Time runs down here, bleeds away. Death is coming. I'm coming. This is all my fault. The air stinks of blood and piss and smoke.
'Hold my hand,' I say to Lissa, snatching it anyway, just as the plane starts to tumble. There's a noise like the grinding of giant teeth, a dreadful rending. The plane is lit with a blue light. The pre-death light. Lissa's as bright with it as the others. I have seen her that way before, and I will not see it again.
The last fragment of the Hungry Death enters me. I feel it pushing against my flesh. The Orcus are dead, all but me. I am the last. And it terrifies me. HD loves it.
Lissa's not looking at me: her eyes are wide. The noise must be terrible but I can barely hear it. I snap my head around in time to see the back end of the plane split from the front, as though something has torn it off.
This plane falls tonight. Two hundred shattered lives. And it's but the beginning. All that ending ahead, and me/we at the fore.
I wish HD would shut the fuck up.
There are screams, guttural, terrified. Someone laughs. It's a peculiar sound; it cuts through me. And HD is joining in.
'I picked the wrong bloody flight, didn't I?' Lissa says.
'Jesus,' I breathe. Every time I blink I can see the One Tree. I can hear it creaking. I force my eyes open. 'Oh, Jesus.'
Lissa holds my gaze.
'Don't be scared,' she says, above all that noise.
Mr D's words come to me: Sometimes terror is the only response. I'm not scared. I'm terrified.
She touches my face. 'It's OK, Steven.' Her hands do not shake, there is more strength in that touch than in all of me. We have been here before. I just never expected to be here again so soon.
'I love you,' I say.
I grab Lissa's hand and try and shift. It hurts. HD pushes against me. It's hard and toothed. The meat of me is screaming with it. I haven't felt this human since… since Morrigan cut me with the stony blade. The universe pushes. But I push back. I push back hard and it shrinks away. And this time I shift.
But Lissa doesn't come with me. I'm standing in my office. Alone. HD screams.
I shift back. Back to her.
This shift is not resisted. I see now that this is where I am meant to be, what I am meant to witness.
The plane crumbles and tumbles around me. People scream, and die. Their souls lash through me: bullet-quick and burning. It hurts, but I ignore it. I reach out for Lissa.
'No!' she says. I can't hear her, of course. The roar of a plane breaking, tumbling, dying, drowns her out. But I can read her lips.
I clutch at her. Wrap my arms around her, and shift again. Pain. A nest of needles jutting through every cell of me, and twisting. I'm shrieking in my office, blood running from my lips, my eyes, my ears, my arse. Every orifice bleeds.
No Lissa. She is not here.
I shift again.
The plane. The plummeting cage. Outside I see the One Tree looming and then a wing clips a branch. Metal grinds, windows crack and blow out.
'Sorry,' she says, and squeezes my hand.
She shouldn't say that. This is my fault. All of it.
She touches my face. 'It's all right.'
'I'll follow you. I'll follow you to the end of fucking time if I have to.' And then there is an explosion. The whole sky seems on fire.
I wrap my arms around her, shield her from the worst of it. I'm hit, but heal almost as fast as the wounds make their mark. There is so much strength in me. But not enough for her.
And there isn't a plane anymore. Just fragments dropping towards a black and perilous sea. The air roars and all around us, people fall. All around us is the death that I made.
She falls. And falls.
And I can't lift her up, so I hold her close. I whisper my love. I press my lips against her, and I fall with her.
We plummet towards water dark as slate in the storm. She holds my gaze with a strength that amazes me. An implacable acceptance. I can feel her heartbeat, like I can feel all their heartbeats, and it is racing. But she doesn't look away.
I am going to lose her.
Let me, the Hungry Death whispers, Let me.
And I do. I let it fill me. I make a void for it within my soul, and for the first time in my life I have an inkling of what real power is. I shift.
And this time she comes with me. We're here, in my office.
She belts her hands against my chest. 'No! You shouldn't have, you shouldn't have!'
'Stay here. I'll be back. I promise.'
'Where are you going?' Lissa asks, weeping.
'To bear witness. To pomp the souls of those lost.' There are bodies in the water, lifeless. Only their souls know motion among the flotsam, bits of plane, and pieces of people's lives. I hover cross-legged, shifting above them, and it is effortless. But the wonder has been sucked from it, by these dead: one hundred and fifty in total. Their souls thrash in the water, bound there, unable to do more than keep their essences afloat. Out here, if I don't do anything…
Long grey limbs slither from the sea. Water spills from narrow bald heads, beneath which beam mouths long and beakish. The ocean wants these souls for itself. It wants them restless and heaving in the depths. The grey shapes flash towards the souls of the dead. I glare at them. HD howls. And they hesitate.
'These are mine,' the Water whispers. 'Not yours. You have no dominion in my seas.'
'This time I do.'
'You would challenge me, Orcus?'
Orcus. I blink at the title, at the stupid formality of it. But it is true. It is what I am. I am Orcus, my region is the earth. I am the only one capable of pomping these souls to Hell away from the shore. Children! There are children here. Dozens of them. And, God help me, HD guffaws with pleasure.
'Yes,' I say, 'and you cannot stop me.'
I close my eyes, and draw the souls within me. It's hard work pulling them from the suck and cold of the sea. I'm sweating and shaking by the end, with the effort of it. The Water was right. I have no dominion here, but I do have my power. Finally they are gone, sent to the Underworld, which is their right, no matter that it has come too soon for all of them.
The grey forms drop beneath the water. 'Orcus, you do yourself no good in making an enemy of me.'
'One more enemy. What does it matter?'
Then the Water beneath me is just water again, and the dead are soulless and drifting among the wreckage. I've done what I can here.
It's time to find Rillman. The bastard has to pay.
33
I can sense his heartbeat. It can't hide its secrets from me. I close my eyes and shift.
The Deepest Dark. Why here? Which is precisely the question Wal asks when he crawls out from under my shirt. I can sense Rillman circling around, shifting from space to space. I catch glimpses of him. A leg. A foot. A hand tight around a knife hilt. His feet send up clouds of dust. Closer and closer. I wait.
And then, through the dark to my left, two stony blades jab out at me.
I jerk to the right, though one of the blade points cuts through my suit, bites shallowly into my stomach. It burns. I resist the urge to crouch over it, as though to stop my guts spilling. But the wound is already healed.
'Out you come,' I snarl.
A body takes form in the dark, arms and shoulders, then head, torso and legs knitted from all that cold shadow.
Solstice smiles. Who else would it be?
'So what do I call you? Rillman or Solstice?'
His limbs move with a jerky energy that Solstice never had. I wonder at the strength of will it must have taken Rillman to contain all that madness. He doesn't need to now, and it bursts from him as wild as any storm.
'I never really liked the name Solstice, but you take what the mask gives you. And he was such a good mask.' Then he changes, becomes the Rillman I know. The Rillman in the tunnel. The dull, smiling bloke in Lissa's photo album. He shrugs. 'You know, after I failed, I killed myself. Not once, but twice. And every time I came back. She helped me come back.'