The Last Days of Magic

by Mark Tompkins

  Brigid looked across the audience and to no one’s surprise called, “Lord Maolan, will you remove the blade?”

  “Maolan! Maolan!” the audience shouted its consent.

  Satisfied that everyone had joined the chant, Brigid waved Maolan forward.

  Head held high, Maolan scowled as he approached the twins. He looked down into Aisling’s green eyes—which signaled her unity with her sister and with Anann in the spirit realm to form the Morrígna—and yanked out the dagger. A small spurt of blood caught his hand. He stared at the half-inch pink line on Aisling’s chest where the knife had stood, then studied the blood on its blade and his hand.

  Turning to face the audience, Lord Maolan held out the dagger, a drop of blood falling from its tip. As required, he wrapped his other hand around the sharp blade and broke it away from the handle to confirm to all that it was not enchanted, in the process cutting his own flesh to the bone. The resulting scar was intended to proclaim for the rest of the challenger’s life his acknowledgment of the dominion of the reborn Aisling and Anya.

  . . . . .

  Patrick realized he’d been clutching the silver cross, which he wore on a braided leather cord around his neck, and let it drop. Had this been a Christian rite, he would have declared that he had witnessed a miracle. But the terms used did not matter to him; he was once again in awe of the many ways God manifested his glory in this magical land. They may call their Gods and Goddesses many names—Danu, Frey, Morrígna, among others—thought Patrick, but they were all one God.

  The Morrígna, in particular, echoed many of his beliefs. Like the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, she also carried three aspects, though she sent two physically into this world. Patrick knew all the stories of the Morrígna, though after what he had just seen they no longer seemed like mere myths and fantastical tales. The events that had unfolded fifteen hundred years ago—the dreadful battle between Celt and Sidhe that had resulted in the Treaty of Tailltiu—now seemed to him to live and breathe.

  The Celts had invaded Ireland using the knowledge of iron weapons and enchantments given to them by the fallen angels Azâzêl and Semjâzâ. The final savage battle ended in a draw. Celt and Sidhe faced each other on the frost-ringed, blood-soaked battlefield, strewn with thousands of their dead and dying. It was the poet Amergin who stood on that field between the Celtic and Sidhe high kings and convinced them to make peace, creating the Treaty of Tailltiu. The two races, magical and human, called upon their Gods to help uphold the treaty and to bring a dreadful fate upon whoever broke it. They were soon to discover that the Goddess Morrígna answered.

  A huge pit was dug, filled with dry wood, and lit. To the disappointed cries of ravens attempting to feed on the dead, Sidhe and Celt worked together to drag the bodies from the battlefield and cast them into the fire. With each corpse the smoke became thicker.

  Toward the end of that gloomy work, the Sidhe high king knelt in the bloodstained mud beside a mortally wounded Celt warrior, a woman he did not recognize. As he stroked her face gently with his soiled hand, her eyes flickered open. Misinterpreting the plea he saw in them, he drew his misericorde dagger—a long, needlelike blade—placed the point under her arm angled toward her heart, and thrust it in to administer a mercy kill. He was surprised when life did not fade from her. Instead she gave a frantic shake of her head. Withdrawing the blade, he suddenly sensed a second heartbeat, a beat carrying a burgeoning female spirit.

  It was from that act that the Test originated, Patrick recalled. He picked up the broken blade from the table and examined the tiny smear of Aisling’s blood still on its tip.

  On the field of Tailltiu, the Celtic high king carried the mysterious woman into a tent close enough to the funeral pyre to keep her warm. When all the dead had been consigned to the flames, the two high kings ordered that the fire be kept burning. If the unknown woman and her unborn daughter died, as expected, they would join their fellow warriors in the flames.

  Tended by widows of the battle—a group that became the Order of Macha, now led by Brigid—the fire burned for nine months. Unable to speak, eat, or drink, the woman seemed to sustain herself on the thick smoke that streamed into the tent from the giant pyre. She drew her last breath upon the birth of not one but twin daughters. The Sidhe high king named the first Anya, and the Celtic high king named the other Aisling—the names every set of Morrígna twins has carried.

  Patrick knew from his Christian teaching that a God, or in Ireland’s case a Goddess, cannot fully inhabit this limited world. That portion of the Morrígna that remained in the Otherworld they called Anann. When Anya and Aisling merged their spirits and acted as one being, it was said that their power was channeled from Anann. And what strength they had, by the time the first twins were fourteen, they wielded magic more powerful than that of a hundred Celtic druids or Sidhe witches.

  Over the centuries that followed, the Morrígna returned eleven times, whenever Ireland was threatened—sometimes from afar, but most of the challenges arose from within Ireland’s own shores. Given enough time, people chafed at being ruled and came to believe that they would be better off governing themselves, even when their sovereign was a Goddess.

  And now it was Kellach trying to break the treaty, Patrick thought. The new twins would have to deal with him. But first seven years of training: Anya to be a druid, Aisling to be a warrior, followed by the Ceremony of Hearts. Then seven more years of training to merge themselves into the Morrígna, when at last they would rule both Ireland and the Middle Kingdom.

  Patrick watched as Liam and Brigid, each carrying a twin, left the hall, followed by Quinn supporting a sobbing Una. They would never embrace their daughters again. Tradition dictated that the Morrígna twins’ parents be kept away so that human sentiment would not interfere with the twins’ learning to become one with the mother Goddess.

  As soon as they were gone, Maolan scurried out to have his hand stitched up. The members of the assembly slowly took their seats, some talking in low tones, most lost in silent thought.

  King Turlough banged his fist on the high table. “Steward, throw open the gates of the keep. Set the grand hall. Send criers out to every village in the surround. Empty the cellar and the larder. Slaughter a dozen pigs and set them roasting. Tonight we don’t sleep, tonight we feast! I will not have quiet in my castle. The Morrígna is reborn!”

  Cheers rose throughout the room.

  “If you have family within riding distance, send for them now! We’ll make a story of this evening. Summon the bard—a song must be written.”

  Those who had squires dispatched them. Others ran for the stables. All who remained filled their cups.

  “Patrick,” Turlough said, slapping the monk on the back hard enough to spill his wine, “it is truly the beginning of a new age.” He refilled Patrick’s cup, then pulled on the gold chain around his own neck, dragging a black leather pouch from under his tunic. “In this is a piece of the heart of the previous Morrígna, passed to me in trust by my successor. Now I’ll be the one to carry it to the Ceremony of Hearts.”

  To be so close to such a relic caused Patrick to catch his breath. The Ceremony of Hearts was an affair of magic and beauty prescribed by the first incarnation of Anya and Aisling.

  Each time the Morrígna twins’ human shells were exhausted, the twins passed together and their hearts were removed and divided by the Celtic and Sidhe high kings into fourteen segments with a silver knife. The segments were entrusted to seven custodians from each race, but even though the Morrígna had just left, prejudice crept in and the segments were never equal.

  Then, on the first winter solstice after the seventh birthday of new twins, the ceremony would take place in an ancient stone pyramid, completely covered with a mound of earth and grass, which stands in the center of the Sidhe city of Brú na Bóinne. Curving along one half of the earthen mound, the lower eight feet is embedded with quartz stones echoing
a crescent moon. Through the center of this white arc, a long, straight entrance passage joins with three chambers, a head and two sides, to form the shape of a cross. Patrick had often wondered how the Celts and Sidhe came to use that shape before Christianity came to their islands.

  In the dark of the morning, the new Morrígna twins would be led down the entrance corridor to the center of the cruciform. In the arm to the left would sit the Sidhe high king, the Celtic high king in the other, with the head left vacant for the Otherworld aspect of the Morrígna, Anann. Coals that originated in the ancient pyre of Tailltiu, attended to day and night through the centuries by the priestesses of the Order of Macha, would glow in a brazier between the girls. Brigid would set an iron bowl on the brazier. One at a time, the seven Celtic and seven Sidhe custodians would enter, place their Morrígna heart segment in the bowl, bow to each twin, and leave.

  When the sun rises, a beam of light penetrates the chamber through a narrow channel above the temple entrance—which occurs only on solstice mornings—and travels diagonally from left to right along a series of carvings representing the Battle of Tailltiu until it illuminates a rendering of the Goddess. At that instant the heart segments transform into two thick ribbons of smoke, which snake toward the twins and are inhaled.

  Following the ceremony they start learning to become truly powerful, Patrick knew.

  LONG AFTER PATRICK contemplated the events of the Ceremony of Hearts, on the first solstice after the seventh birthday of Una and Quinn’s twins, their ceremony did not go as planned. Moments before sunrise a message from Kellach stated that he would not be returning the heart segment entrusted to the Skeaghshee. Kellach further declared that without this heart segment the twins would not be whole and by law could not rule, a declaration the Celtic and Sidhe high kings decided to ignore. The ceremony proceeded with one less segment and a little less smoke.

  From that morning until Aisling and Anya were attacked by the Skeaghshee, days before their fourteenth birthday, many druids tried to divine the impact of the loss, but none had been able to pierce the veil of uncertainty that had fallen over the twins’ future. The general conclusion was that the effect would become manifest after their coronation.

  But there was to be no coronation without Anya.

  4

  All the kingdom of Og in Bashan, which reigned in Ashtaroth and in Edrei, who remained of the remnant of the giants: for these did Moses smite, and cast them out.

  —Joshua 13:12, King James Version

  Oslo, Norway

  Three Years After the Attack on Aisling

  The Norwegian late-autumn sun had made its brief appearance and was beating a hasty retreat. Jordan, commander of a small mercenary force on contract to the Vatican, hurried alone along the Oslo waterfront. The old inn that was his destination had been built alongside the wall of Oslo’s Akershus Castle, where decades of storms howling down the fjord left the inn leaning against the stronger stone structure, causing its stairs, walls, and floors to settle at odd angles. A cold blast through the briefly open door announced Jordan’s arrival into the dimly lit ground floor, where a smoky fire provided a hint of warmth to the room.

  One of the more persistent women working there hurriedly threw off a heavy woolen blanket, revealing a buxom figure, and sidled through the mismatched collection of grimy tables to intercept him. “Good evening, handsome,” and his stalwart Sicilian features saved her from having to lie.

  “Not tonight,” said Jordan.

  “It’s been ‘Not tonight’ ever since you arrived. What’s a man like you doing in this hovel anyway?” She moved in close and stroked Jordan’s cheek. “I could show you a better inn with cleaner beds.”

  “I prefer to spend my money on books,” replied Jordan, edging around the woman and heading for the stairs.

  “Books? And fancy swords by the look of it. Hard to cuddle up with those!” she called after him.

  Jordan pulled a candle stub from his pocket, lit it, and started up the dark, creaky staircase, holding out the candle so as to illuminate the odd slope of each successive step with its weak light.

  Once in his room, he lit the two candles on his desk from the one he held and then set about building a fire. Commander Jordan d’Anglano was named after his famous ancestor, though he did not like to be reminded of it. His forefather, marshal to Manfred of Sicily, captured Florence in 1260 only to quickly lose it again at the Battle of Tagliacozzo, where, as punishment, he was stripped of one hand, one foot, and both eyes. Jordan, who appeared older than his twenty-six years, still possessed both his hands and feet, as well as his intense brown eyes, in which reflections of the fire glimmered.

  Unlocking a trunk, Jordan, an avid student of forbidden books, surveyed the large, neatly arranged collection inside. He removed five and stacked them next to the candles. Opening a Latin translation of Enoch, he resumed reading from the page he had marked earlier with a bit of torn parchment. Unconsciously, he gathered his cloak tightly around himself. While he had demanded the inn’s only private room with a fireplace, it did little to thwart the damp chill that flowed through the gaps in the askew wooden walls. The cold faded from his perception as he lost himself in the pages.

  He had liberated this stack of grimoires—books of magic—from the witch Marija when he captured her outside Trier, Germany, the previous year. She was the first witch he had gone up against, and the event was a turning point in many ways. While he scissored her neck between his dagger and sword tightly enough for trickles of blood to run down her tunic, she had tried to bribe him by offering to teach him how to work the incantations. He surprised himself by hesitating. He did not pause long, sensing even back then that it would be dangerous to give her time to work a spell, a feeling reinforced by the sight of the carcass of an infant on the table, its tiny body stripped of fat. He slit her throat with enough force to feel his blade scrape her spine. Then, just to make sure she would not come back for him, he hacked off her head.

  After reading the powerful spells in her books, Jordan realized that he had been dangerously naïve. If he was going to hunt more of her kind, he needed to learn protective enchantments. He’d been very lucky to catch Marija unawares.

  Then again, he had always been lucky—he had never been wounded, not once, in all his battles and tavern brawls. And so often did his thoughts foretell events that he had begun to wonder if he had some special talent in this regard, or even whether he might influence events with his mind. These were things he did not dare talk about—he could not risk being suspected of witchcraft himself.

  His luck extended back as long as he could remember, back to when he was a child, if you could count it as lucky living through the almost daily ritual of tossing the bodies of friends onto the piles of rotting corpses lining the streets, piles that already contained the remains of his mother and brother. Too few men were left alive to bury all the dead; too little wood was left around his village to burn them. The Black Death stole his childhood, he once told a woman he thought he loved, though he did not really know what a traditional childhood was; he had never seen one that was not immersed in death.

  The plague, which first arrived shortly before Jordan was born, swept a wave of agonizing death across Europe. Afterwards, the risk of new outbreaks loomed over the populace like the hammer of a vengeful God poised to strike down a village or a province at the slightest provocation—a fate that frequently befell those in Jordan’s Sicilian homeland, an island dependent on shipboard trade. He grew up unable to escape the cries of the afflicted: some pleading with God to save them, some pleading for anyone to end to their suffering with a quick death, and neither God nor man caring anymore.

  Jordan was fifteen when he became a condottiere and killed his first man for pay. If God did not care, why should he? His family’s meager fortune had never recovered from his uncle’s failure, and in the devastation of post-plague Sicily his choice was either to live as a
mercenary or to watch his ancestral home deteriorate further while he worked on another man’s land for a wage that would barely keep him from starving. Jordan had decided long ago that avoiding starvation was not a high enough aim. He discovered he was good at killing, and that he liked it. One successful job led to another. Soon, with his reputation for swift action and discretion, his services were in demand across Europe and even in Britain.

  When the townspeople of Trier offered him three times his normal condottiere fee to hunt down the witch who had been stealing their children, he took the job. However, Marija’s stash of grimoires turned out to be a treasure far more valuable than the money. They provided him with his first direct experience working enchantments, an ability he had long admired from afar.

  The restored Roman Church had begun utilizing the condottieri to expand its territories, so Jordan had made sure the Vatican recruiters heard of his successes, though not of his grimoires—to be caught with even one such book would result in a quick sentence to a slow death. He was impressed that the Church had developed such an effective military-like strategy to convert new lands. First they would send disposable mercenaries to kill as many “unholy creatures” as they could—that is what the Vatican called Goblins, Trolls, and the like. Then a group of zealous exorcists, known as the VRS League, would arrive and drive out the rest. Finally they would subjugate any existing Christian groups and convert the indigenous pagan population, by force if necessary, before bringing in Roman priests. All this was conducted at the direction of the head of the VRS, Cardinal Orsini, making him the second most powerful man in the Roman Church.