by Adam Golden
“Thank you, Prioress,” she said to the older woman approaching slowly.
“Thank you, Huntress, for not killing any of them,” the old nun offered. “Your restraint is appreciated.”
“I do not kill unnecessarily,” Rhiannon said.
“Oh?” the Prioress asked with an easy indulgent smile. “Perhaps.” She turned in the doorway, the attendant at her shoulder moving fluidly to clear the way. The old woman’s staff was already clicking away down the corridor when Rhiannon heard, “Walk with me, child.”
The Pyski hesitated, looked around the devastated hospital, and shrugged at Caoin before hurrying after the old woman.
* * *
“Prioress,” Rhiannon called, jogging to catch up. Old as the woman seemed, the abbess of Eamhna moved with a sure brisk efficiency. There was something feline in her movements, a sleek danger that was belied by both the boney, stooped form, and the pleasant gracious manner she presented.
“Oh, stop that now, you’re no Daughter of Cerridwyn and spoke no vows to me. I will call you Rhiannon. You will call me Aphra, and we’ll discuss why you came to hunt my orchard, shall we?”
“I track the Bwgan,” Rhiannon said plainly as she fell into step beside the holy woman. “I have signs pointing to your orchards, and Hervor claims he has been here.”
“He has,” Aphra confirmed with a solemn nod. “Poor creature.” She sighed. “He never stays, the rules chafe harder with some than others, but he comes from time to time.”
“And you allow it?” Rhiannon demanded, her tone growing sharp.
The Prioress stopped and turned, and Rhiannon saw a flash of steel under the surface of her facade.
The Pyski stepped back and bowed her head. “Apologies, but Aphra, he is evil.”
The little woman nodded again. “He is. That is one of the things that he is,” she said with a sad smile and a sigh. “He does no evil here, and, as Sister Hervor would have told you, we here are untouched by the conflicts of the outside. Our charge is to remain apart, to service the interplay of the forces. To be the check.”
“The check on what?” Rhiannon asked. “And how can this charge justify housing the creature that destroyed my people? My home? And began a war that has raged for fifteen years?”
“Our Rule,” Aphra said as patiently and earnestly as a teacher instructing a green novice, “is a check on the tyranny of singularity, whether Light or Dark. Good or Evil. The Daughters of Cerridwyn maintain the Balance. We foster the equilibrium of the forces.”
“How?” Rhiannon asked. “How does a convent full of warrior magicians maintain the balance?”
“We are even now going to the place where I can answer that very question, Raiu Rhiannon.” The old woman promised, “That one and so many more.”
* * *
The altar was a simple tabletop of smoothed and polished stone which held a completely ordinary, unadorned bronze cauldron. The room was not large, but every inch of wall was carved with characters and pictographs in a half-dozen languages that Rhiannon could identify, and a few she’d never seen. High above the three womens’ heads a phalanx of poles held a legion of musty old battle flags and moth-eaten insignia.
“Here is Cerridwyn’s cauldron. Here the mother shows us what has been and what will be. This is how we help to guide the course of life . . .”
Rhiannon was listening carefully to Aphra’s speech, but she was also studying the wall closest to her. Nearly every panel focused on a battle scene centered around an otherwise nondescript form wielding a branch, a silver branch hung with golden apples. “The Silver Maidens,” Rhiannon said after a long silence. “An Ainnir Airgid, Hervor said it twice, and I just didn’t take it in . . .”
A cloud of memories struck Rhiannon all at once, memories of studying ancient accounts in musty libraries, of looking at tapestries depicting the silver-armored legends with their winged helms and long spears. There were other memories, too. Memories of fighting, memories of looking up into the face of a young girl sat atop her horse as she plunged a spear down toward Rhiannon’s guts. Of course, she hadn’t been Rhiannon then, but she felt the spear, and remembered the anger, the betrayal.
“You turned,” Rhiannon grated, glaring at the old woman. She looked up to the banners above and let her eyes close. “Dawn hadn’t broken yet, it was raining again, raining for days. Everything was soaked through. Everyone was miserable. They came over the berm in the night. They must have timed the watch rotations. They went for the sentries first. No alarms were raised. They were among us before we could do anything. We found two score of our dead still wrapped in the blankets at the end. That might have been all of us if not for the scream of some luckless fellow who felt the knife a moment before he died.
“The fighting, it was desperate, savage. Pyski fighting with whatever would come to hand, clawing tooth and nail, but we beat them back. We consolidated a line of defense. The sun was rising, and we could see them massing. So many. We’d been outnumbered since the outset, no one knew where Maeve’s numbers came from, but they seemed inexhaustible. These weren’t the usual Slaugh and Lesser Goblins which formed the largest part of her forces. These were Redcaps. Her elite killers, with their long knives and their blood-drenched beanies, ranks of them. Every Pyski who could still hold a weapon stood ready. Some who couldn’t stand any longer were propped up, spear in hand.”
Rhiannon’s eyes went back to the old woman and she saw Aphra wince.
“I didn’t believe the first blare of the horns. A trick of the ear, I thought. Then the second blast came, and I heard the cheer go up as the first ranks of your cavalry swept onto the field. A miracle! The mysterious Silver Maidens had answered our plea . . .”
“You were at Murias.” The words came from Aphra in a pained whisper.
It wasn’t a question, but Rhiannon stepped toward the old woman angrily and spat. “That’s right. I was. I was there when your ranks swept through the Redcaps like a whirlwind. I cheered our saviors with the rest and gloried in our miracle. And I stood dumbstruck as the mass of cavalry under the silver branch flag wheeled and charged . . . at us. The route at the gates of Murias nearly shattered the Saelig host. Thousands died!”
Aphra’s face was wet, but her back was straight and she didn’t look away from Rhiannon’s blazing gaze. “Our calling is not an easy one,” she said softly.
“Your calling? Your . . .” Rhiannon started in disbelief. “Are you are called to betray? To murder good people by deceit?”
“Sometimes that is our role, yes,” the Prioress said in the low calm voice. “Our allegiance, as I have said, is to the Balance. Before anything else, before our lives, before our families, we serve Order. The Prioress at the time saw, with the help of this Cauldron, that victory for the Saelig Court at Murias would have shifted the balance of power too far in one direction. Equilibrium would have been threatened, and so a hard choice was made.”
“A hard choice?” Rhiannon blared, spittle flying from her red face as her voice filled the tiny stone room. Visions of a carpet of Pyski dead, torn by Redcap knives, dashed apart by goblin maces and pierced by the spears of the silvery cavalry that should have been their salvation played out before her eyes.
“Yes, Guardian,” the old woman said sharply. “A hard choice, an impossible choice, yet one that had to be made. Not for Saelig or Unsaelig, but for existence. I would have made the same choice myself. I would have cried myself sick about it, but I would have done it then, and I have since, countless times. And each time I do so secure in the knowledge that what we do, while incomprehensible to you, is vital for everyone. Have you not made similarly unpalatable choices?”
Rhiannon opened her mouth and closed it again, teeth clicking against each other as Dewi’s scaly crimson face floated before her mind’s eye.
“Those who guarded the Focuses for so long, they spoke of defending Balance, but they . . . you don’t really know what that means. You don’t remember what it looks like when the Balance falters. V
ery few do.” Aphra stepped aside and cleared Rhiannon’s path to the little alter and its bronze cauldron. “Drink. See with the eyes of Eternity and understand.”
She didn’t want to. Didn’t want to see, or to understand. But she did understand, didn’t she? Who knew better than her the weight of duty? The sacrifices that must be made for the good? The kinship she felt with this old priestess twisted at her guts, but she couldn’t deny it, and besides, Cerridwyn’s cauldron could show her something that might help. The last Pyski guardian stepped up to the small stone table, dipped a cup into the cauldron, brought the cold clear liquid inside to her lips, and collapsed in a boneless heap.
Chapter 17
Existence stretched out before Rhiannon. An endless lace curtain river of starlight stretched as far as she could see, a yawning lattice of silver-white brilliance glittering with constant motion. She knew instantly what it was, it was unmistakable. This was the bones and sinews of Reality itself. Here was past, present, and future, laid out for her to inspect and explore. But more . . . here every possible past, present and future flowed together. Probability, reality, possibility, and eventuality knitted seamlessly, forming the warp and weft of a pattern so grand and intricate that the Pyski’s mind tried to skitter away from the weight of it. This was the sight of a Seer.
“See with the eyes of Eternity,” Aphra said to her. Now she did, and it was too much. She saw too much. Lives more numerous than the stars, countless tiny individuals on a seemingly endless tide of worlds dotted throughout a megalithic network of interlocking planes. Life, so much life. It was wonderous and suffocating at the same time. How could she sift through this deluge of image and impression?
Focus! The Bwgan. The mission. Find him. Focus.
The great lacework tapestry shuddered, and Rhiannon had the sensation of being tugged forward. As she grew closer, the myriad of small intricacies and embellishments that made up the larger pattern grew in depth and complexity. From this new vantage, she could see snags where the weaving was jumbled, the threads tangled or knotted. Yet even where it was ugly or confused it flowed into the Working around it and became part of the whole. It reminded her vaguely of a Pyski Warding, though infinitely finer and more delicate than any sigil work she’d ever heard of. There were no Pyski Seers, there never had been, but perhaps those first Pyski Light workers glimpsed some part of this and used it as a template for their own pitifully tiny workings.
Rhiannon reigned herself in harshly and brought herself back to point. She had a purpose. A task. The Bwgan.
Whatever engine drove this seemed to be drawing her toward a single tangled skein of threads. This was him. She could feel him. Every him. She felt the formless power that lived before the Bonding gave him shape and saw every possible version of him that could ever have been, all at once. Every choice and decision spread out before her, and at the end of every one was another Jogah, another Bwgan, another life. She watched his destiny play out a thousand ways at once and found herself stunned. The raw potential was astonishing, but the pain . . . a thousand lives flashed through her simultaneously, and Rhiannon gasped at the sheer darkness that seemed to flow through Jogah’s thread. No wonder . . .
The thought disturbed her. Commiseration of any kind for that monster turned her stomach and yet she shuddered as she thought back on a particularly gruesome scene from one of his lives where Jogah had been torn apart by bucking horses while a black-clad woman behind a veil watched.
Would I be any different? The question troubled her, her doubt troubled her. Yes. I would be different. I would. I wouldn’t be trying to enslave children so that I could use them to . . . to what?
The torrent of knotted light pulsed again, and Rhiannon shot toward a single stitch in the ocean of embroidery. A single moment in a single life.
She saw a frail old man, alone. His heavily lined face etched with an exhausted, long-suffering dread. Eyes wide and unblinking, the emaciated creature trembled as though naked in deep snow. He was terrified to his bones. She felt him, felt his horror. It was old, lived in, so long with him that his dread had become a thing to cling to, something to identify with.
Who are you, old man? She could feel his fear, but the rest, who he was, where, how he’d come to be the ruin she saw, it was all blank, fuzzy, unseeable. What scares you so? And what have you to do with him?
A barrage of images assaulted her: a boy laughing, running through fields flanked by a pair of puppies; that same boy crying, huddled in on himself and surrounded by monstrous looking shadow forms; a cold room full of sharp tools and prodding, a place where cold-eyed men took away something vital, but didn’t take the fear. And she saw Bwgan, both the monstrous scarred thing he was now and the Pyski he’d been before. He floated around this human like an aura, and Rhiannon didn’t understand it. How did this wreck of a human know her quarry? Why was he important?
Her view shifted again. She saw a mountain covered in ice and wreathed by an ethereal blue fire. It was a place she knew, a place that she somehow understood was simultaneously important and had never existed at all. At the highest peak of the strange prominence she could see a dot of color, just a flicker against the stark white that dominated the scene, a pinprick of crimson.
What is that? She squinted. Was that a person?
The entire scene was washed in a blinding glare as a shockwave of brilliant azure light exploded outward from the mountain top, or perhaps from the red-clad figure. Rhiannon’s consciousness reared back from that cerulean tempest, but she couldn’t escape it. The Pyski watched in horror as a sapphire wildfire rolled along the lacework river of existence, eating hungrily, demolishing worlds in a flash, unmaking universes in the blink of an eye. This was real, this had happened, she knew it. Reality itself had been destroyed, utterly unmade and then formed anew somehow.
This is it. This is what he wants. He wants to unmake it. Everything.
Rhiannon shuddered at the thought. It was madness, it couldn’t possibly be done, and yet she was sure. This was what it was all for. The Bwgan meant to unmake existence, not just in Aos Si, or on the human plane, but everywhere. He wasn’t Maeve or the pathetic warring Spriggans of the various Dark Courts, he didn’t want to rule. He wanted to destroy. To burn it all down.
The Seer’s sight showed her images of the Bwgan’s pasty, elongated form hunched over texts in dim vaults, of his eyeless egg of a face leaning in close to study wind-blasted inscriptions on the sides of monoliths buried under desert sands and lost in wild jungles, a journey of long years, a dogged search.
But for what?
She saw his emaciated, shadow-wrapped form standing in rubble, surrounded by wreckage, and she gasped. She knew that place, knew it better than she knew the face that she was often surprised to see looking back in the glass. The Central Archive at Aos Si. The repository of all Pyski knowledge.
We assumed it was spite. That the attack was an expression of mad rage, calculated simply to inflict damage, to hurt us as badly as possible. If it wasn’t that . . . He was LOOKING for something!
A host of shadow things rolled over the Archive like hungry ants ravaging and destroying everything in their path, but their master moved with careful deliberation. Whatever he’d come for he knew where to find it. She knew the section he stopped in, or parts of her did. Shy little Lillian had known it best. How much of her long life had the awkward bookish historian spent cloistered there?
Rhiannon pushed the memories back, she couldn’t be distracted now. It made no sense. The section the Bwgan seemed most interested in was mundane in the extreme: the administrative records of the city, minutes of the various Courts, invoices and tallies of supplies, reports and records of various city functionaries from the porter in charge of vegetable production in the outer fields, to the highest Elders of the Court. What could he want there? Codicies, tablets, scrolls, the Bwgan tore through piles of them, littering them all about him as he searched for the one he needed; ancient manuscripts were discarded over his shoulder like ru
bbish, and Rhiannon felt her blood rising. Probably Lillian’s influence on her.
The shadow king stopped, his long, talon-like fingers caressing the cover of a wooden box which held a collection of bound pages.
“Finally.” The sibilant rasp of his voice would have brought gooseflesh if she had form in the vision. The lanky figure bent over his treasure, rifling through the pages excitedly. “It’s here! It’s here . . .” he muttered to himself as pages flew in all directions. The flurry of activity stopped suddenly and the Bwgan sat as though frozen, staring at something in his lap. “Yes . . . I . . . yes!” He snatched the page and exploded to his feet, the document case falling to the floor, forgotten as he hurried from the broken vault.
Rhiannon tried to keep her focus on the room, she needed to see that box, she needed to know, but the vision pulled her along like a riptide.
The Bwgan, seated in a dank dark crypt of a room. Not a cave, the walls were rounded and made of dressed stone. A rotunda? A tower? A wind screamed somewhere close and papers rustled, a lot of papers. The Bwgan sat before a low, wide table, distractedly tapping a boney digit on the tabletop as he scrawled messy notation with a quill in his other hand.
The room was cluttered with things, shelves and books and devices, some of which Rhiannon knew and some which she thought must have been inventions of the creature’s own—a kind of laboratory. The dark part of her soul that she recognized as Maeve surged with interest, especially when Rhiannon beheld the clutter of pages and notes arranged on the table. Alchemical formulae, glyph chains, sigil clouds and hundreds of hastily scrawled notations all gathered in a complex arrangement that pricked at the Pyski’s memory. No practitioner of any form of the power could have failed to recognize it. It was a Making, a spell meant to manifest . . . something. The configuration slipshod and alien. It seemed cobbled together from a hundred sources, and it was incomplete. There was a hole in the computations, a spot where the bare, scarred wood of the tabletop glared through the litter of paper, hide, and tablets in stone and wax.