10

Jack was lost in a darkness deeper than night. It swirled around him and through him and he felt his whole being fragment into a million pieces.

And in the dark, the guttering candle of his mind brought images looming in from far off to appear briefly before they fuzzed out into nothingness.

Pale faces swam up close to him, eyes green as deep sea and hands as cold as death, smooth as marble caressed him and clung to him, taking him down even further to a place where shadows were.

He saw Kerry flipping up from the makeshift raft in the thunder of the falls, spinning in the air as the sword spangled shards of light.

He saw him sink down through a turmoil of frothing water, unable to loosen his grip on the sword, bubbles wavering up from his open mouth. He saw Kerry drown there, sinking out of his reach.

The cold hands surrounded him, encoiled him, drew him down into the deepest black.

A huge pressure bore own on him like an iron grip squeezing the life out of him as he faded away.

And he dreamed dreadful dreams.

In the dark he saw the ring of standing stones on a bleak and barren moor. On each one a great black bird and the monstrosity with craters where its eyes should be, yet somehow able to see right through him into his soul and he knew he was watched by something so hellish the sight of it could freeze him to stone.

Across the scarred moorland he saw the ogres marching, grey things, squat and ugly in leather armour and scaly skin, bearing clubs and spears and jagged swords, the tramp of their feet so deep and pervasive it was like the booming of a monstrous heart.

The marched on and on, row upon row, growling and chanting as they walked, sounding like rocks sliding down the face of a mountain.

He flew above them, soaring with the huge ravens, as an awful cold speared through him and froze his heart, up in the frigid air above the fields of slaughter and the cascade of bones of men and beasts where the spell of rot wafted up in noisome clouds.

From the height he could see in the distance a great wooden dam across a river, backing its flow, where men and women toiled and strove under the lash and clubs of the grey ogres. In the distance beyond the crude dam, the waters were already pooling into a shallow lake that reached to stony hills where a chasm was cut like a scar into bare rock on the edge of a sere and arid desert.

The freezing wind and the beat of black wings carried him onwards over this desert, flat and barren and featureless but for the salt that was patterned like rippling waves on a shore, devoid of all life.

He flew forever, it seemed, surrounded by the carrion birds who led him on, until he came to the low black hill in the centre of this salt desert.

It sat squat and brooding, like a boil on sick white skin, like a tumour on the very land.

He tried to stop now, will himself away from this place, but he was carried on remorselessly towards the black tor.

In his dream he saw a shadow growing and spreading like the touch of poison on his own skin, like the dark that had oozed from the white-eyed Billy Robbins and flowed against gravity up the wall of the Major's house.

The dark spread out, inexplicably evil, palpable with threat, cracking the salt flats into great fissures from which night-things crawled and scuttered and great grey bats flew on clouds and worms and maggots pulsed as they emerged to trail slime.

The presence called to him, dragging him with the force of its baneful will and he tried to fight against it.

But there was no fighting it.

Come to me .

A crumbling hole appeared in the side of the mound, yawning like a black mouth, sucking him inside.

In the dark, he could sense a shadow within a shadow, reaching for him.

Bring me the key .

He tried to cry out, but still had no breath.

Images flickered inside his head, unbidden, unwanted.

He saw a golden sword spiked deep into a stone so black it was like a hole into nothingness. On its surface he saw the plucked eyes of a great bird and the ragged nerves frayed on its surface.

And in the blackness he thought he saw a motion inside the block of stone, a nightmare ripple that caused him to recoil in horror.

The voice scraped on the inside of his head, claws and he jerked back, willing himself away.

And another voice called his name.

It came from far away in the gloom, but he held on to the sound.

Jack….Jack…

He thought he knew the voice, remembered it from long ago.

Jack!

The call was distant, but clear. It was deep and resonant. Jack felt its pull, turning him away from what waited in the dark.

Ahead of him was bright light, and a tall silhouette framed in its glare. He could see no features, just the shape of a man, one arm raised.

"Come back to the light," the man called.

The hateful web snaring his mind began to loosen and the hideous touch faded as he felt drawn towards the man. He still couldn't see the face, but he knew who called him. It had to be his father.

Jack ran towards him.

***

"Jack man. Oh Jack. I thought you were a goner there."

Kerry's voice was high and agitated.

His vision cleared completely and he turned his head just a little. The blue eyes held him and for a moment he was completely confused.

"Ah, so you've decided to join us."

The voice was soft, a man's voice..

He shook his head and his vision wavered in and out of focus, the way it had done when the green pale shapes had come skimming up to him from the depths. He tried to speak and a warm hand came down on his brow, lightly, like the touch of a feather.

"Lay a bit son," the man said. His beard was white, like his thickly braided hair.

"You're out of the water," the old man said, "but you've a way to go before you're out of the woods.

The hand skimmed his hair back, cupped the back of his head and lifted it up slowly. Pain cascaded all through him and he bit back on it, trying not to yell out, choking back a scream.

"Not in great shape, are we?" The voice had age to it, and an accent that reminded him of the way the Major spoke, and it was gentle.

"I lost him," Jack managed to gasp. There was water still in his lungs; he could feel it crackle deep inside. "He said don't let him drown."

He tried to sit up, failed and the shape in front of him faded into darkness for a moment.

"And I lost her," he muttered. "She went over and Kerry went down." Tears sprung again to his eyes and simply flowed down his cheeks.

"Easy, young fellow. You've been down in the dark a while. And don't you worry."

He felt another touch, hot and shaky on his shoulder and when the tears blinked away he saw Kerry's face coalesce from the grey. Beside him was Corriwen Redthorn's green eyes, all full of concern and misery battling relief and joy.

"Jack man." Kerry said. "We really thought you were a goner."

"You were down in the water," he started to say. "How…?"

"Nearly scalped me, ye beggar," Kerry said, grinning through his own tears. "I'm lucky I've any hair left."

"How did you get out? How did we…?" He coughed and the last of the water came out, though the spasm cost him a sear of hurt from his neck to his waist..

"Ah," the stranger said. "That would be my friends, the Undine. Clever girls they are. You got them in good humour today and I was expecting company. They can lift you up or take you down. And if they do, you never get back up again."

"Remember the wolf?" Kerry said. "I thought it was a fish that took it."

"No trespassers in this water," the old man said. "They don't like those Scree, nor their beasts."

He began to turn away to where a fire glowed in the corner. "Let's get some soup in you, take the chill out."

Jack looked from Kerry to Corriwen, eyes all questions.

"He says they're water spirits," Kerry explained. "I swallowed half the river and never saw them. When they shoved you out, you still had me by the hair. I had to get a stick to loosen the grip."

"I saw them," Corriwen said. "They were green. And beautiful. And fast. I heard of Undines, but I never thought they were real."

"Oh, they're real all right," the bearded man said. "Them and the kelpies of the seashore, though you want to keep away from them. They're hungry all the time, and they'll take man and horse both, given the chance."

He brought over a bowl of something that steamed lazily and he held Jack's head up again. Jack sipped the broth and tasted some kind of spicy meat. It brought some heat back into bones that felt like ice.

"Just take a piece at a time, 'til you get your breath." The man sat on the edge of the bench where Jack lay under a coarse blanket. They were in a house of some kind. The walls were bare stone, with stone ledges for shelves that were crammed with bottles and bags and stone jars.

"You did a good job of work, holding your friend in the water. His head's going to ache a day or two, but it could have been a whole lot worse.

"He wouldn't let go," Jack said between mouthfuls. "The sword. It dragged him down."

"Yeah," Kerry said, unable to keep the grin from his face. He had wiped the tears away with his knuckles, but his eyes were still red. "I never even knew I was still holding on. For all the difference it would make. I swim like a brick."

Corriwen was still holding Jack's hand, warm and close. Some of her heat moved into him, and he snuggled it. Her green eyes searched his and he could see she had been crying too.

"I didn't want to lose you," she whispered.

The old man came back. He had a sheepskin jerkin on, with the fleece inside, and a sort of leather cap and a long cloak that looked to be stitched together expertly from small animal pelts.

"Your friends tell me you're hurt."

Jack nodded, swallowed drily.

"I can smell it on you, and it's not good. So we'd best take a look-see. Maybe we have something here that can help."

"Oh, and by the by," the stranger said, "You can call me Finbar. There's a few other names to go alongside it, that were given to me a while back but you'll never get your tongue around them."

"You live here?"

"Sure I do. The old fellow smiled. His cheeks were rosy and pink and cheerful. "I'm the bard of Undine Haven. And don't worry about those foul things that were hunting you. This here's a hidden place. There's a geas on our haven."

He smiled again. "Know what a geas is?"

"Some sort of spell, isn't it?"

"Right."

Brave the thunder, find a haven. The book hadn't warned of an impending storm. It had predicted the apocalyptic cataract that had flipped them up and cast them down and down. And they hadn't so much braved them as just fallen over. It was a miracle they weren't dead. Avoiding death seemed to have taken a few miracles in the past day.

"Those things and whatever has unleashed them can't see here," the Bard said. "But those flying spies of hers, those roaks and ravens, they're scouring hill and moor. I knew they were looking for something, so I presume it must be you."

"The Mandrake wants me," Corriwen said.

"That I believe, young Corriwen Redthorn."

"You know my name?"

"Of course I know your name. Sure, wasn't I there at Redthorn Keep on the night you were born? Can't have a birthing without a Bard. Not a Redthorn birth anyways."

"But how…?" she began.

"There's a story long in the telling. I know about your uncle and his mad ways, and it's almost time to do something about it. The Bards have been waiting for a sign, and I reckon you and these two lads, you're it."

She looked up at him, eyes wide and puzzled.

"All's not lost, girl. Not when there's a Redthorn left and a sword to be found. We know the old foretellings, us Bards do, and they do come true, sooner or later, and better late than never at all, eh? But I tell you, you'll have a fight on your hands, and I hope you're up to it."

"I have to do something," she said resolutely. "I am sick of running and hiding. My brother is dead on the field, and somebody will pay. Mandrake will pay."

He looked her in the eyes. She was such a slight form compared to the big old man. Jack watched the two of them and he saw the resolute set of her jaw. Just what she had been through, he couldn't imagine, but she had been hunted and harried for months in the forest and she had survived alone. Despite the pain and sickness in him, his heart swelled with pride and admiration at her courage.

The patted her shoulder lightly. "Time for plans and explanations later, young lady," he said. "This here lad's squirming. Let me sort his trouble first, then we'll sit and gnaw the bone." He was bending over Jack now, pulling back the pelted coverlet, easing away the leather Jerkin. Jack closed his eyes and winced.

"Oh my," Finbar said in a soft voice when he finally pulled the shirt aside. Even the touch of the air felt like acid on Jack's skin.

"Jeez," Kerry whispered, aghast. Corriwen said nothing. The dark mass on Jack's chest had expanded, like veins of tar under his skin, reaching up to his neck and over his shoulder. It pulsed with a malignant beat of its own. Jack's breath came ragged and shallow. The cold was draining him.

"How on Temair did this happen to you?" Finbar asked. Jack tried to speak, but exhaustion and cold had worn him down. He heard Kerry speak up, and he told the story, beginning from the moment they saw the shadow flow out from Billy Robbins and ooze up the walls of the Major's house. Kerry told it simple and straight. For once his Irish habit of embellishing stories failed him. Jack listened until Kerry's voice seemed to fade away in the telling and he felt as if he was slowly falling backwards into a deep tunnel.

He woke again under the Bard's warm hand on his brow, struggling up from the cold and the dark, feeling as if his very body belonged to someone else. In his ear he could hear strange whisperings, like echoes in a chasm. He shook his head to clear it and the world spun.

"The Banshee touch," the Bard said. "The darkness of the damned and the lost. Grows in you like fungus roots. Sucks the good out, brings the bad in. You're a tough young feller to have come this far, tough and lucky. And from what your Kerry tells me, you've come a long ways from here."

"What is it?" Kerry asked.

"It's the hate and the poison from the dark world. Beyond Tir-nan-Og, the Land of the Fair. It's the terrible place. And that touch, it's been put there for a reason, no doubt. I'll have to give that some thinking time when we're done."

Done? Jack was too exhausted to wonder.

The old man turned away and spent some time at the hearth. Kerry tracked him with his eyes, but Jack couldn't move his head. Finbar came back again and bent over him.

"This won't be a mayday frolic, young traveller," he said. "I'm telling you now. But we must get that dark out of you before it swallows you up and takes you down to a place you'll never leave."

Jack had no idea what he was talking about. He nodded weakly.

"Here," The Bard beckoned to Kerry and Corriwen. "You be friends to him now. Each take a wrist in both hands and hold it tight."

They did as they were told. Kerry felt the cold seep from Jack's skin into his own. Corriwen's face was set. The Bard took a length of hide and wrapped it around Jack's knees and looped it to the hard boards of the bench. He brought a thick piece of leather, thick as the heel of a shoe and jammed it between Jack's teeth. Bite down boy. Cut it in half if you must."

"Is this some kind of trick?" Kerry wanted to know.

"Something like that." Finbar turned away to the fire and when he came back he held a flat slab of obsidian stone between two metal hooks. It was dark, almost black, but translucent to a degree, like a black jewel. Heat came off it in waves,

"Fireglass," he said. "Made in the heat of the ground below. Now you pair hold tight and be a friend to him. Don't you let him go."

Without another word, he placed the stone right on the centre of the spreading black pulsation on Jack's chest.

Jack screamed.

As soon as the hot slab touched his skin a pain lanced through him in a river of fire, unlike anything he had ever experienced before. His back arched in a spasm against the thongs around his knees and his teeth bit down so hard on the leather that his jaw almost broke.

"Jeez man," Kerry bawled. "What are you doing to him? " Kerry could smell burning flesh and heard the sizzle as the hot stone seared Jack's white chest.

"Hold him boy," Finbar's voice was calm, but firm. "Hold him tight."

Jack screamed again. His whole body quivering like a tight wire. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped down past his ears. The sound of that scream made the walls rattle and the things on the shelf quiver in sympathy.

Kerry burst into sudden tears, but he held on as Jack bucked and writhed on the table. Corriwen wailed in distress, but her grip never slackened.

"Fireglass," the Bard said. "Faerie tears. It swallows the light or the dark. Takes the heat or the cold. Sucks the bad from the good. Let it do its work."

Jack screamed once again, high and pitiful. His back arched until it seemed his spine would break, then he shuddered and fell back in a dead faint. A bubble of blood swelled from his nose and burst wetly. His friends hung on as if their lives depended on it. They took the Bard's word that Jacks life certainly did.

"He's had enough," Kerry sobbed. "You'll kill him."

"Kill or cure," the Bard said, under his breath. "Without a cure that dark poison will take him down to itself."

Steam was rising up now. Jack's lifeless body was still vibrating like a tuning fork and his eyes were turned up so far all he could see was white. They held on and held on and Kerry expected to see the hot black stone burn its way through flesh and bone, but despite that he did not lose his grip. All he could feel was the shiver as if jolts of electricity were surging through his friend.

It seemed to last for hours, though it couldn't have been more than agonising minutes. After a while, the Bard took a thick hank of material that might have been linen, soaked it in a bucket of water and then used it to lift the stone away. Steam hissed and billowed in clouds around him. He put the slab down on a stool, soaked the cloth again, and put it on Jack's forehead. Where the obsidian block had sat, the skin was bubbled and blistered. But even as Kerry watched, the blistering began to subside.

"With a bit of luck, we've brought him back," Finbar said. "How he managed to keep going so long's a mystery to me. He's got a big heart."

"His name is Jack Flint."

"Well named, young feller. Tough as a rock is your travelling man."

He had hardly finished the sentence when Jack moaned, squirmed on the table. He pulled on their hands and the Bard motioned them to let him up. He slumped over the edge of the table and retched a stream of grey black bile.

"He'll clear himself out now," Finbar said. "The fireglass burned the sick out of him."

He wiped Jack's mouth and eased him up to a sitting position.

"You have to do this part yourself," he said. Jack blinked back the sting of tears, breathing hard, feeling weak as a kitten.

"You've had the pain, my friend, now you have to finish the job. "

"What do I do?" His skin was sizzling, so it felt, but that dread dark ache deep inside him was gone.

"Take the stone and come out to the river."

Jack staggered on shuddery legs to the stool and used the last of his strength to heft the obsidian slab. It felt smooth and somehow alive in his hands. The Bard steadied him as he walked through under the narrow doorway, across the short sward to the bank and followed the man as he waded in over a shallow shingle bank. Upstream the monumental falls thundered, cascading from an immense height down through a mist that tumbled and rolled in the air, so high up that he couldn't make out the top. How he had survived that plunge he could not imagine.

"Walk on now," Finbar said. "The heat's taken the cold. Now you have to cleanse you and the fireglass."

The water was cool around his legs. It soon reached his waist. The shingle gave way to fronds of river weed and Jack remembered the underwater vision of a pallid face with huge eyes and flowing hair and a touch as cold as death. The water was up past the puckered skin on his chest now, but he kept walking, took a breath and then he was under, in the coolest clear water. He felt the weakness wash out of him. Felt the strange vibration of the obsidian stone as it gave up whatever it had taken to the sparkling river.

He knew when it was over. How he knew was just another mystery in this world of mysteries. Shapes swam un the water, came up to him, caressed his arms and shoulders, soft cool hair brushed him and he said a silent thanks to these strange creatures who had taken him from the depths.

He turned and walked back until his head broke the surface. He carried the stone up the shingle incline, as if the river was giving birth to a new child. The bard reached and took it from his hands.

"Jeez Jack," Kerry breathed. "Look at that."

Jack looked down at himself. The puckered and blistered skin was smooth now, washed by whatever magic was in stone and river. Where the vicious black shapes had been, spreading up to his neck and down his arms, the skin was white and clean again.

Except for the red hand print right over his heart.

And above it, five dots in a semi circle, matching the position where claws might have pierced the skin in that one savage swipe.

"It's the red hand," Kerry said. "From the myth."

"It's much more than that," the Bard said softly. "Much more."

"Come in and set yourselves down a while. We've got some things to talk about."