by Kevin Hearne
I get to feel confident and superior for all of five seconds, as my lengthened arms take out the vanguard and then the next few as well. But the imps keep barreling forward, counting on their numbers to overwhelm me, and it’s a fine reckoning. I stab as fast as I can, black ichor spilling from them and unholy screeches tearing the air, but it’s only a second more and their weapons are biting into my chitin, hollow thunks that sting but fail to penetrate to my vitals. The weapons get lodged there and while the imps try to pull them free I stab them and they fall away. I backpedal fast as I can, attempting to give my arms more room to dispatch them at a distance, but it’s not as effective as I hoped. They’re already too close and they leap at me. One vaults over the others with a hatchet aimed at the space between my eyes, and I let the chitin shrimp hammers fly at him. He crunches without time to squawk, his skull and ribs shattered as he flies back into the press of his fellows, but I don’t get to enjoy it for more than a fraction of a second as one of my tentacles is lopped off by a scythe and a bolt of pain lances through my body. The tentacle’s nerves fire on the ground and it writhes with one of the shit-covered swords in its grip, and while there are no bones inside it’s a pound or two of flesh I’m going to miss.
The ice knife is no more effective than a regular knife against these creatures. They have no souls, apparently, so I must stab into something necessary, not merely prick them with the tip. I discover this when one of them recovers from a stab to the gut to make a screaming charge and hack at my thigh with a hatchet. I fall onto the blistered, scalloped rocks and the imps follow me there, determined to end me. I fear they might not be successful.
I lash out again with the shrimp fists and that launches three crushed bodies into the air, but there are more doing their best to penetrate my chitin and more piling on top of that. I won’t be getting up on that leg with an ax buried in it. Time to change tactics by changing shapes.
Choosing yet another shape I learned from Jörmungandr, I become a small sphere of protected organs surrounded on all sides by long spines, something called a sea urchin—except far larger than the real ones you’d find in the ocean. I won’t be able to maintain it for long, but I don’t need to: It impales every single imp covering me, and when I shift again, the spines slide out of them and their bodies provide me some cover from the remaining imps, who are not sure what happened to their target. I launch myself out of the pile of dead reconstituted as a spider monkey, one of the most acrobatic creatures I’ve ever seen. I retrieve the ice knife and a sword with my long arms, balancing on them and my one good leg, and proceed to dance among the ten or so remaining imps, chest heaving with oxygen debt and enervated by the shifts and blood loss, hyperaware that I have no natural armor in this form. Metal slices through flesh with slithering noises and howls rise into the fuckfurnace of hell as I spin, slash, and stab through opponents too surprised by my shift to understand what’s happening. And when the last one collapses, I fall onto my ass, exhausted and unable to get a breath of clean air, it being actual hell outside. The imps’ bodies bubble and hiss as they melt into sludge, and I see my bug-dog guide skitter forward to congratulate me.
“Masterful, sir, simply masterful! May I help in any way?”
I shift back into my accustomed human form, which allows speech instead of unintelligible screeches. “You can insert your head into the anus of a rhinoceros and take a deep breath.”
The hellspawn looks around at the blasted land, helpless. “Should one appear, I will do my best, sir.”
“Just get me to the nearest exit.”
“Certainly. Please follow me.”
I collect all my weapons from the ruin of the imp horde and limp after him, my head constantly craning about me, looking for new threats. None appear, and it’s almost more nerve-wracking than if something concrete materialized to attack.
Uncountable moments of heat and pain later, the hellspawn stops and raises an insect leg at the air in front of it.
“Here we are, sir. Just a moment.” He mutters something unintelligible, his leg spasms in a pattern that must have some arcane significance, and the air puckers and warps in front of him before a rectangle shimmers and resolves into a window to the plane of Midgard.
Just as the portal pops into solid reality and I feel a cool gust of air from New Jersey that is no doubt putrid by human standards but qualifies as a benediction in hell, Lucifer appears to my left, unfolding himself out of the air in a flutter of cherubic feathers. I ready the ice knife in case he attacks.
“What now?” I bark at him.
~I merely wished to congratulate you on making it this far. Perhaps you will have more luck in your rebellion than I thought. I will not aid you, but as you have earned my respect, neither will I hinder you. Seriously, though: you need to get a clue about David Bowie and Prince. You missed quite a bit being bound for all those years in the bowels of the earth. Before you decide to burn it all down and start over, take some time to appreciate creative geniuses. For you wish to be one, correct?
“A creative genius? No, that is not among my ambitions.”
~If I’m not being too forward, Loki, perhaps it should be. My father was a creative genius, much as I despise him. I hear Odin is too. Quite a few of the beings I presume you’ll be fighting against are creative geniuses. It would be wise to know your enemy, if nothing else. But also wise to have a plan to build your utopia once the day is won.
“I have a plan. No need to worry about that.”
~Ah. Fair enough. Well, then. It’s all very exciting, isn’t it? This should be good. I’m off to make some popcorn. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Cherubim cannot actually process genemod corn—oh, never mind.
The wings fold around him, he spins like a top in the air until he shrinks and pops out of existence. What a strange adversary.
I’m left alone with the Bosch horror who did nothing to help me—not even provide so much as a warning—against Lucifer’s ambushes. I’d like to try out the ice knife on him and see if he has a soul it can drink. The heat of hell has taxed the blade; the red reservoir along the top has noticeably diminished during our trek. It looks thirsty.
“Please step through,” the hellion says. “I can only keep the portal open for a few more moments.”
Ah, clever to remind me of that. I can’t afford to risk being trapped here. I nod as a measure of insincere thanks and step through to New Jersey. The portal closes behind me, and good riddance. If a large portion of humanity can imagine such a creature as Lucifer and a realm as bleak as hell, then Ragnarok will be a merciful fate by comparison.
Time to get on with it.
An Owen and Slomo Story
Printed for the first time here, this story takes place some months after the events of Scourged, Book 9 of the Iron Druid Chronicles.
Me father used to say, “From bollocks we came,” and…that was it. A pun, a confounding of expectations, and his comment on humanity’s basic character in four words. He was a frugal man. He’d never say “less is more” when he could simply say “less” and let ye figure out the rest on your own.
I’m starting to think this entire fecking era I’m living in now is trying to repudiate me father’s frugality. “More” is the word people live by now. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if you’re talking about more dogs or more attention to the damage being done to the earth in pursuit of ever more material comforts, but that’s not, unfortunately, what I’m talking about.
What I’m seeing is more waste, more pollution and consumption, and more people worrying about lines they’ve drawn on a map and who’s on which side of those lines than the shared planet they’re living on. More blindness to the basic fact that all creatures are part of Gaia and if humans want more of the planet’s finite resources then that means less for other creatures, and that’s the sort of behavior that leads to the mass extinctions we’re suffering now.
What we truly need more of are Druids and I’m working on making that happen, but it’s a
long process. In the meantime, it’s basically me and Granuaile looking after things; she’s taken the eastern hemisphere, because she’s off training with some guy named Sun Wukong in Taiwan, and I’ve got the west.
Siodhachan, me old apprentice, can’t shift planes anymore, so he’s assigned himself the role of taking on long-term projects in a specific area. Right now he’s trying to finish up healing Tasmanian devils and then he’s going to do something in Australia so he can keep on having flat whites for breakfast.
What it all means is that elementals are coming to me now when they want help. And the planet’s so cocked up of late that the cries for help are nearly constant. It’s tough to get me teaching in sometimes. But luckily I have the Flagstaff pack pitching in with languages and the like, and all that I am required to be present for is the instruction in Gaia’s mysteries and the cultivation of headspaces.
That allows me some brief windows of time in which I can visit a friend of mine in Peru.
Her name is Slomo and she’s a winsome lass, cute and kind and covered with bugs and constantly amazed by the wonder and beauty of Gaia. She is a delightful three-toed murder sloth. Together we fight environmental crime.
I left me apprentices playing with their wolfhound puppies—Granuaile had given the grove Orlaith’s entire litter—and shifted myself to the rain forest where Slomo lived.
Slomo? I called out mentally as the humidity of the Amazon basin squeegeed itself around my skin. Are ye awake? It’s Owen.
Where are ye? Can ye make some noise? Shout a word in Slothian and then tell me what it means.
“Aboblamohno!” her high-pitched voice called out from somewhere to my right. Her vocals were much higher than the mental voice I typically heard.
Uh. Say that again?
“Aboblamohno!” she repeated and that gave me a better bead on her location.
What does that mean?
Slomo’s language is a marvel to me. She can talk to trees, apparently, which requires staying in the tree for days at a time. Sloths are one of the few creatures that hang around long enough to have a conversation with them. But in terms of human language she doesn’t really know any yet. I figure out what she intends through our mental bond, a combination of thoughts and emotions and images, and put it into words for me own convenience.
Well, sure. It’s a bonny day. It would be a shame to waste it.
I can’t see you either. Shout for me one more time?
Ah, I think I’m close. Ye should be able to see or hear me soon.
“Excuse me, Eoghan Ó Cinneadie.”
I recognized the voice from behind me and winced. “Oh, great blistered badger tits!” I said as I turned around to confirm it was in fact the Herald Extraordinary of Brighid, First among the Fae.
“There are no badger mammary glands of any kind in this forest. I hope you weren’t referring to me.”
“Coriander the Infinitely Unpunchable,” I said. “Why are ye here and why do ye look like that?”
Normally he wore Brighid’s livery and looked very proper and extra stuffy, no doubt owing to the powdered curly wig he wore on his head. Now he looked like he had stepped away from his corporate day job and into a sex club where they handed out magic mushrooms like after-dinner mints. He had an androgynous look to him—that being a fancy term that Greta taught me recently. Gender, she said, was viewed as a spectrum now—and I think it was back in me own time, too, it’s just that people had gotten better in the last two thousand years at developing new words for what had been true all along. She showed me pictures of David Bowie dressing somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and Cate Blanchett doing the same, just to illustrate the principle. Coriander currently looked a bit something like the latter, dressed in grey tweed slacks and waistcoat over a white long-sleeved shirt with a silver paisley tie and no jacket. His feet were bare and his head sported a blond tousled mess. His cheeks were flush and his big blue eyes wobbled with tears threatening to make a run for it.
“I was on recreational leave just now,” he replied, “thus I am not in my accustomed raiment.”
“That’s how ye dress for recreation?”
“Yes. I find it frolicsome.”
“Ye may have a different idea of what frolicking means than most people.”
“Of that I have no doubt. I am here to solicit your aid in a matter that is very important to me. My gratitude would be bounteous if you could help.”
“What’s this? Ye’re not here at Brighid’s request?”
“No. As I said, I am on leave. This is personal.”
“And so ye came to me?”
“I know that seems odd and I freely admit you were not my first choice. But I cannot ask the Tuatha Dé Danann to intervene in this matter and I cannot trust the Fae to be discreet.”
I am! I got interrupted and will be there soon.
The herald had piqued my interest. “All right, what is the matter?”
“Two humans are dead by what I fear are diabolical means.”
“Diabolical, ye say? As in devils from one o’ them monotheist hells?”
“I know not which hell—it could be some polytheist demon. Or not. Perhaps even a deity of some kind. Or a creature of some horrible mythology not properly assigned to oblivion. But I am sure this was not done by any human or beast of this plane.”
“Huh. And what is your interest in these humans that ye would track me here to ask for help—how did ye find me here, anyway?”
“The Extraordinary bit of my title as Herald Extraordinary means I must be able to find beings who might have some business with the First among the Fae. It is a vital part of my office.”
“All right. Who are these humans?”
“Maria and Javier Garces in Granada, Spain.”
“Spain? That’s the colonial power that messed up this country, isn’t it? Destroyed hundreds of species of potatoes in the process?”
“Yes, I believe that is correct.”
“Spain is in the eastern hemisphere, right? That’s Granuaile’s territory. Ye should be talking to her.”
“She is…indisposed.”
“Indisposed? Are ye tellin’ me she’s on the toilet so ye came to fetch me to the other side of the planet? Just wait. She’ll be flushing before ye know it.”
“She is…going to be busy some time.”
“Bad seafood, eh?”
“No, that’s not it at all. Please just trust me when I say you are my only hope at the moment.”
“Ye must be fecking desperate.”
The tears that had threated to spill down his cheeks finally did and his voice broke on a sob. “I am. Eoghan. I know we have not had the easiest of relationships but I am hoping you will find a soft place in your heart and decide to aid me.”
“I might, lad, I might. Tell me why ye care about the deaths of Maria and Javier Garces.”
“Well, as I said,” Coriander began, and his eyes shifted away and I knew he was going to dodge the question. Prevaricate is the fancy word. “They were slain by diabolical means.”
“That’s not what has ye cryin’ about them. You’ve seen plenty of death before. So tell me why these deaths have ye gibberin’ at me face.”
The herald’s chin raised, his eyes shining with defiance. “They were my friends.”
They were probably more than that. “Both of them?”
“Aye, both!”
“Easy, now. I’m not judging, just tryin’ to be clear. Good on ye, lad. Now, I have three questions for ye, until I think of more. First, were Maria and Javier aware that you
’re Fae?”
Coriander nodded. “They were.”
“Were they different from normal humans in any way? Magic users, descendants of gods, anything like that?”
“Maria was an accomplished witch and Javier a slightly less powerful warlock.”
“Interesting. And where were they killed? In the city, a remote farm, or what?”
“Outdoors in the Sierra de Huétor Natural Park. A secluded portion of it.”
“Ah, perfect. That means I can bring me murder sloth along.”
Coriander’s jaw dropped. “I beg your pardon?”
“Wait here a couple minutes.” I called mentally to my friend. Hey, Slomo, want to go to Spain with me and have an aboblamohno?
I guarantee it.
Coriander left a marker for me so I could follow him to a tethered tree in Spain. Once we got there, Slomo barfed delicately on my shoulder as she always does. Something about shifting planes has that effect on her.
Me too, love. But only because I don’t want ye to feel bad, ye understand. I don’t mind the mess, ye know. It’s more important to me that we get to see the world together.
What do ye think of this place?
Not as humid, ye mean?