The Call Read online

  The temptation now is to cower on his little ledge and hope the Sídhe never find him. But they will. It’s one of the many, many lessons from the Testimonies: You can hide, but not in the place where you first appear. They always know to look there.

  So, he wonders, up or down?

  The Aes Sídhe must be at the top of the cliff, surely. And indeed, far off a hunting horn blares its excitement.

  The climb up will kill me, he thinks. They’ll be waiting by the time I pull myself over the ledge.

  No, it’s got to be down, dark and forbidding as it looks. An inky-black hole full of horror. But better some monster should have him than the Sídhe! Why give them the satisfaction?

  So over the side he goes. The vines are no help, being full of thorns. And the rock crumbles where the rolling stream of mucus attacks it. But Cahal wedges his toes in the cracks and ignores the resulting pain exactly as he has been taught: accepting the discomfort, but aware of the damage.

  It’s a long, slow, dangerous way down and his imagination populates the valley floor with the worst visions of the Testimonies.

  However, horrors enough inhabit the cliff face. He sees what he takes at first to be a huge spider. But it reveals itself to be a living human head. Its ears have been re-formed into a pair of long skinny arms and it uses them to swing like an ape from one tiny handhold to the next.

  When it reaches him, Cahal is hanging between two ledges and helpless to defend himself. He shudders with horror as it brushes against his back. Yet it does him no harm. Instead it swings right over to the dripping mucus and laps at it greedily with a huge, meaty tongue.

  From above him, at the top of the cliff, are sounds of joy. “He’s here! Oh, he’s here! I’ve found him!”

  Tiny stones fall hard enough to shatter Cahal’s concentration so that he loses his grip and slides a painful foot and a half to the ledge below. He’s not the only one: A male Sídhe tumbles past, laughing all the way down to a crunching impact. The sound informs the boy that he has less than sixty feet to go. He tries to hurry as more falling stones communicate a story of pursuit.

  And then he reaches a ledge so wide he thinks he must be at the valley floor. He sees the Sídhe that fell in the light of a torch it must have been holding as it lost its grip on the wall. It has broken its back, but it grins at him through a sheen of sweat.

  “I … cannot … wait … ,” it manages to say.

  But Cahal has no interest in that, because somebody else is there too. A girl. An ordinary human girl. Pretty, sort of, under a layer of filth.

  It is not unheard of for children who have been Called to run into others. Sometimes they help each other out. Sometimes a desperate sacrifice will allow one to escape their pursuers, and everybody’s favorite Testimony is the true tale of how Jenny Dundon and Mary O’Gara spent their last hour in the Grey Land, back to back with improvised spears.

  This girl’s eyes are large and they jump with fright when she sees him. Then, however, she realizes that Cahal too is human. “Help me!” she whispers.

  The wounded Sídhe widens his smile. “I … will be the one … to help you!”

  The girl is caught in a crevice. She must have tried to squeeze in there to hide, but only half of her—one leg, one shoulder, and part of her chest—fits in, and now she can move neither forward nor backward. She’s no Jenny Dundon, that’s for sure! Conor would call her one of the “weak.” One of the “doomed.” But although Cahal is a Knight of the Round Table, although it is his voice that speaks the harshest truths at their meetings, inside … inside, his parents still rule, and they are not like that at all.

  Ever since what happened to Niamh, he has fantasized about how he might have saved her. And here now is a chance, a real chance, but only if he’s quick, because the pursuers are almost here.

  “When I pull you, it’s going to hurt like hell,” he says. “You understand? You’ll have to ignore the pain and run for it straight away.”

  “Of … of course. Please. Just hurry. Please!” She holds out the hand that is not in the crevice.

  Carefully Cahal steps around the dying, delighted Sídhe and grabs on tight. “Are you ready?”

  She grins happily. She opens her mouth and cries, “I have him! I have him! I have him!”

  In horror he yanks back, but she is holding on for dear life. Cahal is almost as strong as Conor and more desperate than he has ever been in his life. He yanks her free of the crevice and realizes that she was never stuck there at all: The girl’s body ends at the halfway point. She only has one leg, her chest stops at the sternum. She falls against him, and when he tries to right himself another hand grips him by the ankle. It is the fallen Sídhe.

  “Dearest thief,” it whispers. Don’t let them touch you! Never let the Sídhe touch you! But it’s too late. The creature squeezes, gently, and Cahal’s flesh gives way like putty under its grip. Never has he known such pain! As though every part of him under that supernatural touch were made of acid and sawing blades! The glitter-skinned Sídhe twists, and when it releases its hold Cahal’s left foot is pointing the wrong way. He falls right over and now a dozen of them are standing around him, palms open, all desperate to get their hands on him.

  “Halt!” cries one. A staggeringly beautiful fairy princess pushes her way to the front to crouch down before him. Her glorious hair spills over her shoulder like a waterfall of silver. Her eyes are full of fun and mischief.

  “Please … ,” Cahal says, “please … ”

  She frowns. “As though you thieves listened to us! As though you listened when we wept here in this land without color! But our worlds are getting closer together all the time! And soon you will have a king again to revoke the terrible treaty that sent us here.” The frown is replaced by a smile almost lovely enough to dull his pain. “Just this once, I am inclined to mercy. You, we will send back alive.”

  In the classroom, the last four seconds tick away. Everybody is standing well back from Cahal’s discarded clothing. Liz Sweeney has run to fetch the instructors. Nobody else breathes.

  And suddenly, something is there: not a corpse and far too large for a human being. Almost seven feet high, it stands on four legs that end in a parody of a man’s toes. Its skin is the pale white of most Irish, but it has stretched so thinly over such a large frame that parts of it lie torn and bleeding.

  The head is the worst of all: a tiny brainpan with Cahal’s brown hair. The mad little eyes too are the same watery blue as those of the vanished boy. They blink, and blink again on either side of jaws wide enough to swallow a basketball. The creature howls. Pain echoes from its throat, along with sorrow, with hatred. And while everybody stands frozen, it grabs the head of Rodney McNair in those mighty jaws and bites down hard. His friends recoil in horror.

  “Out of the room!” Anto says, and Conor thinks how bizarre it is that a wilted pacifist is the only one to keep his cool, but then running away is what he does best, isn’t it?

  “No!” Conor shouts. “We’re staying!” The creature drops Rodney and turns toward the sound of his voice. Conor feels the blood turn to ice in his veins. “We can kill this thing,” he manages.

  “It’s … it’s Cahal,” says Bruggers, identifying himself as a weakling right away. But Sherry earns her place at the table. “Not anymore,” she says.

  The creature launches itself at her, but the girl dives off to one side to crash into the desks and shelves at the edge of the room. It swings after her, but now Fiver and Keith Blake hit it from the left, punching and kicking, barely avoiding the jaws that turn to snap at them. This buys Conor the time he needs to smash it across its tiny cranium with a chair.

  The beast that was Cahal collapses, mewling piteously. But Conor will not be fooled. He lets loose an animal roar of his own and brings his chair down two more times until Cahal is silent for good. So is everybody else, their shocked panting filling the classroom. Conor grips the chair hard enough to turn his knuckles white, for if he releases it they will all se
e his hands shaking.

  Liz Sweeney returns with the Turkey in tow. Ms. Breen takes in the scene in a single glance. “Ah,” she says, her voice barely shaking at all. “A shame we couldn’t keep it alive a bit longer. For study.”

  “My apologies, miss,” Conor says.

  “Listen now,” she says, “it’s rare, very rare, they send them back alive like this. And we never let the parents know, you understand me? So Cahal and … who … who was that?” She points at the room’s other corpse.

  “By the Cauldron!” says Liz Sweeney. “That’s Rodney! Oh … Oh, by Lugh.”

  “Get control of yourself, Liz Sweeney!” says Conor. “It’s Rodney McNair, miss. Cahal … the creature killed him.”

  “I see that, Mr. Geary. Now, boys and girls, when you leave this room, the story is going to be that the two of them were Called, all right? Rodney McNair and Cahal both. If word of this ever makes its way to the parents, the lot of you will spend a week in the Cage.” She waits for a nod of agreement from each of them. “Good. Wash off the blood. I’ll have some bathrobes dropped up to you until you get your spare tracksuits from the dorm. Dismissed.”

  They start to shuffle off, but she has one more thing to say. “Wait! I should also add that I’m proud of the way you handled yourselves. More of you would have been killed if you had panicked. The Nation must survive.”

  “The Nation must survive,” they repeat, and Conor feels a surge of energy when Ms. Breen inclines her head toward him in particular. She knows he can kill. Everybody knows it now, and most importantly he, Conor Geary, knows it. One of the silent fears that lived so long in the back of his mind is as dead now as Cahal Dillon and Rodney McNair.

  Twenty-five years ago, empty jetliners tumbled from the sky. Ferries ran aground, their decks crowded with abandoned clothing and whining pets. Foreign radio stations cut off midsentence and neither Wales nor Scotland could be seen from the Irish coast, no matter how clear the day.

  The world’s disappearance trapped tourists and travelers by the thousand. There were soldiers too: Taaft on vacation, aged twenty-two and twice divorced; Nabil, trying desperately to find somewhere, anywhere, quiet and green; a few members of the British SAS, also on vacation, or so they claimed.

  But no matter how or why they ended up at the various survival colleges, all of the instructors insist that the students will never be able to kill a Sídhe unless the targets they practice on are as human as possible.

  Thus began the traditions of “Pig Day” and “Javelin Day.”

  A fortnight has passed since Cahal’s Call. The Year 1s are all in tracksuits. They arrived less than a month ago, so for the moment, until the soles of their feet have toughened up, the ten-year-olds are still allowed to wear shoes outside.

  They won’t be penalized for speaking English yet either, but by January they’ll get nothing but punishments if they don’t ask for things in the unbelievably complex language of the enemy.

  “Listen up, babies,” says Taaft—she can’t speak any Sídhe either, and never will. “This is going to hurt. From now on, everything is going to hurt, but you’re going to keep going through the pain, understand me?”

  They understand. They look so tiny in their padded tracksuits. Skinny little arms and big, innocent eyes beneath the clunky helmets. They knew nothing but love until they came here, until they woke up naked in the forest. That was just a reminder, to let them know that this is really happening and that one day something worse than they can possibly imagine will occur.

  And now it’s Javelin Day. The first of many that will pit Year 5s against Year 1s.

  Nessa watches them and swallows her pity. This lot are guaranteed two years without the Call, and will probably get four before they lose a friend to it.

  Year 5 have lost six of their number already. The bells have rung for Tomasz, Peggy, Maura, Antoinette, Cahal, and Rodney. And going by past performances, those bells will ring thirty more times for Year 5 before any of them celebrates another birthday.

  She weighs her javelin carefully. It’s blunted but it’s going to leave a bruise the size of the Cauldron on whomever it hits. As in unarmed combat, the legs are important for a good throwing technique and especially for gaining distance. But Nessa cheats by making a string to wrap around the shaft. There’ll be no strings in the Grey Land. Mind you, it’s not as if javelins will be easy to make either. They’ll have to grab any the Sídhe throw at them.

  When the children scatter on Taaft’s command, Nessa picks out a target—a foolish boy running in a straight line. Then, when she releases the shaft, the tether unspools, giving her far more thrust and putting the javelin into a spin for more distance than even Conor will manage. She has researched it and practiced it too. Thank you, Carthaginians, she thinks. It flies high and true. It hits the wrong boy, but nobody can tell.

  Sorry, kid, she thinks.

  In Nessa’s day, seeing her waddle away across the field, none of the Year 5s even targeted her. As if the Sídhe would show such pity!

  “How?” Taaft cries, seeing what appears to be a perfect throw. “How did you do that?”

  “I’m strong,” Nessa tells her in English.

  “Well, I’m not that strong, girl.” (I.e., nobody is, or so Taaft believes.)

  “It’s all in the technique, Sergeant.”

  That’s not good enough for Taaft, who searches her for an atlatl or any similar device for the lengthening of spear throws, but she doesn’t notice the piece of string under the leathery sole of Nessa’s foot.

  Still, the instructor reserves her real fury for Anto, who alone of the Year 5s hasn’t thrown his javelin at all.

  “You know I don’t do that,” he says to Taaft.

  She kicks his legs from under him and he rolls immediately to his feet like the natural athlete he is.

  “You could be the best of us,” she tells him, “but look at you! The Sídhe don’t recognize pacifism, you understand, son? The Sídhe will eat you for breakfast and—”

  “I’ve seen what they can do,” he says quietly.

  She punches him hard in the stomach for the interruption. Again he is quick enough to move with the force of it, taking as little hurt as possible, although his mother’s silver cross now hangs askew. Taaft has to visibly struggle not to break him in two, like Conor nearly did a few weeks before. Instructors are allowed to hurt, but not damage. The whole point of them, some say, is to hurt.

  Anto sees Nessa looking and winks.

  “What was that, son?” screams Taaft, and Nessa turns away before he gets himself in any more trouble, or before somebody realizes that she cares in any way about the outcome of the confrontation.

  After Javelin Day will come Pig Day, which nobody likes. The creatures are as intelligent as dogs, people say. But once a year every student in the school is expected to chase one down and kill it. Even the Year 1s. Especially the Year 1s.

  Anto wasn’t the only one to refuse first time around. But the other little ten-year-olds were bullied into it eventually and no amount of tears or nightmares would get them off the hook.

  Anto, apparently, showed no fear of old Sergeant Miller’s beatings. He took a lonely, freezing night in the Cage without caving in. Then another. And then a whole week, until they had to carry him out looking like something from out of the Great Famine.

  “All right,” they told him. “All right. We’ll let it go for this year.”

  But it only got worse, because after a week of regular meals he looked at his plate one night in the refectory and realized it was pork. That was the last meat he ever ate. Again, there was the Cage and other assorted tactics, and lots of “The Nation must survive!”

  In the end they started making him his own food: a nutritionally balanced and tasteless slop of beans and whatever else was in season at the time. It looked appalling, but Anto thrived on it anyway, to the disbelief and in some cases outright anger of the instructors.

  “The fair folk are going to eat you alive,” Taaft is s
aying now. Not for the first time Nessa finds herself agreeing, finds herself wasting precious time worrying about him. She can’t afford to spend nights dreaming of his death. She can’t afford the terrible buildup of pressure that will only end in another futile visit to the boys’ dorm. It’s not my business. I’ve got to look after myself …

  Even so, even so. She wants to shake him sometimes. She wants to beg him not to throw his life away for pigs and flighty sheep and even fish!

  In the distance one of the teachers—Mr. Hickey from hunt theory—is waving at them all to come in, his face bright red like an alarm. Then the bell starts ringing, but the rhythm is different from the sad, ponderous clangs of mourning. This is faster, more insistent, and it can only mean an emergency assembly in the refectory.

  “All right!” Taaft calls. “Jogging back. Forget the javelins. Year Twos can collect them in the afternoon.”

  Everyone has their own tables to go to, their usual seats. The tradition is not to fill the gaps of those who have been Called, and Nessa hates it, the horrible souvenir of Antoinette’s passing, of Tomasz. And the two new spaces on the boys’ tables remind her of how she humiliated Rodney McNair. Did it contribute to his death somehow? That’s such a stupid thought, she knows it is, and can’t understand why it keeps buzzing and buzzing around her head no matter how she waves it away.

  “There’s more people missing,” says Megan. “Look! Two from Year One even!”

  “Year Ones?” Nessa feels a chill. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s okay,” says Squeaky Emma. “I saw some kids heading for one of the classrooms. A few from each year, I think.”

  Everyone relaxes, which is a mistake, because they are about to hear something far worse than they expect. The signs are already there in the bewilderment of the teachers at the top tables. In the nervous way the Turkey keeps straightening the tattered tweed jacket she always wears. Yes, this is going to be bad.

  But Ms. Breen struggles heroically to control herself. For the sake of the children, and, yes, the Nation. She believes in that kind of thing. She clears her throat, and for once there isn’t a whisper in the place, not the creak of a chair, and three hundred pairs of eyes are staring at her uneasily.