Fairy Dark

by Adam Golden

  They were braziers, and the standing iron baskets of burning coals threw enough light to let Rhiannon see the slightly stooped form of Cerridwyn’s chief seer. The light was bad, her wits were frazzled, and her eyes were blurred with tears that wouldn’t stop coming, but she could make out others as well. There was Airmed, tall and pale, one step behind Aphra. Arranged behind her were a series of gray blurs which had to be the masked fighters from the well. Who were the prisoners? Four? Five? She wasn’t sure. Most were impaled, but she thought one was enclosed, wrapped tightly in thick overlapping tangles of root.

  “You shouldn’t have chased your ghost here,” Aphra said, shaking her head regretfully.

  Rhiannon’s root slowed its snaking course downward until she hung before the priestess, limp, still feet from the floor.

  “You should have let us lead you on the merry little chase we’d planned.” The old woman sighed, like a kindly grandmother lightly scolding a dense child. “It would have ended the same way of course, but you would have had weeks, maybe months of chasing nonsensical blatherings and opaque quatrains that led nowhere before that. If only you could have followed the plan.” She clicked her tongue and sighed. Something was wrong. It was in the way she spoke, it snagged in Rhiannon’s ear, a subtle mockery to her tone and the beginnings of a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. “It would have hurt less, perhaps.”

  Rhiannon was only just listening to the woman. Caoin! Rhiannon looked about her, careful not to jerk too quickly or turn too far. Looking for sign of her friend. “Even now the protector,” the Prioress sneered. “Ever the hero. It’s admirable, but predictable, it makes you easy to herd.” She stepped up closer to where Rhiannon hung.

  “Why?” Rhiannon croaked. “Why would you . . . ? The Bwgan . . . the Balance . . .”

  “Don’t you bleat at me about Balance!” the old woman snapped. “You have no idea what you’re snivelling about. You see the barest shade of existence and imagine yourself to be the axis around which infinity spins. I have shaped and tended millennia, the pattern flows according to the path I set it. I have no fear of your scaremongering. The Balance holds, The Red Man’s meddling did nothing in the long run to change that. This next will be the same. Greater.”

  The tortured Pyski gaped, stunned by the casual dismissal of a threat to the very the fabric of existence. Greater? There definitely was something wrong here. Something didn’t fit, but she couldn’t see it clearly. Details. Look closely, find the outliers. Every anomaly leaves evidence. The thought came in her voice, but she recognized the thinking as Niamh’s, and Rhiannon rallied just a little. She was not just herself. She was all of them—the Last Grand Court of the Pyski personified. She could endure. It was Aphra, the old woman was wrong. Rhiannon may not have known her long, but this personality, this arrogant disdain, didn’t fit with the woman she’d met. It fit more with . . . Rhiannon’s eyes swung to the only other free person in the chamber. Airmed. The words Aphra spoke sounded much more like the disagreeable curator. Petty, hotheaded, spiteful. Yes. She new she was right the moment the thought dawned.

  “What did he promise you, Airmed?” Rhiannon asked. “To betray your order, your sisters, and your oath? What did the Bwgan offer?”

  Airmed shivered as though a stiff cold wind had blown down her spine and blinked hard as though waking. At the same time, Aphra’s face went slack, her eyes vacant as a doll’s, and she slid from her feet to the floor as though boneless and lay in a motionless heap.

  Possession.

  Rhiannon gaped at the slight-boned girl with a mixture of shock and revulsion. Possession hexes were old magic, blood and bone magic. It took strength and skill to use an incantation like that. It took something else too, a viciousness. Workings like that one were, by their nature, destructive. They worked on their subjects like slow-eating acid, burning holes into a being in order to make room for the alien influence to slide into place.

  “I betrayed no one, I do what I must to serve an Oath far older and more sacred,” Airmed said coolly as she stepped over Aphra’s slack corpse. “I have no sisters. No family. No people. Only me.” She looked down at the Prioress and let a glob of spit slide from between her lips to land wetly on the old woman’s staring face. “Do not think to judge me. This one would not have needed to be taken if not for you. I worked beneath their noses for years before you came, studying, planning, and finally executing a plan longer in design than you can imagine. Your arrival had people watching where none were looking before. You cannot fathom what I am, what’s been done to me, or what I’ve had to do to earn my justice.”

  Rhiannon’s root jerked into movement again as the pale novice turned and started walking toward the other prisoners skewered on roots of their own. This time when Rhiannon came to a halt, she was able to put her feet down on the ground. Her legs were weak and shaking but the relief whooshed out of her. The pain was still blinding, but she could push it back some now.

  “Your monster offered me that which hypocrites laud, but only real strength can deliver,” Airmed said as she turned to look at the Pyski again. “Justice.”

  Rhiannon felt a shock of dread at the wild fury in Airmed’s eyes as she said the word. I have to find him, Dewi. She remembered saying. I won’t let you, or anything else, stand in the way of that . . . Did I look like that to him? Oh Light, did I?

  The other prisoners’ roots were moving. A flick of Airmed’s long pale fingers dismissed a bubble of silence around the trapped figures, and the cavern was filled with a terrible harmony of screaming and wailing that made Rhiannon want to howl. The screams were every bit as agonizing as her own, every bit as awful, but stale somehow. More lived in. These men had suffered a long time. Every one of them was naked and each showed signs of long torture: scars, punctures, bruises, missing fingers and toes.

  She’s taking them apart, a bit at a time. Why?

  “Who . . . ?” Rhiannon gasped around the stake through her lungs. “Why, you risk Reality . . . for this?” The Pyski slumped, winced and drew herself up again, panting. It was too hard, it hurt too much to speak.

  “What would you risk?” Airmed demanded, shouting over the screams of her victims. “What would you sacrifice to achieve your mission? What if everything you loved had been taken? Destroyed? What would you do, Guardian?” she hurled the word at Rhiannon and the Pyski started as though slapped.

  I won’t let you, or anything else, stand in the way. The words echoed in her head. She looked up at the raven-haired woman and saw a smug superior smile on her face that made her want to be sick.

  “As I thought,” Airmed said. To her right the root-wrapped form of a hidden fifth victim began to unravel. It was a man, or what was left of one. There were no pieces taken off of this one, but he could hardly be called whole. The figure lying at Airmed’s feet was desiccated, rotting. His skin was thin, yellowed, and torn like old parchment. Clumps of bloody lesions and seeping pustules covered what skin she could see. In some places the flesh was simply gone, rotted away like moth-eaten cloth. His hair might once have been a mane of tawny gold, but now it was reduced to a few grimy patches of silk-thin strands clinging to his scalp.

  He looked up and Rhiannon gasped. Only shattered stubs of teeth remained sticking jaggedly out of his bloody gums, and someone had cleaved his nose from his face, leaving a ragged gaping hole in its place. The damage was atrocious, but Rhiannon’s shock was for his eyes. They were sunken deep into the sockets, ringed around by black bags and a heavy spiderwebbing of deep creases, yet the blazed azure-blue fire took the Pyski’s breath away. The face may have been frozen in a rictus of unknowable anguish, but there was a gravity, a power there, even in this ruined state.

  Airmed kicked something contemptuously and it banged against roots with a faint metallic clink before coming to rest in front of Rhiannon. “Your prize,” her jailor sneered. It was a gauntlet, finely crafted from what little the Pyski could make out but tarnished and worn as though by long ages of neglect. It was dented arou
nd the wrist as though it had been crushed. She didn’t understand, she lifted her eyes back to Airmed, and a peel of derisive laughter filled the root chamber. “Rhiannon, last Guardian of Aos Si, give greetings to Nuada, King of the Tuatha De, Lord of the First Fae, sacker of cities, killer of children, and cowardly thief. Behold his glory and tremble before Nuada Airgitlam.” More bitter laughter rang out and Rhiannon found herself staring at the twisted wretch on the ground before her.

  Nuada . . . ? The primordial Fae tyrant who sought to control the Tree of Life for his own ends . . . This wreckage was that man? Rhiannon looked back from the man to the ruined bit of armor. Airgitlam. “Silver arm?” she croaked. “Nuada Silverarm? You mean?” She looked down at the ruined gauntlet again, and up at Airmed. Could it be? The Silver Bough? That? That battered thing was the last remnant of the mythic Focus of Life? She’d found it only to end up like this?

  Airmed saw the dismay on the punctured Pyski’s face and the cavern rang with her hysterical laughter again.

  Chapter 21

  Airmed lifted Nuada’s head with the toe of her boot. “He found it. Didn’t you?” she asked her victim, wrenching his chin up harshly with her toe. “After endless ages of wandering the planes searching, our hero finally located his prize,” she told Rhiannon. “But there was a problem.” Airmed let the wretched god’s chin drop to the root-strewn floor and moved toward Rhiannon. “You see, Cerridwyn might have been a pompous, self-righteous bitch, but she was no one’s fool. Her so-called Maidens are blind, but they’ve never been weak. So, while he’d found it, Nuada didn’t have the strength to take the Bough. Immortals, however, are patient, crafty things.”

  Airmed moved around behind where Rhiannon couldn’t see her, and the Pyski felt a shiver as though insects were crawling down her back. “I don’t understand . . .” Rhiannon grated. “If your only concern is vengeance . . . why am I . . . ?”

  “Nuada watched,” the demented librarian continued, as though Rhiannon hadn’t spoken. “For years he watched and waited. He recruited among those of the Tuatha De left on the mortal planes. He spent his days trying to convince old fools and naive children that only he could return the glory days to them and then . . .”

  Airmed’s hand closed in Rhiannon’s tawny hair and jerked the Pyski’s head back hard. The stake shifted in Rhiannon’s chest and the Guardian wailed a long warbling scream.

  “You gave him the opportunity he awaited!” Airmed hissed. “That, Rion, is why you are here with us. Your ‘Rending’, your stupid, pointless war, gave him the chance he needed. For the first time in the long ages of its ridiculous charge, the Convent was called to a full muster. Eamhna was all but abandoned.”

  The sallow young woman’s face burned with barely contained fury. Spittle sprayed Rhiannon’s face and the Pyski thought her captor might actually be trying pull her hair out by the roots as she wrenched it around, stirring the root around inside the Pyski’s chest. Rhiannon’s screams filled the cavern again and her vision went dark. For an instant she thought she might finally pass out, but the release of unconsciousness wouldn’t come.

  “So,” Airmed continued once Rhiannon’s screaming had tapered off to a low whimpering, “our intrepid king gathered his court.” Her voice dripped irony as she waved to include the motley collection of Fae hung on her wall. “And slipped past almost non-existent defenses. A single under-strength company of surprised mortal fighters against a party of immortal demi-gods? It was a chance Nuada couldn’t have passed up.” The bitterness rolled off of every syllable of Airmed’s diatribe.

  “There are songs about that day, did you know?” she asked and released the Pyski’s hair.

  Rhiannon shook her head weakly; she couldn’t make herself speak.

  “Oh, that’s a shame!” the demented creature with the face of a child exclaimed. “Bards and minstrels across the Planes tripped all over themselves competing to set the great tale to tune. I’ve heard them all. Ballads of the daring Champion and his brave band of fools, of their epic raid, and how they defied the odds to save us all. There are dozens of them, or there were in ages past.”

  Rhiannon was confused. She didn’t understand what was being said. The pain had unquestionably addled her thoughts, but it was more than that. There was something strange about the narrative, about the words her tormentor used when describing events. The Guardian tried to focus while the girl nattered on in a dangerously light, conversational voice that set Rhiannon’s teeth on edge.

  “. . . I particularly like the parts about how Creidhne here broke open the god-wrought vault,” she said, resting her palm on the wide, muscled chest of a man who must have been monstrously large once, but now his powerful torso ended in ragged tatters of flesh where his lower half had been, and his arms ended in shredded nubs below the elbow. “They’re catchy, good for dancing,” Airmed said, continuing along the line, “though not as stirring as Lugh’s single-handed defense of the antechamber against an entire patrol while his king recovered the prize.”

  Rhiannon’s head came up sharply. Lugh? That wreckage of a man she was standing before . . . could it be . . . ? Lugh? The Pyski gasped. She knew a hundred tales of the famed quasi-deity. Lillian’s memories flooded forward in Rhiannon’s mind. That particular Elder’s memories were almost always about reading or taking notes, dry stuff, but there was passion there as she thought of Lugh. The Pyski historian had made something of an obsession out of studying the Tuatha hero; of course, she’d believed him to be a myth, but she’d still been half in love with him, and spent long decades cataloguing tales of his exploits and adventures. If the giant was really Creidhne . . .

  “Nuada wasn’t a tyrant.” The words leaked out of Rhiannon’s raw throat in a gasp of realization. Airmed turned back to face Rhiannon and the Pyski made herself straighten as much as she could. “He wasn’t some bloody minded despot bent on controlling the Tree’s power, was he?” Every word felt like hot knives in her innards, but she knew she was right. In every tale Lugh was a champion of good and right, a defender, a protector of the innocent. It just didn’t make sense that he would be part of such an enterprise. “They were trying to protect the Crann Bethadh, weren’t they?”

  “They were fools!” Airmed roared. “Idiots caught up in the vainglorious madness of a man who didn’t have the sense to know when he was beaten, or the decency to note the cost.” The girl’s voice broke at the end and she turned back to the Tuatha lining the wall, putting her back to Rhiannon.

  “You told me,” Rhiannon said after a moment, “that you were well-aquatinted with the folly of the self-righteous. You lost someone to Nuada’s quest, didn’t you? Someone you loved? They believed, didn’t they?”

  “He was a child, innocent, naïve, and they used him,” Airmed said. “Used his gullibility . . .”

  “No . . .” The sound came out like a rush of breath, and at first Rhiannon didn’t even recognize it as a word. One of the ruined Tuatha De, a shrivelled old man with a fringe of matted hair and a great tangled beard, had shifted on his spike, raised his grizzled head and gulped for air. Blood bubbled around the root that bisected his left lung and he winced, but the wheezing inhalation as he tried to fill his lungs enough to speak continued. “He . . . insisted . . . tried . . . so hard to convince him . . . to stay.”

  “Liar!” Airmed roared, surging forward and delivering a savage right hook into the emaciated old man’s face. “You needed him, needed his skills. You always did, you old fraud. You coerced him! I know you did! Admit it! What were you without him? What are you now?”

  The old man was weeping, snivelling, there were words, but Rhiannon couldn’t make out all of them. Something twitched in the corner of her eye and Rhiannon turned away from the scene. What was that? There it was again, movement in the dark, among the tangled knots of roots. There was something out there.

  Rhiannon looked back to see if Airmed or her Maiden guards had noticed, but Airmed was screaming at the old man, shaking him violently by his thin shoulders, an
d the masked Maidens watched the spectacle while leaning on their staffs. The tall one with the saber, the one Rhiannon still thought must be Hervor, was a bit more attentive, periodically scanning the darkness around her for anything out of place, but she seemed not to have seen whatever it was that Rhiannon had.

  “Don’t you say his name!” Airmed roared, and the old man screamed as his root shifted violently, twisting itself inside him. “You don’t have the right!” The root shook the old man about like a dog worrying at a scrap of leather, and his wild pitiful screams filled the monstrous cavern.

  Airmed turned back to Rhiannon. She was wild-eyed, panting, her dark hair askew. “The time is coming quickly now,” she said, trying visibly to contain herself. “The last pieces are nearly in place. Soon everything will be made right.”

  The way she said it brought a shiver to Rhiannon that launched new volleys of misery through her battered body. “What . . . what do you mean? I . . . I thought you had your justice?”

  The raven-haired Maiden laughed, a high, piping, half-crazed sound that grated in Rhiannon’s ears like the screech of steel against itself. “This?” Airmed asked with a contemptuous wave of her hand toward the torture chamber. “Petty vengeance? No, my justice is something finer, something grander. Your Bwgan had the seeds but not the vision, or the knowledge. What we’ll make together, however . . .”

  A smile too wide for the girl’s narrow face lit her dark eyes with madness, and Rhiannon shied back, or she would have if she’d been able. Was this what absolute devotion to an end looked like? Is this what she looked like to others?

  Airmed’s cold, clammy hand patted Rhiannon’s cheek gently, almost fondly. “You’ll see. Soon, you’ll see.” Something in her eyes changed as the Pyski watched. They grew far away, glassy, and behind her the vacant corpse of Prioress Aphra stirred. Torturer’s slight girlish form folded and was caught by the tall, saber-wielding Maiden before it hit the ground. The masked woman heaved the much smaller body over her shoulder as Aphra’s stolen hands righted her robes.