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Immortal Make Page 4


  “Let’s move,” Julian said. “We want to go this way anyway.”

  Rob growled. “Be fun to stand here for a few minutes though. You think they’d keep running into me, even if I kept ripping them to pieces?”

  “I think the fog would reach us. Come on.”

  They passed a man holding a sign taller than he was. The sign would normally be a sandwich shop advert, with an arrow pointing in the direction of the nearest store. Here, as Julian had now come to expect, it showed the one-eyed man. The guy holding the sign had a transparent head. Worms spread out from the earphones of his music player, burrowing their way into his glass-like brain.

  “Who’s eye-patch guy?” Rob asked as they passed the sign.

  “I expect we’re on our way to meet him.”

  Rob leapt and ripped the sign off its post. It was only plastic and he tore it in half with ease. “Can’t wait,” he said with a grin.

  The street went straight on to the Hammersmith flyover, but Julian could see dark roots thickening beneath it, blocking the way. Julian and Rob turned right along the road that led under another arch of the flyover, this one clear, to Hammersmith Bridge.

  St Paul’s church stood in a green yard on the corner. Julian pointed at it. “Wrong church.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the chapel they built in the seventeenth century, when this place was just a hamlet. They rebuilt the one we see every day in Victorian times. Said the old one was ‘unsightly’.”

  Rob eyed the blocky little chapel. “What does that mean?”

  “Time may be swinging loose here. We may encounter elements of the past and future.” He studied the lines of the church as they passed, then the graves in the churchyard. “I wonder what they did with these old graves when they rebuilt it.”

  The one-eyed man watched them from what should have been traffic signs, from bus schedules and billboards that displayed ads for sporting goods and cars. At a bus stop, a faceless woman with two faceless children watched them walk by. One of the children was playing with the needle-like teeth ringing its mouth.

  The fog was closer behind them as they reached the Hammersmith flyover. The shadows churned as they passed beneath. But nothing attacked them.

  Beyond the flyover lay the bridge.

  It was still a short walk away, but here the chaos zone deviated even further from the reality it mimicked. The buildings along the street were rough, as though hewn from rock. The trees hissed at each other and snapped their branches like whips. There were no cars, no red buses, no distorted pedestrians. When Julian glanced back, he saw that everything beyond the flyover had been swallowed by the fog.

  Hammersmith Bridge was also out of time. The modern bridge of green-painted iron and steel cables had been replaced by the old bridge of stone suspension towers and wrought-iron chains. A toll-house stood beside the bridge at the edge of the shore, manned by creatures in old-fashioned coats with their heads tucked under their arms. They waved Rob and Julian through.

  “Kind of them,” Julian said.

  “Charging you a toll on the way to your own death would be taking the piss a bit, don’t you think?” Rob asked. “Besides, they’d probably ask for a shilling or a farthing or whatever they used to call money back then. All I’ve got is my debit card and it’s in your bag.”

  The fog ate the shore as soon as they were on the bridge. It rushed in so fast that Julian thought it would roll over them, but pulled up short like an attack dog on a leash. The sky darkened as they walked further out. Julian veered over to the side of the bridge and instead of the Thames he saw a liquid, rippling cosmos. A planet hung below, illuminated by the weak light of an alien sun out of his field of view. The surface of the planet was blank, any life or signs of civilisation ground down to yellow dust. Above the bridge, more planets hung in the sky like great, baleful eyes.

  The suspension towers each consisted of two upright sections that met in a cross-section. Julian suspected the uprights should have been plain brick, but instead they were formed of enormous statues. Women, tall and graceful, wrapped in flowing robes like Greek goddesses. The cross-section was formed of their arms, which melted into each other. Their heads were those of animals. On the right, a lion and on the left, a goat.

  “Loose time,” Julian said. He did not think the towers had ever been so decorated. Either they would be one day, or the statues were relevant to their own futures in some way.

  “There he is,” Rob said. “Eye-patch guy.”

  A figure stood alone in the middle of the bridge, stern and patient. He looked squat until they moved closer and Julian saw how broad his shoulders were. His suit was modern, navy blue. His one eye glimmered at them. But it was his other eye, the one covered by the patch, that pulled at Julian’s senses. It felt like it contained infinity.

  They passed beneath the suspension tower and the conjoined women. The one-eyed man did not move as they approached.

  “Who are you then?” Rob asked.

  “I am the master of the Cult of the Star-shaped Eye.” His voice was deep and compelling. All sound in the chaos zone ceased when he spoke, as though the very place held its breath. “I am the Reverend.”

  Chapter 4 – Rob and Julian

  The fight was going badly.

  Julian pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Pain shot through his legs. The knees of his work trousers and the skin beneath them had been ripped when the Reverend dragged him along the bitumen surface.

  The flux capacitor on the back of his left hand gleamed, but less brightly than in the beginning. Half its charge was gone and the Reverend showed no signs of weakening.

  His ears stopped ringing enough for him to hear Rob’s roar, which cut off in a series of grunts. Rob slammed to the ground beside him and lay there dazed. His clawed hands groped blindly at the ground.

  “Rob.”

  Rob flipped over onto all fours in a single fluid motion. Blood matted his fur in several places. He was favouring his left arm. Julian had worried it was about to break when he saw the Reverend bend it back, but he hadn’t heard bone snap.

  “Tough bastard,” Rob growled. “That thing he does” – he paused to hack up a wad of blood – “where he appears in a few different places at once, that’s a real pain in the arse. Haven’t got knocked around like this since the last time I was in a mosh pit.”

  Julian pulled his satchel around in front of him and rummaged inside. “We need a change of strategy.”

  “Yeah, ‘Get beat up by the bad guy’ isn’t working for me.” His flattened back against his skull as Julian pulled his sword from his bag. “So the plan is, you give him your sword, then we wait for him to go to sleep and have nightmares?”

  Julian wrapped his hand around the sword’s grip. The psychometric residue of its last owner assaulted him – the slaughter, the cruelty, the joy taken in both. It rammed against his battle mage psychic defences. They held – this time.

  He drew the sword. The blade was a long shaft of translucent crystal with a strip of silvery metal at its heart. It made a distinctive ringing sound as he drew it, a sound nothing like the scrape of metal.

  Julian pitched his voice at a whisper. He hoped the Reverend wasn’t so attuned to the chaos zone that he heard every sound in it. “I’m going to take a dive. Can you hold him?”

  Rob didn’t ask questions, just nodded. His bones crackled, his flesh bunched and shifted. His wolf-grey fur rippled and changed to the spotted pale yellow of a leopard.

  He sprang towards the Reverend. Julian rose, left hand raised. He sent a blast of blue electricity at the Reverend from his gauntlet, using precious energy he could not spare from what he planned.

  The Reverend was a solitary figure in the vastness of the bridge, striding towards them without hurry, knowing they could not escape. Then he was three figures. One took Julian’s energy blast and vanished. The other hit Rob from the side with a hard jab and broke his lunge.

  Julian ran forward, his sword raised.
More Reverends appeared and disappeared. He fought like a boxer, quick jabs, powerful swings, crushing fists. Rob twisted and leapt. His claws lashed out and drew blood even as flat-knuckled fists battered him from one Reverend to another.

  Julian raised his sword high. He was wide open to a blow to the body. The Reverend fought with experience – he had to see it. A Reverend appeared in front of him, as if he’d already been there, already in reach. He hit Julian with a one-two combination, upper cuts. The first stopped Julian in his tracks. The second knocked him off his feet.

  He meant to roll with it, but the blows caught him harder than he expected. His sword flew out of his hand and he rolled across the bridge.

  He heard the thumps and grunts and snarls of Rob still fighting. Rob thought his fall was a sham. Rob thought he had a plan and was holding out until then. Julian tried to get his breath back, tried to make his stunned lungs obey him. He groped blindly for his sword.

  He had one trick. If it didn’t work, they were dead.

  Through watering eyes, he saw Rob drop to all fours and change back to his werewolf form. Three Reverends took the opening and kicked him in the side, sending him spinning through the air. He rolled, found his feet and charged, collecting all three Reverends and driving them into the ranks of other Reverends following them.

  Julian saw his sword.

  He called it to his hand with his mind, then lowered his face to the rough bitumen of the bridge. Look like you’re down and out – his combat instructor’s words. It wasn’t hard to pretend.

  He dragged his phone from his pocket. Checked his reception. In the chaos zone, he should have nothing, but his spell from when he checked the bounty board was still active. He had four bars.

  He brought up a map of London.

  Fix it in your mind. The circle of the M25, that artificial boundary around the ancient city. The Thames snaking through on its path to the sea, tamed by millennia of those who had settled at The Place Where the River Floods. The bridges that spanned it. The old contours of the Roman settlement that still shaped the streets. The roads that had once been highways where coaches ran and robbers hid. The spread of hamlets and villages that the city had gradually consumed.

  A loud roar of pain from Rob almost broke his concentration, but he held his mind to his task. Rob was counting on him to do this. He stayed with his image of the city, the city he and his friends had attuned themselves to as teenagers, had learned to harness for a kind of magic no one had taught them.

  With his mind, he stretched out through the mist of the chaos zone, through the boiling impossibility, through the fractured space-time. It had to be connected to reality still – if the Reverend had hived the chaos zone off from Julian’s world it would have unmade them by now. He pushed and chaos tore at the edges of his mind with concepts and emotions and vistas and visions too vast, too complex, too fluid for a human mind to comprehend without unravelling.

  There.

  He felt the city, the life and energy of it, the long path of its history and the bright energy of the future being made, moment by moment, as millions of people made millions of decisions, large and small.

  Julian’s lips moved and the image in his mind of London, the image on the phone screen in front of him, became London.

  The words resisted. The pressure built in his forehead as though his skull was about to fly apart. He knew his body was shaking, lying there on the bridge.

  Still not the hardest part.

  Julian pushed down on the ground beneath him. Reached his knees. He set the point of his sword against the bitumen and levered himself to his feet. He wobbled there, wracked by the chaos winds that howled and tore at his mental connection to London.

  He stumbled towards Rob.

  Two Reverends held each of Rob’s arms. Two more wrapped their arms around his torso. Another held him from behind in a headlock. Julian could see the strain on Rob’s body as he heaved his fading strength against them.

  A single Reverend stood in front of Rob. He grabbed Rob’s jaw. Rob tried to snap at him, but missed. Several of the Reverends grinned in triumph, but not the one standing in front of Rob. That one wore an expression of such hate, an alien loathing that was vaster than any human emotion could be. He raised his free hand to his eye-patch.

  Into this, Julian staggered.

  The Reverend hesitated, his gaze flicking across Julian and his sword. This close, with his senses stretched out so far, Julian saw him as more than just a man. He was a shape in four dimensions, an eel that twisted back and forth. Where he intersected the point of time through which Rob and Julian’s conscious minds traversed, he formed the other Reverends holding Rob. The Reverend’s conscious mind, unlike Rob and Julian’s, was a sick, pulsing glow spread along his slithering, four-dimensional form.

  Julian fell against one of the Reverends holding Rob’s arm. He grabbed a fistful of the fur on Rob’s shoulder.

  The Reverend in front of Rob smiled. “Fitting,” he said. “Both at once.”

  Straining to speak, Rob said, “You – unholy – arse.”

  The Reverend dug his thumb beneath the edge of his eye-patch. An endless ocean of madness swelled behind it like an oncoming tide, ready to break across them both.

  Julian stabbed his sword into the Reverend holding Rob in a headlock. He released his spell.

  White portal light erupted from his sword. It blinded Julian – he squeezed his eyes shut even as he hung onto London with his mind. He gripped the handle of his sword tight and held the forces of the spell to his will. He dug his fingers hard into Rob’s shoulders as the portal pulled him along.

  The chaos zone collapsed, dissolving into madness. The Reverend’s scream was a sound no human being could make. Julian felt the four-dimensional shape of the creature as it whipped back and forth on his sword, writhing in pain as its future and past were hacked into a new shape.

  Julian slammed back into reality. He had no sense of up and down until a grated metal surface hit him in the side. He sprawled there, blind, aware of a large weight on top of him, of his sword bucking in his hand as the creature on it thrashed.

  At first, all Julian could see was a whirl of glimmering confetti. When it blew away, a metal floor stretched away to the walls of a huge iron room. Before him, above him, rose a black sarcophagus.

  Relief and dread bubbled up inside him.

  The sarcophagus stood on a stand of bolted metal. Thick power cables ran in and out of it. Psychic control crystals formed a glowing crown above it. The old, heavy technology of the thing was wrapped in dark, thorny vines with translucent leaves.

  Power throbbed in it. Julian felt the dead presence within crawling across his senses like an army of angry ants.

  With a single wrench the Reverend pulled himself free of Julian’s sword. His human form was badly damaged. Blood poured down his back. Weakened from his fight and trapped in mundane reality, he seemed unable to shift to a new and uninjured body. He looked up at the sarcophagus with his one human eye.

  “What is this?”

  Julian pulled his sword closer. He tried to lift his left hand and shoot from his gauntlet. His hand just flopped onto his chest.

  The Reverend stood. He was bent with pain and injury, but he stood. “This power. I’ve never seen such power in base reality.”

  The weight on Julian said, “Urfflgh” in Rob’s voice.

  The Reverend began to laugh. “You stupid little insects. This is your idea of defeating me? You’ve given me more power than I could ever–”

  A bolt of whistling energy struck the Reverend from behind. Temporal stasis crystals spread across his body. He had time to choke out a cry of pain and then he had no time at all.

  Footsteps clanged on the grated metal floor. A pair of black rubber boots appeared in front of Julian. He followed the boots up a pair of black-trousered legs, over a tool-belt and up a black top with a white lab coat pulled over it. From above these, blue eyes sparkling with annoyance looked down at him. Her re
d hair, as always, was bound back in a severe braid. She carried a device like an oversized dust-buster, held in two hands the way a logger carried a chainsaw.

  “What is this rubbish you’ve brought into my house?” Evelyn Hargrave asked.

  Julian sat with Rob in a side room off the sarcophagus chamber. Evelyn had given them grey woollen blankets. Julian sat with his wrapped around his tattered suit. Rob didn’t want to get blood all over his suit, so Julian had dug out a pair of tracksuit pants he kept in his satchel for this kind of situation. Rob had his blanket around his bare shoulders.

  They sat on stools at a table which they had used in the past when planning with Evelyn. She had put a cup of tea in front of each of them.

  Rob pulled a face after his first sip. “Weirdest tasting tea I’ve ever had.”

  “She put something in it.” When Rob’s face stretched in alarm he added, “A restorative of some kind.”

  Rob held his cup up for a close eyeballing. “If it gets rid of this headache, I guess I can live with drinking magic tea.” He sipped his drink. “I’ve got a headache exactly like fifty guys have been beating me up.”

  “Amazing coincidence,” Julian said.

  Evelyn swept back into the room and past Julian to perch on the stool at the head of the table. “If you’re going to drop monsters here for storage, we shall have to organise protocols for it.” She levelled her gaze on Julian and he realised that she was, for some reason, angrier with him than with Rob. “And you’re going to tell me how you teleported through the facility defences again. My father and I went to a great deal of trouble to make that impossible.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  Rob had pulled his blanket more tightly around him, to hide his bare chest. “Got the Reverend locked away then? He definitely can’t get out?”

  She flicked a glance at him. “Nothing has ever escaped the vaults. Not in the seven decades since we built them.”