by Adam Golden
His hands squeezed at her throat viciously, and Bwgan shuddered with pleasure as her body went stiff and started to struggle unconsciously. He pressed himself down more heavily on her, grinding her into the stone as his thumbs dug at her windpipe. He was panting now, wild with exhilaration.
“Die.” The word came out as a soft moan. “Die.”
His hands and forearms trembled, taut with the effort of squeezing the life from this monster who’d made him into this. He thought of all the times she’d watched him suffer, watched him die, and he wished he could see the panic in her eyes, wished she would scream.
“I wish I had a knife,” he hissed from where he was perched, inches above her face. “Would your nose grow back, Maeve?” he asked her insensate, quickly purpling face.
A snarling bark filled the cramped space a second before Bhargast slammed into Bwgan like a battering ram. The two bodies crashed into the heavy work table and sent it onto its side. A storm of texts, paraphernalia, and blazing hot coals showered the floor. The massive coal-black monster snarled and snapped, pummeling Bwgan with its sheer muscular bulk as it tried to bring its jaws to bear on him anywhere.
Mad with rage at being thwarted, Bwgan hammered on the animal with fists that felt as though they were drumming on stone. He bit and scraped and snarled right along with the animal struggling to get free.
‘I have to . . . have to finish it.’
The great hound was too heavy, too massive. He couldn’t shift it, let alone hurt it. It was all he could do to keep himself from being squarely pinned.
His hands scambled blindly, searching for anything he could use as a weapon. His left landed on a hot coal and he screamed as it seared into the flesh. His arm tried to jerk away but Bwgan gritted his teeth and closed his fingers around the burning rock.
Bhargast sank teeth as long as Bwgan’s index finger into his left shoulder and the crazed slave screamed like a banshee as he pressed his palm, and the burning coal that was melted to it, into the onyx monster’s eye socket. Bhargast reared back and Bwgan exploded out of the space. He didn’t even see what he grabbed next. All he could tell was that it was heavy and had something like a handle that he could grip. He swung the weight with all the strength he could muster and lost his balance as the swing collided with the side of Bhargast’s massive skull.
The dog creature and its intended victim went down in a heap, but this time Bwgan landed on top. Bhargast was dazed, snapping ineffectually as he tried to shake Bwgan off and rise. The slave’s weapon, some kind of elaborately etched demon skull, shattered on impact. Only a shard, a jaggedly ended bit of curling black ram’s horn, remained.
Bwgan bawled a primal, whooping howl and plunged his makeshift weapon into Bhargast’s flesh at the join where shoulder met thick neck. The animal screamed, blood spurted, and Bwgan pulled the weapon free and struck again and again. Black blood fountained as the animal thrashed about trying to get free. Bwgan held fast, his free hand tangled in the animal’s shaggy black coat as he struck again and again.
Something like music blared in his brain. It was both more and less than speech, more and less than thought. A wave of raw impression worked in him, heightening the raw terrible beauty of the slaughter before him and imparting so much more. It was alive, both utterly passive and all consuming. Something was watching, it thrilled, and it showed Bwgan that it, whatever it was, had set all of this in motion.
The rage-drunk Pyski slave watched as Bhargast’s bloody corpse shifted into the pulped, gore-splattered visage of his friend, Ferdoragh, and realization dawned. This moment, this day, his captivity, perhaps his whole life, had been engineered, step by terrible step, toward something, and this moment was a beginning. He was Chosen.
* * *
“. . . must go Jogah. The Purge . . .”
Jogah snapped back from the grip of the memory. He remembered all of it now, the long trek through the wasteland, climbing those razor-edged obsidian cliffs, the blazing oculus that yawned above the range’s highest peak. That was how he’d returned. The voice that wasn’t a voice had shown him the way.
“Jogah!” Niamh yelled. “We must . . .”
“The Purge,” he said woodenly as what she’d been saying fell into place. “You’re going to murder them, all of them.” He shot Niamh a disgusted challenging glare and the old Pyski warrior wilted. “You’re going to kill them. What of all your talk of Pyski serving the Bond? What of the Light, Niamh?”
“We serve the Bond, we always have,” the old woman said tiredly, her cloudy violet eyes fogged with tears. “Yet there’s a higher duty. We protect the Balance. What are a few hundred lives against all of existence, Jogah? We cannot allow the Foci to fall to Darkness. I cannot.” Niamh’s back straightened, her face grew fierce with determination. “I will not.”
“And what of the Guardians, Rion?” Jogah spat, the Darkness surged in him, pulsing from the ragged tears in his face. “Do you believe they’ll stand idle while you condemn them to death?”
“Your brothers and sisters know their duty,” Niamh sighed, “as you did before the filth that crawls in you polluted your mind. I am sorry for what happened to you, Jogah. I am so sorry.”
The last words came out in a bare whisper and were hardly audible over the rush of force as a miniature sun of brilliant white light shimmered into existence around Jogah. The darkened Guardian screamed as the Light seared at him, burning his flesh, scouring at his soul. He felt clothing and the last bits of hair on his body burn away, felt every inch of himself blister as he’d once felt his legs shrivel and crack while they were cooked. He shrieked as his eyeballs ruptured, the liquid remains boiling as it ran down his face.
Be still.
The impression slammed into his mind, overriding the agony and the rage. It demanded attention, demanded surrender. Jogah ignored it. There would be no more surrender. No more. He snatched at the Darkness, filling himself with the emptiness of the void beyond the Aether. Even as the nerves and tendons of his material form snapped and sizzled, his senses exploded outward.
A dozen Elders stood in the room with his rapidly roasting body. How had they ever concealed themselves? Niamh. She was the distraction. His mentor, his teacher. She played on that bond. She’d planned this whole charade. Jogah pulled at the Darkness, dragging at it from all around the chamber. Compressing it, calling it from other rooms, from everywhere. Shadows leaked through every crack in the stonework, leached in from every pit and fissure in the floorboards. They mingled and coalesced, growing thicker and stronger. He heard the first scream of alarm and a hiss like the release of steam as the clinging Dark met blazing Light. The living night grew, expanding to fill every inch, to force out every trace of Light and sound and air. Pyski might be Light-made flesh, Jogah knew, but they were also the marriage of the mystical and the material, and material creatures needed air to live.
The blazing orb of light shattered as the last of the Pyski elders’ lungs exploded. Jogah was dropped, an oozing, gooey mass of bloody overcooked meat, onto the stone. The shadows enveloped him, soothing, shielding and healing their new master. The voice was gone, and he knew he would never hear it again, as solidly as he knew that Niamh’s corpse would not be among the others. Both certainties were fine with him, he would be no one’s chosen, no one’s slave, and he wanted the old witch alive for what came next.
* * *
The room under the kitchen stair had been vegetable storage before the fall of the house of O’Broin, and in a terrible way, the shadow-wreathed Pyski supposed, it still was. The crates and barrels had been removed, the floors swept and carpeted with fresh rushes, and a sturdy cot and thick mattress had been installed, along with the room’s occupant. Meical O’Broin, last heir of the O’Broin line, sat unblinking and unseeing, staring at nothing. He hadn’t moved when Jogah’s power splintered the heavy door; he hadn’t so much as shifted as the Spriggan slid into the room on a carpet of rolling gloom. The string of spittle that leaked from his slack lips went uninterru
pted as Jogah studied the husk that had been the center of his life, thinking how fitting it was that both the hub of that life and the life itself had been reduced to shadows of themselves.
The boy was still in there. He’d just been locked away. How similar their stories were at their base. The former Guardian laid a pale hand, all but healed of its blisters, on the boy’s now drooping, wrinkled cheek and felt the flesh jerk. The scars on Meical’s crudely balding, gray-fringed skull showed what they’d done, mapping where they’d drilled. Barbarian animals. His own people did this? His own parents? They’d killed the spark in the once bright, brilliant little boy out of fear. They snuffed out the joy, the curiosity and the light that had animated him because they didn’t understand. It was sad.
“Take him,” the new breed of shadow-thing commanded the Unsaelig host he’d made his own in the days since he’d come to rule this place.
His tormentors hadn’t been able to take everything from Meical. As he stood there looking into those vacant, far away eyes, Bwgan swelled with strength, and he knew. He might not be able to move, or think, or love any longer, but Meical could still fear, and that fear was delicious.
III
RHIANNON
Chapter 11
Nippen burst through the outermost edge of the treeline and veered sporadically, twisting around the boles of young spruce and ancient twisty oaks, scrambling through the tangle of growth and thick brush at its feet. It made sure to keep its route erratic and senseless. Maybe, just maybe she wouldn’t be able to track it and it could hide until full dark . . . if it could make it to the Haunt in Birr it might be safe.
‘If she’s about, the Haunt is locked tight,’ Nippen told itself.
They’d be no more likely to let the fleeing boggart in than it would be to welcome some passing dark Fae with danger on their heels into its little nest. Not that it had one any longer.
“I could go to ground, she’ll never find ol’ Nippen in the deep places,” the boggart hissed at itself. Very little dug faster than a frightened boggart, but was there time to burrow?
A high metallic sound whistled through air, and the boggart whirled in time to see a shower of silvery glints in the twilight gloom and threw itself sideways before a shower of brilliant discs slammed into the tree trunks where he’d been standing.
“Nippen, stop,”
The squat, hairy little Dark Fae snarled, though it sounded more like a shriek in his ears. She was coming. The boggart pulled its long powerful arms under itself and tensed.
“I said stop. Don’t make me . . .”
Nippen burst upward with all the strength his powerful limbs could give him. Crashing through the lowest boughs of the canopy, he twisted his stumpy little body in the air and clung to a limb twenty or so spans off the ground. That silvery cry sang out again and branches all around the boggart rained down on the forest floor.
Nippen pulled itself up onto the limb it’d snagged, and leaped again, higher into the tree, and then higher again. Not especially fond of heights, the little creature’s head spun a little. Its kind were earth creatures, things of the dark closed places.
‘I’ll flap my arms and fly like a morning dove if it gets me away from HER,’ Nippen thought feverishly as it threw itself to a neighbouring bough and ran along its narrow length.
With the end of the branch in view, the heavyset Fae jumped, springing over a gap in the tree cover. Its long arms pinwheeled as it sailed through the gap, and it bit down on an anxious scream. Something solid slammed into the boggart’s side at the top of its arc and Nippen careened sideways, spinning end over end.
A chorus of crumbling leaves, snapping twigs and pained grunted Sidhe curses rang out before the boggart’s round furry frame slammed into the dirt in a twisted heap of tangled limbs. “Pyski can fly, Nippen,” the hunter’s voice said dryly.
The boggart groaned in pain, rolled on to its back slowly and then flipped up to its feet achingly, but with surprising grace for one so rotund.
“What are you bothering me for?” the household demon grated, crouching low, its long taloned fingers splayed before it, ready. “I don’t take sides. I live quiet. I don’t harm no one.”
“You shelter Spriggans. Your little farm back there provides fresh blood and fear humors to half a dozen Haunts on this coast.” The hunter’s voice was high, musical but hard, like a piper playing a war cadence, and it was close.
“I have to make a living, don’t I?” the boggart whined. “I got no real truck with any of the factions. Those so-called Dark Courts. Pah,” the boggart spat a glob of phlegm at its feet, “bunch of greedy infighting bastards, not doing a thing for the little guy who does the suffering in their endless squabbles. I help out a few hungry Fae now and then, that’s all, and as for sheltering Spriggans, what am I supposed to do if a Dark Pyski drops—”
“There ARE no Dark Pyski,” the hunter’s voice blared angrily. A streak of light flashed in the corner of Nippen’s eye a second too late, and the boggart found itself on its back, head spinning from the hard impact that took it between the eyes. Something heavy and unyielding pressed down on its throat as halos of blood-red radiance hung before its eyes, obscuring everything. The boggart tensed and made to thrash but froze as something sharp pressed into the dimple under its long thin hook of a nose.
“Pyski serve the Light, those creatures who have betrayed their Bonds and their blood are not Pyski,” the hunter spat, pressing down with her blade. “Understand?”
Nippen finally managed to blink away the obscuring haze before his eyes and his widely spaced, beady black eyes crossed to take in the length of strange dun-gray metal pressed against his face. Ignoring the armored boot on its throat, Nippen followed the blade’s length up past the gauntleted hands that held it and shivered at the intense raptor gaze of the Pyski female that loomed above it: Rhiannon.
“I understand, I do. I meant no offense Dion Rhiannon, truly,” the boggart blathered, hating itself for the snivelling tone, but life as a coward was infinitely preferable to a pointless blustering death.
“Good,” the Pyski said with a smile that made the Dark Fae’s mucus-green complexion blanche. “Now, where is he?”
The pinned boggart swallowed, his eyes going back to the wide double-edged length of a longsword poised above his face. “I’ve heard tell that Daiu Rhys is somewhere in the eastern marshes with his forces pressing a battle against the so-called Carog Dark Court,” Nippen said. “Of course, I cannot be certain.”
Rhiannon sighed and tapped the pommel of her sword sharply with the flat of her gauntleted palm. The hapless boggart screamed as the razor-sharp tip of the weapon parted the flesh of its lip like dried parchment. Blood fountained up out of its face, raining down on him as the weapon slammed through its gums and embedded itself in the bone behind.
“Rhys is no more a Daiu than you are,” Rhiannon said with a reproachful click of her tongue as the boggart thrashed and wailed, trapped by the sword embedded in its face. “He’s Spriggan trash who threw away everything he was to follow Maeve. A fool who lost everything for empty promises of power doesn’t interest me. Certainly not some fool who marches around pretending to be a king while scratching away a meager existence, sucking stolen fear humors procured by filth like yourself.” Rhiannon twisted the pommel of her sword subtly and pressed.
The boggart’s body went rigid and the wailing ceased as Nippen felt the tip digging up toward his nose. “I don’t care about Rhys, or the Carog or any of the rest of the supposed Four Courts and their civil war,” the hunter told her prey, leaning in close. “Either they’ll wipe each other out or the Pyski Court will get them. Makes no difference to me. Maybe I’ll mop up whatever’s left after I’m done on my mission,” Rhiannon mused. “You know who I’m after. All you Darkling filth whisper about it. You know me, so you know why I’m here. Stop wasting time. I’m only going to ask you once more, and then I’m going to start cutting for real, Nippen. Where is The Bwgan?”
The boggart
blood-farmer’s own blood felt ice cold. It had known as soon as it saw her that the question was coming, that she would ask and that it wouldn’t be given a choice. What could it do? Trapped beneath the Saelig champion, the most hated and feared of the Light’s warriors, and him a humble brewer and merchant? A clever and canny tradesman to be certain, but not a warrior to match this Pyski monster with her long taut limbs, gleaming armor, and ice-cold eyes.
Nippen took a shuddering, whistling breath through its long sharp nose, opened its mouth and made a series of struggling, terrible noises as the sword point lodged under its nose made speaking all but impossible.
The hunter’s lizard eyes narrowed and then she stepped back off of the boggart’s throat and wrenched the tip of her weapon free. Agony exploded in the Dark Fae again, and it scrambled backward, coming to an immediate halt as Rhiannon spun the blade in her hand and plunged it down into the ground between its legs.
“I’ve never even seen the Shadow King,” Nippen whined, holding the bloody mess of his face with both hands.
“Shadow King,” Rhiannon laughed. “You Darklings love a title, don’t you? The Bwgan’s no king, just another bottom feeder.”
“It’s what some of the Unsaelig took to calling him after the Four Courts’ War broke out,” Nippen said. “After the . . . tragedy at Aos Si, it seemed like the Dark was on the rise. Unsaelig didn’t have to hide anymore, grubbing around in filth just to get a meal like animals . . .” It couldn’t hold in the glare and winced as the blade moved toward his face again.
“Save me the sob story, boggart,” Rhiannon said coldly.
“The . . . Spriggans crawled out from under their rocks, declared victory and hoisted new banners, a dozen groups all claiming the old Queen’s rights and titles. The weak ones fell away quick or got sucked into the larger ones, but the fighting kept on and has for . . . what? Almost five years?”