Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(71)

“I thought you were a goner,” Saul said. His lips felt numb.

“I thought you were a clever man, and I was right.” Randolph gave him a quick grin. There was blood outlining his teeth. “The unenlightened man brings light, indeed. Can you keep that up?”

“I don’t know.”

The laughter came again, a deep mad throbbing sound, as Sam clambered out of the pit. The light had faded to normal intensity now, as though it were merely day. Saul wasn’t sure if he could do it again. His mouth was bitter with green leaves, his fingers cramping in the abused soil, and he could feel a debilitating weakness through his muscles. Apparently this power had a price.

“Of course he can’t, after the day he’s had. Come to that, I can’t do much more greenery and nor can you, Randolph,” Sam said. “We’re retreating to the bridge. Up you get, Saul.”

“Will the light stop if I do?”

The fen-grendels were moving with purpose now, not pain. There was a surge of movement like the sway of waterweed, and a wave of them tumbled up the other side of the pit, just as reaching claws scratched the ground on Saul’s side, and caught, and held.

“Let’s risk it,” Randolph said. “Up.”

Saul grabbed two fistfuls of earth and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. The three of them retreated, backing toward the bridge as the first of the fen-grendels gained its footing and stood straight.

It was about six feet tall, its arms hanging to its knees, great hands twice the size they should have been and tipped with curving claws. It was bedraggled green-brown, wet and stinking, and when it looked at Saul and opened its mouth in a long hiss, he saw all the teeth in the world.

There were about a hundred of them in the pit, and more coming, endlessly more. He could feel it, as though the well tunnel became a gullet, into the belly of something foul and ancient and stirring.

“Bastard’s waking up,” Randolph said. “You’re the Walker. Can we break the bridge?”

“Not from the other side,” Saul said, realising the truth of that as he spoke, as though reciting a long-ago lesson. “Nothing could. It’s made to last. I—rather think I could close it off from here, though.”

“No,” Randolph said, “because that leaves you on the wrong fucking side. Saul—”

Saul stared at the pit. There were more fen-grendels climbing out, and those on the ground were spreading, forming a line with rudimentary military cunning. They wouldn’t attack in single file to be picked off; it would take just one rush. “You go.”

“No.”

“They’re coming. If they cross the bridge—” He imagined the marshweed things with needle teeth crawling London’s streets, lurking in gutters and ditches, infesting the river, spreading, spreading everywhere, with the malevolent intelligence of the Master of London rising up behind them. “Go!”

“Sod your heroics.” Randolph’s hand landed on Saul’s shoulder. “I got you into this. Clear off, Sam, we’ll handle it. And thank you. It’s been a pleasure.”

“Randolph, no.” There was anguish in Sam’s voice. “We need you on this side.”

“But I need to be on this one,” Randolph said. “Shift yourself. Saul, break the bridge, whatever it takes. Now.”

The unnatural day was twilight now, fading fast. The fen-grendels were slinking forward, wary, menacing, growing in number and confidence. Saul dropped to one knee, putting his hand to the earth, feeling Randolph’s touch on his shoulder, steadfast and steadying.

He would break the bridge, cut Camlet Moat off east of the sun, and for all he knew be trapped on this little patch of land for the rest of his life, which he hoped would be numbered in seconds rather than minutes. Trapped with the fen-grendels, and the frustrated Master of London, and Randolph.

“You should go,” he managed.

“Don’t be silly.” Randolph’s fingers tightened. “Finish it.”

“There you are! Sorry we’re late,” announced a cheerful, vaguely familiar voice from the other side of bridge. “Not a cab to be had for ages, then we couldn’t find— Good Lord, what are those things?”

Randolph hauled Saul up one-handed, so hard he was lifted off the ground, and pushed him away with a shove that sent him stumbling. “Get up a tree! You two hold the bridge, the water’s deadly, go!”

Sam sprinted back across the bridge and past Saul, hurling himself up into the branches of an oak like a monkey, clamping his legs around a branch and swinging upside down as Saul clambered up. He was offering a hand to Randolph: naturally the upper-crust sod couldn’t climb a tree. Saul scrambled to the same branch in a couple of movements, and between them they hauled Randolph up, kicking wildly. Saul gasped, “What—”

“Reinforcements,” Sam said. “About time, too.”

“There’s only two of them!” Saul could see them in the remnants of the light: Barney, the cheery junior officer type who’d given him a lift to Randolph’s flat; Max Isaacs, his Cockney manservant. They were standing on the bridge, chatting casually to one another as each stripped off hat and coat and tossed them to the planks of the bridge. They didn’t even have weapons, Saul saw with bewildered horror. Just two men standing in shirtsleeves and braces as the fen-grendels rose from their stalking crouch and moved as one in a wave of marshweed hair, teeth and claws and limbs that surged to the bridge like doom.