Another scream came from the direction of the pub’s toilets. Banging on the shutters and locked doors had reached a demonic crescendo. Through it all came the thud-crack, thud-crack as the defences of the window, next to the hearth, disintegrated under attack. The corner of a blade came through. Then fingers grabbed and tore at the wood, opening the breach wider. Villagers screamed and cowed. Some brandished their makeshift weapons, shuffling from foot to foot, their faces pale as an autumn moon. A few ranted, at Ma, at Herne, or even themselves for not being ready. Which was too true. The earth had at least stopped its shaking, but that seemed only to make their crisis more evident.

  The screaming in the toilet had stopped and was replaced with the sounds of a struggle, involuntary grunts and disconcerting crashes. Ma scanned the bar, trying to formulate a plan. All options were gone. One choice was left to them. Her vision at the world tree ran cold through her veins. She knew as well as anyone that prophetic sight was as reliable as a roll of the dice. Prophecy was as much an offer to travel the path as it was a final destination, and most paths led to more than one place and arrived at different times depending on the minstrel navigating their way. Her mouth ran dry when she told herself that and swallowed the coarse meal of her fear.

  ‘Emma, Aethelred, get your backsides to the bogs and help which ever poor bastard is in there.’ They hesitated. ‘Now, you pillocks! There is no later. Right, the rest of you, if you hadn’t already figured it out, we’re in a fight.’

  ‘She’s right there.’ Grundig Fletcher’s pate leered through the hole in the shutter.

  The double doors bowed against a heavy blow. Several people gasped.

  ‘They’re coming through,’ Ma said. ‘Give them no quarter because they’ll give you none in return. Remember, they aren’t your friends and neighbours anymore. They are Sugnar’s spawn sent to kill you.’

  Fletcher tore one side of the shutters from its hinges. Ma backed along the bar to Judith Sharky as the front doors buckled, and the lowest deadbolt broke under the pressure. Amos Bungy lunged at Fletcher with a cavalry sword they’d purloined from above the fireplace. Fletcher easily avoided the attack and countered with a savage blow of his cleaver to the man’s bicep. A second later, Fletcher slammed his meat hook into Amos’s back and slung him screaming through the window into the waiting arms of hungry Wyrmals.

  In the treacle slow moments before the denizens of the dunes swarmed in, Ma bent to Judith Sharky.

  ‘Here love, take this.’

  She offered Judith a pitchfork, with tines speckled with dirt and chicken shit.

  Judith stared at it. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to see to Jack.’

  Ma’s heart broke. Jack’s face was colourless, but for his dark blue lips, because all the colour had poured from his arm, painting him and his mother red.

  ‘He’s gone, my dear. All I can give you is a chance for revenge.’

  Judith looked at the pitchfork, at Ma, and finally at Grundig Fletcher. A wave of Wyrmals clambered through the window. As Judith’s fist closed around the makeshift weapon, the double doors finally broke open with a crash.

  And the storm rolled in.

  ###

  Oow! Big deal. Some dead bruv’s axe. Sam couldn’t give less of a flying toss. Acid sarcasm at the ready, he was about to say as much, when the psychic cry of the Nar invaded their brains with a savage hiss of steam, chewing their faces into winces of pain.

  The Nar’s hideous forms poured into the chamber, vomiting through the entrance, clambering over one another and erupting from ground and walls like the buboes of a deadly plague. Terry was cut off. Surrounded by the enemy, he swung at them, holding off one flank and giving ground to the other. Tara and Sam’s grandparents formed an all-too-small defensive semi-circle in front of Sam and Tink. At their backs, Sugnar’s great heart gave a deep, pounding double thud.

  Tink pressed close to Sam, gun held by her side, her green eyes moving frantically from dead end to dead end. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Tara glanced back to Sam. In her face, Sam read all the love he’d ever know and all the fear. It said, ‘Sorry, I’ve failed you again.’ He had to look away and face Tink’s despair, and from her to Terry, screaming as the Nar overwhelmed him, pulling him down. To the ghouls of two grandparents he’d never met in life, standing shoulder to shoulder with his mother. To the beating heart of a trapped god, impaled and trapped for eternity by a magical tithe and an axe of his ancestor. The weakened moonthread hung in tatters but remained knotted around the throat of the axe’s handle.

  Sam pulled Tink to face him. If it was a movie, this was the bit where he was supposed to kiss her, deep and passionate on her rosebud lips. But he wasn’t a hero. He was just a scared little boy who’d turned into a petulant teenager. And he’d had enough. All he croaked was, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She seemed not to understand, a single crease appearing between her eyebrows. He swung around to the axe as Tara cracked a bulbous Nar on its fat head.

  He had no idea if this was going to work, and even if it did, he had no idea what would happen.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Tink said as he took the shaft of the axe in both hands.

  ‘Remember when we said fuck it, fuck it all?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tink said uncertainly.

  Tara and Sam’s grandparents were swinging at the first wave of Nar, while the rest of their phalanx formed up behind.

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  ‘You still feel the same?’ Sam said.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Great.’ Sam grunted, heaving with everything he had. The axe wouldn’t budge. His grandmother screamed, with a Nar wrapping its feculent hand around her ankle. Tink joined Sam’s effort, coming beside him, lacing her arms through his to heave as well. Jonathan stamped on the Nar attacking his wife. Its head split like a rotten melon. But for every one they felled they were a dozen more waiting to take its place. Sam and Tink pulled again, as Tara went down and scrambled away from clawing hands.

  Come on, Sam thought. Come on you bastards.

  With a brittle tearing and a powerful sluice of black blood, the axe came free. A great roar silenced the hissing of the Nar and the chamber spasmed, throwing Nar, ghoulish revenants, and humans to the ground.

  The Nar were quiet but not retreating. Their collective gibbering sibilance was returning.

  Lorimer.

  He has the axe.

  What does it mean.

  Nothing. Kill him and we can feed.

  The adults stared at him in confusion. Black blood pulsed forth like tar, spreading out in a thick pool around their feet. Sam hefted the axe in one hand. With the other he found the line of moonthread ensnaring it and lowered the razor’s edge of the axe head to it.

  ‘Don’t! What are you doing?’ Jonathan cried. There was something of Gandalf in the Mines of Moria about it: Fly, you fools!

  ‘Samwise, you can’t,’ Tara spoke softly, holding up a hand palm out, so as not to spook him.

  ‘Why? Because that’s what we’ve always done? Play by someone else’s rules? Be only what someone else lets you be? On and on, in a cycle of dying.’ Half crazed, Sam laughed; ‘Look at you, you don’t even get to die once. And this is our inheritance.’ He gestured to Tink. ‘Maybe we don’t want to be trapped by your past. Maybe that’s all you have been doing. Trapping each other. For what? So you can be safe for a few years? So no one can hurt you? Well, look how that’s turned out.

  In a rippling of realisation, the Nar understood what Sam meant to do.

  Do it.

  Do it.

  Yesssss.

  Tara’s expression changed. The fear and concern softened. She used to have a saying, one she’d lay on when Sam didn’t get a grade, or an opportunity didn’t go his way, or if he was griping messianically about some societal problem or other. ‘You want to change the world, stop moaning, start doing.’ And the look she’d wear when Sam buckled down and came home months later with that better grade was the one wore now. It was all the approval he ever needed.

  Stamping on one end with his foot, he pulled the thread taut with his left hand and swung down with his right. The blade kissed the fine thread and broke its hold on the heart. Sugnar bellowed so loudly, Sam dropped the axe and covered his ears. The world of the dunes tilted as the great Wyrm reared, and Armageddon hastened.

  ###

  Nush’s teeth chattered as she waded thigh-deep through the seawater. Rundleskink wasn’t having the same difficulty. Able to cling to the rough walls above the water line, the elf

  scampered ahead, moonthread and the bells on his shoes tinkling like an annoying itch just beneath the din of gushing water and rumbling earth. With more and more of the tunnel lying beneath water, the faint illumination was weaker still, so that Nush was staggering through an underworld in which light was nothing more than a tormenting suggestion.

  ‘Tarry quicker!’ Rundleskink urged, fretting further down the tunnel.

  ‘I’m tarrying,’ Nush snapped, and waded on muttering, ‘Bloody Michael Lorimer. I’m going to kick you in the nuts if I ever see you.’

  Even over the noise of the water, Rundleskink heard. ‘Don’t blame him but hold on to that thought of him. We may yet need it. Follow me in here. It is a little farther.’ He disappeared into the wall. When Nush got a little closer, she could make out the hole. It was half below the waterline and hidden in shadow. A perfect circle, trimmed with red bricks and neat mortar.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me?’ Nush said to herself because the elf was already splashing in a half-crouch down the tube. Lowering herself into the salt water, she gasped at the frigid embrace. ‘I should… kick you… in the nuts, you… little… git.’

  ‘Yes, yes, much better to blame me. But you’ll be gelding no one if you don’t hurry.’ Rundleskink’s black eyes shone like a cat’s.

  ‘Bollocks!’ Nush said, snaking her way into the tunnel that was more like a large pipe. She shuffled on her elbows and knees, craning to keep her head above the water. The tunnel was a cylinder of brick and mortar, something she could sense by touch instead of seeing, because the light in there was near zero.

  ‘Wait!’ she suddenly cried, the tight space growing claustrophobic. The dark pressed in on her with lascivious hands, wrapping around her throat, constricting her chest. Fear accompanied it, big and black as the night sky and as mountainously heavy. It settled on her, with its unseen forked tongue, licking its pointed fangs, hidden from sight but redolent with gruesomeness in the mind’s eye. All her will drained and with it every ounce of power in her limbs. In the blackness of despair, she began to weep.

  Splashes sounded in the tunnel and a tiny hand came to rest on her shoulder. ‘You must go on. You will not die here. It was not written in the stars,’ Rundleskink said, softly.

  Nush opened her eyes and blinked back her tears. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am a wyrdsmith, Weaver of the Fates. The last of my kind.’

  ‘Okay, but are you sure?’

  The little man hesitated for a fraction of a second. ‘Of course, I am.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘You are fated to fall in love with Michael. It is sewn into the fabric of the universe.’

  ‘But you changed that, didn’t you? You play with fate, don’t you—.’

  ‘We really don’t have time for this. Let’s—’

  ‘You’re avoiding the question. Why should I trust you? Maybe you’re leading me to some other hole in the ground. It’s not as if you don’t’ have a track record.’

  Rundleskink huffed through his nose. ‘Point well made. But I didn’t change your ultimate fate. I have been a fool, holding onto something that I, we, should have let go off long ago. Love is a powerful force, and we did indeed play with it and at times changed its course, but that always leads to other consequences. Consequences I fear have brought us to this calamity. With you and Michael, I merely steered you a little off track for a time. But that fate is still on course to come to pass, if,’ he stressed this last word, ‘we don’t die down here.’

  ‘Alright,’ Nush said. If nothing else, the elf had brought her out of herself enough to shake off the paralysis of fear.

  ‘Excellent,’ Rundleskink said and immediately turned heel and ran back down the tunnel in a stooped gait.

  Nush crawled after him, chaffing her knees and elbows on the rough bricks. Rundleskink was waiting for her at a turn into a brighter side-tunnel, which caused his coal black skin to sheen and his eyes to sparkle wetly.

  ‘It’s through here,’ he shouted.

  But then their underground world spasmed. The roar was deafening. Nush screamed, trying to keep moving. A brick splashed down into the water ahead of her, followed by another, and two more after that. She quickened her pace. Rundleskink beckoned frantically, staggering as the world rattled. In the falling of a black curtain, the tunnel ahead collapsed. It pushed a bow wave back in Nush’s face, choking her. She struggled her head back above the water, clawing for air, sucking in lungfulls and groping and splashing. Jagged rock, compacted soil, and gnarled roots met her touch. It quickly became apparent there was no way through.

  ‘Rundleskink! Rundleskink!’ She listened but no reply came. The water was deeper, more like two-third the depth of the tunnel.

  Claustrophobia and fear loomed once more. Nush back-peddled away. ‘Oh no. Oh fuckity-fuck-fuckit no,’ she whined.

  This simple profane incantation and physical retreat once started, she let it do its work. One knee, one elbow, one swear-word at a time, Nush retreated. At every paroxysm of the earth, she flinched but it did stop her tourettical escape. With each inch she gained, she kept the thought of finally seeing and kicking Michael Lorimer in the nuts firmly in her mind, and she allowed herself the luxury of an imagined kiss as she finally slid out of the tunnel.

  Floundering for a second, she found her feet and discovered the water had risen above her waist. One disaster over, she checked each direction. What did any of it mean? She’d been following Rundleskink and without him she wasn’t just up the proverbial without a paddle. No, it was more like she’d had fallen overboard and was in said effluent up to her tits. In one way, it was a simple decision: right or left. Yet in that binary, either option seemed to be a fatalistic Hail Mary. Back the way they’d come or on in a direction the Wyrdsmith had chosen not to go? Nush was rigid with indecision, until in the distance came the sound of another cave in. That made the decision for her. Nush waded away from the collapse.

  Fate and love were written in the stars, the little coal-black elf had said. Keep the thought of Michael Lorimer in your mind, he said. It wasn’t much of a plan, but that was all she had.

  A reflexive prickle flushed up her spin. She stopped wading and listened. There was the white noise: the splash and flow of water, but behind that wall of sound was something else. A change in volume or pitch maybe. A breeze feathered against her cheeks that wasn’t there before. Nush stopped, ear cocked, and started to turn as the sound grew clearer, like an oncoming train. Louder and louder.

  Not good. Not shagging-well good at all. Nush waded faster, struggling against the weight of water, unable to stop herself checking over her shoulder until she saw it: a surging wall of water engulfing the entire tunnel, floor-to-ceiling.

  ‘Oh, bollocks!’ she said, frozen before her impending demise. She had enough time to take one final huge breath and duck beneath the surface before it swept over her. The torrent snatched her up and carried her away, tumbling head over heels.