14

The hordes of acolytes bayed. The priests roared. Matt turned and ran. He made it as far as the beginning of the bamboo forest before the guards caught him. He tried to think about them all toppling over and how lucky he might be if that happened. One or two of them did trip up, but that might simply have been due to their haste in getting to him. Besides, he couldn’t think straight; his mind still fumed from the injustice of it all. As they piled in on top of him, all he heard was a bloodcurdling yell from the high priest.

“Bring him back alive!”

The ensuing scuffle broke Matt’s nose, and his struggles didn’t do him much good anyway. There were far too many of them. They dragged him back to the clearing and tied him to a stake. He caught Kylah’s desperate glance before they yanked him up and secured his hands. One of the grey-winged, insectoid guards took charge and, when it was finished, leaned in close, transmogrifying into sinuous, silky-haired Silvy.

“I homed in on your voice again, Mathew,” she said, grinning. “Speaking was a very stupid thing to do.”

“Yeah, well,” Matt said. “It was worth it to get all that off my chest.”

Anaconda Head appeared before him. He looked almost apoplectic with glee as Silvy fell to her knees in supplication.

“Blasphemer!” he roared in Matt’s face. The stink was even worse than the stagnant boar’s blood. “As punishment for taking Cthran’s name in vain, you will be the first.” He turned back to the unsettled crowds. “We have awaited a sign,” he sang out, waving a hand at Matt. “Behold. Here is a non-believer sent to taunt us. Yet Cthran in his wisdom has delivered him to us, soaked in the blood of a pig.” He held up both hands theatrically. “THIS IS OUR SIGN!”

The crowd let out a chorus of ululations.

Matt looked around. Behind and to his left was a woman. She wore a wax jacket and a skirt, an ordinary middle-aged, middle-class woman plucked from a Sunday walk in the country. A pair of broken glasses sat awry on her nose and she was white and shaking with terror, crying softly while murmuring to herself. Matt strained to hear what she was saying. As the crowd’s noise fell towards a misguidedly respectful silence, the woman’s words drifted across to him. But it wasn’t a prayer that he heard; it was a simple, sobbing goodbye.

“Charlotte, Jake, Abby…Mummy loves you.”

Matt wanted to say something to her. He wanted to tell her not to cry, but what could he do? What words did he have that could succour her? And what was worse was that no one would know. There would be a spate of disappearances, but no clues as to why they’d happened. And the disappearances would continue, with no Kylah and Mr. Porter to guard the doors. Even worse, the authorities in the Trans-Dimensional Holiday Inn might even give in to these barbaric, snake-loving idiots and make this the Ghoulshee’s Glastonbury festival.

Doubt and fear crowded in on Matt. What the hell had he been thinking of, blundering in here like this? There were hundreds of thousands of them, not just one bloke with yellow eyes and a cape. Understanding spread like thick oil through his head. The things that Matt made happen, like making the pea stay where it was under the shell, were possibilities. Improbable possibilities, perhaps, but still possibilities. They weren’t miracles. But with a hundred thousand acolytes and more screaming for blood only yards away, what could possibly happen to change things? Even if the Danmor mojo did work here, what the hell could he do to a crowd this big?

For years, he’d been plagued by bad luck. Women (well, woman, anyway), career, and now rescue attempt. Naive and idiotic, that’s what his plan had been.

Matt squinted up at the blazing sky. High above, he could see the vultures circling. Rimsplitter was up there, probably laughing his vulture head off and saying “I told you effin’ so” at the same time. But even as these uncharitable thoughts jostled for position in Matt’s tortured brain, he saw one of the birds break formation and start to dive. The thing fell like a stone to a height of a hundred feet, at which point it tapered into a glide and began circling, above the high priest’s head, in ever-decreasing loops.

The priest, still busy trying to whip up a good old acolyte frenzy, halted in mid-rant as a lump of vulture guano the size of a hen’s egg landed squarely on his shoulder. The priest looked up and waved a fist at the bird who, in turn, made a noise very much like a crow cawing, which was odd, since it definitely wasn’t a crow. Matt squinted a bit more. Yep, it was a vulture all right, but why was it making a noise like a crow…

It was Matt’s moment of epiphany. That cawing was no accident, nor, indeed, was the little present deposited on Anaconda Head’s shoulder. Rimsplitter was sending him a message. Matt had been here before, and Rimsplitter had decided to remind him of it. The vulture knew about the kids’ playground on Clarenden Street, knew about Jock the Reaper, knew about the fraudster and his henchmen. Rimsplitter was the most unlikely of cheerleaders, and yet… Hope, almost extinguished from Matt’s tortured spirit, flared into a flickering bright-blue flame. The odds were massive, the chances minimal, but it was time to find out.

“Oi, Anaconda Head!” Matt yelled to the high priest.

A guard scuttled forward and stabbed Matt in the leg with a spear. “Careful how you address your betters, infidel.”

“No,” said the high priest. “Let him speak. It amuses me to hear the whining of a dog who is about to die.”

“I just wondered,” Matt said through gritted teeth and watering eyes. “Once we’re rendered. What then? What else does Cthran want, besides our blood?”

“Cthran is wise. We will send the Doorkeeper’s head to the infidel rulers and ask them to meet our demands. If they refuse, we will visit them with our wrath.”

“The wrath of Cthran? Wasn’t that the parenthesised name of Star Trek ll?”

“Again, you take Cthran’s name in vain. Retribution will be swift and I guarantee it will be painful.” He half-turned back to the crowd.

Matt coughed to get his attention. “One more thing. I see that there are no women priests. Why is that?”

Slowly, the priest turned around, his lips pulled back in a dreadful parody of a smile. “Ordinary women have no place in the priesthood. Cthran decrees that they be mothers…or whores.”

“Decrees, my arse. Little tip—don’t use that one in your talk to the Women’s Institute.” There was a familiar pricking behind his eyes, and the little blue pilot light flared into a turqoise flame. “Oh, and here’s a newsflash. The infidels won’t give in to you.”

“You are wrong,” the priest smiled and flashed his graveyard dentition again. “There are many in the Fae world who consider you vermin. We will be doing them a great service. In return, they will see the error of their ways and follow us.”

Matt nodded. It all sounded ludicrous, but recent history had taught him that the irrational was not to be discounted as a viable belief system, in a fundamentalist sort of way. Too many people had died in concentration camps to deny the horrible truth of that fact.

“These people have families.”

“If you find a scorpion, you destroy it. You care not for its young. That is Ghoulshee wisdom,” the priest sneered with triumph.

“It’s Ghoulshee bollocks, more like,” Matt retorted.

Again, the priest smiled horribly. “It is time.”

Matt watched as the guards and the priests began moving to the edge of the killing field. They were making way.

“Oh, buggery,” Matt said. He was first in line. The first to greet the hacking, maiming, tearing, murdering mob as it swarmed forward. Weirdly, he found that he didn’t care much about what they did to him. Having died once, he was getting a bit blasé. But what he did care about, what made all this all so unacceptable, was Kylah and—for some even greater reason—Charlotte, Jake, and Abby. He’d never met them, but knew they didn’t deserve the months and years of constant heartache that would come from wondering why their mother had left them. Wondering if she’d died or been abducted. Or worse—if she’d opted for an anonymous life away from them because, secretly, she didn’t love them. It was a blight they’d be marked by forever. They didn’t deserve that.

The turqoise flame erupted into a spitting white jet.

The high priest held up his death-head stick and screamed.

“Behold, The RENDERING.”

As one, the crowd moved forward—a screaming, bloodlust-fuelled, religiously myopic mob.

Matt stared and tried to quell his galloping heart. He thought about Jock the Reaper. He’d imagined the cape catching in the rusty nail, seen the possibility, but what on earth could stop a rushing horde?

Matt squeezed his eyes shut and thought very, very hard.

Ahead of him, the earth began to tremble under the tramping of hundreds of thousands of feet. Matt could feel it under him. Feel the ground resonating…

Resonance.

What if the vibration of those thousands of feet set up a harmonic frequency that matched exactly the natural frequency of some fault line in the limestone rocks beneath the ground, so that…

With a dreadful, rumbling groan, the ground in front of the mob shuddered, and a million tons of earth underwent a seismic shift.

Matt’s galloping pulse seized.

A huge pall of dust billowed upwards and blotted out the sun for several seconds. He blinked away the dust. He could barely breathe. When he’d stopped coughing and dared peek, an adrenaline charge brought a triumphant “hah” bursting from his lips.

A sinkhole had opened up where once had been bleached plain, barely twenty yards in front of the baying mob. It had to be a mile across, a hundred feet deep, and fifty feet wide. With hundreds of thousands of roaring acolytes behind, those in the front couldn’t do much about it. Even as Matt watched, the front-runners tumbled in, their bloodthirsty cries giving way to yodels of terror.

It was a scene straight out of Lemmings 3: The Director’s Texas Chainsaw Cut.

The guards and the high priests had escaped the quake, but a new rumble shook the ground, accompanied by a very odd hissing noise. Beneath the priests, the ground bulged ominously. They started running, but it was too late. A huge spout of boiling water gushed upwards, taking most of them with it three hundred feet in the air. Matt dragged his mind back and wondered what these stakes they were tied to might feel like if they’d been made out of balsa wood instead of oak or teak or… Matt wriggled, and realised that the stake was now feather-light; he could lift it out of the ground with impunity. He fell backward. The thin wood crumbled to dust under his weight. It was a simple matter to then slip his arms around beneath him and loosen the knots with his teeth. He turned his attention to his fellow captives and went first to the woman with the crooked glasses. Swiftly, he untied her hands.

“They’ll be fine,” he whispered into her ear.

She could hardly speak, but managed to splutter, “Who?”

“Charlotte, Abby, and Jake. You’ll all be fine.”

The woman turned to Matt and looked into his face with gobsmacked wonder. “Did you do all… that?”

Matt could do nothing but shrug. “I’ll clean it all up later, I promise.”

“But who—?”

“Just think of me as your average friendly four-hundred-pound gorilla,” he said, and left her speechless with relief.

From then on, it was a domino effect. Matt and the woman released two more, who released two more, and within ten minutes all the captives were freed; the acolytes, finally having come to a halt on the opposite side of the divide, glared across at them like rabid dogs staring in through a butcher shop window. Matt untied Kylah himself, but instead of the wild embrace of gratitude and more he was hoping for, he got a muttered “I think we need to talk” instead.

“Agreed,” Matt said, watching as she rubbed her wrists to get the circulation going. “But can I suggest we get out of here first?”

Mr. Porter looked a little the worse for wear but was in good spirits as Matt released his bonds, this time with one of Kylah’s borrowed ultra-sharp knives.

“Goodness me, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Mr. Porter massaged a bit of stiffness from his neck. “Did you have a hand in all that, young Mathew?”

“I think so. It’s difficult to be sure.”

“Not that difficult,” Kylah said without looking at him. It earned a questioning glance from Matt, but her expression remained stonily businesslike.

“I can honestly say that I could cheerfully murder a cup of Mrs. Hoblip’s special tea,” murmured Mr. Porter wistfully.

“You mean the one that’s not safe to have next to a naked flame?” Kylah asked.

“The very one.”

Birrik and Kemoch led the evacuation with swift military precision. It was helped by the total absence of any pursuit. One or two of the Ghoulshee made it around the edge of the fissure as the captives began climbing out of the valley. But there was little danger. Even when one of the priests—out for the count after being geysered—sprang up, let out a blood-curdling cry, and lunged for Matt with a poisoned dagger in his hand, it wasn’t a problem. He managed two paces before Kylah expertly pierced his neck with a precision ten-metre throw of a gleaming stiletto. The priest gurgled and fell with his arm outstretched.

“Thanks,” Matt said.

“Pleasure,” she replied with a workmanlike shrug as she thrust the retrieved knife repeatedly into Uzturnsitstan’s rich soil to clean it.

“Armed and dangerous,” Matt murmered to Kemoch as they watched Kylah round up those priests who hadn’t been turned into lobster thermidor by the geyser, while they waited for reinforcements. He said it with a kind of grudging admiration, as you might describe a finely engineered piece of armament, something to be respected but also feared just a little.

“She’s probably saying the same thing about you,” Kemoch muttered.

That left Matt’s sails flapping in a dead calm. The implication was insane. Kylah was highly trained and capable, whereas he…he was simply someone who’d stumbled into all this and got lucky.

Extremely lucky.

Okay, rewind that one. Incredibly lucky. He tried to push Kemoch’s thought-provoking Exocet to the back of his mind, but all it did was sit there, fizzing.

He tried to blank it out by busying himself, doing what he could with the shocked and traumatised captives. The last to be released was a young boy of eleven, who’d been snatched on his way home from a local co-op in Preston, Lancashire, where he’d been buying some bread for his family’s tea. His name was Wil, the same as Matt’s friendly childhood neighbour. Wil was frightened and very weak from lack of food. Matt found a serendipitous Mars bar in the pocket of his trousers and watched as Wil scoffed it hungrily.

“Better?” Matt asked and got a very definite nod from a lip-licking Wil. “Right, so follow those two nice Sith Fand.” He pointed towards Kemoch and Birrik, who were a few yards away with some elderly captives. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“You mean those two elf blokes?” Wil said in his broad Lancashire.

“Yeah, those two elf blokes,” Matt said, grinning at the scathing look he got for his trouble from Kemoch.

They were at the very edge of the clearing, close to where the jungle was trying to march inexorably back to reclaim that which had been taken from it, at the spot where the path led back to the ledge and the baked-bean tin exit. She must have been waiting there, Matt surmised later. Hurt and angry, waiting for an opportunity to strike back. And strike back, she did. With a vengeance.

Wil was halfway between Matt, who’d decided to wait for Kylah, and Kemoch, who was striding out in front, when Silvy launched herself. It was obvious she was injured from the way she skittered across the space between the jungle and the boy. Her movement reminded Matt very much of a wounded spider. But it was still too quick for anyone to prevent her grabbing Wil.

“We meet again,” she said, tightening her grip around the boy’s throat so that he gurgled alarmingly. The snakes’ heads at the ends of her corn-row hair all hissed in unison.

“Stop it,” Matt yelled. “What can you possibly achieve?”

“This is not about achievement, this is about appeasement. Cthran is angry.” Her voice was strained, but Matt couldn’t tell if it was from rage or pain. “Cthran is grievously displeased. Otherwise, how could he have allowed this? Allowed you…” She tightened her grip on Wil’s throat some more. “I can begin the appeasement with this captive. One rendering is better than none at all.”

A black knife appeared in her clawed hand. Her ice-blue eyes looked ragged inside the red rims of her lids.

Matt shook his head. “We both know it’s me you want. Let him go.”

Silvy spat with derision. It sounded like an angry viper. “But you are their weapon,” she said. “I know now that I cannot kill you, but if I kill this boy, a part of you will die. That will please me.”

A scarlet balloon of anger burst inside Matt. He wanted nothing more than to crush this abomination with the heel of his shoe. But he couldn’t. He daren’t.

“Do not move,” Silvy said. “If you move, his death will be slow and painful. He will beg you to finish it for him. Do you think you could do that, infidel?”

“Please,” Matt said. “This is wrong. He’s done nothing.”

“The choice is not whether he lives or dies. It is how he dies that you will decide.” Ochre dust streaked her white, translucent skin. As visions of evil went, it was a real keeper.

“Please,” Matt said again.

“On your knees, djinn,” Silvy roared.

In his peripheral vision, Matt could see Kylah and the SES watching, inching closer.

“Tell them to stay where they are,” Silvy said.

Matt sent them a glance and they stopped moving.

“On your knees,” spat Silvy again.

“I’m not a bloody djinn,” Matt said. “When will you people realize that I’m just an ordinary bloke? I don’t want any part of this shitty, effin-jumb—”

He cut himself off because someone had opened the door to the fridge in his head again.

“Okay,” he said trying his best to sound defeated. “On my knees. Okay.”

Matt let his knees bend, at the same time twisting his body so that he was at a slight angle to Silvy and Wil. He kept one hand out as evidence of his cooperation, and put the other on his blood-soaked thigh as if he was in pain, which wasn’t difficult because, by this point, his spear wound was hurting quite a bit. But it also meant that he could slip his hand into his pocket. There was a fifty-fifty chance that it was the right pocket but he, of all people, could trust to luck on that one. His knees met with the ground just as his pocketed fingers met satisfyingly with a crumpled ball of muslin. The bloke in Harpy Nix had said something about especially awkward moments.

“Good,” Silvy said. “The knife is quicker than choking. But it might still take a while.”

She brought her machara to within two inches of the boy’s right eye, all the while keeping her gaze fixed on Matt.

“Is ‘Thou shalt be cruel’ on the core curriculum with you lot?” Matt asked, feeling his own fury boil inside.

“It’s optional. But a girl has to have some fun, eh, Mathew?”

“You’re an abomination.”

“I hope you like the sound of screaming,” Silvy said.

Matt saw her eyes slip away from his towards Wil’s face. She needs to see where the knife is going. She’s going to bloody do it. If ever there was a Mattipedia entry for “especially awkward moments,” this would be it.

Right, Harpy Nix. Let’s see what you’re made of.

Matt pulled his hand out from his trouser pocket and, in one fluid movement, threw the Bachau Oma in Silvy’s general direction. He heard his own breath freeze in his throat. Wil’s struggles were buying a vital few moments, long enough for the muslin ball to reach the apex of its arc and begin to fall. To Matt’s astonishment, it stopped for a split second in midair before flying unerringly towards the Ghoulshee priestess, shedding its muslin wrapping like the heat shield on a re-entry craft as it did so. In its wake, a comet tail of fine yellow dust hung in the air.

The movement distracted Silvy, but only for the merest second while she registered its presence, and Matt heard her curse. She sent him a hateful glance and jerked the knife towards Wil’s face. But it was too late. That single moment of distraction was enough. For at that precise moment, the Bachau Oma, which had stopped six inches above Silvy’s head, exploded in a puff of yellow dust which fell like intelligent talcum powder, coating the priestess in her entirety whilst missing Wil completely. Everything in the Silvy/Wil vicinity froze. Except for Silvy’s eyes. Something was moving frantically behind them. A maniacal anger combined with a silent scream of fear and, much to Matt’s delight, sudden, undeniable defeat. No matter how she struggled, her limbs were locked down tight.

It wasn’t quite a Wicked Witch of the West moment, but it was damned close. Okay, there was no wailing or collapsing cloak and no voice saying, “I’m melting! Melting!,” but it was just as effective. The yellow powder coating Silvy simply began to fade away into nothing, and Silvy faded with it, leaving Wil standing there, rubbing his throat and face.

Matt was on his feet in an instant and at the boy’s side a second later. He pulled Wil’s hands away and exhaled in relief when two frightened but intact eyes looked back up at him in bewilderment.

“You okay, Wil?”

Wil nodded. “What was that?”

“A very bad dream,” Matt said. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.” He took the boy’s hand and helped him over to Kemoch, who stood watching in admiration.

“Okay,” said the Sith Fand. “The sinkhole stuff was good, I’ll give you that. But what you just did to that Proturan dirt-bag,” he shook his head, a half-moon smile playing over his lips, “I’d pay good money to see that again. You going to tell me how?”

Matt smiled. “I know some people in retail.”

Once out of the toilet at Longbridges, they summoned a squad of reinforcements and soon had some tents set up. In one of them, they hung a wooden door, which they used to repatriate the Fae.

In the other tent, the British people were given cups of tea and debriefed, a process that always ended with them wearing a headband with a green stone in it as a “check” for any head trauma. Once the pentrievant had done its stuff, they were whisked off by SES agents through another door with an onyx handle, to emerge on the streets near where they lived. Confused and a little dazed, but mercifully alive, not one of them was able to explain in detail what had happened. Alien abduction stories had a brief resurgence in the local press all over the UK for a week or two, but then everything settled back down.

Once everyone was despatched to wherever they were from, Kemoch produced a stick of what looked like modelling clay from his backpack and wired it up around the collapsed brick wall that hid the entrance to Uzturnsitstan.

“What’s that?” Matt asked, “Some sort of closing charm?”

“Works like a charm, I have to admit, but this is good old-fashioned modified C-4. They won’t get out this way for a long time.”

The last of the SES reinforcements came out of the hole and nodded to Birrik. “That’s it, Sarge. The Ghoulshee, what’s left of them, are about halfway up the trail and looking pretty hacked-off. Plus, there’s this really ugly vulture who won’t take no for an answer when I tell it to bugger off. Bloody menace. Took a couple of pot shots at it.”

“I hope you missed,” Matt said, alarmed.

They all looked at him as he ducked back beneath the wall. “Give me one minute,” he said as he plunged back into darkness to emerge into the sweltering jungle heat.

“Psst,” Matt hissed. “Rimsplitter, it’s me.”

There was a rustling in the trees; a second later, a very large and cheesed-off vulture flew down. “About effin’ time, you cee. That bleeder shot at me.”

“Sorry, we’ve been a bit busy. Look, I’m grateful for what you did. That thing with the high priest and the crowing noise…”

“What crowin’ noise?” Rimsplitter asked. “It was me that splattered the snake man, yeah, but the only noise I made was me usual log-layin’ strain. Like to build up to one with a bit of effin’ vocalisation, you know?”

Matt shook his head. “Did anyone ever tell you what a lovely turn of phrase you have?”

“Frequently.”

“Well, anyway, if you want to come back through, I’ll fix it.”

“Too bleedin’ right I want to,” the vulture said. “’S not safe ’ere anymore. My guts will be some bee’s guitar string by mornin’ if I stay ’ere.”

Matt led the way and emerged with Rimsplitter in tow, earning plenty of suspicious glances, as well as several of disgust, from the SES boys. Kemoch and Birrik finished wiring up, and everyone retired to the undergrowth while the detonation took place with a satisfying whump. There was a bit more to do to ensure that the baked-bean tin was well and truly sealed, but finally, Matt stood with Kylah at the broken toilet door, just as they had that morning. The only difference this time was that Rimsplitter stood with them.

“Right,” Kylah said, “back to HQ. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” She led the way, with Matt bringing up the rear. As Kylah stepped across the threshold, Rimsplitter whispered in a voice that was probably only audible as far away as Birmingham.

“I think you’re in deep effin’ doo-doo, mate.” He swivelled his head from side to side which, Matt realised, was a sign to indicate that he was enjoying himself at someone else’s expense. “But if you’re goin’ to get a rollockin’, she’s the one to get it from. Oh, yeah, no doubt about it, pal; I would, on a bed of nails with me leg in a bear trap.”

Matt shook his head, grabbed Rimsplitter by his scrawny neck, and yanked him through.