by Gavin Smith
And Cliodna stood over her. She too seemed to sway with the warm wind. Crouched over like a predatory animal, she did not look like her lover any more. She was all armour and hard edges. She looked like a warrior. No, Britha corrected herself, she looked like a weapon. The other woman seemed to seethe somehow.
Cliodna reached down and ran a sharp black claw across Britha’s skin. Britha did not cry out. Her head wanted to burst and the claw wound seemed like nothing. Even through the war in her body and the agony in her head, even though she was slowly beginning to realise that some of the thoughts in her head were not her own, the thought that Cliodna would hurt her made all the strength that had carried her this far evaporate. She wanted to curl up and end it. If Cliodna wanted to then let her kill her.
Instead Britha got up unsteadily.
Cliodna threw Britha’s spear at her feet. ‘Kill me,’ she said quietly.
Quicksilver tears sprang from Britha’s eyes but she didn’t move. Cliodna darted forward and more slashes appeared in Britha’s flesh. The blood ran down her, dripped onto the flesh of the floor and was instantly absorbed.
‘Kill me,’ Cliodna said more loudly and licked her bloodied nails. Britha knew that the Otherworldly woman couldn’t help herself and shook her head.
Cliodna embraced Britha. Her skin was course and rough now, she felt jagged and sharp. She grabbed Britha’s hair and yanked her head back. ‘Kill me!’ Cliodna screamed in her face, breath smelling of meat, before sinking rows of teeth into the other woman’s shoulder and pushing sharp nails through her skin.
This time Britha screamed and pulled away, Cliodna’s fingers and teeth tearing her flesh.
Britha staggered back, sobbing. ‘I can’t!’ she screamed.
‘I can smell that monster’s scent on you,’ Cliodna growled. ‘Either kill me or I will kill you.’
‘You pushed me away!’ Britha screamed at her. She knew it wasn’t fair. Now more than ever it was evident that Cliodna had done it for Britha’s safety. Not only that, it would seem that Bress was more than a little responsible for Cliodna’s transformation.
‘I don’t want to live like this,’ Cliodna told her. ‘I only destroy. I am hanging on to what little is left of me. My nails are bloodied by the meat of my younger brothers and sisters!’ Britha knew she meant her and the other peoples of Ynys Prydein and beyond. ‘Soon I will be gone. I would rather I be killed by someone I loved, when I was capable of that. Better that than I become a terror to your people.’
‘I’m sorry but—’
‘Then I will kill you and forget my name and all that came with it.’
‘I can’t . . .’ Britha was begging Cliodna to understand.
‘You have no choice. It is your responsibility to stand between your people, all people, and the likes of me. Isn’t that what they taught you in the groves? I’m holding on as long as I can, but there is a red tide inside me.’ Britha was sure she could see tears mingling with the remaining drops of water on her lover’s face. ‘Please.’
The only way she could do it was to give in to the fire part of her that lived in her blood. To let the demon that lived in the spear have its way as her hand closed around its haft. Later she could tell herself that it wasn’t even her who wielded the spear that she pushed through her lover.
Britha finally managed to throw the red-tipped spear away from herself. The demon in the spear laughed as it showed her Cliodna’s death at her hands. She sank to her knees. She screamed as the pain returned. She could feel the thing crawling through the rip in the sky like it was a hole in the back of her mind.
She was in the same cave of flesh, with the same warm wind and rib-like arches of bone. She did not know how or why she had come back from the red rage. Behind her there were rents in the Muileartach’s flesh that she had dug with the spear in her frenzy.
Then she remembered the other voice. No, she decided, voice wasn’t the right word. Despite her magics allowing her to understand all other languages, there was no common language between her and the thoughts that she felt rather than understood, that had soothed her, called her back, though they themselves were filled with pain.
She reached for the Mother’s mind. The pain in there almost killed her immediately. It had already turned the Mother’s elder children insane. Sent them into the water to slay her younger children, to put them out of their misery. To her massive and very alien intellect it seemed the most merciful thing to do. Then the Mother was there in Britha’s mind, through the link in the blood given to her by Cliodna. The Mother tried to protect her from the pain and the suffering being sent to her by Crom Dhubh, but Britha was crawling across the floor of the cavern, screaming, wounds appearing on her flesh.
‘I can make it stop.’ The voice was like silk, low and mellifluous, somehow breaking through all the pain. Seductive, the voice offered what she needed.
He was so very tall. His skin was black. Not the very dark brown of Kush and his compatriots from the kingdoms across the sea far to the south. He looked like a tall and beautiful member of a long-forgotten race. His skin was the absence of light and colour. Naked, he knelt next to her.
She almost asked him to do it, to take the pain. Then the parasite in her mind recoiled from his power. Her mind, struggling to understand what the crystal was showing her, visualised it as lines of black energy crackling into him, which he turned into poison that bled into the Mother. The man did not just exist here and now, but stretched into other places which, although Britha could now see, she had no way of understanding. Crom Dhubh was not there. He was a man-shaped hole in the world. The nothingness inside that hole squirmed like maggots writhing over each other. Britha threw up.
‘It’s nearly over,’ he told her. She wanted to surrender to the voice but the crystal would not let her turn away from what he really was. Britha concentrated on the stray threads of his outline. She reached out to another place. It hurt. Like she had been snapped. She took a thread and pulled.
Crom Dhubh’s head rotated, breaking his neck. Bones splintered, piercing organs, flesh and skin. He fell to the ground, his body a wreck. He looked like a broken doll.
The energy stopped. The poison seeping from him stopped. Begrudgingly the crystal showed her the little part of Teardrop that it had jealously kept. Britha touched the Mother’s mind. Suddenly Britha could feel the pain and the terror of all those in the water. Being attacked and fed on by the Muileartach’s predatory elder children, by poisoned creatures released from corrupted wombs. It threatened to overwhelm her, but she held on to the mind of the Muileartach and the fragment of Teardrop as he taught her the mindsong.
Teardrop knew it as something else, some kind of instruction, but Britha recognised it for what it was. A complex and beautiful magical working designed to lull a god back to sleep.
She could feel the Muileartach reach out and call her elder children back home, sing her own song as she tried to soothe their fractured minds. As the pain receded, Britha started to feel her anger. Britha felt rather than saw writhing tentacles flick out and destroy black ships like a reflexive response to pain.
The organs that ran through her, organs possessing magics that Britha could barely understand, which could draw power from the stars in the night sky, glowing organs, which had opened the way for the Hungry Nothingness – they closed the way as the Mother fell asleep. The way collapsed. The tear closed and was gone, as if it had never existed. There was no sense of it at all, and the wound in her mind closed.
Only the connection with the sleeping god allowed her to cope with the pain.
There was a sound like dry twigs snapping. He did not so much seem to stand as rise before her. Britha looked up at Crom Dhubh.
‘I was dead and dry, full of dust when your people were brute animals,’ he said quietly, his impossibly deep voice carrying. She wondered if any of her people had lived.
‘That sounds like no way to be. I think you should go now,’ she told him through the pain.
‘Wo
uld that I could.’ He turned and walked away.
Britha was surprised that she was still alive. She did not think she had the strength left to fight anyone, let alone someone with his power.
‘This must seem like a victory to you, but I am eternal. The parasite in your head will consume you. You are already dead,’ he said, answering her thoughts.
‘Why?’ she asked.
He stopped but did not turn around. ‘The pain.’ He sounded sad.
She was being consumed. Joining. Going back, becoming one. The comfort of something else’s flesh all around you. Her Mother wanting her to hide something deep inside. A secret that the Hungry Nothingness could never know again. Her Mother had to sleep before her insane sisters found her. Already they were reaching for her.
The coldness and the weight of the sea again. It felt like death after where she had been.
She had washed up on a beach in the company of twisted monstrosities that crawled, slithered and flew and recognised her as kin.
She had no idea how long she had been wandering. It seemed like an age. Her throat was bloody from screaming due to the pain in her skull. She did not understand how there could be so much pain when there was so little of her left.
The crystal grew from her skull in a way that no other could see, to places that could not exist. The paths to these places only made her hurt more when she looked at them.
The circle of stones was far vaster than any cairn she had seen. Some part of her which used to be Britha recognised it as the time between times, either dusk or dawn, she wasn’t sure which. The time when the borders between this world and the Otherworld were at their weakest. The southrons had not inscribed symbols of power on the stones to protect against the influence of the gods.
Shapes all around the stones. People? No, the dead. Spirits. Her people. She sank to her knees in the centre and somehow found it in herself to scream with her ruined voice.
Something moved deep in the earth.
Britha was more aware of, than actually saw, a star going out in the sky.
Pulsing blue and white light.
The light faded. The stones again. More people. Shouting, running, readying weapons. All of them like Fachtna, well made and richly appointed with armour and fine weapons. No, they were different stones. Teardrop had told the truth. The earth was the sky and the sky was the earth.
In the Otherworld they showed their power. They caged her in light and destroyed her with fire. Just before the fire consumed her, she saw the dead. Fachtna was watching her from beyond the circle of stones.
33
Now
Beth sat in the Range Rover at the bottom of Alhambra Road, picking dried blood off herself and looking at the wreckage of South Parade Pier. Knowing what she knew now, it was difficult not to think that this was the apocalypse – but happening here in Portsmouth? A back-alley apocalypse largely unnoticed maybe, seen out of the corner of the eye. The helicopters in the sky, the light and the sirens meant that people knew something was happening, but they talked a little louder, the laughter was more forced and they pretended it wasn’t. Or maybe this wasn’t the apocalypse. Maybe this happened all the time in the secret world Beth seemed to have been inducted into. Perhaps every terrorist atrocity or disaster was actually brought about by this hidden conflict of monsters, strange technology and madmen.
‘There’s a house down there with its windows painted black and it smells bad,’ the chief madman said. Beth looked over at du Bois. He wasn’t looking at her; he was glancing over at the partially destroyed pier. Another piece of collateral damage in this hidden war. She wondered if she was on the right side. She would think about that once she got her sister back.
Beth felt something wet coming out of her ear. She touched it and her fingers came away bloody. Indescribable pain lanced through her head and her vision went red. Beth found herself in the passenger foot-well of the Range Rover, curled up as if trying to hide from the pain. It had lessened, but her head still felt white hot and was throbbing. Du Bois was looking at her with a degree of sympathy, though no surprise.
‘What’s happening?’ she managed before screaming again. There were very few people on the streets. The city had been told that it had been the target of multiple terrorist attacks. Home might not feel safe at the moment but it felt safer than outside. However, Beth’s screams, the badly damaged Range Rover and their ragged and bloodstained clothing were drawing attention. Du Bois watched people get out their phones and press one button three times. That didn’t matter. They were covered on that front. They were supposed to be special forces combating a particularly bloody group of terrorists. The local police were kicking up a storm but were holding off. Du Bois knew that helicopters filled with Special Boat Service commandos were en route to Portsmouth.
‘I dumped a lot of information into your head at once.’
‘All the gun stuff?’ Beth said and then suddenly looked out to the choppy Solent under the bright blue sky.
Why did she do that? he wondered. ‘Small-unit tactics and . . . yes, all the gun stuff. Normally the information would be assimilated in a much more careful manner, but there wasn’t time. Whatever you have inside you coped admirably but there was always going to be bleeding and pain. I’m sorry.’
‘I almost certainly wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t.’ Assuming I believe you, Beth thought. ‘I would have been trying to fight those things with a bayonet.’
‘You have a bayonet?’ du Bois asked, a little confused.
‘That’s it? That’s what we’re going on? Blacked-out windows and a bad smell?’ Beth asked, holding her head, the pain having subsided a little.
‘The smell’s really bad. And it seems to have its own naturally occurring blood-screen.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘They have access to technology like . . . It means it’s the people who took your sister, okay?’ du Bois said, sounding exasperated.
Beth looked up the Alhambra Road. It was a road of white-painted terraced houses which had seen better days, like much of the seafront in Southsea. Most of the houses were four or five storeys high.
‘What’s the plan?’ she asked.
‘I do this, and you sit here and try to cope with the pain.’ Beth stared at him. She didn’t realise her eyes were full of blood. ‘No? That’s what I thought. Has it occurred to you that if the pain distracts you, it could get us both killed? Not to mention, I don’t have anything that could even kill hybrids. The best I can hope for is to debilitate them for a while. When they heal they’ll also be very angry about having just been shot.’
‘Really?’ Beth glanced towards the gun compartment in the back of the Range Rover. ‘With all the guns you’ve got?’
‘It’s not about the guns; it’s about how quickly their internal nanites can knit them back together again. I don’t have anything that can stop that from happening, I’ve used them all, and all the guns have a different purpose,’ he said somewhat defensively.
‘Look, I won’t let you down, but if I have to I’m going in there on my own,’ Beth said. Du Bois sighed. ‘So, what’s the plan?’
‘Well, when I was having a look at the house I just happened to attach some frame charges to the bay window . . .’
Du Bois backed the Range Rover up the narrow road at speed, clipping more than one car. He then yanked the wheel and reversed the four-by-four up against the wall of the house with the blacked-out windows, not quite braking in time, letting the wall of the house stop the car.
With a thought he sent the command to the radio detonators on the frame charges. The bay windows on the front of the house exploded inwards.
Beth was out of the car running at the front door, the Benelli M4 at the ready. Du Bois was on the bonnet of the Range Rover, the H & K UMP in his hands.
Beth fired lock-breaker rounds into the door’s hinges and then the lock, looking away as she fired so she didn’t get blinded by splinters. Du Bois leaped through the hole wh
ere the black-painted panes of glass had been.
Beth checked the hall quickly but saw nothing. She raced up the stairs as she heard du Bois kicking in doors on the ground floor. Quickly she checked the rooms on the first floor. There were signs of lots of people having lived there recently. The place stank like sewage. Discarded food, most of it meat, had been left to rot, but there were no flies.
Du Bois ran by her on the landing as he headed up to check the second floor. Moments later Beth was on the stairs heading to the third as du Bois searched below.
On the third floor Beth kicked in the door to the first room she came to, a back bedroom. The same soiled mattresses, the same rotting food, the same smell of sewage. She tried not to gag as she heard du Bois on the stairs to the fourth and final floor.
Beth came out of the back bedroom and moved to the front, kicking it open. This was not quite as bad, perhaps because the blackout curtains that had covered the windows had fallen down, making it less usable.
If her senses hadn’t been quite as acute as they had become recently, Beth wasn’t sure she would have heard the burst of suppressed sub-machine gun fire from upstairs. She probably would have heard du Bois’s cry of surprise, however, and definitely the sound of glass smashing above her. She saw a shape, much larger than du Bois on his own, plummet past the window. She heard the impact and a scream. Beth rushed to the filthy window and looked out. Du Bois was lying mostly on the roof of the Range Rover. Something not unlike what she had fought in the dog stadium was crouched over him, repeatedly slashing at him with an extended spur of bone.
Beth ran out of the room, leaped over the landing banister and landed on the stairs close to the second-floor landing. She ran down the few remaining steps and charged at the landing window. The black-painted single pane exploded outwards as she hit it. It felt like she had a long time to think about what a stupid move this had been on the twenty-five-foot drop to the ground.