Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Thomas and Alastair hurried to follow it into the arcade. It swept ahead of them, seemingly unconscious of their presence, and whisked through a doorway that led into the Second-Class Booking Office. It was dark and deserted inside; the ticket windows along the mahogany counter were shuttered and the marble floor was littered with abandoned luggage, some of which had burst open. The archway that led into the station was blocked by a large brown leather suitcase, spilling a pair of red-and-white-striped pajamas and a child’s stuffed bear. Thomas and Alastair leaped over the mess and emerged into the cavernous vault of the station.

They were on platform one, which, like the booking office, was strewn with abandoned luggage and a random selection of passengers’ personal items, all laid out like a stall at a giant bazaar. The big station clock, permanently stopped at a quarter to four, was wearing a red woolen scarf; an enormous, befeathered “cartwheel” hat hung at a jaunty angle from the top of a chocolate vending machine; and five cheap novels, spilled from a velvet bag, lay on the floor like collapsed dominoes.

Above them soared the huge triple arch of the great iron-and-glass roof: a gigantic cathedral, supported by rows of delicate, ornate wrought-iron columns, like the ribs of some metal giant. In normal circumstances it would have been filled with trains and clouds of steam and smog and crowds of people and sounds—the babble of voices and railway announcements and guards blowing whistles and slamming doors; the deafening clanking, chuffing, and whistling sounds of the trains.

Now it was empty. Belial’s demon twilight filtered down from the soot-laden glass roof through a misty haze, broken sporadically by flickering lamps; there was a weird fizzing electrical hum coming from them that sounded eerie in the echoing quiet. The faint illumination from the open end of the station, where the trains came in, cast an uncanny glow across the far ends of the platforms and threw everything else into a gloom that made the deep shadows deeper. Sometimes they seemed to be moving, and small scuttling noises came from them—rats, probably. Hopefully.

Thomas and Alastair headed down platform two, hands on their weapons, their footsteps muffled by Soundless runes. The platforms were empty except for a lone train halfway down platform three, its doors standing open, waiting for the passengers who would never arrive. And—there was the Watcher, walking along beside it. As Thomas spotted it, it turned and seemed to look directly at them. Then it stepped between two carriages of the train and disappeared.

Alastair swore and broke into a run. Thomas followed, jumping off the platform when it ended, onto the dangerous ground of the rail yard: uneven wooden railway sleepers on top of coarse, sharp chunks of gravel, crisscrossed with iron tracks.

Alastair slowed to a stop where the Watcher had disappeared, letting Thomas catch up to him. They looked around and saw nothing. The area around the train seemed deserted, the silence almost oppressive.

“We lost it,” Alastair said in disgust. “By the Angel—”

“I’m not so sure,” Thomas said, keeping his voice low. The silence didn’t feel comforting, but wrong somehow, just like the shadows were wrong. “Draw your weapon,” he whispered, reaching for his halberd.

Alastair looked at him for a moment, eyes narrowed. Then, seeming to decide that he trusted Thomas, he started to reach for his shamshir—just as a white-clad figure leaped from the train’s roof, knocking Alastair flat.

The shamshir flew out of Alastair’s hand as he and the Watcher rolled across the uneven ground. The Watcher pinned Alastair down; there was no way he could reach for his weapons belt. Instead he reared back and punched the Watcher in the face.

“Alastair!” Thomas shouted. He ran toward the place where Alastair was grappling with the Watcher; he was hitting it over and over, and the Watcher was bleeding, spattering red-black droplets over the gravel of the train yard. But it seemed impassive: if the blows hurt, it gave no sign. It had one long white hand wrapped around Alastair’s throat, and as Thomas watched, it started to squeeze.

Something exploded behind Thomas’s eyes. He did not remember closing the space between himself and the Watcher, only that he found himself standing over it, swinging his halberd. The polearm connected with the Watcher, its axe-head slamming into the thing’s shoulder. It snarled but kept choking Alastair, whose lips were turning blue. Panicked, Thomas yanked the halberd free—and tore half the Watcher’s cloak away with it. He caught a glimpse of its hairless skull and the back of its neck, printed with a demonic scarlet rune.

Acting on instinct, Thomas swung the halberd again, this time driving the blade straight into the rune, slashing across it, obliterating the pattern.

The Watcher sprang to its feet, releasing Alastair. The ragged remains of its white robes were soaked in red-black blood. It staggered toward Thomas, catching hold of him with hands like iron claws. It flung him, hard; he flew through the air and slammed into the side of a train car. He slid to the ground, dazed; he had lost his halberd somewhere, but his head was ringing too loudly for him to look for it.

He could taste metal in his mouth. He willed himself to get up, to move, but his body would not cooperate. He could only watch through blurred eyes as the Watcher twitched and spasmed strangely. It fell to its knees, something peculiar seeming to emerge from the bloody wound on the back of its neck. Long, spidery legs, feelers scraping at the air. They pushed the Chimera demon’s body free. It crawled out of the Silent Brother’s limp body, its abdomen pulsing, its green eyes glowing as they fixed on Thomas. It leaped toward him, as a merciful darkness came down like a curtain.





30 ANTIQUE LAND




I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.… Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”



Cordelia had passed through many Portals in her life, but none like the one to Edom. It was an acrid whirlwind full of smoke; she spun breathless through the dark, her lungs aching, terrified that Lilith had tricked her, tricked Lucie, and they would die in the void between worlds.

Eventually the darkness faded to a fiery red-orange light. Before Cordelia’s eyes could adjust, she struck a hard surface. Uneven earth; the desert floor. She rolled across gritty, dark yellow dunes, sand in her eyes and ears and lungs, clutching at the ground with her fingers until at last she came to a stop.

Coughing violently, she rolled to her knees and looked around. All around her stretched a bleak and unfriendly desert, shimmering with heat under a dark red sun. Dunes of dry sand rose and fell like waves, and between them snaked fiery lines: narrow rivers of molten fire. Black rock formations burst from the ground at intervals, jagged and ugly.

There was no indication of anything alive nearby. And no sign of Lucie.

Cordelia staggered to her feet. “Lucie!” she called, her throat burning. Her voice seemed to echo in the emptiness, and she felt the first stirrings of panic.

Steady, she told herself. She could see no footprints in the sand, only the marks where she had bounced and rolled across the ground, and the hot wind was already beginning to cover those with new sand. She narrowed her eyes against the sun’s shimmer and saw a gap between two rocks at the top of a shale-and-gravel hill. The sandy ground near the gap seemed disturbed and—was that a boot print?

Cordelia scrambled up the hill, her hand on Cortana’s hilt. Closer up she could see a sort of path, perhaps a place where water had once flowed, which passed between the two boulders. With some difficulty, she was able to squeeze through. Beyond the rocks, the hill fell away to more sandy wasteland, but not far away was another sizable rock formation. Leaning against it, her eyes closed and her face pale, was Lucie.

“Lucie!” Cordelia skated down the hill on a wave of loose sand and gravel before hurrying over to her friend. Up close, Lucie looked worse—her face was strained, and she held her hands over her chest as she struggled to breathe.

Cordelia fished her stele out. Lucie held out her wrist obediently, and Cordelia traced an iratze on the skin there—only to watch in horror as it rapidly faded, as if it had been drawn with water.

“Lilith said,” Lucie gasped, “that runes wouldn’t work here.”

“I know,” Cordelia muttered. “I hoped she was lying.” She put down the stele and opened her flask, which she pressed into Lucie’s hands. After a moment, she was relieved to see Lucie take a swallow, and then another one, a little color returning to her face. “What happened?” Cordelia said. “Are you hurt? Was it the Portal?”

Lucie took a deep breath and coughed again. “No.” She looked past Cordelia at the landscape beyond: dusty with ash, studded with dozens of blackened rock formations. A burned land. A poisoned land. “It’s this place.”