The Defiler

by Steven Savile

  "The first of his kind born in a century, if Myrrdin speaks the truth. Sláine son of Roth seeks to save his people from the threat of one called Feg. I did not understand all of the druid's words, so much has changed within the world we used to know, sister. From what I could follow, this Feg is a slough-skinned one devoted to the Wyrm God. Under his tyranny the lands to the south have soured; the priest has erected standing stones that draw the life from the earth to power flying ships and other monstrosities. Crops no longer grow. It is a place of rot. The son of Roth possesses the secrets of the priest and would return them to his people though it seems his people despise him, and to return is sure and certain death. He hopes to buy his life back with a gift: he seeks the fragments of a relic broken and scattered to the four corners of the world and beyond. That is how he fell to the Night Bringer's hunt. He stole a part of this relic from her possession, giving his life so that he might lift it from her."

  "So he truly has the heart of a champion," Leanan said, almost wistfully. She laid her hand flat on his chest, above his heart as though trying to feel its latent power. She looked at the other women, meeting their eyes one at a time, "Are we decided, sisters?"

  "It is our duty," Helios said simply, laying her hand on top of Leanan's.

  "His sacrifice makes him worthy of our love," Sister Solis said, adding hers to the others, sharing its gentle warmth. "The Lord of the Trees would not betray us."

  "Our dedication is to the healing of the flesh," Luna said, and even as she did she laid her hand on top of Solis's. "He has fallen that others may live. His sacrifice makes him precious."

  "He is not our concern, sisters. He is not our ward. He is a man with countless names, countless destinies. He is the Eater of Souls, the Death of Worlds," Modron said, staring at her sisters' hands. "He is the Defiler. To save him is to damn ourselves." She laid her hand down atop Sister Luna's delicate hand. "The gods have mercy on us all."

  Leanan began to sing softly, her voice barely audible above the breathing of her kin. One by one the others joined with her song, adding their own sweet voices to the chorus of life Leanan wove. Above them, behind them, a bell chimed, a single voice, joyful, triumphant. The warmth spread through their hands, down into Sláine's chest, enfolding his heart tenderly, drawing the life back to it. Her voice rose, her words merging into one long lamentable song, a lover refusing to say farewell. The words of her sisters coiled around her song, snakes of passion and pain adding their power to the enchantment. Leanan leaned in close, parting the dead man's lips with her own so that she might breathe a little of her essence into him, sharing the life that was hers.

  There was nothing.

  No answering heat in his skin.

  No lurch or trip of his heart.

  No wisp of breath between his parted lips.

  And then the bell tolled again, and it was answered by another, and another, until the glass walls of the palace resonated with the voices of a thousand thousand bells, deep and booming, shrill and screeching, in all of the harmonies that together formed the song of the everliving. An impossible breeze stirred, bringing with it a deep and abiding chill and the redolent musk of the departed. The breeze wove around each one of them, its gentle hand touching their hearts, drawing strength and purpose from the truth of them. The chill deepened, sinking bone-deep, leeching every ounce of warmth from them. The ghost of a voice, a war cry that became a scream, primal, base and desperate, pierced the ethereal bell chorus, as the spirit of the fallen warrior was drawn across the turgid black water, back towards his flesh.

  Leanan touched his lips with hers, offering the kiss of life.

  And a sudden, shockingly violent spasm tore through the body beneath her, that first desperate breath catching in Sláine's throat, the born-again warrior choking on it.

  Sláine's eyes flared open, his head coming up off the table as body and soul were reunited.

  "Shhh," she said gently. "Shh, be at peace, warrior. You are safe here."

  He looked about wildly, trying to take it all in at once, to understand what had happened to him, and then, an afterthought, he looked down at his hands and saw the insubstantial shape of the fragment of the Cauldron of Rebirth clutched in them. The women flinched, Sláine's life-force repelling their touch. They stepped away from the man, their eyes following the direction of his gaze, and retreated another step, stunned to see the relic solidifying in his grasp.

  Sláine closed his eyes and sank back onto the table.

  Sláine wasn't dead.

  He did not know why - or how - but he breathed. The toll living exerted on his flesh was huge.

  The ghosts of Gwalchmai and the Eighth had faded but he wasn't alone. He slipped between consciousness and sleep, dreaming of devils. He felt hands touching his face as he struggled back to consciousness. He didn't have the strength to fight. His spirit was exhausted. Oblivion offered rest, peace. If the Night Bringer's beasts wanted to play with him before they killed him, so be it. He was too weak to argue.

  "Kill... me then," he managed to say. The words were barely voiced. He groaned. "Just get it over with because I hurt."

  He opened his eyes expecting to see the shoggy beasts or the Huntress's hell-hounds, or even Myrrdin's tattooed face and Ukko's ugly mug leering over him. Instead he opened his eyes on beauty. The woman's face was exquisite, sculptured, delicate bones and porcelain-pale skin, but it was her eyes, older than time and filled with sadnesses he could not conceive, that truly made the beautiful exquisite.

  Sláine reacted instinctively, his hand going for the axe that was no longer by his side, dropping the fragment of the Cauldron in his haste. It clattered on the floor. The movement left his head spinning.

  "Be still," the beauty soothed, her voice velvet around him.

  "Ceridwen?" Sláine breathed, invoking the name of the Goddess's deathly aspect. Surely the mother of death was a hag, not a vision of loveliness. The beautiful woman laughed, a sound every bit as enchanting as her features.

  "I must look worse than I remember. No, my pretty one, you are a long way from death."

  "Then who?" Sláine struggled to sit up. The effort was dizzying. He sank back to the warm mattress, beaten and breathless.

  "A shadow of the woman I used to be, I fear."

  "That's no answer, lady."

  "No," she admitted. "But then, you asked the wrong question. In the pursuit of the truth the secrets most often lie in the why; the who is usually misleading."

  Despite himself, Sláine smiled. It hurt. The pain in his shoulder flared as he tried to move. "But there are so many whys."

  "So start with the simplest one."

  "Why aren't I dead?"

  "Because it wasn't your time to be," she said. "You will know when it is."

  Sláine laughed; it was a short harsh sound. "That didn't exactly make things any clearer, did it? All right, tell me, where am I?"

  "Where isn't a why, but you are in the Glass House, last sanctuary of the lord of the fey, Finvarra. Why you are here is a more interesting question, so indulge me as I ask a question now. Tell me, why are you here?"

  Sláine closed his eyes, not wanting to see those eyes stripping away his words for truth and honesty, measuring his worth the way the eyes of beautiful women always did. "I do not know. I was dead, fighting beside brave men against the revenant shades of the damned, and then I was pulled back to my flesh. As to why here, this is where my body was. Now, why are you here?"

  "Ah, a better question. You learn quickly, warrior. I was brought here a long time ago, centuries even, as a young girl to serve the Wounded King. My other life is like a dream now..."

  They talked day and night over the days and weeks it took Sláine to regain his strength and his wounds to heal properly.

  The darkness of night never came to the Glass House; even the moon's lambent glow brought the crystalline walls to life so the only clue as to the passage of time was the quality of the colours as they changed.

  The woman, Leanan,
told him she was a Sister of Prieddeu, one of the faithful Sidhe who served at the right hand of Finvarra, the Wounded King. She would sit with him at night, sharing a little food and more conversation, teaching him the ways of the Glass House. He was anxious to be on his way but as weak as a day-old calf, so the demands of the flesh superseded those of his stubbornness. Like it or not, Sláine was forced to rest.

  At first he asked frequently about his companions, trying to glean some small hint as to their whereabouts, but all Leanan Sidhe would say was that they had moved on, leaving him on the island to heal. He found his memories of them slipping, almost as though his mind was wilfully trying to forget the scurrilous runt and the Skinless Man. Some nights, in the hours where his pain was most insistent, he would feel Leanan slip into the bed beside him, her naked skin warm against his. She caressed his wounded flesh, tenderly tracing the lines cut into his skin. She pressed her lips against his throat, suckling at the pulsing veins there.

  And they made love.

  And he forgot himself.

  It was not the frantic coupling of youth, the lecherous rutting of the boy he had been, eager to sample the differences of the flesh, the old, the young, the supple, the stiff, but a more mature yearning, a need to be close, to feel alive, and yet even as he surrendered to it he knew it was wrong. It violated the pledge he had made to his Goddess. It betrayed the man he had sworn to be. But he could not help himself. She whispered in his ear, she touched his throat, smeared unguents into his sore flesh, and looked into his eyes, and he lost the will to resist.

  Later they walked out into the garden. The moon was high in the sky, a disc of silver watching over the white hills. The ground around the Glass House appeared frozen, a layer of glittering white clinging to the contours of the earth.

  "There are so many ghosts here. Can you feel them around you?" she said, as they walked down towards the water's edge.

  It seemed like an odd thing for her to say.

  The voices of the garden's birds joined in song as he reached down to trail his fingers through the black water. Something prevented him from touching the water. He lifted his fingers to his nose, as though trying to smell some ephemeral residue that might yet linger on them, a trace of the afterlife that prevented him from interacting with the world around him. There was nothing. He tried again, feeling the resistance of the air closing around his hand to hold it still, inches above the surface. He pushed against it but it refused to give.

  "You cannot leave," Leanan said softly, kneeling down beside him. Her skin smelled of fragrant oils, subtle, inviting. He stared down at his fingers, trying to force them into the water. "That is the geas the druid and godless Crone placed upon this place. They promised eternity and fashioned nothing short of hell. Life and death have no dominion here, but anything preserved by enchantments of Ynys Afallach cannot cross the water. I cannot leave; I have been here so long to do so would be the death of me, my flesh would crumble to dust as the ravages of time caught up with it. You were reborn here - the geas is all that keeps you alive, it will not allow you to break it. To touch the water would undo all that we have done."

  "I am trapped?"

  "You are alive. Everything comes at a cost, warrior."

  The healing process was frustratingly slow.

  Her words haunted him. The Glass House was a prison, claustrophobic, confining. He yearned to be free of the place. Every morning Sláine would wake from disturbing dreams and explore his wounds with tentative fingers, feeling out the areas of tenderness around the scarred skin, and for the first few weeks even own his light touch was enough to make him wince.

  But gradually the pain faded.

  He worked on building his strength, running laps around the island to add muscle to his legs, lifting rocks to regain power in his arms. The laps grew faster, the rocks heavier until he began to feel alive again.

  Not once in the weeks did he see Ukko or the druid, nor did he see the fabled king or any of his entourage. Resentment fuelled his need to heal. They had abandoned him in this strange place with Leanan Sidhe. Indeed, he had not seen another soul since waking from death. That in itself was enough to frighten him. Again and again he walked down to the water's edge, testing the limits of his captivity, looking for a weakness in the geas that would allow him to escape this wretched place. At night he would dream himself back across the water, fighting once more side by side with Gwalchmai against the Night Bringer's horde, or would come surging up from beneath the press of man-animals with their grotesque feral faces, Brain-Biter tasting malignant blood.

  And in some of those dreams he remembered dying - and why he had. He recalled the Morrigan and the Weatherwitch and Feg and the skull swords, and his own people, and his Goddess, helpless against the souring of her body.

  And he remembered the Cauldron and what it represented, the hope it promised.

  "Where is it?" he asked Leanan when she came to him that night.

  "Where is what, my love?"

  "The relic I brought here; a shard from the Cauldron of Rebirth. Where is it?"

  She hesitated, her breathing shallow against the nape of his neck. Her arm encircled him, fingers lingering over his heart. "That slab of rusted iron you were clutching when you came back to us? Your friends took it with them when they left."

  He did not believe her. Something about her words, breathed into his ear, did not ring true, but the more he tried to focus on what it was about them that felt wrong the harder it became to concentrate on it. She was lying, but why? His thoughts grew muggy, and his ability to recall even the simplest things about his life before coming to the Glass House faded.

  She kissed his throat and the touch of her lips was enough to put the worry out of his mind for as long as they were joined.

  He clung to the image of his mother, Macha, dying twice, once on the sword of the vile soldier of Feg, and again beneath the crushing chariot wheels in the hell of Purgadair's coliseum. He fixated on her pain, refusing to let it wash away beneath whatever enchantment the Sidhe wove around him. And seeing Macha he remembered another mother, and the toll her love for Avagddu, her only son, had taken upon the lives of so many people. And recalling the Crone brought with it memories of the Cauldron.

  "Where is it?" he said again, determined not to forget this time.

  "Gone," she whispered. "Far away. Do not dwell on it, thinking about your life before only hurts and makes it harder for you to accept being here. Oh, my beautiful boy, until you let go, you won't truly heal."

  And there was a heady euphoria wrapped within her words and her touch.

  He so desperately wanted to succumb to them, to just forget, but his mother's face would not let him.

  "Leave me," he said, closing his eyes.

  "But, my love-"

  "Leave me," he said again.

  "No."

  "Then I will leave you." He pushed himself out of the seductive comfort of the bed and walked naked across the room. The peculiar subdued light glanced off the edges of his musculature, rippling over the shapes and lines so they made in a shadow play of phantom forms.

  "Come back to bed, my pretty one. I have such delicious pleasures to share with you, such violent delights."

  "Find yourself a new plaything, woman. I have no need of your flesh."

  The woman leaned on one elbow, the single sheet slipping from her shoulder to reveal the gentle curves of side and breast and her body's own shadow play as the light touched her ribs. Her hair fell across part of her face, its gentle waves almost undoing his resolve. She smiled at him and patted his empty side of the huge bed.

  "You need me, Sláine," Leanan said, "And I need you. You give me so much, I would not throw this thing away so lightly. We are all we have here. This can be such a lonely place."

  "That is a lie, Leanan Sidhe. We both know it is. Do me the decency of letting the truth touch your lips for a moment: you serve your king, I am his prisoner, that makes you my gaoler. This thing between us is nothing more than a distr
action, a means to keep me docile, is it not?"

  Her smile was anything but warm; she leaned forwards, on all fours like some animal on the prowl, the predatory cunning of her kind burned behind her eyes. "Aren't you the clever little man? Would you rather the cuffs and chains came out? Are you not sufficiently imprisoned by the wetness of my flesh?"

  Sláine turned his back on the woman. Whatever hold she had over him was gone. There was no enticement in her words. He saw her for what she was.

  "Take me to Finvarra."

  "Why would I want to do that, my pretty little manling?"

  Sláine fastened the leather belt and adjusted his kilt so that it sat comfortably on his hips. He picked up the boar's head codpiece with its vicious tusks and turned to the supine Sidhe in his bed. "Because," he said, toying with the sharpened teeth of the boar's head, "the next 'tusk' of mine to impale you will almost certainly do a lot more damage to your insides." He made sure she saw the brutal tusks as he secured the codpiece over his groin. "From what I hear about this island such a wound would never heal, but at least it wouldn't kill you. Where is he?"

  "He is by the lake, fishing. It is how he spends his days."

  "And my friends?"

  "They are enjoying the ample charms of my sisters, much as you were until a few moments ago."

  "What did you do to me? What kind of enchantment was it that you spun around me so that I could not resist?"

  Leanan Sidhe laughed, genuinely amused by the notion that she had somehow seduced the warrior with witchcraft. "Is my beauty not enough for you now? Believe me, it is no magic, my pretty one, no more than any seduction is. You want to lose yourself, to forget. We merely offer you what your heart desires. We know you better than you know yourselves. You came to me broken, I healed you. Sex is vital, vibrant, holy even. It is good for the flesh and the spirit. With my body I gave you yours back. The joy of the coupling was enough to hold back any doubts you had upon awaking, the rush of sensations that came with your release enough to dampen down any guilt or interest in your companions or your quest. You could call it witchcraft, just as you could call it love or lust. In truth the only magic of it is within your own chemistry. You wanted this, you wanted to lose yourself."