The Hounds of Avalon (Gollancz S.F.) (24 page)

‘“Far and away and here”?’ Hal checked to see if Bearskin was joking, but he seemed quite serious.

‘Aye. It’s as good as any.’

Hal said his goodbyes and slipped out into the night. It was even colder than it had been earlier, and the chill was exacerbated by the beer. Overhead, Petronus’s glittery trail darted back and forth. Hal pulled his coat around him and trudged in the direction of his quarters, surprised that he felt more alive than he had done in
years. Everywhere felt so magical, the dreaming city alive with wonder.

Moments of ice, moments of heat.

Fate has a strange way of intruding into lives. It’s possible on occasion to trace back the compounded good fortune of a well-lived life to one event that, if whipped away, would have changed everything that came after to such a degree that the life would not have been even half as well lived; perhaps it would have been quite miserable. The whole edifice of wellbeing built on one random incident. Hunter found the capriciousness shudder-inducing. Walk a little slower, indulge yourself with a more lingering glance at something that has caught your eye, and everything could be different; everything could be bad. The only way it became bearable was if you believed that the universe inherently looked after the living creatures that inhabited it, and that the mechanics of the system would always pull towards the best possible outcome. Hunter liked to think that was true; he had enough evidence from many of the lives around him to consider it to be so. But he was never sure.

Case in point: seven years earlier, a late screening of
It’s A Wonderful Life
at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in London. Hunter had come out of a long meeting at the MI6 offices at Vauxhall profoundly depressed. For the first time, it had felt as if
his life was slipping into shadow. There had been the incident in Bosnia, one terrible act committed for the greater good; and then the briefing – at which, he recalled, Reid had been a very junior but highly ambitious attendee. The list of potential hotspots was followed by details of Hunter’s next three missions; no feeling human being should have been asked to undertake them, but Hunter had accepted them without batting an eye. It was simply the path he was on.

And so he had wandered, lost in thought. He could have gone into the nearest pub to drown himself in Jack Daniel’s, and then on to the brothel in Battersea, which had been his intention. But something made him pause outside the NFT, with its poster of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. A moment later he had bought a ticket and was fumbling in the dark to find a seat.

The film had washed over him, his thoughts too bleak to take it in. But on the way out, he had been following a young man with a large briefcase that had burst open, spilling files all over the foyer. As Hunter helped collect them up, his barbed small talk and louche attitude had been deflected by the young man’s intense nature. Hunter had felt some inexplicable but profound connection with the dark, troubled depths in the stranger’s eyes and when he discovered that they both shared a Government background, Hunter had persuaded the man to go for a drink. As was Hunter’s style, one drink had become many and by the time Hunter had left his acquaintance on the doorstep, vomiting, the basis of a friendship had been formed.

The young man, Hal, had been Hunter’s turning point towards a life well lived. It would be too glib to say that Hal had reset Hunter’s priorities, but certainly in Hal Hunter saw some kind of redemption. When the Fall came, Hal had been ahead of the game, reading the signs, briefing Hunter on the re-emergence of the supernatural while others in the Government had laughed and protested that it was some sort of disinformation campaign to camouflage a terrorist attack. And when the Battle of London had finally burst with devastating ferocity, it was Hal who had convinced Hunter to leave the city to the warring gods and monsters, and to the monstrous beasts that had destroyed whole sections of it with the fiery blasts of their breath. Most of their colleagues had died in the atrocity that had befallen Parliament and
Whitehall. And as he had stood on Hampstead Heath looking over the raging fires and plumes of black smoke, Hunter had clapped an arm around Hal’s shoulders and proclaimed that he owed his life to Hal; jokingly, of course, but he had meant it all the same.

They were like two very different halves of the same person, each with their own individual quirks and characteristics, which, when brought together, made a much better whole. They both knew it, and they both knew they were lucky to have found a deep and abiding friendship in the small details of their lives, because it was quite obvious they couldn’t exist without each other.

Heat, flaring intensely, giving way to excruciating pain. Hunter’s thoughts jolted out of their deep introspection into a monochrome world. White snowflakes drifting dreamily down against blackness. White snow all around, black patches obscuring it here and there: heads, legs, arms and blasted tree branches, chunks of rock and earth. His thoughts swirled, desperate to get back to the cocoon of memory.

Someone was tugging at him.

‘Come. You cannot stay here.’ The voice was like shattering glass.

‘Where … where am I?’ Hunter was surprised to hear how weak and sluggish his voice sounded, as if he was coming out of a three-day bender.

‘Come.’

Pain lanced through every part of Hunter’s body as he was lifted effortlessly. It cleared his mind enough for him to realise that he was shaking with cold and shock; he blacked out instantly.

Samantha was kissing him passionately, and he was feeling emotions that had not been stirred for many a year. He’d always liked Samantha, but he would never have guessed she would ever trigger those kinds of feelings. He wanted to kiss her again and again, but the sensation was drifting away to be replaced by more white, everywhere white …

Hunter emerged into the harshness of the world, still so cold that he could barely feel his body. He was in a sheltered spot that protected him on three sides from the harshest blasts of the gale. Before him,
snow-blanketed hillsides rolled away into valleys. More snow was falling.

The battle. The ghost-flight. The shell falling. Memories and all their accompanying sensations rushed back with such force that he jolted against the rocky outcropping that surrounded him. Once again he felt that instant of horrific realisation rip through him when he had appeared back in his body just as the explosion threw him through the air. How had he survived? Hunter quickly checked his limbs – all present and intact, a miracle in itself – but his fatigues were shredded and covered with an inordinate amount of dried blood.

‘The Pendragon Spirit is already healing you.’

Hunter started at the same breaking-glass tones he thought had previously come to him in a dream. The voice emanated from the direction of a deep snowdrift. Slowly his hand searched for his gun; it wasn’t there, nor was his knife. Two red circles appeared in the snow. They disappeared, returned, and Hunter realised with shock that he was looking into a pair of eyes.

What he had taken to be a snowdrift rose up to reveal itself as a strange creature with a crab-shaped head atop the body of a man. It was clad in tattered rags that blew back and forth like the trailing appendages of a jellyfish. Both the physical form and the clothes were so white that they merged perfectly with the surrounding snow.

Hunter bunched his fists, though he didn’t have the energy to fight.

‘I am a friend,’ the creature said.

Hunter weighed this, decided it was probably true. ‘You’re the one who dragged me off the battlefield.’

‘I was walking the hillsides in my search when I saw you blazing like a blue star. But your fire was dying.’

‘I was freezing to death.’

‘Yes. This world has grown very cold, and your injuries were grave.’

‘Hunter checked his limbs again, puzzled. ‘Just scratches.’

‘Now. But not earlier. I brought you to shelter so that the Pendragon Spirit would have time to heal you.’

‘Right. I grew myself some new limbs. I always knew that skill would come in handy one day.’ Hunter’s mind was already racing
ahead: he had to get back to debrief. All the information he had garnered about the enemy would be vital. ‘What are you?’ he asked obliquely.

‘I am Moyaanisqui, sometimes called the White Walker. I search for the Cailleach Bheur. She has unleashed the Fimbulwinter in anticipation of the End-Times. She is near. Have you seen her?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Thanks for saving me and all, and not that I’m ungrateful, but I need to get out of here.’ Hunter could feel his strength returning with each passing moment; it felt like a trickle of electricity bringing life to his limbs and his thought processes. There was something so clearly unnatural about the sensation that he paused to reflect once more on what had happened. ‘What did you just say … the Pendragon Spirit?’

‘The Blue Fire. It burns within you.’

Hunter examined his hands. A scratch he had seen moments before had now disappeared. ‘What’s happened to me?’

‘I met one of your kind in recent times,’ the White Walker said, ‘in the Far Lands. But she had ice inside her, where in you the fire burns clearly.’

‘What do you mean, “one of my kind”? A human? The Far Lands … is that … the Otherworld?’ His mind raced even faster.

‘Yes, a Fragile Creature. She was the first of your kind I had met. But she was not like the others with her. She was special – like you.’

In the deep caverns of Hunter’s subconscious, something stirred. The information the White Walker was imparting was something he already knew instinctively, although he had no idea how.

‘Since my encounter with her, I have learned more of your kind,’ the White Walker continued. ‘Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. You are one of the Five.’

Blue sparks flared in Hunter’s mind, and for a second he thought he might black out again.
Impossible
, he thought.
Coincidence
, and a score more denials, but he knew it was true. Suddenly the world looked a different place, his whole life turned on its head. He needed time to think about what it all meant. Glancing rapidly around, he searched the bleak hillsides. All roads had been obscured; there was no sign of life.

‘Can you help me to get out of here?’ he asked.

‘I need to find the Cailleach Bheur,’ the White Walker said hesitantly.

Hunter struggled to pull himself up the rocks to his feet. He wouldn’t be able to get far in his current condition.

The White Walker reached forward with fingers that resembled hoar-frosted icicles and grabbed Hunter’s hand. The touch was so cold that Hunter felt it sink deep into his bones. ‘Come, then,’ the White Walker said. ‘I will take you, for how could I refuse such a source of wonder?’

Hunter found himself lifted effortlessly on to the White Walker’s back. Flickers of frost crusted Hunter’s eyelashes. The cold infused every part of his body until it seemed as though the whole world had turned white.

The White Walker set off down the slope with a fast, loping gait. The Scottish countryside fell by in a blur. Hunter clung on as tightly as he could with fingers he couldn’t feel, yet inside, mysteriously, his soul had started to soar.

They hadn’t gone far when Hunter saw a figure standing on a hilltop nearby. It was indistinct at first, but gradually Hunter made out an old woman with wild hair, like a black crow hunched over against the wind. Clinging on to a tall staff for support, lightning danced around her so that it seemed as if she was at the heart of a storm.

‘That is the Cailleach Bheur, known by some as the Blue Hag,’ the White Walker called above the wind. ‘The one I seek. I will return to beg her to stop the Fimbulwinter.’

In that instant, the cryptic comments the White Walker had made earlier fell into place. ‘She’s causing this weather,’ Hunter noted aloud. ‘And it’s not going to stop, is it?’

‘Not until all the worlds are white, and the only ones left are the Cailleach Bheur and me. As Existence falls into the dark, the winter shall go on for ever.’

Hunter closed his eyes against the knives of the wind and clung on tightly, urging the miles to fall away quickly. Events were turning bad faster than anyone had realised.