There was a long period of silence filled only with the crackle of the fire. Then Tom began slowly, "It is all right to be scared of Balor. This is not some Fomorii like Calatin or Mollecht, who are frightening, but within our power to beat. As the Fomorii are to us, so Balor is to the Fomorii. He is their god, the embodiment of darkness, evil, death, chaos…" He shook his head slowly. "He is more than a force of nature, he is an abstract given form: destruction. You only have my word for this, but I can see from your faces your fear goes beyond what I say. Because you know. In the furthest reaches of your worst nightmare, in the dimmest purview of your race memory, in your primal fear of the night, he lives. If Balor returns, it truly will be the end of everything."
No one spoke. They listened to the wind whistling across the hills of Skye and somehow it seemed harsher, colder, the night too dark.
"Then we really do have no choice," Church said.
Laura turned away so the fire didn't light her face.
"How are they going to bring him back?" Ruth asked finally.
"None of those ancient races truly die," Tom said. "They flitter out of this existence for a while. Time is meaningless, space insignificant. They simply need to be anchored and dragged back." He shrugged. "How? I have no idea. Some ritual using the powerful distillation they have been amassing which we saw in Salisbury and under Dartmoor."
"Then we've got to stop the bastards before they start the ritual." There was an innocent optimism in Veitch's voice that raised all their spirits slightly.
"But where will they be doing it? And when?" Ruth asked.
"The when I can answer," Tom said. "The ritual of birthing will not be conducted until the next auspicious date when there is a conjunction of power and intent. What the Celts named the feast of Lughnasadh, the Harvest Festival. August 1."
"Three months." Church mulled over this for a second or two. "Doesn't seem very long. But we managed the unthinkable by our last deadline-"
"With no time to spare," Tom cautioned. "This task is far, far harder. The essence of Balor will already be contained in the birthing medium, ready for the ritual, and the Fomorii will have it hidden in their deepest, most inaccessible stronghold. To them, this thing is more valuable than anything in existence. Imagine if you held the spirit of your God? How much would you fight to protect it?"
"Do you think they've got it at that fortress we saw them building in the Lake District?" Ruth asked.
Tom shook his head. "It will be somewhere none of their enemies will have seen, beneath ground, certainly, and protected against all eventuality."
The wind came howling down from Sgurr Alasdair high in the Cuillin Hills, whipping up the fire so the sparks roared skywards like shooting stars. Looking up into the vast arc of the heavens, they felt suddenly insignificant, all their plans hopeless.
"Then how are we going to find it?" Ruth asked. "If they've gone to such great pains to make it safe for them, we're not just going to stumble across it."
Tom nodded in agreement; slowly, thoughtfully. "We need guidance. There is a place we could go, a ritual I could conduct-"
"Then let's do it as soon as possible." Church looked around at their faces; they were watching him with such intensity it made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't want the responsibility they were forcing on his shoulders.
"So you've decided, then." Laura's expression hid whatever she was thinking. "We've been lucky so far." Her hand went unconsciously to the scars on her face. "If you can call barely surviving luck. But sooner or later someone's going to die, and I don't intend it to be me."
"No one wants-" But she had risen and marched off into the night before Church had a chance to finish. He sighed and waved his hand dismissively. "We better get some sleep. We can start at first light."
Veitch and Shavi headed off to their tents while Tom lit a joint from his rapidly diminishing block of hash and wandered off beyond the light of the campfire.
Ruth sat down next to Church, slipping a tentative arm around his shoulders to give him a comforting squeeze. "No rest for the wicked."
"No rest for anyone." Church sighed. "I wish I had some Sinatra to play. He always makes me feel good at a time like this." Overhead a meteor shower set pinpricks of light flashing in the black gulf. "You remember when we sat in that cafe after we first got dragged into all this under Albert Bridge? You asked me if I was scared. I didn't even know what the word meant then. Now every morning when I wake up, it hits me from a hundred different directions: fear of screwing up again, fear of dying, fear that the world doesn't make sense any more, that there's no secure place anywhere." He paused a second before continuing, "Fear of what this nightmare means on some kind of spiritual level. That there is no meaning. That we're just here as prey for whatever things are higher up the food chain than us. Fear that the whole mess doesn't even end with death."
"You think too much." Ruth gave him another squeeze before removing her arm. "That morning in the cafe? It seems like a lifetime ago, doesn't it? I barely knew you then."
Church looked up, unable to pinpoint the tone in her voice. She was smiling, her eyes bright in the dying firelight.
"I think you should look for meaning in the small picture, not the big one," she continued. "It seems stupid with all the upset and suffering, but on that micro level my life is better now than it ever was before. I was in a job I hated, just going through the motions because I knew it would have made my dad happy, not really having any idea who I was at all. Now everything in my life seems heightened, somehow. Even the smallest thing has passion in it. You know I'm not one to get poetic, but compared to how I live my life now, I was dead before. Maybe that's where the meaning lies."
"Maybe," he answered noncommittally, but he knew what she meant.
"And I feel like my life's been enriched for knowing you and the others. I feel closer even to the ones I don't particularly like than anyone I knew before. Maybe when the rulebook was redrawn, the dictionary was too." She laughed at her metaphor.
"What do you mean?"
"I know what friendship means now." Her smile slowly faded until her features were sadly introspective. "I don't know how to say this, but at this point, with all that shit lying ahead, it seems important."
"So what does friendship mean?" He tried to raise the mood with a smile.
"It means being prepared to lay down your life for someone."
"If we're careful, that's something we won't even have to think-"
"Church, be realistic. If we go into this, we're not all, maybe not any of us, going to come out of it alive. You know that. Don't insult me by pretending it's not true."
He was hypnotised by what he saw in her eyes.
"You've changed too," she continued. "You've grown in a lot of ways, in just a few short weeks."
"Yeah, well, you know how it is. Pressure is the catalyst for change."
"It's a shame we have to lose our innocence." Although she said we, Church felt she was talking about him.
"You can't stay innocent and face up to sacrifice and death and war. Those bastards killed my innocence when they arranged for Marianne to die. To forge my character," he added with a sneer.
"You mustn't let it eat you up."
"I won't. I let that happen before, when I thought I was somehow complicit in Marianne's suicide. It's not going to happen again. I'm going to find whoever killed Marianne and I'm going to get my revenge, but I won't be consumed by it. This is different. It's colder, harder." He could tell she wasn't happy about what his words implied about the change in his character, but on this subject he didn't care. "I'm not stupid. I've read the classics and I know how revenge destroys people. But for the kind of suffering that's been caused to all of us, there has to be some kind of payback."