Into the Infested Side Read online

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

  The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  Copyright © Shane Hegarty 2015

  Illustrations © James de la Rue 2015

  Jacket illustration © James de la Rue 2015

  Jacket Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Shane Hegarty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

  James de la Rue asserts the moral right to be identified as the illustrator of the work.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Source ISBN: 9780007545735

  Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007545759

  Version: 2015-07-07

  Find out more about HarperCollins and the environment at

  www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

  For Oisín

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Previously in Darkmouth

  The Arrival of the Human (Part 1)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  The Arrival of the Human (Part 2)

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The Execution of the Human

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  The Three Explodings of Niall Blacktongue

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  The Purge

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Hugo’s Rescue

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  The Leaving of Niall Blacktongue

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Thank Yous

  About the Author

  Books by Shane Hegarty

  About the Publisher

  PREVIOUSLY IN DARKMOUTH

  (AND THE MESS THINGS WERE LEFT IN)

  It was, everyone on the Council of Twelve agreed, a bit of a mess.

  Actually, it was a lot of a mess. In fact, ‘mess’ understated things a little. It was more of a disaster really. A catastrophe. A complete catastrophe.

  It was, everyone on the Council of Twelve eventually agreed, a complete catastrophe.

  What was the worst part of the catastrophe? There was so much to choose from.

  Darkmouth was the last town left on Earth where Legends of myth still invaded, but Hugo the Great, the only active Legend Hunter left to fight them off, was lost on the Infested Side.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough – and it was very, very bad – Darkmouth had been left in the hands of his son Finn, a boy still almost eleven months away from his thirteenth birthday when he would become Complete as a Legend Hunter.

  Worse yet, this boy was not exactly top of his Legend Hunter class. Which was some achievement given he was the only boy in his Legend Hunter class.

  Somehow, that wasn’t even the end of the mess.

  The Twelve had managed to plant a spy in the town. Steve, a Half-Hunter from a long line of Legend Hunters, had never properly hunted until he arrived in Darkmouth. It turned out he had never properly spied either, as his cover was blown by Finn, the very boy he was supposed to be keeping a close eye on.

  There should have been a positive in the form of Steve’s daughter, Emmie, who not only befriended Finn, but also showed a desire and heart for fighting Legends that the boy lacked. Except it was increasingly clear that her enthusiasm would cause trouble someday – and that day came when she helped a Legend, Broonie the Hogboon, escape back to the Infested Side from which all Legends come.

  And then, just to add icing to the whole cake of catastrophe, Darkmouth turned out to be harbouring a traitor. Mr Ernest Glad was supposed to be a Fixer, a helper, a lifelong friend to Hugo. Instead, he was collaborating with the Legends and helped them invade. And he ended up opening a gateway to the Infested Side and pushing Finn’s mother, Clara, through it. Eventually, Clara was rescued by Hugo, but he became trapped in the world of the Legends.

  Yes, Finn did shove Mr Glad into the gateway, trapping him and turning him into a million points of light. And yes, he did admittedly defeat a Minotaur and stop an all-out invasion of Legends.

  But buildings were destroyed. People were hurt. Every goldfish in Darkmouth disappeared. Hugo the Legend Hunter was gone.

  And it would not help matters at all if the boy tried to get him back. No, that would only end in further, final catastrophe.

  Or something far worse.

  ‘The Arrival of the Human’

  From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse,

  as told by inhabitants of the Infested Side

  When the human stepped into this cursed world, the sky changed colour. A gateway had opened from the Promised World. There were two voices, that of a human boy and a man. But when the gateway closed only the man remained and, as the army arrived to capture him, the sky went from its usual bleak grey to an entirely different shade of abysmal grey.

  It is true that all of this was witnessed and described by one of the ancient Graeae sisters, and it is also true that it was not her turn with the single eyeball they shared between the three of them. She could sense it, though, she insisted, just as she could sense the advancing army. She had felt their tremor through her only tooth. Just before it fell out.

  The army followed the fleeing human across the dead earth. Shimmering armour covered his body, yet by the time the chase was over he had suffered wound after wound until the redness of his flowing blood was vivid against the desolate land where even the soil desires vengeance.

  Escaping deep within the scorched forest, the Legend Hunter glanc
ed behind to see if they were closing on him, only to stumble at the edge of a crater in the earth. He grasped desperately at a petrified branch, but, when it broke, the crack echoed across the land.

  The human fell.

  The army converged.

  Through the wood, creatures of every sort crept forward. Two-headed and goat-backed, serpent-tailed and poison-tongued, scaled and leathery, hairy and fire-scorched. They moved as one, encircling him, howling, snarling, barking, yelping, expressing their bloodlust in a thousand voices.

  The human hauled himself to his feet, pain obvious in every fighting breath, and turned, slowly, to take in the full scene and absorb the great futility of his situation. Having done this, he then did something most surprising.

  He smiled.

  At this time of all times. In this place of all places.

  It caused a momentary hesitation, a brief quietening of the army.

  What did he know?

  They pushed away their doubts and closed in on him again, crawling, creeping, flying across branches, screaming through mouths rimmed with teeth, heads rimmed with mouths, necks rimmed with heads.

  This human would soon become one more pile of bones in a forest of the dead.

  “Stop!” demanded a voice.

  Every creature did, standing aside as a giant pushed his way through their ranks.

  He was a Fomorian, armoured and fierce. Holding a spear, he moved forward steadily, circling the human, letting the fear sink in, until he stopped in front of him and pressed the spear against the intruder’s chest.

  “I command this army in the name of the great and mighty Gantrua,” the Fomorian told him. “And you have wandered into the wrong world.”

  The human slowly scanned the Legends around and above him, then leaned in close to the mighty giant towering over him and spoke.

  “Actually, this is exactly where I wanted to be.”

  The army howled, leaped, roared. The Fomorian raised a hand to calm them again. “Choose your next words very carefully, human. They will be your last.”

  The Legend Hunter lifted his chin and declared, “They call me Niall Blacktongue. I come from the Blighted Village of Darkmouth to find someone, but not anybody of this world. And I wouldn’t press that spear too hard if I were you.”

  “You mean like this?” The Fomorian applied just the tiniest pressure to the spear, but enough to pierce the armour until a dribble of blood ran down Niall Blacktongue’s chest plate.

  The human flinched. Then sparked, like the ignition of a match in the moment before the flame consumes it.

  “I did warn you,” sighed Niall. Then he exploded.

  THIRTY-TWO YEARS LATER

  Finn’s father had told him to go to room S3 in the house.

  Then he’d pushed Finn out of the Infested Side, back through the buckling gateway to their own world and safety. Finn’s dad had gone to the Infested Side to rescue Finn’s mam, and Finn had gone there to rescue both of them. The last time he saw his dad, he was stepping towards the onrushing Legends and the human who led the charge – Hugo’s own father, Niall Blacktongue.

  So, once the gateway had closed, trapping his father on the other side, Finn ran straight to room S3 in the Long Hall. All he found there was a plain box. Inside it was a handwritten note with a simple instruction: Light up the house.

  So Finn did. He switched on every lamp and light bulb from the library to the bedrooms, from the bathrooms to the storerooms. He replaced spent light bulbs. He filled empty sockets. He lit up rooms he’d spent hours training in. Rooms he’d never been in. Rooms he’d hardly even noticed.

  By the time he’d finished, the house must have been visible from the moon.

  “Find the map,” his father had also said.

  So Finn found maps.

  Lots of maps. Two weeks of hard searching later, he hadn’t found his father, but he was still finding maps.

  They were now stacked in piles the length of the Long Hall, under his ancestors’ portraits lining the wall. One mound of maps was overseen by the painting of a meek, almost shameful Niall Blacktongue that Finn could hardly bring himself to look at since losing his father.

  Pages were heaped up across the circular floor of the high-ceilinged library, scattered about the device in the centre of the room that his father had built to desiccate Legends, but which Mr Glad had used to awaken them for the invasion. And, at the very spot where Glad had been trapped by a collapsing gateway and scattered into light, there was a small mountain of maps, sorted, discarded, ruled out or held on to for further investigation. Finn sat on one of its slopes.

  But he wasn’t alone.

  “I’m guessing we can ignore The 1956 Guide to Norway’s Best Pudding Restaurants?” he asked Emmie.

  “The Great Scourge of 1886: A Map of Missing Legends,” she read from where she stood by a half-ransacked section of the vast shelves that ringed the room. “How many Legends went missing? And how can there be a map of them if no one knows where they are in the first place?”

  They had spent a fortnight leafing through books of maps, fold-out maps, laminated maps, two braille maps, even a jigsaw map of Ireland that Finn used to play with as a child. That very afternoon, they had put the jigsaw together and become very excited when they discovered the piece for County Tipperary was missing.

  “It must mean something,” Emmie had said excitedly, until Finn remembered that he’d almost choked on Tipperary when he was very young and the piece had been thrown away as a safety precaution.

  He and Emmie continued sifting through the maps in the hope that something might jump out at them. Although, given that they were surrounded by the desiccated husks of Legends, shrunken and frozen but not at all dead, they quietly hoped that nothing would literally jump out at them.

  Since his father’s disappearance, no alarms had wailed. No gateway had opened. No Legends had come through. Instead, it had been all about the maps, with the problem being that even if they found one that looked right they didn’t have a clue what it would lead them to.

  A weapon? A person? A Legend with its mouth wide and teeth sharpened? Maybe it would be a convenient path to the Infested Side, and they would skip their way along it to find Hugo sitting in a room somewhere, grinning at them.

  With the way things had gone so far, that seemed unlikely.

  “We’ll know it when we see it, I guess,” Emmie said, apparently sensing Finn’s despair. “I’m sure that at some stage the map we’re looking for will just drop out of something like...” she looked at the book she was holding, “...An Illustrated Atlas of the Last Stands of Slain Legend Hunters. OK, bad choice.”

  Finn was flicking robotically through another book, The Happy Rowers’ Guide to the Inlets of Southern Sweden, 1974 edition (Now with Added Coves).

  “Dad wouldn’t have told me about it if he didn’t think we could find it,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Emmie. “And he told me he knew I wouldn’t give up. So I won’t. Except...” From the book he was holding, a small, red, frayed hardback notebook dropped to the floor. “...we’ve been doing this for weeks now, looking for something we mightn’t even recognise.”

  “We’ll find it soon, Finn,” said Emmie.

  “I’m not saying we won’t,” Finn replied, picking up the notebook. On the inside cover were the initials NB, and he scanned its pages of hand-drawn mathematical symbols, diagrams and shapes, the writing so small it was like a spider had fallen in an inkpot before scampering across the page. NB, he thought. Niall Blacktongue? Was it possible this notebook belonged to—?

  A crumpled-up bit of paper bounced off the side of his head. “Earth to Finn?” said Emmie, with a sympathetic grin.

  Finn blinked. “Oh. I’m not saying we won’t find it, I’m just afraid we’re looking for the wrong thing in the wrong places.”

  Which was the exact moment he found a map.

  Low evening sunlight flooded the small Darkmouth alley, forcing Finn to pull his visor down to block
its glare. He crept low along the narrow laneway, brushing the high walls on either side, the butt of his Desiccator pressed into his armoured shoulder, ready to protect him against whatever he might find. Whenever he found it. Whatever it was he was looking for.

  He backed along a wall, the armour of his clattering fighting suit screeching across the stone. Keeping out of sight, he took a hard right into another alleyway of high glass and nail-rimmed walls in a town built for defence. Gouges and missing chunks in the brickwork were a reminder of the invasion only two weeks before, of the chaos and near catastrophe wrought by multiple Manticores, a Minotaur and those trying to hunt them down.

  He scuttled down the laneway where Mr Glad’s burnt-out shop stood behind a criss-cross of police tape warning trespassers to keep out, a blackened reminder of the traitor who had opened a hole in Darkmouth through which Finn’s father and mother had gone and only one had come back.

  Where the lane bisected another, Finn stuck his head round the corner. From a parallel alley, the barrel of a weapon emerged, followed by a helmet and a flurry of exaggerated hand signals.

  Palm out flat. Knuckles curled. A swirling motion.

  Finn flipped open his visor, squinting against the sun as he tried to properly convey his bemusement. “What?” he mouthed.

  Steve pushed his visor open and repeated the gestures, this time adding some kind of pumping fist motion.

  “Lie down?” asked Finn. “Hop?”

  Steve gritted his teeth with obvious frustration. From behind his back, another head appeared.

  Emmie, her helmet propped on her head, tight red hair avalanching from it, waved at Finn. He waved back.

  Her father gently but firmly pushed her behind him and then, pressed against the wall, crab-walked towards Finn. Emmie followed, no Desiccator in her hand. She wasn’t allowed one. Her sole weapon was an eagerness that almost burst from her.

  The three crouched at the wall. Finn’s fighting suit was pushed up uncomfortably at his neck; his kneepads dug into the top of his shins. He shifted awkwardly and loudly as Steve spoke.

  “We’re to follow that lane north for another forty metres,” said Emmie’s father, pointing ahead, “then west for twenty metres. That’s where we’ll find our target.”