Cadmus Damiola was dying.
He had known it for a long time.
Maybe it was punishment for what he’d done to Eleanor, or more likely something utterly prosaic like cancer. It didn’t matter much to him either way. He could feel the disease inside him. It had begun as a pain in his shoulder, such an innocuous thing, and had progressed to become a throat that felt like it was lined with razor blades, which made it impossible to swallow. It was just a matter of time, but if one man in London understood just how unimportant time actually was, it was Damiola.
The wooden slats of the old park bench dug into the base of his spine like some flagellant’s punishment. He wasn’t twisted; there was no comfort in pain. He didn’t enjoy it. The bottle didn’t help much, either. He took another swallow and wiped his lips with the back of a grubby hand. No amount of cheap whiskey was going to shift the burden of guilt he felt for what was happening to them. He should have known better. He looked through the cemetery’s iron gateway. Not many people got to see their own grave. It was a humbling experience. The old stones would be around long after he was gone. They’d already stood against the elements for the best part of ninety years. The sharp edges were weathered smooth and pitted where the frosts had worn away at them, but they would easily stand for another ninety or more, even if they were abandoned to nature.
He had known something would come through; that was why he had taken up his lonely vigil. He had just assumed it would emerge here, through the weakness he had made in the veil, not somewhere else. He was nothing more than a foolish old man with a little knowledge—and as the saying went, that was a dangerous thing.
Damiola had spent the longest part of the night, through three o’clock—he’d once heard about how more people died at that hour than any other, which with the moon silver on the rooftops around him, was a disconcerting thought—wondering how it had come this far, how things could have got so out of control. It was more than just cause and effect, or the notion of balance. Seth, Eleanor, Josh, him, they were the instruments of something so much bigger than that.
He saw a crow watching him from the iron gateway. The bird’s head inclined slightly as it ruffled its feathers and adjusted its perch. Those beady black eyes darted left and right, never settling for more than half a second on any one place in the old street. The crow gave the old man the creeps.
Damiola needed somewhere peaceful where he wouldn’t be disturbed. What better place could there be than his own final resting place? He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and shuffled toward the gate, causing the bird to fly. It moved off into the cemetery, settling on one of the stones.
If he was right, the Horned God—or whatever the thing that had come through from the Annwyn really was—was gathering the creatures of the Wild Hunt to his side. What would happen to the city when they were all gathered? He shivered, looking at his mausoleum and knowing that no goose had walked across his grave. If he understood the mythology correctly—and it was always hard to separate truth from legend—the wildlings were more akin to forces of nature than living breathing heroes, but that was how the collective myth functioned. It created realities we could understand from our limited point of view, shaping the stories handed down from generation to generation into something fantastic where giants climbed up beanstalks and wolves dressed in granny’s shawl. To Damiola’s mind they represented the sheer destructive force of the world at its most catastrophic. They were a cataclysmic force waiting to be unleashed.
How did you stand against that?
You don’t, he thought bitterly. You hide and wait for the world to end.
But he couldn’t do that anymore than he could run.
Damiola had dared to hope they might have been lucky. It was naïve of him. Nature always sought out balance. Julie’s visit, trying to guilt him into helping, had done nothing more than put the lives of those five children on him. There was no escaping the fact that they weighed heavily. They were as good as lost if he didn’t at least try to save them, but short of going toe-to-toe with Arawn’s wildlings he didn’t know what he could do.
Stop lying to yourself, old man. You know exactly what you’ve got to do, and you know exactly what will happen when you try and do it, which is why you’re putting it off.
He walked among the gravestones, trailing his fingertips across the rough surfaces of a few of the closest, not thinking about what they represented.
He reached his own mausoleum.
The crow moved four times during his sad parade through the dead, keeping him in sight every step of the way. He saw a battered sign declaring no loitering, no ball games, and couldn’t imagine what sort of kid would willingly hang around a place like this. The crow cawed and rose up above him like some kind of omen. He did his best to ignore it.
The ironwork around his final resting place had seen better days; it was choked with weeds and climbers, colorful blossoms just beginning to flower on the vines offering a brilliant counterpoint to the rust. He pushed the gate aside and entered. Instead of taking the few short steps down to the doorway, he lay on his back in the grass and looked up at the sky. The world was never less than strange from this perspective. The clouds gathered, foreshortening his view of eternity.
Damiola pushed all of the thoughts of Arawn and the wildlings from his mind, banishing the face of Seth Lockwood and the memory of his rage as they cornered him.
He needed to be in the moment.
Clear.
Calm.
The crow watched him intently.
It was impossible to pretend it wasn’t there, so instead he used it, concentrating on the minutia of its feathers, the tiny imperfections as its wings beat a steady rhythm against the air, rising and falling, drifting, rising and falling, as it circled overhead. The bird’s oily black feathers glistened slickly in the moon. Damiola concentrated on his breathing, with each inhalation imagining he drew the universe and time into his body, and with each breath that slipped out between his lips he let his soul out to merge with the source of all things, sending it back whence it came. He’d learned the trick from a fakir almost a century ago. He tried to remember the man’s name … it sounded like a foreign land or maybe a mountain. Alkeran. That was it. It was the only thing about the fakir that he did remember. There were no details to the man’s face when he tried to bring it to mind, but that was memory for you. He hung the clothes of recollection on sensory triggers, smells, funny little ticks or gestures, and more often than not forgot to fill out the skeleton with simple things like names or faces. What he did remember was the story of how the fakir claimed to have come by the sacred knowledge whilst on pilgrimage to some remote corner of Tibet’s perilous mountains. A guide had taken him north—a month’s walk through thin air and ice—into shadows of the highest peaks to pay homage to a holy man who they claimed had taken up residence beyond the snow line. The man, they said, had lived a thousand years and more, and possessed wisdom from the oldest of the mystical texts. They called him the Eternal. Alkeran spun a good yarn, and his fractured English hid the fact that he had been born into a life of relative privilege in the Raj, not forced to work the tea plantations until his fingers bled, and the more obvious lie that no man could live for a thousand years. But no one was interested in the reality of it; they only wanted the showmanship. That was the secret to selling the illusion. Alkeran was on the same touring circuit as Damiola, more often than not a day or two ahead of him at smaller venues, no more than a week ahead at the major theaters, lifting the red curtain to offer the good, ordinary people of England a glimpse at the mysteries of the subcontinent where men could live an eternity.
Damiola had been sure he was a faker as well as a fakir.
He’d been wrong, of course.
The man had a gift, and the Eternal, far from being some exotic Tibetan wise man, was every bit as British as the land itself. Rather than live at the top of some unconquerable mountain, the old man made his home in the ancient wildwood on the outskirts of London. His name was Viridius. It was funny how things moved in circles. He was back at that name again. Viridius, the god of spring.
His own act might have been little more than smoke and mirrors in the early days, but Alkeran offered him his first glimpse of what could only be called true magic, the greatest of which allowed him the grace to leave his body and soul walk a short way.
Alkeran had needed to ingest some sort of root to divide body and soul. When chewed, the root possessed hallucinogenic qualities, but when left to dissolve slowly on the tongue it seeped into the bloodstream and allowed the fakir to leave his flesh behind, if only for a short while.
That was what Damiola needed to do now, but without the aid of the hallucinogenic root.
All he had was his faith and desperation.
He needed to believe that the gods of every season were listening now, and cared.
He saw the face of the divine slowly begin to take shape in the pattern of feathers, ignoring the fact that he couldn’t possibly see anything in that kind of detail from where he was, and concentrated on it and only it, until he felt himself drifting and realized he was no longer looking up at the crow but down at his own body unmoving on the grass below, seeing the world through the eyes of the black bird.
A silver umbilicus glittered a trail down to his body.
His eyes were open, staring blindly into the great cosmos, whilst Damiola stared back the other way.
It was a dizzying dislocation.
There was no one moment when his spirit began to soar. No silence between heartbeats when his spirit slowly separated from his flesh, no ghostly transition where he rose up, up, and away to fuse with the consciousness of the bird. Damiola felt himself drift farther away from his body, the cemetery falling away vertiginously beneath him until his body was a speck, a smudge of black on the ground, and the canyons of the city streets began to take on shape and form around him. The rooftops did little to hide the poverty to the left of him against the glittering glass wealth of the offices to the right. One hundred feet, two hundred, four, five hundred, up and up, spiraling ever higher. He banked to the left, gliding on a warm current of air.
Damiola’s breathing turned ragged, coming in short, sharp gasps despite the fact that the last thing he needed to do was breathe; it was all an illusion, a memory of the spirit. He was free of the burden of the flesh.
He looked out across the rooftops of the city, following the zigzag of tiles and flashing as they moved street by street down toward the water. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, only that there had to be some hint, something that marked the gateway that had allowed the wildlings into this world. He needed to find it, and he needed to close it before more of them could come through. He envisioned the Wild Hunt coming: first the champions, then behind them the dancing dead, the chorus of myth and legend, the ethereal figures riding out of the mist and onto the streets of London intent on razing the place to the ground. That way lay madness.
He willed himself toward the river, imagining the slow beating of wings to carry him south. The streets rolled by beneath him as the glittering umbilicus stretched out ever thinner.
He could feel it, he realized.
The other side. The Annwyn.
It was like a black hole trying to draw him in.
Its pull on his spirit was relentless. Instinctively, he pushed back against it, and had to stop himself fleeing as fear threatened to overwhelm him. It was the bird’s influence on his personality. He had to fight it to fly on. He’d been naïve enough to expect to see some bright, burning wrongness blazing through the streets, a glowing silver arch lighting up the sky to mark the gateway, something like that. But of course it was never going to be so obvious, why would it be?
He saw the trees of Coldfall Wood and the rise of Cane Hill in the distance; the natural beauty of the world was laid bare by the deep wounds in the concrete that allowed them to shine through. And they were glorious.
Mother, the thought bled into his mind. He had no idea where it had originated, but it felt right.
Damiola willed himself to move, struggling with the dizzying sensation of the riverbank rushing along below. All of the people scurried around like ants beneath him, oblivious to his soul. He knew the city, or had known it, but things had changed beyond all recognition since his grand illusion had opened Glass Town.
He changed his angle of flight, banking and soaring.
He imagined he could feel the wind on his face, but of course he couldn’t.
The silver line shimmered all the way back to the graveyard, stretched thin. Fissures had already begun to appear in the umbilicus. The black lines shot through the silver rope of his soul. The farther he ventured from his flesh, the more tenuous the link would become. Venture too far from the body and the likelihood of returning to a corpse was virtually assured; the autonomic memories controlling the breathing and heartbeat wouldn’t go on functioning indefinitely. They would slowly begin to fail without the proximity of the soul to keep the organs vital and then he would be cast adrift. Those black lines were the first hints of necrosis stealing in.
Damiola had never pushed it more than a couple of minutes before, but he had to ignore the cracks slowly opening in the tether and focus on the cityscape beneath him, understanding as he did that he didn’t need to see the gateway to find it, all he had to do was surrender to its tidal pull—and with that realization the streets sped away beneath him, all those lives racing by as old industrial red-brick chimneys reared up before the magician only to disappear in his wake as he was drawn over the water and on toward Coldfall Wood.
Where are you?
The Rothery looked like Hell from above; everything broken, everything in the grips of decay, weeds growing in vibrant green through the cracks in the pavement, shopping trolleys abandoned in the stream to rust and along with the detritus of everyday, carrier bags, the frame of a bike, the wheel rims stripped of rubber so the spokes jutted out, snagging wrappers from candy bars and a fluttering of black fabric that might have been panties or a bra once upon a time, before all of that innocence was lost.
He looked away from the stream, toward the trees, and realized how majestic the old wood must have been before the city came. Even in the years he’d fast-forwarded through, the forest had shrunk in half and half again with the houses encroaching on its heart.
Damiola saw the light through the dense undergrowth of the ancient wood; at first it appeared to be a scattering of coins on the ground, the silver glow filtered through the leaves, but as his spirit neared, Damiola saw the first curls of mist and knew what he was seeing. The silver glow emanated from the dimgate.
Something stirred down in the foliage.
He needed a different angle to better see into the clearing, so banked and rolled, angling his flight to skim along the canopy of leaves. They rustled in his wake, more agitated than they had any right to be from his passage. The movement rippled outward from the circle of the fairy stones, and the wooden warrior that in turn circled the stones.
It was a magnificent creature, unlike anything he had ever imagined even in his darkest nightmares—and it was absolutely a creature of those dark places, capable of instilling fear bone deep in all who set eyes upon it’s twisted grace. The wooden boughs of its rib cage bowed as the beast breathed, alive. The desiccated leaves still clinging to those boughs rustled, a thousand tiny voices filled with the fears of the great wood going back generations.
The Horned God stood beside his pet, looking up at Damiola. The Knucker crouched beside the antlered man, a boy kneeling at his feet. Arawn held a rowan staff in one hand, while the other rested on the boy’s chest, over his heart. He felt the intensity of Arawn’s loathing all the way back to his bones where they lay in the old cemetery.
It was the first time he had set eyes upon a god—and there was no doubting that whatever the antlered man was, he wasn’t merely flesh and blood, he was something very much more than that—and it reduced him, stripping away the years of experience and knowledge to leave an infantilized caricature in the magician’s place.
Damiola was afraid.
He wasn’t thinking about flapping his stolen wings anymore; all he could think about was bolting, getting as far away as fast as humanly possible, as Arawn’s voice sounded in his mind:
I see you …
The words chilled the blood in his borrowed body. He couldn’t fight against them. The air around Damiola chilled as it filled with a weird static charge that thrilled at the promise of the Horned God’s magic. He recognized it as the precursor of real magic; his own spells had a unique signature scent that made it easy for other practitioners to recognize the caster. In his case it was cinnamon. A sweet smell. He’d met others who smelled of freshly baked bread, of vanilla, of grass, and darker fragrances, oil and petrol and smoke. But Arawn’s magic was an ancient one, its signature the heady scent of the forest itself.
It was overpowering.
Dizzying.
Damiola felt his grip on the bird’s mind slipping.
In that moment—trapped in the heart of the Horned God’s earth magic—he saw the ghostly white stag seem to leap through Arawn’s flesh to meet his challenge head on. The stag charged through the clearing, negotiating the broken stones on the ground, and launched itself up to meet Damiola’s crow.
The symbolism was as old as time itself, the white stag and the black crow, and fundamental to the battle for Albion.
He should have known better than to meddle in the matter of men and gods.
Damiola couldn’t flee.
The white stag charged into the air, its ethereal hooves sparking with crackles of blue-tinged electricity as they struck the nothing beneath them, rising effortlessly. This was Arawn’s second skin; the form he took at the head of the Wild Hunt. He was King Stag. The ghostly creature broke through the cover of the trees, charging head down to meet Damiola in the sky.
Ic béo wacende þē, the voice sounded in his mind, and with it came images of a distant battlefield where the Carrion King picked over the remains of the dead, moving from corpse to corpse, no respecter of sides, of right or wrong, as he feasted upon the soft sweet meats of the dead. I know you. I see you. Or, more sinister in its overtones, I am watching you.
Damiola shook his head, trying to banish the image, to tell the Horned God he was mistaken, that he had never seen that killing field in this life or any other, but he recognized the contours of the land for what they were: the ground beneath them. He was seeing—Being shown? Remembering?—killings that had happened in this very place, and beyond it. It was a glimpse of the real tragedy of this place. This was where King Stag, the Horned God, Arawn—all of the names he owned meant little across time—had been cursed. This was his doom. Where he and his kind had been Albion’s doom, tearing the green grass apart in war. The Horned God was doomed to be her savior now. It all crystallized in Damiola’s mind. He understood the great tragedy for what it was. King Stag was the source of all of the myths around the once and future king.
The ghostly stag and the stolen crow clashed in a battle of antlers and feathers.
There could only ever be one winner in the mismatched fight.
Damiola felt the feathers of his borrowed body mat together, slick with blood as the stag came at him again. A blazing white light burned off the god, the crow’s flesh blistering beneath its onslaught.
Damiola couldn’t fight a god.
No one could.
Cadmus Damiola was dying.