‘We need your help,’ he said finally, ‘to make up the numbers, in the hope that it might make up for one of us being dead. But we need your experience, too. To be honest, none of us knows what the hell we’re doing with this Pendragon Spirit thing.’
Hunter was taken aback by Laura’s laughter. ‘This is the best! You’re coming to us for help and advice? Listen, we were the biggest collection of fuck-ups you could ever imagine. Church — Jack Churchill — he was up to his neck in grief over the death of his girlfriend. Unhealthy? You bet. Ryan Veitch was a crook who’d killed a man, who turned out to be a relative of the Uber-Witch, but Ruth had got her own problems, one of which was a poker up her arse. Shavi, our seer, now he was cool. Not what you’d call wholly present, if you get what I mean, but a nice guy. And me? I was perfect, but you’ve got to have one or the whole thing falls apart.’
Laura was a woman who liked to play games, to distort for effect and for her own aims, and Hunter knew he couldn’t trust everything she said. Their conversation was a dance, defining boundaries, deciding status; he was impressed.
‘Two questions. First: if you were all so useless, how, out of all the possible candidates in the human race, did you get selected for the Pendragon Spirit?’
‘Maybe you get selected at random.’
‘Secondly, the Fall. Overnight, the Otherworld pumped out gods, devils, monsters, every supernatural creature that ever existed in any fairy tale anywhere. All the conventional responses failed. But you five stopped us from being wiped out. If you were so useless, how did that happen?’
‘We were just lucky.’ She smiled tightly, giving nothing away.
‘Go on,’ he pressed.
She shrugged, pretending it was old news, but the memory was carved in the tense muscles of her face. Whatever had happened to her during the Fall had shaped her character, eradicating the woman she had been before, replacing her with someone forged in the cauldron of strife.
‘How long have you got?’ As a faraway look appeared in her eyes, some of the hardness dropped from her face. ‘We made lots of mistakes, but somehow… somehow everything turned out all right in the end.’ She caught herself. ‘All right for the human race, that is. Not so great for us.’
‘You’re talking about Jack Churchill and Ryan Veitch dying.’
‘It’s more complicated than that. Things never happen in isolation. You deal with the repercussions for ever. Anyway, you can talk to Ruth about that later. You want to hear tales of swashbuckling adventure, five people beating the odds to come up with the goods for humanity? Yeah, I can do that. It was all about the Pendragon Spirit, all those myths about King Arthur that Church was always banging on about. I don’t really care about how it’s all linked together. The bottom line is, despite all the failures and the mistakes, everything came together right when it needed to. Just like it was planned. And you’re right, it was a big win. At the Battle of London…’ She closed her eyes in recall. ‘The city, burning… things swarming all over it that would give anybody nightmares…’ She drifted for a moment.
‘How did Jack and Ryan die?’ he probed gently.
‘We were steered to a tower that had risen up on the banks of the Thames. There was something inside…’ An expression of distaste sprang to her face. ‘A power… evil, yeah, definitely evil. If we hadn’t stopped it, that would have been it, game over.’
‘Did it have anything to do with the Void?’
‘I don’t know. There’s nothing to say it did… but maybe all these things are linked together, you know? Everything that wants to stop us getting a foothold on the ladder. I used to think good and evil were ideas for kids. Too simple. Fairy-tale stuff. But now… on the big scale, the universal scale, I think good and evil are what it’s all about. A constant war from the beginning of time to the end. And we’re just little troops, cannon fodder, there to make sure things don’t go belly-up for our side.’
Hunter moved closer to the brazier. He felt as if he couldn’t get enough warmth.
‘We confronted this thing at the top of the tower,’ Laura said. ‘We’d got the right tools, magic shit, a sword, a spear… Church was about to deliver the killing blow. Then Ryan stepped in.’
‘Why did he do it?’
‘He didn’t mean to,’ Laura said wearily. She’d obviously spent long hours turning the tragedy over in her head. ‘Ryan was just that little bit weaker than the rest of us. He was manipulated, by the gods, the evil things. All those so-called Higher Powers just manipulate us all the time. And Ryan paid the price. There was a fight. He died. Church managed to kill the thing that had been waiting for us, but Ryan had thrown everything off-balance. Some kind of hole opened up in the air… like a hole into space. The thing went into it with its last dying gasp, and Church got sucked in after it. So we won and we lost. Story over.’
‘You’ve been through the mill-’
‘I don’t want your sympathy.’
‘And you’re not going to get it. You had a job to do and you did it. There’s always a price to pay in situations like that… like this. No point crying over it. So after that you came here?’
‘Not at first.’ Laura rubbed her fingers together and a rose grew magically out of the floor, its bud bursting, blossoming into black petals. She stared at it thoughtfully. ‘Ruth wanted to pass on all her witchy skills, so we travelled the country for a while with her doing her Hogwarts bit to a load of wannabes. But her heart wasn’t in it. When we reached this place she decided she wasn’t going any farther.’
‘And you stuck with her.’
‘Somebody had to. She didn’t have anybody else.’ She snapped her fingers and the black rose shrivelled and died.
Hunter cracked his knuckles, then put his feet up on a small table; he’d found out all he needed to know for now. ‘Must be boring here for you.’
‘I’m not getting any, if that’s what you mean.’ She gave him a challenging smile.
‘Fancy some?’
Laura thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Why not?’
The sex was the first physical contact either of them had enjoyed for a while, and was passionate and unguarded. Hunter discovered that Laura smelled of lime and roses, but afterwards she told him that she could manipulate her scent at will. ‘That’s probably my greatest power,’ she added, ‘now that we live in a world without deodorant.’
When they were both dressed again, Laura reluctantly agreed to take Hunter to see Ruth, who Laura said would be ‘brooding in her batcave’. They moved through the fantastic ice tunnels and chambers, a crystal world within the very heart of the cathedral, their breath trailing behind them in clouds.
Finally they came to a cavern so large that it dwarfed all the others. It was a work of art, with icicles hanging ten feet or more from the ceiling and reflecting surfaces designed to catch and distribute the light of many candles. At the far side was a throne made entirely from ice and sitting in it was the saddest woman Hunter had ever seen.
She was swathed in black fur, her fragile features as pale as hoarfrost. Her hair was long, dark brown and curly, and black rings beneath her eyes emphasised the painful grief in her face. Those eyes, too, were dark, filled with a surfeit of shattered emotion. A black and white woman in a frozen world.
‘There she is, the Witch-Queen of the world,’ Laura said quietly to Hunter. ‘We’ve got a guest,’ she added loudly. ‘Get out the best china.’
Ruth had been lost to her thoughts and unaware they had entered. Her eyes flickered to Hunter, then moved away.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Laura whispered in his ear before departing.
Hunter marched up to the throne. ‘Are you expecting me to kneel and kiss your ring?’
‘Who are you?’ Ruth said coldly.
‘My name’s Hunter. I’m a Brother of Dragons. And I still haven’t quite come to terms with that as an introduction.’