The Return of the Arinn

by Frank P. Ryan

  Alan looked at the huge siege towers, borne on the largest wagons he had ever seen, their wooden wheels some twenty feet high. The unwieldy towers were tall enough to breach the curtain walls. Other wagons bore trebuchets, their throwing masts almost as tall as the siege towers, but as yet unused, since they needed to be much closer to the walls to be useful. A hundred or more braziers were blazing under huge cauldrons of tar, ready to coat the fireballs that would be hurled over the walls into the city when the trebuchets got close enough. But that series of razerine slopes up ahead made Alan wonder if they would ever get close enough make a contribution. More wagons bore field cannon capable of discharging multiple lead balls, or chains armed with a hundred deadly spikes. These would be useful when they broke through into the city. And there was more weaponry lying in wait for when they broke through the south gate, including blunderbuss-like cannons with barrels a foot wide, capable of clearing a street with a single discharge. Added to this was Prince Ebrit’s cavalry: four thousand troops, fully armoured and mounted on chargers, equipped with muzzle-loading musketry, halberds, mace and longswords.

  Alan nodded to Kate, who passed him the Spear of Lug. Kate hated the fighting. He saw how her eyes were full of anxiety. He took a firm grip of the shaft, looking up for a moment at the lengthy rune-incised spiral head.

  Thank you, grandfather! He closed his eyes wondering if he would ever see Padraig again.

  Kate called out to him: ‘They’re waiting for you.’

  He opened his eyes again to look to where the Kyra, and Bétaald, were standing at the head of a spearhead of Shee. Alan and Qwenqwo spurred their onkkhs horizontally across the hillside to meet up with them. He lifted his forearm, to conduct the Shee greeting with the Kyra.

  ‘Ready when you are!’

  Bétaald looked at him: a direct confrontation, eye-to-eye.

  ‘We are ready to attack the south gate of the city. I salute you, Mage Lord, who thus risk your life though you are a stranger to this conflict. Many indeed have been the years we have prayed for this day. We would restore the light to our world!’

  Alan bowed his head, in concert with the Kyra, Qwenqwo, Kate, Mo and Turkeya, as Bétaald intoned a prayer for success in their assault on the city. He waited for the prayer to end before he asked the obvious question:

  ‘What danger can we expect?’

  ‘We will be confronted by the usual defences one might anticipate in the siege of any fortress city. But this is no normal city. There will be darker perils that we should anticipate.’

  Qwenqwo nodded. ‘The Septemviles.’

  ‘What do we know about the ones who are left?’

  It was the Kyra who answered him. ‘As I have said previously, our knowledge is scant. All are said to be immortal, but, as we have discovered to our joy, immortality does not mean invincibility.’

  Alan looked at Magtokk. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I’m familiar with a few of them through legend. There is one that is known as Lightbane, another as Stormbane and yet another as Firebane. None who has encountered them has ever lived to illuminate history with adequate description – or the means to defeat them.’

  Kate reached up to grip Alan’s armoured left hand. He bent to kiss her hand before releasing it, then looked at the Kyra. ‘So now we know why the Tyrant has only offered a token resistance so far. He’s looking to draw us in.’

  Alan sat erect on his onkkh, his eyes closed for a moment or two while he took a firm grip of the Spear of Lug in his right hand, its shaft rammed against the rocky ground. When he opened them again, Qwenqwo was tamping out his pipe against his brass-covered knee. Alan felt the tingling sensation of the First Power run through him. Kate reached up and Alan took the final opportunity to kiss her on the lips before his helm was passed up to him. He slipped it over his head. The aides who had ministered to him now stood aside.

  He nodded to the Kyra, who told the trumpeters to sound out the signal for the assault to begin. She metamorphosed to the shape of a giant snow tigress. He spoke to her, oraculum-to-oraculum:

 

  They began slowly, ascending the grit-strewn slope that led to the first of the rocky ridges. Ledge after ledge of the same black granite criss-crossed their approach, their edges sharp as blades and their sloping surfaces slippery as ball bearings. All around them, the Shee had metamorphosed to great cats, their claws extended to grip the rocky slopes. Alan looked up, searching for a useful break or cleft in the crags that would provide a path up the rising slope. His every instinct bade caution. As they rose, the landscape became ever more brooding, as if daring them to proceed. Alan’s onkkh had its own way of dealing with the treacherous ground and so he allowed it to plod forward at its own pace.

  *

  The attacking army reached the first ledge, pouring through the narrow and twisting pass, but within minutes, began a new zigzagging ascent. The Shee widened their forces in order to try out several different passes up to the second ledge.

  Alan planned to attack the gate with the First Power, but first he needed to get a clear view of it, and this was difficult from the position he was in, with scarp after scarp rising before him and blotting out any clear view of the more distant fortifications. A shadow moved across the ground as something gradually covered the sun. Glancing overhead through the visor slit, he saw thunderheads moving at an unnatural speed.

  Alan addressed the nearby Kyra.

 

 

  Even as Alan lowered his head again to face the direction of the south gate, the first forking trails of lightning crackled down out of the thunderheads, disintegrating a rocky outcrop and the squadron of Shee that had been bounding over it.

  ‘Shit!’

  Alan racked his brains in an attempt to think through this new threat. How could he use the First Power against something that was so similar? Even as he struggled to think of a strategy, a trumpeting sounded from all around him: a new order from the Kyra.

  The Shee were fanning out to reduce the risk of lightning strikes hitting them. They were also speeding up their ascent, passing by him on either side. There was a deafening fusillade from the naval artillery in the bay below them: Prince Ebrit following their progress and doing what he could to help them. Meanwhile the darkness was rapidly deepening. Alan dug his heels into the flank of the onkkh thinking that speed of ascent might compensate for the onkkh slipping as it clawed through the rubble-strewn ascent.

  Then he heard Kate’s voice:

  The communication faded. Alan turned to his left, attempting to look out to sea. His normal vision was useless in the obscuring dark, but when he used the oraculum, he saw that Kate was right and the Leviathans were consumed with flames. Even through the oraculum he could only glimpse it poorly. It alarmed him that the encroaching darkness was capable of obscuring not only his vision, but his senses through the oraculum.

  He redoubled his efforts with it.

 

  It was Mo, and not Kate, who answered him:

 

  Alan had to turn away from the horror of what was happening to the fleet. He had to focus on a single objective: the most important contribution he could make was to destroy the south gate. He must do this at any cost, otherwise the Shee would be stuck on these unfriendly slopes. There would be nowhere f
or them to go and the walls above would direct their firepower down onto their unprotected bodies. Through the thickening gloom, he glimpsed something within the formidable bulk of the walls: the twin towers of the fortress surrounding the south gate.

  He spurred the flanks of his onkkh in an attempt to catch up with the advancing Shee, though they were now a hundred yards ahead of him. He sensed rather than saw Qwenqwo following his lead, his armoured bulk close to Alan’s heels.

  But they were still not much higher than the lower slopes, and the south gate loomed higher and more threatening as they drew closer.

  Ahead, the boom of cannons roared from the walls. A glowing ball swept by him, no more than a few feet away, to explode somewhere behind him. He felt the heat of the explosion on the back of his neck. A hideous green glare permeated the inky light. The cannon balls were hollow, filled with the nacreous green luminescence of the Tyrant’s poison he remembered from the Battle of Ossierel. Even minor wounds inflicted with that vile poison would turn to gangrene. With a cry of defiance, he spurred his onkkh into a still faster climb, ignoring the twisting and turning of the track ahead and heading into a direct confrontation with the monolith ahead. Explosions and violence surrounded him, much of it lost in the dense black smoke, until he found himself three quarters of the way up the slope – close enough at last to see the arched silhouette of the south gate, which looked relatively small in proportion to the flanking towers. There was a strange illumination from within the arched gate. It took Alan a moment or two to realise what this meant: the south gate had been flung wide open.

  Alan warned Ainé,

 

  Alan probed the opening with his oraculum, but his view of it remained hazy. It occurred to him that he was being restricted by the helm covering his brow; the heavy iron was blinkering his oraculum.

  He tore off his helmet and cast it aside. He felt better and stronger immediately. He closed his eyes and examined the view of the gate through his liberated oraculum. Something was standing within it, half as tall as the opening. Assuming that the gates were forty feet high, it could not possibly be human. He saw a figure pallid as wax, a face as still as a sculpture. The eyes within the face were black, as if a soul of darkness were looking at him. The cold indifference in that face was challenging.

 

 

 

 

  Alan returned his focus to the Septemvile. He had to defeat it with the First Power. He began to charge the Spear of Lug with it, keeping his focus on the enemy. He saw no sign of fear on that waxy face.

  The Legun floated forwards to the top of the slope ahead – confronting him. Alan lowered the Spear of Lug and fired a thunderbolt of glowing red lightning at the Legun. The thunderbolt struck home and the figure dissolved, but in its place he saw a spreading mist. The mist billowed and widened, flowing like a heavy vapour over the edge of the uppermost slope, then tumbling down, scarp by scarp, like a stepped waterfall.

 

 

  The cannons in the walls were still raining down a catastrophic fusillade. With his onkkh now halted, and with the spreading vapour descending towards the attacking army, it could only be moments before the leading Shee came into contact with it.

  Mo’s cry, mind-to-mind:

  A Strategy

  Mark and Nan’s conversation around a makeshift table in the abandoned garage was interrupted by a signal from HQ, picked up by the radio rigged to the Mamma Pig. It was evening, and would have been pitch dark in here had it not been for the lights running off the Pig’s generator. They’d put blackout blinds on the windows to prevent the light seeping out. The garage had become a field station of sorts, with the hidden Pig sprouting a proliferation of electrical and electronic leads to an adjoining ad-hoc video-conference centre, based around the same table. Tajh spoke into the microphone: ‘Roger – receiving!’

  She played the conversation with a comms tech through a speaker so everybody could listen in to a conversation with Resistance HQ: ‘General Chatwyn is taking part in a conference call with a spokesperson for the joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. We need to speak to Mr Travis urgently.’

  Tajh said: ‘What’s going on?’

  The tech’s voice asked: ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Tajh Madine – one of the crew.’

  ‘Is Mr Travis available?’

  ‘He’s outside. It will take us a few minutes to get hold of him. In the meantime, could I have a word with Jo Derby, if she’s available?’

  A few seconds later, Jo’s voice came on the line. ‘Hello, Tajh. How are things where you are?’

  ‘Tense. We’re all wondering what’s going on?’

  ‘If you’re referring to the Pentagon, I have no idea. But globally the situation is worsening.’

  Tajh glanced at the others around the table. Everybody was interested in news from HQ. Then she said: ‘There’s nothing here except the Rose. No Razzers. Just a devastated landscape and the threat of discovery by Seebox’s air and ground patrols. What’s Grimstone up to in America?’

  ‘The same as he was here: provoking chaos. He’s been conducting monster evangelical meetings.’

  ‘I presume he has the Sword?’

  ‘Is that you, Mark?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He has the Sword.’

  ‘Then the Americans have a big problem.’

  ‘President Harvey has declared a state of emergency.’

  A newly-arrived Brett plonked himself down in a free chair and listened in. He muttered: ‘Oh, shit!’

  They also shuffled to make room for Padraig around the ad-hoc conference table.

  The tech voice cut across the conversation to tell them: ‘I’m now handing you over to General Chatwyn.’

  Brett accepted the microphone from Tajh. He said: ‘General?’

  ‘Brett, you making any progress?’

  ‘From what I can determine, the Black Rose is a massive power sump. That central pillar – the dang thing two miles high – looks like a receiver. It gets increasingly cold as you approach it. And you can feel the ground vibrating in slow but incredibly powerful waves when you get really close.’

  ‘The Pentagon is becoming understandably prickly, given Grimstone’s presence over there. I’ve been trying to explain what little I understood from talking to Mark and Nan – about the Tyrant and this other world called Tír.’

  ‘General, I can confirm that I’ve seen some very strange things on the road to here. Everything Mark and Nan have been telling us appears to fit. Seems to me we’re dealing with an enemy, and resources, that are way out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Put Mark on, Brett.’

  Brett passed the microphone to Mark.

  ‘Mark, you have any thoughts?’

  ‘General, Nan and I have had a good look at the Rose. We’ve looked at it through our oracula, which give us a better view than through ordinary eyes. We both agree with Brett. It’s soaking up energy.’

  ‘Makes one curious as to what it’s doing with all that energy?’

  ‘We’ve talked it over with Padraig. All three of us are convinced that the Black Rose is somehow linked to the Fáil.’

  ‘Ah – the Fáil?’

  ‘Do you remember what we told you about that?’

  ‘I recall your speaking about it, but I can’t really say that I understood. I’m not sure what we’re talking about here, Mark. Are we talking about magic?’

  ‘The people on Tír talk about portals, which are like gateways, to the Fáil. The Tyrant has been attempting to take pos
session of one. If he succeeds, that would allow him to control the Fáil.’

  ‘Even though I don’t understand a word you are saying, you’re still managing to disturb me.’

  ‘Sir, we also think that Grimstone’s church is a distraction. This has nothing to do with religion. It’s to do with power.’

  ‘Well, at least that’s something we do understand. I can well believe that the social upheaval, the violence and the anarchy are being orchestrated by this Tyrant you speak of as a means to power. And I can also believe that his purpose is very much contrary to our interests.’

  ‘Then we share the same goal, Sir. We need to stop him. So, the only question is: how do we stop him?’

  ‘I’ve talked to our friends in America. The weight of opinion is that the answer lies in London. We have to destroy the Black Rose.’

  Mark said, ‘I’d better pass you back to Brett.’

  ‘Brett – you with me?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Brett, we’re opening up an encrypted line. You should already have the codes.’

  Brett now accepted a keyboard from Tajh. He looked at the screen, his fingers typing in a series of sequential codes. When he was finished, the screen filled with the image of a grey-haired officer in an American uniform. There was a brief conversation between Brett and the officer and then the crew were looking at the face of Adam Wilberforce Harvey, the President of America.

  ‘Mr President!’ Brett said.

  ‘Can I speak to you alone?’

  ‘Sir, these people have risked their lives to get me here. They know things that I don’t know, things that might be relevant to this discussion. I would prefer to keep them in the loop.’

  ‘This is FEMA, Brett.’

  ‘I know, Sir.’

  ‘We have a very important decision to make.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Very well! I don’t think I am revealing any state secrets showing you this.’

  Mark, like everybody in the crew, stared at scenes of anarchy and chaos in New York, Washington, LA and many other American cities.