Even if she could put together a group of newcomers with the right weapons, and Anharad allowed them to hunt the Lochlannach, and she could get warriors of various tribes to cooperate long enough, the Lochlannach were staying close to the fort and the cave. She did wonder where their food was coming from. Anharad and a number of the ranking warriors thought they were waiting for something. Tangwen was of the opinion that Crom Dhubh just didn’t care about the warband camped outside his lair, and why should he when his sword destroyed utterly with a touch?
The Dark Man’s sword was just one of the problems facing them. Assuming the warband didn’t destroy itself, and some were already leaving, then they had a number of things to contend with, apart from the magic of the Lochlannach and Crom Dhubh. Where did they attack? The Dark Man had to be their target and this ended when Crom Dhubh and Bress died, however Britha might feel about the Lochlannach’s second-in-command. If they attacked the cave mouth, then the Lochlannach from the fort would charge down and hit them in the back. The fort was a nightmare to attack, cliffs on two sides, steep approaches on the other two and very heavily fortified. Their best bet was to besiege the fort, try and tempt the Lochlannach out and take a second force against the cave mouth. Which of course meant splitting the warband, and inside the caverns, inside Annwn, the Lochlannach had all the advantages.
The giants. Fachtna had slain one in the grips of the most powerful riasterthae frenzy she had ever seen. Though admittedly all the other frenzies she had seen had just looked like warriors who were either really angry, really drunk, or had eaten a lot of the mushrooms that grew on cow dung. She did not think that any among them had the power that Fachtna had, as his magics had come from the Otherworld. She smiled at the memory of them lying together. She had lain with a prince of the fair folk. Admittedly it had been in a muddy ditch.
Then she remembered that he was dead. Twice killed by Bress, the second time with the help of Britha. None of which helped her come up with a way to deal with the giants.
This was one of the reasons she was sitting up on the south ridge, close to a wide ravine, thinking of the idiocy of abandoning your warband to travel to the far west at a time such as this. The other reason was the ‘humiliation’ of her defeat. She didn’t want to be in the camp because it meant putting up with further insults or fighting.
It had stopped snowing. The whiteness of the landscape made it look stark and empty, but still beautiful. Although the presence of Oeth in the Underworld, beneath the earth, made her feel like the land was sick.
She watched a miserable Germelqart struggle through the deep snow towards her. She was also aware of Selbach the Timid trying to sneak through the snow towards her on her right.
Germelqart was spending most of his time in the shelter they had made. He was well treated by those who had fought against Andraste’s Brood, but for many of the others he was too much the foreign magician, and Father had taught her that people feared what they didn’t understand. She had been forced to intervene on more than one occasion, and his biting skull club had torn the face off a spear-carrier who had tried to steal the chalice. Tangwen couldn’t prove it but she was pretty sure that Ysgawyn had something to do with the attempted theft.
Once she had come back early to the shelter they shared, to ask him if the chalice could help them deal with their enemies, perhaps using the same magics that had destroyed Andraste’s Brood. She had found the Carthaginian on his knees holding up a brass bottle stoppered with melted lead. He had been talking to it. Germelqart had explained that he was praying to Dagon, the navigator’s odd fish god. Tangwen had told him that he was very far from the sea. She never liked seeing anyone kneel before anything.
When she had asked about the magics of the chalice, Germelqart had warned her against asking too much of it. The god inside it had been prepared to undo the excesses of another god, Andraste, but too much would attract the powers of others like it, and make more problems. She had half believed him but had thought there was more to it than he was saying. He definitely seemed frightened of something. She did not wish to push the matter, however. Other than Father, her tribe’s own, small god, she was of the opinion that the gods whose work she had witnessed were nothing more than a curse on this island. She would be satisfied if this Ninegal, whom Germelqart said lived in the chalice – though Britha had given him another name – a god of the forge by all accounts, could provide them with weapons that weren’t too ruinous when the time came. They had enough problems with Bladud and Ysgawyn’s visions of all-powerful warriors ruling Ynys Prydain for all time through the gifts the chalice gave.
She thought casually about putting an arrow close to where Selbach was trying to creep up on her but she couldn’t be sure if she would have noticed him before she had drunk of Britha’s blood. Besides, it struck her as the sort of thing the more obnoxious of the warriors down in camp would do. The ones who wished to capitalise on Madawg’s triumph over her. Instead she waited until he revealed himself and showed little surprise, though she had to admit he was good. She suspected his skill in hiding came from the terror of getting caught. She noticed he carried no weapons. Though he had limed himself the colour of the snow and was wearing the similarly limed bearskin again.
He opened his mouth to ask her why she had summoned him. She held up her hand for quiet. She only wanted to have to explain this once. Germelqart had nearly reached them. She saw he had the bag with the chalice in it as she had asked.
‘I mislike this,’ the Carthaginian told her in his own language. Selbach was looking between them. Tangwen didn’t like how she suddenly knew all these tongues; she’d had to work hard for all her other skills, and felt that people should have to work hard for what they had, otherwise they didn’t value it. ‘What if we are killed and the Lochlannach capture it?’
‘Speak in the language of the Pecht,’ Tangwen said in Pecht herself. Germelqart glanced at the Cait scout, who smiled at him uneasily.
‘How do we know we can trust him?’ Germelqart continued in the language of Carthage.
‘We don’t know if we can trust him,’ Tangwen answered in Selbach’s language. ‘But I am going to behave as though I can because I’m tiring of all the mistrust among our own people in the face of that.’ She pointed towards where she knew the cave mouth was.
Germelqart looked towards it uneasily. After the last time they had travelled to Oeth Tangwen and the others had questioned him on what he had known about Crom Dhubh, asked why the Carthaginian had called the Dark Man Sotik? Whatever Crom Dhubh had done when he stuck the tendrils from the stump of his finger into the navigator’s head had removed all knowledge of the Dark Man. As much as she liked the navigator, she could not claim to know him well. He had seemed changed since then, however. Always one to keep his own counsel, he was now nearly silent, as though he had turned away from people for the company of his god in the brass bottle.
‘I cannot be trusted,’ Selbach said. ‘I am a coward.’ He seemed ashamed of himself.
‘I need a coward today,’ Tangwen said. Germelqart laughed. She didn’t think he’d seen him do so since Kush had died.
‘Then you are twice blessed,’ Germelqart said in the language of the Pecht. ‘What would you have of us?’
‘Where did the giants go?’ Tangwen asked. ‘Selbach, you have hidden close to the fort. Even lying down you would have seen them?’ Selbach nodded. She turned to Germelqart. ‘And we have seen the path to Oeth through the Underworld. If the giants crawled they might get into the first cave, but they could not have got all the way through.’
‘Are they not things of the earth, though?’ Selbach asked. ‘Could they not sink into it, travel through it?’ He may have been cowardly but Tangwen was starting to think that he wasn’t stupid.
Germelqart looked thoughtful. ‘I do not think so. But they may just have gone elsewhere, bigger caves, woods, a body of water we have not found.’
‘Or there could be another way into Oeth?’ Tangwen said. ‘We went
the way we went the last time because Britha knew it. This whole land is riddled with caves. It would be strange if there wasn’t another way to get there.’
‘I’m not going to the Underworld!’ Selbach cried.
‘Keep your voice down,’ Tangwen snapped.
‘You wish to go searching caves?’ Germelqart asked sceptically.
‘I wish to track the giants,’ Tangwen said.
‘I know little about tracking, but they passed many days ago and there has been much snow since,’ Germelqart said.
‘But they were heavy, heavier than two aurochs,’ Selbach said. Tangwen nodded. ‘And when they killed Eurneid …’ He was trying to suppress a smile. Tangwen wondered if the horrible old dryw had made everyone miserable.
‘They made a deep hole,’ Tangwen supplied. She pointed down into the ravine.
‘You found tracks?’ Germelqart asked. Tangwen nodded. ‘But why am I here? I’m no scout.’
‘It doesn’t matter how quiet and well-hidden Selbach and I are because of Crom’s wards,’ Tangwen told them. Selbach spat and made the sign against evil. She remembered the feel of walking through spider webs when they had first gone to Oeth. From that moment on Crom had known of their presence. ‘I understand that the gods will not fight our wars for us, that we need to prove our strength to them for their aid, but we face gods and their magics.’ Tangwen pointed at the leather bag with the chalice in it. ‘Can this Ninegal help us hide from Crom’s wards?’
Germelqart looked less than happy.
He ran. Bress had finally climbed out of the caverns and into wooded foothills. He ran through the snow-covered woods. It hadn’t taken long to find the wasteland that the spawn of Andraste had left behind them. The snow hadn’t reached that far south yet. The cold and the damp had packed down a lot of the grey dust. It was like running across wet silt, though his footfalls still sent up little clouds. He had seen no one, no animals either.
Poking through the unnatural grey mud were the first signs of regrowth. He knew that the Red Chalice had left the land fecund with life beneath the dust. The winds would blow it away eventually and come spring, when the sun shone and the rains fell, plants would grow again, the animals would start to return, and then, finally, so would the people. Until then it was a near featureless wasteland broken only by grey hills and occasional standing stones. The stones had been left untouched. They were waymarkers of ancient tech buried far beneath the earth.
He ran for days, taking only the occasional break to sleep and eat. He didn’t like to think about where the food came from. It was as tasteless as the land was featureless. It just provided the sustenance he needed to keep going. He tried not to think too much about the boned corpses lying in the water around Oeth.
He came down to the summit of the hill and looked down at the coast. The three islands. Two of them separated from the coast by only thin strips of water, the other one by a much larger channel. Now all three of them were barren, windblown wastelands of grey mulch, though here and there some of the hardier plants were trying to grow through.
Without any remaining point of reference it might have been difficult to work out where the wicker man had stood in the water before it had fallen apart, except there was a ship close to, or over, the spot. It looked like a galley from the Sea of the Greeks far to the south. Except this one was made of brass. He glanced at the brass scorpion clinging to his metal-clad shoulder. Then he started running again.
Bress had slithered into the water among the dust-covered marshes between the two islands closest to shore. He had waited until the tide was going out and let it sweep him towards the ship. Much closer he could see the living metalwork of the vessel was very similar to that of the scorpion, still with him on his shoulder.
The ship’s crew were all bundled up against the cold, but what little skin was on display was either swarthy, or various shades of brown, suggesting that they all came from the lands far to the south across the sea. They were a small crew for a vessel that size. Standing towards the rear of the galley, and not wearing furs like the rest of the crew, was a large, powerful looking, brown-skinned man. He wore a light-coloured robe split open at the front revealing a sizeable gut. Instead of hair he had bands of polished copper embedded into the skin on his head. From where Bress floated in the water, the man’s eyes didn’t look right either.
The water was much clearer than he remembered. He assumed that the seed of the Muileartach must have consumed, or transformed, any life that had been in the water as well. This made his job more difficult. After all, this ship must have been there for a reason.
As the man slowly turned around, surveying his surroundings, Bress let the water slip over his head as he sank down. He could not breathe the water like some of the children of the Muileartach, but he was confident that he could hold his breath long enough, though it could take several trips to locate what he sought.
Finding his master’s prize was easier than he had expected, but not for a good reason. The spear that Fachtna had used to slay the Naga dragon was ancient and powerful. It had killed the dragon, and the serpents melded with it in a rage. Crom had sent Bress to see if he could salvage something. The sailors in the brass ship seemed to want to finish Fachtna’s job.
The dragon lay in the silt on the seabed, scaled, sleek, reptilian, obviously dead, and half buried. On its back, legs and pincers digging into the dragon’s body, was another of the scorpions. Except this one was even larger than the one now clutched to his shoulder had ever been, even after it had consumed the rock. The arachnid’s mouth consumed the Naga dragon’s flesh. The sting and half of its tail was embedded deep into the dragon, and pulsed as if it was feeding something into the corpse. As Bress watched, the scorpion grew. The hindquarters of the dragon were rotting away in front of his eyes. Bress guessed that the scorpion was using the carrion it ate to create the poison it was feeding the dragon’s body through its sting, as well as increasing its own bulk. It was a monstrous but efficient parasite destroying its host.
Bress checked all around him in the clear water but he couldn’t see anything else. There was no way to approach the dragon without the scorpion parasite seeing. If it was a servant of those on the ship, as seemed likely, then it had just been told to do the one thing and didn’t care about anything else. If it did react to him then he wasn’t sure what he would do.
He looked up as he dived deeper and saw the bottom of the brass galley distorted by the water, but again there was no sign of him having been seen, or even of them looking out for anyone else. He felt his own much smaller scorpion crawling around his armour, seeking to be out of sight of the monstrous scorpion and the galley.
With a little difficulty he drew his sword, and with a thought the weapon started to change shape. The hilt extended, covering half of the blade, then thinned as it turned into the shaft of a spear, a much more practical weapon in the water. With another thought a barb grew from the shaft and pierced his skin, sucking in a little of his blood. If he was forced to fight the thing then he would try the same blood magic he had used on the smaller one.
Bress swam past multifaceted eyes of black glass as he made towards the head of the dragon. The scorpion gave no indication of having noticed him, as its mandibles tore away and fed the reptilian meat into its maw. Bress reached the head and used the spearhead to open the skin of his palm but it did not bleed. He put his palm against the dragon’s head, felt the smooth, hard, cold feel of the scales against his skin. Then, with a thought, he used the blood magic that Crom Dhubh had taught him. Naga blood magic. There was very little fear in Bress, yet as the dead flesh of the dragon opened against his skin, pulling his hand into the corpse, there was a moment when he tried to pull away – but it had him, and the moment of fear stretched out into the closest he had been to panic in a long time …
The flesh parted like a corpse giving birth. Bress fell through dead flesh and bone and into the dragon’s skull. He was surrounded by rotting meat, felt it pushing again
st him, like he had been swallowed. He flailed, his hand touching one of the dead serpents still attached to the throne of bone it had grown into to meld with the dragon.
He could hear the gobbling, tearing noise of the scorpion. He looked down the dragon’s gullet. Scythe-like brass blades tore through flesh, letting surprisingly little seawater in. He saw diseased flesh spreading through the corpse towards him. He was sure he couldn’t have it come into contact with him. He felt around, trying to find the sac that held the dragon’s brain, cursing Crom Dhubh in his mind and hoping the Dark Man could hear it. He touched what he thought was what he was looking for. More of the blood magic that he had been taught. He felt the sac rip and his long fingers wrapped around something that felt partly like shaped stone, as if it had been worked, and partly like flesh. Bress tore the stone/flesh thing out of the momentarily revived pulsing organ. The cavity he was in was starting to fill with seawater and other fluids. He jerked his hand away from where the rotting corruption had grown close to him. He tried to wriggle around, trying to concentrate, to suppress the fear, but this was too close to being swallowed, or unborn. He smeared his bloody palm on un-diseased dead flesh again and the contraction yanked him into the flesh.
Snow had covered the tracks but after they had found the first few and then worked out the enormous length of the giants’ strides, tracking them became easier, though their efforts would be difficult to hide from any who chose to look themselves.
They had climbed down and followed the ravine. Then they climbed over the hills of the southern ridge, and curved round west, running parallel with the valley, always climbing.
The cave was in a narrow gulley, the entrance obscured by trees, though a few of those had been pushed aside and then put back in their normal position recently. The giants would have had to crawl to get into this cave, but not far into it there was a large crevice in the rock.
The Beauty of Destruction Page 24