Black Feathers

72

Gordon walked until dawn but the smell of smoke on the night air never left him. The road he took from the town had suffered some damage but not enough to deny him passage. Clear of the outskirts, he left the tarmac and walked on the grass between the road and the hedges beside it.

Once it was dark, the horizon became a glowing line, the flames themselves invisible but the light they cast illuminating the canopy of cloud, a dusky orange glow rising and falling in waves to every direction. Sometimes he walked through patches of cold smoke, rolling across the land like mist. Other times his way was clear. The Earth itself was calm and quiet, but at the perimeter of his hearing its people wailed laments of injury and loss and death.

Before dawn he heard rumbling again, felt it in the soles of his feet and braced himself for destruction. It didn’t come – at least not in the way he’d expected. The rumbling increased gradually, as did the vibrations in his feet. What approached was not an aftershock but a convoy. His first thought was that help was finally arriving – emergency vehicles, medical supplies and rescue workers. That thought was swiftly overruled; some instinct he couldn’t define made him throw himself to the ground in the drainage ditch beneath the dense hedgerow he was following. There was no time to get through the hedge and even if he’d tried he wasn’t sure he’d have made it through the tangle of thorns.

Immediately soaked by freezing filthy water, he peeped over the lip of the ditch as the convoy passed. Six grey personnel trucks, two grey Land Rovers and three grey armoured cars. Two long haulage vehicles brought up the rear, each carrying three bulldozers and a digger. Every vehicle bore the insignia of the Ward. The armoured cars had heavy machine guns mounted above their cabs.

After they’d passed he crawled out of the ditch, wet and stinking. As soon as he found a break in the hedge – a gate opening into a field in this case – he climbed over and followed the road from behind cover. The Ward had come of age: government, police force and army merged to become a single unstoppable force and, as theirs were the only vehicles on the road, Gordon had to assume they now had control of all the fuel reserves.

When light began to creep over the eastern horizon, Gordon veered away from the road and looked for shelter. Having crossed a couple of fields, he saw the remains of a building frozen corpselike against the lightening sky. Nearing it, he saw it was an old brick outbuilding with a slate roof. One end of it had collapsed in the quake, but most of it still stood. The building was already old and many of the slates were missing at the “good” end. After testing the walls and some of the fallen beams for movement, he found a way in through the broken wall and thrashed his way through the weeds and nettles to the most secure-looking corner of the structure. There was no floor and the whole place smelled faintly of manure, but he could put his tent up inside and it would be out of sight from every direction.

The ground is uneven and uncomfortable. Megan shifts to find a better position and knocks her head against the wall. The wall is ridged and rough; a sharp edge scratches her face as she turns over. Still exhausted, she opens her eyes just for a moment.

There is no wall. There is no dust.

She scrambles to sit up and hits her head again, this time on one of the heavy branches leaning against the trunk of a vast tree. The branch slides off the trunk and her shelter collapses around her. She struggles to free herself from the fine weave of the sheet which presses her against the gnarly bark. Megan springs away from both tree and shelter and turns to face it, backing a few paces towards the clearing. She has one hand on her forehead as she tries to replay what happened after she lay down in the centre of the city to sleep.

There are no memories. She was there and now she is here.

The black crystal!

One thing she remembers very clearly is holding the crystal to her chest as she fell asleep. She no longer holds it in either hand. Near the base of the tree, partially covered by the collapsed shelter, something reflects, concentrating the flat, grey light of the day. As she approaches to retrieve it, a vibration comes up through her feet.

She hesitates, glancing around the clearing. The vast space is deserted and silent. The sky beyond the outer branches of the tree is white with uniform, indistinct cloud. The bright gloom mutes every colour, deadening the land in every direction. Nothing stirs.

She takes another step and the vibration comes again, stronger this time: a tremor rising from far below. Above her, Megan senses movement. She glances up.

The branches of the tree bristle with dark crawling shapes. Some of them detach and glide slowly towards the ground on wet gossamer threads. She stifles a cry with her fist. At the centre of the tree, descending in slow spirals and sinuous meanders, legless, muscular forms approach the glint of the crystal. Every creature means to possess the black light which the engraved stone reflects. Every creature means to prevent her from taking it away. This she cannot allow.

With the ground beginning to rumble and roar, she dives for the crystal and her pack just as the first of the spiders reach the level of her head. The snakes, seeing their prize snatched up, dispense with crawling and now begin to fall from the trunk and inner boughs. By the time Megan is scrambling out towards the clearing, her knapsack hastily shouldered, it is raining serpents and eight-legged nightmares. Their intelligence and determination nauseate her. She crawls because she wants to stay below the falling spiders for as long as possible, but it means she can’t move fast. She hears slithering behind her, fast and loud. Meanwhile, the first heavy-bodied spiders land on her back. She can feel the tongues of a dozen snakes tasting the soles of her boots, preparing to strike.

Megan lurches to her feet, making contact with a hundred more spiders as she rises up. Ahead of her the space beneath the lowest branches of the tree has become a forest of densely populated web. All she can do is flail her arms ahead of her to shake the spiders out of the way. She doesn’t remember her knapsack being this heavy; it’s enough to slow her down until she realises that the spiders on her shoulders, head and back are where the extra weight is coming from. And what’s slowing her is not their weight but the mass of silk threads she is running into.

This knowledge and the touch of many spiny legs on the bare skin of her neck elicit a scream. A few more paces and she’ll be stuck. Risking everything, Megan stops running and shakes her body as hard as she can. With fast fingers, she brushes away as many of the spiders as she is able to reach, careful not to leave her hands near them long enough to let them bite her. Some already have their fangs through the fabric of her clothes and she can feel their venom trickling down the naked skin of her back. She tears off her knapsack, scattering thirty or forty spiders into the arriving cohorts of their kin. Inside the pack is the knife which she unsheathes as she pulls it free. The knapsack is only a hindrance now and she throws it behind her. Thousands of crawlers and slitherers make for the pack, hoping she has relinquished the prize in a bid to escape.

Meanwhile, Megan stops flailing so wildly and begins to sweep the knife through the threads of silk which block her path. Spiders fall to the ground and scrabble towards her legs. Others fall and are caught in their own silk, only to be leapt upon by their brothers and sisters and bitten, paralysed and poisoned. Two snakes have bitten her right boot and one has bitten her left. Their fangs are locked into the leather. As she pulls them with her, other snakes use their bodies as ropes, coiling onto them in an attempt to reach her. Once again, the weight of extra bodies causes Megan’s pace to slow.

She is almost out from under the branches of the tree. If she can make it that far, there will be no more cloying strands of silk to contend with. She turns and slashes down at her feet mid-stride, lifting her right ankle to meet the blade. It severs the head of one snake. As its body falls away, several other snakes are left behind with it. With a cry of determination, Megan pushes the pace. Her arms are sleeved with spiders that have latched on as she cut their drop-lines. She uses the blade to scrape them off, scattering their broken body parts left and right.

She breaks free of the tree and slashes the knife down at her other ankle. This time she misses. It takes three more attempts, each one slowing her almost to a stop before she has rid her left leg of snakes. She breaks across the clearing, making for the exact place where she entered it.

Looking back as she sprints, she sees a black sea of spiders pour out from under the tree. This sea is shot through with green and brown veins – the snakes riding over their backs. Some of the snakes are three times the length of her body. But she is free of them, she is clear of the tree.

Something sidles over her left shoulder, and out of the corner of her eye Megan sees a spider twice the size of her own hand. It lifts its front legs, exposing two gleaming black fangs with red, needle-sharp tips. The fangs unfold forwards and Megan sees the ugly, machinating mouthparts behind them. If she uses the knife now, she’ll stab herself to kill the spider. All she can do is swap the knife into her left hand and reach up with her right. She grabs the spider, trying to keep her fingers away from its fangs, and pulls it off her shoulder. Its grip is terrifyingly strong and the spider loses two legs before she is able to tear it away. She crushes its body in her fist until its insides burst out through its mouth and spinnerets. Disgusted almost to the point of vomiting, she throws its carcass away and wipes the sticky filth of its innards on her leg.

She glances behind.

The tide of spiders and the snakes that ride them is flowing fast, closing the space between them.

The trembling of the earth increases, causing her to stumble. She puts out her hands to save herself from a fall, staggering but managing to keep her balance. The stumble costs her time, though, and her pursuers gain ground. From behind her comes a terrible noise, something like a splintering rip in one moment, in the next, a howl. She hazards a look over her shoulder in time to see the tree being forced open from within. Sparks and prongs of flame dart out of the rend in the tree’s bark. The tear extends down into the earth, which also parts in that instant. A black-winged creature steps forth.

Megan knows she risks a fall by running forwards and looking back but she cannot take her eyes from the dark angel who now stands beneath the tree’s spread of branches. The tearing of its trunk is so severe, the tree has begun to list backwards. There’s a deeper tearing sound now, accompanied by the sound of roots snapping below ground. The tree cants away from her and begins to fall, shattering branches and sending up a spray of earth and splinters. An explosion of burning heartwood bursts from the place where the tree has broken, rebounding harmlessly from the creature’s black feathers but setting alight the scrubby grassland. The Crowman ignores the death of the tree.

He steps away from the destruction and upon his black-taloned feet gives chase.