by E. E. Holmes
I’d forgotten that Moira used birds to carry her messages and observations about our Léarscáil to other Keepers in other clans across the world. It couldn’t have been a very precise or speedy method of communication, but she refused to operate under any other parameters, and none of the Council was foolish enough to attempt to argue with her. She’d once told me birds were not susceptible to Castings or gaps in internet service or other pitfalls of modern communication. They were, however, susceptible to being knocked out of the air by a wildly swinging pendulum of doom, and so she watched the birds flutter toward her with her hands pressed over her face, peeking between the spaces of her fingers. It was obvious the birds were in a panic, many of them dipping toward her before shrieking and soaring back up as the pendulum whizzed by them. Moira doggedly continued to call them down, coaxing and twittering, and raising her arms into the air as though inviting them to alight upon her fingers, promising that she would protect them.
“Come along now, my pretty little bairns,” she was calling to them, wiggling her gnarled fingers in the air like so many twigs on an ancient tree. “Come now, my lovelies. Come to Moira, now.”
A few intrepid birds managed to skirt the pendulum and land on her hands and shoulders. Moira scurried quickly with them over to a little door set in the wall that resembled a dumbwaiter, which I knew contained a chute that would allow the birds to fly straight up out of the top of North Tower and into the sky. Moira flung open the door and deposited the birds one by one onto a perch, frantically looking over her shoulder at the Léarscáil pendulum, making sure that it was not headed toward her. Then she hurriedly began to dash off note after note onto scraps of parchment, rolling them up into the tiniest of scrolls and affixing them to the birds’ legs as quickly as her arthritic joints would allow. As each bird was armed with its communication, it took off like a bullet up into the chute and, presumably, out into the starry night sky, carrying the news of the Northern Clans’ mad Léarscáil off to the other Durupinen Keepers of the world. Perhaps their pendulums had also begun swinging out of control. Perhaps the other maps had been destroyed, the records and instruments smashed. We would not know until one of the birds fluttered back, bearing the news tied to its leg.
Following Seamus’s orders, I pressed my back to the stone wall and edged my way, slowly and cautiously, around the curve of the tower to where Moira stood, still trying to coax down more birds. Twice the Léarscáil blew by me, within a few inches of my face. I sucked in a sharp gasp and closed my eyes, but it seemed that Seamus had been correct; even at its greatest length, the chain could not bring the Léarscáil all the way to the walls of the tower. This observation gave me a tiny shred of relief as I inched ever closer to the tiny old woman. If I could just keep her to the edges of the room, if I could just get her to follow me, then, in all likelihood, the pendulum would not do her any harm.
At last I reached her, wedging myself up against the wall beside her battered old desk. “Moira!” I called loudly. The frantic birds were making a racket. “Follow me. We’ve got to get you out of here! Let me lead you over to the stairs!”
“Feck off,” the old woman grumbled, and she threw a hesitant bird directly up the chute.
11
X Marks the Spot
“I’M SORRY?” I ASKED, and even in my fright, I felt the incredulity creeping in. “I’m trying to help you. Did you just tell me to fuck off?”
“I cannae be leaving with ye,” Moira said, turning her madly magnified eyes on me and scowling ferociously. “I must record this. I’ve important work to do. Begone with ye.”
“But…” A note of flustered laughter escaped me. “You can’t stay down here. That thing is going to kill you. There’s no way that chain is going to hold,” I added, pointing above us, even as the pendulum’s chain gave a loud grating shriek of metal on metal.
“It’ll hold as long as the spirits mean it to hold,” Moira insisted stubbornly. She tipped an inkwell upside down and shook it, saw that there was no ink left in it, and swore again, chucking it away across the floor. It rolled over the surface of the map, until it was knocked with the force of a bullet across the room and into the opposite wall, where it shattered on impact, the tiny shards of glass falling to the ground like dust or snow.
“Moira, come on, now. You’ve got to get out of here,” I repeated, starting to panic now. The old woman was tiny, but she was also feisty, and I didn’t think I’d be able to carry or drag her all the way back around the tower, not if she was unwilling to go with me.
“What I’ve got to do is my job, lass,” Moira grumbled, barely bothering to look up from her search for a new bottle of ink. She opened a desk and began to rummage through it, a steady stream of cursing issuing from her like steam from a kettle.
“Moira, you can’t record the movements of the Léarscáil if you’re dead!” I cried in exasperation. “Come on now, I’m serious! No one—not the Council, not the entirety of the spirit world—wants you to sacrifice your life for this job. You need to come with me right now. Just take my hand and I’ll guide you across to the…”
But I couldn’t complete the request, because Moira chose that moment to pick up a heavy glass paperweight off her desk and chuck it at my head. I ducked just in time, and the thing shattered against the wall behind me, just as the inkwell had done. I gasped, and turned to glare at her, but she was resolutely ignoring me, and had turned back to her small flock of birds.
Desperately, I turned back to face the middle of the room, and looked around for Seamus. He was all the way across the tower with his back pressed against the far wall. He was swaying back-and-forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot, as though he and the pendulum were involved in a deadly sort of dance. I can only assume that he was looking for paths across the room to where we were, but the pendulum was not cooperating, refusing to stick to a predictable pattern. He looked up and caught my eye.
“What are you still doing here?” he shouted at me. His voice was barely audible over the screeching and grinding of the chains that were still miraculously holding the possessed pendulum aloft.
“She won’t come!” I shouted back. “She won’t go until she has finished her work!”
Seamus let out a roar of frustration that echoed around the space, sending several birds fluttering up to the rafters again in fright. “Tell her she’s got no choice!” he shouted at me. “If she won’t come with you, you’ve got to drag her out! Just grab her by her bloody hair if you have to!”
“I can’t! If she struggles, we’ll both be killed!” I called back to him.
“She’s just a bit of a thing!” Seamus called. “Just throw her over your shoulder or—”
“Throw her over my shoulder?” I practically shrieked. “Are you insane? If she struggles, and I trip, it’s all over! The pendulum will crush us in a second flat!”
Seamus turned and punched the stone wall in frustration. When he pulled his hand away, his knuckles were bloodied.
“I don’t think breaking your own hands is going to help us here, Seamus!” I cried, but I don’t think he heard me. At that moment, the chain gave a particularly piercing shriek, and a flurry of stone dust drifted down from the ceiling. Seamus and I both looked up, frozen with fear. But miraculously, the chain continued to hold, and the pendulum continued to swing.
I turned back to Moira, who was pulling an ancient reference book off a shelf, and laying it flat upon her desk to rifle through it. I opened my mouth and then closed it again, completely out of words to try to convince her she needed to save her own life. Instead, desperate for help, I reached out into my connection to find Milo.
“Milo! Where are you? Are you on your way back yet?”
I felt Milo’s anxiousness zinging into my head like a snapped rubber band. “I’m here, I’m here! I went to the barracks, but the Caomhnóir are running around like chickens with their goddamn heads cut off. They’re gathering as many as they can, and are on their way to the castle now. But honestly, I do
n’t think they have any idea what they’re doing. They’re all grabbing like, clubs and staffs and bows and stuff, like they’re going into battle. They’re totally clueless about how to stop this thing.”
“Yeah, weapons are going to be totally useless down here,” I told him. It should have brought comfort knowing a virtual army was now on its way, but somehow I only felt more nervous. It didn’t sound like they had any kind of plan, and without a solid plan to stop the Léarscáil, it just felt like there were going to be more people in danger.
“Jess, you’re not still down there, are you?” Milo asked.
“Yeah, I am!” I told him. “I can’t get Moira to come with me. She’s just refusing to leave until she can interpret what the Léarscáil is doing.”
Milo heaved a deep sigh, and I could feel the waves of forced calm rippling across the connection, clashing with the waves of my own fear. “Jess, I do not say this lightly, and I know you’re not going to like it. But you have got to get yourself out of there. If Moira won’t come with you, you just have to leave her.”
“No way, Milo! You know I can’t do that! She spends all her time down here, she’s not right in the head! I honestly think she’d rather let that thing crush her than miss a single opportunity to interpret what it’s doing.”
“Well, I’m not willing to let you get crushed for someone who is not even willing to save her own skin!” Milo cried, and the shrillness of his mounting panic made me wince. “Just let Seamus handle it, Jess, and get yourself out of there! I’m serious!”
Just as I prepared to argue with him, a third energy expanded inside my skull, and Hannah entered the connection. It only took her half a second to feel the tenseness and fear that was zooming around inside my brain like so many of Moira’s hysterical birds.
“Hey, where did the two of you go? I got back to the room and… wait, what’s wrong? I can feel something is not right. Where are you guys? What’s happening?” Our panic was infecting her by the second, her questions becoming more and more frightened.
Knowing that I did not possibly have the words or the time to spare to describe what was going on, I instead allowed the image of the scene before me to play across the connection, so that Hannah could see what I was seeing. I listened for a few seconds as she gasped, and cried out, and swore. At last she said, “But what’s causing it? Why has it suddenly gone crazy?”
“If we knew the answer to that, we might be able to stop it,” I told her. “Its movements are powered by shifts in spirit energy. But it’s never done anything like this before, and I can’t imagine what we could do to make it stop. The Léarscáil is obviously picking up on a serious shift in the balance of spirit energy somewhere in the world, but instead of zeroing in on it, it seems to be sending it haywire.”
“I’m going to find Celeste,” Milo said suddenly. “And as many of the other Council members as I can track down. Someone must know enough about the Léarscáil to understand what’s going on, and how to stop it.”
“I really don’t think so, Milo,” I said skeptically. “If Moira hasn’t figured it out, and she spent her entire life down here studying this thing, then I don’t know how anyone else would—”
“I don’t care,” Milo snapped. “It’s worth a shot. I’m not just going to sit around and wait for that thing to fly off the chain and kill someone. I’ll be right back. Just… don’t die, okay? It’s complicated enough around here with one of us dead.” And with that, he pulled out of the connection with the sharp crackle of evaporating energy and was gone.
“That’s it. I’m coming down there,” Hannah said. “I’m coming down to help.”
“No!” The thought was so forceful inside my head that it echoed like a bass drum and made me wince. I tried again, attempting to keep my emotions under control. “Hannah, stay away from here! We don’t need anybody else in danger, and there’s nothing you can do to—”
But there was no time to complete the thought. A sudden, thunderous rumbling noise made me gasp and look up. For one heart-stopping moment, I was sure that the ceiling of the tower was going to fall in, crushing us beneath it, but a moment later, the door at the top of the stairs flew open, and the rumbling sound revealed itself to be the pounding of dozens of pairs of Caomhnóir boots. At least thirty Caomhnóir came crashing downstairs one after the other, their weapons drawn and their faces set. They lined themselves up along the entire length of the winding staircase. All of their eyes, which were watching the progress of the pendulum, widened in shock. They looked like jackasses standing there clutching their flimsy wooden weapons, which would surely be smashed to splinters if they so much as brushed against the Léarscáil pendulum traveling at such speeds. I could tell from the looks on their faces that they had no more idea of what to do than I did. Seamus edged his way around the base of the tower until he reached the bottom of the stairs, and started consulting with the Caomhnóir that was standing at the bottom. Within moments, they seemed to be arguing. Both of them were gesticulating wildly, and though I could not hear their words, I could tell that they sure as hell weren’t agreeing on a plan of action.
Unable to think of anything else to try, I turned back to Moira, determined to convince her to come with me. If the Caomhnóir couldn’t stop the Léarscáil, we could at least bring her out of harm’s way. I inched closer to where she stood, now working furiously over a map with a tool that looked like a many-legged compass. She was twitching the thing back-and-forth over the map marking the points where the tiny sharp legs met the parchment. She was also muttering to herself, though between the noise and her accent, I had absolutely no idea what she was saying.
I slid carefully along the wall until I was standing directly behind her and looked over her shoulder. The map she was working from was an exact replica of the map on the floor of the tower. She had drawn so many lines and marks across it that it looked as though an overexcited toddler had been let loose upon it with a pencil she knew she wasn’t supposed to use. As I leaned around her to try to get a better look, the pendulum swooped past again, whipping my hair around my face and causing me to gasp and retreat to the wall again.
“Moira, please,” I begged her once more. “This isn’t about work anymore. This is about life and death. We have to go. We have to get out of here before someone is killed!”
Moira completely ignored me, still immersed in her work.
Desperately, I changed tactics. Maybe if I tried to help her, if I showed her I understood that what she was doing was important, she would stop rebuffing me and actually listen? It was worth a shot. Almost anything was worth a shot at this point. I cleared my throat and called over the sounds of the pendulum’s whooshing and shrieking. “What have you found out?” I asked her. “Have you figured out what’s causing it? What do all those lines mean?”
Moira turned her mad, magnified eyes on me. The wild, unhinged gleam in them made me take an involuntary step back, so that I scraped the back of my head against the wall. “This is the path!” she shouted, tapping a gnarled finger on the parchment. “That’s the path that it’s taken. And I dinnae think it made sense, until I saw it here, laid out before me.”
I stared down at the tangled web of pencil lines, incredulous that anyone could make even a modicum of sense out of it. “How does it make sense?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice even as the pendulum swung within inches of us again. “What does it mean? Why is the Léarscáil doing this?”
“It keeps trying, more and more violently, to make contact with a single point,” Moira said. Her fingers scuttled over the surface of the map like spiders, following the lines around and around. “But each time it tries to make contact, the spirit energy sends it sailing away again. It’s too strong, too concentrated. It’s disrupted the balances, throwing it all off kilter. And it all comes back to this. This is the place.” She snatched a red wax crayon from a cup on the desk, and scribbled an “X” on the parchment, like a mad old pirate marking the place where we ought to dig for treasure. “So
mething is happening here,” she whispered, her face now barely an inch from mine. Something is terribly wrong here, and it cannot be ignored. The Léarscáil is warning us. This be where the danger lies.”
“Danger?” I repeated blankly, hoping I had misheard her, but knowing that I had not.
“Danger!” she confirmed, nodding her head of mad cotton candy wisps of hair.
She turned away from me, the parchment now clutched in her hand, and stepped forward to call another bird. She lost her balance and faltered forward just a bit.
“No! Moira, be care—”
It happened in the blink of an eye. One moment, she was standing there, one hand pressed to the side of her mouth as she opened it to call for her birds. The next, she was gone, swept up from the ground by the violent swing of the pendulum. Shock paralyzed me safely against the wall and I could not even scream as I watched her fly through the air, a tiny, bent, and wrinkled thing, like a child’s doll that had all its stuffing loved out of it. Her limp body tumbled through the air and collided with a terrible, muffled thud against the rough stones of the far wall. Then she slid to the floor and crumpled into a heap of robes and tangled limbs. She did not stir.
I felt as though all the air had been sucked from my lungs, as though the Léarscáil pendulum had hit me too, knocking all the wind out of me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move. I just stood there, staring at the broken little body, letting the horror seep like poison through my veins, paralyzing me where I stood.
There was shouting and a flurry of activity around me, but I barely registered it. Figures were moving on the outskirts of my vision, which seemed to have turned into a dark and narrow tunnel. I could not see anything around me, just Moira lying on the ground, the sole object in my line of vision, which had become a small circle, like a spotlight in the gathering darkness. My legs were turning to water. Any moment, they would spill out from under me.