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by A. A. Attanasio

  Merlinus pulls back, expecting her to turn and see

  him with her second sight. She does not. Instead, she sits up and squints at the idol, no longer feeling the flow of vigor that has sluiced from it.

  To Merlinus' shock, he spies King Someone Knows

  the Truth hiding behind the statue, shielding it with his billowy, emerald-hued cape.

  Beyond the god, the ground still seeps with astral

  fumes from where he has risen. The spirit of the land, he has materialized directly out of the soil, and Morgeu and her conjure-warriors are not yet aware of him.

  But Ethiops is—instantly. His angry cry wails down

  the stairwells like a storm wind as he comes flying.

  King Someone Knows the Truth catches sight of

  Merlinus, and his taut brown lips in his bristle-whiskered reindeer face shoot him a savage smile.

  Then, the demon slithers into the crypt.

  Ethiops flings himself furiously at the elk-king.

  Merlinus sees the invisible demon as lunatic shadows

  flailing against the green light of the elk-king. The two giants grapple: Ethiops coils serpentwise about the god's broad frame, and the elk-king holds the viper jaws at arm's length with one hand while wielding a short, hooked blade with the other.

  Ethiops should know better, Merlinus thinks, backing away from the thrashing titans. No single demon can alone take down a god created by angels. Gods draw their power directly from the planet, and if destroying them were so easy, demons would never have allowed any empire to

  have blotched the Earth at all.

  Someone Knows the Truth is particularly agile,

  having dwelled so long underground, where the body-lights of the gods are more condensed, more focused than in the Great Tree. With a few deft jabs, the elk-king extricates himself from Ethiops's coils and furiously heaves him across the crypt.

  The demon's writhing tantrum amuses King

  Someone Knows the Truth. The elk-king shakes

  deliriously, dancing around the idol of death-as-a-woman, chasing the demon with laughter like screams.

  *

  Morgeu seizes a scarlet robe from where it lies at

  the base of a serpent pillar and wraps it about herself as she paces before the lethal image of Morrigan. She

  perceives none of the demonic drama before her.

  Her confusion peaks in a shrill cry for her soldiers.

  Several women in boots and camouflage tunics emerge

  from their dank warrens nearby. Their cropped hair and kohl-blackened eyes mark them as Y Mamau.

  "Bring Ygrane," she gruffly commands. "Quickly!"

  The soldiers dash down the lightless corridors, and

  Morgeu wades through coils of incense fumes to a stone stairway in the wall. Merlinus follows her up through the darkness to an iron door that shrieks open onto a brilliant autumn morning.

  Pine and heather scents whisk on the wind. It

  plummets down from the mountain ledges, where forest on forest hang above her head.

  In the dark fenny depths of the valley, the wizard

  can see them coming—the armies of the Daoine Sid. They roll through the night-held grottoes like fog, a legion of dragon-warriors come to retrieve their queen. Wearing red-beaded reptileskin and polished skull-shards for armor plates, they wield whittle ribs, honed fangs, and whetted talons of firesnakes. They slither forward like the Dragon itself, belly-crawling up the mountain flanks.

  Morgeu does not see this with her mortal eyes. She

  senses the impending attack in her blood. The Sid's

  fevered piping and fabled drum-thunder reverberate in her soul, and she shivers as if before the onslaught of a night's frost—though the morning sun angles along the misty

  mountainsides.

  Her conjure-warriors are no match for the oncoming

  dragon-soldiers. Merlinus sees the open-mouthed fright on the faces of several of them watching from the slot

  windows above.

  "Morrigan!" Morgeu cries out, her yell folding into echoes. "Morrigan! Defend your warriors!"

  Ethiops, fleeing the elk-king, swirls up from the black stairwell, his darkness breaking into forms of crinkled light that stain the air with bituminous smudges. He focuses the will of his energy on Morgeu, and a hell stink like the despair of the world, like punctured corpse bloat, pierces her and brings her hands to her throat.

  She goes down on her knees before the harsh,

  choking presence of her master, and he enters her as best a demon can squeeze himself into a mortal, without

  rupturing the blood-tangles of the fragile human brain.

  Here, he can shield himself from the Celtic god, for the elk-king will have to slay Morgeu to get at him.

  Morgeu rises with an ominous little grin on her pale

  face. Spikes of stars glitter in her mad stare. Now, with the demon's acuity in her eyes, she can see the Daoine Sid.

  They rush uphill clothed in fire snake moltings and bone-

  plates, gaudy with feathers and fur tufts stuck to their faces with tree resin. Brandishing wicked lances and serrated swords black-tipped with poison, they come scrambling out of the cellars of the valley.

  Morgeu lifts hands clawed with fury. She rises to her toe-tips with the power of the demon. Ethiops's

  vehemence, so useless against the elk-king, slashes

  lethally into the vaporous dragon-warriors. Morgeu's body jars with the violent force coursing up out of the magnetic depths of the planet and shooting out through her stiffened arms.

  The attacking hordes fall in waves before the violet

  glare stabbing from her. Like steaming breakers mangling against the rocks, the Daoine Sid collapse. Their firesnake armor flutters away as dead leaves, and their slender bodies shred to smoke, fading into the sunlight in dew sparkles and gasps of flying spume.

  Weightless as dying moths, the fallen warriors swirl

  against each other in the downdraft of cold pouring from Morgeu's wrathful body. Their loud, wounded shouts crawl away through the murk of dissolving corpses.

  Slathered in a blue film of elf-gore, the valiant Sid minions keep coming, lances tilted against the murderous wind.

  Morgeu flaps with the outpouring of demon-cold like

  a rag thing. Eyes rolled up, she no longer witnesses the killing she dispenses, only feels it ascending her vibrating bones and heaving out of her. And she hears it echoing back, leaping against the torrent of her slaying ecstasy, glittering into the screams and gibbered cries of those who dare to defy the Mother of Death.

  *

  Ygrane hears the suffering of the Sid warriors

  burning in the morning air and pulls herself upright before the slot window of her cell. Far below, among the citrons, oranges, and greens of the woods, her rescuers die in great numbers. She can see, in the cutwork shadows of the forest, their frail bodies ripped apart like sun-lanced exhumations of night.

  Rays of violet energy shoot from the base of the

  tower where she is imprisoned. By fitting her face into the window slot, she can just make out a scarlet-robed figure directly below.

  Morgeu!

  Stabs of black light ray in purpled streaks from her

  writhing body and cut into the troops rushing uphill, withering them to wind-borne lace. At the sight of this,

  Ygrane mashes against the stone wall and her face smears wild-eyed within the restraint of the slim window.

  She cries out for the young woman to stop, and her

  voice flails uselessly into the far-flung mountain spaces.

  A bell jar of overshadowing force warps the air

  around Morgeu, and by that Ygrane knows that her

  daughter is possessed. The queen pulls back and sticks her arm out the window, palm open, in an attempt to signal her dragon-soldiers to withdraw. She fears for them.

  Before she can make herself seen, the bulky cell

  door s
lams open, and two wolf-masked Y Mamau rush in.

  Ygrane shouts a curse that kicks the soldiers' knees

  out from under them. Two more advance, and she winces again, releasing another invisible blow that jerks them off their feet.

  Those two attacks exhaust Ygrane, and when the

  next two wolf-soldiers charge at her, she can only swing her fists weakly. They seize her arms and drag her twisting body from the chamber, along the corridor, and down

  winding stone steps, bruising her shins. They hurry, hurting her arms, banging her legs on the stairs, eager to get her below before she regains the violent power of her curses.

  In the ceremonial crypt, they fling the queen to the

  ground at the feet of Morrigan's monstrous statue and hurry out, crashing doors behind them.

  King Someone Knows the Truth has gone. Merlinus

  whirls among the lightless enclaves searching for him and finally has to depart the crypt, sliding through the heaped stone to the outside.

  There, he glimpses the god, a green flash in the

  forest under the scarlet wing of morning, calling his damaged troops back to regroup them for a flank attack.

  When Merlinus returns to the crypt, he finds Ygrane

  prostrate before the idol of the demon-goddess. He thinks she is praying to the Fang Mother, until he touches her and finds her empty.

  Dead!

  Fright jerks at him, and he desperately begins

  shouting a chant to revive her, though he doubts so

  powerful a spell can work without his physical body to focus the summoned vitality. Mind whirling with dire

  suppositions, he stops in mid-cry.

  He senses a slim thread of her glistening like a snail track in the shadowy air of the crypt.

  The wizard's brails braid around the tenuous splice

  of her life, and his fright evaporates. Ygrane has done the same as he: She has left her body.

  Unlike himself, however, she has no one to watch

  over her physical form. Within the thrumming cord that

  connects her to her physical form, he hears her thoughts and vibrates with her feelings.

  The unicorn fills her mind. She has taken the terrible risk of leaving her body unoccupied here, in the lair of her enemies, to search for her beast.

  The mental image of the unicorn's long, bony face

  vanishes, displaced by an astonishing sight that has seized her attention. Merlinus shares what she sees.

  In the brightness of the upper air, a pure ruby

  appears. Like a meteor, it burns across the sky, dropping into the solar glare that fills the cup of the eastern mountains. Printed on the sun in a sharp, saurian shadow.

  It swells nearer—a tremendous dragon-shape—Uther's

  dragon...

  Drapes of dark brown skin peel from Wray Vitki's

  sides like fungoid gills on a tree, and ancient growths embroider the sinuous length of his neck, again like

  patches of fungus and lichen. Soaring out of the sun's radiance, the dragon-magus looks aged. Knobs barnacle his flanks, and flakes like dull metal curl from his talons.

  His flanged jaws trail whiskers like rags of ocean weeds.

  Only his flame-cored eyes, glowing in their sullen caves, look animated. And his wings—rainbow fire—whirl like

  polar lights.

  The dragon-magus sets down in a gloomy dell,

  arriving like a renegade chunk of the daybreak sky. That is as close as he can land without toppling the rock pile. A moment later, he is gone. Carrying Uther up from the

  Otherworld exhausted the power that Merlinus has given the aged dragon-magus. If Wray Vitki had lingered, he would have died, and so his abominable darkness and

  iridescence spiral away into the fuming clouds of dawn.

  Uther stalks out of the dell, and behind him come

  the armies of the Daoine Sid, led by their towering

  reindeer-faced god.

  At the sight of them, Ethiops flees into the crude fort, knowing he cannot stand down the elk-king and his

  reinforcements. Morgeu slumps vacantly with his

  departure, deflated to a mere woman. Weakened, she

  sags to the ground and briefly glares at the lone man in front of the otherwise-invisible attack. By his black leather armor and the sable hair in his eyes, she recognizes him.

  "Uther!" she screams. "To hellfire with you!"

  She forces herself to her feet and hurries into the

  tower, clanging the iron door shut behind her and ramming the rusty bolt into its latch. "Morrigan!" she bawls, plunging down the stairs.

  In the crypt, she discovers her mother lying

  facedown before the death-dancing idol, and she pauses,

  not sure what she is seeing. "Mother?" she cries. "What are you doing?"

  When Ygrane does not respond immediately,

  Morgeu kneels alongside, her perplexed face close to her mother's. She puts her fingers to the prostrate woman's throat and detects the faint knock of arterial blood. The realization of her mother's utter vulnerability seizes a sharp laugh. "What have you done?" she whispers in Ygrane's ear.

  Merlinus slashes through Morgeu, vainly attempting

  to distract her with his empty presence.

  With an abruptness that makes him think he has

  affected her, Morgeu stands erect. She looks all round, searching for the obsidian blade that is used for ceremonial sacrifices. Intently, she marches the perimeter of the crypt, searching among bone-heaps and tallow-draped skulls of lesser altars.

  From above, the squeal of ripping metal declares

  her enemies have broken through. A door opens behind a serpent column, and a half dozen moonbitch-warriors pile in, swords drawn. "Princess!" the first across the threshold gasps through her mask. "The Sid have reached the tower!"

  "Where is Morrigan?" another asks.

  Morgeu points to the dark stairwell that climbs to the outside. "Four of you up that way. Kill Uther!" She grabs the remaining two by their sword arms. "We must find the knife of sacrifices. Where is it?"

  "There is no time," the gruff voice from a dog mask replies. "No time, Princess! The Sid are in the tower. They kill with cold fire!"

  "We must flee," the second speaks sharply. "If not, Morrigan will lose all her worshipers this day."

  "No!" Morgeu yells. "Morrigan promised. I am to be queen of our people."

  "Then we must flee, princess—at once!"

  Under the flaring torch shadows of the corridor,

  Morgeu hesitates. "Stop! Take Ygrane. Morrigan shall have her sacrifice."

  "No time—look!" The soldier points her sword down the hallway to where purple fumes seethe. "Run! Hurry!"

  Merlinus reads the fumes for what they are, a squad

  of dragon-warriors surging down the corridor, poison-tipped lances leveled. The dog-faced warrior stands her ground to block them. She is only human, an oaf compared to the nimble sprites. Their lances dart under her swinging blade and pierce her thighs and abdomen.

  True horror sparking in every nerve, Morgeu spins

  about to flee. Fear jams her legs. Her last remaining guard

  grabs her by elbow and shoulder and heaves her forward.

  Merlinus watches them recede into the citadel, Morgeu's jarred gaze peering back with abject fright.

  *

  The wizard circles back to find his king. Uther

  Pendragon stands on the threshold of the doorway whose iron door the elk-king has ripped off its hinges. Dragon-warriors scurry ahead into the stairwell to dispatch the remaining Y Mamau posted below. Satisfied that Uther is safe, Merlinus passes through a blind interval of solid rock and earth, back to the crypt to watch over Ygrane's body.

  Hovering in the glow of the skull-lanterns, he

  pauses. Ygrane has already returned to her body She sits up, her face pale as a winter lake, eyes staring hard at nothing.

  With trepidatio
n, he touches her—and inside she is

  not alone. Ethiops hunkers within her brain, very small, coiled more tightly than Merlinus thought a demon could contract.

  The wizard listens for what Ygrane feels, afraid for

  her. Glossy black, Ethiops the eel entwines the

  consciousness of the queen. "You took a bold risk when you left your body," the demon says in his most sinuous voice, "—and you lost. Now, you are a hostage in your own brain. Do you understand?"

  Ygrane stares blankly, ignoring the voice in her

  head, willing herself not to notice the viper's face crowding her mind. The red muscles inside its obscene smile drool for her. She focuses on the unicorn again, wanting to see the spiral stairway of jade climbing out of the blackness of its vertical pupils.

  "I am inside you, Ygrane," Ethiops coos. "Do you know what that means? I can touch you."

  A twinge of pain breaks the ice of her face to a hurt frown.

  "Ethiops—get out!" Merlinus shouts. The demon cannot hear him. No one can hear his astral voice.

  The pain stops, and an unmusical, lewd pleasure

  torques through Ygrane's body.

  "Do you like that?" the demon whispers. "Do you want more?"

  The unicorn is no good, Merlinus feels her realize.

  This is too horrible even for the unicorn to save me from.

  "If you do exactly as I say," Ethiops breathes inside her, "I will let you live. You will not fight me. You will go where I tell you to go, do what I say to do, and I will leave you your life."

  Ygrane turns her attention away from the moment's brink. She peeks down into the darkest part of herself for the stranger she has seen in the depths of her despair.

  Where is she— Uther's friend? Miriam—

  "Silence," Ethiops demands. "You will keep silent in my presence."

  Miriam—Ygrane calls again—and she sees again in her mind the blue-veiled woman. Miriam appears with her head bowed, as if praying. She looks up, lids closed, lips trembling with words entrusted to a deeper hearing. And then, her large eyes open like the sun.

  Merlinus pulls away from the wincing white heat and

  hears Ethiops's pitiful wail. Against the blinding flash, the wizard glimpses his eelish shape squirm past and thrash away from Ygrane. In an instant, the horror is canceled.

  The demon has gone. Ygrane blinks, touches her temples with trembling fingers. Her mind is empty—whole again.