In the short time that David, Kate and Ben had been in the study, things had changed. The beasts still prowled below, but now they pressed against the iron fence at the edge of the garden, their eyes constantly on the house. Beyond them, other figures began to shape themselves and step from the air.
It was hard to say what exactly they were, for they flickered, like images on a film being run at the wrong speed. Some were more or less human, but others were like the jumbled remains of animals and plants, trees and rocks and fog … nightmare figures held together by willpower alone.
Kate choked back a sound in her throat as she saw Ben stare, wide-eyed, at the emerging horrors below.
“Now those are good,” he said approvingly as Kate and David stared at him, astonished. Evidently they’d been more convincing than they’d thought.
“We should check the back again,” said Kate.
They closed and locked the shutters and went back to the study. This time, as they unshuttered the window, something swooped past only a few feet away and they jumped back with a mutual gasp. Ben gave a nervous laugh.
David peered cautiously round the edge of the shutter. “There’s three of them sitting on the garden wall.”
Kate looked and as she did the three flying creatures spread leathery wings one after the other and crawled up the air towards them. They slammed the shutters closed again.
As Kate looked at David’s pale, sweaty face – much like her own, she supposed – they heard a noise from above them, from the roof; the sound of something heavy struggling to find a foothold on the steeply sloping slates, claws skidding.
They stared upwards, mesmerised. There was a pause, then a loud snapping sound, then another.
“What’s that?” Kate whispered.
“It sounds as though they’re breaking the slates,” said David, his gaze fixed on the ceiling. “That would let them into the house.”
“How can we stop them?”
“I’ve got no idea.”
In unspoken agreement, they retreated down the stairs to the hall. As they got to the foot of the steps, a terrible noise started up outside, all the beasts howling and crying out and behind it a wailing and grinding from the other figures.
In the hall, the grandfather clock chimed once and began to tick.
***
“Go while you can,” Morgan had shouted over the torrent of sound. Erda shaped herself into a handful of dust and was gone in a swirl of air. Alone, Morgan turned to face the wrath of the Lords of Chaos.
They stepped through the splintering air: Queen of Darkness, Lightning King and Hunter. It seemed to Morgan that all the noise drained out of the world as they watched him.
It was the Queen who finally broke the insupportable silence. She took a step towards him, gowned in the immeasurably dense blue of a winter dusk, diamonds wound around her throat and in her hair.
“So Morgan, we see what you truly are. A traitor, forsworn – doubly forsworn, for you have served neither us nor the Stardreamer. I only wonder that she has not struck you down herself.” The Queen looked about her. “Where is she? She has not gone into the fire. Where have you hidden her?”
“She is gone. Safe from all of you – all of us; from the Lords and the Guardians and from me.”
“You let her go?”
“Yes.”
The Queen laughed; an awful sound. “So you have found a third way to be forsworn; the Stardreamer, the Lords and now the Worlds as well. You are remarkable, Morgan.”
Morgan kept silent, for he could feel that Erda was still close by.
“But she has not yet gone, has she Morgan?” the Lightning King asked. “You feel her presence, as we do.”
Morgan said nothing. There was nothing he could deny. He was just what the Queen had said; forsworn. He had tried to betray Erda and had finished by betraying all the Worlds.
He knew that death awaited him here, on this little patch of dry grass. He would not try to evade it. How could he? All that remained to do, all that could redeem the smallest part of what he had done to everything he loved, was to give Erda a little more time to escape. He understood that it could not be long.
The sun was up and the air was full of birdsong. After all, this would not be too bad a place to make an end of things.
He brought his bow round from his back, slowly and deliberately, nocked an arrow and aimed at the place where the Queen’s heart should be. She smiled and he let the arrow fly.
A bolt of lightning like a spear snapped the arrow in mid-flight and shattered his bow into a dozen pieces, throwing him off his feet and slamming him back against the rock wall at the mouth of the cave.
The Lightning King smiled a wolf-smile of pleasure at his shot.
Morgan shook his head to try and clear it as he sat up, wiping blood from his face where one of the shards of his bow had laid his cheek open. He looked into the beautiful, deadly face of the Queen of Darkness and watched her pluck a jewelled pin from her hair and breathe on it. It rose from her hand like some elegant insect and flew towards him.
“How could you be so foolish as to think that you could stand against us? See that you die well at least.”
***
They stared at the grandfather clock for a moment, until a new sound took their attention.
“Ben? Ben I know you’re in there. What’s going on? Let me in.”
“Mum?” Ben ran for the door. David grabbed him and held him, squirming. Kate looked out of the spy hole in the front door. Outside the door stood her mother. Most of the Chaos beasts were clustered beyond the fence, but two or three had braved the garden boundary and were picking their way towards the house.
Her mother was outside, in danger, calling Ben.
“Quick, Kate, let her in,” Ben wailed.
Kate backed away from the door a little.
“No Ben, she’s part of the pretend too. Think about it – Mum doesn’t know you’re here. How could she?”
David’s father’s voice was next, angry and imploring by turns. David stood beside the grandfather clock as though its ticking could drown out the rest of the sound, shaking his head.
Kate risked another look through the spy hole. The thing that wore her mother’s face stared back, looking straight at her, while behind her and around her the beasts tore at the garden and began to push blindly at the walls of the house itself.
Suddenly her mother took a swift step forward, so that all Kate could see was an eye staring back at her from the other side of the door. Kate shot backwards and crashed into David, knocking him to the floor.
Ben stared at them. “Why are you both so scared if you know this is just a game?” From upstairs came the sound of breaking slates. “It is just a game, isn’t it? Kate?”
But Kate wasn’t listening any more. She was staring at the door as the letterbox was pushed open very slowly. A hand slid through, slowly, fingers feeling the way, and turned and moved towards the locks, the arm that supported it bending in such an un-natural way that Kate thought she was going to be sick.
Beside her, David scrambled to his feet then stood rooted with horror as the crawling hand found and turned the first lock.
***
Morgan got to his feet as the jewelled dart flew towards him. He pulled out his knife and tried to cut it down before it reached him, but it was much too fast, dodging the blade as though it was a living thing and striking him in the left side of his chest, the force spinning him round as he fell to his knees.
The dart burned like fire in his flesh, but even as he reached to pull it out, it melted away as though it had been made of ice. The wound though, was all too real, blood welling from it frighteningly fast. There would not be much more time for him.
The Hunter raised his terrible head, scenting blood.
***
Hanging as a drop of dew on the tip of a beech leaf high above, Erda watched the confrontation between Morgan and the Lords of Chaos.
It was growing more difficult to prevent the power bursting free. Below her she could sense it pulsing in the Lords of Chaos, could feel the assault on the house in Kate and David’s world increasing in ferocity.
Betrayed. Forsworn.
The words drifted up to her and crawled into her head. She already knew what Morgan had intended when he first met her. He had been prepared to use her to save the Worlds because he loved them. He loved them; and yet he had drawn back and told her what he had planned, so that she would leave and be safe, because he loved her too.
And with that thought, she saw everything and understood everything and all the words in her head made sense at last and power blossomed within her like a flame.
She was aware of everything in all the Worlds in one incredible shock of knowledge: the stones, the leaves, the black deer in the Wildwood, Tisian staring into her fire, Kate and David in the house at the still centre of a storm of noise; and above all, Morgan. She looked down on the scene below and saw the Lightning King’s spear fly and knew, for the first time, fear, and anger.
She dropped from the leaf to the ground below.
***
As the Hunter approached, Morgan struggled to get to his feet, but couldn’t do it. On his hands and knees he waited for the end. The Hunter drew a long knife with a blade curved like a sickle, so black it was like a gash in the universe. He fingered it thoughtfully as he looked at Morgan. He spoke in a voice as cold as bones.
“I had hoped you would prove stronger, my son. You have disappointed me.”
The Traveller appearing in the doorway of the hut …
“All my life I have worked to escape my heritage from you. I gave my life to the Light long ago.”
The Hunter spat in contempt and moved slowly towards Morgan, owl-eyes unblinking. Morgan tried to find strength from somewhere to fend him off, but it was beyond him and the Hunter caught him by the hair and threw him to the ground on his back. He set one foot on Morgan’s right arm to pin him there and knelt over him. For a few seconds they stared into each other’s faces and Morgan could feel the Hunter’s hot breath, then he looked down at the knife and poised it above Morgan’s chest, ready to cut out his heart.
***
As Kate and David stood frozen with fear, a small figure darted past them, yelling “Get out! Get out!” and Ben was at the front door before they could stop him, bringing Gordon’s second-best putter crashing down on the ghastly arm. There was a shriek and a noise like tearing cloth as it hit and the arm broke off and fell to the floor, turning back as it did so to a shower of dust and sifting down through the cracks between the floorboards.
Kate dragged Ben away from the door and together the three of them pushed the hall table against it to block the letterbox, then retreated to the bottom of the stairs.
Now the noise of attack came from all around them: blows to the roof and the shuttered windows and the walls, and most of all to the door. They could see it shaking. They clung to each other amid the buffeting noise and swirls of hot wind that rose from nowhere, waiting for the inevitable sound of splintering wood as Chaos broke down their world.
***
As the Hunter bent towards him, Morgan closed his eyes for the last time.
“STOP.”
Neither the word nor the voice were loud, but they filled everything. Even through his closed eyelids, Morgan could sense light of extraordinary intensity.
He heard the Hunter snarl and the pressure on his arm and chest was removed as he backed away.
A figure of flame and light stood near him, so impossibly bright that he could make nothing of it but a vaguely human shape. Before it the Lords cringed, hiding their eyes. The figure raised an arm and the Hunter’s knife flew from his hand and burst into flame.
“GO” said the voice. “YOU WILL NOT TROUBLE THESE WORLDS AGAIN. YOUR POWER HERE IS ENDED.
The Queen snarled. “If you battle us the power you release will blow the Worlds apart and Chaos will take them.”
“YOU UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER IN ME. I DO NOT NEED TO BATTLE YOU, ONLY TO COMMAND YOU. GO!”
With a despairing shriek, the Lords of Chaos wavered and frayed and shattered like glass and were gone.
***
Kate, David and Ben clung together at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the end of the world they knew.
“I’m glad you’re with me,” shouted David. “It would have been terrible to be alone.”
“Oh, David, it’s all going, isn’t it? Goodbye… Don’t worry, Ben, it’ll be over soon.”
There was a noise so loud it was like silence and a shock wave threw them to the floor. The grandfather clock burst apart in a shower of wood and glass and metal, then there was silence.
***
As Morgan watched, his vision beginning to blur now, the brightness around the figure faded and it diminished and became Erda. She walked to where he lay and knelt down beside him, her eyes fixed on his.
“Why did you come back?”
“The power would not be contained any longer. If I had tried to escape it would have destroyed the Worlds; and besides, I understood at last.”
“Understood what?”
“Your love for the Worlds and what you would do to save them. And what you would not do. But you have trapped me anyway, for you have taught me to love the Worlds too.
“I do not desire to return to the void and to what I was before, myself and always alone. I will walk into the Heart of the Earth and dream the Worlds until the ages end.”
It was becoming hard to breathe now. He looked at her, saw the fire only just concealed behind her human form. She was crying.
“With all the power I have, there is one thing I cannot do, and that is to give back life. I cannot save you.”
“It doesn’t …”
“Sssh. Hear me. I cannot save you, but I can give you strength for a few minutes more. Walk into the fire with me Morgan. Walk into the Heart of the Earth. We will become part of everything, together we will dream the Worlds and maybe some small part of each of us will remain. Walk into the fire with me, Morgan. I do not want to dream alone through all the ages of the Worlds.”
He lifted a hand to wipe a tear from her face. “I will go into the flames with you.”
She bent and put her hand over his wound. He felt warmth flow from it throughout his body and felt some strength return. After a moment Erda took her hand away, but the warmth remained. She helped him to his feet and they stood together looking at the world around them: the wood below, drenched in birdsong, the reflection of the sun on the river, the scent of water and of green things growing.
“We should go now,” she said and looking at her he could see that the power could barely be contained by her human form any more. He looked his last on the Wildwood and turned to walk with her into the cave.
The Heart of the Earth burned with heatless light, its fire reflected and redoubled by the walls. The air was cool and fresh.
Morgan looked at Erda, translucent with power. Perhaps this was not an end, but a beginning.
Hand in hand, they walked into the fire and the flames rose about them and they were gone.
***
Kate and David crept to the front door and looked through the spy hole and into the garden. They stared at each other for a second and bolted for the stairs, Ben trailing in their wake. All the way to the top they ran and pulled open the shutters and found Edinburgh all around them, as it should be, no trace of the battle that had raged moments earlier.
“Did we win? We won the game, didn’t we? Didn’t we Kate? We won.”
“Yes, Ben, we won.”
David said quietly, “But how? I wonder what happened.”
“Morgan will tell us.”
They waited for a long time that day and for many other days, but Morgan did not come.
***
The Heart of the Earth burned strong and steady but now there were two pinpoints of golden light suspended in it.
Morgan?
Erda?
Yes.