The Defiler

by Steven Savile

  "Indeed. Did your mother never tell you that threats are the last refuge of the coward and the blusterer?" the Wounded King asked, unconcerned by Sláine's anger. "If you want to hurt me, warrior, I suggest you get on with it before I decide to hurt you."

  "Don't tempt me, old man." Sláine turned on his heel and stalked away back towards the coruscating façade of the Glass House, clearly struggling to master his temper.

  Beside Finvarra the fishing pole jerked as a fish took the bait and drew the line taut in its panic. He reached over and began reeling it in. The sleek silver fish came up, hook piercing its gaping mouth and flapping gills as it sucked desperately at the air, drowning out of the water. It wriggled in Finvarra's hands as he freed it. A moment later he dropped it back into the black water.

  "What is the point if you are not going to eat it?" Ukko said, nonplussed. He walked over to the edge of the jetty and peered over the side, watching the silver shadow disappear.

  "Sometimes the hunt is more rewarding than the kill. When you have eternity to waste what good is an empty lake? There is a life lesson in the answer to that, dwarf. I will let you fathom it out for yourself," said Finvarra, baiting the hook once more before casting the line back into the water to begin the cycle again.

  "And the fish never learn to fear your hook?"

  The thought genuinely amused the old man. "Do any species? And in that damning assessment I happily include humans."

  He thought of Sláine, so easily manipulated into rising to take the Wounded King's bait, and saw the truth in the old man's words. "So are you hunting us now? Is that the game you are playing?"

  Finvarra brought up a handful of maggots from his bait box and crushed them in his hand until their innards oozed out between his fingers. Then he opened his hand and showed the dwarf its contents. Despite the crushing and ruination every maggot still writhed, full of life. "I think you'd make poor sport, don't you, little man? Unless it was to see how far I could toss you..."

  "Oh, I think you'd be surprised."

  "Very little in life surprises me now, dwarf."

  "Then it is a good thing that I am very little, wouldn't you say?"

  Something that the Wounded King had said stuck with Ukko: your trinkets are a part of my collection now. You remember how much I love beautiful things.

  And the important thing here wasn't that few of Sláine's things were missing, not even the shard of the broken Cauldron. Oh no, far more interesting was the fact that hidden somewhere inside the Glass House was a collection of beautiful things worth liberating. That was the important thing. The dwarf rubbed his hands together in gleeful anticipation. The old man hadn't even realised he had said it, Ukko was sure. He had been so busy baiting Sláine that he hadn't for one minute considered the predilections of his audience.

  Ukko smiled. "Once a thief," he said to himself. He had left Urian asleep in bed, worn out from his lusty excesses. The Sidhe was pliable, flexible and a whole lot of other "bles". He had drunk his fill, rolled over, farted and begun to snore loudly, faking unconsciousness until Urian's breathing had changed in quality to the regularly shallow rhythm of sleep, then he had snuck out of their shared room. Finvarra hadn't lied; for all its sensory delights, the place was no more than a gaol - and there hadn't been a gaol built that could hold the resourceful dwarf. She hadn't even stirred as he carefully laid the sheet back over her legs, padded across the room to his pile of clothes by the crackling fire, and dressed.

  The passageways were deserted, the Glass House in the grip of what passed for night in this peculiar place.

  He walked slowly along the narrow corridor, listening at every step for signs of life, but the Glass House was in deep sleep. Even the hues imbuing the walls seemed more subdued, somnambulant.

  Now if I were a senile old man locked away on my own for four hundred years, where would I hide my precious knickknacks?

  Think.

  You've got this whole place to yourself, where would you hide the goodies?

  Think.

  It's not as though you'd be expecting guests, so there's no need to squirrel them away in a vault, even supposing this place has dungeons, no, you'd want them close at hand, somewhere you could visit them whenever the mood struck. So, where in this endless sprawling palace, would that be? Near your bed chamber? In a chest at the bottom of your bed? You're a king, how about near your throne room? Or up in one of the towers, where the light is always perfect?

  It's about splendour, he reasoned, following the curve of the passage to one of the many servants' stairs, and climbing them, You possess these glorious things, these things of beauty, so you want to revel in them. That means you keep them somewhere that enhances their perfection. Somewhere the light is perfect, somewhere spectacular.

  The chamber at the top of the very highest spire, with wide open windows to capture all the natural light sun and moon have to offer.

  Pleased with his logic, Ukko set off looking for more stairways, always rising, higher and higher through the labyrinthine corridors of the Glass House, pausing at corners, breath caught in his throat, to listen. He felt like a character in some dumb fairy tale, disappearing into the woodland without a trail of breadcrumbs to find his way home.

  More than once he found himself walking down a passageway identical to one he thought he had left behind two stairways earlier. Then he would walk to the far end of the corridor and peer out through the glass trying to get his bearings in relation to the highest tower and its crooked spire. It was an unnerving experience. Before long he was sure he was utterly lost. And still he headed upwards, following the never-ending twists and turns of the Glass House as though he were in the belly of a huge beast.

  Ukko rested his hand flat against the wall, feeling the frequency of the light resonate through his fingers like a pulse, tripping as the hue shifted, racing as it deepened.

  And like a body, there was an internal logic to the construction of the Glass House. The rooms fed off the corridors like vital organs, each serving a purpose, feeding the vitality of the place; the corridors, stairs and passageways the veins and arteries that kept life pumping through the Wounded King's home, the servants' stairs the capillaries that made certain life reached the furthest extremities.

  Twice he heard the harmonics of movement, the chimes that accompanied one of the Sisters going about her business, and both times he almost blundered into them before he realised that they were closer than the elegiac melody that their footfalls suggested. He ducked down, heart hammering against his chest, and clung to the dark places, watching them until they disappeared before he scuttled off. He wished he had a way of telling the time - or that there was at least some rationality to its passage in the Glass House that he might judge how long he had. The notion that the whole place might wake up at any moment, with no obvious hint as to when or how distant that moment might be, was a deeply uncomfortable one.

  Ukko counted all manner and number of doors before he found the one he wanted, tucked away in a far corner of the seventh storey, around the seventh corner in the seventh room. He knew it immediately, even without opening it. Ukko paused, his hand on the door, allowing his spatial awareness to adjust as he mated the image of the Glass House in his mind to the reality of his location. It was a useful skill, one that had served the little dwarf well over the years of petty larceny, especially when it came to hoofing it away on his heels before a disgruntled "donator" could collar him.

  The stairwell beyond the door was different, a tight right-hand spiral cut into a cone of solid glass. As with every other staircase in the Glass House, the stairs were worn smooth in the centre. There was no balustrade for support despite the fact that the stairs coiled up and up and up and up, over one thousand steps that burned every muscle in his body as he ascended, until it opened into what was obviously Finvarra's museum of curiosities. It was nothing like he had imagined - or dared to imagine. The tower room was easily fifty paces across, circular in dimensions, with windows cut into the thick
glass walls at each of the cardinals. It was unnerving, being so high up, encased in glass and yet able to see not only through the windows but through the tinted walls and the floor. Ukko stood at the threshold, wrestling with the sensation of being suspended over a terrifying drop. It was exacerbated by the floor, which appeared no more substantial than a thin patina of ice crusting over a fathom-deep sea. Ukko breathed deeply, inhaled, held the breath for the count of eleven, then exhaled, and again, regulating his heart and the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm his mind. He reached out with his foot, tapping the floor. He half-expected a crack to splinter through it but of course it bore his little added weight with ease.

  "Stupid dwarf," he muttered, cursing his idiocy. Various display cabinets were arranged around the walls and lined up in a concentric ring near the centre of the room. Dubious treasures including pieces of dented armour, blunted weapons, marbled statuary, jade figurines with likenesses to every manner of shoggy beast imaginable, rarities of hunts stuffed and mounted, tablets etched with Ogham and stranger runes, more like pictograms than letters, were proudly displayed. And there in pride of place at the heart of the curiosities, Slough Feg's Ragnarok book on a lectern, open on one of the many pages that promised the end of the world as humanity knew it.

  Ukko took the first step into the room. He couldn't help himself - he looked down and through the glass floor at the hundreds of feet of nothing between him and the rocks below. The huge twisted spire rose up from out of the escarpment itself, entirely separate to the Glass House which seemed to have been fashioned around it. The rocks were a black death waiting below his feet. It was impossible to tell how thick the glass was. The fact that the tower had stood for at least four centuries was no comfort - that just made it old and ready to crumble as far as he was concerned.

  Ukko closed his eyes and ventured a second step expecting the glass to groan beneath his feet at any second, dreading the sharp crack that would precede the fall.

  After a fifth step without the floor opening up to swallow him, Ukko opened his eyes.

  Brain-Biter hung on the wall betwixt and between an imperious Gae Bolga and the vestiges of what appeared to be a warrior's grave shroud. On a table beneath it was an exquisite chess set, each piece six inches tall, one army fashioned from pure gold the other appeared to be obsidian or another black rock. Ukko moved closer to examine the pieces. They truly were exquisite, each rendered with the precision of a master craftsman, flawlessly detailed, the features so life-like it was creepy. A game was in progress. Ukko studied the board for a moment, realising with a wry grin that mate was only one move away. He reached out to touch the black knight astride his obsidian destrier only for the horse to glide across the board, answering his instinct to move around the cardinal, and mate the enemy king in the pincer its advance fashioned.

  The miniature gold king bowed his head in surrender.

  Ukko grinned, forgetting for a moment the thousand-foot drop beneath his feet.

  Despite the urgency he felt, he was sorely tempted to rearrange the pieces for another game, but the sudden flare of warmth within the tower room and the brightening of the walls as the sun breached the horizon was enough to deter him.

  He collected the book, stuffing it into his pack, and lifted down the heavy double-headed axe, putting it down in the middle of the floor, then stuffed his pockets with a few of the smaller pieces of jewellery he thought would fetch a decent price from one of the more disreputable fences of his acquaintance.

  Almost as an afterthought, Ukko pocketed the gold king as a souvenir. After all, he thought to himself, I did win it fair and square.

  He had no idea what the gold figurine was worth, but judging from its weight in his pocket, it'd pay for more than a few nights of indulgence in wine, women and well, more women, which made it worth far more than its weight as the old adage went.

  Still, it would be a shame to ruin such fine craftsmanship, but it would be so much easier to spend melted down.

  It took the dwarf a few minutes to locate the two shards of the Cauldron of Rebirth; he had expected them to be out among the other treasures but they weren't. Finvarra had locked them away behind glass in one of the many display cabinets that formed the concentric rings around the very heart of the chamber.

  Refusing to be rushed by his own impatience, Ukko studied the lock.

  It was made of brass, the aperture wide, the mechanism disturbingly simple to pick for anyone who understood even the most basic rudiments of the mechanics going on beneath the hasp. Indeed, it was an insult to a decent thief. Ukko could have opened it with a fingernail, it was that pathetic.

  Which in itself felt wrong to the dwarf. It was like a thief's sixth sense, the fine hairs at the nape of his neck bristled and his fingertips itched as he turned the lock over in his hands.

  He resisted the temptation to simply pop the lock.

  He studied the mechanism again, this time with a more suspicious eye, expecting to see some kind of subtle trap secreted away within the tumblers - a poison-tipped needle perhaps or a trip for something more explosive. The last thing he wanted to do was make a mistake and leave what passed for his brains smeared across the wall, still fully conscious even in his liquefied state thanks to the damned geas on Ynys Afallach.

  The dwarf scratched his head thoughtfully. A second layer of protection made sense, considering the elementary nature of the lock itself. Added to that the fact that the two pieces of the Cauldron were among the only treasures locked down in the entire collection (and that was including the gold, diamonds and other gemstones) underlined their value to the Wounded King. And knowing that, only a fool would assume they were going to be easy pickings.

  It irritated him that the lock was so crude; a wiser trap would have been to employ a considerably more sophisticated lock with a well-disguised trigger to mask the fact that there was a second failsafe on the mechanism. The would-be thief would find the first, reward for their skill, and vanity would see to it that they triggered the second. There was a finesse to a good trap, a cunning that a thief couldn't help but admire. There was no such finesse to the lock in his hand.

  He squinted, peering in through the aperture, identifying not one but two black metal teeth, almost indistinguishable from the teeth of the cogs and tumblers of the mechanism itself, and the spring-loads behind them, poised to drive first one and then the other into clumsy fingers.

  He smiled wryly to himself, enjoying the game at last. The trap itself was relatively well disguised, not flawlessly but at least with a little subtlety. There was nothing more disappointing than just being able to take what you wanted. Any thief worth his salt wanted to earn his spoils.

  And like any good thief, he came prepared. Ukko dug around in the lining of his grubby tunic for one of the fine needle-like picks worked into its lining. He teased it out slowly. It was a thin piece of metal, two inches long with a slight hook at the tip. Ukko put it between his teeth while he worked a second, slightly more substantial pick out of the lining, this one half an inch longer than the first and a little thicker, with a blunted tip.

  He eased the first hooked pick into the lock, teasing it across the tumblers one at a time, daring them to click out of place and fire the pin, until it rested just beneath the coil of the first sprung tooth. Ukko held his breath, biting his tongue as he slid the second pick in alongside the first, easing it slightly deeper so it negated the second treacherous tooth.

  Then slowly and very deliberately he sprung the first mechanism.

  The needle, dripping thick poison, stung the air less than a quarter of an inch from his calloused finger.

  The second mechanism didn't launch a dart; it cracked a phial within the lock itself, releasing a noxious vapour and corrosive liquid which ate into the metal, quickly fusing the metal tumblers into one solid lump while Ukko coughed his lungs up. Cursing his arrogance, Ukko lurched away from the still-rising vapours and grabbed Brain-Biter from where it lay. Covering his mouth and nose with one ha
nd, he stepped forwards and slammed the axe into the glass front of the display cabinet and reached in through the jagged shards of glass to retrieve the two pieces of the Cauldron from inside. Each fragment of black iron was as heavy as Ukko himself. He struggled to get them into his pack, wrestling with the drawstring and then the shoulder straps as he struggled to lift it. With the pack slung over one shoulder and Brain-Biter over the other, Ukko staggered and lurched down the thousand stairs, his feet running away beneath him as the weight of the Cauldron bullied him forwards quicker and quicker with each spiral of the stairs until he was running, tripping on the lips of the steps as he desperately tried to keep his balance. He hit the wall again and again, lurching and staggering and stumbling, barely maintaining his precarious balance as his momentum threatened to send him arse over tit rolling down the glass stairs.

  Then he burst through the door at the bottom of the tower, tripped over his own feet and went sprawling into the room head first. He threw his arms out in front of his face to brace his fall as the floor rushed up to hit him. Ukko's cry of pain was muffled by the press of the glass up against his face. He tried to catch his breath, the wind driven out of his lungs by the savage pummelling of the iron weight on his back driving him into the floor. He lay there for a moment, unable to move, waiting for the inevitable cry of alarm.

  When it didn't come he grunted, wincing against the sudden flare of pain as he pushed himself back to his feet. Looking around once more, to be sure the Wounded King wasn't about to complete his own subtle checkmate, Ukko set off at a lurching run to find Sláine and Myrrdin, not caring that his footsteps rang like a mad chorus throughout the Glass House.

  "I don't pretend to understand, druid," Sláine said, worrying away at the dilemma relentlessly. His frustration was, yet again, close to boiling over into outright anger. Sitting, essentially doing nothing, was anathema to him. "Surely if you were responsible for laying the geas on this place, you can lift it also? Can this magic be so convoluted that even you cannot unmake it?"