Fairy Dark

by Adam Golden

  “The guards will be close behind,” she said in a grating whisper. “I eluded them for the moment, but they will not be fooled for long.”

  “What . . . ? Rhiannon groaned “How? I thought . . . ?”

  “You thought that because I neither like nor trust you I must be a part of . . . this?” the roughhewn warrior woman asked acidly as she waved to indicate the cavern’s horrors. “The convent is in riots. There is open fighting in the orchards. The Prioress is . . .”

  “It is not Aphra,” Rhiannon wheezed. “Airmed . . . controlling her . . . did this.”

  The Nordic woman spat something foreign and ugly sounding. “Airmed, yes . . . that one could. She ordered a mobilization. A full-strength assault onto the human plane.”

  “What? Why?” Rhiannon asked, but she thought she understood. “Distraction, she’s emptying the convent.”

  “Why?” Hervor demanded, “and what goes on here? Who are these men?”

  Rhiannon lifted a hand for silence, but the other woman had already gone still, head cocked to the side, listening. Soft footfalls above, moving with stealth and speed.

  “Pull me off!” Rhiannon begged urgently. “Please!”

  Something blazed between Hervor’s hands. The Pyski reared back, throwing an arm over her eyes to shield them.

  “If I remove it,” Hervor said in a rush, “you die. Brace yourself.”

  The words weren’t even out of her mouth entirely before Rhiannon yelped as her support dissolved and she fell forward. The other woman caught her roughly around the middle and guided her to the floor none too gently. Rhiannon’s head spun with the agony of the jostling. She bit down on her lip until she tasted blood.

  No more screaming, no more tears. You’re free. Oh Light but it hurts!

  The northern woman was chanting something under her breath, something low and guttural sounding which made the Pyski’s flesh prickle. A bolt or missile of some kind whistled out of the darkness above and struck something. A shield. Obviously, the imposing sorceress’s Dark-fuelled magic was not as crippled here as the Light had been. There was more than just the shield, something was worming itself into Rhiannon, digging, rooting, coiling around inside her torso.

  “What . . . what are you doing?” the Pyski gasped. She tried to rise, but the large Nordic warrior pushed her roughly back to the ground and held her weakened form there without interrupting her chant.

  More missiles rained down on the shield. Hervor twitched as though struck with every impact, but her spell working went on uninterrupted.

  Something was blooming inside Rhiannon’s battered torso, she could feel it, something warm, soothing and strong. This was like no Dark magic she’d ever heard of. She felt . . . good. There was still pain, a lot of pain, but whatever was being done had pushed it back behind a swell of vitality and power. She felt strong. Very strong.

  “Listen,” Hervor said. “The shield will fail. The galdr was not strong. I needed the strength for your binding.”

  “What did you do?” Rhiannon asked as the other woman released her and she wrenched herself up.

  “Galdr, I sang the runes,” the stern-faced sorceress said, looking ragged. Whatever she’d done had obviously been at personal cost. “Spells of the old Gods of my people. You will be strong, terribly strong, but you must be careful. The runes I combined are volatile. They will make you . . . Ber-serkr.” Hervor cried out and pitched forward. As the Norse woman fell, an iron crossbow bolt struck the floor an inch from Rhiannon’s right thigh. The shield was down.

  Rhiannon moved without time to consider.

  She could see shapes moving among the roots around her. The Straif’s masked guards, and a lot more of them than last time. More bolts whistled out of the dark and a high-pitched squawk of pain made Rhiannon’s head whip around.

  Caoin! An iron quarrel glinted in the pale orange light from the braziers, standing up where the girl’s milk-white thigh was smeared with blood.

  Thick, red, blood. Red.

  The growl rumbled through Rhiannon’s core and burst from her lips as a roar of animal rage; she looked away, but everything she saw seemed washed in that same brilliant crimson hue.

  A javelin whistled down at her from above and the Pyski flowed sideways, dodging the iron tip and snatching the smooth wooden shaft out of the air as she spun and lunged, driving the sharp tip through the throat of the first masked woman to touch the floor.

  As the corpse sagged to the ground, Rhiannon let the weapon slide from her fingers and kicked the fallen Maiden’s sword up into her hand. The power surging through her was intoxicating. She moved with such ease, such strength! The sword sang through the air and struck a second shroud-masked Maiden under her left ear. The blade smashed through bone and sinew, burying itself deep in the woman’s skull, but Rhiannon wrenched it free with an easy twist of her wrist as she leapt, throwing herself at a knot of crossbow-wielding Maidens perched on a root a half-dozen feet from the floor, and halfway across the cavern.

  She landed among them with the force of a catapult stone, smashing two of them to the floor below with strangled screams that ended in sickening crunches. The rest wailed as her sword rose and fell, parting limbs and opening stomachs. She snarled to herself as her face was spattered with hot blood, then turned on her perch and roared a long guttural challenge. The guards shied back, and she grinned a hungry, bloody mouthed grin.

  They held spears or swords before them as if trying to ward her away, even at a distance. The Pyski tasted the blood on her lips and a wave of predatory glee crashed against her mind. She bent and leapt. Where she landed, Maidens died or were mauled. The blade was ripped from her hand as the woman it was buried in jerked away in her final spasm. The maddened Pyski killed the next one with her hands, drove her fist deep into a young ginger-haired woman’s torso and clutched her heart, watching the light fade from her eyes. She crushed throats under booted feet, punctured eyeballs with stiff fingers, and sent women to their deaths with a single, hard-swung fist. She was a whirlwind of murder. A hard-thrust spear stuck her in the right shoulder and Rhiannon batted it aside without noting the wound. She snapped the haft with a casual blow, flipped the broken staff and drove the splinted end into her attacker’s stunned face.

  Glorious! The Freedom! The Power!

  A dozen lay dead around her, a score! A bolt whizzed by her face and the Pyski growled like a threatened animal as she threw herself at the archer. The woman backpedaled madly, heaving her heavy iron-armed crossbow at the running Pyski and struggling to draw the short, heavy leaf-shaped blade from her belt.

  The blade was less than half free of its scabbard when Rhiannon pounced, driving the silver-clad warrior to the ground with her weight. The rushed pleading cries turned into a high gargling shriek as the Pyski sunk her teeth into the young Maiden’s throat. Warm blood filled her mouth, and the animal in Rhiannon surged. Weak hands slapped and scratched at her face but the Pyski took no note. Fingers made strong by years of weapon training tore at the ripped bloody flesh of the girl’s throat like talons.

  Something closed around the Pyski’s throat like an iron manacle yanking her backward off of the kicking, dying Maiden. The clipped guttural cadence of Hervor’s strange language reached Rhiannon’s ears as she flailed, trying to free herself of the ephemeral shackles that held her down.

  “Come back, Huntress,” the Nordic Maiden cried. “Fight the galdr, banish it! Remember yourself!”

  The animal that Rhiannon had become looked around wildly. There, the tall one with the shock of white hair. She was weak, being held up by the nude child with the wounded leg. Her eyes latched onto the blood running down that milk-white thigh. So rich . . .

  What? What am I? She wanted nothing more than to tear that child apart with teeth and claws, to suck the marrow from her bones. Dear Light, I’m a monster. A shiver of disgusted revulsion and quaking dread tore through the Pyski’s body. She gagged, coughed and managed to roll weakly onto her side before a pool of blood, bile, a
nd phlegm surged out of her, spraying the roots on the ground around her.

  “Guardian, look out!” the girl who had been Caoin screamed.

  Rhiannon looked up in time to see the silver arc of a blade flashing down toward her face and, for the first time in her short, violent life, Rhiannon of Aos Si froze. A brilliant flash of light burned away the darkness and an ear-rending metallic wail filled the cavern. A foot of sickle-curved, carefully sharpened saber blade fell impotently onto Rhiannon’s chest. The Pyski warrior stared upward dumbly, unable to make sense of what she was seeing.

  Standing in front of her prone form was a tall, broad-shouldered man in a casual guard position, bearing a blade carved of pure luminescence.

  The Light? Here? How? She blinked away the blazing halos that shone before her eyes and really saw the scene before her. Nuada, King of the Tuatha De, stood over her, guarding her from the masked woman who she’d mistaken for Hervor.

  Chapter 23

  How was he standing? Nuada had been barely strong enough to lift his head—a shrivelled wreck of a man. Hervor’s strange healing must have done for more than just me.

  The masked Maiden seemed at a loss. Rhiannon saw her look from the blazing spike of Light the King held to the broken stub of blade that rose off of the guard in her fist. She was wary, Rhiannon understood. For years she’d stood beside Airmed while she tortured this powerful Fae, and now here he stood, seemingly restored. It would have given her pause as well. As though she heard the thought, the masked Maiden stiffened and threw the wreckage of her sword hard at the Tuatha king’s face. The brilliant light sword came up in a fluid guard and a lump of seared steel landed at Nuada’s feet.

  The Maiden moved like a viper. Before the wreckage of her sword had even landed, she lunged with a long thin dagger taken from somewhere Rhiannon didn’t see. Nuada took a step back and his left foot came down on Rhiannon’s arm. The Pyski cried out, not in pain, but in alarm for what her fighting sense told her must come next. It played out before her mental eye a second before she saw it in the real world.

  With his footing upset, Nuada faltered. He tried to recover, laying about him with his terrible weapon, but his opponent expected it. She danced around the clumsy strikes and lunged with her narrow needle-pointed dagger again and again. The needle-sharp point scored and scratched in a dozen places, but the Fae king seemed not to notice the wounds until a final hard thrust penetrated his left bicep.

  Rhiannon saw alarm in the man’s eyes as the light sword wavered, its point dropped, and then the weapon slipped from the grip of his dead arm. The transition to his good right hand was as fast and fluid a movement the Pyski had ever seen, but his opponent was quick to capitalize. She kicked out with a vicious blow to the battered king’s right knee. The lord of the First Fae toppled with a frustrated squawk.

  Instead of vanishing as a blade made of Pyski Light would, Nuada’s strange sword landed with a crystalline tink and slid, coming to a stop at the masked Maiden’s feet.

  Rhiannon was halfway back to her feet when she saw the tall killer bending to collect the remarkable weapon. She tensed to throw herself at the woman and cried out in surprise when Hervor’s powerful frame streaked through the air and collided with the other woman. The two went to the ground in a clawing, pounding tangle of fists and feet. Both women were skilled fighters, but Hervor had the better of her opponent from the start. Fists and elbows landed in flurries that visibly shook the masked Maiden.

  Airmed’s assassin managed to wriggle free of Hervor’s hold and scrambled to her feet. Hervor came to her feet easily and rolled her head side to side, cracking her neck as she shook out her limbs. Rhiannon judged their postures and found herself smiling grimly. The masked woman was uncertain, intimidated. She knew Hervor was the better fighter and that knowledge only increased the northern woman’s advantage.

  “Honorless filth!” Hervor spat. “You betray everything. You risk everything!” she bellowed, springing toward the other woman. The masked Maiden dove for Nuada’s shining sword, rolled, and came up with the singular weapon before her in a two-handed grip.

  “Time to die, bitch!” the masked woman grated in a strained rasping voice.

  Rhiannon winced as the woman attacked. It was possible to defeat an armed opponent with your bare hands, if you were skilled and lucky, but that was against mundane weapons. Against that blade? The Pyski recalled how effortlessly it had sheared through the root that held her; even a nick from that blade would be devastating. Rhiannon’s fighting sense calculated and recalculated every move, every twitch and glance of both fighters, and she didn’t like the conclusions that she kept arriving at. The masked woman was too good.

  The Pyski waited until the sword wielding Maiden turned aside and slid forward a single step. Sharp bites into her forearm made her wince and look back. The girl clutched at Rhiannon’s forearm with both hands. The Guardian looked down into the girl’s pleading, terrified eyes.

  And who wouldn’t be scared? Thrust into this madness, not even knowing who she is?

  The Pyski looked between the fighters and the girl anxiously and sighed, patting the girl’s hand reassuringly and stepping back beside her, for now at least.

  The Maiden’s first cuts were sloppy, lazy things. The sword made her overconfident. Rhiannon could all but feel the triumphant smirk on her hidden face as Hervor backpedaled, trying to make space to maneuver around the deadly spike of light being thrust at her. Hervor flowed around an over-extended cut and lashed out with a hard kick to the side of her attacker’s left knee. The woman staggered, slashing desperately with her weapon to keep Hervor at bay.

  “Hervor!”

  Rhiannon jumped to hear the girl beside her call out—she was so intent on the contest between the two Maidens she’d forgotten the former banshee’s presence. The girl was bouncing on her toes, frantically pointing at a jumble of bloody corpses in the ground. Some of Rhiannon’s own victims. On the ground near one of the bodies was a discarded and still unbroken spear.

  Hervor dove, rolled, and caught the haft of the weapon as she came back to her feet. Rhiannon exhaled with relief and put her hand on the nude girl’s slim shoulder. That would even the contest somewhat, at least. The longer weapon let the Norse Maiden dictate the flow of the contest, jabbing at her advancing enemy with the leaf-shaped head to keep her back.

  At the same time Hervor was careful to keep her weapon clear of her enemy’s weapon lest she lose her advantage. Hervor’s movements took on a sinuous, circuitous flow, almost as though she were dancing with the spear. Rhiannon hadn’t seen the technique before, but she appreciated how difficult it would make things for the other woman. Each time the masked Maiden tried to engage, Hervor flowed sideways, pirouetted around a thrust or ducking under a slash. She ignored obvious chances to counter-attack and opted to use the superior reach of the spear to keep the light sword at bay instead. And her tactics were making the other woman increasingly sloppy.

  Rhiannon could see the frustration in the woman’s stance, in the rapid succession of cuts and thrusts. She wanted to end it but couldn’t make contact. She thrust and Hervor spun around behind her, cracking her hard across the buttocks with the haft of her spear. The other woman whirled and slashed, and Hervor jumped back and lashed out with a lightning-fast thrust that her opponent had to dive away from in the last second.

  A visceral cry of rage boomed through the cavern, and the masked Maiden charged at Hervor with her weapon extended like a lance. The white-haired Maiden side-stepped the charge, took the spear in near the bottom of the haft and swung the thick ash pole with both hands. The age-hardened wood splintered across the other woman’s shoulders and the light sword fell from limp fingers as the masked maiden hit the ground in a writhing heap. Hervor bent to recover the mystical sword and stared fawningly at the weapon.

  “Like a finger of the War God Himself,” she breathed. “Tyrfing.” She spun the blade in her hand lazily as she advanced toward the prone maiden, who was trying, unsuccess
fully, to drag herself away.

  “How?” Hervor demanded. “How could you? How . . . ?”

  The Norse woman drove her booted foot into her victim’s side.

  “You bring shame to the Order, you dishonor the Charge.” Hervor bent, gripped the other woman by the back of her jerkin and flipped her onto her back.

  The masked one’s boots scraped on roots as she tried to pull back. Her body convulsed and Hervor sagged and then staggered backward.

  Rhiannon tensed and made to move forward, but the big warrior woman straightened woodenly, lifted the blazing sword in one hand and drove the lightning blade down into the fallen woman’s masked face. Hervor staggered, trying to lean on the sword for support, but the god-wrought blade slid into the rock and root as easily as it had through the masked Maiden and offered no support. Hervor cashed to the ground in a heap, but the weapon only sank into the stone.

  The girl cried out, and both she and Rhiannon rushed to the Maiden’s side. A froth of bloody bubbles covered her lips and chin, and her right hand cupped the knife that jutted out from under her left breast.

  Punctured lung, quickly deflating. Blood filling the thoracic cavity. Rhiannon looked about herself helplessly. There was nothing here, not even a proper bandage. Not that it would do any good. She knew a hundred uses of the Power that would mend wounds of this type, Master Meddyg Gawan’s memories screamed them at her, but without the Light . . .

  Hervor coughed. “In my cloak . . .”

  Rhiannon moved aside the worn and shoddy looking brown farm cloak the Maiden was draped in and found a slim packet of vellum pages, torn, hastily folded and jammed into a pocket.

  “I took this from the Prioress’s study before I was forced to flee.” Hervor wheezed. “Aphra . . . Airmed I suppose, she scattered the women working on these. Several are under guard.”

  Rhiannon unfolded the hasty packet and read, smoothing out the worst of the creases and wrinkles with her flat palms. “Lairgnen.” She gasped, reading. “This is an entry from a biography . . .” The Pyski scanned the page excitedly, eyes widening as she went. “Lairgnen, as much occultist as Meddyg,” she read out loud, “experimented in several opaque areas and fringe disciplines, including an exploration of the primeval realms beyond the common Planes, which he dubbed ‘the Carmot Protocol.’”