Náith roared, put every ounce of weight and might he had left into a last chain of blows, sinking the death-god’s mask into the bubbling corpse flesh beneath it.
And you… came Ancu’s fading whisper, you cling to a mother… who eats her own.
Ancu’s arms fell away, its body running liquid over its bed of dead men, black fluid draining away into the hollows between them. Náith watched it fade, shoulders heaving, arms shaking, red and black below the elbow. Only the death-god’s faceplate remained, embedded in a nest of dead flesh. Náith’s hands dripped blood as he reached for it and prised it free. He stood and stared into its featureless visage, lips twitching as the meaning of it awoke.
All was still as Náith thrust Ancu’s face into the air, his cry shattering the newborn quiet. ‘I am Cu Náith! Greatest warrior in Luah Fáil! And I have conquered death itself!’ Silence was his answer, and Náith filled it with laughter, turning away to head back to Síle.
Something hard squelched into the flesh under his boot at the first step. Náith pulled his foot back, frowning at a glittering stone. He plucked it from the mess, shook it free of clinging strands of rot and examined it between thumb and forefinger. It was an uncut gemstone of deepest blue, half the size of his palm. A plain-looking thing, and yet there was something about it that gripped the eye all the same.
‘What are you, eh?’ Náith muttered. He looked closer, and the hair along his arms prickled as if lightning filled the air. A storm flashed in the stone’s depths.
Chapter 20
Death Uncrowned
She’d been singing that day, Luw recalled. He’d heard it through the trees. It had drawn him to the forest’s edge, leaving Bann behind to guard a partially skinned deer, while he followed the drifting, golden thread of her song. And there she had stood, down in that garden she so carefully tended.
Síle.
Ah… but what a treasure she had been. The way she had moved between the rows of flower, fruit, and shrub, as light on her feet as a swallow in flight, the light of her Earthbond dancing in her eyes. He could still hear the words of her song, lilting through the trees, embracing him as he’d watched her tend to her garden, hidden and utterly transfixed.
‘I am the winds that blow… grey waves of iron that ever flow… and I am the sun that burns black upon your horizon.’
A Nuankin funeral song, it sounded like. It should have been haunting, morose as a sour drunkard in his cups. Yet somehow it was sweet, as her perfect voice shaped its melancholy into something radiant.
‘I am the moon that shines… from death does spring life, woven in time…’
‘Whom do you sing for?’ Luw hadn’t the wit nor will to stop himself from calling out to her. Síle’s song had ended, their eyes meeting for the first time as he rose carefully from the undergrowth, and by the earth’s own blood, Luw had never seen a Nuankin woman more beautiful than she.
‘For my father,’ she had called back. ‘Who are you? It’s not often I talk to those who linger in shadows.’
Little in his life had frightened Luw as much as approaching that maid in her garden, her eyes tracing every step and motion, shining their light on every insecurity and unnamed fear that dwelt in the self. ‘I am… Luw, the Hunter,’ he offered her, trying not to bend beneath her stare. ‘I… I heard you sing. I just wanted to listen. I’ve not heard a Nuankin song in some time.’
‘Why, you’re one of the forest folk, aren’t you?’ He could still feel the touch she had gifted him in that moment, how her slender fingers had played soft shapes along sharp bone and scattered every fear and doubt. ‘The Hunters… I’d thought you were all gone…’
‘Most of us are.’
She’d tilted her head, a hand following the shape of his antlers, teeth teasing at her lip. ‘Then that makes you special. Doesn’t it?’
Luw had fought a losing battle against an oafish grin. ‘What is your name, my lady?’
‘Síle, of Mael Tulla.’
‘Can I hear you sing again, Síle? Your song was… beautiful.’
‘You can,’ she’d said, taking him by the hand, ‘if you take tea with me first, and tell me of yourself.’
He’d choked an answer, let her take him by the hand and guide him through the garden.
Gentle were the days that followed. Days spent abed, with Síle beneath his arm and Bann at his feet, listening to mice play in the thatch and the wind fret at the shutters. She’d let him watch how she wove her magicks through earth and seed and stem, how she turned barren soil into a patchwork beauty and made the withered petal bloom again. The sick and injured that begged favour at her door found healing, and that she asked nothing of them in return. Life ran from Síle like a river, and all around her the world seemed to blossom, grow brighter as she scoured away impurity.
Joyful times… even as Luw had returned to his watch over the forest, she’d been there, waiting for him and the precious days where they forged memories together, and he watched her weave the threads of her Earthbond into lifegiving splendour.
But it was all gone, and now only memory remained, the embers and ashes of what they once were, stomped and scattered by that bastard, Náith. And yet, as the Southern Forest’s dark line loomed against the sky, and Maebhara’s weight made itself known in Luw’s sweating hand, those embers seemed to burn brighter than once they had.
Those days would be theirs once more.
The Southern Forest rose from behind the hills – a palisade of black claws, scraping a sky the colour of scorched sulphur. Luw skidded across the grass, boots tearing a furrow through the hillock he crossed. It was dying.
No, he cursed himself, it’s already dead.
When he’d stolen the Earthblood from the Heartoak, Luw had known what it would do to this place. To his home. It would wither and it would rot, sure as any man who’d had his heart ripped from its shell of flesh. But… he’d not imagined it to happen so quickly, so devastatingly. Forest, sky, land. All were diseased, dead-looking, wreathed in silence.
Luw pushed the shock of it aside, laid a hand over his heart. For her, I would see the world burn. He adjusted his grip on Maebhara, checked the quiver on his back, and made his way to the forest over the hills. The hunt was about to begin. There was not a chance that Ancu could resist so much death.
It was much like the nightmares Luw sometimes had, stepping into the shadow of that dead wood. There were no animals, no birds. No life. The trees had shed their brown leaves to crackle and crunch underfoot, speckled black with rot. The trees themselves were eaten through, hollowed and crumbling from the inside. Groans echoed now and then through the ranks of their dead trunks, ripping apart the silence as decay consumed Luw’s world. A bough crashed down before him a bare handful of paces from the forest’s edge, belching up a cloud of spore-stinking dust as it shattered and sprayed him with its crumbling flesh.
Luw fell to his knees, scooped up the bough’s corrupted fragments and let them spill through his fingers. He put a hand to the ground, reached for the Earthbond and recoiled, hissing, staring at it aghast. It was as though he’d shoved it into the bowels of something long dead, writhing in its fit of decay. He had done this… all of this. He was the guardian of this place, its last defender, the watchful eye that kept the axes and saws of Aodhamar’s ravagers at bay. And he had brought ruin upon it, death upon death, and left it but a vast, festering shell.
He’d ripped the soul out of everything he’d ever believed in, ever loved, and shat on it in the name of a bond Síle had willingly broken. The horror of it threatened to take him in that moment, drag him into its bleak river and dash him against the madness of it all. Instead, Luw stood, the sun’s befouled light filtering through the trees to daub the old, forgotten paths.
Make it worth the price.
Maebhara held low, Luw made his way deeper into the corpse of his home.
The corruption grew thicker the further he went, the nearer he drew to the root of it all. The trees grew sparse, many so riddled
with decay they were little more than piles of crumbling branches, the winds gnawing at them. Further on it was worse. Luw passed wilted trees, sodden with rot, oozing black filth from trunk and bough as if melting from within. Sagging boughs jutted from great, bubbling pools of it, and a reeking grave-miasma drifted from them, prickling in Luw’s nose like thorns drawn from a sour wound.
He spat a mouthful of its taste out and hurried on, eyes raking every shadow and hollow. He already knew where Ancu would be, it didn’t warrant much thought. The place where he’d torn the soul from this forest – the Heartoak. Where else would a death-god haunt, but where death was at its thickest?
A shadow passed across the path ahead, sweeping through the trees.
It was gone before Luw’s bow was even raised, the forest still against the weapon’s creaking. Luw swept the arrow’s point over every gap between the trees, the sound of his panicked breaths rasping in his ears. There was nothing. Dissolving vegetation and frothing black filth sprawled for miles.
I am the winds that blow…
The whisper trickled through the ruined trunks ahead, setting Luw’s skin to prickling, his mouth to flapping. He shouldered the bow and tore Maebhara from the ground, panic urging his feet along the trail. ‘Síle?’
Grey waves of iron that ever flow…
It was her song – Síle’s song. Luw’s heart was spewing ice as he sprinted down the trail after her voice, thoughts reeling beneath his fear for her safety. It couldn’t be her. It shouldn’t have been her – she wasn’t stupid enough to wander so deep into a place brimming with decay. It had to be some trick of the rot and its bubbling poison, their fumes warping his senses. A horrid thought struck him though as he hurtled through ruin, decaying branches exploding into black slime against his chest and shoulders. The forest had died so quickly – so utterly. Surely she would have seen it from her home? Had she come to try and save it, try to stop the rot before it spread to her garden?
Foolish, foolish, foolish bastard!
‘Síle! Síle!’ Fear overcame Luw, sent him hurtling through the forest, every horrid thought snapping at his heels. The journey seemed to vanish in moments beneath the pounding of his legs, the Heartoak’s grove opening before him. Skidding on his heels, he threw himself backwards, landing in a cloud of mouldy dust a bare inch from the ring of black rot surrounding the Heartoak.
Luw’s mouth flapped wordlessly at the sight of it. Once, it was towering, its twisted limbs splayed against the sky like the antlers of a proud buck, defiant and old beyond the reckoning of men. A tree that had watched the land shape itself before either Nuankin or Hunter had walked upon it. But now the Heartoak was dead, sagging and rotten. Every crack and crevice in its vast trunk was bleeding black. As though the thing regurgitated his betrayal, it ran thickest from the hollow Luw had ripped the Earthblood and its amber shell from, draining into the stinking pool around it. It was half-collapsed into the stuff already. Its tangled, deflated branches trailed through the filth, the tentacles of a sea-beast dashed and stranded upon the shore. The air about it felt heavy, barbed with an accusation that dragged over the rawness of Luw’s guilt.
A shadow moved beneath the drooping arch of the Heartoak’s bough, vanishing behind its oozing trunk.
I am the moon that shines…
‘Síle!’ Her voice crept across the distance, as if it seeped from the tree itself. Luw found his feet snatching up his bow. ‘Síle! My love! Where are you? Come to me!’
His voice rang over the decrepit serenity of the grove, iron screeching against iron. A heartbeat’s silence answered him, broken by a wretched groan that came from the Heartoak. The lower half of its trunk swelled, bloated outward as though it were a pregnant sow. Luw hissed, thrust Maebhara into the earth and reached for his bow, the sound of tearing, wet flesh filling the grove. A black rent opened in the tree’s quickened gut and burst apart, spewing forth a wave of umbral filth, flooding the grove with impurity. The Heartoak disgorged something behind the wave, vomited it up to slide across the ground toward Luw. He splashed back from it, ankle deep in rot as he drew, the arrow’s point wavering over a curled, glistening, foetal thing.
It was shaped almost like a man.
For a moment, all Luw could hear was the terror in his own breath. The thing twitched, an arm unfolding, long and insectile as it shed an oily skin, a dripping claw slapping down in the rot to push its body upright. A head convulsed at the end of a distended neck, scattering flecks of black ichor.
Luw’s bowstring cracked even before the thing’s face snapped toward him. The shaft struck home, punching through where its eye should have been and blowing the left side of its head apart. Luw nocked another arrow, drew, took aim, and found its empty face staring toward him, black ooze knitting the missing chunk of its head back together.
‘What…’
A breeze came slithering about the Heartoak as the thing stood, its body coursing with rot. There was a voice, its sound the wind hissing over weathered bones – speaking words that cut Luw’s very soul.
I am the winds that blow…
Luw’s bow cracked, the shaft tearing through its chest, the hole closing in a heartbeat. Its oozing head lifted toward him, long arms spreading.
Grey waves of iron that ever flow…
The thing came on, heedless of the arrow that shredded its knee. Dripping fingers lengthened into talons. Luw waded back through the flooded glade – nocked, drew, loosed. A claw shot out and snatched the shaft from the air. A sheet of ichor shed from the thing’s face, revealing a pale, featureless plate of bone. Points of pale, blue light awoke in the voids of its eyeholes, the glittering ghosts of stars.
And I am the sun that burns black upon your horizon.
It crushed the arrow in its claw and cast the splinters into the rot flood. Luw’s bow lowered, chest heaving beneath the slamming of his heart. The creature’s head cocked, its eyes were shards of moonlight glinting from ice. It circled slowly to his left like a stalking beast, wading silent through the flood as though a part of it. Talons flexed, dripped, its chin lowering.
What’s this, a dead voice drifted from it, another of that witch’s worms?
‘Who are you?’ Luw called, shifting through the muck to his right. He drew, arrowhead following the creature’s path. ‘Where’s Síle?’
I have no name, it answered, trailing a claw along a dead tree, bark parting like flesh to ooze rot. A shard of ice wedged itself in Luw’s throat.
‘You are Ancu,’ he croaked, backing away, fingers screaming against the bowstring.
Your kind have called me that before, it spoke, halting to stand tall, towering over the dead grove, growing taller as he watched. Its glittering eyes swept across the forest. Why have you done this?
‘To summon you,’ Luw hissed, arm shaking against the strength of his bow, the arrow begging to fly. Ancu’s head snapped back toward him, spraying filth. The ground shook beneath the flood of rot, something in its rhythm speaking of anger.
Nobody summons me, little one, uttered Ancu, advancing another loping stride, sinking low with claws spread. I am death. Not you. Is this another of her ugly little schemes, child? Did she think this would make me let him go?
Luw’s bow snapped, the arrow taking Ancu through the throat. The death-god came forth heedless, swelling in size as wound sealed itself. It dropped onto all fours, advancing through the flood like a stalking bear.
She will never have Tárchan back. He is dead. He is gone.
Tárchan. Luw stumbled over something beneath the rot, fumbling the arrow he reached for. Ogmodh had mentioned that name. Síle’s dead husband. That same wretched feeling came over him, of secrets like snakes slithering over one another, a churning nest of worms.
Ancu loomed over him, yet more monstrous and warped than it had been but a heartbeat before. You run blindly after your heart, little one, it whispered. There is only pain for you here, and only death for her. She will never have him back.
The death-god’s face
flipped back upon its long neck, a shapeless, fang-lined maw opening beneath it that loosed a hideous bellow, casting ripples through the flood. It pounced at Luw, its size belying its speed. Luw leapt to the side, Ancu’s claws biting rot-drowned earth, filth fountaining from the blow. Luw splashed down, loosed a shaft into Ancu’s side and ran, filth sucking at his boots as he sloshed toward the edge of the grove.
He made it to the trail, pulling himself free of the flood onto its gentle slope. A hand seized him by the ankle, its cold strength ripping a scream from him as it snatched him down to the earth, dragging him back toward the flooded grove. Luw flipped onto his back as he fell, ignoring the jolt of pain that burst through him, bow drawn, arrow seeking target. The rot writhed with a swarm of black, dripping hands – hundreds of them, squirming and wrestling over one another to reach toward him, a colony of bristling maggots. Ancu’s dark mass hovered over the flood, its shape caught somewhere between a spider and a bear, its front end shimmering with rows of ever-moving teeth.
You will not leave this place, little one, Ancu whispered, the swarming hands digging cold digits into Luw’s flesh, winding themselves in his clothing, dragging him down until the black flood was at his neck. You will rot in the deepest depths of this forest.
Luw screamed, turned, tried to claw his way back up to the trail, the hands from the rot latching onto his back, pulling him under. A cold weight shoved down on the back of his neck, dead nails tearing his skin as a legion of tiny hands pinned him beneath the flood. Flailing, his hand brushed something in the filth, still warm against the flood’s biting cold. Maebhara. Luw seized her haft and he swung blindly behind himself. Her blade and haft burst through the rot in a trail of silver flames, slicing through the hands and scattering them like ashes. Luw spun, flipping onto his feet and making for the trail, the rot-flood gushing over the circle of dead earth Maebhara’s blade had cleared.
Ancu’s roar scalded Luw’s back, its shockwave blasting trees to pulp and smashing him to the ground. Luw grunted, picked himself up and sprinted through the devastation, Maebhara trailing silver at his side. The ground started to shake, a sound swelling like the roaring of the tide, the endless tearing of flesh. A glance behind him – Ancu rode the crest of a shrieking wave of rot, a million tiny, grasping claws reaching from its bulkhead. Screams battered Luw’s ears as he looked away, innumerable, retching and wailing together, over one another, a symphony of misery.
Horns of the Hunter: Tales of Luah Fáil Book 1 Page 16