by Adam Golden
* * *
The little cavern was cramped, humid and thick with smoke from the brazier that stood atop the room’s only furniture, a heavily scarred work table set in the room’s exact center. The stone walls were carved with hundreds of shallow niches that lined them floor to ceiling like shelves and were packed with all manner of things both mundane and alien. Manuscripts, tablets and scrolls in their thousands were packed in among a dizzying assortment of knickknacks, baubles and strange devices. Instruments and tools were jammed beside bolts of fine silk, snarls of rough sack cloth, hunks of raw crystal and core drillings of stratified rock, all apparently placed without rhyme or reason.
The skulls of a hundred species dotted those alcoves or were suspended from the ceiling by braided thongs of pale leather. Most were animal, some were human, and a few twisted, deformed examples could have been either, or both. Set on the work table beside the smoking brazier was an example of the deformed, alien kind. Seemingly neither man nor beast. It was rough featured, angular, and dominated by a great snout and jaws lined with sharp teeth. Decidedly lupine in shape, yet no wolf could ever have supported a skull so large. It was bigger and heavier than even the largest man’s skull, and besides the pair of great black ram’s horns that curled backward from the twin sockets in its brow never belonged to any wolf.
Despite years of study she knew no more now about the creature who’d owned this skull than what she’d been told when it was given to her. It was a thing of this place, and they were no more. She’d been led to believe that at one time the place she’d named Duinn had been teeming with such creatures, and that the entire species, every trace of them, had been wiped from existence save for this one single piece. It was a fascinating puzzle, but not her purpose this night.
The petite, delicate seeming woman before the work table reached out a dainty pale hand and traced a finger along one of the horns. This one ended in a jagged break inches short of its twin’s length. Another mystery, a story she’d never hear. It was fascinating and infuriating. The entire surface of the skull was intricately carved with a cloud of glyphs and symbols, both occult and alchemical, most of these were no mystery to her, though how they combined to do what this device did she still wasn’t sure, after nearly two centuries of study. Too many unanswered questions, too many puzzles. They wriggled about under her skin like an infestation. The need to know burned in her, it always had. That curiosity, that willingness to reach beyond boundaries others feared had raised her high, granted her power and respect beyond what most could imagine, made her a force to rival any other on earth.
‘And saw you banished to this place . . .’ a traitorous little whisper in the back of her mind chimed up.
That wasn’t true of course, it was cowardice and treason that had precipitated her fall. The short-sightedness of fools and the envy of weaklings had seen her banished. But none, neither enemies nor adherents, had ever truly understood. None grasped her drive or dreamed of the power that backed her. Soon now they would . . . soon.
“Maeve.” The word boomed inside her mind, rattling her entire being and bringing her to rigid attention. “Your mind wanders over trivialities. You are not still.” The master had no use for words, no truck with language, yet His meaning could never be mistaken. A wave of impressions, images, sounds, and a host of sensation for which she had no name scraped across Maeve’s consciousness like burs on raw flesh. The sorceress shook and shuddered with a violent series of seizures and collapsed onto the scarred surface of her work table. She worked her jaw feebly, trying to push out the sounds to make an apology, but only a gasping series of grunts issued.
She looked up pleadingly into the gaping sockets of the skull before her, and shivered again. The scrawl of glyphs and sigils strewn across the surface of the skull writhed and twisted wildly. Moving across its surface, changing places, and remaking themselves endlessly.
“You have forgotten your lessons. Only in stillness can you see. Only by seeing can you understand.”
Each concept burned through her like molten gold poured down her throat. It penetrated her like a lover, caressed her skin with summer breezes and flayed her innards with a thousand flensing knives. She shuddered, twisted, and bucked in an ecstatic mania. Hands locked into impotent fists drummed on the tabletop, and toes curled inside silk slippers scraped at the stone floor in futile attempts at escape. Her body tried over and over to swallow her tongue so that it might bring the endless barrage of sensation to a halt, but she could not. Through it all the monstrous horned skull leered at her, boring deep with empty, vigilant eyes. The witch pushed her senses past the turmoil, through it. She stretched herself to encompass the maelstrom, to surround and smother it with her will. She pulled it inside, letting the pandemonium blend with the deepest core of herself, and a long trembling breath leaked out of her as she lay prone on the table, drenched in cold sweat and staring into the writhing, twisting face of the demon skull.
“Remember your lessons, sorceress. Remember your purpose,” the master’s voice demanded. “Desire is nothing. Power is nothing. Fear is nothing. In stillness you free yourself of the shackles of structure and look on the unruly edges of existence. You must invest yourself utterly in turmoil. Find comfort in disarray. This is the true path.”
“I . . . I hear Master . . .” The words came in a euphoric drunken slur.
The crawling of the skull’s decortications slowed, the chaotic twisting and twining becoming more organized and patterned. “The time comes . . .” the master’s flood of impression communicated, though more weakly as his hold on this plain ebbed. “. . . do not falter . . .” A dull thud sounded as the heavy skull struck the tabletop, and Maeve jumped, bouncing her breast bone off of the thick wooden surface painfully.
A speculative whine sounded from the mouth of the study cave as the sorceress squared her clothing and quickly passed her fingers through her dishevelled hair. “You press the bounds,” she said to the darkness. “Have I let things grow too slack?”
“Sure an’ I know who that holds the leash well enough, milady,” Ferdoragh said with an elaborate flourish and bow as he stepped out of the darkness. The rakish-looking Fear Dorcha propped himself on the edge of the worktable and gave his mistress his customary appraising look. Despite herself, Maeve felt the momentary flutter she always did at that look. It was a feeling she always stomped down immediately, or nearly always . . . and when she didn’t choose to stomp it? What of it? Why should a mistress not indulge herself? Was she not a Queen?
“Report,” she snapped.
The shadow man grinned at her discomfiture. Perhaps he did need a reminder of the proprieties after all. “Tis all comin’ about as ye said it would, my queen,” the darkened figure said. “Yon pitiable wretch begins t’recall . . . with a nudge or two, to be sure.”
“Very good, the time is nearly upon us, Ferdoragh,” Maeve said, unnecessarily repeating what her lieutenant knew well. It was a sign of the nerves that even the stillness couldn’t banish. She resolved to redouble her efforts. “All of the pieces must be in place before the Blooming.”
“My queen, on my life an’ love I swear t’ye that all will be as you require,” Ferdoragh said, his voice taking on a low husky tone as he stepped closer.
Maeve turned away quickly. He would come to her when she demanded, and only then. She could not allow it, not now. Not when her stillness teetered so. “My queen? What ye plot . . .” the shadow-man asked tentatively. “Is’t . . . that is . . . it’s too dangerous, Maeve.”
The sorceress whirled about in a flash of anger, her rigid pale palm lanced out and a loud crack echoed through the cave as it landed hard on Ferdoragh’s dusky cheek. “You forget yourself!” the once mighty queen of the fallen Unsaelig fae roared. “How dare you question . . .” but as quickly as it came, the anger bled away at the sting and hurt in the face of her most loyal retainer, the only one who’d remained. The only one who’d stayed loyal. “Ferdoragh . . . what has begun must be seen to completion.
All that we have endured, all that has been lost, it was all toward this end. A thousand years and more, a universe made and remade, races born and died, a war that near destroyed us all, and all in preparation for these next few days. Do not ask me to shy away now. Do not weaken now. Remember your promise. Hold to your duty. Please.”
The shadow man’s face softened and his eyes clouded, and the queen knew that in that moment he was seeing the girl who was. Before the sorceress, before the queen and before the shadows rose up to claim them both. Once there had been a boy and a girl. She shook herself and turned away again.
“Will you see to it?” she asked.
“Aye lass, that I will. When have I done other?”
She felt the change in the air as his form shifted to shadow and the soft padding of insubstantial feet felt on stone as he retreated. A long sighing breath leaked out of her and she deflated, leaning against the table. Maeve looked back over her shoulder at the inanimate skull looking up at her and shivered. What was love, or fear or even death, when put up beside the risks of forgetting the oaths she’d sworn? Still, Maeve hugged herself close and let herself remember the before for just a moment. Just a boy and a girl.
Chapter 8
“. . . how can he be?”
“. . . do not understand it . . .”
“. . . the Breach . . . ?”
“One moment there was nothing and then . . .”
“Are we sure it is . . . ?”
The confusion of words and voices batted Bwgan about like competing tides, pushing and pulling him in directions he couldn’t control and had no interest in going. There was so much light! Oppressive, choking light held him, pressing him flat. He was blind, as a curtain of luminous white blanketed everything. So much light and noise, he wanted to bury his head, to hide, but he couldn’t move so much as a finger or a toe. Something jabbed him hard in the ribs and he tried to shy back. Again, his body refused to do as commanded.
“. . . careful, it might be . . .”
“If it’s not dead now it soon will be.” This voice was clear and strong, and distressingly close. He tried to wriggle, to shift, anything to move himself away from whatever threat this was. That it was a threat was the only certainty he had. Others were always a threat. Always.
“Gather what you can, we move for the Thinning immediately. They’ll want a report, and they’ll want to see that as quickly as we can get it there. Daire, you be sure you keep your Wardings well knotted now and as we Transit. The trip will probably kill it anyway, but I’ll not have some Spriggan filth inside the walls unless it’s leashed good and tight. You hear? All of you, keep your eyes open and your wits about you.”
He was moving, floating. He shuddered inside his light cocoon. It was like being clutched in a giant fist; he couldn’t feel it, but he couldn’t escape it either. He was a prisoner. Again. Still? Always. He always had been. Friendship, justice, freedom, they were illusions. A flash of Ferdoragh lunging for his throat with a wild scream on his lips replayed itself before his eyes. A trick then, some vicious game to make him deliver himself into whatever fresh Hell awaited him.
‘Was any of it real?’ he wondered. ‘Are they even really dead?’ Or were they laughing at him even now, waiting to peel his flesh or loose the hounds on him? Maybe not, neither of those would take all of this effort. Perhaps Maeve had dreamed up some new atrocity, some monstrous new method to feed her better. It was fear she wanted. That’s what the long nights of whispered conversations with Ferdoragh had led him to believe. The Shadow Man hadn’t said anything directly, but there were just enough oblique hints and veiled suggestions to make Bwgan believe he was right. Somehow Maeve drew strength from the torments she visited on him, from his dread of them. He no longer sensed that wriggling, gnawing worm of horror that had been his constant companion on Duinn. He hadn’t felt it since that night in the study. Since the blood and the voice. That voice . . .
Bwgan shook himself and set his focus firmly in mind. No matter what they had in store he wouldn’t run or hide. He wouldn’t help them debase himself or play their games any longer. Oh, he was sure they’d make him scream, make him wail, but fear? That was beyond them now. He was done with that.
Ferdoragh had called him Jogah, he’d said that Jogah was a warrior, a proud protector, a Guardian. Ferdoragh was a liar and a traitor. He wasn’t a warrior or some noble guardian, but he could at least aspire to some pride.
‘And some vengeance,’ a savage part of his mind snarled.
The forward movement stopped and Bwgan hung crammed inside his egg of luminous oblivion.
“Prepare yourselves,” came the voice of the leader of those that held him.
He was coming to hate that voice, but he heeded it. He steeled himself. Whatever came next, he would meet it without fear.
* * *
There were tears in the old woman’s eyes. The rest of them gaped, glared, smiled, or scowled. Not the old woman. She just looked, her alien violet eyes boring into him, slicing through layers that even Maeve’s knives never reached. He felt as if she saw every particle of him, and it made him want to squirm, to slink away and hide. The mad chittering of whispers ceased at the barest flick of a finger from the old one.
“Where have you been, boy?” The words were softly said, and her impassive mask cracked just enough for a whisper of a soft, kindly smile to leak through. “What has been done to you?”
A rush of air blasted out of Bwgan’s lungs and he deflated like a pricked bladder, folding to his knees on the pristine white marble of the chamber he’d been dragged to.
‘She knows me.’
The thought thrilled and terrified him at the same time. Ferdoragh hadn’t lied, not about everything. He really had a life before Duinn, before Maeve. This woman knew him, maybe they all did? Had he lived in this place? Had he made his home in one of those impossibly tall silver spires he could see beyond the chamber’s great teardrop-shaped windows? Had he been like these brilliant luminescent creatures gathered about him now? He clawed for any hint of memory, any touch of the familiar, but there was nothing there. He felt some kind of kinship with the old woman, and there was a pulling, a kind of strain in the back of his head that had been growing since he’d tumbled out of Duinn to . . . wherever this was, but there was nothing there to explain either sensation.
“Jogah.” The word hung, echoing like the blare of a gong in the silent chamber. Bwgan’s body thrummed with sudden tension. His eyes swung back to the old woman, pleading.
‘Not that name. Not him.’
Something thin and desperate inside him quivered dangerously. “No.” The word came out in a breathy hiss, as though forced out while lifting some impossible weight. A thousand scenes of degradation and torture from his life in Duinn slammed back to him: The sharp sting of the flensing knife, the sight of his own bones picked clean of meat, the weight of Bhargast’s paws holding him down, the jagged cliff face slicing at hands and feet as he clawed his way ever higher toward the portal Ferdoragh said was his only hope. Always there was Maeve’s pitiless laughing face, delighting in his torture, mocking his foolishness, and now in his mind’s eye the witch’s eyes blazed with light. Lilac light.
“Jogah?” The old woman’s melodic tone was threaded with twin skeins of concern and warning now.
‘Fool!’ he raged inside himself. ‘Another trick, another trap, and you wandered blindly in, as always.’
Whatever it was that had been holding him together inside broke away with a snap that was almost audible in his ears. The illusion shattered. He could see the laughter under their masks of concern and pity, the cruelty under the shining white exterior.
‘Fool!’ They were laughing at him, and soon the pain would start again.
Something thick and caustic surged up from inside him, burning as it came. Bwgan threw back his head and wailed, giving voice to the ocean of pain, fear, hatred, humiliation, and shame that roiled inside him. Something black as midnight and thick as oil exploded out of him and
lashed wildly around the room.
* * *
Naimh regained her feet as her Light smashed into shadow things like tidal waves striking at stick huts. The first strike caught her in the middle and sent the old Pyski flying backward, but her power had surged to defend her. Now, everywhere her power touched them, the snaking tendrils of darkness imploded, but there was always another to take its place. Ropes of midnight as thick as her body lashed about the chamber, cracking marble, knocking the white stone facades from the walls and striking down swaths of her people with every blow. The panicked screams of Highs blended with the animal shrieks of Wilds as everyone desperately tried to flee the madness that Jogah’s strange attack had wrought.
Jogah.
Her prized student, lost for all of those months, brought back as . . . this. It was too much. Niamh forced the thought away as she formed her power into a blade of impossible sharpness and hurled it against the closest knot of writhing shadow tendrils.
“Fight!” the ancient elder panted at a knot of young Pyski as her Light blades cut down the night whips around them. She was tiring too quickly; long decades had passed since she’d been called to use the Light in such quantities. It was worse for the young ones, who’d never known war, who had no experience drawing on the Light under real duress. Most of them were trying to flee, and they few who had the presence of mind to strike back did so in panicked haphazard knots.
How was Jogah, or whatever he was now, calling such power? He’d been strong but nowhere near what she saw now. She should have ordered that he be brought to the Central Hall, where he could have been properly shielded. Yet what if those wardings had failed to hold him? The destruction would have been . . . She shuddered to think.
“Flee!” she roared at the young ones behind her. “Fight if you can! Gather others and make your way to the Core! Go!”
An onyx tentacle as thick as her torso flailed toward her and forced Niamh back a step, while another thinner coil snapped out from her right and snagged her ankle. The Pyski elder screamed and fell as a burning lightning shock shot up her leg. She flailed desperately with a flickering lash of Light, trying to free her deadened, burning limb.