‘That’s not right,’ Cruibne said. Britha nodded. She had seen wounds this bad, just not on anyone living.
‘Who knows this man?!’ Cruibne demanded of the remaining people around the fire. Many peered at the wounded man, who was drooling blood. Britha used her fingers to force his mouth open.
‘His tongue’s been cut… ripped out,’ Britha said. ‘He could not have ridden far, not in this state.’ Except that she knew everyone for many miles and she did not know him.
One of the Cirig’s own landsmen edged forwards. He lived in the northernmost of their lands.
‘Mormaer, I would not swear to it, but I think he is a landsman from the land of the Ce.’
Britha gestured to two of the warriors. ‘Take him to the circle. Go quick and soft – he is badly hurt.’ The warriors picked the man up and carried him out of Ardestie towards the woods to the east. Britha walked with them. She had to mask how unnerved she was.
What frightened her the most was that without woad, without mushrooms, she could see the lines of blood within the man’s flesh. They looked like they had fire crawling through them.
3. Now
He suspected that the drugs and alcohol made the sea of naked bodies in soft red light seem more erotic than the cold harsh reality probably was, but that didn’t matter. It felt good, edgy, exciting, like they were pushing boundaries. Besides, she was beautiful; they complemented each other in both looks and willingness to go forward, to explore. Being inside her felt right, more than just sex. He looked down at her, hair dark, eyes glazed with narcotics and sex, moving against him, guiding him inside her to where she wanted, where he felt good, moaning slightly when he found it.
He’d heard the stories but hadn’t believed them, but what mattered was that she liked edge play. He could see the scars on her neck from the bloodletting. The bullshit about people seeing things after tasting her blood was probably just the effects of blood-drinking while tripping.
As he moved inside her he reached for the razor. Pushing deep into her he held it in front of her looking for consent. She didn’t say no. Best not to spoil their game with words. He used the razor to draw a line in red on her neck.
He considered himself creative. Perhaps that made him more sensitive, perhaps it didn’t. He would never know the latent talent he had and the tiny tear that talent made when her blood sought it out. A single tear of blood ran down his smooth pale cheek, as he became a beacon first. Then a gate as his mind was torn apart. He saw it, briefly, the red burning ghost world.
Then as they came through he felt like he was being torn apart at some base level. His scream echoed in another place. Nothing that heard it cared, or even understood it. It was drowned out by a much louder and all-encompassing scream.
Then there was destruction.
Du Bois hated driving through London almost as much as Londoners hated people driving Range Rovers through the tightly packed streets of the city. He fantasised about killing the taxi driver who had seen him coming, seen him obviously in a hurry and had still pulled out in front of him. Pedestrians scattered as he slewed the big four-by-four onto the pavement. He had not hit any of them, not that it mattered – they would all be dead soon. He did nudge the taxi, the impact barely registered on the armoured Range Rover that du Bois had won from a drug dealer playing baccarat in Monte Carlo.
‘They got all the crèches?’ du Bois asked again. He was talking into the air, but the secure mobile connection easily picked up his words. It was not often he asked for information to be repeated – there was no requirement – but it was not every day you heard the death of hope itself.
‘Each was hit simultaneously worldwide and in orbit.’ It did not matter that Control was discussing near-certain extinction, the female voice was the same, somehow managing to be cold, artificial, distant and sexy at the same time. Normally it had du Bois musing on how things had changed but not today.
‘The souls?’
‘They are all gone, the backups as well. They used a virus, a possible derivation of L-tech.’
‘Then it’s over,’ du Bois said quietly.
‘They may have stolen the souls,’ Control said. That explained the security incident he was on his way to deal with.
‘Which is just so much information without the children. Who was it – the Brass City? The Eggshell?’
‘All information points to it being agents of the Brass City, but we cannot be sure. We would like the souls back, Malcolm.’
Du Bois said nothing. He had to ignore the hopelessness he felt. More than two thousand years of planning, all for nothing. They had failed.
He threw the Range Rover around the corner and had to brake hard, brought up short by a cordon of flashing lights, vehicles and armed men. He could just about make out the building the suspect was supposed to be in. His vision changed to bring it into sharper relief. He watched the members of SCO19, the Metropolitan Police’s specialist firearms unit, hit the front door of the run-down, four-storey building with a battering ram and pile in.
‘Brilliant,’ du Bois muttered to himself. It was the tiniest of consolations but he had decided that whoever was responsible for this fuck-up was going to suffer.
As soon as he climbed out of the Range Rover he felt the blood-screen. It was like walking through preternatural spiderwebs. He hid behind the door of the Range Rover as he did not want the local police to see him self-harm. Du Bois drew the tanto from the sheath in the small of his back. The blade opened his flesh. He barely felt it, the folded steel was so sharp.
Waiting was the worst thing for Hamad. His first out had been blown: the Circle, with their grip on the security services and their command of surveillance technology, had responded too quickly.
He sat cross-legged in the filthy room in the flophouse. In front of him were the two curved daggers. They were older than any existing civilisation and made from materials that most modern scientists would fail to understand, unless of course they were part of the Circle.
The simple white blade, Gentle Sleep, was not the problem: it killed easily, almost sorrowfully. The other blade, the blade of skeletal black metal, Nightmare, was another matter. It lusted for the killing, whispered to Hamad, drew out the dying and made it hurt for every victim.
Hamad had thrown a blood-screen up, and through it Nightmare was aware of everyone within the flophouse and the surrounding buildings, the street, the station. Nightmare wanted all their deaths.
He had been aware of the sirens from the furthermost elements of the blood-screen long before he had heard them. Nightmare had whispered the joy the sirens heralded. Hamad felt like weeping. When would he finally have killed enough?
Chief Inspector Benedict Appleby did not have time to deal with the special-forces cowboy walking towards him. The man wore loose-fitting, dark casual clothes, his sandy-blond hair down to his shoulders, surprisingly clean-shaven, blue eyes and designer leather jacket, but it was his cock-of-the-walk attitude that gave it away.
‘Tell me, Chief Inspector, was one of the group of men you’ve just murdered fucking your wife?’ du Bois asked.
‘What? No!’ Appleby had been so taken aback by the question he had actually answered it.
‘Then why have you sent them all to their certain death?’
‘I think we can handle—’
‘No, you have shown no aptitude for thinking at all. I need to get in there now.’
‘We’re in the middle of an op—’
‘A very public sodomising – yes, I’m aware of that. Do you know what one of these is?’ The man showed Appleby a warrant card. Appleby’s eyes widened.