The Angels were circling wildly, widdershins between the megaliths as before, their cries in eerie counterpoint to Sonia's keening. Karen, arms high and wide, was intoning an invocation, its charged sentences weaving in the air like smoke. John, entranced by his pain, stared alternately at the horizon and at Sonia's pulsing throat on which the pearl necklace rolled gently back and forth like the creamy edge of a wave on a smooth beach.
Time stood still but sound and movement and rhythm did not.
Then, at the end of timelessness, the edge of the sun blistered the horizon.
John struck at the white throat. The song ended in a bubbling hiss, and the blood rippled down from pearl to pearl and spread over the Altar Stone. Sonia's head rocked sideways and the eyes, sightless and blissful, gazed into his own.
Moira felt the shock-wave of evil sweep over them and gasped, tightening her grip on the hands to right and left. Fighting back, she rallied. One of the Group had fainted but his neighbours had joined hands across him; the rule had to be 'no stopping for casualties'.
She knew, with a flash of certainty, what she had to do next.
She ordered: 'Joy Hassell! Project Joy to John!'
The Group heard and understood. Some had known Joy and the others had been given a photograph to study, for she was one of the prepared weapons. Bracing themselves against the black tide still flowing from Stonehenge, they worked together, building up Joy's image.
Sonia's body had been removed and the first of the prisoner-victims, bound and gibbering with terror from Stanley's reviving injection, had been flung down on the Altar Stone. He had slipped on Sonia's copious blood, and the two men responsible for bringing forward the victims were having a struggle to place him for John's knife. Karen's incantation had become specific, launching the tide of power in support of the 6,000 soldiers already fanning out in the skies of Britain, strengthening their resolve, binding any urge to compassion, numbing and paralysing all who would resist them. John, in a rage of destruction now that blood had flowed, roared at his assistants to hold the sacrifice still. He raised the knife.
In that instant the earth moved. The great uprights of the trilithons groaned at the tremor and one of the capstan lintels screeched.
Briefly, the screech merged with John's scream, and Karen failed to distinguish the two. Then she realized that John had dropped the knife and was staring transfixed past her shoulder. Karen spun round and saw what he saw: misty but unmistakable, Joy, his dead golden wife, as she had been at the Grand Sabbat before the lance impaled her but with a face of infinite love and infinite sadness.
John screamed again, then turned and ran.
Joy flickered, was gone – and reappeared, running ahead of him.
Half blind with fury, Karen snatched up the knife and dispatched the sacrifice, ordering the next to be prepared. She knew the source, now; Moira and Dan, her mortal enemies, were nearby and striking back. She flung venom at them and then directed all her power at John, who had reached a horse and leaped into the saddle.
He tried to ride away but could feel her power drawing the horse back, in a tightening spiral round the Henge, inwards and inwards though he tugged at the reins till the horse's mouth bled. Joy was away, beyond the earthworks, still calling to him, but he was helpless. He screamed again in misery and despair. The horse brought him almost to the Altar Stone and then reared in panic at another victim's dying cry. John was thrown from the saddle, hitting one of the uprights. He fell to the ground inside a trilithon archway and the horse bolted away, trampling him as it turned.
John lay there, three-quarters stunned, but conscious enough to know that his back was broken. He would never move again and he did not care. He watched, almost with detachment, Karen at her murderous work. Dimly he heard the exultant cries of the circling Angels of Lucifer and the shrieks of the victims. He did not care. He had willed all this and he was past redemption.
The earth was trembling again, quaking and shuddering under his ruined back. He saw, against the sky, the uprights of the trilithon move, scraping a hand's-breadth outwards along the underside of the lintel. A shower of splintered sarsen fell around him. What did it matter?
But through the haze of pain, golden Joy would not let him rest. She stood by the upright, urging him, pleading with him; it does matter, there is still something you can do, you can help to stem the tide you unleashed… There were others with her. He lay in a circle of people – Moira, Dan, other familiar faces… No, they must leave him, it was not to be borne… His eyes were drawn back, despite his shame, to the figure who pleaded with him, his golden Joy, his accuser, his dead beloved…
Then she was blotted out by Karen, towering over him with the knife, the two helpers behind her. Her face was a mask of hatred and she pointed at him with an arm that was red to the elbow.
'Now him!'
John was not afraid; death did not matter. But he was furious at her for obscuring Joy and he could feel the shadowy ring of Moira, Dan and the others, urging him.
The earth trembled again.
Something broke loose in the dying John and he cried: 'Mother Earth! Great Mother! Destroy her!' The last thing he saw was the uprights falling outwards and the huge lintel crashing down to obliterate Karen and himself.
At Avebury the battle had seemed endless; two more had fainted and even Moira, locked in a nightmare of clashing darkness and light, was beginning to wonder if she could survive much longer. But near the worst of it, she had felt John, or a part of him, reaching out to them; tormented and confused, he was a breach in evil's armour and she had hung on, gasping.
Then, without warning, the dark wave had shattered.
Knowledge of victory swept over them. Moira could feel the tears of relief running down her cheeks, hear the others laughing in triumph, some of them near to hysteria; feel Dan's arms around her; hear Miriam excitedly relaying Bruce's reports.
She bathed in the tide of success for a few moments longer, then pulled herself up. Quietening the Group, assuring herself that the three unconscious ones were all right and re-establishing control, she made them listen.
'We've broken the Angels of Lucifer, with the Goddess's help. They challenged her once too often. But she's still challenged. Right now the soldiers of Beehive are setting out to steal or destroy what the survivors have built. They'll be on their way to Camp Cerridwen at this moment – and to all the other places, some good and some not so good -but even the worst aren't as evil as what Harley wants to impose. He's damned himself by the allies he sought and the methods he used. He mustn't be allowed to succeed -I don't have to tell you that… Our people at home in Wales are still working to feed us power. So let's use it. Make victory complete… And remember, the Earth Mother's with us. You heard what Bruce reported – an earth tremor hit Stonehenge and brought down the stones on Karen and John. But it didn't reach here – or anywhere else, is my guess. And what does that mean?'
She held out her hands and the ring re-formed. When she knew it had re-formed mentally and astrally as well, she gave the word.
'Speak to the soldiers. Speak of peace.'
'It's as though the Earth had punished them,' Captain Brodie said, wonderingly.
The two pilots had watched the whole murderous ritual, held almost hypnotically in their seats, feeling its evil like a corrosive vapour in the air. When the huge sarsen trilithon had splayed outwards and collapsed on the Black Mamba and her High Priest (who seemed to have lost his nerve but been dragged back, in that crazy horseback spiral), Brodie had instinctively reached for his switches to take off, visualizing a shock wave that might damage the helicopter. But he had realized at once that no shock was coming, only the faintest tremble. It did not make sense because the trilithons were barely 200 metres away, and a narrow fissure had appeared in the ground across the heart of the Henge and reached almost halfway to where they sat. The chopper should have been shaken like a child's rattle… The horses, away on their right, had plunged and pulled at their reins and three of them had managed to tear free from the fence and had bolted. But then animals, Brodie told himself, sensed many things that men and helicopters did not.