Entangled (38 page)

The man in the white suit grinned at Leoni, opening a mouth crowded with jagged inward-turned teeth.

She wanted to be as far away from him as possible, but flight wasn’t an option. The web of red light that he’d flung around her aerial body held her fast and now, with hauling motions of his hands, he dragged her towards him as though drawing in a net. His hooded eyes glittered as he spoke to her: ‘I am making this magic,’ he boasted. ‘It is very strong, yes?’ Another vigorous heave brought her face to face with him: ‘See! You cannot resist me!’ And with that he pulled tight the net’s drawstrings, crammed them into his mouth and plunged into the river, towing her behind him.

Except it wasn’t the muddy waters of the Amazon they’d entered but some gloppy, transparent, mucilaginous goo, like a torrent of thick snot. And her captor was no longer a man but had transformed into a monstrous white shark.

Leoni felt herself starting to freak out. It was entirely possible, if this continued, that she was just going to totally
lose
it. It had happened to her before on an acid trip that went sour. And this thing she was in the midst of now – this capture, this
abduction
– was already far more freaky than that, and horribly immanent and convincing. She had to keep reminding herself that she was out of body and that if anything real was happening to her at all – even now she couldn’t be certain – then it wasn’t happening to the physical Leoni. It was the non-physical part of herself, released by Ayahuasca, that had been spirited away.

It had occurred to her that her abductor could be Sulpa in one of his many guises. But she didn’t think the beautiful monster she had seen, revelling in the blood of children, would have felt the need to boast about his powers in the way that this creature did.

With a massive effort of will Leoni controlled her panic and peered into the thick flood swirling round her. It had grown from a river into
an ocean and the whole mass glowed with luminous particles. Below, the huge white shark swam straight down, his massive tail sweeping from side to side, drawing her along behind in her net of light, plunging into a seemingly bottomless abyss.

Leoni felt a renewed surge of fear but was distracted by the sudden arrival of a sleek dolphin. Improbably, it was pink. It materialised out of a cloud of bubbles, studied her for a moment with a large, quizzical, almond-shaped eye, and darted away as quickly as it had come. She just had time to wonder
What was that about?
when a serpent bigger than a nuclear submarine reared up out of the depths below. It was bearded, like a Ming dragon, its head was surmounted by long plumes of feathers, a ruby the size of a small car was set into its brow, its eyes glittered amethyst and its teeth were quartz daggers. Its jaws yawned wide to reveal a churning whirlpool in its gullet.

The shark dragged Leoni straight down through the gaping mouth. They were spun and wheeled by the heaving vortex and rocketed into a sinuous light-filled tunnel, wide as a house, its walls patterned with grids of glowing jewels.

Leoni realised she had passed through similar contraptions on her journeys to the land where everything is known. Despite their high strangeness, and many superficial differences, these swirling tunnels and tubes and shafts of light seemed to be part of some sort of system, utterly beyond her understanding, that offered transit from realm to realm, from world to world, from the present to the past – if Matt was right about Sulpa – and even from the state of being alive to the state of being dead.

With a final rapid gyration she was spilled out onto a cold stone floor beside her captor who had already morphed back into his human form. The tunnel spun closed behind them and vanished, as though it had never existed, leaving no obvious return route. Simultaneously, Leoni discovered she was in a body again, dressed in simple clothing – much as she always found herself in the land where everything is known.

But was she back in that realm now? There was no way of knowing because they were in a bare geometrical room. Dimly lit at floor level from some unseen source, but with no windows, it felt cavernous – the size of a cathedral at least – and its immense walls, crafted from massive blocks of red granite, vanished into the darkness above.

She struggled to her feet.
Shit!
The net that had trapped her aerial
body was gone but now there was a chain round her neck, attached to a thick leather leash in her captor’s hand. He shook it, rattling the links, making her cough and choke.

‘I tricked you very good,’ he bragged, ‘very fine! I, Don Apolinar, did this with my magic and you could not resist.’ He twitched the leash again: ‘What you say about that?’

Leoni gripped the chain with both hands and jerked it back hard. ‘You’re an asshole,’ she hissed as he struggled for balance. ‘That’s what I say.’ She let go of the chain so that she could point the index finger of her right hand at him. She didn’t know why she felt she should do this, but as she made the gesture a surge of energy poured through her, Don Apolinar’s eyes widened and he staggered as though punched by an invisible fist.

He dropped the leash and backed off several paces. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you have the force.’ She stepped towards him and he retreated; another step towards him, another retreat. He was still speaking: ‘But you don’t know how to use it!’

He extended his free hand, flexed the fingers and closed them into a fist. At once Leoni lost all power of movement and fell sprawling on the granite flagstones. She could neither resist nor speak, yet remained fully conscious as Don Apolinar stooped down beside her and thrust his fingers deep into her brain.

The distance between the two groups was down to sixty paces and the Illimani were closing fast when Bont began his charge. Twelve against nine, but Ria intended to shorten those odds. Wincing at a fresh surge of pain from her bruised rib, she picked the brave wearing another man’s skin, empty hands and feet flapping at his wrists and ankles, and smashed his head with her first stone.
Vermin!
Who the fuck did these people think they were? She palmed a second stone, targeted a warrior with a necklace of dangling penises, and broke his nose in an explosion of blood. He fell to his knees, clutching his face.

A shadow appeared beside her as she reached for more stones and she saw Ligar draw his bow and fire an arrow into a man’s eye. Right away he drew and fired again, a belly shot that dropped a tough-looking brave screaming. His third arrow transfixed a brave’s naked chest, protruding a span beyond his back. Then Bont was amongst them, his double-headed axe snaking out with incredible power as he smashed his way through the survivors, hacking off one man’s head with a single blow, opening a huge fountaining wound in another’s side, backhanding the blade into the next man’s face, chopping the legs out from under another.

Screaming defiant war cries, the last three mounted a desperate attack, swarming the Clansman, pressing him hard, getting inside the reach of the axe. While Ligar was darting back and forth, searching for an angle, hesitating to shoot into the melee for fear of hitting his friend, Ria let fly with a third stone, bringing down another man. That left two, both big guys, one wearing penises in his hair, the other with a severed head tied to his waistband, grappling with Bont.

But Bont seemed energised after his healing. With a roar of fury and a tremendous explosion of raw strength he flung both attackers back, swung his axe double-handed and hammered its blade into one man’s chest. The second circled, jabbing with a long knife, but Bont slapped
it aside with the flat of the axe, stepped in on him and brought the blade down with such force onto the top of his skull that the blow split open his head from crown to chin, scattering brain tissue and teeth.

As the brave crashed to the ground at his feet Bont gave a great bellow of triumph, raised the dripping axe high in the air, shook it, looked around eagerly and shouted: ‘WHO NEXT?’

At once his question was answered. A blood-spattered Illimani, mightily built, with rippling muscles and armed with an axe bigger than Bont’s, stepped out from a narrow alley and swaggered into the middle of the camp’s main thoroughfare about two hundred paces to the south. He was bald but, as though to compensate, four severed heads of Clansmen and Clanswomen, dripping gore, were suspended by their hair from his leather waistband, their open eyes glaring. The massive warrior shouted something at Bont in the jarring, grinding gutturals of the Illimani tongue, loosened his waistband letting the heads thud to the ground, raised his own axe, and began to march forward, confident and threatening. As he walked, another brave stepped forth from the side streets, and another, and another.

Ria saw they were a second scouting party, this time numbering close to forty. They marched forward in a tight mass and stopped a hundred paces away, spreading themselves out across the thoroughfare in two wide ranks.

Ligar fired an arrow, taking a warrior in the throat. Ria palmed her last two hunting stones and began to jog towards the Illimani. At eighty paces she hurled her first stone. It struck the bald brave on the dome of his forehead and bounced off with a loud
clunk.
He stood looking stupid, then his eyes rolled up in his head, the axe dropped from his fingers, and he fell senseless.

Ria was still running as more arrows from Ligar’s bow hissed past her. Two more men crumpled. A third, pierced through the eye, shrieked and clawed at his face, stumbled out of the line and fell. At forty paces, Ria brained another with her last stone. Realising how far ahead of her companions she had run, she stopped just twenty paces from the waiting Illimani and pulled the long flint knife from her belt.

With a thud of running feet, Bont appeared beside her, his axe held loosely in his huge hands. Ligar was right behind him but a glance showed Ria he was out of arrows. He laid his bow down and pulled a dagger from his belt.

Then Brindle, Oplimar and Jergat pounded up. All had armed themselves with discarded weapons. Jergat had picked up one of the short Illimani throwing spears that lay scattered about and taken a jagged-edged knife from a brave Bont had killed. Oplimar held a big war axe in his right hand and a smaller wicked-looking hatchet in his left. Brindle wielded a heavy wooden club studded with shards of razor-edged flint.

Next Vulp pushed himself into the line, his mane of long white hair hanging to his shoulders, a dagger in each hand. Bahat was with him, swarthy and bearded, swinging an axe.

Last came Rotas. His movements were stiff and dignified, but he held a heavy Clan spear tipped with a long leaf-shaped blade pointed at the Illimani phalanx.

For a frozen instant the two groups, still more than thirty against nine, eyed one another in complete silence across the narrow strip of trampled ground that separated them. Then, in the distance, from the edge of the camp where the captured children were held, a great collective chant began to rise up from the mass of the Illimani force, thousands upon thousands of rough, snarling, brutish voices all calling out in unison. And what they were saying was:

The sound of that name, uttered like this, was spine-chilling. The Illimani braves seemed to cock their ears and listen. A blank look settled like snow over all their faces and, with a scream, they launched themselves at Ria and her companions.