It was raining
in Shalereef. Water, black like the sea,
came out of the dark sky in endless torrents.
It gathered in gutters and pipes, showered through rusted holes and over
clogs of moss and weeds. It ran in
channels down the hill, turning each cobblestone into an island and every
street into a river. It had been raining
like this almost constantly, as far as Siren could tell, for about three
months. And what months those three had
been.
She tried to
stick to the shelter of the buildings, where overhanging second storeys created
a pathway a few feet wide, just enough to avoid the worst of the storm. On stormy days in the past one would have
found such shelter filled with citizens, a crush of bodies, so that anyone
wanting to get anywhere quickly would have to brave the middle of the street,
with the rain and the carriages and the horse dung. Not so today.
Today Siren walked alone.
The streets
were not completely deserted, of course.
The knights of the city guard could be seen on distant street corners,
their armour hidden beneath dark crimson cloaks. Siren had to duck out of sight anytime they
turned her way. She had had enough
run-ins with them since they began taking orders from their new master and she
really didn't have time for another one now.
In this manner
she slowly made her way through the dismal streets, towards the destination she
had sought all these long, long months.
The last time
Siren visited it Mouldthicket Avenue had been depressing and run down, despite
its grandeur. Now it had an atmosphere
of quiet, deserted despair which was only emphasised by the constant rain and
the occasionally rippling shadow of a tentacle in the clouds above. Number 335 had lost a few more slates and the
blood red ivy which had covered the north wing before now stretched across most
of the facade, more sickly and disturbing than ever. Siren kept having the impression that it was
twitching slightly out of the corner of her eye.
The front door
was much as she remembered it, although the dragonish door knocker had been
pulled too hard at some point in the past few months so that is hung at an odd
angle from only one screw. A quick tap
revealed that it was still capable of doing what was required of it, whilst a
second, booming knock revealed that no one was going to answer it regardless.
Siren wandered along the front of the house, peering
in through windows to reveal dusty interiors beyond - so unlike the tidy way
Miss. Barkcastle liked things to be.
Books were strewn about the drawing room, cupboards had been upended in
the sitting room and the carpet in the dining room had been torn up in patches,
as if by something with particularly terrible claws. Of any current inhabitants, either living or
dead, there was no sign.
Siren leaned
against the wall near the front door after she had completed her circuit and
let out a sigh of frustration. I was
sure they were going to be here, she thought, but I guess it's back to the
drawing board, again...
She pushed away from the wall and was about to make her
way back onto the avenue when something unusual caught her eye: a pattern in the
paving which lead around the house. At
first glance it appeared to be another merely decorative feature of a grand
house, but what had caught Siren's eye was that the pattern was inlaid dark
against the pale stone; very dark, almost black - and it caught the light in a
strange way, glittering slightly, tiny particles reflecting green, though the
sky was covered in clouds and there was no bright greenery left in the
garden. It was almost as if the paving
design had been made with a mixture of cement and black sand. It was regular, but didn’t match with the
rest of the paving pattern, instead forming an obvious loop around the mansion
and which did not continue in the section of the paving which lead to the
street.
She retraced her steps, following the pattern all
around the building until she reached a section in the back garden where the
entwining lines of sparkling black joined together from each wing of the house
and disappeared along a section of paving leading through an arch into a
walled-off section of the garden. After confirming
that the rest of the pattern did indeed continue all around the house, she made
her way back to this path and began to explore.
The walled garden turned out to contain a hedge
maze, but apparently not a very difficult one since the twisting pattern of
black sand only followed one path and so Siren was not easily misled by
alternative routes. At least, that’s
what Siren thought as she followed her way deeper into the tall, dark passages
between the hedges. When the pattern in
the paving suddenly vanished through the hedge wall, however, she realised it
wasn’t going to be that simple after all.
She spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes retracing
her steps, trying other pathways and looking for the point where the pattern
re-emerged on the other side of a hedge wall.
Eventually she gave up, returned to the original end of the trail, drew
out her knife and carved a doorway through the hedge. It took some time as the bush the hedge was
made of was old and sturdy, but the activity helped her to take out some of her
frustration and, once she had made enough space to get through and reach the
other side, she quickly realised that, aside from there being some mechanism
which might have opened a doorway for her, there really was no other way
through.
She stood on the pattern paving, on the other side
of the hedge maze, the hedge stretching the full width of the garden of number
335 Mouldthicket Avenue. Beyond there
was a very narrow area between the hedge and the wall and here the pattern
ended above a large brass disc, like a decorative manhole, out of which stood a
tall metal pedestal with a bowl on top.
The lines of the patter entwined the pedestal and
came to a stop at either side of the metal bowl. Siren stared at it for a moment in wonder,
for she knew exactly what she was looking at.
It was the primer for an hypostatick circuit.
Reaching into a pouch on her belt, Siren withdrew a
small handful of black sand and poured it into the bowl, making sure that the
pile of slightly sparkling grains matched up with the twin lines of black on
either side. Then she placed her hand
over the sand and began to concentrate.
At first nothing happened and for a few moments Siren stood with her
eyes closed in the rain, not even succeeding in getting wetter since she was
already drenched and her black hair – blonde roots now visible from underneath
her hat – was matted to the sides of her face.
Then the sand began to glow and a green light spread from the bowl, down
the sides of the brass pedestal and along the path towards the house.
Lightning flashed and thunder rolled as Siren
continued to let her own hypostatick energy feed the circuit. She could feel herself getting colder and, as
she opened her eyes after a particularly loud, boom of thunder – the afterglow
of its lightning still in the sky, she saw the tips of tentacles began to
descend through the clouds towards her.
I really hope
this doesn’t take too much longer, she thought, but tried to focus all of
her energy and attention on the brass bowl.
She wasn’t sure if she would know if the circuit had
completed its function, but when there was a sudden loud whistling sound and
then a bell began to chime from a tower to the rear of the house, she knew she
could stop. She pulled her hand away
from the bowl willingly and the glow vanished.
The tentacles, however, continued to writhe towards the house.
Now what?
she wondered, starting to panic as the monstrous limbs drew nearer, What did I just do?
She glanced down at the brass dais beneath her, but
nothing there had changed. As her eyes
followed the lines of black sand in the cement of the paving away from that,
she realised that whatever she had changed it had to be back at the house.
A quick glance at the thick, sinuous lines in the
sky silhouetted against the lightning told her that she had better start
running. She tore through the hedge,
barely turned corners in the maze in her haste to get back to the house and the
still tolling bell. She emerged in the
garden on the other side covered in scratches and with privet leaves caught in
her hair.
The house loomed before her, lit by lightning and
still reverberating with the solemn chime of the bell which sounded like it was
coming from a tower in the east wing.
She glanced up towards it, but saw nothing obvious which told her what
its significance was. The first of the
tentacles had almost reached it.
She dashed around the front of the house and heard
the bell ring one last time before there was a crash of crumbling stone and
falling masonry and deep, metallic groan as the bell and all its machinery were
pulled out of the tower.
Now she knew she was in real danger. The tentacles would be after her next, as the
source of the sudden spike of hypostatick energy that had drawn their attention
in the first place. There was a house
between her and them, of course, but when what you’re evading at the tentacles
of a gigantic, world-spanning elder god, little things like houses and
directions of approach mattered little.
She could hear the nearest tentacles tearing through the roof of the
house on the one side, whilst a quick glance at the sky behind her revealed
more were coming.
To compound matters a sudden flash of lightning
revealed a pair of knights approaching down the street, their crimson cloaks
billowing in the sudden storm wind.
I have to get
inside, Siren realised, then, glancing at the collapsing roof of the east
wing added, and I have to hope that
whatever I did will give me a way out once I’m there.
She charged the front door, taking it down in two
swift kicks and one shoulder barge.
Inside she was faced with the main hall, filled with doors and stairways
and no obvious way to proceed. The
ceiling groaned as the stones of the upper storey began to collapse in upon
them and part of the plasterwork exploded in cloud of dust and debris. The violent shaking of the house caused the
doors to rattle free of their hinges and a door beneath the stairs swung wide
to reveal a faint greenish glow coming from within. There was nothing for it but to run.
Siren dashed into the tiny stairwell leading into
the basement coughing a spluttering as a cloud of dust followed her through the
doorway. Ahead the glow she had seen
moments before was pulsing slightly brighter and she hurried down the steps
towards her. All about her the house
seemed to be creaking and rumbling and she was sure that it was all going to
collapse in on her at any second. She
leapt the last few steps and found herself facing a glowing circular emblem on
the brick wall before her, its light strengthening and weakening at a rate like
a calm heartbeat, something Siren knew next to nothing about right then.
Masonry clattered down the stairs behind her,
sending yet another cloud of dust out around her and obscuring the dim light
from the wall. She took a step towards
where it had been, felt something get warmer beneath her hands and then she was
walking through a large circular doorway into a dimly lit corridor beyond. She hopped through, grabbed the door and then
quickly pushed it shut again behind her and not a moment too soon. There was a horrendous crashing sound from
the other side as the ground floor fell in under the pressure of the attack
from above. Several more crashes
followed as something thrashed about through the debris, then the sound of
something slick, sliding away, dust filling the places where it had been and,
at last, silence.
Siren took a deep breath, let her heartbeat slow a
little, then turned away long the corridor.
It appeared to lead for some distance away from the house, but there was
definitely something happening at the other end, for Siren was sure she could
detect the smell freshly cooked toast drifting towards her and that could
really mean only one thing.
Awesome start!! Yay Siren!
ReplyDeleteAnd I was going to complain about the paucity of toast, but it does show up at the end, so I'm happy.