Pandaemonium (23 page)

In the dark, in a car park lined with security lights, the horizon is not actually that far away. What I was seeing was as far as I could see, which was right there, immediate, which sometimes just means
very close indeed.

Which was those sweet delicious elvers ready now, rising up.

Who knew that eels could survive out of water? And, hell, why the hell didn’t they ever tell me?

T
HE CAR PARK
had water on two sides: the mill-race between it and the inn, and the river that the race ran into. Not that much of a river, perhaps – you could cross it with a vaulting-pole, easy – but enough. Enough to host a swarm of eel-things, at least.

They’d clogged and overflowed the mill-race, to the point where there was no water in it any more. All the water was spilled out across the car park. I was standing in it. The eels were standing in the stream-bed, rising like cobras from a basket. My feet were probably wetter than they were.

The way out of the car park, the way I’d meant to drive? Meant crossing that little bridge I’d walked over an hour ago.

The bridge with eel-heads risen on either side of it, big enough now to pluck a mortal girl off a motorbike and swallow her whole.

I might fight, mind, from the inside. Might fight my way out, even – but not if those teeth had done their work properly on the way down.

I didn’t fancy making the experiment. They looked reliable, those teeth. Some of us depend on an Aspect, and count ourselves lucky; some just depend on what they’re born with. As far as I could see, these things had no cause for complaint.

I suppose if they’d stayed in the water, they’d all have eaten each other until there was just the one left. The size of a wyrm, that one might have been. Maybe that’s where wyrms came from, maybe they were all survival-of-the-fittest types, evolution in action, making Darwin proud.

If so, they interrupted their natural cycle to come after me. Maybe I should be proud, that they thought I was worth it. Good protein, I guess. Food with benefits. Actually I didn’t think they’d get the benefit of the Aspect, though I might be wrong; and they might think the opposite, if they had the wherewithal to think at all. Right or wrong, it didn’t really matter. People have eaten other people for millennia, in hopes of benefit from their strength or smarts or whatever. Mostly they’ve been disappointed, but it’s never made any difference to the eaten.

So. I was fairly determined, actually, not to become one of the eaten. But there were still a lot of these creatures, despite all the eating each other; and they were huge, and vicious, and coming up out of the water now, squirming across the tarmac to come at me. Eating very definitely on their minds.

Eels are amphibious, I guess. Who knew?

Here they came, anyway. And here I went: back up the steps the way I’d come, to where I’d been before. There’s a tradition in terror, that you run from something scary into something worse, and have to double back. And then hopefully face down what scared you first, maybe even learn a lesson from that. I’m not convinced about the lesson because really you’ve just levelled up, you’re running from a higher grade of terror now, but even so. We cling to our traditions. This way, that way, back again.

Traditionally I suppose I should’ve been screaming, but... Nah. Not even to oblige the tradition.

Back into the annexe, then, which did feel kind of like hopping from one frying-pan to another. Hopefully, though, I wouldn’t have to face down anything. In so far as I had one, my plan was to spend no time at all at the eelface.

Even as I came through the door, the floor reared up ahead of me, like a whale broaching. Wood splintered, slabs of glass shattered and slid across each other, and whoops.

Eelface, right there. In my face.

Do regular mortal eels of usual size look like that, is the Sargasso Sea full of cynical ill-mannered fish popping their heads up to sneer at each other? Should we rename it the Sarcastic Sea?

I don’t know. I don’t even know if eels are fish. I know a pair of boys who’d know that kind of thing, sans internet. Or they’d argue about it, more likely. They argue about everything.

No matter.

The eel’s head was, oh, the size of me. The length of me, of my whole body, from its snout to the back of its skull. I’d still be more than a mouthful, but not much; I was fairly sure it could swallow me whole by now, if I only held still long enough. If I didn’t get tangled up in its teeth.

Those teeth were the nastiest things I’d seen in a while. The length of my forearm, but wicked sharp; inward-curving, to be sure of a good grip, and don’t ask me how it never punctured its own tongue; glossy and foul both at once, the kind of colours you don’t want teeth to be.

The kind of close you don’t want teeth like that to be, right there as it opened wide, reaching for me. They were almost more in my face than its own.

I’d have liked to kick them straight down its throat. I had a really good view of that throat, the way it was waiting for me, gulping slowly in anticipation, grey-green and lubricated with slime. The tongue was long and leathery, lurking behind the teeth. Hunched there, quivering. Poised.

T
HERE MUST BE
shelves of theses, shelves and shelves in academic libraries the world over, all about predators and size, how it’s not always an advantage to be huge.

When they were tiny, these things could’ve stripped the flesh off my bones before I had a chance to shriek. Bigger, they could still have overwhelmed me while I had my hands full with just a couple. Even my Aspect couldn’t have helped me, against that many that fast.

At this size, though? The thing was still opening its jaws and I was right there – in its face, yes, and wanting to kick its teeth in. As far in as I could manage it.

But. It is always, always an advantage to be smart, and measure your chances. If I paused to give it the kicking it undoubtedly deserved, its friends from the car park would be coming in behind me, and – well. One thing at a time.

This thing? I just jumped, clear over it. While it was still gearing up for a Desi-swallowing snap, I was over its head and rolling, tumbling through the doorway into the pub proper.

Not without a pang of regret, but hey. I’m philosophical. You can’t always get what you want.

Sometimes, you have to play the hero.

So I dived and rolled and came up in the public bar, where people were just now figuring out that something odd was going on out there. Little old men struggling to their feet by aid of walking-stick, pulling their flat caps on firmly, you’ve got to be properly dressed; local young-farmer types on their feet already, staring at me and then staring past me, the way you would if there was a girl doing acrobatics out of a doorway and a giant girl-eating monster-head peering after her, peering maybe straight at you.

I said, “Get the hell out of here!”

Quite loudly, I said that. An Aspect is good for amplification.

Then I led the rush.

Out of the public bar, not out of the building, not yet. I left the front door for them. Me, I plunged into the lounge to give the same warning again. And found the landlord behind the bar, with a teenage boy just pulling a sweatshirt on over his head, over his bare torso. He eyed me from under his tangled fringe, and I felt a cold recognition.

Didn’t speak to him. Spoke to the landlord instead: “Yours?” with just a jerk of the head to indicate the boy.

He nodded fractionally, knowing what he’d got.

“Congratulations.”
Live with it
, was the subtext I was pretty sure he was picking up.
If you get the chance,
footnote to the subtext. “Now give me a bottle of whisky and a lighter, and see your people safe.”

For a wonder, he didn’t ask questions. I don’t know if he had any talents himself – he looked human-normal to me, but then so did his boy now, apart maybe from those wolfish eyes – but I guess he knew that something bad was here. Hell, he kept the White Horse, and that place is a rivet. He might be mortal, but he couldn’t be blind to the Overworld; he’d never have survived it.

Perhaps he didn’t survive it. I haven’t been back to see.

Anyway: no questions. He rolled a bottle across the bar at me, didn’t ask for money. Wise man.

Wiser if he had another way out and a getaway car. Or maybe his boy and he could make the shift together and lope off under the moon to some new and preferably distant life, if he had the gift of it.

I didn’t stop to ask. Just grabbed that bottle and said, “Lighter?”

“No lighters. Matches, in the other bar.”

We looked at each other; we both knew that neither one of us was going back in there. Matches would be no use to me anyway, but he didn’t know that.

It was the boy – in a sudden access of conscience, maybe, or to save his dad, or save the moment, or whatever random teenage impulse it actually was – who pulled a lighter from his pocket and tossed it to me.

I snatched it from the air and ran.

S
OMETHING IN ME
wanted to stop and fight. Something clenched around me did, at any rate. Inside, I was more ambivalent. I didn’t like to run away, I didn’t want to leave anybody behind me; no mortal should have to face what was rising up out of that water.

Hell, no mortal
could
face it, for more than a second or two. A moment of frozen horror, and then the teeth, the gullet, gone. That would be it, more or less.

With me in the way, between them and it? Um. They might get the time to run. Might do.

I couldn’t fight the things either; I knew that, even if my Aspect didn’t. Hell, I’d bounced off the wyrm, hadn’t I? And these things were – well, I was guessing, but I’d guess that they were just as tough, and faster, and more vicious. And more plentiful. I wouldn’t stand a chance. Teeth, gullet, gone. The only difference was – might be! – that at least I’d go down fighting.

That was probably not a particular advantage. They probably wouldn’t even notice.

Besides: either I was very wrong, or else they were here for me. Directed, by some intelligence not their own. Some distant mind that was very, very pissed off with me, and didn’t want to talk about it, no.

With luck, if I ran they’d leave the people alone and come after me.

Maybe I should hoot at them and throw things, to be sure they got the message

Maybe there’d be no need to do that. They’d found me easily, once the boy delivered his tip-off; they had my scent, or my psychic trace, or whatever they needed to locate me exactly. I figured they could probably follow well enough along.

Besides, the only thing I had to throw was the whisky, and I wasn’t throwing that.

The front door was clear now. Everybody who was going that way must have gone already; I didn’t look back to see how many hadn’t made it. I could hear noises coming from the public bar, that I hoped were just the sounds of furniture and floor breaking up under the grinding passage of massive eel-bodies, as they came in pursuit of me.

Out I went, then. Found the slow and the not-too-smart milling around, seeing the road and the bridge asquirm with monsters, all blocking their most obvious getaway route. It’s not only in movies that people want to run down the middle of the road, regardless of what’s coming after them.

I waited long enough to yell again – “Get the hell away from here! No,
that
way, go
that
way,” pointing them around the side of the building, where they could put the whole damn pub between them and the water and the eels, if they only got a bloody move on.

I didn’t wait to see them do it. They were on their own now, like me, like everyone. Like me.

I hate it. It’s what the world does to me, always, in the end: it leaves me on my own, and I hate it. That’s not the worst of what the world does to me, maybe, but it’s what I hate most. I don’t do well this way, I wasn’t born to be solitary. I like to look around and see someone else running with me. Arms around my waist, riding pillion.

Jordan did that. Jacey never would.

Never mind.

Neither of them was here now. Just me, and a stew of chasing eels.

I sent the fretful innocents one way, or tried to; me, I ran another.

Not down towards the water, where more eelage writhed. I’m not a total idiot.

Orthogonal to everything: I ran straight ahead, to where a hedge bordered a field of sprouting barley.

Straight at the hedge; straight through it.

Cross-country would probably be easier for the eels than it was for me, but hey. I figured pretty much whatever I did, wherever I ran, the eels would have it easy and me not. That’s just the way it goes.

At least I knew where I was going, and it was this way. As the crow flies, as the girl runs when she’s a daemon in a hurry with eels at her back.

P
LOUGHED FIELDS ARE
hard work; growing crops are harder.

Possibly not for eels.

My legs pumped, my blood surged, I told myself – quite grimly – that I could do this all night if I had to. Run and run.