Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(70)

“Forthlaede!” Sam barked at the same time, and green exploded from a single shaggy fen-thing’s face. “Balls,” he added. “This won’t be enough. Saaamaaa Ritual?”

Randolph shook his head. “No use. They’re native. They’re here.”

“And they’re still coming out,” Saul said.

“So use your words!” Sam snapped.

Randolph spoke. The words shuddered and clanged in Saul’s brain, making his skull vibrate, each of them a hammer blow of iron. He reeled sideways, Sam dropped to a knee for balance, the fen-grendels shrieked cacophonously. And the world lurched, a dreadful thump like a huge heartbeat.

“Jesus wept,” Sam said, rather loudly, as though he’d been deafened. “Don’t do that again.”

“Not planning to.” Randolph sounded somewhat ragged. “That wasn’t a good idea. Fighting fire with fire when what I need is water.”

Sam shone the torch into the pit. The fen-grendels were all hunched over in apparent pain or shock, but they were unquestionably alive, and as Saul watched they started rising to their feet. “They’ll be out of there any moment. And there’s nothing to stop them strolling into London, all teeth and claws. How the devil do we stop that many of them?”

“They’ll have to cross the bridge first,” Saul said.

“They’re amphibious,” Randolph said irritably. “I’m fairly sure they can manage the moat.”

He was still wearing his hat. Saul snatched it off his head, scrambled down the edge of the bank to the moat’s edge, and scooped up as much of the algae-covered water as he could. It seemed to glow faintly. He returned to the edge of the pit, Sam lighting his way with the torchbeam, thought Please be right, and tossed the pint of brackish moat-water over the creatures below.

The scream that erupted was appalling. The fen-grendels heaved and fought to get away as though the water were acid, a movement that urged the seething crowd of them toward the sloping side of the pit furthest from Saul. One of them fell onto the slope, and started to climb with a gibbering cry.

“Forthlaede,” Randolph commanded, and it writhed and screamed as ivy burst from its face, but there were more climbing now. “All right, point made, now stop ruining my hats.”

“The water doesn’t like them,” Sam said. “That’s something. So the Moat will hold them in as long as we can stop them crossing the bridge.”

“At least until Johnny-in-the-well wakes up,” Randolph said. “At which point all bets are off. Where are our reinforcements?”

“Do we have some?” Saul asked, with a flicker of hope.

“Probably lost in the fucking dark,” Randolph said, and then his legs were jerked violently from under him. He crashed downwards into the pit with a scream, and disappeared into the mass of fen-grendels.

Sam bellowed, dropping the torch and hurling himself forward. Saul leapt to where the beam of light shone over the edge of the pit. He couldn’t see anything except heaving bodies and flailing parts—claws, limbs, branches shooting up—and he couldn’t do a damn thing to help Randolph, lost under shrieking devils. Everything was screaming, in pain or triumph or hatred, and he could hear the horrible low chuckling again, around or under him, as the terrible wrongness slowly pulled Camlet Moat apart.

This was his fault, his appalling failure. He’d been the Walker of Camlet Moat for two days and presided only over its death, and now it had taken Randolph too.

Walker, said a silvery breeze by his ear, quiet as the rustle of a leaf, as though he could hear such a thing over the shrieks.

Saul knelt, digging his fingers into the earth, calling on the image of the Moat as it should be in his head. The great ancient power of the endless forest, the purity of the water, the sacred cathedral of trees pierced with dappled sunlight, the bright eyes in the leaves. There had to be something that the Moat could do and he was its Walker, he would be, he was.

He was only sure of one word so he said, whispering it, “Leoht.”

The light was blinding. It was more than day: it was desert light, so bright it hurt, blasting through the ravaged soil. The fen-grendels shrieked and clamoured, scrabbling at the earth as though trying to bury themselves back under the ground. There were, Saul now saw, an awful lot of them. And there were a number not scrabbling or moving, because they seemed to be impaled on wooden stakes. Leafy ones, rising straight and tall in a tiny grove just big enough to hold a man.

“Randolph!” he shouted desperately.

Sam appeared from the other side of the sapling grove with blood running down his face, eyes screwed up against the glare. He wrenched and shouldered the slender branches aside, and bent to haul a long body out from between them.

“No,” Saul whispered, a dreadful fear curling through him. “Please. Please, no. Randolph!”

“Keep that light on,” Sam called up. “Good work. He’s fine.”

Randolph struggled free and rolled away, shoving himself to his knees. “I’m not fucking fine,” he said, extremely testily. “Can we get out of this hole?”

He emerged from the pit in a way that suggested Sam had given him a shove to get him over the edge. His clothes were filthy and ripped, blood seeping through; his face was masked with blood from a vicious tear across his scalp; he was muddy and ichor-stained. He’d never looked better.