Fairy Dark

by Adam Golden

  “Nuada,” the Pyski warrior pressed. “Your Highness . . .”

  “Do it,” the Fae king said, cutting her off.

  The knife bit into his arm at the shoulder, and the primeval Fae barely flinched. Long years as the recipient of his niece’s tender attentions had given Nuada a new perspective on pain. He watched with a mixture of grim fascination and trepidation as the Pyski woman carefully dragged the well-honed blade down toward his elbow and pulled back a flap of flesh.

  “By the Light,” the lass gasped. “Miach made you Nuada Airgitlam, in truth as well as in legend, Highness.”

  Nuada looked and saw the muted gleam of bloody metal underneath the flesh and sinew which Miach had grown, and a peel of laughter burst from his lips. The ancient monarch couldn’t contain it, and it kept coming until there were tears in his eyes. It sounded manic in his ears, unhinged, just right to fit his mood. So much pain. So much death. And it had been here the whole time. If I’d but known . . .

  The thought brought him up short. What then? I’d have told her . . . I would have. He knew it in that moment as firmly as he knew that he was a failure. That his reign, his life had amounted to a sad sick joke. He looked at the wreckage of his people strewn about the walls of the cavern of roots.

  “Cut ‘em down,” he commanded.

  “Sire,” the Pyski woman said.

  He could hear the avarice in her voice, she could see an end, how well he remembered that feeling, and how sick it made him. “Cut ‘em down, Guardian,” he said more strongly. “Have they nae suffered enough?”

  He held the girl’s gaze for a long moment before she nodded.

  * * *

  Rhiannon set the bloody belt knife down and stood. Stepping away was hard. It was there, right there, gleaming underneath the god-wrought flesh and muscle of the mutilated Fae’s arm. Everything she’d been searching for, a real way to finally meet her destiny and an end to the evil once and for all. It felt wrong to waste a second, and yet . . . Nuada was right. They had suffered enough, far too much really. He had suffered enough.

  She moved to where the partially stripped dead woman lay and bent. Nuada’s brilliant sword slid through burnt skull and rock with equal ease. A subtle but profound power pulsed into the Pyski warrior as she held the contoured hilt of Claímh Solais and she gasped with relief. A well-being that had been absent without the Light flooded her, and she felt herself straining to mend.

  The sword wanted to dance. It seemed to move Rhiannon’s arm as much as her arm moved it, as though the blade itself knew what cuts were needed. The Pyski let her conscious mind pull back and delved deeply into her battle sense. The sword cut perfectly, too well, the utter lack of resistance brought Rhiannon up short on the first cut, but Creidhne’s battered and shredded torso thumped to the ground. She spun, pulling the blade around her body, and sheared through another root, and another, until the five prisoners, the wreckage of the Tuatha De, lay sprawled on the cavern floor before her. The Pyski stopped and slowly pushed the tip of the blade into the stone, leaving it standing in place as she knelt beside Creidhne.

  “I’ve seen ye every day of me life,” the smith god rumbled. “I always knew it would come t’ this. That I would make it.”

  “Make . . . what?” Rhiannon asked, thrown by the immortal’s words.

  “Th’ sword that’ll end th’ world,” Creidhne said gravely.

  The words boomed in Rhiannon’s ears, echoing inside her skull like the clamor of bells. Her whole being tensed and shook, and then she bent and emptied her stomach. A thick sputum of blood and bile splatted on the uneven ground.

  “Th’ world has ended b’fore child,” the smith said, “and will again. Sometimes an end is needed.” The giant’s iron-gray eyes showed more to his words. “Heal Lugh,” he said.

  “I . . .” Rhiannon said, turning to look at the flensed hero. “What? Why?”

  “It is important lass.”

  “Hervor, can you . . . ?” Rhiannon asked, turning to look at the wounded Norsewoman. The question died on her lips. The severe-faced fighter was as pale as the shock of white hair that hung over her face—her head lulled to one side and her breaths came in short, sharp gasps.

  Not long now. Lack of oxygen is starving the brain.

  She moved to the woman’s side. “Hervor, how did you heal me? Please, can you show me?” The woman’s head rolled from one shoulder to the other. Rhiannon caught her chin firmly. “Hervor, please. How?”

  The dying woman’s left hand clawed at the thin dirt over the rock, scraping out a strange primitive shape. The dying woman jerked toward the girl, and Rhiannon could barely make out the sound of Hervor’s gasping, gurgle-filled whispering.

  “. . . rune . . . Berkano . . . healing,” the girl said, straining to make out Hervor's words. “Speak it . . . chant . . . feel. Norse magic . . . is balance. Call . . . Dark . . . reach through to . . . Light. Twine them.”

  Call the Dark? Summon Darkness? Into her? She couldn’t. Rhiannon’s core quailed at the idea, twisting her guts into knots. Her every instinct screamed danger, but there was something else too. Something small, a whisper in the back of her mind, a spark buried deep down. Was that . . . excitement? It felt eager. She couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t give the Dark a foothold inside her . . . could she? She looked over at the skinned, limp form of Lugh, lying where he’d fallen, and then at Creidhne. The giant just watched her as though looking over a piece of strange stock he meant to form and wondering if the unknown alloy were up to the task.

  Rhiannon let out a long slow breath. What choice did she have really? She needed the sword, and Creidhne said she needed Lugh, in some capacity, to make that happen.

  The Pyski champion moved to where the Tuatha hero lay slumped and sat beside him, resting her hand lightly on one of the few patches of whole flesh left to him. She tried to think on nothing, to envision pure dark, and channel the vacuum between stars, pulling it into herself. To draw the Light, one reached toward the Aether and created a conduit through which the Light flowed into them of its own accord. The Dark did not work that way. The part of Rhiannon that was forged of the Spriggan queen, Maeve, knew that summoning the Dark was an exercise in domination. One had to cast their will at the void like a weapon, tearing shreds from existence and wrestling them into the form you chose. Using the Dark was a constant struggle to maintain your chosen working and to hold your body and mind together in the face of a power that wanted nothing more than to consume everything. The Light wanted to endure, the dark wanted only to spread, and given the slightest opportunity, it would consume its host utterly.

  It came so readily and eagerly that Rhiannon almost screamed with the terrible ecstasy of it. After so long without the Light, so long feeling mundane, powerless, weak even, the corrupt pulsing of the Dark was like a breath of fresh air. Well, a breath of air anyway. It hardly felt fresh. The Dark had a sense of slickness, of pollution, like swallowing a mouthful of rancid grease, but it was also incredibly intoxicating. It wanted to be used, it was straining to be used. What would it be like to try and work this alien force?

  The traitor voice pricking at the back of her mind exulted, throwing up a thousand Dark workings she could enact: hexes, spells, and curses of all types and descriptions. Try it, those flashes of knowledge seemed to be saying.

  Rhiannon shook herself and pushed back against the urge to explore. She could feel herself through the Dark power. She could follow its traceries through her veins, feel it bridging wounds and binding tissue, strengthening as it subverted, and it was subverting her. She pushed back, building a bulwark of pure will around the part of herself that was the core of her identity. She had to hold on to herself.

  The living Dark prodded at the bit of root still lodged in her chest like a tongue flicking at the cavity where a tooth had once rested. The power gave her a sense of the foreign object inside her, let her touch it, examine it, and what she found was astounding. As the Dark twined and twisted through her, it encountered fila
ments of the blighted plant curling about her organs. It was still alive and growing! Whatever Hervor had done to her had maintained the power of the Strief within her. That was why she couldn’t be pulled free. The root’s power had replaced her heart, it was keeping her alive.

  But as what?

  Lugh convulsed under her hand and snapped the Pyski back to the moment. She grasped the Dark roughly, immersed herself in it with all the unwillingness of leaping head first into a pond of sludge, and made herself see reality through its shadowy lens.

  The confused tangle that the Strief showed in the physical world paled to insignificance in comparison to its etheric form. Viewed from the hidden realm of energies, the great tree was a megalith of twining tendrils that coiled into and around everything she could see, strangling the Pattern itself, and like the roots of a tree growing under paving stones, where the Strief stretched, things cracked and broke.

  The monstrosity thrummed with Darkness, radiated it, but there was Light there too, and other things, forms of power Rhiannon didn’t know and couldn’t fathom. With her Dark-infused eyes, Rhiannon could watch the great black tangle ingesting all it could get, and she could actually see it growing, expanding and forcing itself between the very threads and stitches of the Pattern. The sisters of Cerridwyns’s convent weren’t so much safeguarding the Pattern as they were directing its destruction to suit their ends. They must have discovered a means of dictating the spread of the thing’s cancerous tendrils.

  Rhiannon beat at the darkness inside her with the hammer of her will, forming, twisting, and battering it into what she needed before she cast it out at the great black canker that was the Strief. A fine mesh net of Dark energy fanned out from Rhiannon and filled the cavern. She couldn’t catch the Light as she had the Dark, but if she could slow it, strain it, perhaps she could direct it gently, like one trying to sluice gold from a river.

  The Light trickled into her, collided against the Dark and recoiled, trying to leak away again. The Pyski cupped the Dark around the fleeing Light, and the brilliant filaments ceased with no avenue of escape, quivering. Tendrils of the inky black energy snaked out slowly from all sides, bending and sliding around their counters. Hervor had said to twine the two energies, but despite Rhiannon’s best efforts they seemed to repel each other. She gritted her teeth, working to hold the construct of loosely braided forces together. Each felt slick and volatile, as though a single lax instant would send whips of raw power lashing wildly about.

  Berkano, the rune of healing. Rhiannon scratched the crude angular glyph into the thin soil beside her as she clutched at the writhing lashes of power. Berkano. She pushed her will outward, blending it with the conflicting forces, and a low growling chant rumbled up from inside her. Her body shook, swaying to the rhythm of the chant; the air around her felt strange, charged, and as the chant grew stronger and louder, the contrary forces contracted against each other. The weave of her braiding grew tighter until she couldn’t discern Light from Dark, or separate the thread of her will from that of the two magics. To her power-infused eyes, the construct looked like a tightly woven skein of shimmering gray silk. Like Twilight, or gloom . . . Soul of Gloom. That’s . . . me.

  “Berkano!” the Pyski growled, launching the melded forces at Lugh’s battered form like a weapon.

  The ashen force struck the skinned godling like a blow, and his tortured form spasmed and shook with waves of violent seizures. Rhiannon pushed with all the strength should could muster, driving the blended powers into him relentlessly. She could see the strange new force she’d made melding with his own tissues, sewing fissures, sealing gaps. She gasped and nearly pulled back. There was nothing gentle about this healing. The twilight power she’d made pushed and prodded at Lugh’s makeup, welding him together by force. It sank barbs of raw power deep into him, yanking and tugging vitality from an unwilling husk, stoking his life force but at terrible cost.

  The shattered hero gasped and arched up off of the floor in a spasm of gut-wrenching agony.

  “Enough!” Creidhne called.

  Rhiannon’s mouth snapped shut, the chant died away immediately and the strange hum in the air around her faded away slowly. Lugh, hero of a hundred tales, warrior champion of the Tuatha De, sobbed like a child, writhing on the root-strewn cavern floor like the wounded animal he was.

  “Dear Gods . . .” the girl gasped from behind Rhiannon. “What have ye done?”

  The Pyski sorceress swallowed the acid rising in her throat and made herself take in the scene. This is the cost. Look. This is what you make. Soul of Gloom indeed.

  A long warbling cry of agony tore out of the tortured demi-god.

  “Lugh!” Creidhne called in his deep rumbling bass. “Lugh! Fight it! One more battle. One task, then we rest. All o’ us. It’s time boy-o. She’s come.”

  The wretched warrior’s flensed head turned, and a pair of pain-maddened brilliant amber eyes shorn of their eyelids glared at Rhiannon. The Pyski felt herself scoot backward. So much pain, so much rage and hatred it rolled off of the once great champion in waves.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “so—”

  Lugh’s hand shot out toward her—a skeletal claw devoid of all but two mashed and broken fingers, covered in a thin cracked film of flesh painted with a crust of ancient blood.

  “Take it,” Creidhne coached. “Take it. Dunnae make him suffer more than ye must girl!”

  Rhiannon shot forward and clutched at the mutilated hand, chanting her apology again and again.

  Something electric shot from the broken Tuatha in jerking spurts, convulsing out from his deepest depth. Something hidden, buried, safeguarded through all of the centuries of hiding, of shame, through the long years of pain and anguish, something that had been waiting for Rhiannon to come.

  The Pyski sorceress gasped at the molten flow of energy that filled her, pushing aside both Light and Dark. Her connection to the diverse powers snapped in the face of something finer, something older and more grand than either.

  “What . . . ?” she started to ask, but the question died on her lips as understanding blossomed. Samildánach, Master of all Arts. They used it like a name, Lugh Samildánach, Lugh God of Skills, but it was this . . . this ability. This was how . . .

  “You understand, lass?” Creidhne asked.

  She did. With Lugh’s final gift she could learn anything, share the skill and knowledge of any being, do anything.

  “I . . . I can use your knowledge, your skills. I can make it . . . I can make the Twilight Sword,” the Pyski said in wonder.

  “Aye, an’ so ye will. Once ye’ve met my price,” Creidhne rumbled. “The Samildánach will nae let ye take. It doesnae steal. T’is nae the Dark. Skill must be shared willingly, an’ mine will be, as soon as ye promise me my price.”

  Rhiannon was on her feet, a blend of shock and outrage giving rise to fury.

  “How dare . . .” she started and froze at the hard look the giant gave her. She took a deep slow breath, forcing herself to calm; anger would get her nowhere. What could she do to this creature that he had not already endured? “What do you want?”

  “Nae, not me little one, destiny,” the forge god said. “It was always meant t’ unfold this way. Ye will have what ye wish. After ye kill her, after ye kill us. The Tuatha De die here today.”

  “What?” Rhiannon sputtered.

  “No!” the girl cried from behind her.

  “Aye,” Creidhne said with a shake of his huge head. “The blood of the First Fae is needed child. She will come. Ye will kill her, ye will give us our revenge and our rest, and when t’is done, I will give ye what ye need to make the Twilight Sword.”

  “Rhiannon . . . no,” the girl cried in a small voice. “Ye cannae.”

  “She can,” the smith said fiercely. “She will. It is . . .”

  “My destiny,” Rhiannon whispered sadly. “Alright. I’ll do it.”

  Chapter 26

  The cavern was dark. The shrouded warriors of An Ainn
ir Airgid instinctively formed a protective wedge around their mistress as they descended the last few yards toward the cavern floor.

  Aife’s offhand was clammy where it held the haft of her back-up spear. Her primary rattled on the rim of her shield where it rested, ready to thrust. She would usually have been embarrassed by the show of nerves, but she saw the signs of tension in her sisters as well. More than one Maiden eased her sword in its sheath, ensuring the weapon could be drawn quickly if needed. Several fingered knives or touched the heavy darts some sisters favored, as though reminding themselves the weapons were there. Something was wrong here, and they could all feel it. But then, Aife asked herself, why should this damned and haunted place be any different from the rest of Eamhna?

  The convent was in chaos. Sister fought sister in the holy precincts, blood flowed in the Goddess’s orchards, and rather than working to right things on the surface, their leader was here, skulking around in the dark. Why? It didn’t make sense. To find one lost Maiden? That’s what the Prioress had told them; a rescue mission she’d called it. Muirisc was a brilliant fighter, and everyone knew she’d recently become close advisor to the holy mother, but it wasn’t as though she’d been missing long, and it seemed to Aife that there were larger concerns at present. Surely the sisterhood should be Aphra’s first concern?

  The young Maiden felt uncomfortable questioning Aphra’s decisions, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. After all, who was she to second guess a figure as wise and ancient as Cerridwyn’s chosen Prioress? Still, something itched between her shoulder blades when Aife looked at the old woman her squad was guarding.

  It was the Prioress who’d first detected and announced the use of a Dark hex on the convent grounds. She’d acted swiftly and decisively then, locking down the convent and dispatching Muirisc’s handpicked squad of sorceresses and fighters to find the source. It was them who’d discovered the traitor Hervor and her Pyski accomplice in the act of fleeing before the madness they’d unleashed took effect. Aife supposed the fugitives had to be apprehended, especially the traitor, but surely the first priority had to be containing the damage their spellwork was doing? So why were they in this godsforsaken hole beneath the wild edge of Eamhna? And why would the escapees come here rather than the Thinning, where they could make good their escape?