3: Lands Of Fire
Philip’s eyes shot open. Most of his vision was obscured by blood. The screams of shoppers had obliterated the silence. Not much was left of the restaurant. Debris was falling at odd intervals from what remained of the ceiling. Everything was burning. Smoke choked the air around them. At the edges of his vision he saw blurred figures running about. His face, arms and clothes were scratched and torn by fragments of glass. He scrambled to his feet from under the wreckage of the table and searched wildly for his father. But there was no sign of him. Everywhere he looked there was just blackened and burning rubble. He threw dark pieces of brick out of his way in his urgent quest. Philip’s lungs were yearning for oxygen, but in the smoke there was little to have. Then the coughing fits began, as he knew they would, they were his body’s last attempt for air. And he saw him! Trapped under a fallen rafter, his dad was showing no signs of life. He staggered over and knelt beside him, trying to find a pulse, faint or strong. And he found it. His father was alive. But for how long would he be? He couldn’t breathe and could hardly see. He no longer even had the sense of relief he had been feeling but moments before.
Suddenly a hand clamped onto his forearm, dragging him up.
“No! No! Get my dad! Save my dad!”
Then he saw his rescuer: the man in black.
“You!” he shrieked.
Philip struggled and punched and bit and kicked, any attempt to escape this madman stalker. But the man was much older and stronger than him with fully developed muscles. Philip was wasting his breath in vain. But to his dim surprise the man scooped up Samuel with his other arm and marched them both out of the ruined building.
“I’m sorry,” confessed the man, “I guess that’s not the best way to gain your trust.”
“No, it damn well isn’t!”
And from out of the burning embers behind them emerged the waiter Philip had imagined being a strong man in the circus. He had a resonating voice which reached them easily over the dying din of screams.
“The Brethren Lords have no need for Chaos! You know that very well. We made it quite clear last time.”
Philip’s rescuer just barked. It might have been a laugh, Philip couldn’t tell. Abruptly, he and his father fell to the hard road beneath them. He glanced at his father; Samuel was still out cold. Above them the two figures were still arguing. The next second the strong man had his hand to his stalker’s throat. The figure just smiled.
“You haven’t changed a bit, have you Marz?” The figure’s accent sounded strangely like that of an American, behind the gruff tone.
“And you’re as treacherous as ever,” Marz retorted.
All of a sudden Marz’s arm burst into flames. Philip had to roll out of the way to avoid having a cloud of ash land on top of him. He grabbed hold of his unconscious father and pulled him to a safe distance, somehow finding that he could do so without as much effort as he’d have imagined it requiring. No one was left in the street, they’d all run for their lives. He propped Samuel up against the door of an estate agents’ and gave a fleeting look at the duelling pair. Marz had been thrown backwards through the air onto the remains of the ‘Cloak and Scythe’. His adversary apparently vanquished, the stalker was facing Philip, and for the first time he got a good look at the stern, dark-haired, dark-eyed, hollow face.
“I have something to tell...”
He couldn’t finish his sentence, however, as Marz had thrown a fireball into his chest. The card shop would need to pay to fix that man-shaped hole in the wall tomorrow morning, or this evening if this didn’t last much longer.
All was quiet but for the crackling fire. Nothing was moving. Philip stood up and surveyed the damage. Stepping onto the ash-layered ground he checked for any of the freaks. There was a crunching sound. Philip froze. A shadow sped from the firelight to the shine of the afternoon. Feeling it was safe, Philip trudged forwards and stepped on something soft. Looking down he saw the checked red hoody that the bulky man had hidden his face with. It was torn to pieces. But it didn’t look like the result of flying glass, more the result of a couple of large tears made as it was pulled apart. Snip snip snip. The sound of pincers filled Philip’s ears. Thud thud thud. From the sound he guessed it was the footsteps of a huge beast. Rrrrrrrrr. His very bones seemed to become ice. There was that blur again, closer this time. He could hear its grinding panting loud in his ears. Mixed in with the panting was the cracking of joints. But there was no way to tell if it was the joints of the beast or a corpse. Crash! Remnants of building flew away from the impact site. From the new crater climbed the earthbound demon. Its front legs were bulky in the same places as the hooded man. Five horns crowned its red, scaly head. Its eyes were like that of an insect, and its skin looked as if it had been in a terrible accident involving a vat of acid. The lower jaw of the creature was slightly longer and thinner than the upper one, giving the impression that its jaw was dislocated. It sniffed the smoky air with slit-like nostrils. Webbed feet with long cracked talons clasped the separate pieces of rubble to inch its way towards Philip. It was at that point that he realised that he was covered in blood, and figured that the thing would have caught onto his scent, making it too late to just run and hide. Philip was flung onto his back as the thing propelled itself through the air at his chest. In a daze, Philip stared at the beast through blood tinged eyes. It reared onto its hind legs, standing like a man. Its head was lost in the smoke. Philip prepared himself for death. His heart pounded with abject terror as he realised the last thing he would hear would be the crackling fire. The last thing he’d feel would be the talons ripping his raw chest open. The last thing he’d taste would be his own blood. And the last thing he’d see would be the beast lunging down onto him. The beast roared, and all sound stopped.
Philip opened his eyes. The beast was gone. The only sign that it had been there were wisps of ash and smoke. Philip’s stalker was running over the debris, his hand and chest sizzling.
“What do you want?” Philip coughed.
“You.”
Philip fled the scene as fast as his bleeding legs would take him. He soon arrived at the estate agents’ and Samuel. The problem was that the man in black was close behind him. Philip grabbed hold of his father’s wrist and concentrated hard on the woods by his school. In that split second when his peripheral vision unfocused he saw the man swipe at his jumper.
*
Philip awoke first and immediately began to crawl over to Samuel. He could see the rabbits running, the birds taking flight and the insects scuttling away as quickly as they could to avoid the incoming trio, still moving even though the air had settled down, the travellers having regained their corporeal forms. They had been separated in transit, so each lay a few feet away from the others.
His dad was still blacked out, and now he saw the other cuts and bruises that had been obscured in the smoke back at the restaurant. At least there didn’t appear to be anything overly life-threatening. The man behind Philip groaned. Philip turned on the spot and leapt at the wakening man. The man managed to raise his fist just in time to knock Philip out of the way, sending him flying. As the undergrowth scattered around Philip the man towered over him.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” the man insisted, desperately.
“Funny, you have a strange way of showing it.”
The man stamped on Philip’s hand, breaking a few fingers. As if the rest of the day hadn’t been painful enough. The conflagrations of pain that had sprung up in his nerve receptors shot up his arm, overloading his brain with agony.
“I need you for a very important mission. I’m trying to protect you from the Brethren Lords. They’re the ones trying to hurt you. You have to believe me.”
“Unlikely. You just want to kill me.”
The man pulled Philip to his feet by his school blazer lapels. He’d been up and down all day long. The canopy above them cut out most of the sunlight, making shadows dance on his captor’s face, and any movement seemed to be seen under strobe lighting. Their hair ruffled their faces in the evening breeze. After a short struggle Philip pulled himself out of the man’s grasp. The man wasn’t putting much into it. He was enjoying this.
“And why would I do that? Just follow me,” he commanded.
Philip stepped backwards, “No.”
“Fine then.”
The man dodged around Philip and walked towards Samuel.
“You won’t touch my father!”
He lunged for the man, who swivelled and hit Philip in the chest. In a quick bounce Philip jumped back and aimed at the man’s neck with his unbroken hand. Out of nowhere, the man appeared to conjure a ball of energy in the palm of his hand and with a flick of his wrist held it out in front of him. Philip, whose reactions were too slow, ran straight into it. Electricity coursing through every molecule of his body, Philip stood there comically for a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hairs standing on end, prickly like a hedgehog with sparks running between them, a stunned expression on his face. Then he crumpled in a pile on the earth.
Singed slightly, Philip rolled over onto his back to face the patient man. His battered chest rose and fell rapidly as his adversary looked upon his undignified form. Wham! Philip’s leg connected with the man’s shin, making him tumble backwards like a felled tree. Knowing his luck couldn’t get him much further, Philip’s unbroken hand groped around in the undergrowth for anything useful. In a matter of seconds, under a grimy pile of sodden leaves, his fingers found something hard and covered in insects. With an enormous amount of effort he pulled it towards him, his one last weapon: a thick broken branch. He lifted it over his head and looked for his target. The man was on his knees, wincing as he tried to regain the higher ground. Philip swung the branch such as he’d never swung anything before. His opponent saw it coming a second before collision and, with inhuman bendiness, curved his spine backwards so the branch went above him. He then flung himself over onto his front and found his own branch from the area he was kneeling on. Philip knew that he had but a moment to act, and all he could think about was tricking this madman into going away from his father.
They lunged in the same split second. The thuds of clashing wood echoed through the trees. Neither adversary was generating a proper blow, all attempts being blocked by the other. As the swiftly slowing duel persisted, the pair were gradually rising on their injured legs. After they were as high as they could get without leaving the ground, they were free to move, jumping out of the way, weaving around each other, not very fast, seeing as both were getting weaker by the minute. Trying to move in a serpentine manner, thinking that this would make him a harder target to hit, Philip side-stepped the man, believing that he could then draw him in the opposite direction. But out of the blue, the man dived for Samuel, and Philip desperately pursued. The two of them tussled on the muddy earth, trying with all their might to be the victor.
“How about another little trip?” the man growled between his uneven yellowing teeth.
Philip instantly knew what he was going to do, and focused on the calmest place he could think of. And then he remembered the empty fields outside his grandparents’ village. It had been very peaceful there, with barely anyone around. Oh, what had it been called? The Isle of Tiree!
Both of them had been thinking of different locations when they had entered transit together. Subsequently, they appeared where neither had expected.
*
The air at the top balcony of St. Paul’s Cathedral rippled like a vertical liquid. A strange mixture of buzzing and crackling was growing ever louder, until...Philip pushed himself away from the barrier-protected edge and stood firmly on his feet, though he was feeling far weaker than he looked. But the man, to Philip’s dismay, was already running towards him from further up the walkway, drawing two knives from an inside pocket of his coat. Philip could just find the energy to move. His challenger pushed him against the back wall.
“Listen to me,” the man was almost pleading for some reason. “You must have wondered what you are. You must wonder why you have powers. I can tell you. My name is...”
But Philip never heard what his name was. Inside of him, a chunk of rage had finally broken loose. His fists were connecting with the man’s burned chest with such force that he’d never known he possessed. It was as if his muscles had suddenly increased in mass. The man fell back onto the barrier, the only thing stopping his fall. The man’s eyes were red with tears.
“Wait...”
But it was too late. With a primeval strength Philip’s fist hit the man right between the eyes. He swayed, then toppled over the barrier and down into the dark of the hall below. Philip looked at his hand, not noticing the sound of the man hitting the floor, or lack of. He figured that no one could have survived that fall, and perhaps if his head hadn’t been throbbing so much, he might have been disturbed at that fact. Philip flexed his fingers. Earlier he could have sworn the man had broken them. It must have just been the pain magnified. He noticed that the blood that had been swimming at the edges of his vision had disappeared. Philip shrugged, not really caring about his injuries. He was unable to focus on them, just as he was unable to comprehend the ramifications of what he’d just done. Tomorrow there would be an inquiry about the body, but he’d be long gone. And without anything else to stay there for, he returned to his father.
*
The fire crackled behind Gryal as he inspected his skull once more in the cracked mirror. His glinting yellow eyes were the main source of light in this far corner of the living room where he stood, tucked away behind two of his antique cabinets. It was sufficient to see his reflection and that was good enough for him. He still looked the same, but he felt different, a new Immortal.
He pulled his cloak tighter around his skeletal chest. Gryal moved away from his reflection, the heat of the fire irritating his bald crown. His legs clicked and clacked as the bones scraped one another on passing. He stood imposingly to the side of his fireplace. It was decorated in ornate carvings in blackest stone. Blue, pink, purple and clear crystals were entwined in the elaborate design of the mantelpiece, which supported an array of artefacts. Gryal crouched down by the white flames and blew on them with air from non-existent lungs. The flames obediently extinguished. The darkness that inhabited the high rafters descended to the weak gas lamps hanging in brass brackets now that the tall and extremely bright flames had gone. Lord Repa liked to be old-fashioned in his lifestyle.
Gryal moved to his grand velvet armchair, with its back so tall that it overlooked even him. His feet rested on the carpet next to the talon-shaped ones of the chair that had been cast from raw time energy. The Lord leant his head back into the chair and gazed out of the window to the pulsating Rift ahead, a last reminder that the final war had begun. If he could sleep, he would have drifted away in that rare peaceful moment and dreamt of his once regal place among the Gods. But by definition, he wasn’t living, so he could not be truly awake to fall into the spell of slumber, no matter how hard he desired it.
His fantasies were disrupted by the knocking at his door. Not in the best of moods, Gryal glided over to the door and touched it, turning it to cinders.
Warren Marz was not shocked or scared by the sudden combustion of the door hidden in the stretch of cliff before him. He merely stood his ground and looked blankly at his brother.
“May I enter?” he requested, calmly.
“I do not think my quarters are a good place for any discussion you wish to have with me, brother,” Gryal snapped harshly.
Warren turned around. Behind him was a cavern of flames. Blurred Braknagh workers were busy in the glaring light, some falling to the depths below. Those that didn’t might have shown stress or remorse at this at the beginning, but now such accidents were but a way of life, and so they merely carried on with their work. Rickety bridges crossed the crevasses to meet solitary pillars of stone jutting out from the unseen base of the Tower. Braknaghs scampered along these suicidal walkways, occasionally being hit by a jet of steam hundreds of degrees hot so fast that reactions on their parts were impossible. The construction work that connected the cliff walls encircling the pit and the stalactite-scarred roof was rickety and badly made. Thin girders were standing in a fashion similar to a house of cards. Platforms looked as if they’d been dropped at random onto the structure wherever there was a piece of metal jutting out. The white and blue flames licked the bottom of the work stations, leaving charred marks.
All the way up at the roof enormous metal rings protruded to meet the fragile construction, getting smaller and smaller with every one, ending at the size of a small human airplane, starting with one big enough to fit a small star. Green light emanated from the top and largest ring, lighting the top half of the room, or cave, whatever you wanted to call it, where the light of the gigantic flames didn’t reach.
Gryal’s chambers, minuscule compared to this monstrosity, were based in the south cliff face overseeing a ledge leading over the abyss by about one hundred metres. To say that this was approximately one two-millionth of the way into the diameter of the abyss gives you an idea of how big the Tower is.
All of a sudden, the ground began to shake. Shards of rock fell from the towering ceiling into the fiery crater, melting to oblivion the microsecond they touched the dancing flames. And then the flames were out, sucked through tubes in the rim of the abyss. The employees ran for cover away from their building work into reinforced cages along the ledges on the opposite side to the on-looking pair. Yet one unlucky soul (well it would be if it had one) tripped on a bar of metal and took too long in standing back up. A pure white beam plummeted from the rings above, destroying the little demon, and escaped through the bottom of the abyss, now visible thousands of miles below. Life flickered back to the area a few minutes after the workers were doubly sure they were safe, as they all set back to their individual jobs, one replacing their dead colleague, whose scream no one had heard in the roar of the beam. It hadn’t been that important. None of them were and they knew it. The flames reignited, increasing the temperature again to beyond what a normal human could withstand. Warren turned back to face his brother.
“Would this be a better place to talk?” Marz gestured at the hive of activity behind him, or rather what was visible between him and the doorframe. “Or maybe you could pay the Furimun of this Tower to take us to the higher levels, such as the conference room near the top floor.”
Gryal tried to scowl, but feature arrangements on bones are hard to change. Warren got the message anyway.
“You do realise the rest of us don’t choose to live in the basement of our Towers. There are magnificent and luxurious living quarters already in place in every Tower. I personally don’t see why one would want to stay here next to this flaming pit.”
“I don’t like the cold.” Gryal ground his teeth, emphasizing every word, especially the last one. “Just get in here.”
“Yes sir,” Warren burbled in a babyish, mocking voice.
Lord Repa led Lord Marz straight through his majestic living room via an oak door, down a musty passage and finally into an equally ostentatious study. It had everything Gryal needed in a study. In the centre was a table covered in star charts. On the far wall was a massive window reaching from floor to ceiling. A seven foot tall mirror stood against the bit of wall that wasn’t shrouded by shelves nesting hundreds more artefacts he’d collected from throughout the multiverse, and over in the far corner floated the Waters of Lution next to a chair and writing desk.
Warren watched his brother’s cloak of night enviously. What he wouldn’t give for something like that. It didn’t really do anything; it just gave off an air of panache. He didn’t wear it as such. And it didn’t follow him either. It became wherever he was and slid down the air to form the shape of the cloak. It never stopped moving, unless the Lord stopped. When the molecules reached the tail of the cloak, they simply ceased to exist. Gryal truly wrapped reality around him as a cloak.
They stopped at a round table just big enough to seat four people. The brothers sat facing each other.
“You came here for a reason.” It was a statement, not a question.
Warren cut the small talk he’d prepared on the way there and asked the question, “How is your side of the plan going?”
Gryal sat up a little straighter.
“Excellent,” he spoke with a manner usually related to someone full of hot air who never thought they could do wrong. “The temptation is in place, I have the spy, and the Mancynn is acting to my will.”
“Okay, now I know you’re lying through your teeth. In case you hadn’t noticed, I was at the ‘Cloak and Scythe’ when the boy joined with that filthy traitor. I was there doing my duty to the Cause, unlike you.” He ended on a dark note.
“She detained me.” Gryal put it simply; best if the underling understood in his opinion.
“All these tangents, all these distractions, your strange demeanour, anyone would think you’re human,” Warren chuckled.
Gryal burst into a fiery rage, in every sense, “ARE YOU SERIOUSLY CALLING ME, GRYAL REPA, THE SUPREME BRETHREN LORD, A HUMAN!” he boomed from his now fire-spitting jaws.
The effect of the echoes gave the impression that he was saying each word a number of times over.
“Of course not.” Warren hadn’t flinched at all. “I was merely trying to lighten this icy mood with a little joke.”
“After countless millennia you still haven’t learnt to be serious in these matters. Anyway, Mierdi did detain me.”
“Then that old crone will be punished. But it does not matter now. I guess the Mancynn could survive the trip.”
“On his own, maybe, but if we’re to be certain, we’ll have to interfere, even if we are restricted by the Rift,” concluded Gryal.
Warren got to his feet, recognising by Gryal’s posture that he wouldn’t be welcome much longer, saying, “Do you think it’s possible to interfere at such a delicate place and not get him killed?”
“Yes,” Gryal confirmed, bluntly. “Now go, unless there’s anything else.”
Gryal knew that Warren had nothing else to say, but he gave him the opportunity to speak all the same. Warren had always liked to be treated with manners, even if he didn’t treat others with them in turn. Not receiving a response, he watched the muscular Immortal leave his private dominion for another Tower.
Sighing, Gryal stood and walked to his mirror. He had one in every room; he never knew when an urge of vanity would kick in. Just as the last time he’d looked into this very mirror, he had the feeling that something was standing behind his reflection. But when he turned, he proved he was the only one in the room. Yet his reflection definitely had a shadowy figure skulking in the background. Or at least it had had a shadowy figure skulking in the background. But now it was gone. Instead, there was something misty behind his eyes, at the back of the sockets, growing larger and larger, until it burst forth...
He looked at himself in the mirror. Gryal figured he must have imagined it. But the edges of the mirror were a bit icier. Then again, they were probably like that before. Yes, it was his same old skull face and his same old skeleton body in his cloak of night. Really quite...cool, to use the human word. Oh Gods, his overly strong brother had been right. He was getting a bit human.
His eyes were yellow now. When he’d been younger they’d been electric blue...not that he’d heard of Immortals changing with age. His saw himself smile and stroll towards the door, a bit jerkily, like he hadn’t walked in a while. But he, Gryal, hadn’t walked anywhere. He tried to move, he couldn’t. He tried to walk forwards, but he bumped into the mirror.
What had been Gryal’s reflection up until a few seconds ago learned how to walk quite quickly, having seen the old Gryal do it many times. Just as it reached its first obstacle, the door, it looked back at the mirror to see the Lord hammering at the barrier, taking his place as the prisoner of glass. But this was the new Gryal, an improvement on the last, who could do its duty to Mierdi much better. Off to war it went. It had to prepare, it had been so long since it had existed.