There was another possibility still, a more worrisome one. Had her Master cast the dice on some new gamble? Was that why the city was burning? Had the Tyrant of the Wastelands always followed an altogether different plan, one in which such losses were irrelevant? In emerging from the cloying tent, Kawkaw’s mind was already in torment. But, he couldn’t afford to worry about the Preceptress’ threats, not when there was a more pressing situation. Everywhere the Shee witches, and Ebrit’s mailed army, were in the ascendant.
He was careful to avoid the vast proliferation of tents, banners and pennants of the prince’s army. Less worrisome were the giant siege towers of the Shee witches – no longer needed now that the city was fallen. Still, he gave their ditched and patrolled enclosure a wide berth. Those cattish nostrils could sniff him out in a trice. Instead, he struck south, distancing himself from the blazing city and the vast encampments of one sort or another that filled the air with the smoke and smells of a thousand cooking fires. His compass, as ever, drew him towards the poorer and less guarded warrens of the Olhyiu. Here ramshackle bars proliferated.
Here Kawkaw managed to distract a youthful assistant chef with filthy jokes, giving him the opportunity to slip half a roasted duck inside his coat. The rising aroma of the roasted flesh caused his mouth to water before he had put a hundred paces between himself and the bar. He was so hungry he devoured his entire prize in a few hungry crunches, the bones, sinews, and fat dribbling flesh.
O powers who dare!
Not a single guard, Shee or Carfonese, had confronted him. None was interested in a solitary feral.
Ho, then! Am I invisible?
He strode to the summit of a hillock, a vantage which overlooked the entire battlefield from the ship-clogged ocean to the blazing inferno of the Tyrant’s city. From this high point, Kawkaw could see a black pall of smoke, which created a vast cloud that wheeled and battened over the wide bay. Soot fell from it like black snow. The fleet, which only a day or two before, had retreated with fire licking at their sterns, had returned to crowd against the walls of the city. Kawkaw could make out the blackened ruins of most of Ebrit’s Leviathans poking out of the shallow waters near the shore, but now, all around them, the ocean was solid with hundreds of lesser craft endlessly spitting cannon fire, no matter that they were pounding ruins.
What a sight was the burning Ghork Mega! From this elevation, Kawkaw could glimpse the continuing battle within the city walls. He could make out ant-sized figures still fighting within the vast labyrinth of streets and squares despite the billowing flames and the clouds of black smoke, determined to fight their way to the Tyrant’s own lair, the adamantine citadel that crowned the summit. An acid of consternation burned in his belly to witness how the great city – perhaps the greatest gem of architecture and wonder in the whole of Tír – was being reduced to havoc and ruin. What was to gain from such plunder? More pertinently, who was to gain?
Not him – not Snakoil Kawkaw, who had suffered such privations in the journey hither. Not the witch warriors, who had no empathy for architectural grandeur, any more than they had for gold and jewels. They would destroy it all. Never in his life had he had the pleasure of entering the outskirts of Ghork Mega, nor the pleasure of viewing the vast metropolis from within. Even the hinterlands had been so warded and threatening that they had excluded all but the Tyrant’s pets from enjoying its pleasures.
And just look at how the mighty were fallen!
How had things come to this? What did it signify? More pertinently, what did it signify to Snakoil Kawkaw?
These questions whirled in his mind. He had long admired Ghork Mega’s wealth. No city, not even Carfon, with its treasures of architecture, could hold a candle to this – this overwhelming abundance. All the jewels and pleasures of the flesh the greediest heart could desire. Or so the mealy-mouthed poets had proclaimed. It was rumoured that within the high citadel, at the heart of the city, the buildings were lined in tapestries spun from golden thread. And the slaves within were said to be beauties of every race and pedigree, so comely in voluptuousness that man or woman would find them impossible to resist.
How natural that he had dreamed of being granted access to such overweening wealth, and pleasure. Why else had he accepted the burden of spying for that weasel, Feltzvan, back in Carfon? Have I not braved danger after danger, because at the heart of it all I fostered a dream of love? Did I not accept the dreadful burden of that talisman of doom that killed poor Porky Lard, my best friend? Was it all an impossible dream? Did I not steal for no reason other than to bestow jewels upon the woman I loved? The woman I adored with a passion worthy of the fireside legends?
What privations had he suffered! And all for nothing! At every step of the way, his finer feelings had been spurned – pissed and shat on – until the gentle heart within him had been turned to stone.
Surrounded as he was by perfidious enemies, Kawkaw saw there, in the burning city, a metaphor for himself. Now, looking down through the moist eyes of endless hurt, he beheld the spreading plague of fire and its insatiable destruction of the city’s splendour.
How could this be happening? How could the almighty Tyrant of the Wastelands, whose Black Citadel rose into the very clouds, permit the scum of Shee witches and Ebrit’s callow troops to destroy such wonder? Why would a being as powerful as the gods allow these scum to destroy his city and with it Kawkaw’s most treasured dream?
Man Down
‘I’m bloody petrified,’ Tajh said to Mark.
‘You and me both.’ Mark blew into his cupped hands to try to warm his fingers. ‘I never imagined we’d be out here this long.’
Tajh looked across at him from a distance of a few feet. She was smoking a cigarette with shaky fingers. She had offered him one, but he’d refused. ‘That great monstrosity – I know it’s doing something, I can feel the vibrations. But why does it need all that energy?’
‘I really don’t know, Tajh.’
‘This Tyrant you talk about, if he’s the one behind it do you think he might be in the Rose right now?’
Mark paused within the foxhole of the ruined café and thought about the Tyrant of the Wastelands. ‘All of my childhood,’ he said, ‘and my sister, Mo’s, too, was warped by Grimstone. And now we know he was the agent of the Tyrant all along.’
‘But who, or what, is this Tyrant?’
Mark blew into his hands again. ‘What more like? He can’t be human. According to Nan, he’s been waging war on Tír for thousands of their years.’
‘I just can’t get my head around it. We’re under attack by a being of magic from an alien world?’
‘I’m afraid there are many things about Tír that wouldn’t make sense to someone from Earth.’
‘Like the thing in your brow.’
‘My oraculum is empowered by a goddess you wouldn’t care to meet. Mórígán is literally Death.’
‘Where did the Tyrant come from? How did he get his powers?’
‘I have no idea. But a dying ruler, called Ussha De Danaan, told us that he had gained a partial access to one of the portals to the Fáil.’
Tajh shook her head, no wiser. She couldn’t stop herself shivering despite the fact she was wrapped up in numerous layers of clothes.
Mark looked in the direction of the Black Rose, barely visible in the grey misty light as a shadowy leviathan. ‘On Tír, magic is as familiar to the inhabitants as technology is to us. And the Fáil is at the heart of it. I think that whatever game the Tyrant is playing, it all revolves around it.’
‘And Padraig understands this magic?’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say he understands it, but he knows more about it than anybody else here on Earth.’
Mark thought back to the barrow grave, when Padraig had taken him and his friends to see it. He recalled the ancient writing that ran around the walls; horizontal lines in which strange verticals and slanted
inserts went above and below the lines, a system known as Ogham that was perfect for rapid inscription in stone. Padraig had read a little of it to the friends. He had explained how the Ogham – ancient as it was – captured an oral history that was more ancient still: knowledge that had been handed down by Padraig’s druidic ancestors, which stretched back into the Bronze Age.
‘Padraig is knowledgeable, but what I’d really like to know is how my friends are getting on with the war on Tír. That war must be important to our battle here. Earth and Tír are closely linked.’
‘Do you feel guilty that you’ve returned to Earth?’
‘I do feel guilty, but if Nan and I hadn’t come back we wouldn’t be helping you fight the Tyrant here.’
At that moment the oraculum in Mark’s brow flared. Abruptly he grabbed hold of Tajh, and pressed her down, shielding her body with his own.
Tajh cried: ‘What is it?’
‘Stay down!’
At that moment something large, streamlined and utterly silent tore overhead at extraordinary velocity. When the roar of its passing followed it a split second later, it coincided with the explosive detonation of the missile as it struck the great cliff face of the Black Rose. The explosion blew apart Mark’s foxhole like a sandcastle caught up in a tidal wave. It lifted him off the ground and tossed him twenty yards through the air to land amid broken pieces of brick and debris. Mark stared at the conflagration of flames and smoke that had become the entire horizon.
‘Oh, god . . . shit!’
He felt overwhelming pain. He was half blinded, deafened, lost in the confusion of the explosion. His mind was blank, fading . . . He called out in a husky whisper, ‘Tajh! Are you all right?’
There was no answer.
Groaning, Mark struggled to bring his feet under him. He moved his head agonisingly slowly to try to find Tajh in the dust-filled devastation. He could find no sign of her. It was an agony just to breathe. There was something grossly wrong with his right leg. When he looked at it he saw that a rusting steel rod had torn through his buttock and passed through bone, muscle and tissues to emerge half way down his thigh. Pain was beginning to register there, coming in sickening waves.
‘Fuck!’
For a while the agony overwhelmed his ability to think. Mark screamed. A thunderous symphony erupted in his ears, blotting out his rational mind. It was as if it wasn’t him that was screaming, but the entire world around him.
Then a voice he did not recognise spoke to him, mind-to-mind:
The oraculum!
The Return of the Arinn Page 32