—Lord knew there were enough of them down here—but the next minute, the croaking and squawking gave them away.

  They were birds. A flock of birds. Birds half a mile underground, a hundred or more.

  “What the—?”

  His next question, directed inward, was as cold and as sharp as a sword point. What the hell had driven them here? What had driven the birds, blind and fluttering, into these depths?

  Something in the world above. Something bad.

  This was no accident. He was past giving that notion the time of day. The flock had come here deliberately, seeking his lair.

  Or more likely the fairy.

  Yeah. Von Hart was the hub in all this, the last son of Avalon on earth, a focal point of all that was magic and strange. And the cause of all the trouble … Ben had seen it before, of course, how the phantoms in the nether had pressed against the fabric of things, hungry for the essence of Creation. It made a weird kind of sense that the natural world would respond, panicking over the ever-fraying skein between reality and elsewhere, if that’s what he was seeing. He had good reason to think so.

  Magic. Hocus pocus. He could smell its stink on the air.

  Witches …? A slice of shock went through him, served cold. But for all the blackness of their wings, these birds weren’t crows. Not exactly. He had his extraordinary eyesight to thank for the insight, his shoulders falling in relief. Not witches. No. The Coven Royal had fallen. The Three were dead. If other witches were to come—and he had no reason to doubt it—they’d have to find him first. These birds had come for the envoy, surely.