Fury (27 page)

I walk back down the slope towards him. When I reach him, it’s automatic what I do: I take his arm. He’s still so angry that he tries weakly to shrug me off, but I don’t let him. His chest is heaving, the almost horizontal rain running down his face in rivulets, like tears.

‘I’m so far away,’ he grates, as he stumbles along, looking at his feet rather than the astounding, almost prehistoric grasslands around us, and certainly not at me. ‘Anything could be happening. I should be there.’ Then it slips out before he can take it back. ‘I wish I’d never met you.’

‘You don’t really mean that?’ I say, as wounded as if he’d taken a weapon to me. Despite all that has happened, I never wish that. Ryan is synonymous with life for me.

He drops my arm like it’s burning him. ‘I don’t know what I mean. Without you, I wouldn’t have Lauren back. With you, I feel helpless, when I used to be known for my strength and speed.’ His laughter sounds as harsh as his breathing. ‘I’m just some guy you keep around,’ he murmurs. ‘I don’t know why you even bother with me.’

He won’t let me defend us, just holds up a hand to silence me.

‘Don’t go snooping around in my head right now,’ he mutters, ‘because you won’t like what you see there. Go be a superhero, or whatever, with your superhero friends. Just give me some space — I need to think.’

He walks away from me then, deliberately pushing himself to pass Uriel and reach Mateo up ahead, though it looks like it’s killing him to do it. And it’s such a Ryan thing to do that I want to smile as much as I want to cry.

I rejoin Uriel, who’s walking easily. He seems taller, more alive out here, even in his human form, even though the elements are throwing everything they’ve got in our faces. Wind and water. But not fire. We’re bringing the fire.

Ryan falls back again, his face set and miserable, as we continue ascending sharply in driving rain, through the thinning air, thousands of feet up. Mateo warned us the night before that it would take at least three or four hours to reach the first set of ruins along this stretch of the trail, but the punishing pace that Uriel is setting is pushing Mateo, Ryan, even me, to go faster and harder. The other groups we left with are nowhere in sight.

In the middle of a raging downpour, Uriel starts to sing:

Suddenly, there’s no wind, no rain, just the sound of his voice. I stop dead in my tracks in astonishment — at the aching beauty in his voice, in the words, in the melody, cast in some ancient and peculiar minor key.

All of us have stopped, in a ragged, drawn-out line down the narrow, rocky trail, except Uriel, who keeps walking in long, easy strides, singing in a pure, clear, resonating tenor that seems to come back at us from all the surrounding mountains.

Mateo points into the sky, astounded, and a giant, winged shape seems to coalesce out of the darkness above us, out of the rain. I tense instantly, preparing to duck, or to fight if it be demon born — until I see that it’s a bird. Not the falcon Uriel sang of, but a giant black condor, its wingspan at least nine feet across. It passes so close overhead, in a single smooth sweep, that I feel a rush of air, hear the sound of its wings passing over, as Uriel finishes with his original refrain:

I join him, feeling almost compelled to do it, singing in an alto counterpoint that is rusty and hesitant, but as weirdly resonant as the thread of Uriel’s melody:

Our voices echo back at us from the stone before dying away. As the song ends, Uriel just keeps walking, as if we have not just produced the most glorious sound anyone will ever hear on this mountain.

Mateo shouts in wonder, ‘I have walked these paths for many, many years and I have never seen a condor pass so close! It’s as if he brought it down from the sky.’

Still awe-struck, he hurries to catch Uriel.

I continue uphill, occasionally glancing back at Ryan trailing behind us, head down against the rain. I wish he’d make some attempt to try and catch me; there’s so much I want to share with him.
Carmen was a soprano, and I’m not!
I want to tell him, though what use that information would be is anyone’s guess. Even when we’re not together, I find myself telling him things in my head, or storing up impressions, anecdotes, stories to tell him later, though we might never have a later. It’s got to be proof of love, or at least of madness.

I think this is the first bad fight we’ve ever had; and this edgy, unsettled, unhappy feeling I’m having is the feeling of being shut out.

My feet suddenly hit cut granite: an Inca stairway carved from living stone; and above the sound of the rain there’s the sound of something else, something elemental, that’s growing in power. Then I round a corner, and see a ruined city of light grey stone clinging to the cliff face, spilling down the side of the mountain in graceful, concave terraces, punctuated by ancient fountains and watercourses. Behind and above it, across a ravine, is a raging, tumbling waterfall — glorious, eternal, uncaring, vastly swollen by the interminable rain.

I turn automatically to share what I’m seeing with Ryan, but, of course, he’s not there.

Mateo shouts down to me from the pathway above: ‘Wiñay Wayna!’

And I know that the name of the place means ‘forever young’, but it is young as we are young. It endures, like we do, because we were made to.

I see him turn to Uriel and gesture. I can tell that he’s suggesting a break, but Uriel shakes his head. Mateo argues, and points down to Ryan, who is still struggling below me on the stairs, every line of his body telegraphing his sheer exhaustion and misery.

‘Ryan? Break?’ Mateo calls to him anxiously.

Ryan looks up and shakes his head, proudly, bitterly, before looking back down at his boots. So we don’t stop for a break because no one’s asking to stop, and Mateo has no choice but to agree.

We pass the mysterious, curving terraces of Wiñay Wayna in the driving, dismal rain, and keep walking, keep moving upwards.

When we finally begin to descend through a cloud forest of twisted tree trunks, ferns, orchids and lush, dark green leafy plants, my internal clock tells me it’s just before midday. It’s warmer now, and the thick cover overhead shields us from the worst of the rain. Green hummingbirds and butterflies dart amongst the foliage.

Mateo overrules Uriel at last, insisting upon a rest break. He hurries back along the paved Incan roadway to fetch Ryan.

Uriel shrugs off the pack of supplies and studies our surroundings with barely concealed impatience. ‘Ryan’s holding us up,’ he says bluntly. ‘Remind me again how he’s supposed to be useful?’

‘He’s committed,’ I say tautly. ‘He can hardly turn around and go back now. Like I said,
he’s with me
, and you don’t have to like it, you just have to deal with it.’

Mateo and Ryan stagger into view, and I hurry down the path to meet them, shocked at Ryan’s pallor, how badly he’s shaking.

‘He’s hallucinating,’ Mateo says worriedly as I take Ryan’s other arm over my shoulder, curve an arm around his waist. ‘He keeps saying he’s seen the Devil and the Devil looks just like him.’

‘I wish he
was
hallucinating,’ I mutter.

We spread out the rain ponchos Mateo brought along and lie Ryan on them. I hold him until his core temperature rises and his breathing evens out and his anger returns.

He sits up finally. ‘I’m
fine
,’ he snaps hoarsely, trying to fight his way out of my embrace.

But he’s exhausted, and I just lock my arms more tightly around him, refusing to let him go. Suddenly it’s a battle of wills, an all-out wrestling match on the grassy embankment, and we’re sliding around on mud, getting tangled in the plastic of the rain ponchos, until Uriel drags us off each other, still cursing.

‘This is the way you show
love
towards one another?’ he says incredulously.

‘No,’ Ryan rasps, splattered with dirt, his hard expression suddenly dissolving. ‘I usually say it with flowers. But flowers are too subtle for someone as pigheaded as she is.’ He turns to me and says warily, ‘Friends?’

‘You know I’d always take a round of Greco-Roman wrestling over flowers, so no hard feelings,’ I shoot back.

Ryan laughs out loud, and some of that horrible edginess that’s been plaguing me all day, like my own personal black cloud, dissipates at the sound.

We smile at each other, and Uriel says disgustedly, ‘I don’t understand you.’

Mateo approaches hesitantly, handing us each a bottle of water and a plastic plate loaded with food from the pack: slices of fresh bread topped with torn pieces of a soft, white cheese, with a side of some colourful-looking salad involving potato and cucumber, sliced onion, beetroot and mayo. I see him take in Ryan’s forlorn appearance, before his eyes slide uncomfortably away from me, from Uri — completely dry and neat as two new pins.

Uriel and I exchange glances of our own.

‘The food looks lovely, Mateo,’ I say casually, ‘but how about you and Ryan take a little more of ours? Uri and I are still working off breakfast.’

Mateo looks down sharply at what’s left on my plate, on Uri’s, after we’ve redistributed most of our food to the two of them. But though he’s clearly dying to point out that we must have worked up some kind of appetite after hiking for almost three hours straight without stopping, he doesn’t. Perhaps out of a natural sense of tact, or to maintain the growing fiction that there’s nothing remotely screwy about either Uriel or myself.

When the two men are done eating, Uriel rises immediately and his voice is commanding as he says, ‘When we reach Machu Picchu, Mateo, leave us. Take as many of the other guides and porters and tourists with you as you can. Make directly for the car park you talked of last night, the buses to Aguas Calientes.
Do not linger
.’ Uriel doesn’t actually add:
If you want to live
. But it’s in his voice.

Mateo nods, looking troubled as he stows the remains of our meal in the pack. ‘There will be hardly anyone on the mountain today. It should be easy, what you ask for.’

‘A good day, then, for us to pay a visit,’ Uriel replies calmly, hoisting the pack onto his broad shoulders. He turns and looks at Ryan for a moment. ‘As for you, do as your “will” dictates. Just keep yourself alive, or there will be no living with this one,’ he indicates me brusquely, ‘ever again. Got that?’

Then he turns and walks away swiftly, silently.

For a time, our route through the forest is meandering, almost easy. But then the paved roadway transforms back into a steep staircase that’s exposed once more to the elements. We find ourselves battling uphill through a curtain of rain upon a slick and infinitely more treacherous surface: Mateo in the lead, followed by Uriel, then Ryan and I, side by side, because to be any other way, we’ve come to realise, feels wrong.

‘I don’t even know what day it is today,’ Ryan mutters, his hands balled into fists in his pockets in a vain attempt to keep his fingers warm.

‘Friday,’ I say unerringly.

‘Friday in Peru,’ he mumbles in disbelief.

I hear him give a gasp as the forest to our right suddenly falls away into thin air and we’re staring down a huge cliff face into absolute space. Then we enter more ruins — like standing stones situated upon the crest of a ridge — and Mateo calls out from just beyond them, ‘Inti Punku! The Gateway of the Sun!’ and we look left through the gate, and down, and we see it at last.

A sprawling complex of ruined stone buildings that lies across the saddle between two mountains, a sheer drop on two sides into deep valleys, a towering mountain peak at its back. The city of Machu Picchu.

As we look down in awe, the rain abruptly stops. The absence of sound is almost disorientating, the silence so intense it feels as if I’ve momentarily lost my hearing. The heavy pall of cloud that hangs low over the mountain peak framing the city seems suddenly lit up from within, as if the sun is trying desperately to break through.

The cloudy sky is steel grey shot through with silver as we begin our descent down a narrow walkway paved with large flagstones. The zigzagging scar of some modern roadway defaces the steep hillside to our right, a bus — tiny from this distance — travelling back down it. We begin to pass outlying walls and buildings, and it’s around 1 pm when we hit the heart of the city. There are stone structures in almost every direction, situated along wide plazas or separated by a multitude of walkways, fountains, ramparts, lookouts, dividing walls, most open to the sky. It’s impossible to get a feel for things, or to know what we’re even looking at, but I understand what Uriel meant when he said the place reeked of blood and power. The city fell silent centuries ago, but if I listen hard enough, I can almost hear ritual and violence emanating from the stone itself.

The path seems to end at a great three-sided structure, and as Ryan and I reach Uriel and Mateo, I glimpse a few people moving about the complex. I see flashes of colour, feel shifts in energy eddying around me, but nothing I can really put my finger on. Just a pervading sense of menace.

‘Where to now?’ Ryan wheezes.

Uriel scans the area uneasily. ‘Everywhere. We walk every inch of this place until we feel something, see something. He’s still here, I know he is. They haven’t moved him.’

‘That doesn’t strike you as weird?’ I ask quietly.

He shakes his head. ‘I was always supposed to return, Mercy. It was always a trap. In the end, there will be no hiding what we are. All we’ve done by coming here on foot is to buy ourselves a little more time, some slight advantage. The “
gringo
” was wiser than I gave him credit for.’

Behind Uri’s back, Ryan raises his eyebrows and I have to smile.

‘Luc’s forces will have to work out who we are before they can deal with us,’ Uriel murmurs. ‘They have to find us first. And while they’re looking, we need to locate Gabriel.’

‘It’s a pretty big place,’ Ryan says.

Uri sighs as he considers the elevated structures to the west of us, then below us to the east. ‘There’s no scientific way to do this. We take as long as it takes to find him.’

His eyes fall on Mateo, still standing there, listening to us talk.

‘Go with our thanks, Mateo,’ Uriel says quietly but commandingly. ‘Find your compatriots, tell them to get their charges back down to the buses. It is no longer safe for you here.’

Mateo nods and starts to walk away, before turning and saying hesitantly, ‘The children made me promise to ask what it was that brought “Ayar Awqa” to Machu Picchu. What should I tell them,
señor
?’

Uriel and I exchange glances, before Uriel replies softly, ‘Tell the children that he came to seek his brother, upon the mountain.’

Mateo’s eyes widen in surprise. ‘Lost?’ he exclaims. ‘Here?’

‘If someone were to be held here, against his will,’ I say, because it has to be worth a shot, ‘where would he be?’

‘How could he know?’ Uriel says exasperatedly. ‘Let us waste no more time, Mercy. What slight advantage we have is slipping away.’

‘Held how?’ Mateo asks.

‘Bound in some way,’ I reply. ‘Tied up.’

Mateo’s face clears immediately. ‘But that is easy. It is like a riddle, a puzzle, yes? Like you, like him.’ He indicates Uriel. ‘I will take you there, follow me.’

The three of us look at each other, scarcely daring to hope.

Mateo descends quickly through street after street of ruins, until we find ourselves loosely ringed around a strangely configured stone that’s been roped off to prevent people touching it. It’s irregular in shape, with a diameter wider than a man is tall; a broad, stepped area, almost like a bench, cut out of one side; a protuberance of rock — like a blunt finger — pointing up out of it towards the sky. The stone stands above a frightening precipice, framed by cloud.

Uriel says suspiciously, ‘What is this?’

‘Its name is Intiwatana,’ Mateo answers eagerly. ‘You understand our language,
señor
, so its meaning will be clear to you.’

‘But not to me,’ Ryan says apologetically, taking a drink from the bottled water in his pack.

‘It means, literally, “sun-tying-place”,’ Uriel murmurs, walking around the curious stone. ‘The instrument to which you tie up, or hitch, the sun.’

‘How can you be sure this is the place?’ I ask Mateo, feeling nothing more than that general sense of unease.

‘This stone has magical properties,’ he replies. ‘It was built so that on certain days of the year, when the sun stands directly above the stone, it casts no shadow at all. If your brother is like you, then this is the place.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ Ryan says. ‘There’s nothing here but this rock.’

Mateo points at the ground at my feet, at Uriel’s, and I see Ryan’s face change as he works out what Mateo’s trying to tell us.

Since we left Milan, the sun has barely touched my skin, or has touched it so fleetingly that I never felt its warmth. But here, upon this windswept plateau, its light finally struggles through the cloud. And as its rays move across the face of the stone called Intiwatana, across all of us standing here, I see what Mateo saw before any of us did. There are four people present, but only two cast shadows upon the ground.

Uriel and I glance at each other sharply.

‘The Inca believed this stone held the sun in the sky. If he is your brother,’ Mateo insists, ‘then he, too, is a creature of the sun, bound to this place.’

‘Superstition,’ Uriel scoffs, saying out loud exactly what I’m thinking. ‘How could he be here? I don’t feel anything —’

But then, as if in reply, the earth begins to roar, it begins to tremble, and I hear distant screams, the sound of buckling stone, of thousands of roof tiles falling and shattering in the streets. I hear Mateo’s cries, Ryan’s, as they struggle to remain on their feet in a shifting, rending world.

There’s something else, too: like the sound of steel on steel, something fleeting, but so discordant and sharp that it resonates painfully within me, makes me want to claw at my head in agony.

Uriel gasps aloud, similarly afflicted, as the brief sound recurs, then recurs again, and again. Something’s coming, something fast. A whole bunch of somethings, erupting from everywhere, but nowhere, all at once.

‘Ryan!’ I yell through the roar of the physical world being torn apart, through the searing pain in my head. ‘Mateo! Lead your people to safety! Find them, get them out.’

Mateo nods, already turning, but Ryan hesitates, crippled by his loyalty to me.

‘Every one of them could be your sister, your mother, your father!’ I cry. ‘Don’t just let the bad stuff happen, Ryan. It’s penalty time. Every action counts. We have to do what we can with the abilities we’ve got, don’t you see?’

And I see that he gets in an instant what has taken me lifetimes to figure out.

As Ryan and Mateo stumble back up the stairs, a heavy white fog rolls towards the lip of the plateau that Uriel and I occupy. Even as we watch, it begins to ascend
up
the terraces of Machu Picchu, blanketing everything in its path, turning the air an unnatural white that has a tinge of grey, like contagion, at its heart.

Demonsign
. Uriel’s voice is like a breath of fire in my mind.

Then, without warning, out of that fog sweeps a wraith. It leaps onto the plateau, ghostly braids streaming about its skull-like face, a star-shaped stone axe raised high, mouth stretched in an undying scream. I can see the outline of the man it once was, but the face and form are indistinct, shredding and re-forming like the fog that surrounds us.

Uriel and I are between the wraith and the stone. I see the thing’s head questing from side to side as if it’s deciding which of us to take first with its ghostly axe.

Uriel puts his arm around me and pulls me close, as if he’s Gerry McEntee from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I’m Estelle Jablonski of Mississauga, Canada, and we’re lost together in the fog.

Hold your nerve
, he roars in my head.
Do not shift
.

The creature throws itself at us, through us — like shards of glass, or a handful of nails — and is gone, subsumed forever by our peculiar energy.
Daemonium
of this kind are no match for us. The ones that wear faces are the ones we fear.

And then an army of wraiths comes boiling over the edge of the plateau, a legion of the violent, mindless dead. Surrounding us, momentarily, like a milling herd of shredded, shredding energy. Those that touch Uriel or me vanish like ether, but hundreds remain. Each one distinct, each one once a man.

Suddenly, as if startled, they flow away, as one, into the trembling streets of the city that once was theirs when they yet lived, mouths stretched wide in silent, ravening screams, taking the unnatural fog with them.

When Uriel releases me from his hold, the roped-off stone lies exposed beneath weak sunlight, and the earth is no longer shaking.

He and I circle the rock warily, studying it, and I tell him of what was done to Nuriel; the forms of punishment that were visited on Jegudiel and Selaphiel.

‘If he’s in there,’ I say, ‘he may be compromised. Don’t touch him until you’re sure he’s clean.’

Uriel nods grimly, then leaps lightly over the guard rope onto the upper surface of the stone. He places his right hand upon the granite, effortlessly reaching through and into it, before declaring in ringing tones, ‘
Libera eum!
’

Nothing. Nothing but storm cloud moving in from the northeast, and the lonely shriek of a hunting bird drifting through the valley below us.

Uriel withdraws his arm from the stone and I watch his forearm, the fingers of his hand re-form in an instant into apparent solidity.

‘I’ll take the western reaches,’ he says finally, ‘including the lower terraces. You take this side, and we’ll meet back in the middle, near that structure where the path of flagstones ended.’

Uriel — still in his human guise — takes the stairs at a run and is soon lost in the rolling fog above me.

I enter the fog with reluctance; it seems almost impenetrable, even to my eyes. It sucks and eddies around my ankles like a tide, draws its weblike tendrils across my face. Trapezoidal doorways and windows loom up in front of me without warning. All sound seems deadened in the roiling, cloudy atmosphere. I could be the only thing alive on this mountain.

Then the hallucinations start. Snatches of past lives, old demons, stalking me through the streets of the city. I hear Ezra’s husband’s voice calling her
slut
and
whore
, the dull sound of fist and open palm meeting flesh, a woman’s scream. A baby cries, the sound weak and thin, high from hunger and withdrawal, and I know that it’s Lucy’s baby. I can’t escape the crying, try to outrun it. But I lose my footing by a gaping building with walls stained red with earth or old blood, and Susannah’s mother roars at me from out of the darkness inside: ‘You ruined my life, you little bitch! I wish you’d never been born.’ But as I pick myself up clumsily, gripped in the cold fear of memory, I hear her sob, ‘Come back, come back! I didn’t mean it, oh, how could I? I’m sick,
so sick
.’

Her voice pursues me as I stumble past a row of houses with trapezoidal rooms, scrambling almost on all fours up the staircase beyond them only to hear Lauren say quietly, ‘I’ve been in hell. Am in hell. And now you are, too. You get used to it,’ she calls after me. ‘Used to it.’

Then I’m lurching uphill, struggling to get away from them all, heading on autopilot towards the place where I’m supposed to meet Uriel, trying to outrun memory. But my own sneering words come back at me in Lela’s gentle voice, and stop me in my tracks. ‘You’ll never get out of here alive, you know,’ I hear myself say.