Fairy Dark

by Adam Golden

  Rhiannon nodded curtly.

  “Well, some ‘Darklings’ don’t care about banners and titles. They know who really tipped the balance, who really struck the blow.” Nippen felt its blood running faster with every word, felt its pride returning. Its body hummed with excitement. “They say the Bwgan broke the chains that held us down for centuries. And that the one who laid waste to the fabled White City deserves the crown, more than any of our so-called rulers ever did. To them, to us, he is the Shadow King.” The Boggart winced as one of the long talons on its right hand bit into the flesh of its palm and smiled up at Rhiannon. “A whisper on the wind, Dion. A cold shiver down your spine. Unseen eyes in the dark. That’s where the Master can be found, Guardian.” Nippen spat the last word as the wicked silver blade bit into its right thigh and out the back, pinning the leg to the ground.

  The creature screamed, a wild gurgling sound that turned into an agonized chuckle. “My King!” he called, raising his eyes to the twilight sky. “Pyski bitch,” Nippen growled. “He remembers you fondly. Says you’ll make a fine dog yet.” The widening of the hunter’s ice-blue eyes sent a cackle ripping through the boggart’s heaving body. A painful cough scraped its throat raw and blood spattered its sickly green cheeks as it spoke. “He . . . would want you to know. My . . . King . . . makes for . . . the Slyphid Pass, and victory.” The rotund creature croaked before its body started to convulse too wildly to talk or think or breathe.

  The pain was incredible, but the Master’s servant had said it would be, and that Nippen’s sacrifice would be remembered. The boggart didn’t know about that and didn’t care. After almost two centuries of being lorded over by shining white bastards like this hunter, Nippen just hoped it’d take this uppity Saelig slut with him. Its back arched painfully as a series of violent spasms rocked its body, and Nippen saw alarm on the Fae wench’s face. It opened its blood-soaked hand and let her see the broken glyph burned there. It wanted her to know, to see what was coming. It doubted she’d be fast enough to escape, and if she did manage to survive she’d be a broken thing, too crippled to interfere with what was coming next.

  * * *

  The detonation hit the tiny patch of woodland and the nameless village it surrounded like the fist of an angry deity. A ring of force exploded outward from the center of the struggling boggart’s chest, turning the pinned monster into a mist of pink vapor. Trees centuries in the growing were shattered into kindling in an instant, huts were scooped up and smashed as though by an invisible whirlwind, birds exploded in mid air, and panicked land creatures were scoured into bloody rags of tattered fur by a flash storm of flying grit, rock, and wood shrapnel as they tried to flee. The spell burned itself away, all of its fury vanishing in an instant, leaving a ring of scoured stone surrounded by a circular mound of dirt, debris and bloody flesh.

  At the center of the destruction, where the wounded boggart had lain, stood an outcropping of strange pale stone. It looked like the rough beginnings of a sculpture, some artist’s nightmare conception of a vaguely human shape made of rough lines and harsh angles. It gave the impression of an ungainly body driven to one knee, its uneven lumpy head bent toward its bulbous, malformed chest, and a single misshapen arm thrown up over its eyes. The stone itself looked like unpolished marble, dirty white shot through with veins of onyx, silver, and gold, and spiderwebbed with a network of fine cracks that leaked silver blue residue into the gloom of the blasted wood.

  Chapter 12

  The air was thick and growing thicker; had there been anyone alive to note it they would have felt the strange buzz that accompanied a close strike of lightning. The outcropping trembled slightly, and a whisper thin sliver of stone broke away. A beam of brilliant silvery light shot out from the break in the façade and a grinding crack sounded. More bits of gold- and onyx-flecked stone fell away, dozens of shafts of blinding white light shot out from the edifice, and it trembled. The unnatural stalagmite exploded, sending slivers of razor-sharp debris in every direction.

  Rhiannon, Guardian of Aos Si, collapsed in a clatter of plate mail and lay panting in the dirt. ‘Gods-Damned sprig bastard!” she gasped between struggling, desperate breaths. Her mailed fist beat weakly at the exposed rock underneath her. That darkling scum, it had known something. She should have been more careful, should have . . .

  A sigh leaked out of her. ‘Doubts are easy. Second guessing oneself after the fact is the easiest thing in the world. Doing right is hard. Sometimes impossible. But past is past, and doubt makes the work harder.’ The words floated up from somewhere, the voice she thought them in was male, older, but that didn’t tell her much, and her mind was too fragmented by the exertion of such a large transmutation to dig at the problem. Besides, it didn’t matter who’d said it. They were right. Recriminations helped nothing. There was work to do now.

  The Pyski female’s arms trembled and refused to lift her when she tried. Transmutation from the animate to the inanimate took great strength and great focus. One had to maintain enough of the self to allow for reversal of the sequence, but not so much as to weaken the structure. It was taxing. In the way that lifting a boulder over one’s head and throwing it to the moon might be said to be taxing. Rhiannon closed her eyes, let out a weak shuddering breath and opened herself to the Aether. It was dangerous, maybe even foolhardy, but what choice was there? The heavy plate and mail that encased her melted away and weak tendrils of air wrapped her limbs, giving her the leverage to drag herself upward.

  Once she’d regained her feet, Rhiannon drew a spark of light and fashioned it into a long thin shift to cover her nakedness before closing the Aether away. Handling even the wispy thread of Light that clothed her was like wrestling a greased eel, any more and she risked calamity, besides she’d need the strength for the walk.

  ‘My King makes for the Slyphid Pass.’

  The Darkling’s voice grated in her head. What in all the Hells was that supposed to mean? What was the Slyphid Pass? She dredged through the library of memory that was both hers and not. That vast storehouse of knowledge, wisdom, impression and experience that was her birthright, and sometimes her curse, one that rarely failed to provide at least some insight on any topic, but in this case, she got nothing but disjointed facts; a Slyphid was a sort of air elemental, a pass was a route through rough or mountainous terrain, but together they meant nothing that Rhiannon could make sense of. Maybe the words were nonsense, Nippen’s attempt to throw her off a trail or send her down one that went nowhere. Maybe.

  “I’m coming for you, you bastard,” the exhausted Guardian grated through gritted teeth as she hobbled away from the wreckage of the woods.

  * * *

  “I need to know what you know, Caoin,” Rhiannon said gruffly, frustrated by the spectral washerwoman’s cagey cryptic. For her part, the banshee looked utterly unperturbed as she scrubbed at a stain in an old shift, elbow deep in a tub of wash water.

  “Sure’an ye always did need ol’ Caoin’s advice, Gruaidh. Though ye nae take it after ye hears it.” A frustrated sigh washed over the hilltop where Rhiannon’s little camp was laid out.

  “Caoin, Gruaidh has been dead for five years.” The exhausted Pyski sighed. “Rhiannon, I’m Rhiannon, and I need to know—”

  “About the Slyphid Pass, an’ don’t ye just bang on about it?” the washerwoman snarked. “Even as a boy, ye n’ere did have any patience,” the sudsy old ghost groused under her breath as she rung out Rhiannon’s shift and inspected the stain with a careful eye.

  “Caoin?” Rhiannon asked. “The Slyphid Pass?”

  “T’is a name I’ve not heard in a long stretch of ages,” the old ghost said after a moment. “Not somethin’ many o’ ye young ones would know of today. Why, I recall—”

  “Where is it, Caoin? Where does it lead?” Rhiannon snapped. “How do I reach it?”

  “Gruaidh! I didnae think ye such a lout! Interuptin’ an’ carryin’ on whist folks is talkin’, honestly!” the banshee exclaimed, shaking a long spectral digi
t at Rhiannon as she did so. Her ghostly form wavered and reformed as the breeze blew across the hill. “Now, as I was sayin’. T’is nae a name that’d be well known, mayhap only to them as studies the deep magics, the old rites. As for where . . . Ha.” The crone laughed, shaking out the bit of cloth she held before shuffling over to her line to hang it beside a pair of socks she’d darned and washed already. “All about us, everywhere. Nowhere. The Slyphid Pass be one o’ the names fer the pathway ‘tween realms, the route to an’ through the planes their selves.”

  Rhiannon felt as though she’d been kicked in the stomach by a horse. Her quarry was travelling the planes? He could be anywhere. There were hundreds of planes, maybe thousands of distinct realities, all sandwiched together to form existence.

  ‘More.’ A voice in the back of her mind sprang up. ‘Many more. Kehyrdius postulated ten thousand thousand realities arranged in a series of concentric rings around what he called the . . .’

  Rhiannon pushed the thought aside. She recognized the droning mental voice as Lilian, and she had no time for the ancient historian’s prattling recollections just now.

  If the Bwgan was travelling the planes, she needed to move quickly. Before he got too far away.

  “How do I reach this pass?” she asked the banshee, who was carefully looking over the hem of a skirt.

  “Ye? Ye cannae, no more then I can enjoy a fine steak an’ a pint o’ stout.” The ghost crone cackled. “T’is a thing o’ the air an’ the Aether. A thing of elementals, spirits, an’ shadows.”

  “Spirits?” Rhiannon asked perking up. “Can you follow the pass, Caoin?”

  The washerwoman gave the Pyski a long look and shook her head sadly. “Nae, love. I cannae. My tether to ye wouldnae allow as such. Besides, how could I be leavin’ ye before ye’ve heard me warnin’?” The apparition took a deep breath, her mouth opening wide, too wide, much wider than a human ever could.

  Rhiannon clapped her hands over her ears while screaming at the ghostly messenger. “Be silent, Caoin! Be silent, I do not want your warning,” Rhiannon blurted urgently.

  A Banshee’s warning was a terrible, ear-rending shriek that could be heard for a mile; this close it could shatter her ear drums. Moreover, the sound was one of such intense sorrow and foreboding that many who heard it never fully recovered from the emotional toll it took. The Pyski warrior shivered as memories of Banshee wails from former days came back to her. She remembered crying day and night for a month after the dirge that told of Kamryyn’s death during the Rending. She also recalled looking down at water smashing against sharp rocks far below a craggy cliff, while another one of Caoin’s kind sang its terrible song about the death of an infant daughter. What it felt like to plummet off of that cliff and see the sharp rocks racing up toward her was still fresh in the Guardian’s mind. The fact that neither memory was her own did nothing to insulate her from them, and she had no wish to hear Caoin’s wail. Besides, the batty old ghost might not be able to tell the difference between her and Gruaidh moment to moment, but she did show surprising insight into Rhiannon and her circumstances now and again. Perhaps the warning she offered so often would be purely about the Psyki Caoin thought she was, but Rhiannon would not take the risk. She wanted no foretellings of her fate and could live quite happily without any insights into her doom.

  “If the living cannot use the pass,” Rhiannon asked, sipping at the tea she held in the earthenware mug between her hands. “How can the Bwgan expect to? He’s every bit as material as I am.”

  “Aye, so he is at that, but a creature o’ shadow as well, is he nae?” Caoin asked. “I dunnae think he could . . . nae on his own.”

  “What would he need?” Rhiannon asked, perching forward in her seat. “You said that someone would have to be a student of the deep magics to even know the name. I take it there wouldn’t be many that could show him how to use this pass then?”

  The banshee shook her head, her attention going back to the clothing in her hands, this time a bit of torn petticoat. “M’self, I doubt there be more ‘an a score o’ wizards, witches, alchemists an’ scholars in all the races o’ the planes that could enter the pass without a Thinnin’,” she said in an idle tone, as though discussing the weather. “Fewer still could walk it. An’ ‘fore ye ask, I dunnae know o’ any myself,” the old woman added, shooting the younger an irritated glare.

  “There has to be some—” Rhiannon started.

  “Aye, so there does, if’n t’was me I might start in the one place I was sure t’find lots o’ writin’s and such on the mystical,” the ancient spectre said blandly, shooting Rhiannon piercing glances as she pretended to be carefully studying her work.

  “No,” the Guardian said firmly. “Not there. Not yet. I vowed—”

  “Ach!” the old woman spat, throwing her arms into the air. “Aye, an’ I’ve had an earful o’ yer bloody vows. Foolish man-stubborn pride I call it. Nothin’ more ‘r less.”

  “I’ll go back with the Bwgan’s head or not at all,” Rhiannon said fiercely, “and I’ll not hear another word about it.”

  The old ghost hmphed at that and went back to her darning.

  “Besides, the Grand Library is hardly the only choice. There’s a closer option . . .”

  “Ye cannae mean . . . Oh Gruaidh, why were ye born six kinds of fool rolled so tight?” the old woman asked. “Look at ye, barely hobbled in here but a few hours past an’ now ye’re chompin’ to go into that snakes’ nest? I swear ye werenae born with th’ sense the gods gave a fly.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Rhiannon laughed. “I know, Mother. I’ll be careful, Mother,” she said, sticking her tongue out at the old ghost woman.

  The spectre smirked and threw the pants she’d been mending at the Guardian, only to have them evaporate once they left her hands. “Light save us all from lovin’ fools,” the exasperated spirit sighed.

  * * *

  The cottage hardly deserved the name. The ramshackle collection of rough timber and moldy thatch was held together more by the thick tangle of moss, brambles and ivy that had grown up to ensnare it than anything else. The back end of the derelict shack was all but submerged in the mud and muck of the bog that lapped at the walls. Clouds of midges filled the air and frogs croaked and warbled everywhere. Now and then something big lurched in the thick filthy water, and everything went silent as some hapless creature was dragged under the surface. Marbh Bog, the Dead Bog, not even the most intrepid peat cutter ventured here, and hunters gave those dark waters a wide birth as well. Stories of the fell creatures and vindictive Fae who dwelt in the hidden recesses of this putrid hole spread for miles in every direction. And the stories didn’t do this place justice.

  Rhiannon had to heave her boots out of the clinging mud with every step, and when she reached the crooked, ill-fitting door she hesitated. The wood was green with mildew, twisted and bloated with moisture. There was no knob, no pull, and though it looked as though Rhiannon could walk through the putrefied wood without so much as a pause, that was an illusion, like so much about this place. In the center of the door, just visible beneath a thin spot in the furry green growth, was a small but finely detailed representation of a roaring dragon’s head done in charcoal. Rhiannon squared her shoulders, let out a long slow breath and reached out to touch the drawing with two fingers.

  The magic of the place closed around her thickly, as filthy and grasping as the bog mud that dominated everything here. Unreasoned dread bubbled up in the Pyski sorceress. It was hard to breathe. The Light surged on the edge of her consciousness, like a hound straining at its leash, and she was forced to pull it back. Her power wouldn’t help here, besides, that panicked feeling wasn’t real.

  ‘It feels real enough,’ a small frightened voice in the back of her mind snivelled, and Rhiannon pushed it down. It was magic. Unsaelig fear magic, just one of the layers of dark wardings that surrounded the Marbh and kept the unwanted out.

  “Really now,” the Guardian muttered, exasperated with herself. “Y
ou haven’t even made it through the door yet.” A frustrated growling rose in her throat and Rhiannon surged forward her heavy, mud-encrusted boot to strike the center of the door with all the force she could muster.

  * * *

  Rhiannon shook her head and sucked in a breath to slow the spin that threatened to send her to the floor. That would never do. What would her partner think? ‘I’m just so hot.’ She felt as though she’d been dancing for hours, and the press of the crowd made it so warm. The ballroom was massive, she could barely make out the far walls, but even so mammoth a chamber grew stifling when packed so full of bodies. And there were bodies everywhere, knots and waves of them. Men like her partner, tall elegant figures in fine coats and silk capes worked with silver embroidery and thread of gold, whirled and spun graceful women bedecked with fine jewels, decorations and brilliant spreading gowns in a thousand hues.

  The masks though, the masks were thrilling. Wonderous creations of gold wire festooned with feathers, fur and jewels, and made to look like animals. Wolves and bears and lions stepped and twirled through the steps of a complicated waltz with peacocks, does, jaguars, and minks. A pageant of the fantastical spread out before her, and the Pyski girl couldn’t help but grin, but Light it was hot!

  A servant in a weasel mask worked with dappled black and white fur wound his way deftly through the press of dancing bodies, his silver tray and its load of delicate crystalline flutes balanced effortlessly on the tips of his fingers. Rhiannon reached out to snag one of the glasses as the man passed, but a grip on her waist hoisted her up and twirled her away as her fingertips brushed the delicate crystal. Her partner stood head and shoulders taller than her, and his fine suit and flowing dun cape hid a frame both wide and strongly built. Aside from his size, however, everything else was hidden from view, utterly lost behind the embellished features of his intricate leonine mask and thick mane. Even the hands that held her waist were covered by gauntlets set with long ivory claws.