Geas and draiocht, Dubhain had warned him. Necessity and sorceries had combined against him. Now he knew that Dubhain’s abandoning him had been definitive, and that it was not Dubhain’s sort of magic which lay about this place, and not Nuallan’s sort either. No arrow of a common soldier could have separated him from the pooka. No such men as these could have stopped Dubhain. Names slithered out of the dark, old names, flint names, stone names, the gods of the deep groves and the thunder— names a few worshippers still danced to in the woods, names the wheel-fires burned for on the hills, at the falling of the leaves, ... at the dying of the year, as the sun wandered south from his hitching-post...
Stay, worshippers begged the sun, and rolled their wheels of fire through the night, until they died in light-reflecting meres.
Stay, they pleaded, and they hung only the straw-men, now, that was all. It was Lugh who was god and not Belenos. The bright Sidhe kept the balances in this age, and their geassi bound the magic in the world ... Could a woman be so rash as that, to defy the Sidhe and wake the lords of hell?
Or could a man be so foolish as to betray the Names by which the Sidhe could be conjured, and bound ... even Dubhain’s, who deserved it? It was not mere bad luck: the draiocht was at work about him, making the nets tighter, constraining his choices, making advantage out of inadvertency— he had not been to blame, not wholly...
But that changed nothing. And he was alive now because it pleased them ... if he had use left in him, now that they had gained the Names...
The thoughts turned over and over, to the lap of the loch water against the shore, to the echoing movements of his fellow prisoners, if prisoners they were. On such waves and such cycles of thought the pain came and went, until they found a level that stayed constant, until not knowing the danger he was in seemed worse than knowing.
He lifted his cheek from the cold mud, blinking through the haze that obscured his eyes, finding his lower limbs twisted in some uncomfortable puzzle he was too dazed to untangle. The cold of the ground had ceased to be a comfort. It made his wound ache, and as he tried to look about him, one foot fell limply past the other and solved the tangle without his having to think about it.
“Dubhain,” he said faintly, forlorn and dying hope. His mouth was cut and swollen. He was all over blood and his movements discovered new pains, at sudden, irretrievable angles on his way to sitting up. He had said the Names. What could he do worse by saying them again?
And the Sidhe deserved it, who had led him to this pass. “Dubhain, damn you!”
For he still entertained the faintest hope that Dubhain would answer, now, finally, perversely having played his bloody trick— he clung to the hope that Dubhain could answer, if Dubhain could hear him, wherever he was.
But all he saw was Ceannann squatting at the bars of his cell, pale face and white hands ghostly above Ceannann’s plain dark clothing.
“O man,” Ceannann said, and grimaced and shook his head as though the gory sight of him were too much. “Man, —”
Caith groaned and rolled over on his better arm to cast a look beyond to the loch and the fading daylight, hoping for intervention either bright or dark.
But there was only sweating, aged stone and water on that side; and in the tail of his eye, another such grating, behind which Firinne stood— the real Firinne, he might believe or disbelieve— he no longer knew.
But there were indeed two cells, on left and on right of him, so it was not, after all, that they were changing shape— he resolved that much of the puzzle.
And it wounded his pride that he had been beaten in Ceannann’s sight; worse, in Firinne’s. Most of all it stung, that he had lost every fight since he had come here, then foolishly blurted out a Name that Ceannann and Firinne could not have told them, lending power to their enemies.
So rather than sit in their sight like a drunkard in the mud, he got one knee under him and made shift to get up. It tore his wound. Cold sweat broke out on him from head to foot, and he fell— tried to get his legs beneath him, and saw Firinne wince as if it had been her own pain.
“Damn,” he said when he had breath. “Damn,” — for it was curse after that, or weep. He hung his head down to catch his breath, then made the third try— set one foot beneath him, and one hand, the other swinging useless as if the arrow were still in it. Not an elegant sight.
He considered his next attempt, added another foot, staggered upright like a newborn calf and reeled to left and right. He felt himself falling, and instead, in a desperate, tilted series of steps, crashed against Firinne’s cage and caught at the bars with the hand that would hold at all.
“My friend is cursed late,” he declared, in a voice gone ragged. As humor it was exceeding poor. It was Dubhain’s own kind of joke, which won nothing from Firinne but a pitying shake of her head and a despairing look.
“But late or not,” he said, fearing that all this shouting after Dubhain sounded mad, “— he may well be planning our rescue. The lad is fond of schemes.” Leaning his good shoulder against the bars to support himself, he found the chain that locked the grating and felt, one-handed, after the joining of it, making a gentle clanking of iron which woke echoes off the ceiling and the walls and the water.
It was secure: he had hardly dared hope for a slip there, even by Sidhe magic, not against iron chain. He caught suddenly at the bars as giddiness betrayed him and whirled his senses reeling about the vault.
Firinne’s hand fell on his, a touch so light he could scarcely feel it.
“I do take it,” he went on doggedly, in his ragged voice, “that your quarrel with this place and its lady is no casual matter. I mind me Ceannann mentioned some lady of Dun Glas...”
“Moragacht is her name,” Firinne said in a small voice. “This keep is all her making. The evil in this valley is her evil. Oh, stranger, if you could possibly swim out from here ... if you could go quickly— you might escape. A man could slip between the bars that close us from the loch...”
“Escape to where?” he asked.
“He could never make it,” said Ceannann from behind him.
Caith turned his back to the bars of the cell and leaned his head there, dizzied with the pain, letting his eyes rove the circuit of the vaulted ceiling. He recalled dimly the view of the keep from without, a tortoise-like mass of stone set on the very rim of the water, so unnaturally made on unstable ground, with no stone below it to quarry for its building, no hill to raise its cellars above flooding nor rock to buttress it against its own great weight. He smelled magic, and corruption, as if it seeped up from the wet stones and trickled down the walls. He recalled the storm that had driven him to the cottage, and his ride that had ended on the loch shore, and with a sudden chill and a dazed contemplation of the water beyond the barred water-gate, he could think of one reason why he had been left free between these two stone-backed cells, in the witness of the lady’s two fair captives.
“The beast,” he said. “It can reach the loch. Can it not?”
“Yes,” said Firinne.
Ceannann said, “I think it must already be there.”
The water was the vault’s only source of light; and its illusory glow was like the sheen of a hostile weapon, or the glamor of an enchantment.
For a moment Caith slipped away, and found a dark place behind his eyelids as he leaned his back against the iron bars and tried to catch his breath. He reached for faery, a refuge against that gathering shadow, but each time he failed he believed a little less, and the darkness in faery only thickened. Something stalked him there, something well at home in that darkness.
He opened his eyes wide— his head rolling, his heart laboring as he recovered the pewter light on the water, and the black iron grating that closed off the vault from the loch— but he had stood too long. His knees had gone to water, and that darkness hovered behind his eyelids, wanting to claim him, as he felt the bars slide through his fingers.
Dubhain, Dubhain, Dubhain, what is amiss? Where are you? Babdh and
Macha, why can you not hear me?
Ceannann said, low-voiced, “She’s won his friend’s Name of him, and one Other. What might she do now?”
“The sun is sinking,” said Firinne. “We might call her, we might bargain with her, do you think? She might hear us....”
And Ceannann: “Hush, hush! Has he fainted?”
* * *
The waters were grey, chill, and full of shadows, no place for a man born to air and sunlight, but Caith wandered there, within the edge of the loch that had surged up like a flood towards the meadows of faery. He was outside the silver gates ... he was at that place again, he had at least gotten that far, but found those gates shut more tightly than the grating in the vault, and he could not find their sides or their top, their silver metal burning to the touch as the chill water swept about him in violent tides.
But he did not drown. He looked about him in bewilderment, at grey brightness. The sun slanted rays down into the upper levels of the loch, and bubbles sparkled, rising through the water, past the incorruptible silver.
But he could not stay near that light. Currents swept him inexorably farther from the gates and toward some greyness within the loch he did not know. At the heart of the loch there were caves; there were cold springs and fountains where dark things laired— he knew this in the way one knows such things in dreams, and he knew that although he could not drown, he could die in this dream ... because it was a wandering of the soul, and because the creatures that had existence in this place could kill, and seize the souls that came to their hands.
There was a creature that ruled this loch. It was a creature of the earth, of deep springs, a sort of Sidhe, old and wicked, that had tried before to take him, and he had about his neck the pierced stone that would show him its nature in the world of five senses, if he dared look. Reason might say it was better to search it out and look and know the enemy for what it truly was, but fear said that such small, unpracticed magic might only draw its attention ... and by that, ensnare him. Like all faery gifts, the elf-shot stone was full of conditions and bargains. A greater Power could turn such a weapon in a man’s hands, oh, so easily, and aim it at his very sanity.
* * *
“It’s ourselves she wants,” said Firinne. “Why does she aim at him? It’s naught but wickedness...”
“She is sporting with us, do you not see? There was never time for him to get away.” Ceannann’s voice was hoarse and small.
Then Firinne’s: “She will kill whatever we touch. Even this man, only because he was beneath our roof. Like the poor goats. He weighs the same in her intentions. She will do anything to force us.”
“No! She mustn’t. She mustn’t. Whatever cruel thing she does, keep thinking of that. We’ll have to see him die if he stays here, but he might get as far as the shore, and he might call the Sidhe through, mightn’t he?”
“The Sidhe are helpless. Did we not see the pooka fall?”
* * *
The arrow hit and he flew helplessly from Dubhain’s back. But now, instead of being participant, he saw himself strike the ground with a violence that he remembered in his bones.
He saw blood— his own. He saw the pooka turn to smoke and plunge into the loch. There by the unwholesome weeds, that was where Dubhain had gone down. Dubhain had not deserted him. Dubhain had been overwhelmed by the draiocht in this place. Perhaps he had met defeat altogether ... in which case he was doomed, himself.
Which he would not admit to the power of this place. He began to struggle in the currents, to search with what strength he could, as long as he could, there seeming no other hope of escape.
Then he saw the dark shape which haunted Loch Fiain, a vast shadow which brushed seal-like through his mind. With the passing of one huge flipper, it ghosted away, leaving a stench of horror in the water, for it was a thing without a skin, and the bones of dead men were its bones, and the corruption of the deep loch covered that membranous, veined surface.
It went with a sound of waters and with the grinding of ill-joined bone against bone. Its entire body shifted and shaped itself to the currents, sometimes seal-like, at other times like a great fragile sac of pollution.
This was the evil. This was the power here, one of the oldest things, bound to the witch’s service.
Dubhain was a creature of the waters, at heart, though not such an old or great one, before the bright Sidhe had turned Dubhain to their use.
But the evil here would draw Dubhain by his own wicked mischief. This Great Dark One would hunt him relentlessly, and claim him for its own. That was another thing Caith knew without reason— that the whole loch spoke now to Dubhain, calling on him, calling to him, calling for him to merge himself with the dark.
For the likes of Dubhain these waters held such wicked power, such gentle seduction. Be free, it said, once one knew how to listen to it.
And, Free, Free, Free, the echoes said out of the deep, with nothing of ease or grace in that cold voice. It was the killing-rage, it was the blood-lust; it was the raw power of the earth and the stones and waters it offered. And a man could hear it, and shudder at the smallest temptation it offered to his soul.
But Dubhain must not give way to it. By the geas on both of them, Caith had no power to give him up, and by the Babdh, did he not swear to disown the mischief-bound wight at least three times a day?
But not to the likes of this, he would not. There was a sort of a man, at least a feckless, reckless youth, lodged in Dubhain’s dark soul; and by what in him was a man, he would never give that part away, of Dubhain or of himself, not to the cold deep.
Yet if Dubhain once fell under the spell of the loch, and called to Caith in turn— the only creature, by the geas on him, that he might have for company— then the geas would work against them both, and for the power of this place. He suffered a shiver of fear at that thought, for that place in Teile, for that woman and that man and that boy he protected. For if he himself should slip to the dark side, oh, he knew what wickedness he would do, earliest and worst of all the harm there was in him to do, precisely because there was something he loved, and he must not touch it or go there. He had met his father. He knew what was his heritage. And he had never been so afraid as now, of what this place and the draiocht might offer him.
He searched madly in his dream, poked into dark, unsavory holes and crannies, desperate to find Dubhain, or, at worst, the remnant of Dubhain, and draw him out, before he slid deeper into the loch and its darker haunts.
But the darkness rose out of the depths on its own search, stirring the currents, shaping itself to its own will, fierce, and desirous of harm.
* * *
“The sun is almost gone,” said Ceannann.
“Hush, let him sleep,” said Firinne. “What has he to hope for?”
“If he had a weapon—” said Ceannann.
“What could that avail him against the beast?”
“Hope of revenge,” Ceannann said. “It would deceive him with that, at least.”
* * *
It hunted, and the thing that it hunted, poking its long neck among the reeds about the loch-edge, was small and dark, with fierce red eyes. That thing scuttled and dodged with great cleverness, but the hunter was quick. Caith shuddered at the shadow’s close passage and found his own hole to hide in among the reeds, battered by the current it stirred.
He rested there, watching the beast swim and turn like a great seal in a patch of sunlight. It called to its prey with great squeals that echoed through the depths. It breached and dived and searched the places a dark one would choose ... and missed a flitting shadow among the reeds, as it carried its search around the loch.
Its squeals and echoes diminished in the distance and Caith plunged through the slithery, loathsome reeds before his quarry could take flight.
“Dubhain,” he said, “I need you! Carry me out of this place!”
“’T is yourself,” came a voice like a flurry of bubbles, as a pair of red eyes glowed in the soft grey ambience,
among the spiky shadow of reeds and water-grass. “’T is yourself maun carry me, my Caith, hae ye not heard me at all? No more can I do for ye.”
“Dubhain, come to where I am. A place on the shore. A dark place. I need your help!”
He tried to go closer. But Dubhain retreated, quick and wary, and the baleful eyes resumed their red, frightened stare.
“Dinnae tempt me, man. Dinnae come near....”
“Then how can I carry you, fool? How can I bring you out of the loch? You make no damned sense!”
“Hsst,” said that voice, and the shape seemed to glance aside distractedly. “It rises, it rises”flee, man, while there”s time!”
Came a sudden upwelling of cold water, a marked change in the currents, as if a stream had broken upward on the slope beneath him. The beast came like a geyser from the deep and Caith turned with nightmare slowness, seeking the grey shallows and the upper banks, in its direct path.
He broke the surface, came up in dry air with a gasp for breath and a pain in the shoulder that sent his sense reeling. His reaching hand caught the cold bars of Firinne”s prison and, muddy and bloody as he had been before, he stared stupidly at the changed water beyond the water-gate, for the grey daylight was gone and the water was stained with bloody sunset. The water-gate bars were lifting, slowly, as hidden chains hauled the gates apart with a clatter of ratchets and clank of iron.
A touch came on his fingers where they rested on the bars of the cell: Firinne’s hand, reaching to his for comfort. “Your friend has failed you,” Firinne said. “Swim for the outside. Try to reach the shore. There may yet be time. If you were outside the lady’s wards, perhaps there you could call him....”
“Call him,” he echoed hoarsely. ‘Him’ had no meaning left. ‘Call’ was what the beast was doing now, incessantly. Words rattled hollowly in his skull. In his mind he still saw the grey water and the shadows, felt the chill currents—
He felt another presence, too.
Caith! it cried in panic. “Thou fool!”
He slipped his hand from Firinne’s and struggled to his feet.
Faery Moon Page 17