by Neil Beynon
‘That’s foolishness,’ replied Sevlen. ‘She could have adopted an heir at any time, still could for that matter, and you know it.’
Jeb flushed. The horse shifted under him, trying to pull a little to the left and pulling the reins in his right hand enough for it to hurt. He squeezed as best he could with his knees and pulled gently on the reins. The horse obeyed, but the beast was getting twitchier the closer they got to the forest.
‘Have you been in the forest before?’ he asked.
Sevlen shifted in her own saddle. ‘No. That is the one place we are not allowed to go, even as shadows. She handled any communication with the gods through other messengers, usually a short dark-haired man that would occasionally come to the city gates and be ushered through the thain’s path to her chambers.’
Jeb nodded. He knew who the short man was. Not that he was a man.
‘I didn’t want this life for you,’ he said. He was tired of leaving this unsaid.
‘Pardon?’
‘I didn’t want this life for you,’ he said. ‘This life of shadows and of stolen moments between long periods away from all of us, away from her, and I could not see any way out for you after you gave away your heart.’
‘Oh, Jeb,’ she said. ‘You silly old fool. It was my choice. I have had a good life, and we have … we have few regrets. I was always heading for the shadows whether we had caught each other’s eye or not. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been really good at. Your idea of a romance is fantasy. No one has it.’
Jeb thought again of his wife. ‘Oh, they do. If they are lucky.’
His sister rode up alongside him and put her hand across his. ‘I was sorry when Sola passed. She was a wonderful person, and I know how much it hurt you to lose her.’
Jeb let her keep her hand there. The contact felt good. He would have liked to have frozen time there, to have potentially lived a little longer in that moment. He had only one sister, and he was conscious of how lucky he was that neither of them had died before this ride and that things were being said that needed to be said. The forest was only a league away now. He could smell the trees.
‘The land is too quiet,’ she said, withdrawing her hand.
‘You worry too much,’ he said. ‘The gods do not permit harm within the forest.’
Sevlen pulled her horse to a halt. Jeb carried on. He would not fail his mistress on this final mission that she had been good enough to give him when most would have sent him to the yard to amuse the children.
‘Jeb,’ she hissed.
‘I would have your company, sister,’ he said. ‘But I will not stop on my course.’
‘Where are the birds?’
Jeb looked at the trees, only yards away, and searched for any sign of life. There was nothing that he could hear, nothing that he could see, not even an owl in the trees, searching the dusk for any prey they could pick up. The last time he had entered the forest, not far from here, the trees had been full of birds, and the edge of the forest had been teeming. Now there was nothing but those yellow, gleaming eyes.
The wolves attacked before he had time to think. They took his horse down, two of them, bearing down on the creature with a ferocity that spoke of actual intelligence even before the wolves spoke. Jeb managed to roll away from the beast as she went down, and pulled his sword with a pace approaching his old speed. The first wolf went down with his belly split, and the second lost her head.
‘Jeb!’ cried his sister, goading her horse on.
There were more wolves. Jeb killed another. And another. A stag emerged from the shadows, and he seemed as big as the moon. Jeb saw in another blink that it was not a stag but a giant man rising, naked, with a spear that gleamed and his skin covered in tattoos. The god’s name came into his head. He couldn’t remember where he had left his slippers most of the time, but here was the name he had been taught as a boy nearly a hundred years ago, popping into his head like it was yesterday. Cernubus.
Jeb turned to his sister. She was attacking the wolves from horseback, slicing at them with her sword, killing a fair few. One bit Jeb. He howled and killed it.
He turned back to his sister. ‘Run!’
She hesitated even as he turned to block Cernubus’s spear.
‘Run!’ he yelled. ‘He’s a god!’
Jeb knew she would understand, that the shock would bring out her duty, sending her away on the horse, giving him that one last victory before the death that he knew was coming. He’d be damned if he would make this easy.
‘Why make it so hard?’ asked the god. He seemed to be speaking from everywhere all at once.
‘Why have you turned on us?’ asked Jeb, staggering. His right leg gave way, and it allowed Cernubus to drive the spear into Jeb’s side.
Cernubus stepped in close to the old man. Jeb was gritting his teeth against the pain in his side. He felt like he had been cut in half as he grabbed the spear with his left hand. He could feel his own blood leaking over the shaft.
‘Your people abandoned me,’ hissed the god, ‘sided with that woman, Danu.’
Jeb held the spear tight. ‘Always,’ he replied, driving the sword into the god’s chest up to the hilt.
Cernubus laughed.
‘The old man has teeth,’ the god shouted, wrapping his left hand around Jeb’s and extracting the blade from his torso without leaving any tears or blood.
In one sudden movement, he pulled the spear from Jeb and spun and struck the old man in his neck. Everything splintered. Jeb was on the floor. He couldn’t feel his body.
‘Should we follow her?’ asked a wolf.
‘No,’ said Cernubus, looking out across the plains after her. ‘It is better this way.’
Jeb had time to consider what this meant before everything faded to a sickly orange. He was in another place, where the light did not seem quite right. He felt an irresistible pull towards the river and beyond. He had been on a mission. Going somewhere. He couldn’t remember what it was. He was sure he’d remember if he just kept on walking, and so he did. He didn’t notice that nothing hurt any more.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The world was darker than the inside of her head.
The ribbons of phosphor that had lit the walls of the cave they started in had tapered out long enough ago that Anya felt she had been walking down the throat of the mountain for an age. None of them mentioned that the route was taking them slowly lower and therefore further from the surface and their route back to the real world. Vedic went first, his courage recovered for the time being, no doubt because he had not seen a vision of tunnels in his dream of death. Anya thought it was strange that he set such faith by a vision that could have just been a hallucination.
You’re one to talk. Her mother’s voice was in her head more and more the deeper they went. Occasionally she thought she saw Fin and her grandfather disappearing ahead of them, their forms glowing lightly in the dark. She knew they were in her head. She didn’t know why she did, but the certainty was there like the knowledge that the suns would rise in the morning, unfailingly. This didn’t stop her hands shaking when she thought about having to fight real people again, to end their stories with her sword.
The Tream went next after Vedic, his left hand clasped to the woodsman’s right wrist, and Anya came last, her left hand linked to Akyar’s right wrist. On the occasions Vedic stopped, they tended to collide into each other and mutter apologies in the dark.
The breeze stopped them. Air rattled down the passageway, and with it was the faint smell of the Tream throne room.
‘Meyr,’ whispered Akyar.
Vedic drew his sword. The blade was invisible in the dark, but the noise was unmistakable as the metal left the sheath.
‘Trivium,’ he replied.
Anya could smell another scent on the air. It was dirty, wet and foul, and faintly familiar, as if the scent had a cousin on the surface. Then Anya placed the odour – wet dog that had not been washed for an age, if at all. There was a growling up ahead.
/>
‘Kerberos,’ she replied.
‘Is meant to be dead,’ said Vedic, his irritation showing.
‘We’re in the land of the dead,’ replied Anya.
‘Who is Kerberos?’ asked Akyar.
Anya let go of his wrist and drew her own weapon. ‘Kerberos is the guardian of the three roads that split from this at the Trivium. Three roads: one leads to the void, one to the Cave of Shadows, and one leads to the Morrigan’s home – or so we say. No one has ever come back from that road.’
Akyar laughed. ‘You humans have some very strange ideas. I think death is a great deal less complicated than this.’
‘Yes, but we’re not the ones who talk to trees,’ said Anya.
‘He does,’ said Akyar. She imagined he was pointing at Vedic. This made her laugh.
‘Shh,’ said Vedic, as if he were straining to hear.
The howl, when it came, was almost on top of them. They all had their weapons out, but there was little room to actually fight in the tunnel – it was a poor place to try to defend. Vedic cursed. There was the sound of tearing and of fabric being pulled tight, and then there was light.
Vedic was holding a human thigh bone wrapped in part of his tunic, which he had torn off and managed to light with the flints he used for his pipe. He placed the torch in a section of wall where it would hold while still burning, and picked up his sword.
‘Right, are we doing this?’
‘Are you?’ asked Akyar.
Anya steadied herself. She nodded at the Tream’s question.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said the woodsman, shifting round to face them. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to fall in some godforsaken tunnel.’
Vedic’s eyes flashed angrily, almost as if he were a demon himself. Anya wasn’t sure for a moment if that meant Vedic was going to fight them or whatever was coming up the tunnel. There was a glimpse of someone else there for a moment, another Vedic, and a sense that the growls weren’t the most dangerous thing in the caves.
‘One last charge, is it, Vedic?’ asked Akyar, finishing the last of the water.
‘What choice do we have?’ asked Vedic, nodding in the direction of the growls. ‘Fight and likely die, or lie down and definitely die.’
‘I’m not making the journey across Golgotha again, not for a long time,’ said Anya, gripping her blade, forcing her hand not to shake. Fin stared at her across the tunnel, but when she blinked, he was gone.
The woodsman smiled. ‘I wish I could be so confident.’
‘This isn’t what you saw,’ said Akyar, putting his hand on Vedic’s shoulder. ‘In the water, you saw your death, and it wasn’t here.’
‘Small mercies,’ said Vedic, shaking his head.
A howl went up again from wherever the tunnel ended. They turned as one to look at the darkness ahead, willing themselves to move on. Claws scratched on stone, and Kerberos sniffed, trying to scent them.
‘Well, we don’t have that comfort, but I’m not sure I like how my story is going,’ said Anya, checking her blade. ‘I don’t plan on the tale ending here.’
‘We’re all just shadows,’ said Akyar. ‘All light fades in the end and passes into darkness. All we can do is hope to burn bright enough that our afterglow lasts as long as possible.’
‘Balls to that,’ said Vedic.
The woodsman couldn’t run – there wasn’t enough clearance – but he managed a swift shuffle down the tunnel, his sword in one hand, and his axe in the other. A rolling growl came, deep and loud.
‘Now he decides to be courageous,’ said Akyar, padding after the woodsman.
Anya hesitated for a moment, her heartbeat a swift staccato in her chest, and the black seemed too close to that sweet darkness when she had lain bleeding in the forest, as close to Golgotha as she was right now. She looked at her shaking hands. It would be so easy to just go back, to dwell in Golgotha until the darkness forced itself on her. Who would blame her? She forced the shake away, and the grip on her sword tightened.
‘Balls to that,’ she whispered. And then, louder: ‘Balls to that!’
Kerberos, the three-headed dog, guarded the Trivium from souls trying to do exactly what they were attempting to do: return to the world of the living.
Kerberos, the Morrigan’s hunting companion, had supposedly been slain by the hero Arawn. The Shaanti recalled the hero who dared to return his love to the living as one of their treasured myths. The dog had lived on as a way to scare children into obedience, and perhaps that, Anya thought, was what had sustained it: childhood terror.
Anya had always baulked at the story, the only tale from the Pantheon that she had never really had any patience for. Her grandfather had spent each night reading from the Pantheon, from the time she lay in the cradle to the last night she saw him alive. To Anya, a three-headed dog and someone riding into hell for love just seemed foolish. This didn’t seem as fanciful as they burst into the Trivium and saw what was waiting for them.
The chamber was high, a granite dome, which, had it been painted, would have done the Kurah proud as a chamber for their stone god. Behind Kerberos, at the far end of the room, lay three openings arranged in a semicircle. They had no time to appraise them or form a strategy, because in the middle of the chamber was the beast. Kerberos, his fur as black as the passages behind him, his muzzles flecked with silver, his eyes as amber as honey and his maws as red as torn flesh. He smelt of earth and decay.
Kerberos leapt for the woodsman. Vedic and the animal went down in a mass of jaws and axe swings. The wrestling pair took out Akyar as he tried to intervene with his sword, launching him from his feet in a sweep of tail and legs that sent the Tream across the ground, crunching into a wall. Akyar’s blade scattered one way, while the torch landed somewhere near the central opening.
Anya circled the fight with her blade up, ready to strike if she got a chance. In her periphery, she saw Akyar nip up, unarmed and scrambling for his sword, before she was forced to duck as Vedic was thrown by Kerberos across the chamber. He struck the wall and lay still.
Kerberos panted. His fur was blood-tinged, and not all of it from Vedic. All three of the heads glared at Anya, though one was hanging limp and wounded from the creature’s right shoulder. Anya raised her sword, letting her voice bellow with the war cry of the Shaanti, projecting her fear out of her as she ran for the creature. She had no problem killing this monster. She was in control.
The dog leapt but not for Anya. The Tream tried to roll out of the way, but the creature merely bounced onto his rolling form and raised his heads up, one set of jaws holding Akyar, fists flailing at the maw. Kerberos shook the head that contained Akyar, trying to finish off the Tream.
Anya gave Kerberos no time, adjusting her attack. Lighter than Akyar, she dodged the first head and rolled, coming up from the ground with her sword in an arcing swing that took off the dog’s central head with one sweep.
Blood gushed briefly from the stump. Kerberos’s left head howled in pain. He leapt on Anya with leopard-like speed. She landed on her back with her sword-arm caught underneath her. Her shoulder burned with a pain unlike any she’d ever felt, and she thought she heard something pop. It took nearly everything she had to get her free hand up under the jaw of the creature’s left head, holding the blade mere inches from her throat.
The animal grunted and howled from its wounds. All was muscle, blood and teeth. Anya was cast free of the fetid fur, rolling out of the way as the animal howled again.
Someone stood, blade extended into the side of the creature: Vedic. Bloody, scowling and cursing in a language she didn’t understand, the woodsman twisted the blade, the ghost of another man just hovering on the edge of his expression. He’s enjoying this, she thought, catching the look on his face.
The dog howled again.
‘Die!’ grunted Vedic, slamming the blade in up to the hilt.
The creature yelped, dropping Akyar. The Tream rolled away, clutching his pierced sides but not getting up.
/> Kerberos crouched between Anya and Vedic, one head staring at each of them. A stalemate. Kerberos’s left head swung round so quickly it caught both the woodsman and Anya by surprise. The hound was faster than either of them. The jaws clamped round Vedic’s waist and tossed the woodsman like an errant puppy. Vedic sailed through the air, his eyes widening as he arced towards one of the openings – a tunnel that led down into the black.
He hit the ground just in front of the drop, his hands scrabbling for a hold as his body slid towards the yawning darkness. There was nothing to hold on to. He issued a grunt of surprised dismay and disappeared from view altogether, falling into silence. The woodsman was gone.
Kerberos turned to face Anya. Her heart pounded at what she had seen. Her chest hurt and her belly churned. Kerberos’s jaws dripped blood and saliva. The dog limped from the bite of one of their blades; gashes lined its flanks; but still the beast came on with the feral tenacity of a killer gone mad. A growl rolled from deep within its body. The dog tensed its haunches to jump. Anya held her blade two-handed and ready to fight. She would not give Kerberos the satisfaction or spur of showing fear.
Kerberos yelped in surprise, his right head nipping at his side. Anya glanced and saw that Akyar, unable to find a weapon, unable to really move much at all, had resorted to the only thing left to him and sunk his own teeth into the dog’s tail. Anya didn’t wait. She flipped over the snapping right set of jaws, slicing the head from the neck, and rolled under Kerberos. She drove her blade up beneath the creature’s breastbone with every bit of upthrust she could muster. Anya felt Kerberos’s heart resist her sword momentarily before splitting like an overripe fruit as she twisted with all her might, the creature’s belly pressed down on her shoulder. It grunted, pressing the air from Anya’s lungs as the beast collapsed on her and expired.