by Adam Golden
‘Monster. Spriggan. Danger.’
They were terrified of him, as he’d been of Maeve. Spriggan. The word tickled something deep inside him. He clung to it and dug deep; there was something there.
A wave of strength pulsed into him and brought his eyes to the limp form of the man-shaped one. The fear! Understanding hit Bwgan like a ram, and something at his core shuddered. He nearly lost his hold on the strange darkness that held his enemies. The fear was feeding him! That had to be it! Just like Maeve. He hammered at that thought. He wasn’t, it wasn’t. It was different. He didn’t want it. He needed it. Bwgan drew a deep breath and centered himself. Spriggan. He rolled the word around in his mind, studying the feel of it. There was something there, something familiar.
“Spriggans are dangerous, deceitful and have no honor . . .” The words leaked through the fog of his recollection in hazy drabs. The voice was rich, at ease, comfortable. He knew that voice. He was sure he did. “. . . fear not, there are no Spriggans about, I would know.” He drew harder on the strength of the two he held, on their memories and knowledge. Something was forming in his mind, there was a face, wide-eyed with concern and excitement. A young face.
‘Boy.’
The word came to him. A human child. And that boy was special, its name . . . his name was . . . Bwgan gasped at a flash of recognition.
“Meical!” Memory crashed back to him and Bwgan wailed at the force of it. “Jogah . . .” he wheezed. “I am . . . I was . . .” The images of what he’d been and what he was scoured at him. The Guardian, the slave, the monster. He looked down at the crumpled Pyski held by the grasping tentacles and moaned. What had he done? The Dark flickered and surged with a will of its own.
“No!” Jogah roared through gritted teeth, trying to push it down, to force it away. He couldn’t . . . it was too strong. He’d been too long from the Light.
“The Light,” a soft voice, Naimh’s voice, echoed faintly. “The Bond drew forth the Light . . . The Bond . . .”
“Meical,” Jogah rasped. The Bond could help him, heal him. Meical could save him. Meical would save him. The tormented Pyski squeezed his black eyes tight and pressed at the shadow stuff about him with his will as he had once formed the Light. The whipping tentacles of clinging ink drew back slowly, grudgingly releasing his victims and shifting form. Jogah launched into the air on a pair of tattered, veiny, jet-black wings, racing toward the Thinning that memories stolen from the Cat-kin Wild told him was close. It was time to go home. Finally, home.
Chapter 10
Transit using the Darkness was savage. A brute force assault of the boundary between the planes. The way he’d been taught, using the Light was a blending, a gentle alignment of two places. What he’d just done felt like violation, like forcing himself on an unwilling world that was fighting to resist him. If there had been anything in his stomach the twisted Pyski would have heaved it up.
He landed on his knees in a mire of thick mud covered by a thin crust of dirty snow. Above him the skeletal spread of a hundred barren cedar trees loomed. The grove, his grove. Even with his memories largely restored there was relief in him. It was true, it was real. He hadn’t imagined those days in this place. The season made things bleak, the frost-crusted foliage and sullen iron-gray skies were a poor reflection of the verdant landscapes he remembered, but it was home. He was here. In just a few minutes he would be back where he belonged. With his charge, his friend, and all that had befallen him would be put behind him forever.
‘It will!’ he thought fiercely. It had to be. Meical would help him. Together they would make everything just as it had been. They could do that.
Jogah’s eye was drawn by a ripple in a puddle in the muck. He winced as he caught sight of his reflection in its surface. He was white as a ghost and gaunt as a skeleton. His face was sharp and angular, the bones pressing at the flesh as though trying to burst through. His eyes were black pits sunken deep into his skull, and his once thick dark hair was gone save for a few limp gossamer-fine strands. And there were the scars. The six wide ragged gashes that started under each eye and met at the point of his chin that had once bled Light, now they yawned with a darkness as deep as the void between the stars, and they’d been joined by a crosshatching of hundreds of finer marks that made his face look like a poorly stitched patchwork quilt. He traced one long thin scar along his jawline. Here were the wages of Maeve’s gentle attentions, a visible reminder of her lessons, and of his shame.
One night, while he lay coiled around himself in his little rock cell in Duinn, the hunger overwhelmed Bwgan. He couldn’t take another second of it. He’d gnawed the flesh from two of his own fingers like a starving rat. By morning the digits were restored, but she knew. Somehow, she knew. He ate when she willed it and starved when she didn’t. He’d known the rules. He sat before her silver mirror and watched as she peeled the flesh from his face inch by agonizing inch. Eventually he stopped hearing it, but the screaming never stopped. Not while she peeled the meat away, or while she fried it. He even screamed while she forced it into his mouth, while he chewed it. He remembered how she hummed along absently, harmonizing absently with sounds of his suffering as one might with a pleasant tune.
Jogah dashed the puddle with his fist and pulled himself to his feet. That was over now. Maeve and her traitorous servant were gone forever, and he was home. Soon everything would be right again. Unwillingly he snatched up the Darkness and wrestled the writhing snake of force into submission. The power tore through him, reforming and reordering his structure. Bones shifted, ligaments popped, joints ground and Jogah leapt into the sky, beating at the air with a pair of heavy fibrous batwings.
Command of the Darkness was coming more easily, and frighteningly, part of him gloried in the savage nature of the new force. It was exhilarating, empowering and terrifying. The sooner he could excise it the better. He told himself that again and again as he flexed the new muscles. Told himself he didn’t want it, that he was only using it so he could be rid of it. Meical would help him. He would be frightened at first, but Jogah would explain, and his sweet boy would understand. The boy hadn’t meant to attack him the night of the assault on the tower house, it hadn’t been Meical’s fault. He’d been scared out of his wits, and Jogah looked so different. What else could he expect? He’d be more careful this time.
The flight from the grove to the looming bulk of O’Broin tower passed in a distracted blur as Jogah grappled with what he meant to say, how he planned to approach his oldest, dearest friend, and convince him that he was in fact himself. The Pyski was surprised to find the crack in the western wall, his private entrance into the home for years, had grown over with a tangle of sickly-looking ivy. The groundskeepers usually kept the vines neatly trimmed and limited to the lower levels. Strange that they’d let it grow so high and wild this year, he thought idly, and why had they failed to prune away the dead with the coming of frost? Goodman Llwyd was usually so diligent in his work. Perhaps the old gardener was getting too old to properly supervise his subordinates? Jogah pulled away a browned tangle of the clinging growth with an irritated click of his tongue and shimmied into the narrow break between stones.
The Guardian coughed as his drop from the narrow fracture kicked up a fine cloud of dust from the faded runner that ran down the center of the corridor on the Tower’s bedroom level. “Dust? Here?” Catriona would never allow the runners in the cellar corridors to get to this state, let alone those outside the family’s sleeping chambers. The housekeeper would have had an apoplexy to see the corridor in this state. “What is going on here?” the Pyski asked, an itch of alarm tingling in the back of his mind. He raced down the dusty runner toward the end of the corridor. To Meical’s room.
He was breathing heavily before he’d done a dozen strides. Why was the corridor left to the dust and cobwebs, and why couldn’t Jogah hear anyone moving about in the upper levels? What was happening here? The doorway to Meical’s bedchamber gaped, doorless. Heavy iron hinges hung empty a
nd the stones of the arch showed somewhat faded but obvious scorch marks. The rubble had been cleared away, and someone had scrubbed at those scorch marks to little avail, but little else had been done. Jogah burst through the doorway and stopped dead. Linen dust cloths covered everything, a company of ghosts standing sentry in a chamber overrun by spiderwebs and neglect. The heavy tapestries that warmed the walls, all decorated with the fanciful hunts and battles Meical always favored, were thick with mildew and disfigured by grime. The rushes on the floor near the fireplace reeked of mold, and a confusion of insects crawled over some forgotten bit of bone left behind by one of the puppies, of which Jogah saw no sign. The chamber was a tomb, utterly devoid of life. No one had been in here in an age. No one save himself, and the Pyski woman who stood near the grimy soot stained window.
“What happened here?” Jogah asked. His voice cracked. He felt numb.
“After the night of the attack, the family abandoned this level of the tower. Since then they’ve abandoned several others.” Niamh’s voice was quiet, as though she were trying not to disturb the silence of this place. “They keep closer to the great hearths these days, closer to the exits. Besides, after a time, climbing the stair so often became untenable.” Her shoulders were hunched, her head hanging, as though she were bowed under some great weight. She turned from the window to face him and Jogah gasped.
The ancient Pyski looked . . . old, truly, terribly, old. “Rion . . .” Jogah started, choking on Bwgan’s memories. The purple-eyed creature he’d flung about in the white city, the shadows crawling over her, consuming her. He did this.
She raised a hand, shaking her head. “Jogah,” she said, her face ashen and voice heavy with strain. “It is time to leave this place.”
The Guardian spluttered wordlessly and took an unthinking step back. “What? Leave? Now? How . . . ? No! I cannot Rion. I need . . . Meical needs . . .”
“Meical needs nothing of you Daiu. Not any longer,” the bent and wrinkled old woman said sadly. “And as for you, the boy has nothing to offer. There is nothing here for you that you want, my boy.”
“What are you saying?” Jogah demanded, surging toward the old woman. “Meical lives. The Bond remains.” Naimh shuffled back, her dim eyes wide with alarm, and Jogah pulled up short. She was afraid of him, of course she was. How much Light had she lost to be reduced from the powerful, stately creature he recalled to the shrivelled, stooped remnant before him?
“The Spril’fe is intact,” she acknowledged, squaring her shoulders and meeting his eyes with a spark of the fire he remembered. “Your charge is alive, though whether he lives . . . Tell me Daiu, have you looked about you? Really looked? Come. See.” She gestured to the grimy window and stepped away, inviting him to approach.
Jogah stepped up to the window and wiped away at the layer of dirt and dust that obscured the pane. The view from this window was one he’d always loved. He loved how the width and breadth of the O’Broin lands rolled out below, a verdant carpet of grass dotted with manicured gardens, bubbling fountains, pathways of pristine gravel arranged in geometrically stunning designs. When Meical was small they’d played at being giants, with the whole world spread out before them, and it had all seemed so magical. Now the damaged Pyski looked out and gasped in horror. It was dead. What he’d dismissed, in his distracted state, as the dormancy and murk of winter, he now saw for what it truly was. Decay. Rot. Under the thin crust of snow and frost that blanketed everything, he saw gardens left to ruin, paths grown over with dead weeds, fountains slick with half-frozen slime. Where he could see the once stunning fields of rolling grass, through the crust it was churned to mud and muck, and even that mud was a pale lifeless gray, as though it had been bled of its essence.
“Look deeper,” Niamh urged in a sharp whisper.
Jogah willed the Darkness into his eyes and gasped as the Ulster Ward Net shimmered into view. He whirled on Naimh. “What have you done?” he demanded. “How could you?”
“Look Jogah,” Niamh barked angrily. “Stop hiding from it and let yourself see.” The stick she was leaning against lanced out like a cobra’s strike, belying her fragile appearance. It drove hard into his shoulder and spun the devastated Guardian back toward the window. “See it. Understand,” the old woman demanded, her voice in an odd chant-like cadence.
Jogah pressed his will outward and slowly things began to shift before his eyes. The land seemed to writhe, as though it were alive, squirming. ‘Infested.’ That’s what it looked like, like the insects in the corner crawling all over that bit of forgotten dog treat. The land, as far as he could see, was overrun with milling movement. He pulled at the Darkness, forcing it to refine and focus his sight.
It was a parade of horrors. Hundreds, scores of hundreds of stooped, twisted, gnarled, evil-looking creatures stampeded everywhere he looked. They hung from the eaves of the outbuildings in the kitchen yard. They ran in packs through the muddy ruins of the fields, they splashed about in the grimy half-frozen pools and fountains. Trolls, goblins, ogres, gnomes, and a hundred others, the entire gamut of the Unsaelig races were spread out below in host that Jogah couldn’t credit. He looked back up at the Ward Net and shook his head in stupefaction. The Net, which had always been a shield to protect the Focus, his Focus from the influence of the Darkness, had been inverted. It’s once delicate lace-like lattice of intricate glyphs and sigils now resembled a barbed grate of sharp edges and jagged points. A cage.
“What have you done?” he repeated, his voice low and threatening. The slap took him full on the side of his head and dropped the rail-thin Pyski on to his side.
“What have we done?” Naimh demanded, her voice high and shrill with rage. “Our duty! Your duty. That is what we have done. Look, and remember what that boy is. Not the child. Not your friend. A Focus.” She delivered each declaration with a clipped, pointed intensity as she stood over Jogah’s toppled form. “A Focus. A hub of the raw force of creation. Have you forgotten everything? How many humans can even summon the strength to give form to a single fae? One in a score? One in a hundred? And those are always weak creatures, like that poor boy Pwyll, whom you nearly killed. Your Meical though, and those children like him, the ones formed with the gift. How many can they form, and of what strengths? Do you even remember why we guard them? Do you remember what you were told about the Rending?”
“I remember,” Jogah said, wiping a drop of dark blood from his lip as he came slowly to his feet. “Maeve and the Hundred Fallen Guardians broke away from the Court, they found new powers, new Bonds. They made themselves Spriggan and brought forth an army of Unsaelig creatures.
“. . . and the Dark Court was born,” Naimh continued. “They used the inborn strength of their charges, perverted it with fear and anger, and gave birth to legions of twisted things like those outside. It took nearly a hundred years, and more lives than I could count, to drive them back. To stem the tide. And you ask what I’ve done? I dammed the flood you unleashed, Guardian.” Naimh spat that last word at him, heavy with hurt and recrimination. She took a slow trembling breath and, when she continued, her voice had softened somewhat. “The breach you opened here, on the night you tried so hard to save him. It let something through. Something bled into the human plane, and into our own.”
“Spriggan?” Jogah asked, and the old woman shook her head.
“Something worse, something ancient and unfocused, discordant but hungry. The Court believes it is the force behind Maeve’s original rebellion, the power that turned the Hundred from their bonds, but we just do not know. All we know for certain is that the survivors of the Rending War are surging in numbers we thought impossible. A dozen regions have fallen, their Foci killed or corrupted. Scenes like the one below are growing more and more common. The balance is tilting toward the Dark, despite our best efforts.
. . . unfocused, discordant, hungry . . . I felt it. The memory opened under Jogah like a sinkhole, sucking him in.
* * *
Bwgan’s mouth tasted like b
lood. His left eye was already starting to swell closed, and the smoke in the air burned at his throat, threatening a coughing fit that would topple him if he let it. That would ruin everything, she couldn’t be allowed to come to. The heavy stone pestle slipped from his grip, carrying blood and hair with it to the floor. His first blow missed, barely glancing her shoulder. He’d been too frightened, too nervous. He was lucky. Surprise made her clumsy and Maeve lashed out with a fist rather than striking with her power.
The strength of her wild right hook nearly dropped him, but Bwgan managed to keep his feet and swing again. His weapon struck true the second time and the witch crumpled as though her bones had turned to water. Bwgan dropped down atop Maeve’s senseless body, straddled her hips, and wrapped his hands around her slim throat. He’d need to catch her unaware, Ferdoragh had warned him many times during their long nights of whispered plotting. He had to make sure she had no time to speak.
“Should she bleat so much as a single sound, ye’re done fer,” the shadow man had seemed to delight in reminding him. They went over it again and again, repeating and refining every detail until Bwgan knew what had to happen like he knew the scars on his own face, until he saw it unfolding in his sleep. “Ye willnae get another chance lad, and the price o’ failure . . .” The shadow man trailed off with that cruel grin of his and a dramatic shiver. He hadn’t needed to bother. No one knew the cost better than Bwgan.
None of that mattered now; there would be no price exacted, no failure. He had her. She was the helpless one now. He was in control. He had her. Something stirred in him, something all but forgotten, a visceral physical thrill that hummed through him. He’d woken to the sticky evidence of spilt seed more than once after dreaming of this moment, but this?