by Adam Golden
As she watched, the Bwgan pulled a brace of crumpled pages from beneath the tattered mantle of moldy black cloth that covered him and set to smoothing them out with a long skeletal hand. “This will work,” he muttered as he placed the sheets in the empty place among his jumbled creation. “This time it will work.”
Rhiannon forced her perspective to change and found herself peeking over the monster’s shoulder. The vantage provided her a much clearer view of the Making, but gifted sorceress that she was, Rhiannon knew this to be wildly outside her depth. A dozen of the greatest Pyski sorcerers of the modern age had combined their skills and knowledge in her, and she was at a loss. It was just so alien.
As the Bwgan muttered to himself, shifting pages this way and that, making hasty notations, the Pyski female noticed something beneath the collection of notes. There was a tattered bit of canvas pinned to the tabletop in its center. She thought it might have been a painting, or part of one. The edges were frayed and uneven, as though it had been cut from a larger work. It was old, the colors all but leached away entirely, but she thought it showed a man, a tall, bearded man enshrouded in a cloak and holding a book. The cloak hid his features, and the image was too poor to make out the book, or much of anything save for a fringe of fur around the hood and the slightest hint of red. The cloak was red.
Crimson, like the speck on the mountain.
Was this an image of the source of the existence-ending cataclysm?
The scratching of the quill ceased, and the Bwgan straightened, lifting his chin to sniff at the air like a beast. He set down his implement and turned slowly. “I feel you, like an itch on my skin. Is that you, little monster?”
Rhiannon froze, though she knew herself to be invisible, and she hoped, invulnerable. How could he know? How could he be so strong? So practiced? The urge to flee was strong but she couldn’t, she needed to know what he’d taken from the Archive. What was it? How did it fit in with the rest of . . . whatever this was?
“Found yourself a pet Seer, have you?” the Bwgan asked, his voice heavy with disdain. “What have you learned, I wonder? No matter, it won’t be enough. The only way to stop me is to kill me, and you can’t seem to manage that, can you?”
The harsh bark of the shadow king’s laughter made Rhiannon want to throw herself at him, rip into him with teeth and claws she didn’t have. It also made her want to run, far and fast, run from the madness of it. She tried to shift herself. She could almost make out the pages if she could change her viewpoint just a bit more. They were blurry, she couldn’t quite make them out. It looked like some sort of experimentation log, notes for some sort of trial . . . There was a scrawl at the bottom of the pages, a messing, looping jumble of script that could only be a signature.
Lar . . . Largon? Or . . . Lairgnen!
Recognition hit her like a blow, it must have boiled up from the part of her that was Gawan. The Master Meddyg couldn’t help but know one of his most famous predecessors. Lairgnen had been Master Meddyg during the most bitter years of the Rending Wars, a genius of healing magic. What could the Bwgan want with . . . ?
Something scraped softly against the stone behind Rhiannon, and the Pyski’s incorporeal self spun. She’d thought the room empty, but it seemed the Bwgan wasn’t alone at his work. There was a form huddled in the gloom against the wall. A prisoner? Why would he keep prisoners here, with his precious experiment?
Test subject?
Rhiannon shuddered. She tried to move closer, but something resisted, something strong. The Pyski pushed harder, and whatever the block was it gave way slightly. The figure looked human, the proportions were right for a human adult anyway. The prisoner grew more agitated, hands and feet scrambling on the stone as he tried to push himself closer and closer to the wall, as though trying to climb through it. Rhiannon came closer and the huddled prisoner froze like a startled animal. Its head came up and Rhiannon recognized him. The old man from the other vision. He was with the Bwgan? Why? Those wide, senseless, terrified eyes locked on the place where Rhiannon’s formless essence hung.
The old man’s slack toothless mouth worked silently, lips slapping wetly for a moment and then they parted, and a piercing shriek rang through the little room.
The Bwgan bounded forward, setting himself in front of his prisoner possessively. “Leave him!” the beast roared, displaying that wide maw of jagged sharp teeth. “LEAVE!”
A wave of something struck Rhiannon’s immaterial form hard and sent her spinning away from the room.
The last Guardian skittered along the tapestry of eternity like a skipped stone. Visions came in a disjointed, confused rush; a massive tree whose titanic-spreading branches blocked out the sun, the silver bough banner of the Maidens, torn and trampled, a dark-haired woman running down a dim corridor, a man chained around the neck like a dog and clutching at his shoulder, and Rhiannon herself, her face streaming tears and her right arm wet with blood from her elbow to the fist that clutched a sword made of a strange lusterless metal. The images all felt of pain, of horror and anger and sorrow, but there was hope buried deep. Just a touch, a single grain of a chance.
* * *
The Pyski came awake with a gasping wail and bolted upright, panting. “I saw . . . I saw . . .” Aphra and Caoin were both around her, looking startled and worried. How long had she been away? “I saw him . . . saw the plan . . . monstrous.” She couldn’t seem to pull enough air, couldn’t slow herself. Aphra was petting her arm gently, trying to say something, but Rhiannon trampled over her words turning, wide, almost crazed eyes on her urgently. “The tree . . . the silver branch . . . the sword . . . I think I found it. I think I know how I can kill him.”
Chapter 18
“I dunnae know if he can be killed, lass,” Caoin said, hovering close and looking into Rhiannon’s eyes with that strange motherly concern the ghost often affected. “Are ye sure ye’re alright? Ye look as though ye’d been dragged behind a horse.”
“I feel as though I’ve been through a mangle,” the Pyski said, though she bounded to her feet easily enough. “Caoin, stop fussing.” She slapped at the Banshee’s ephemeral hands as they roamed her, checking for injuries. “I found it. I know what he’s doing, and I think I know how to stop him.”
“Aye an’ I heard ye,” the ghost replied in the infuriatingly patient voice of a parent speaking to a particularly careless child. “But ye’ve rushed off more ‘an once before—”
“You spoke of a silver branch,” Aphra said, cutting in. “Was it that?” She pointed to the battle flag of the Maidens hanging above them. The black silk pennant was bordered in silver knotwork, inscribed in its center with a gnarled bough picked out in silver thread, and hung with golden apples. “Are my sisters to play a role?” Something in the Prioress’s manner seemed strange, more diffident than before, more reserved.
She knows something. Rhiannon might not know the old woman well, but she knew people. She knew when they were lying and when they were hiding something, and the Prioress of Cerridwyn was keeping something close.
“I saw the banner,” the Pyski said slowly, unsure how much to tell before she knew this woman’s motivations. “It was torn, trampled as though it had been dropped. The branch I saw wasn’t that though, not an image. It was real, an actual physical object, but I cannot really describe it. It seemed in flux somehow . . . I saw no apples. I saw the branch, the sword . . . and the blood.”
“And the sword?” Aphra asked. “What can you tell me about that? Was it bright? A thing of brilliance? Like your Light?”
Rhiannon rubbed at a pain behind her eyes and stretched her back. “No. It was metal, probably steel, plain looking, without any embellishments that I could see, but well made. A warrior’s sword, definitely not a construct of the Light. If anything, it seemed . . . dull, not dark exactly but without the shine one expects from a finished blade.”
The old woman turned to look at her young attendant, who until this point had been so silent and unmoving that Rhiannon had fo
rgotten her presence. “Airmed, go to the Annals and bring Donella’s Forecasts. We will await you in my study.”
The girl held her place. “Forgive me, Prioress, but—” Her tone and manner were as meek and subservient as one would expect from a novice addressing her superior, but there was something strange underneath them. Something in the girl’s baring tickled at Rhiannon’s senses. So many undercurrents here. There always were where people gathered, perhaps she’d just been alone so long that the normal foibles of interaction seemed like more . . . or perhaps not.
“We will speak later child,” Aphra said, cutting off the younger girl. “Donella’s Forecasts, please.”
The girl, Airmed, held her place a moment longer and then finally turned and left the room.
Rhiannon looked to Caoin and the Banshee nodded slightly. The ghost could all but read her mind in moments such as these and understood that Rhiannon wanted to know more about this Airmed.
“Please,” Aphra said. “Let us retire to somewhere more comfortable. My old bones need a chair.” And you don’t want any passing Maiden to hear what’s about to be said, Rhiannon added to herself as she followed the old woman out of the little chapel.
Caoin lagged as the two women headed up the corridor and, before they made the first turn, the Banshee was gone.
* * *
“There is a legend among our order,” Aphra said once the two women were seated by the small hearth that warmed the cozy little study. “A prophecy delivered by one of our earliest Seers.”
“Donella,” Rhiannon guessed.
The old woman nodded. “Just so. Since she spoke the words some eight hundred years ago, it has remained one of the most studied, most debated prophecies in our collection, due to both its content and the complexity of deciphering it.” The old woman must have been able to see Rhiannon’s confusion.
“The gift of the Seer is a difficult one to bare, Guardian,” Aphra explained. “Donella, like myself and most of the Order’s Seers, was human. Like so many humans, she was utterly unprepared to deal with her gift when it manifested. Many of us don’t survive, many go mad. Some say we all do, though thankfully the degree varies. In Donella’s case the madness was quite severe. The records say she was given to violent outbursts, speaking in tongues, even self-mutilation. Several of her predictions were found scrawled on the walls of her cell in her own blood or fecal matter . . .”
“And you trust the tellings of this lunatic?” Rhiannon asked, appalled.
Aphra smiled indulgently and took a sip from the glass of dark coloured liquid she’d fetched for both of them before they sat. “In the centuries since her death, dozens of Donella’s visions have been verified, and scores more are thought to have occurred in one form or another. She remains, even centuries later, one of our most prolific and accurate readers of fate.”
“Alright then,” Rhiannon conceded. “Tell me about this prophecy you think concerns me.”
“In time, Airmed will bring it,” Aphra said. “You said you knew what the Bwgan had planned, what he meant to do. Can you share with me?”
“I think he means to end existence,” Rhiannon said, deciding to speak plainly. “All of it. Everywhere.”
The Prioress froze, her glass halfway to her lips, and Rhiannon saw the hand that held it tremble slightly. “That is,” she cleared her throat, “um . . . surely such a thing is impossible?”
“I don’t think so,” said Rhiannon, putting her untouched glass down on the delicate little table beside her chair and sliding forward in her seat. “And I don’t think you think so either.” The Pyski gave the old woman a challenging glare. “You’ve drunk from that cauldron many times, you must have seen it. The mountain of ice? The blue fire consuming the pattern? Is that what it means? Could he do it?”
Aphra set her glass down on her own chair’s side table and sighed. She turned and looked into the flames of the little fire as though trying to divine some truth from them.
“Aphra,” Rhiannon urged.
“I have seen it,” the old woman said after a moment. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and let out a long sighing breath. “We all see it eventually. The End That Never Was. Some see it in more detail than others. Some get only vague glimpses like the ones you describe, others . . . well, suffice it to say that the end of all things entails a great deal of suffering. As for whether or not the Bwgan could repeat that horror, I don’t know.”
Rhiannon opened her mouth to say something, and the old woman’s face hardened. “I don’t know,” she repeated harshly. “We see only snatches. We know enough to know that it happened, that it was real. From what we can gather, a thousand years ago or so Reality unravelled, the Great Pattern was ended . . . and then it wasn’t. It was remade, repatched. I’ve walked the flow of it many times. I’ve seen the welds, the cracks. We don’t understand it any better than you. No Seer I’ve ever heard of has seen the how of it, and no sorcerer I’ve known could imagine a power capable of such an act. Do you know of any?”
Rhiannon didn’t. Power on that scale was nearly inconceivable. Every Pyski still animate couldn’t wield enough Light to . . . there might not BE enough Light in the Aether for such a working. Is there enough Dark? She didn’t know, and the thought chilled her blood.
Rhiannon pushed herself up out of the chair and paced an anxious line before the little fireplace. She stopped and whirled back toward Aphra. “You have to help me with this, now.”
“We do not—” the Prioress started.
Rhiannon chopped the air with a frustrated blow. “For eight hundred years you’ve balanced the scales, so you say. You’ve done that to maintain the flow, to protect everything, to stop this from happening. We’re talking about the tipping over of everything. The Bwgan will destroy the Balance, and you will be the Prioress who failed in your office’s sacred duty. Centuries of struggle, death, and all of those impossible choices you told me about, it will have been for nothing.”
The old woman reared back in her chair as though Rhiannon had struck her. The Guardian supposed she had, and she felt the guilt of that act add itself to the weight of sin she carried already. She needed this woman, needed her understanding, her resources and her help. Existence was at stake now, and that justified anything, didn’t it?
“What do you need of me?” Aphra asked, straightening in her chair, a mask of stony resolve firmly fixed. “I won’t ask you to fight him. That task is mine,” Rhiannon told her. “But you have practitioners here, scholars. I need to understand. We think we know the final goal, but how? How is he going to do it? I need you and your most capable sorceresses to dig into your annals, plumb your knowledge and experience. We think he’s using the teeth of Focus children, for something which relates to the work of a Pyski Meddyg named Lairgnen. Those things are key, but I need to know more. And I need to know about the sword. What does it do? How do I get it? Will it kill him?”
Aphra stood from her chair and moved across the room and around her writing table. “It will,” she said after a moment. “If the sword you saw is what I believe it is, it will be quite deadly to anything that lives. Man, Fae, or God.” The old Prioress placed her hands on the high back of the chair behind her desk, and Rhiannon noticed that the place where a seated woman would rest her head was worked with a carving of the Silver Bough emblem of the order.
“Long before the first pattern ended,” Aphra said in what Rhiannon was coming to recognize as her lecturing tone, “before whatever remade it, the ancient ancestors of the Fae formed some of the most potent magics in existence. They saw themselves as stewards, caretakers of Reality. They fostered it, cared for it as gardeners tend their plants. The greatest of their works was the Crann Bethadh.”
“The tree of life?” Rhiannon asked doubtfully. She knew the myths and dismissed them as just that. Just as I did the Tuatha De.
The old woman nodded. “It was a Focus. The first Focus. A hub of possibility,” she said, and the Pyski froze.
A Focus? Someone made a Focu
s?
“The roots and branches of the Great Tree twined themselves into the Pattern itself, creating, promoting growth, enriching the weaving. But a Focus is a dangerous thing,” the old woman said with a shake of her head. “As your people learned much later. So much power creates ambition, it breeds descent and division, even among beings as powerful and wise as the Tuatha De. A cabal formed among them, led by their King, Nuada. The Fae king wanted to harness the power of the Tree, to create and destroy, not according to the needs of the Pattern, but according to his own will. He found many supporters for his quest among the Tuatha, but not all. Some, our patron Cerridwyn among them, resisted, they wanted the Tree left to do its work unmolested. The fighting, when it came, was bitter, but eventually those resisting the tyrant cabal managed a great coupe. They hid it.”
Rhiannon waited, and the silence stretched. There was a glint in Aphra’s eye as she spoke. She wanted her audience to ask, and so Rhiannon asked, “They hid . . . what? The Tree? They hid a tree whose roots permeate . . . everything?”
The Prioress nodded, a smile curling her thin lips. “The legends say that they ‘pushed it beneath the pattern.’ Whatever that means. But the records indicate the would-be tyrants were thwarted. They searched endlessly, but no trace of the Focus was ever found. Eventually their struggle ended, the Tuatha De faded from our awareness, and the Pattern went on.”
The Pyski Guardian opened her mouth impatiently, but Aphra waved her down gently. “Centuries later,” she continued, “a hundred years or so after the Remaking, a stranger came to Eamhna. She just appeared one day, battered, bloody and only just clinging to life. There was a small community here, simple farmers who tended the apple trees for their sustenance. A woman and her young daughter took the wounded stranger in and tended to her. She told them a danger would come, a danger to all of us, everywhere. She said that Order was to be protected, nourished. She said that the Pattern needed stewards again, and she showed them—”