‘Rashim’s right,’ said Adam, ‘he’s blaming us. He’s gonna use us …’
She could see where this was headed. Although these people were far less blood-thirsty and brutal than the sacrifice-addicted Aztecs, they had conducted several animal sacrifices in honour of their guests over the last week. And Adam had found, in their pictoral history, some evidence that in the past – on rare and extreme occasions – they had conducted one or two human sacrifices. Right now, she imagined, Pat-ishka was considering whether this might be a good time to have another one.
A sacrifice to flatter their gods or appease this monster. She looked around for Becks. At least with her they were safe from –
‘Where the hell’s Becks?’
The other three did the same look-around. ‘She was just with us!’ said Adam. ‘I swear I saw her moments ago.’
‘She must have got separated from us outside,’ said Rashim.
Maddy felt her legs wobbling. Becks … she’d been sure she was right here, right beside her. No Bob … now no Becks.
Oh crap.
Pat-ishka was jabbing a finger towards them now, his voice finding a bit more strength and conviction. Only … not jabbing a finger at them, he was pointing his finger directly at her. He shrieked a command and a group of men, young and old, began to approach her. One of them pulled out a long sickle-like blade from beneath his poncho.
Even if she could speak their language and appeal to them, she’d be talking to men doing the only thing they could think of to protect their families, their loved ones.
All the same, she shook her head. ‘No! Please … don’t do this!’
Rashim raised his torch as a club. Adam reached for the hunting knife strapped to his belt. Bertie balled his fists. The three of them instinctively huddled close together, forming a protective phalanx in front of her.
Outside, the sound of destruction had suddenly ceased. Now a calm had descended upon them; the noise had suddenly reduced down to the ragged breathing of her three male protectors; three unconvincing musketeers facing up to the group of fifteen or twenty men standing before them.
‘We – need – to – leave,’ whispered Adam. He glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘Is there another exit to this building?’
There was none. They all knew that. There was a narrow doorway that opened on to stone steps that led up to the floor above, to the rooms they had been allowed to stay in. Up there, the only way out of the building was the terrace, the low wall and a forty-foot drop over the side down on to cobblestone steps. The drop would undoubtedly result in broken legs.
The men began to fan out round Adam, Rashim and Bertie as they shielded Maddy. And the four of them backed up several steps to prevent the natives working their way behind them. Backed up until they finally found themselves hemmed into a corner of the large temple room. Nowhere to go and now out of options other than a short, brutal fight that was only going to end one way.
The elder shuffled towards them, he began to speak again, one withered hand extended towards Maddy, imploring her to step forward. With his other hand he was gesturing back at the huddled groups of frightened women and children. Maddy could guess what he was saying. He was imploring her to do the right thing, the decent thing, to offer her life up in order to save all these others.
And perhaps she might have been prepared to sacrifice her life if it could have saved them all. But letting them gut her like a freshly caught fish, right here, right now with that large sickle-shaped blade – a grotesque and futile sacrificial ritual – wasn’t going to make that thing outside go away.
Oh God, not like this … I don’t want to die like this.
She felt her legs trembling beneath her. Her stomach churned, desperate to jettison its contents one way or the other.
A loud crash. Something large and heavy slammed against the door to the temple. The women and children answered with screams. The thick wooden door was already cracked and weakened, a shard of rosy evening light piercing through into the gloomy interior.
‘The door will not hold long,’ said Rashim.
Pat-ishka stepped further forward, eased his way through the younger men until he stood just in front of Adam. His feeble voice didn’t sound angry – which, given the destruction Maddy and her colleagues had accidentally visited on them, would have been perfectly understandable. It was, instead, a plea.
Maddy could see that he could so easily order his group of men to charge down Rashim, Adam and Bertie. These were frightened men, frightened for their families. At a word they would rush forward and do the bloody necessary. But the old man clearly wanted Maddy to willingly offer herself up, for it not to be a forced sacrifice – but an offering.
The voluntary surrendering of one life to protect many.
Perhaps that was the way it worked with these people; a sacrifice had to be a gift from the ‘victim’? Not something brutally taken by force.
Another crash. The wooden door rattled in its frame, its hinges working loose from the stone, freeing grit and sand on to the floor.
Maddy looked at the shafts of light piercing through the increasingly fragile door. The dying sunlight flickered as something large moved around outside, pacing the narrow street. She imagined the entity could sense the hundreds of frightened souls trapped inside this building. It was determined to find a way in. It was almost through. It wasn’t going anywhere.
‘I’ve already spoken with it,’ she told Pat-ishka calmly.
The elder hushed. He narrowed his eyes. He seemed encouraged at the calm sound of her voice. He offered her a warm, paternal smile. The fingers on his extended hand twitched, beckoning her to step forward, to prevent her friends from dying needlessly.
‘I spoke to it,’ she said again, ‘inside chaos space … I was talking with it.’
Adam glanced back at her. ‘That thing speaks?’
She nodded. ‘It might be … reasoned with.’
All three of them turned to look over their shoulders at her. ‘Tell me you’re not thinking of going out there,’ said Adam.
The door crashed again, this time it bulged inwards, splinters of wood clattered on to the floor. Renewed screams of terror from those inside. The door was a shattered ruin now. Just one gentle nudge away from collapsing to the floor.
I may not actually need to go outside. Next bang – it’s coming right in.
‘I’m going to go talk to it,’ she said.
‘Talk to it?!’ Rashim shook his head. ‘The thing will tear you apart!’
‘No! Maybe not! I think … I think Sal’s in there!’
‘What?’
‘I think Sal’s a part of that thing!’
Chapter 63
1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
‘Where did they get to?’ Liam surveyed the scene of panic around them. He and Bob were now standing beside the entrance to the tunnel out of the basin. People streamed past them into the darkness and the escape beyond that would take them out of the cave and down the narrow cliff-front trail into the jungle.
In the city below they could see a thick river of people pushing up the narrow stepped alleyway to the main temple building; a river of those with more faith in their gods’ ability to protect them.
‘I do not know.’ Bob scanned the chaos of the city. Every terrace, every passageway, every rat run between buildings, seemed to be filled with fleeing people, a multicoloured storm of painted skin, flowing robes, rattling beads and flapping ponchos.
They listened to the din of terrified cries all around them, amplified by the bowl-like acoustics of the city. And in that cacophony somewhere they heard the distant roar of the beast and a deep echoing boom as it smashed its way into some building.
Liam had assumed the others would have made their way here. The obvious place for them to rendezvous. The only way out. But clearly they hadn’t.
An old woman slammed into Liam, her brow decorated with tattoos, her earlobes stretched with clay rings. She screamed something
at his face. A curse? A warning? A plea? Or perhaps just raw fear-fuelled rage that he was impeding her exit from the end of her world. She side-stepped and bustled past him, several small children in tow behind her.
It was a true miracle, he mused, that so far, none of these people had been tempted to lash out at him as they’d passed by. A fist, the swipe of a sickle blade, the thrust of a spear tip. And why not? Their meddling down below had brought destruction upon this city.
Their thoughtless meddling.
These people had demonstrated their anxiety and fear over the forty-eight hours they’d waited for Maddy. There had been an angry crowd that had gathered and grown beside the plaza, and the atmosphere of hostility had become intimidating enough that they’d elected to stay out of sight and down in the lower chamber. These people seemed to consider that place either far too sacred or far too dangerous to enter.
Despite their anger, their fear, these people had refrained from attacking any of them. He suspected these poor, poor people, whose world they had just brought to a premature end, were normally a passive and contemplative people. With hindsight, Liam had realized this place had seemed more like a monastery than a city. A spiritual retreat.
They’d been here little more than a week – and look what their curiosity had done to this little piece of Eden. It now looked like the fall of Rome. Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jesus, what have we done to them?
‘Becks is approaching!’ said Bob.
He must be picking up her ident signal. Bob stood straight, alert, craning his neck one way then the other to look over the people flooding past, like a meerkat on predator-watch.
Liam scanned the passing faces, painted many different colours but all punctuated with the same wide white eyes and dark oval mouths stretched with terror. This was their version of the end, their apocalypse in miniature. Their Pandora.
And it was us that caused it. Jesus.
Just then, Bob pointed. ‘There is Becks.’
Liam thrust his thoughts and regrets aside and followed the direction Bob was indicating. By the fading light of evening he just about managed to make out the distinct outline of her tall athletic frame striding up through the river of people evacuating the city. She casually pushed those in her way aside. Her icy glare met Bob’s and she tipped a nod of greeting at him and Liam as she roughly shoved a small girl out of her path. The girl fell to her knees and would have been trampled to death had it not been for the helping hand of some old man scooping her up again. Becks was oblivious to that as she strode out of the flow of people and approached them.
What lay in her wake was irrelevant to her.
She was alone. The others weren’t with her.
‘Where are they?!’ called out Liam.
‘I do not know.’ She frowned. ‘I estimated a high probability they would attempt to rendezvous at this location.’ She pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘It appears I was wrong.’
Chapter 64
1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
The wooden door crashed inwards into the temple hall, shards and splinters of wood skittering across the stone slab floor. A cloud of dust, rubble and grit filling the doorway.
A large shape pushed through the cloud. It was no more than an indistinct mass that seemed to glide in through the opening. Its animal-like roar filled the temple chamber. Pat-ishka turned and cried out in horror, his weak, reedy voice lost beneath the chorus of screams and wailing behind him.
But, trembling and frail and now fallen down on to his hands and knees, he had courage enough to crawl towards the swaying, roaring entity standing just inside the shattered doorway.
Half a dozen yards short of it he stopped, lifted himself up on to thin wobbling legs and spread his arms wide. He called out something – a challenge, a command, a plea? But it was drowned by the din of the beast’s trumpeting cry. Something invisible and large swiped through the air, the only indication of mass in motion was the blur and ripple of heat. The elder seemed to explode. More precisely, his body appeared to suddenly separate of its own accord into four large pieces – legs, abdomen and pelvis, upper torso and head – each portion spinning, flailing along a bloody arc of their own direction.
‘Oh, God Almighty, have mercy!’ cried out Bertie.
Maddy pushed Adam’s obstructing arm aside. ‘It knows me! It’ll listen to me!’
‘No!’ said Adam. ‘Not you!’ His lips trembled uncertainly. ‘I’ll talk to it. Let me –’
‘No.’ Maddy shook her head. ‘She won’t listen to you. It’s got to be me!’ She pushed past him and stepped forward, not entirely certain that this thing was quite the same entity or in the same frame of mind as it had been back in chaos space. Back there in the mist, it seemed to be able to reason, to think … and certainly able to communicate. But this terrifying apparition appeared to be nothing but energy and blind rage.
The entity surged forward into the temple room, now wholly invisible again and only detectable as a gliding cloud of shimmering super-heated air. She could feel the burning heat of its energy on her cheeks as she approached it; like the open coals of a furnace roused by a blacksmith’s bellows, glowing fiercely and crackling as it fed on the fresh blast of oxygen.
Another roar from the beast. A chorus cry of tormented human voices filled the room. It seemed to her more a collective cry of anguish than an animal’s territorial challenge.
Maddy waved her arms above her head. ‘Look at me! Over here! It’s me! Maddy!’
The entity’s roar faded away and for a moment the energy phased and it became visible. It had changed form yet again. No longer a giant boar-like head with a snout, but now necks protruded, long, swan-like necks that emerged from the central mass, different human heads on each. Heads that constantly morphed from one face to another.
‘It’s Maddy … you saw me in chaos space!’
A head turned down to look at her, then the neck swung down. The head staring at her from its tip was human but not of human proportions, three times larger than her own. She thought she recognized one face that came and went in the blink of an eye – wasn’t that the secret agent guy who’d found their archway? The one who’d been carefully looking after that fossilized piece of clay containing Liam’s carved message? What was his name? She remembered.
Cartwright.
My God, was that deliberate? Was this beast signalling that it knew her? Deliberately presenting a face she might recognize?
‘Yes! You know me!’ Maddy called out again. ‘YOU KNOW ME!’
The room had become quiet. The entity was no longer roaring. The men, women and children behind Maddy had quietened down. She could hear the whimper of one or two children, but the rest of the people seemed to be collectively holding their breaths.
More faces played across the giant head hovering in front of her, but no more that she recognized. Perhaps, as she’d imagined back in chaos space, they were the faces of other people who had become trapped in the mist. Lost souls. Ghosts.
Then – so sudden and unexpected it made her take an involuntary step backwards – Sal’s face appeared. Her eyes narrowed, her head cocked slightly, just as Sal’s used to do when something was puzzling her.
‘My God! S-Sal!?’ She gasped. ‘Is – is that you?’
The entity, or at least this portion of it, seemed to stir with the faintest indication of recognition. ‘… Maddy … ?’ The voice was many voices, old and young, male and female. But in there, somewhere, among the chorus, was Sal’s voice.
‘Yes! It’s me! It’s Maddy!’ She wanted to reach out … she wanted to touch her friend. But the searing heat, even from feet away, was too intense. She could feel her skin prickling, the first sting of burning. She had to step back a little. ‘Oh my God, Sal … what’s happened to you?!’
Again, her friend’s eyes narrowed. She looked as if she was fumbling to retrieve distant memories. ‘… so long ago … we were friends, so long ago …’
‘No! We’re still friend
s. You and me and Liam. The three of us. We always will be friends. Sal, we were so worried. You went missing. We tried to find you –’
‘… you abandoned me …’
‘No!’ Maddy shook her head. ‘That’s not true. I came into the mist looking for you, hon. We –’
‘… waited … and waited … hundreds … thousands of years … you never came …’
‘Why, Sal? Why did you do it? Why did you step in?’
Her face became vague again. And so old. An ancient soul trawling a mind long ago wiped clean of childhood memories.
‘… I … I … don’t remember …’
Then her eyes suddenly widened. Some of her ancient past was coming back. ‘… I remember …’
Maddy nodded encouragement. ‘Remember what?’
The entity phased and became invisible for a moment. Maddy could still see the shimmering air, and knew the head on the long neck was just there, still hovering a few feet away from her.
‘Sal? You there? Remember what?’
Her face reappeared. ‘… you wanted to kill her, destroy her …’
‘Kill her? Destroy who?’
‘… Saleena …’
‘What? I don’t understand. That doesn’t make any –’
‘You wanted to change history … make her life never happen …’
Then it came to her. She understood. Sal had been convinced her memories were those of a real girl. Maddy remembered her telling her how she’d actually seen her ‘real self’ in New York. Seen her with her father, young and happy even in a world full of portents of a dark and difficult soon-to-be future; there she’d been, wearing an impenetrable cloak of contentment. Happy seeing the sights alongside her father. Happy simply being in the company of her beloved father.
‘We just want to know whether this is the right history, Sal! Can you remember? We all talked about it? That it could be wrong. It could be we weren’t meant to wipe ourselves ou–’
‘… you envied me … I was once real …’ Sal’s eyes narrowed again. Her face contorted, her jaw distended, grew longer. It became underslung and pointed like the jaw of a Punch and Judy hand-puppet. Cruel and clown-like.