by Terry Madden
A fat drop of blood gathered inside the drip chamber and fell, vanishing into the conduits of his body. For a millisecond, he felt a surge of false hope that they were replacing all of it with some college kid’s blood. They were flushing the venom of his identity from this body, turning him into a business major, or maybe an accountant. Yeah, an accountant. His mom would like that.
He knew better. The tubing that fed his veins could never replace the venom that coursed through him, it could never rid him of the choices he’d made so long ago.
“You’re awake.”
The voice came from the doorway, not the intercom, and the words came in Ildana.
It was the girl who’d given him the green moth, the one who’d sent him across the Void. The one who’d kissed him. Dylan’s Elowen. That was it.
He turned away from the radiance of her face, of her living flesh, to face the gray wall. He pressed a button that he hoped would call a nurse. Maybe she’d give him morphine and let him sleep for a decade or two. He was already dead, after all.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” Elowen said.
“Get out,” he croaked at her.
When he was met by stony silence, he glanced back at the door to see if she’d obeyed. She hadn’t.
She held her right hand cupped in her left as if she was restraining it from doing something she didn’t want it to do. What an odd girl. She sucked in her lower lip and squinted at him.
“Ye have no right to speak to me such.”
“I’m doing it anyway.” He tried English this time. “Get. Out.”
“You’re not like he said.” Her reply was so quiet he could barely hear her.
“Who?”
“My lord king. Nechtan. He knew ye well, he said. He said you were impulsive, but good at heart.”
“Good?” It hurt to laugh. “’Nechtan’ doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know me any better than you. And I hope it stays that way.”
She took a step into the room, cluttered with emergency equipment. Syringe caps littered a tray that looked like a crash cart. Were those heart paddles? The ones that bring back the dead? Had they used them on him? Shit.
Eyes narrowed, Elowen dared take another step closer. “Who are you, Connor Quinn?”
“If you’re not leaving, will you get me out of here? Or are you just going to stare at me?”
“You can’t leave,” she decreed. “Not yet. But I’m afraid for ye. Celeste might know you’re here.”
“Who’s Celeste?”
“My lord king discovered there are those who worship the Crooked One, here in the land of the dead.” She made a sign against evil. “Some crossed with him when the well opened, but others remain.”
Connor’s eyelids grew heavy.
“Celeste would have crossed,” Elowen said, her hand lightly resting on his shoulder, “but for your friend.”
Friend? What friend was she talking about?
The crushing weight of sleep took over as she prattled on about Iris, of all people. She’d met Iris? Connor was asleep before he understood any of it.
As it turned out, the doctors wouldn’t let him go just yet. They’d given him a full two and half liters of blood and done some extensive needlework on his right forearm in an attempt to stop the bleeding. I.V. antibiotics had started kicking in, and at last his flesh recognized this world as its own and the cells had agreed to divide and grow and heal. Platelets formed and Connor gained strength. And yes, they’d had to jump start him not once, but twice. He was beyond weak.
Elowen came and went like the sun from behind a cloud. In spite of Connor’s request for no visitors, he awoke to find her standing in the doorway. Every day. She was always just watching him. Maybe she thought he was going to try to make a break for it.
The nurses didn’t seem to notice her radiance. The starburst of a living being in the land of the dead could be so blinding. Her skin was made of light, though she tried to cover it with a long-sleeved shirt that must have been Iris’s. On the back, it had the red logo for Dark Martyr, Iris’s favorite metal band.
Elowen explained at length how she and Dish had found the salamander, how Celeste had gathered Dish’s blood for the ritual of opening. It had resulted in the perfect storm of blood magic.
“I know you’ve suffered much,” Elowen said, on the fifth consecutive day of visiting. “I know you want to hear nothing about joy or hope.”
“And how do you know this, wise one?” he asked sarcastically.
“I was trained on the Isle of Glass. With Lyleth. Brixia…” With that last name, she took a chair and drew it closely enough to him that he could hear her whisper. “When the little horse first came to me, there in the mountains after I’d run away from my first hive, she spoke to me.”
“The little horse?” Connor was playing dumb, but knew exactly what she was talking about. He knew Brixia well. The water horse had carried him over the first time, and carried him back after Nechtan died once more on the battlefield. The horse had met him at the edge of the Red Bog when Lyleth pulled him from the pool, still half-made of stone.
Brixia was her name. And Connor had made her.
“What do you know of the horse?” he tested her.
“She was my guardian, there in the mountains. I found her standing in that very life well where Lyleth raised the king back to the living. I never knew why she followed me so. I know now. She believed I would lead her to you. I think she can take us back.”
“I’m not going back,” he stated flatly.
“Not go back? My lord king needs ye.” There was a frantic desperation in her voice. No wonder she’d been standing guard over his bed. She thought Connor could take her back through the well.
Connor finally said, “The last thing he needs is me.”
Elowen didn’t know anything about Tiernmas, about Connor’s past with the Crooked One—and Connor had no intention of telling her.
Trying to change the subject, he asked, “Who’s caring for Merryn’s sheep?”
“Me.”
Connor swallowed hard and looked away, afraid she’d see the tears in his eyes. “I need to sleep. Leave me be.”
When he turned to look again, she was gone. He felt a pang of disappointment. Maybe she’d never really been there in the first place.
He was released from the hospital the next day. It wasn’t Elowen who came to fetch him, but Bronwyn. As soon as she heard he was conscious, she’d been in to pick his brain about what had happened to Dish and the events on the other side. It became clear that Dish had told her everything or almost everything about the state of affairs in the Five Quarters. It also became clear that Bronwyn had been doing some lying of her own to cover for Connor’s reappearance, which had drawn the interest of the local authorities.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t been to visit with you yet,” she told him, pushing Connor in a wheelchair out of the door of the small hospital and to her waiting Land Rover.
“Who?” he asked.
“Inspector Trewin. Now that Hugh has vanished, you surely have turned from the victim to the suspect.” She laughed.
“And I’ll have to explain Dish’s disappearance?”
“Likely,” she said, “though none of us have reported him missing. He’s just…away.”
“He most certainly is ‘away.’”
Elowen, who waited in the back seat, hopped out to get the door for him. He gave her a look and she backed off. He found opening the car door more challenging than expected. It was made worse by Elowen who watched him struggle until he was victorious.
After her attempt at conversation, Bronwyn thankfully gave up. The drive to Merryn’s farm was silent after that, but for the eighties classics hit channel on the radio. Connor watched the landscape stream by to the sound of Duran Duran singing Hungry Like a Wolf, feeling the pulse at his temples as if hammering to break out. He imagined his head exploding and spattering the leather interior of Bronwyn’s car like a scene from Pulp
Fiction. Wonder what Inspector Trewin would say about that?
Merryn’s cottage was a maze of boxes. She’d only been gone for six weeks and her life was already being parceled out to thrift stores. Bronwyn was chattering about how Connor should make himself at home, something about Elowen staying with her, but Connor wasn’t listening. He stood on the faded, rose-printed carpet where Merryn’s hospital bed had been, looking out the parlor window over the sweeping pastures toward the sea. Outside, the hawthorn tree was beginning to turn deep gold, and the flower garden had gone to seed. And at the bottom of the sheepfold, the hump of the barrow called to him.
The well had been there all along.
He allowed himself to think about how Merryn had used him, but as soon as the pain of it surfaced, he chose to push it back into the darkness. There were surely other explanations, aside from her need to return to Tiernmas to build the kingdom of the Sunless. Connor had to trust that Merryn’s convictions had not changed in a thousand years. But who would not change in that time?
He would have no answers unless he did as Elowen asked and returned them to the Five Quarters.
Elowen was watching him again. When his eyes met hers, she glided across the room to stand beside him, offering a juice glass full of Merryn’s Scotch. Dish must have taught her to do that.
He took it and tried to give her a smile, knowing he looked like an idiot.
“You want me to send you back, is that it?” he asked.
Her face bunched up and she a lock of golden hair over a tiny ear. “Nay, sir. I want to help, however I might. I will always serve my lord, Nechtan. And I know he’d want me to do as you instruct now. Brixia chose you for a reason, and though you’ll not tell me that reason, I trust her as I trust Nechtan. So, now I trust you.”
“You’re far too trusting then.”
It was she who’d chosen to drag Connor’s lifeless flesh back through the well, not him, not Dish.
Had she not done so, his soul would be sitting at table with Tiernmas in the halls between the worlds, a slave of immortality with all the others who’d died at Tiernmas’s hands. There would be no fleeing him then, no resisting his commands. Life in this world was somehow preferable. He’d made a good attempt at convincing himself of this fact, but the lure of Caer Sidi could not be ignored. There, he would be a slave to his creation, but he could still continue to create.
Here…he was nothing more than a dead man waiting for rebirth.
As if reading his confusion, Elowen said, “What will you do now?”
He sipped the Scotch and it burned all the way down. “You’re going to take me down there.” He motioned with his glass toward the window, his eyes on the barrow beyond.
With Bronwyn off to the market, Connor and Elowen crossed the sheepfold, sending the flock to the east end of the field. Connor had found the broken handle of pitchfork he could use to steady himself. He wondered where Mr. Peavey had gone, and then realized there was no need for him here any longer now that the well had opened and Merryn had gone. Connor couldn’t help wondering where the green gods had sent the old guardian.
When they reached the barrow, Connor found a gaping hole had been opened in the side of the ancient tomb. Trampled undergrowth and soggy mud holes filled with bootprints attested to the number of people that had converged on the place.
Elowen stood with her hands on her hips at the edge of the mound. “Your woman, Iris, stood here—”
“She’s not my woman,” he said with a laugh.
“She once was, I think.”
“Just go on.”
“She stood here.” Elowen took a wide stance and clasped her fists together, pointing at the top of the barrow. “She had that short device you own that makes a great noise and she raised it over her head and let the fire fly forth. The thunder frightened Celeste.”
“I’ll bet,” he muttered. It crossed his mind that the pistol wasn’t among his other things in his duffle bag. He could only conclude that Iris had taken it across with her. Interesting.
Celeste, he’d gathered, was the leader of a cult of Sunless in this world. He found it hard to believe that Tiernmas had reached into the minds of the dead, that his songs were being sung to them as they slept in this world. But the deep subconscious runs like a shared current through all minds. Connor had heard it in the hospital. Tiernmas had said his name and Connor could not deny the fire it stoked in him. He could only try to quench it.
“The salamander opened the way in.” Elowen indicated the narrow passage. “She conjured the well and met another salamander.”
“Her sister,” Connor said. “They were made as one and divided.”
“You know of their making?”
Connor had said more than he’d planned. “I know the legends.”
“I know them, too. But never have I heard of such creatures.”
“Well, now you have.”
As expected, the well had opened in much the same way as it had on the other side, and the two salamanders had joined in the Void between, linking living and dead, and opening a conduit for all to cross the gulf between worlds.
Connor had fashioned a number of salamanders; he’d kept them just as Elowen described, in jars.
“When the well opened,” Elowen said, pointing out the hole Dish had dug to get inside, “the ground was covered with frogs.”
“The Old Blood,” Connor said.
“Aye. They followed us through.”
It appeared they had forestalled the few Sunless who had sought passage. Or at least, slowed them down with Connor’s pistol.
Connor was on his knees in the mud, using a cheap flashlight from Merryn’s cottage that emitted little more light than a glove box lamp. He missed his cell phone and remembered that he’d dropped it in the bog after surfacing. It seemed like a lifetime ago. How long had he really been gone from this world? A little over two months?
He bellied through the muddy turf, trying to keep his bandaged forearm out of it. His pathetic light revealed a low circular chamber. No well, just the muddy depression that might have been a well.
“Open long enough for the Old Blood to pass, right?” he asked Elowen.
“Aye.” She was right behind him. “Them and a few of those Sunless ye speak of.”
The chamber wasn’t tall enough for Connor to stand fully upright. The corbeling stones blushed with patches of brilliant green moss. Moss couldn’t grow without light, so there must have been a light source of light even before the wellstone was opened. Connor guessed it had come from the well itself, sunlight from the other side.
But there was something else there in the soggy mess. Something white. Connor knelt in the mud and picked up a short bone. Half-buried beside it, a glint of silver winked at him. A circlet. Beneath it…
The yellowing skull was brittle and the jaw came away. “Nechtan,” he stated with deep surety.
“Aye.” Elowen’s voice was no louder than a whisper. “My lord king.”
“You say that some of the Sunless might have made it through. What of Celeste? The one you call their leader?”
“Nay, she’s still among us as far as I know.”
“Good. I’ll be paying her a visit.”
According to Bronwyn, the lawyer—who had kidnapped Dish and bled him—clearly had knowledge of the principles of blood magic. Celeste’s part in opening the well could not be overlooked. There had been no more than four blood scribes at the time of Tiernmas’s death, himself included, and Connor had trained them all.
Every one of them had been executed by Black Brac. Dish had told Connor stories of an old soulstalker named Irjan from Sandkaldr who had poisoned the queen’s womb and created a blood beast, a red crow. She’d shaped it from the greenflow of a druí the queen had executed. If Connor remembered right, Irjan had been trained in the far north, in Sandkaldr, possibly by those who’d kept the teachings alive in secret.
This could only mean that blood scribes still existed, passing on their craft from generation
to generation. A craft that began with Caradoc…Connor.
Therefore, at least one of them had passed on their knowledge before they died. Or like Merryn, Lyl and even Connor, they had stored their memories in a soothblade to be rediscovered centuries later.
Which was it for this lawyer named Celeste Arundell?
The Old Blood had taught the Ildana to melt the sea sand to make glass, to read the passing of the stag in the whisper of leaves, to mix the blood of their enemies in the steel of their swords. Some regretted the passing of their secrets to the invaders, but Connor knew there would be a time when invader and invaded would be one. They would share the same blood and the same tongue. This mingling of culture was not just the way of existence, but the reason for it.
Strife gives meaning to peace; pain makes pleasure real.
Immortality was certainly the single regret of the gods. One day, Connor believed, they would fashion a creature that could kill them, and send them on to their own land of the dead. There, they’d would forget who they’d once been and find out who they might be.
The gods worship Death, as Connor once had. Deep down, he knew why, and even now, he could not turn away.
That night, long after Elowen and Bronwyn had left him alone at the cottage, Connor found himself sitting cross-legged in the mud in the center of the dark tomb.
He cradled Nechtan’s skull in his hands, saying, “I believe in the human soul, in the destiny of each person to leave his mistakes behind and remake himself. I worship the flame that is the mind, the soul, the ‘I am’ and all the mistakes and triumphs of that flame, all the potential to uncover the lessons of rebirth.
“The green gods have set the streams of life into motion, but it’s the flow that sculpts the landscape, and with it, our souls.
“I cannot change the past,” he said to Nechtan’s sleeping mind, “but I can shape my own future. And that cannot be taken from me—not by you, not by Lyl, and not by Tiernmas.”
That night, Connor slept in the barrow.
He walked the land of the living, the Red Bog. It was as he’d left it, stripped of every green thing and humming with a plague of insects. But walls grew from the great hole that had opened in the earth, spiraling from the depths like the shoot of a seedling reaching for daylight.