Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (32 page)

For an errant moment, she thought she might have heard hundreds of screams emanating from within.

Jason took a flaming torch, just one of many being lighted in the crowd, and held his arms up high. “Witness, all, justice done to those who would have us all dead and buried. Justice. Justice!” He turned to face her, a wicked glint in his eye: he didn’t believe a word of it.

The crowd, however, was sent into hysterics, roaring, “Justice! Justice!” Fingers pointing, faces livid and searing. The encircling crowd stepped closer and lowered their torches into the hay.

“Please, don’t do this. We’re innocent,” cried the woman to Sarah’s left.

The woman to her right kicked and thrashed, weeping. “I want to go home. I wanna go home, I wanna go home.
Please
!”

Sarah said nothing, just watched the torches descend into the bales at her feet, which caught the instant the flames touched them. The heat bloomed under her, and smoke rose up in choking plumes. After that she focused on Jason, keeping his gaze, boring down into him as though she could punch through the back of his head.

One way or another, he was going to remember her.

By the time the pain started, the smoke was too thick to see the crowd anymore. Falling away into darkness, starved of air by searing smoke, she shifted her gaze to the horizon, searching for her husband. Her gaze was met by a bare horizon, except the crumbling spires of the distant cathedral.

Billy screamed in the firestorm. Flames reared up in all directions, arcing between dried-up houses flanking either side of the street. Behind her, one house collapsed with a calamitous groan, pouring flaming debris across her last route of escape.

One moment Allison had been pulling in a rollicking dash that threatened to send them both rolling into the dirt with the Bad Men at their backs. The next, the fire had been everywhere, the Bad Men had been gone, and Allison had stopped. By the time Billy struggled from her grasp, Allie was mumbling to herself, her eyes rolling in her head and her legs bowing. Billy had managed to grab hold of her just as Allie sank to the floor. The grown-up was far too heavy; she barely managed to keep Allie’s head from cracking against the cobbles.

Presently she crouched beside Allie’s prone form, shaking her shoulders. The flames were monstrous, like beasts made of hellfire, cutting off all escape as they pressed in closer. There was nowhere to go. They were trapped.

“Allie! Allie, wake up!”

It was so hot and the air so dry that she could hear her hair crackling. Each breath burned her lungs as though the glowing embers were airborne and creeping down her throat. The flames licked closer, swirling and dancing with terrible choreographed grace.

Allie groaned, her eyes rolling. The blood on the side of her head had congealed into a dark clot.

“We have to go. Get up,
get up
!”

Allie gave a soft sigh, and she moved no more.

Smoky fumes fingered their way into Billy’s chest and took the world cartwheeling away.

I promised Daddy I would keep going. Daddy.

His face appeared in her mind’s eye, and new strength leaped up inside her. She pushed
out
with her mind, and the Light inside her sparked to life. Reaching through the flames as though they were but puffs of cotton, she searched the city—though for what she had no idea.

Pull. Pull.

Pull what?

She didn’t know, but she flexed her mental muscle nonetheless, and she felt something—no, everything—draw in towards her. Something intangible yet irrefutably
there
sucked into a sphere about her head, swirling and twinkling and cold.

Smoke clogged her throat, and her eyes streamed with acrid tears. It was getting harder and harder to keep her head raised. She flexed once more, and another surge of cold gathered in around her. The cloud of otherworldly death the army had cast over the city like a veil, yielded to her command. Head thrumming and crackling, only distantly aware of blood trickling from her nose, Billy held back the flames. The heat receded, just, held at bay by the most tenebrous barrier.

No such thing as magic, Daddy? I hope you can see this now.

That barrier began fading as soon as she pulled it into being. Each breath came with a crackling wheeze in her chest. The flames sapped her strength as fiery tongues lashed out.

Then something. A pique somewhere on an internal compass, on the edge of deep eternal nothing. Dark figures racing towards her. As Billy’s head touched Allie’s chest and she blinked blearily, she picked out a horse at full gallop ahead, then another. In moments they went from undulating fire demons to solid, yelling men, and then they were reaching down, lifting her into the air. A face swam from the ether, a face she knew well.

Norm.

Somewhere, perhaps very close, perhaps far away, more horses were racing past, surging down the street and leaping over the burning rubble. Allison was lifted beside another rider.

A distant, warped voice: “We’re surrounded! Where do we go?”

Taking a deep breath, Billy dredged one last flex from the base of her being, casting the bubble of Frost down the road. A gale whistled forth, and the fire along the street whittled down to chest height.

That same warped voice: “There! Go now!”

Then they were moving, the air grew clearer, and they left the fire in their wake. Yet the explosions, the terrible rending of stone and earth, never faded, not even when they left the city behind.

Norman rode hard into the hills, cresting the foothills to the south-east. All around scrabbled the few who had managed to escape the city: some of the militia, a gaggle of wailing kids, and some families who had removed their homes’ barricades and fled before the fires had started. So few, perhaps eighty. There had been eight hundred people in New Canterbury.

Ahead, Lucian climbed down from his horse with Allie cradled in his arms and laid her down gently in the grass.

“Is she all right?” Norman yelled.

I promised I would come back to her. I promised.

She stirred feebly.

“She’s fine, Norman,” Lucian said, his lips white as marble.

Allie’s eyes fluttered open, and she sat up slowly in the grass.

Norman let loose a puff of breath and sagged on the saddle. He could only sit there for a moment, trembling and coughing on ash and a gob of panic stuck in his throat. Steeling himself, he dropped to the ground and pulled Billy after him. Sooty and limp, she slid down into the grass but found her feet.

“Wha-whassapanin?” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles.

Norman crouched and took her into his arms. “Are you okay?”

“Mmm…”

“Billy, what did you do?”

His heart was pounding like a rabbit’s; not only because he had been afraid he could have let the kid die, but because now he knew what she really was. They had been springing the city’s horses from the stables when a horn had blared in his head; a whistling fit to deafen him. His chest shrank to a prune, and he felt the Frost cut at his bones. He had known it was her as if she had screamed in his ears. She had wielded it like dough. He had followed the gale right to her.

The Jester hadn’t lied. If she had that kind of power, maybe she was the one to save them. If she had died, there would have been nothing to stop the Frost from consuming the city and everyone in it.

“Billy… talk to me.”

“Norm?”

“Yeah, it’s me, kid.”

“It’s too late…” Her bleary eyes turned to the city. “It’s too big. Too much. So much… cold.”

Norman turned to the burning city and knew he was seeing the same thing as her: a crushing chill, overbearing, a thousand-fold greater than any he had felt before.

How could that be so? How can we be looking at a city on fire and feel nothing but cold?

He didn’t know. But he did know that his entire body felt as though he were encased inside an iceberg.

Did the others see it? Feel it?

He didn’t think so, not in the same way. But they felt something; he could see it in their faces. Not only those upon the hillside, but those of the enemy, which now spilled from the ruin of New Canterbury on the far side, out into the crop fields.

The shelling had stopped. Without the accompanying yells of battle, gunfire, falling rubble or explosions, the fire sounded eerily peaceful. Blank expressions trained upon the city and the sky, searching for something just out of sight: the source of an unsettling shiver. Shadow had fallen over everything, cast by nothing and never quite touching the ground, merely hanging like smog, slowly spreading, feeding off the fear and destruction and pain and death.

“This is bad,” Norman said. “They’ve started something…”

“It’s the End,” Billy said, sounding far away still. “Soon. It spreads from here.”

“To where? London?”

She ignored him, her glassy eyes on the city. “I can’t stop it now. He’s too strong.”

James. It’s him who started all this.

Norman gripped her hard, and her gaze crept slowly over to him. “He’s not won yet—”

An earth-shattering
crack
rang through the air, and every pair of eyes—upon the hillside and in the fields—turned to face the cathedral. The spires had long ago succumbed to the bombardment and lay now as only so much rubble in the surrounding grounds. What remained was a smoking windowless husk, scorched stone made shapeless, pockmarked and trembling. A great well of dust billowed from the northern edge, obscuring the burning city behind.

Those on the hillside cried out and gathered on the crest, none daring to stray any closer. Hands were held to chests, arms wrapped around anybody who would have them, and a single unified breath held painfully.

No. This can’t happen
, Norman thought.

He was sure of it: so grand a masterpiece of Old World engineering could bear anything. All his life it had been a symbol of the unchanging tapestry of the world, immune to their comings and goings.

The terrible sound came again, a whip crack that shot over the landscape and blanketed all else. A black fissure unzipped the entire superstructure across its centre, and the emanating dust built to an unending billow. The two halves of the cathedral, ever so gradually, separated.

Norman could only watch, his mouth ajar, as the roof split into countless sections, a spiderweb of fractures lancing through the masonry. Then with dreamlike slowness, the slabs fell inwards, dropping down into the pulpits and transepts, the magnificent delicate carvings, and all those who prayed at the pews. The walls followed in short order, toppling inwards, and the entire cathedral vanished in a monstrous cloud of ash and dust.

Those on the hillside fell silent and dropped to their knees in the grass.

“How many people were in there?” Norman said.

Allie answered weakly from nearby, a whisper on the wind. “Hundreds.”

Alexander had gone numb. Motes of chalky dust accrued on the crop-heads by his side, upon his clothes, his lips. Dust that had moments ago been the cathedral, and his friends.

Agatha…

He felt so weak, as though he could just fade away from the world. Judging by the gnawing cold in his chest, underneath the stabbing well of heartache, he suspected that wasn’t far from the truth. The dark smudge hanging over the city grew still, weaving its fingers over the last of the burning rooftops, encompassing the city proper and spreading out into the fields and forests, bridging the river as though it wasn’t even there.

“It’s over.” Charlie stared after the city with a gaunt expression.

Alexander would have felt sadness at the first sight of him here, amongst all this, if he had any feelings left to feel. The doe-eyed young man they had brought into their clinic so short a time ago—just a kid—who they could have saved, if they had had the mind. It hadn’t had to be this way. None of it had. He had failed even this stranger.

“Not yet,” James said, thigh deep in the crop heads.

Alexander yelled at the top of his voice, struggling forwards against the guards, but all that emerged around his gag was a muffled warble.

The wicked leering creature who James kept for a pet loped from the city, away from High Street, where a blaze of hay bales had been ignited. “I see runners,” he hissed hungrily. “Give me a hundred men. We’ll finish this.” He started off to flank those on the distant hilltops, but James raised a hand.

“No. Leave them.”

“They’re chickenshit cowards. Let me finish them!” The creature’s eyes were livid and bulging.

“No. We go.” James didn’t once look away from the burning skyline. “Their debt is paid.”

I hope somebody’s over there. Somebody
, Alexander thought.

But what could anybody do now? London alone remained, they were outnumbered five to one, and outgunned.

“Isn’t it done?” the young man said. “Can’t we stop this, now? Cain’s mission is done.”

James said nothing.

The young man stumbled through the grass. “I’ve stuck with you. I did everything you asked because I believed that we stood for something.”

“We stand for balance. Everybody standing here has been wronged.”