Chapter Eleven #2
No flash, or at least none his eyes could detect through their closed lids.
True to Crumley’s word, Duncan felt the iron filings lash at his raised hand and his brow, no worse than wind-driven sand.
Strangled involuntary curse out of Garner, though.
And strange seething sounds from the cairn.
He gave it a couple of seconds, lowered his arm, and opened his eyes.
Unless you knew what to look for, the effect had been undramatic.
But where the stones of the cairn were once smoothly cemented together, now deep cracks ran between them, radiating out from the place Duncan set his bomb.
The glowing runes were in trouble, too, bleeding a thin bluish sleet through their edges, seeming to stain the surrounding stone like a luminous verdigris.
The seething sound, seeming to emanate from the cairn’s core, grew more insistent.
“And what the hell was that?” Garner wanted to know.
Duncan dug out another Fae-fucker and held it up for the other man. “Kegg bomb. As in Crumley and Kegg’s. Combat science. Shape of things to come, apparently.”
Garner snorted. “Those two lunatics! Toys they make, tha wanner to be careful tha donner blow thy own hand off.”
Duncan put the bomb away again. Nodded at the cairn. “Seems to have worked, though, doesn’t it.”
“It’s poisoned the binding glamour, for sure. Happy with that?”
“Nope. Here, give me a hand.” Duncan set his shoulder to the cairn, waited for Garner to join him. Fitful bluish light from the damaged runes speckled the older man’s face in the dark. “Right. Hard as you can, on three. One, two, three!”
They strained, leaned into it. The cairn shifted, gave with a reluctant grating, subsided a little, slowly at first—
“Harder! Come on!”
Then, with a long, grinding rumble, and a yell of triumph from Duncan, the whole structure collapsed sideways to the ground, individual rocks tumbling and bouncing away, some of them right over the drop-off and into the treetops below.
The two men stood, bent over and panting.
“Right…then,” Garner huffed. “Tha happy…now?”
Duncan straightened up. “Couple of finishing touches yet.”
He surveyed the tumbled field of rubble they’d made, the rough stump of stonework that remained where the cairn had stood. The stubborn dying glimmer of a few glyphs in the mess. He cast a glance around at the nearby trees.
Then he opened his fly and pissed carefully over the stone stump in a gentle back-and-forth figure eight loop. Steam rising off the urine in the autumnal gloom, hiss and patter as it fell. Garner, breath still not fully caught, gaped at him in silence.
Duncan finished, buttoned himself up, then unshipped his pack and dug out a screw-top steel canister of iron filings.
He tipped the contents slowly and steadily over the humbled cairn in the same figure eight loop.
Where it touched them, the dying glyphs went out like blown candles.
Duncan examined his work with the care of a joiner checking a finished table, then he resealed the canister and stowed it again.
He gave Garner a small, preoccupied smile.
The older man shook his head. “Please tell me we’re done.”
“Almost.” Duncan drew the McCulloch from its sheath on the pack, racked a round, and pointed the weapon at one of the nearer trees.
“Lad, what—”
Door-slam bang from the gun. The tree’s foliage rustled, something yelped and fell out.
Duncan, face gone suddenly harsh, stepped forward, racked the gun again, pointed it downward.
Whatever the thing he’d flushed out was, it scrabbled rapidly to its feet in a crouch—glinting eyes, clawed feet and hands, pallid gleaming flesh.
It hissed and bared its teeth at the two men, then fled into the undergrowth with a noisy crash. Duncan watched it go.
“We’re killing tree pixies now?” Garner asked mildly.
“If I’d wanted it dead, it would be. We’re trying to send a message. I just want to make sure the message gets carried.”
“So what now?”
Duncan shrugged. “Now we head back.”
“That’s it? We piss on Meb’s adoption cairn and then just go home?”
“We’ve done enough for now.”
“I thought this were about information?”
“It is. But I don’t think anyone else is going to talk to us tonight.” Duncan gestured at the tumbled cairn. “Not after this. What it will do is stir up—”
He stopped. Cocked his head, oddly lupine, stared away into the gloom under the trees.
“Stir up what?” Garner, brusquely impatient. “Stop thy bloody woolgathering, lad. Stir up what?”
Duncan snapped out of it, turned and peered over the edge of the drop-off instead. “Forget it. You reckon you could navigate us back to Dowgreave from down there?”
Garner came and stood beside him. “Don’t see why not.
There’s Macclesfield”—sighting down his arm, swinging it to point nearer in, gauging—“Wizard’s Oak about…
there. The old Haughton place just north of that.
It’s ruined now, but the farm track takes thee right out into the fields on the south side of St. Edith’s.
Easy enough—once tha make it down in one piece. ”
“Good.”
“I said once tha make it down in one piece.” Eyeing the drop-off mistrustfully.
“But we’re not, lad, we’re up here. That’s a long drop.
Steep, and not much to hang on to on the way down.
Happen we’d scrape our arses raw, if we donner just get in a bloody tumble and break a leg.
Tha have some good reason we conner just go back the way we came? ”
Faintly, through the gloom under the trees behind them—a low, moaning howl. It froze both men in place. It lifted the hairs on the nape of Duncan’s neck.
It didn’t sound that far off.
Duncan gestured.
“That a good enough reason for you?”
—
They ran a hasty check along the edge of the drop-off, found a couple of promising gullies—long, thin earthen scoops in the sandstone cliff wall making a scant few degrees better than vertical, fringed with squat deformed trees and bushes whose branches reached obstinately across the gap.
In the patchy moonlight, it was hard to see what might be waiting for them farther down.
Duncan picked the broader of the two channels, dragged his pack off, and seated himself on the lip.
“This gets my vote,” he said.
Garner glared down the gully. “I conner see a bloody thing down there!”
“Aye, well—like the man says, if you knows of a better ’ole, then go to it.”
“Oh, now tha’re a bloody humorist?”
Another long, drawn-out hunting howl from the Forest behind them. This time, they heard it answered.
“It’s fight here or run, old man.” Duncan got his pack situated between his legs, protecting his groin. “I know which I prefer.”
“Tha knew this was going to happen, then?”
“Aye, well—thought we’d have a little longer than this. Days or hours. Not minutes, anyway. Can’t be helped.”
Strangled, wordless growl from the other man. But you could hear that he was done arguing. Duncan nodded.
“Keep an arm up to shield your face. Lot of brush down there. I’ll see you at the bottom!”
And he shoved himself off the lip.