The Fall (The Last Druid Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  THE FALL

  BOOK ONE OF

  THE LAST DRUID TRILOGY

  GLEN L. HALL

  Published in 2017 by G22 Publishing

  Copyright © Glen L. Hall 2017

  Glen L. Hall has asserted his right to be identified as the

  author of this Work in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  ISBN Paperback: 978-0-9957985-1-9

  Ebook: 978-0-9957985-2-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue copy of this book can be found in the British Library.

  Published with the help of Indie Authors World

  To Mum

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people have played a part in helping me write The Last Druid and I am grateful for and humbled by each and every one of them.

  I must begin by thanking Lizzie Henry, my editor, who has worked with me to make the book the very best it can be. In fact, when I really think about it, she has transformed (almost) every aspect of the story, and for that I am eternally grateful.

  To Jill Davidson from Purdy Lodge (they do the best breakfast in the whole of Northumberland), thank you for putting up with my writing schedule. I couldn’t have done it without your love and understanding. The view of Bamburgh Castle is simply amazing.

  I approached Niki Jupp, my illustrator, with one paragraph, and over the next few months she brought the text to life. She captured the images in my mind perfectly and I couldn’t be happier. Thank you, Niki. Thanks also to Will Welsh for becoming Sam for a day.

  My love affair with books started with my primary school teacher, Mrs Flather, who gave me a copy of Prince Caspian when I was seven years old and sparked a lifelong love affair with fantasy. I wrote to her in 1997 and received a reply which I will keep forever.

  Thanks also to Adam Cooke, who put together the web-site and made it work. He understood exactly what I wanted. I suppose that’s what comes from a seventeen years business relationship.

  The book would not have seen the light of day without David Hamilton, author of The Five Side-Effects of Kindness. When the path to publishing got a little tricky, he threw light into the darkness.

  A big thank you to Kim and Sinclair Macleod from Indie Authors World, who made everything seem so easy and who managed my ‘attention to detail’ (some would say ‘obsessiveness’) with a firm but honest guiding hand.

  My publicist, Camilla Leask from Willow Publicity, who kept sweeping away my self-doubt and telling me to believe in myself and in what I had written. For that, I will be eternally grateful.

  Thanks also to the talented people at Everything Different. Ben Quigley, their CEO, brought together an exceptional group of people, who between them took the book from my imagination and made it real. Special thanks to Mike Roberts, a very patient client partner, Marcus de’ Jesus, who created the book’s overall style, Frazer Barrington, who blew my socks off more than once with the book’s trailer, Mell Black, who came up with a very smart social media plan, and Emma Clark and Claire Knight, who made sure everything ran smoothly.

  Last but not least, thanks to Philip Stuckey, who read extracts from the book each morning. He was even brave enough to tell me the first three chapters didn’t work. I went back to the beginning and the rest is history.

  ‘Tell the professors, Samuel, that the Circle is broken and a Shadow moves through the Otherland. Tell them that the Dead Water is lost and the Fall is dying. Tell them that they must seek the help of the Three. You must be wondering whether these words are those of the wise or the mad. On the road ahead you will find out…’

  THE FALL

  It came without warning, rising from the cold black waters, a dark resonance of lightless silk.

  To the north the giant ridged spine of the borderland broke in great waves against the threatening Cheviot night, whilst to the south the ancient lands of Northumberland gave way to wild woods and fast-flowing rivers moving east to the sea.

  Surfacing from the Dead Water, the darkness coalesced into a solitary wave, the last light of the Fall still dancing around its pitch-black form.

  Across the vast barren waters, a tortuous wail bled its anguish into the dark night and out through the fells and burns of the wilderness. The murmuring voices of the dead called its name, but quickly faded as the light turned to darkness and the Shadow was amongst the living.

  It moved through the chilling waters, where even the grasping fingers of the fallen could not touch it, towards an unseen shore.

  A man, bent with age, looked out across the waters. He could feel the malevolence growing with every second as the wave spread out across the vast lake. He knew it meant to crush him.

  He had heard another voice amongst those of the fallen, but there was no time to ponder its meaning. Already the air around him was cold and the waters were beginning to glimmer with the arrival of a deadly chill, a white sheen creeping across the waters.

  He could feel the horror of what he was about to face, a nameless servant of a primeval enemy. It had freshly come through the Fall and he knew it was still gathering itself. They had not been vigilant. They had become like the dead and they would pay a heavy price for ignoring the warnings of the living.

  The waters gently brushing his naked feet were turning to ice and a dark mist was hanging above and beyond the water. The air was freezing and the ice began to cut into his legs as it thickened. As the blood flowed, a deathly silence hung over the dark water. Black despair was arriving at the shores of the living. Something was rising up – a suffocating mist that was swirling, twisting, drawing long shards of ice into its pulsing heart as it span faster and faster, forming a giant tempest in the darkness.

  The silence was broken by a wordless sound that spoke directly to the old man now locked into the frozen water. It was a cruel resonance that could have once been a voice of rattling bones, heartless and inhuman, reminding him of centuries of pain and loss.

  There was blood around his feet, but defiantly he swept his arms down and the ice broke around him as he turned to face the whirling darkness. His voice spiralled out in a flash of frozen air, strong despite his feeble frame.

  ‘I am the Ruad Roshessa and you cannot pass.’

  His voice thundered above the roaring wind.

  ‘I am Fer Benn. Go back – you cannot pass.’

  The tempest rose before him like a black mountain. Dark winds blew down to meet him, answering his words with primordial power that sent the swirling tempest and its long cutting ice to rupture both body and soul. It hit the old man with such force that he shattered into pieces that fell down through the ice. It flared crimson and he was gone.

  A shadow appeared on the shore, in the world of the living.

  But where the old man had fallen, subtle cracks were appearing. The ice was whispering his name. Soon it was echoing across the valley and through its secret ways. Droplets of light flickered through the water and the old man stepped again into the world of the living and again faced the Shadow.

  * * * * * *

  As they fought, the crack of thunder fell in the deepest places of the Earth. In the darknes
s, eyes opened. Still they were blind, but the power that had kept them asleep had been broken. Down in the Underland, a murmur arose in the caverns and halls as those long imprisoned stretched and found themselves free.

  There was one amongst them without wings or giant maw, one whose hate for those who had imprisoned her people flowed like molten lava, one who knew the meaning of this awakening.

  The murmur in the depths slowly swelled. Angry calls rang out. Soon the darkness was alive with sound, a chorus of cawing and screeching.

  * * * * * *

  They came through the waters gasping for breath, memories of the flowing waters of the dead still clinging to their hearts. They were like ghosts themselves, colourless skin and silver hair contrasting sharply with grey eyes.

  They were a strange company dressed in shifting colours. Each carried a finely woven bow with a single string that appeared to be cut from glass. On the shores of the Dead Water they didn’t stop to consider where they had come from or where they were going. They had come this way before, and their forefathers before them. In the dying night they, too, passed into the world of the living.

  As they vanished into the trees, their coming signalled the end of the beginning.

  * * * * * *

  Two thousand years of history lay crumbling into the Northumberland night, and she had endured each one. She stood motionless on the high wall, her attention fixed on the north. The night was still, yet there was a disquiet moving unseen. She felt the babble trickling through her thoughts and it brought back memories long forgotten. Memories that she would rather keep locked away.

  There beside the Knag Burn Gate, a twisted and broken relic of ancient enemies and fallen heroes, the ripple caught her by surprise and she found herself reaching for the reassuring presence of the gate. She could feel her father’s thunder and see his light echoing through the Otherland, but there was something else there too. In the vast Northumberland night, atop Hadrian’s Wall, stretching eighty miles from east to west, she knew that peril had come to the Mid-land.

  CHERWELL COLLEGE

  Cherwell College was a real oddity. It was set in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, tucked away in a corner of the Fellows’ Garden. According to those in the know, it had been the last Oxford college to receive a royal charter, shortly after the Second World War. It had supposedly been founded by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others of the literary group known as the Inklings. No one really knew the reason why they had set it up and over the course of several decades facts had mingled with urban myth. What was certain was that its emblem was a circle with an unknown tree at the centre.

  With the last of the Inklings now fading to memory, the college was mainly home to visiting professors and a small group of post-graduates, though the odd undergraduate would also be admitted to its small gatherings, blinking in the light of quantum metaphysics or the philosophy of coincidence or some other arcane subject matter. It offered a collection of disciplines that had fallen through the cracks of more conventional universities, and its strangeness was mirrored by its students and professors.

  One of these students, a big-framed red-headed young man, was sitting in one of his favourite places, his very own room looking out over the Fellows’ Garden. Sam Wood had spent the final term of his first year gracing the curious buildings of Cherwell, and felt lucky to have gained a place there. He’d never heard of it before coming to Oxford. There was no prospectus for it and you couldn’t apply to it either. He had initially been studying physics at Magdalen and had been invited to a private meeting one evening at the Eagle and Child pub. His own tutors, professors Stuckley and Whitehart, had been there, along with a handful of undergraduates who had subsequently debated the nature of light until the early hours. He had eventually stumbled back to his lodgings exhausted and a little bewildered. Then a week later, a letter from a ‘Jack’ had appeared in his pigeonhole, inviting him to spend a term at Cherwell College.

  He had moved with Angus, the only other undergraduate chosen, to a grand Georgian house known as the Fellows’ House. His room was simple – there was a bed that was rarely made, a wardrobe on the far wall and a large writing desk that sat neatly in the bay window that made for a remarkable centrepiece.

  From this vantage point, he could see the neatly trimmed shrubs, green lawns and ancient trees of the Fellows’ Garden below. He had seen the seasons pass through that window – the unfurling of the spring leaves, the ancient oaks’ giant canopies offering quiet shelter from the summer sun and now the creeping curl of autumn leaves heralding a carpet of the finest conkers anywhere in England. A touch of Rivendell, one friend had called it, and it did remind him of the haven in The Lord of the Rings.

  He had even spent many evenings walking with friends along the tree-lined Addison’s Walk, where Tolkien himself had strolled. The river Cherwell would meander quietly alongside and now and then the silence would be broken by some far-off merriment from the fine lawns of Christ Church Meadow or the splash of a pole as a punt sent ripples across the still water.

  Back in his room, he would often stop his studies and watch several of his professors making their way towards the pond in the Fellows’ Garden, which was hidden by a circle of trees. They would always appear on the first Sunday of the month, their long walking sticks like the staffs of sorcerers, and he would wonder what secret society they were part of.

  It was late August now, and he was planning on going home for a short while. He had stayed in Oxford over the summer to resit his end-of-year exams and then been asked to wait to receive his results in person. He had been surprised and horrified to have fallen short. He had failed on the electromagnetic flow and its relationship with time. Amazingly, it had been the very subject he had debated at the Eagle and Child the night that had given him entry to Cherwell. So that in itself had been a great shock.

  Over the summer he had seen the city slowly empty of students and the tourists arrive in droves. Angus had gone back to his parents in Edinburgh’s New Town, and right now Sam was writing him a letter. But as the afternoon sun shone through the open window and fell across the page, his eyes were drawn to the view before him.

  Over the past few weeks he had watched the gentle colours of early autumn spread from the flowerbeds to the hedges until finally even the trees couldn’t deny the inevitable rusting of their leaves. Now the sun and the rhythmic purring of the Cherwell were making him feel sleepy. He stretched his back against the leather chair and looked west across Addison’s Walk towards Angel Meadow and the spires of Magdalen College. There were very few places that gave him such feelings of blissful contentment.

  He’d wanted to go to Oxford for a long time. His eyes came back to the book that had started his journey down from Newcastle. With a smile, he reached for it and placed it on his knee. He had numerous copies of The Hobbit, but this was his most treasured. Tolkien had illustrated this edition himself. How beautiful it was, with its green-leaved trees stretching into the forest and the Lonely Mountain rising ominously in the distance.

  For a second he was eleven years old again, remembering the incident that had set him on the path. He had been taking a short cut through the school library when a tattered old book had fallen from the shelf, just missing him. It was as if someone had nudged it as he was passing, but the library was empty. He picked it up and read, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…’ and, just like Tolkien, who had, by all accounts, written this on the back of an undergraduate’s exam book in 1935, he wanted to understand what a hobbit was and where it lived.

  He took the book home and read it in a week. The Lord of the Rings took him to Middle Earth and he would eventually stumble on the Inklings. Eight years later he would be in Oxford, retracing Tolkien’s footsteps to the Eagle and Child pub.

  Sam didn’t want to spoil this moment, with Magdalen’s spires sending their shadows peacefully down to the walk and the meadow be
fore him. This was the Oxford he had dreamed about, and it was perfect.

  But, as he tried to refocus on his letter to Angus, the sound of the gently flowing river brought other memories to his mind. He tried to push them back, but it was like trying to hold back the tide.

  He’d finished his first term at Oxford and, buzzing with the knowledge he had acquired, had returned home to a hero’s welcome from his mum. Later that Christmas holiday, Angus had come to stay and he’d taken him to Warkworth to stay overnight with his friend Emily’s uncle and aunt, who lived in an old school house on the banks of the river Coquet.

  It had started off well. He and Angus had had a perfectly good breakfast and spent a pleasant afternoon in Bamburgh, trawling through the rock pools and sipping a delightful cup of tea in Sam’s favourite tearoom. They’d arrived in Warkworth as the winter sun was fading and a cold silence was enveloping the Northumberland village, and had spent an enjoyable evening with Emily and her uncle and aunt. But then Sam had been woken in the middle of the night by what could have been a noise, although he still wasn’t sure whether it had been a noise or a feeling.

  Leaving the others sleeping, Sam had found himself going down to the old school house library, standing at Emily’s uncle’s desk and looking out into the blackness of the winter’s night. Then he’d gone out, right down to the water’s edge, where the Coquet was in full flow…

  The thought ran an icy-cold finger down the length of his spine and he again turned to the letter he was writing. But the memories would not be denied. Second by second, they crept into his mind and there was nothing he could do to stop them. One by one they came, creeping and slithering, until the brooding Shadow was standing once again on the bank of the Coquet…

  Sam was brought back to the present by two of Magdalen’s gardeners appearing suddenly in their green dungarees, pushing wheelbarrows full of hedge clippings. The garden was now empty of tourists and he guessed Magdalen had closed its gates to visitors.