"Then you should waste no more time." He moved ahead of her, heading higher, towards the sun, then dipped down and made a strange movement with his left hand that stretched his ligaments to their limits. By the time he had finished, a patch of air had taken on a glassy quality; Ruth had the odd impression that it was a pool of water, floating vertically. He flashed a piercing glance that charged her to follow him and then he plunged into the pool and disappeared. She hesitated for only a second before diving.
A sensation like icy rain rushed across her skin and then she was high off the coast of Mousehole, as if, for all their travels on Wave Sweeper, they had not gone anywhere at all. Everything seemed so much duller after her time in T'ir n'a n'Og, the quality of light, the sea smell, the greens of the landscape beyond the shore. Her companion had once again reverted to his owl form, keeping apace with her with broad, powerful wing strokes.
As she moved inland across the late summer fields, her apprehension became more intense. On some rarefied level she was sensing danger ahead.
Increasing her speed, she swooped over the landscape, uncomfortably eyeing the deserted roads and tiny villages that appeared devoid of life. And faster; Dartmoor passed in a brooding, purple-brown blur with memories of the Wild Hunt and senseless slaughter. In Exeter a fire was raging out of control. The grey ribbon of the M5 was a string of abandoned vehicles. And on through Devon, acutely aware how much the land had changed. No more comforting mun danity, supermarket shopping and boring commutes to work, daytime radio and bank managers and accountants. Even with the cursory glance she was giving the rolling greenery below, she could see it had become wilder, a land of mythology where humans were at the mercy of competing species with much greater powers. A place where anything could happen.
Over Wiltshire and Hampshire, closer to the source of the danger. Some towns and villages were wrecked and burning, others reclaimed by strangely wild vegetation. But there were still signs that people were there, either in shock or in hiding: cows, obviously milked and fed, here, clothes hanging on a washing line there. Little markers of hope; it was something. The faint, insistent tugging dragged her eastwards.
The owl had been keeping pace with her, beyond the ability of any true bird, but the beat of its wings began to grow slower until it had dropped back a way, dipping and diving with obvious caution. The reason was clear. On the horizon, London brooded. Although the sun shone down on its sprawling mass, Ruth had a definite sense that it hung in darkness. Her heartbeat speeded and anxiety began to gnaw at the back of her head; an aura of menace was rolling out across the Thames Valley.
It had to have been London, where it all started. The circle had closed.
Yet from that distance, nothing appeared out of the ordinary, apart from the stillness that lay over the approaching M4. She dropped back until she was beside her familiar, adopting its cautious approach. She listened: nothing, but not a serene silence: no birdsong at all. She sniffed the wind and caught the faintest hint of acrid smoke. As the suburban tower blocks and estates fell into view, that ringing sense of menace became almost unbearable, hanging like a thick cloud of poisonous gas over the capital. It was moving out across the land, barely perceptible in its slowness, but inexorable.
"Dare I go closer?" she asked the owl. When there was no reply she took it on herself to advance. She still needed something substantial to tell Church.
She knew she could be seen by the Fomorii in that form-they had spotted her as she watched their black tower being constructed in the Lake District-so she soared higher, desperately wishing for some cloud cover. And with that thought came the realisation that, if she wanted it, she could make it. Under her breath, she mumbled the words the familiar had taught her, making the hand gestures that activated the primal language: words of power in both sound and movement.
The wind changed direction within seconds and soon a few fluffy white clouds were sweeping in from the north. Not too many-she didn't want to draw attention to the sudden change in the weather pattern-but enough to provide a hiding place.
With a slight effort she sent them billowing towards the capital and slipped in amongst them. The air became filled with pins and needles; her heart was pounding so hard she thought she was having a coronary. "It feels bad," she said to her familiar, although she was really talking to herself, "but it doesn't look too bad."
And then the clouds cleared.
She was still beyond the suburbs, but from her vantage point she had a clear view deep into the heart of the city. At first it looked like the outlines of the buildings were rippling as if they weren't fixed. She wondered if it had somehow slipped into T'ir n'a n'Og, where things regularly looked that way. But as she drew closer, she could see it wasn't the outline of the buildings that were changing; something was moving across them.
A wave of revulsion swept through her. London was swarming. It looked like an enormous jarful of spiders had been emptied out on to the buildings and streets. The Fomorii scurried everywhere, at times as though millions upon millions of long-legged insects were racing chaotically over everything, then as if one beast lay across the capital, flowing like oil. Many or one, it didn't matter; London was subsumed. And at the heart of it, an abiding darkness pulsated: Balor, replete in its lair, growing stronger after the strain of rebirth, sucking in energy ready to consume the planet. Beating like a giant heart. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. She couldn't truly see it, had no real idea of its form, but it was there on a spiritual level, tendrils creeping out from the cold sore. She gagged, despite the fact her corporeal body was a world away.
What made her flesh creep the most was the way that vibrating black mass was pushing out from the centre, reaching into the suburbs, moving out across the country. Nothing could have stood in its path.
"All those people," she gasped. The realisation of what must have happened made her head spin: an atrocity on a grand scale; perhaps millions dead, and more to come.
"We have to get back," she said to the owl. "We can't afford to waste any more time."
But as she turned to depart, brutal reverberations crashed inside her skull and her body doubled up with pain. Looking back she saw, rising up above the skyscrapers of the City, an area of infinite darkness, blacker even than deepest space, cold and sucking. It was impossible to tell if it was truly happening in the real world or if it was a metaphor imprinted on a higher level of consciousness, but it filled her with utmost dread. It was alive, and it had an intelligence so vile her mind screamed at even the slightest brush with it.
Balor. The name tolled like a funereal bell deep in her head.
And it rose up and up, bigger than the city, bigger than all existence. How can we beat something like that? she thought with the bitter sting of despair. And still it rose, and washing off it came waves of malignancy. And then, as it had in the dream that was not a dream in Mousehole, an eye opened in that black cloud, an eye that was not an eye, though she characterised it as such. And it focused its attention on her and she thought she was about to go mad with fear.
It could see her there, hidden in the clouds, miles away. It could see her anywhere. But worse than that, it recognised her.
The shock dislocated her thoughts; it was already in motion before she registered it was coming for her.
A wide flailing disrupted the air currents next to her. Her familiar was thrashing and screaming, an owl, a ball of feathers, then the owl man, and then something infinitely worse, moving rapidly backwards and forwards across the spectrum of its appearance in a terrible panic.