Bones of Haven Page 5

  Hawk nodded quickly, and the SWAT team set off down the corridor again.

  "At least we've got one less rioter to worry about," said Hawk after a while. The others looked at him. "Just trying to look on the bright side," he explained.

  "Nice try," said Winter. "Hang on to that cheerfulness. You're going to need it. From what I've heard, we'd be better off facing a dozen rioters with the plague than the Portrait's original occupant. It might have been human once, but its time in the Portrait changed it. Now it's a nightmare in flesh and blood, every evil thought you ever had given shape and form, and it's running loose in Hell Wing with us. So, along with all our other problems, we're going to have to track it down and kill it before we leave. Assuming it can be killed."

  "Are you always this optimistic?" asked Fisher.

  Winter snorted. "If there was any room for optimism, they wouldn't have called us in."

  "Something's coming," said Storm suddenly. "I can't see it, but I can feel it. Something powerful…"

  Winter barked orders, and the SWAT team fell quickly into a defensive formation, with Barber, Hawk, and Fisher at the point, weapons at the ready. Hawk glanced thoughtfully at Barber. Now that there was finally a chance at some action, the weaponmaster had come fully alive. His dark eyes were fixed eagerly on the gloom ahead, and his grin was disturbingly wolfish. A sudden conviction rooted itself in Hawk that Barber would look just the same if the order ever came down for the weaponmaster to go after him or Fisher. Barber didn't give a damn for the law or for justice. He was just a man born to kill, a butcher waiting to be unleashed, and to him one target was as good as any other. There was no room in a man like Barber for conscience or ethics.

  A sudden sound caught Hawk's attention, and his thoughts snapped back to the situation at hand. Something was coming towards them out of the darkness. Hawk's grip tightened on his axe. Footsteps sounded distinctly in the gloom, drawing steadily closer. There were two separate sets of footsteps, and Hawk smiled and relaxed a little. It was only a couple of rioters. But the more he listened, the more it seemed to him there was something wrong with the footsteps. They were too slow, too steady, and they seemed to echo unnaturally long on the quiet. The air was tense, and Hawk could feel his hackles rising. There was something bad hidden in the darkness, something he didn't want to see. A slight breeze blew out of the gloom towards him. It smelt of dust and sulphur.

  "They're coming," said Storm softly. "The chaos bringers, the lords of entropy. The dust and ruins of reality. The Brimstone Boys."

  Hawk glared at the sorcerer, and then back at the darkness. Storm had sounded shaken, almost unnerved. If just the approach of the Brimstone Boys was enough to rattle a hardened SWAT man, Hawk had a strong feeling he didn't want to face them with nothing but his axe. He fell back a step and glanced across at Winter.

  "Might I suggest this would be a good time to try out another of those incendiary things?"

  Winter nodded sharply and gestured to Barber. He took another of the glowing stones from his pouch, whispered the activating Word, and threw the stone into the darkness. They all tensed, waiting for the explosion, but nothing happened. Storm laughed brusquely, a bleak, unpleasant sound.

  "That won't stop them. They control reality, run rings round the warp and weft of space itself. Cause and effect run backwards where they look. They're the Brimstone Boys; they undo natural laws, turn certainties into whims and maybes."

  "Then do something!" snapped Winter. "Use your magic. You're supposed to be a top-level sorcerer, dammit! You didn't sound this worried when you first told us about them."

  "I didn't know," whispered Storm, staring unseeingly at the gloom. "I couldn't know. They're too big. Too powerful. There's nothing we can do."

  Winter grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him back out of the way. "His nerve's gone," she said shortly to the others. "The Brimstone Boys must have got to him somehow. I'm not taking any chances with these bastards. The minute you see them, kill them."

  "We're supposed to take these creatures alive, remember?" said Barber mildly.

  "To hell with that," Winter snapped. "Anything that can take out an experienced sorcerer like Storm so easily is too dangerous to mess about with."

  Hawk nodded, and he and Fisher moved forward to stand on either side of Barber. The weaponmaster was quivering slightly, like a hound straining at the leash, or a horse readying for a charge, but his sword hand was perfectly steady. Hawk glared into the darkness, and then looked down suddenly. The corridor floor seemed to be shifting subtly under his feet, stretching and contracting. His boots were sinking into the solid stone floor as though it had turned to mud. He looked across at Barber and Fisher to see if they'd noticed it too, and was shocked to discover that they were now yards away, as though the corridor had somehow expanded vastly while he wasn't looking. He jerked his boots free from the sticky stone, and backed away. The ceiling was impossibly far above him, and the wall was running with boiling water that steamed and spat at him. Birds were singing, harsh and raucous, and somewhere children screamed in agony. The light changed to golden summer sunlight, suffusing the air like bitter honey. Hawk smelled dust and sulphur, so strong he could hardly breathe. And out of the darkness, stepping slow and somber, came the Brimstone Boys.

  They might have been human once, but now they were impossibly, obscenely old. Their bodies were twisted and withered, turned in upon themselves by time, and there were gaping holes in their anatomy where skin and bone had rotted away to dust and nothingness. Their wrinkled skin was grey and colorless, and tore when movement stretched it. Their faces were the worst. Their lips were gone, and their impossibly wide smiles were crammed with huge blocky teeth like bony chisels. Blood ran constantly from their dirty yellow eyes and dropped from their awful smiles, spattering their ancient tattered skin.

  Barber shouted something incoherent, and launched himself at the nearest figure. His sword flew in a deadly pattern, but the blade didn't even come close to touching the creature. Barber strained and struggled, but it was as though he and the ancient figures, only a few feet apart, lived in separate worlds, where they could see each other but not touch. Fisher drew a knife from her boot and threw it at the other figure. The knife tumbled end over end, shrinking slowly as though crossing some impossible distance but still not reaching its target. The withered creature looked at Fisher with its bleeding eyes, and she cried out as she began to sink into the floor. Despite all her struggles to resist, the flagstones sucked her down into themselves like a treacherous marsh. She struck at the floor with her sword, and sparks flew as the steel blade hit solid stone.

  Hawk ran towards her, but she seemed to recede into the distance as he ran. He pushed himself harder, but the faster he ran, the further away she seemed to be. Somewhere between the two of them, Barber sobbed with helpless rage as he struggled futilely to touch the Brimstone Boys with his sword. Hawk could vaguely hear Winter shouting something, but all he could think of was Fisher. The stone floor was lapping up around her shoulders. The light was growing dimmer. Sounds echoed strangely. And then something gold and shining flew slowly past him, gleaming richly in the fading light, and landed on the floor between the Brimstone Boys. They looked down at it, and despite himself, Hawk's gaze was drawn to it too. It was a pocket watch.

  He could hear it ticking in the endless quiet. Ticktocking away the seconds, turning past into present into future. The Brimstone Boys raised their awful heads, their grinning mouths stretched wide in soundless screams. Dust fell endlessly through golden light. The floor grew solid again, spitting out Fisher, and the walls rushed in on either side. The ceiling fell back to its previous height. And the Brimstone Boys crumbled into dust and blew away.

  Hawk looked around him, and the corridor was just as it had always been. The silver light pushed back the darkness, and the floor was solid and reliable under his feet. Fisher picked up the throwing knife from the floor before her, looked at it for a moment, and then slipped it back into her boot. B
arber put away his sword and shook his head slowly, breathing heavily. Hawk turned and looked back at Winter and the sorcerer Storm, who seemed to have completely recovered from his daze. In fact, he was actually smiling quite smugly.

  "All right," said Hawk. "What happened?"

  Storm's smile widened. "It's all very simple and straightforward, really," he said airily. "The Brimstone Boys distorted reality wherever they went, but they weren't very stable. They could play all kinds of tricks with space and probabilities and the laws of reality, but they were still vulnerable to time. The ordered sequence of events was anathema to their existence. It was already eroding away at them; that's why they looked so ancient. I just speeded the process up a bit, with an augmented timepiece whose reality was a little bit stronger than theirs."

  "What was all that nonsense you were spouting before?" demanded Fisher. "I thought you'd gone off your head."

  "That was the idea," said Storm smugly. "They didn't see me as a threat, so they ignored me. Which gave me time to work my magic on the watch. I could have been an actor, you know."

  He stretched out his hand, and the watch flew through the air to nestle snugly in his hand. Storm checked the time, and put the watch back into his pocket.

  "Heads up," said Barber suddenly. "We've got company again."

  "Now what?" demanded Hawk, spinning round to face the darkness, and then freezing on the spot as he saw what was watching them from the edge of the silver glow. A human shape, formed of bloody organs and viscera, but no skin, stood trembling on legs of muscle and tendons but no bones. Its naked eyes stared wetly from a flat crimson mess that might once have been its face. It breathed noisily, and they could see its lungs rising and falling in what had once been its chest.

  "Johnny Nobody," said Hawk. "Poor bastard. Are we going to have to kill him too?"

  "Hopefully not," said Winter. "We're going to be in enough trouble over Who Knows and the Brimstone Boys. With a little luck, we might be able to herd this thing back into its cell. It's supposed to be strong and quick, but not very bright."

  And then something pounced on Johnny Nobody from behind and smashed it to the floor. Blood spurted through the air as its attacker tore it apart and stuffed the gory chunks into its mouth. The newcomer looked up at the SWAT team, its mouth stretched in a bloody grin as it ate and swallowed chunks of Johnny Nobody's unnatural flesh. What upset Hawk the most was how ordinary the creature looked. It was a man, dressed in tatters, with wide, staring eyes you only had to meet for a moment to know their owner was utterly insane. Just looking at him made Hawk's skin crawl. What was left of Johnny Nobody kicked and struggled, unable to die despite its awful wounds, but incapable of breaking its attacker's hold. The crazy man squatted over the body, ripping out strings of viscera and giggling to himself in between bloody mouthfuls.

  "Who the hell is that?" asked Fisher softly. "One of the rioters?"

  "I don't think so," said Winter. "I think we're looking at the original occupant of Messerschmann's Portrait."

  "I thought he was supposed to be some kind of monster," said Hawk.

  "Well, isn't he?" said Winter, and Hawk had no answer. The SWAT leader looked at Barber. "Knock him out, Barber. Maybe our sorcerers can do something to bring his mind back."

  Barber shrugged. "I'll do what I can, but bringing them in alive isn't what I do best."

  He advanced slowly on the madman, who looked up sharply and growled at him like an animal. Barber stopped where he was and sheathed his sword. Moving slowly and carefully, he reached inside one of his pockets and brought out a small steel ball, no more than an inch or so in diameter. He hefted it once in his hand, glanced at the madman, and then snapped his arm forward. The steel ball sped through the air and struck the madman right between the eyes. He fell backwards and lay still, without making a sound. Barber walked over to him, checked his pulse, and then bent down beside him to retrieve his steel ball. Johnny Nobody twitched and shuddered, leaking blood and other fluids, and Barber's lips thinned back from his teeth as he saw the raw wounds slowly knitting themselves together. He moved quickly back to the others, dragging the unconscious madman with him.

  "About time we had a little luck," said Winter. "Johnny Nobody's in no shape to give us any trouble, and we've got ourselves a nice little bonus in the form of our unconscious friend here. At least now we'll have something to show for our trouble."

  "Winter," said Fisher slowly, "I think we've got another problem."

  There was something in the way she said it that made everyone's head snap round to see what she was talking about. Thick tendrils of the dirty grey cobwebs had dropped from the ceiling and were wriggling towards Johnny Nobody. The bloody shape struggled feebly, but the grey strands whipped around it and dragged the body slowly away along the floor into the darkness, leaving a trail of blood and other things on the stone floor. Hawk looked at the thick mass of cobwebs covering the walls and ceiling, and made a connection he should have made some time back. He looked at Winter.

  "It's Crawling Jenny, isn't it? All of it."

  "Took you long enough to work it out," said Winter. "The rioters must have opened its cell and let it out. Which is probably why we haven't seen any of them since. According to the reports I saw, Crawling Jenny is carnivorous, and always ravenously hungry."

  "Are you saying this stuff ate all the rioters?" said Fisher, glaring distrustfully at the nearest wall.

  "It seems likely. Where else could it have got enough mass to grow like this? I hate to think how big the creature must be in total."

  "Why didn't you tell us what this stuff was before?" said Hawk. "We've been walking through it all unknowing, totally at its mercy. It could have attacked us at any time."

  "No it couldn't," said Storm. "I've been shielding us. It doesn't even know we're here."

  "There wasn't any point in attacking its outer reaches," said Winter. "It'd just grow some more. No, I've been waiting for something like this to happen. Since Johnny Nobody is undoubtedly heading for the creature's stomach, all we have to do is follow it. I'm not sure if Crawling Jenny has any vulnerable organs, but if it has, that's where they'll be."

  She set off down the corridor without looking back, hurrying to catch up with the dragging sounds ahead. The others exchanged glances and moved quickly after her. Barber carried the unconscious madman over his shoulder in a fireman's lift. It didn't seem to slow him down any. Hawk glared suspiciously at the thick mass of cobwebs lining the corridor, but it seemed quiet enough at the moment. Which was just as well, because Hawk had a strong feeling his axe wasn't going to be much use against a bunch of cobwebs.

  They soon caught up with the tendrils dragging the body, and followed at a respectful distance. Storm's magic kept them unseen and unheard as far as Crawling Jenny was concerned, but no one felt like pushing their luck. Hawk in particular was careful to keep to the center of the corridor, well away from both walls. He found it only too easy to visualize hundreds of tentacles suddenly lashing out from the walls and ceiling, wrapping up victims in helpless bundles and dragging them off to the waiting stomach.

  Eventually, the tendrils dragged the body into a dark opening in the wall. Winter gestured quickly for everyone to stay where they were. Barber lowered the unconscious madman to the floor, and stretched easily. He wasn't even breathing hard. Winter moved slowly forward to peer into the opening, and the others moved quietly in behind her, careful not to crowd each other so that they could still retreat in a hurry if they had to. The silver light from the corridor shone brightly behind them, and Hawk's lip curled in disgust at the sight ahead. The narrow stone cell was filled with a soft, pulsating mass of mold and fungi studded with lidless, staring eyes that burned with a horrid awareness. Sheets of gauzy cobwebs anchored the mass to the walls and ceiling, and frayed away in questing tendrils. As the team watched, two of the tendrils dropped Johnny Nobody's writhing body onto the central mass, and a dozen snapping mouths opened, crammed with grinding yellow teeth. They tore the body
apart and consumed it in a matter of seconds.

  "Damn," said Winter. "We've lost another one."

  "So much for Johnny Nobody," said Barber quietly. "Poor Johnny, we hardly knew you."

  "I don't know about you," said Hawk quietly to Winter, "but it seems to me that swords and axes aren't going to be much use against something like that. You could hack at it for hours and still not know if you'd hit anything vital."

  "Agreed," said Winter. "Luckily, we should still have one incendiary left." She looked at Barber, who nodded quickly, and produced another of the glowing stones from his pouch. Winter nodded, and looked back at the slowly pulsating mass before her. "When you're ready, Barber, throw the incendiary into one of those mouths. As soon as the damned thing's swallowed it, everyone turn and run like a fury. I'm not sure what effect an incendiary will have on a creature like that, but I don't think we should hang around to find out. And Barber—don't miss. Or you're fired."

  He grinned, murmured the activating Word, and tossed the glowing stone into one of the snapping mouths. It went in easily, and Crawling Jenny swallowed the incendiary reflexively. The SWAT team turned as one and bolted back down the corridor, Barber pausing just long enough to sling the unconscious madman over his shoulder again. A muffled explosion went off behind them, like a roll of faraway thunder, quickly drowned out by a deafening keening that filled the narrow corridor as the creature screamed with all its many mouths. A blast of intense heat caught up with the running figures and passed them by. Hawk flinched instinctively, but Storm's magic protected them.

  Rivulets of flame ran along the walls and ceiling, hungrily consuming the thick cobwebs. Burning tendrils thrust out of the furry mass and lashed blindly at the running SWAT team. Hawk and Fisher cut fiercely at the tendrils, slicing through them easily. Burning lengths of cobwebs fell to the corridor floor, writhing and twisting as the flames consumed them. Charred and darkened masses of cobwebs fell limply from the wall and ceiling as a thick choking smoke filled the corridor. Storm suddenly stumbled to a halt, and the others piled up around him.