Into Eternity (The Eternals Book 3) Read online

  “Who spoke last,” Merryweather said, after too little thinking time.

  “You, just now.”

  “Damn, I didn't think you'd know that one,” he grumbled.

  “Merryweather.”

  “Jean,” he said, in mockery.

  “Honestly, no games, who was Jesus?”

  “That was a very serious question for you.”

  “I'm in a serious mood.”

  “Touché. Well, he really was the son of God.”

  “Ah, just a story then.”

  “Humanity would have disagreed.”

  “If they were that deluded, then it's no wonder they left.”

  “They weren't deluded, they were certain.”

  “If they were so certain, why did they leave?”

  “To find him. To find his father. To find their creator.”

  “I thought they left to escape the end of time.”

  “Well, that too, I suppose, but you've got to aim for something. And let's not forget, they counted lifetimes very differently to us. What we see as an impending event would have mattered little to someone whose great, great, great, grandchild wouldn't even have seen it.”

  “Did you like them?”

  “Who?”

  “The humans.”

  “I envied them in some ways, but wouldn't have said I liked them, after all, they were our food.”

  “Why did you envy them?” I pressed, whilst trying to appear not to.

  “Oh, setting out to meet your maker and all that. Quite an adventure in the greater scheme of things.”

  “You sound like you regret not being able to go.”

  “To find God! What would I have done when I got there, he didn't make us?”

  “Then, who did?

  “Oh, I don't know,” he said with a dismissive flick of his wrist, “some ungodly idiot.”

  I didn't know what to say to that, so just returned to my staring. However, the silence didn't last long.

  “Do you fancy some refreshment?” Merryweather chirped.

  “Not really.”

  “I know what you mean. Not quite the Rhineland, is it?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Do you miss it?” he asked, leaning out so far over the edge that only his fingernails gripped the stone.

  I resisted the urge to give him a shove and answered, “Yes and no.”

  “Ah, the old undecided ploy. I don't miss it, yet I miss how it used to be. I prefer the quiet, yet miss the interventions of life.”

  “You mean the balls and the parties.”

  “Good grief, no!”

  Merryweather threw his head back and gave such a raucous laugh I thought the battlements might collapse. It was the most genuine act I'd ever seen from him – how sad was that.

  “No, I mean real life: beating hearts; blood; warmth. I really miss the latter.”

  “I forget how old you are.”

  “So you keep reminding me, or is it me that reminds you? Odd, though, because I never forget how young you are.”

  “Thanks, granddad.”

  “Hm.”

  “Do you think it'll all end in a pop or a bang?” I asked, my eyes drawn to the pooled sun. It squelched in an overinflated distance like a stood upon cranberry.

  “Knowing our luck, a fizzle at best.”

  “I don't care which.”

  “I sense a disclaimer.”

  “As long as I'm with Linka. It seems a long way off, though.”

  “Don't give up hope, Jean. Hope is all we have to see us through the torrents and the dark.”

  “Is that the voice of experience?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking away.

  We remained in our own private bubbles as life awoke to unravel below us. Women busied here and there with mops and buckets as guards set about polishing epaulettes and armour. Everywhere I looked, everyone busied themselves in preparation for a dignified end; I had no time for dignity.

  “Do you fancy a slow perusal of the upper echelons, dear boy?” Merryweather asked. “It is a magnificent view.”

  Because I had nothing better to do, I acquiesced. And though I found it hard to believe; our wanderings lasted all day.

  * * *

  I returned to Violante's bedchamber half expecting her to be there waiting. She wasn't. However, someone had ventured inside, as the place had been tidied to gleaming perfection during my absence. Every tap and trim sparkled, every carpet and curtain fluffed. The place was immaculate for no reason other than immaculate's sake. Was that what we were all doing, polishing and preening for a good-looking death, tidying up our loose ends? I wasn't. Linka was no closer, Grella gone, and no decision made as regards tracking our shared foes the Marquis and Chantelle. In that single moment of resignation, I had an epiphany: the next morning, I would leave, regardless of whether Grella had returned or not. I didn't know where, or how I would go, but I had to try. Someone had to do something.

  I slipped into Violante's coffin, flipped the lock just in case, and fell into a fitful sleep. I could have sworn I dreamt again, that the ghosts of a torrid past had returned to torment. But somehow within my subconscious self, I remembered we Eternals had no soul to send forth to the astral plane, and, accordingly, they disappeared. Whenever I imagined I saw things, terrible things, I would open my eyes to the inside of the coffin; velour stared back in purple tones, my dreams already dismissed. The inclination to get up and wander was overpowering, but I knew I would need my strength for when I left, so remained.

  When I awoke, not realising I'd even slept, it was to a familiar face.

  Chapter Sixteen

  -

  Bells

  “Morning,” said Merryweather, as I opened the coffin lid to his leering face.

  “I must be dreaming.”

  “You wish.”

  “You sound cheery, it must be a good morning.”

  “Not today it's not.”

  “I should've kept my mouth shut.”

  “You should, I smell death.”

  “Why, haven't you washed?”

  “Oh, tee-hee. You are on a roll. Is there anyone you haven't either offended, murdered, or made love to?”

  “There's you.”

  “You've attempted two of them and you won't be getting a chance at the third.”

  “Any sign of Grella?” I said, ignoring him.

  “No. It looks like he's migrated.”

  “Violante?”

  “No. Love's done for her.”

  I shook my head and climbed out of bed. The curtains were already drawn back and the window open. That was a touch disconcerting as I wondered how long Merryweather had been in the room. I said nothing, though, because he'd only have denied it, as he meandered over to the window and sniffed. “Ahhh.”

  Whilst Merryweather was otherwise distracted, I dressed, and then joined him. Propping myself up beside the Britannian, I inhaled the early air. “Hmm!”

  “Told you.”

  And much to my chagrin, he was right. There was death in the air, a particular aroma I couldn't quite place?

  “They all love you, you know,” Merryweather said.

  I would have answered but still sought to place my inhalation's charred aftertaste.

  “Always have.”

  Like a mouthful of mud, the taste lingered on my tongue and I stuck it out as though I had bad breath.

  “I don't know what you've got that others haven't.”

  I rolled the bitter taste about my palette.

  “Could be those dark eyes.”

  “Many vampires have dark eyes.” I poked my head further out and had a good look around.

  “Might be the hair.”

  “I have ordinary hair,” I said, tracing an upturned streak of cloud.

  “God, I hope it's not the attitude that appeals or we're all doomed.”

  Merryweather rambled on as I gave the unusual cloud a hard stare. It was too early for concentrating on such things.

  “Cirrus fibr
atus.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That's what kind of cloud it is.”

  “You're making it up,” I said, not sparing him a look.

  “Am not.”

  “Do you take me for an idiot?”

  “Well…”

  I shook my head and followed the wisps of cloud across the skyline.

  “Must be the breeding then,” he persisted.

  “Those clouds don't look right,” I said ignoring him.

  “Do they look like a mare's tail?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Cirrus fibratus,” he repeated.

  “How on earth do you know that?” I bemoaned.

  “I know many things, as I'm always telling you.”

  “You never demonstrate it.”

  “I never get the chance!” he exclaimed.

  I gave him an exasperated look and nudged his arm unwilling to get drawn into another verbal tête-à-tête.

  Merryweather opened his mouth as if in rebuke, gave the clouds a puzzled look, lowered his head, then repeated the action. “They're not cirrus fibratus,” he mused.

  “Told you.”

  “Because, dear boy,” he said in a most peeved manner, “they aren't clouds.”

  “Pardon?”

  But before I could say more, Merryweather did the most unexpected thing I thought I'd ever seen him do, and he'd done many. Like a flash, he was up on the window ledge, one more glance to the sky as if to get his bearings and he leapt to the ground. It was only a drop of thirty feet, but about twenty-nine feet more than I would have imagined of him. He shook his head, looked straight back to the sky and was off. Never once did Merryweather take his eyes off those wisps of slow dispersing white as he crossed the courtyard and headed for the palace gates.

  Intrigued, I too leapt to the ground and followed.

  The Britannian minced up to the guards at the gate. The two, high-cheeked and barrel-bodied, barred his way and glared in intimidatory bad manners. I readied myself for the inevitable coming to blows, but without need. I did not catch what he said to them, but they moved away as though leaves in a gale. Out of the palace and across the plateau cliffs, Merryweather pursued some unknown goal. I did, too, although my goal was him. He turned left at the cliff edge, which I was surprisingly relieved at, and then followed its jagged boundaries around the perimeter of the palace. Like a hawk in reverse, he eyed the washed-out sky with an intensity bordering on paranoia. Then, as abruptly as he'd begun, he stopped.

  “What? What is it?” I asked. He shushed me with a limp-wristed waft of his hand. I wanted to protest, and more, but didn't. There was just something about Merryweather's carriage that drew me to do as he wished. So, I did.

  Merryweather tilted his head this way and that straining to hear something that was otherwise unapparent. I mimicked him, though I knew not why, cocking my head from side to side, even cupping a hand to my ear. Perhaps if I, too, hadn't have been silent, I wouldn't have heard them, but I did, and so did he.

  Just like that, he was off. Like fork lightning, Merryweather bolted away with me in hot pursuit. In a blur of gaudy motion, he flounced around the palace's eastern edge, then skirted its southern perimeter. He raced along the plateau surface at a speed bordering insane, Gorgon's home an indistinct pattern out of the corner of my eye. Before I could stop him, he was gone. A bird catching an updraft that simply wasn't there, Merryweather stepped from the plateau and dropped like a stone.

  “Walter!” I gasped and rushed to the cliff edge. I needn't have worried, Merryweather had alighted some two hundred feet below and dashed off again. I gulped, much to my embarrassment.

  A man without options has no other than to move forward and that's what I did. With unpleasant memories of the Sunyins' monastery ramparts foremost in my mind, I closed my eyes and jumped.

  I was not unaware of the presence at my back; I'd felt it before. Perhaps that was why I was unprepared for the impact when it came. The landing rattled my ribcage, jarred my knees and caused me to bite my tongue; the metallic tang of blood rolled down my throat. With no time to dally, I dusted myself down and raced after my erstwhile companion.

  I found Merryweather easy enough. He'd made no attempt to hide his trail. He stood with a view of the lowlands beyond Gorgon's realm and the distant valley's and peaks of what had been Vladivar's beyond them. However, the view appeared of little consequence to the Britannian: Walter made music. He waved a small, white something-or-other from side to side with the gentlest care, as though it made of glass and liable to shatter. He moved the delicate creation back and forth, and as he did it tinkled like a bell. It was a bell I recognised though struggled to place.

  I cast my mind backwards, sorted through the files of life in search of that exact sound, to their exact place in time, a better time, a perfect time, until I placed them. The sound of the north was upon them, and the memory of the Rhineland in their birth. “Linka!” I gasped.

  “The flowers she engineered,” Walter confirmed, although he'd no need to.

  “Where?”

  “Laid on the floor.”

  “Then, how did you hear it?”

  “It was placed there, Jean.”

  “I don't follow.”

  For a moment, Merryweather looked on the point of sarcasm but on seeing my face held back. “Someone waved it back and forth like this,” he repeated the gesture. “Once sure of our attention, they placed it here,” he said. “The pretty thing's white petals were unmissable against the barren rock.”

  I didn't need to hear more. I span to leave; Walter caught me by the arm.

  “You would do well to remove your hand,” I hissed.

  “No.”

  “What!”

  “No,” he repeated.

  “We must run.”

  “We must not,” he returned.

  “But it must be the Marquis, maybe even Linka herself.”

  “Yes, it must.”

  “So?”

  “So, we look before we leap. We consider before we react. We do not permit ourselves to be manipulated like puppets on a string. Not any longer, Jean, I am tired of it.”

  “You're mad,” I said, as I attempted to loose his iron grip.

  “I am many things, but mad is not one of them. Not like that, anyway. The Marquis seeks to draw you like poison from a wound. He seeks to exploit, to control your every movement.”

  “I don't care!” I snapped.

  “You should care. You've done an awful lot of running, have you not?”

  And just like that, I stopped. Walter's eyes narrowed, and he released my arm.

  “The Marquis wished me to run, to never have time to stop and think. It is a detail I have considered before.”

  Walter smiled in a way I'd never seen. It was like the parting of the clouds before a Hunter's moon, his upturned lips illuminating both our dialogue and him. With a certain sense of satisfaction, too.

  Walter reached for a pink handkerchief from an inside pocket, wiped his nose, and then replied, “I wondered when you'd twig.”

  “Why the hell didn't you say something?” I blustered like a bag full of deflated gas.

  “You wouldn't have believed me!” he retorted.

  I rubbed my chin. What could I say, I wouldn't have?

  “Good to see you thinking straight again.”

  “What do you mean, again?”

  “You have not thought straight since you came of age and took on the aspects of the Eternal you would remain.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “You are free, Jean. At last, you are free to be yourself.”

  Walter did the strangest thing then as I fought to remain calm when my inner self would have me not. He offered me his hand. I took it.

  “Sir, Walter Merryweather,” he said. “And you are?”

  “I am Jean, and I am my own man.”

  “About bloody time,” he said and shook my hand with such vigour I thought it might come away at the wrist. “So,
what does the new clean-thinking Jean suggest we do?”

  “Stalk,” I said.

  “I couldn't have put it better myself.”

  * * *

  The world I knew seemed suddenly changed. A newfound freedom came over me, one I revelled in. Where I'd raced, instead, I observed. Where I'd raged, instead, I stood becalmed like an Alpine lake the heavens captured in perfect reflection. The little things revealed themselves like the detailed veins beneath a woman's skin. The lay of the land presented itself for my exploratory eyes. I noted details, where the landscape had changed and how, whether a lopsided tree trunk was that way due to age or upheaval. Nature bowed before its master. I had forgotten such things, how to hunt, how to live. I would not forget again.

  We worked our way back through the rocks and scrub at a pace more akin to tortoises than terrors. And though I knew there was the possibility of Linka lying just ahead, I appreciated that to blunder upon her would be of no use to either she or I. So I allowed the cold breeze to enliven my skin, tingle on my lips and pressed on.

  “Njord favours us,” Walter said.

  “Who?” I replied, stopping behind a large boulder.

  “Norse god of winds.” Walter waited for a response I did not issue. “Njord,” he repeated. “Norse, as in Grella's kin.”

  “So?”

  “Oh, never mind, I thought you might appreciate the irony of a fresh wind blowing from those you've befriended.”

  “A wind is just a wind.”

  “A wind is never just a wind, my young companion. A wind's direction can carry so much information: scents; sounds; tastes; etcetera, etcetera. It looked like you may have partaken of them.”

  “I was, sort of, but not like that.”

  “You should. Try again.”

  I stood up straight, so as my head popped out from behind our shelter and sampled the air.

  “There is a definite tang,” I declared. “It is slight, but it is there.”

  “Tang, as in?”

  “Lavender,” I said.

  “And?” Walter pressed.

  “The Nordics.”

  “Yes, I sense them too.” Walter's eyes gleamed with maniacal light. He revelled in every inhalation like a demon scenting death. “So what have we learned?” he enquired after a lip-smacking pause.