Grindhelm's Key Read online

  ‘Toro! Toro!’ said the pocket-voice. Its owner was just visible as a small shape perched on a tree root. Trev realised that the glow Cled had created around that first tree was now spreading. Outside the circle of light generated by his spectral blade, he could see a faint luminescence creeping up the bark of several other trunks.

  The elemental had executed another flawless turn but it hadn’t started another charge. Instead it stood and glared at Trev, one hoof slowly pawing at the frozen earth. Trev shuffled his own feet, trying to scrape some of the detritus off the soles of his boots. Not that it mattered much, with the ground getting broken up by the tricorn’s charges. He risked a quick look around. He was in a small clear space between the trees, which gave him a bit of room to dodge, but if he slipped he was going to be an easy target. And if he chose to move nearer the trees for cover, he was in danger of tripping over a root or braining himself on a low branch.

  The tricorn tossed its head and set its rear hooves, ready to spring into another charge. Trev dropped into a crouch and prepared himself for evasive action.

  ‘Get a move on, Cled,’ he rasped out. ‘I can’t keep this up all night.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d heard that about you,’ said the pocket-voice.

  ‘Another few minutes,’ Cled called back. His voice was faint and sounded strained.

  ‘Shit,’ said Trev. The tricorn had heard Cled speak and its head was now turned in that direction. It snorted and began to move towards the Welshman.

  Shoving his self-preservation instinct aside, Trev ran after it, waving his vapour weapon. ‘Oi, Dobbin! Over here!’ he wheezed.

  The tricorn ignored him, heading towards Cled’s position at a steady trot. Trev followed in its wake, mind racing. Whatever his friend was doing, it seemed to be taking up most of his concentration. That meant that he might not see the tricorn until it was too late. He tried to shout a warning but the freezing air had left him breathless and his throat raw.

  He swore and upped his pace, moving in a series of barely-controlled slips and lurches. He hadn’t got any kind of plan. He had no idea what he was going to do if he managed to catch up to the creature. Hell, he was using all his mental faculties just to stop himself from performing a spectacular face-plant into the frozen mud. Without the vapour weapon’s influence, he’d have lost that fight several times in the last few paces alone.

  Despite all that, he was gaining. Had the sure-footed tricorn used its full speed, Trev would’ve been left standing. Was it playing with him? Teasing him? Or was it wary of what Cled was doing? Well, whatever it was up to, Trev had to stop it.

  He stumbled within striking distance, raising the vapour weapon. If he could hit the tricorn’s back legs, he could bring it down. After that, Trev wouldn’t be the only one struggling for footing. He hoped.

  The tricorn hadn’t increased its pace. It hadn’t even looked back. Trev felt an odd sense of irritation that the creature had apparently dismissed him as no threat. Right then, he thought, gritting his teeth. He watched the tricorn’s hooves, judging the best moment to strike at its back legs.

  Something in his brain flashed up a warning.

  Back legs.

  Hooves.

  What was it they said about horses?

  ‘Trev!’ yelled the pocket-voice. ‘Never get behind a hor–’

  Trev stopped fighting gravity and let his feet slip out from beneath him. The tricorn planted its front hooves and kicked out with its back legs. Had Trev still been standing, his face would’ve been left resembling a late-era Picasso. As it was he almost lost half his scalp, one of the hooves grazing his hairline. He landed hard on his back and lashed out blindly with the dagger. By sheer luck he sliced clean through the tricorn’s right rear leg. The severed limb exploded into a shower of soil and gravel and the creature crashed to the ground with a startled bellow.

  Trev coughed out a plume of steaming breath and rolled onto his side. His left arm was numb, a result of his awkward landing. He could feel a trickle of blood freezing on his forehead from the graze on his scalp. I need to get up before the tricorn does, he thought. Unfortunately he only had one working hand, and it was holding the vapour weapon. He scrabbled for purchase with his feet, cursing.

  The tricorn was faring better. It simply planted the damaged leg against the ground and the frozen soil broke apart, flowing up into the limb to reform it. Within seconds the leg was repaired and the beast was rising to its feet. It turned its gaze to the struggling Trev, its eyes two patches of utter blackness in the glow emanating from the trees. A low rumble came from deep within its body. It lowered its head and crunched towards him.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Trev hissed. He managed to drag himself into a sitting position but his foot slipped as he tried to shift into a crouch. He looked up. The tricorn was on him.

  It thrust the three horns at his throat. Trev swivelled to the side, smashing the vapour weapon into its face. The blow took two of the horns off at the base and left the third as a stub. The tricorn roared in outrage and reared back, intending to trample Trev with its front legs. He rolled out of the way and the hooves raked the ground inches from his head. The vapour weapon flashed out again and took one of the legs off. The tricorn went down and Trev scrambled clear, finally able to get to his feet with the aid of a nearby tree.

  The tricorn reformed its leg and stood slowly. Trev was no expert at reading equine facial expressions, but he was willing to bet that the one staring back at him translated as “really quite pissed off”. The soil shifted beneath the creature’s hooves and three new horns sprouted from its head.

  ‘All you’re doing is annoying it,’ the pocket-voice pointed out.

  Trev didn’t bother answering. He backed up until the tree was between him and the tricorn, his left arm cradled against his chest. The numbness was fading but had been replaced with a crippling pins and needles sensation. Trev didn’t class that as an improvement.

  The tricorn began its low rumbling noise again. This time it began to rise in volume as the creature stepped forwards. Two more horns erupted from the top of its head.

  ‘Blimey,’ said the pocket-voice. ‘Five horns? What do you call that?’

  Trev had no idea. He shuffled further behind the tree. The glow was all around them now. It bathed the advancing beast in soft, pulsing light. Trev could feel as well as hear the rumbling noise now, the vibration buzzing up through the soles of his frozen feet. Trev gulped. His earlier estimate of “really quite pissed off” now seemed woefully inadequate to describe the creature’s mood. As he stared, the surface of its body rippled and dozens of crystalline spikes burst out. Trev was now facing something that looked like the offspring of an improbable one-night stand between a horse and a porcupine.

  ‘Oh come on, that’s just unfair,’ said the pocket-voice. ‘Right. Um… multicorn? Polycorn? No, wait, I’ve got it – omnicorn!’

  ‘Please shut up,’ Trev growled.

  ‘Well it’s got to have a name,’ the pocket-voice persisted. ‘It’ll be difficult to explain to people what killed you otherwise.’

  Trev let out an exasperated sigh, which turned into a minor coughing fit. The omnicorn reached Trev’s tree and began to circle around it. Its angry rumbling made Trev’s eardrums itch. He matched the omnicorn’s circling, keeping the tree between them. Flickers of light glinted off the creature’s spikes. There wasn’t going to be any chance of dodging a charge now; if Trev got anywhere near the thing, he was going to get shredded. Running wasn’t going to work, and he’d already proven that fighting wasn’t going to work. Plan C was hiding, but he didn’t have high hopes for that either.

  The omnicorn jinked to the side in a sudden burst of speed, trying to catch Trev out. He jumped back, grabbing at the tree for balance. The omnicorn’s head lunged at him around the trunk, horns flashing. Trev swung the dagger, fending it off. It pulled back before coming at him from the other side. Trev dodged again. The tree suddenly seemed a lot narrower than when he’d first hidden behind it.
The luminescence that Cled was creating was an extra distraction, as well – a sizeable part of the wood was now gently shimmering.

  Trev was a fraction slow with his next dodge and the serrated edge of one of the horns slashed the sleeve of his coat open. He was tiring. The omnicorn pressed its attack, coming at him again and again. Trev’s breath rattled in his chest. The vapour weapon’s influence was giving him enough speed and stamina to stay alive, but even that had its limits. One slip, and it would be the end.

  ‘Trev!’ called out Cled’s voice. ‘Trev! Time to go!’

  ‘Right,’ Trev gasped. ‘Go. Yeah.’

  How the bloody hell am I supposed to do that?

  He defended himself from another attack and manoeuvred around the tree so that he was the right side of it to run towards Cled. Now all he had to do was think of a way to outpace the omnicorn, which was about as likely as Douglas Bader outpacing Usain Bolt.

  ‘Get ready,’ shouted the pocket-voice from somewhere nearby. ‘You’re about to get some help!’

  Trev risked a quick look around. Something was happening to the glowing light around the trees. It was spreading, drifting away from the trunks and branches in wisps. The movement wasn’t random, either. The light was being drawn towards the omnicorn… and towards Trev.

  ‘Trev! Now!’ yelled Cled.

  Trev hesitated, wary of turning his back on the omnicorn, but the creature had become distracted by the streamers of light flowing towards it. It stamped its feet and tossed its head uncertainly.

  ‘I think he said “now”, Trev,’ said the pocket-voice. ‘That kind of suggests that time might, you know, be a factor.’

  Trev gritted his teeth and stepped away from the tree, trying to keep the omnicorn in sight while also watching where he was going. This made for the slowest escape in recorded history. Trev’s one hope was that his glacial progress would escape the omnicorn’s attention, but he was disappointed. The black eyes stopped following the wisps of light and locked onto him again.

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  He raised the dagger, caught in two minds between a futile last stand and an equally futile sprint for freedom. It essentially boiled down to a choice between being skewered through his back or through his front. The omnicorn bellowed and charged him.

  The effect on the streamers of light was immediate. They stopped their vague drifting and homed in on the omnicorn like streaking fireworks. The creature crashed to a halt and bucked wildly, but it couldn’t shake them off. Within seconds it was surrounded by a fierce glow, the light leaping between its spikes and arcing down to strike the ground. Its body began to crumble. Chunks of soil and rock fell away from it, pattering into the snow.

  ‘You should be running away,’ called the pocket-voice. ‘You used to be good at that, what happened?’

  Trev tore his eyes away from the thrashing omnicorn and broke into an unsteady jog towards the sound of the voice. He felt something brush his arm and almost fell. He looked down. Wisps of light were converging on him. They sparked and crackled in contact with the vapour weapon and Trev felt a shock travel up his arm.

  ‘Shut it off!’ Cled shouted. Trev could see him standing just beyond the tree-line. ‘It’s attracting the energy!’

  Trev concentrated and deactivated the weapon. The artificial bubble of calm it had given him vanished, along with the hot-wired reflexes and pain resistance. All his injuries immediately made themselves known and he fell to his knees, gasping in shock.

  The light withdrew from his arm but stayed nearby, darting around him. Trev willed himself into motion. Standing was out of the question, so he crawled instead. It was undignified, but he quickly decided he could live with that. There was a crunch of footsteps and Cled was beside him, grabbing his tattered coat and pulling him to his feet.

  ‘We have to go!’ the Welshman said, all but dragging Trev along with him. The clouds of light were flickering, their agitated movement building. Trev felt all his hair stand up and a high-pitched whine invaded his head. They staggered to the edge of the wood and Cled literally threw him clear before flopping down in the snow himself.

  There was a last strained bellow from the omnicorn. The creature was barely visible in the maelstrom of light surrounding it, but Trev could see enough to make out its body crumbling into the ground. The light followed it down, sinking through the tree branches and into the roots. There was a sharp whoosh and Trev felt his ears pop. The light disappeared, leaving them in a stunned, moonlit silence. Nothing remained of the omnicorn.

  Trev let his head flop in Cled’s direction.

  ‘You owe me a pint,’ he said.

  Three

  Cled shrugged, then nodded. ‘That’s probably fair. I might stretch to a packet of crisps as well.’

  ‘Seriously though, mate, what the hell was that all about?’ said Trev. The force of his anger was somewhat blunted by him being flat on his back and unable to get up, so he injected a bit of extra venom into his scowl. ‘You told me I’d just need to wave my dagger at it and it’d hide in the trees.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cled got up and brushed the snow off his clothes. He winced. ‘Sorry about that. I had no idea the thing was that strong. If I had, I’d never have agreed to this job in the first place.’ He took a torch out of his pocket and switched it on, turning the drifts of snow into a carpet of sparkling diamonds.

  ‘No shit,’ said Trev. ‘What exactly is an earth elemental, anyway?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have asked that question beforehand?’ said the pocket-voice.

  Trev looked around. A small ginger kitten sat on a fallen branch nearby, staring at him. There was a very faint glow around it, and its eyes were different colours; one was blue, the other green. It smiled at him, showing tiny sharp teeth.

  ‘Oh good,’ Trev said, his voice flat. ‘You survived.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ replied the kitten. ‘I wasn’t the one antagonising the big spiky monster.’

  The kitten’s name was Oscar, and he wasn’t really a kitten. Well, physically he was, but the body was just the latest in a long line of temporary residences for an ancient feline spirit who’d been summoned to the earthly plane by a cult of Ancient Egyptian cat-worshippers. Unfortunately for Oscar, they’d failed to learn the necessary ritual to send him back before the Romans arrived and had them all executed. As a result he’d spent over two thousand years trapped on Earth, switching from body to body as each one wore out.

  ‘Can you… really talk to that cat?’ asked Cled. ‘Or are you winding me up?’

  Cled was a druid, and his training had given him some pretty unusual abilities. However he didn’t have the Sight, the hereditary sensitivity to psychic energy that Trev had, and shared with a very, very small percentage of the world’s population. As a result, Cled couldn’t see ghosts, use a vapour weapon, or hear Oscar.

  ‘Tell the Welsh bloke that rugby is rubbish,’ said Oscar. Trev stifled a smile.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Cled, narrowing his eyes.

  ‘Um, he said hello, pleased to meet you,’ said Trev.

  ‘Right,’ said Cled. ‘I bet he did.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Trev. ‘Earth elementals?’

  ‘One of the druids’ biggest mistakes,’ Cled said. He held out a hand and hauled Trev to his feet. ‘Come on, let’s get back to the car. I’ll tell you on the way.’

  They picked up a muddy track and slipped, stumbled and limped down the hill towards Cled’s old Land Rover. It wasn’t the most stylish or comfortable vehicle on the roads, but Trev didn’t care about that. All that mattered was that it had a working heater. There were sensitive parts of his body that needed urgent thawing-out.

  ‘The Romans almost wiped the druids out,’ Cled said. He walked a little ahead of Trev, lighting their way with his torch. ‘The ones that survived had to hide, and that, along with their lack of numbers, meant that they couldn’t protect the land anymore.’

  ‘So they started mucking about with things they didn’t understand,’
said Oscar. He was perched on Trev’s shoulder. ‘Just like the bloody Egyptians.’

  ‘So they resorted to desperate measures?’ Trev asked Cled.

  Cled nodded. ‘Yup. Desperate and stupid.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They knew there are other planes of existence. And they knew about the spirits and other beings that live in them. So they tapped into the Greenweave for power and pulled a few spirits through. Ones that had a particular affinity for the element of earth. The druids thought they could use the spirits, these elementals, as guardians, to protect their most sacred places.’

  ‘Idiots,’ muttered Oscar.

  ‘I’m guessing it didn’t work,’ said Trev.

  ‘Not really,’ said Cled. ‘Some of the spirits just sank into the earth and vanished. Some of them wandered away from the areas they were supposed to protect. And even the few that did stay put tended to attack everyone that came near, including the druids themselves. It was a disaster.’

  ‘Bloody humans, not a clue,’ grumbled Oscar.

  ‘What did the druids do?’ said Trev.

  ‘They quickly discovered they couldn’t send the elementals back, so the only thing they could do was to bind them in place,’ Cled explained. ‘They used the Greenweave again, snaring the spirits with its energy. It worked, but it meant that they couldn’t use those sites for their rituals again. All the energy was tied up in containing the elementals.’

  ‘Hell of a balls-up,’ said Trev.

  ‘That was very nearly the end of the druids,’ Cled said. He shrugged. ‘Some say it was.’

  ‘So if the old druids trapped all the elementals back in the day, why was there one running about out here?’ Trev asked.

  ‘Good question,’ said Cled. ‘Can’t give you an answer though. It’s been known for elementals to break free, but it hasn’t happened for hundreds of years. The druids thought they were all secure.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Especially here. The Greenweave is pretty strong at this site. Very old trees.’