In desperation he sought the fallen gun, but before he could locate it the child came in fresh pursuit, its weight pulping the bodies it trod upon. Cal attempted to roll out from beneath it, but the beast was too quick, and snatched hold of his hair and throat. He clutched at the corpses, seeking purchase as the creature hauled him up, but his fingers slid over their gaping faces, and he was suddenly an infant in the embrace of his own monstrous off-spring.
His wild eyes caught fleeting sight of the Prophet. The Mantle's last defenders were dead. Shadwell was yards from the wall of the cloud. Cal struggled against the beast until his bones were about ready to break, but to no avail. This time the child intended to complete its task of patricide. Cal's last breath was steadily pressed from his lungs.
In extremis, he clawed at the polluted mirror before him, and through the dusky air saw gobs of the child's flesh come away. There was a rush of bluish matter - like its mother's stuff - the chill of which slapped him back from dying, and he drove his fingers deeper into the beast's face. Its size had been gained at the price of durability. Its skull was wafer thin. He made a hook of his fingers, and pulled. The beast howled, and dropped him, the filth of its workings spilling out.
Cal dragged himself to his feet, in time to hear de Bono calling his name. He looked up towards the shout, vaguely aware that the ground beneath him was trembling, and that those who could were fleeing the battlefield. De Bono had an axe in his hand. He threw it towards Cal, as the by-blow, its head cratered, came for him again.
The weapon fell short, but Cal was over the bodies and to it in an instant, turning to face the beast at his back with a sideways blow that opened a wound in its flank. The carcass loosed a stinking froth of matter, but the child didn't fall. Cal swung again, opening the cut further; and again. This time the beast's hands went to the wound, and its head was lowered as it peered at the damage. Cal didn't hesitate. He raised the axe and brought it down on the child's skull. The blade divided the head to the neck, and the by-blow toppled forward, the axe still buried in its body.
Cal looked about him for a sign of de Bono, but the rope-dancer was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any other living person, Kind or Cuckoo, visible through the smoke. The battle had ended. Those who'd survived it, on either side, had retreated; and with reason. The shuddering in the earth had intensified; it seemed the ground was ready to gape and swallow the field.
He turned his gaze back towards the Mantle. There was a raw-edged tear in the cloud. Beyond it, darkness. Shadwell, of course, had gone.
Without hesitating to compute the consequences, Cal stumbled through the devastation towards the cloud, and entered its darkness.
Suzanna had seen the conclusion of Cal's struggle with the by-blow from a distance, and might have reached him in time to prevent his going into the Gyre alone, but the tremors that rocked the Narrow Bright had Shadwell's army in sudden panic, and she came closer to being killed in their haste to get to safe ground than she'd been in the conflict itself. She was running against the tide, through smoke and confusion. By the time the air had cleared, and she'd oriented herself, Shadwell had dismounted and disappeared into the Gyre, and Cal was following.
She called to him, but the earth was in further convulsions, and her voice was lost beneath its roars. She cast one final look round to see Nimrod helping one of the wounded away from the Bright, then she began towards the wall of cloud, into which Cal had now vanished.
Her scalp tingled; the power of the place she stood before was immeasurable. There was every chance that it had already annihilated those foolhardy enough to trespass inside; but she couldn't be certain of that, and as long as there was a sliver of doubt she had to act. Cal was there, and whether he was dead or alive she had to go to him.
His name on her lips, as a keepsake and a prayer, she followed where he'd gone, into the living heart of Wonderland.
Part Nine. Into the Gyre
‘Upon our heels a fresh perfection treads ‘ John Keats Hyperion
I
TRESPASSERS
1
Always, worlds within worlds.
In the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, the Weave; in the Weave, the Fugue; in the Fugue, the world of Mimi's book, and now this: the Gyre.
But nothing that she'd seen in the pages or places she'd visited could have prepared Suzanna for what she found waiting behind the Mantle.
For one thing, though it had seemed as she stepped through the cloud-curtain that there'd been only night awaiting her on the other side, that darkness had been an illusion.
The landscape of the Gyre was lit with an amber phosphorescence that rose from the very earth beneath her feet. The reversal upset her equilibrium completely. It was almost as if the world had turned over, and she was treading the sky. And the true heavens?; they were another wonder. The clouds pressed low, their innards in perpetual turmoil, as if at the least provocation they'd rain lightning on her defenceless head.
When she'd advanced a few yards she glanced behind her, just to be certain that she knew the route back. But the door, and the battlefield of the Narrow Bright beyond, had already disappeared; the cloud was no longer a curtain but a wall. A spasm of panic clutched her belly. She soothed it with the thought that she wasn't alone here. Somewhere up ahead was Cal. But where? Though the light from the ground was bright enough for her to walk by, it - and the fact that the landscape was so barren - conspired to make a nonsense of distance. She couldn't be certain whether she was seeing twenty yards ahead of her, or two hundred. Whichever, there was no sign of human presence within range of her eyesight. All she could do was follow her nose, and hope to God she was heading in the right direction.
And then, a fresh wonder. At her feet, a trail had appeared; or rather two trails, intermingled. Though the earth was impacted and dry - so much so that neither Shadwell nor Cal's footfalls had left an indentation, where the invaders had trodden the ground seemed to be vibrating. That was her first impression, at least. But as she followed their route the truth became apparent: the soil along the path pursuer and pursued had taken was sprouting.
She stopped walking and went down on her haunches to confirm the phenomenon. Her eyes weren't misleading her. The earth was cracking, and yellow-green tendrils, their strength out of all proportion to their size, were corkscrewing up out of the cracks, their growth so fast she could watch it happening. Was this some elaborate defence mechanism on the Gyre's part? Or had those ahead of her carried seeds into this sterile world, which the raptures here had urged into immediate life? She looked back. Her own route was similarly marked, the shoots only just appearing, while those in Cal and Shadwell's path - with a minute or more's headway - were already six inches high. One was uncurling like a fern; another had pods; a third was spiny. At this rate of growth they'd be trees within an hour.
Extraordinary as the spectacle was, she had no time to study it. Following this trail of proliferating life, she pressed on.
2
Though she'd picked up her pace to a trot, there was still no sign of those she was following. The flowering path was the only proof of their passing.
She was soon obliged to run well off the trail, for the plants, growing at exponential rate, were spreading laterally as well as vertically. As they swelled it became clear how little they had in common with the Kingdom's flora. If they had sprung from seeds brought in on human heels, the enchantments here had wrought profound changes in them.