For the next half-hour, as the Enemy was decimated, Decebalus finally began to believe that despite the odds they could win.
The first sign that events had begun to change was a sudden retreat by the Enemy that left aV of unoccupied ground. Decebalus signalled for the Army of Dragons to proceed with caution; it looked to him as if the Enemy was encouraging them to pursue with abandon, and he never did anything any enemy wanted.
Silence fell across the Enemy ranks, the only sound the beating of the rain on the sea of mud.
'What are they doing?' Aula asked.
'Waiting,' Decebalus replied.
After a moment, the Enemy ranks parted and a ten-foot-tall figure stepped through, his identity at first cloaked by the storm. As he neared, Decebalus recognised him from the description Church had given during one of the numerous briefings: brutish features, part pig, part ass, added an incongruous aspect to the elegant clothes of the ancient Egyptian ruling class. Seth, god of evil and the desert, raised a staff mounted with a single golden eye and a flurry of snow swirled around him.
'Fragile Creatures!' His booming voice sounded like a boulder dragged across gravel. 'My people were great and wondrous, shining stars in the vast firmament of Existence. Yet you destroyed them, and in your arrogance you thought you could do it with impunity.'
'He is talking about the devastation wrought by Church and the others in the Great Pyramid,' Aula whispered.
Decebalus barely heard her. Already his tactician's mind was racing ahead, weighing potential options as he tried to evaluate what Seth would do.
'Get back,' he said loudly after a few seconds, before bellowing, 'Retreat!'
The word had barely left his mouth when Seth raised his other hand to reveal an object that radiated a brilliant white light. There was a second when all the sound appeared to have been drained from the world, and then a shimmering, glassy wave washed out from Seth and the entire battlefield lit up, growing brighter and brighter until it felt as if the sun had crashed to the ground.
And that was the last thing any of them saw.
7
In the Grim Lands there was little to mark the passage of time. Sometimes the quality of light would be a shade darker, sometimes it would have a silvery glint, as though night and day were coming and going beyond the constantly rolling mists. Everywhere was grey, all the time. It left the spirits dampened, and gradually leached the energy from both Mallory and Caitlin. Each incline became a little harder to climb, each graveyard navigated with an increasing number of rest stops, until they started to fear that the mood of the place would eventually bring a critical lethargy that would leave them drifting and aimless like the land's regular inhabitants.
Sitting on the dusty gravel with her back to a tomb marked with the legend Et In Arcadia Ego, Caitlin examined the flickering blue flame of the Wayfinder and tried to ignore the feeling that if she closed her eyes she would sleep for ever.
'I wonder if Hal is aware of what's happening,' she mused.
Sitting beneath a carved skull on an adjoining tomb, Mallory lazily drew a cross in the dust with the heel of his boot. 'That was quite a sacrifice he made. Imagine being a part of the Blue Fire — a part of everything there is and was — and then giving it all up to lock yourself in that little lantern to guide our way. It must have been like being God, and then quitting to become an ant.'
'You wouldn't expect anything less. He's always been one of us… of our Five.' She winced and corrected herself: 'Our Four. I wish we'd got a chance to know him better.'
'It's even more of a sacrifice than that,' Mallory continued. 'He can be destroyed while he's in the Wayfinder. He'd escaped from death, and now he's put himself back in the game. That's brave.'
The flame continued to point the way across the last few yards of the graveyard and out into the wilderness beyond, where Callow was on reconnaissance.
'Does this place make you think of your husband and boy?' Mallory asked.
'I've never stopped thinking of them. Not in a morbid way. I remember the good times, and what they meant to me, and I know we're going to be together again some day. Have you ever lost someone you love?'
'Yeah.' He paused before realising, 'I just don't know who.'
The thought clearly troubled him so much that Caitlin didn't press. Chewing on his lip absently, he slipped back into a deep reflection.
In the silence that followed, Caitlin became aware of the presence of her other selves deep in the back of her head. Their whispering always ebbed and flowed like the pulse of her blood, but now she could hear Brigid's voice growing more insistent. Listening intently, she absently spoke the words the second they came to her: 'He's coming! Run!'
Mallory started. 'Who's coming?'
'I… I don't know.'
They were surprised to see Callow watching them from the shelter of a nearby mausoleum. 'How long have you been there?' Mallory snapped.
'No time for that now,' Callow replied obsequiously. 'Listen carefully and I think you'll hear to whom the little miss is referring.'
Dimly, the scrape of feet on gravel filtered through the blanketing mist. Moving quickly and silently, Mallory and Caitlin kept low, using the tombs and mausoleums for cover. As the mist shifted across a wide expanse of statuary, they saw the Hortha stalking steadily in their direction.
'What does it take to stop him?' Mallory said incredulously.
'He doesn't look like he's been hurt at all. Yet that thing in the mausoleum was…' Caitlin's words dried up as she considered the implications of her notion. 'How are we going to stop him, Mallory?'
'There's no point thinking about it now. We just need to keep a few steps ahead of him.'
'But we'll have to rest some time.'
'Maybe we'll think up a brilliant idea on the way.'
Returning silently to Callow, they motioned for him to follow as they left the graveyard behind, heading down the rough shale into a bleak landscape of boulders and stones that reminded them of photos they'd seen of the surface of Mars.
After what they estimated to have been an hour, but may only have been a quarter of that time, the going became harder with sheets of shattered slate underfoot that they had to travel over carefully to avoid turning an ankle or cutting themselves on the razor-sharp edges.
This sloped down to an area of towering rock formations that merged until they were moving along the bottom of a deep chasm over large fallen rocks. Through the mist, they could just make out holes cut into the walls above their heads — more tombs, Mallory guessed.
Caitlin thought she glimpsed a head looking down at them out of one of the holes, but the mist closed over it before she was sure. A little further on she definitely did see a figure pulling itself out of one of the dark spaces to watch them pass.
'Yeah, I see them too,' Mallory whispered to her before she could warn him.
'The dead are an inquisitive bunch,' Callow said. 'They half-remember what it was like to be alive and always want to recall more.' He glanced at the soaring rock walls. 'Probably best not to get caught by them down here. They're not at all like me — witty, vivacious company. They can be a little jealous of what you have, and they have lost.'
'How long till we get out of here, then?' Mallory asked sharply.
'Only forwards, just a little way now. If we are lucky,' he added.
'I'm starting to question your value as a guide,' Mallory said.
A thud resonated behind them, and another: the dead dropping to the rocks from their resting places. Soon the steady tramp of feet followed them. Now whenever Caitlin glanced up she saw the grey, desiccated bodies of the dead levering themselves out of their holes on skeletal arms, some plummeting directly down, others climbing slowly and steadily on near-invisible handholds.