Scourged

by Kevin Hearne

  “Yes, I’ve heard. The Buddha Victorious in Strife. May I ask…”

  “Of course.”

  “Why is a Buddha spending his time serving bubble tea?”

  He shrugs. “It is a simple pleasure that tends to make people happy. And when they see that they can be made happy by something so simple, then all their other grand desires seem silly by comparison—for indeed they are. A Buddhist wishes to point out that desires are what prevent people from achieving happiness, that materialism is the cause of discord. The simple pleasure of bubble tea gets them to a receptive place to hear that message. Or to reinforce that message, if they’ve already heard it.”

  I suddenly cannot keep myself from smiling as I mentally take note of what I’m doing: I am talking to the Monkey King in Taiwan about Buddhism. My life has become far more dangerous since becoming a Druid, but at the same time, I get to talk to living legends.

  It’s at that point that Seven Star Mountain explodes again.

  slomo tells me of the birds she likes and the birds she doesn’t. The insects who bite and who leave her alone. The monkeys, screeching and leaping around her, eating yellow tube fuel. The colorful moths and butterflies snapped up by croaking frogs. The thrilling quiet that settles in the forest when the jaguars pass through. Her occasional, half-hearted yearnings to find a mate, but even yearning was more energy than she wanted to expend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  And then me mind is bombarded by images and emotions, all relating to a sliding scale of satisfaction with staying still through a wide range of environmental factors. Bearing witness to frenetic activity while remaining almost motionless gives Slomo great pleasure, but she can visualize and imagine things so well. When I ask her why that is, she replies,

  I ask her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Slomonomobrodolie chews on the idea along with a leaf, slowly enough that I can hear the exquisite crunch and grind of her teeth and perhaps the churning of metaphorical gears in her head. When she finishes, her eyes refocus on me and she nods, upside down.

 

 

  She answers and I continue to ask, absorbing as many basic facts as I can and combining them with a fluid understanding of her personality so that I’ll be able to shift with her safely. And in truth there is no hurry until I’m asked to be somewhere again. A couple of hours pass with her sharing her life with me in pictures and feelings, and I can sense I’m getting attached to the lass. She doesn’t like toucans, for example, because they have wee beady eyes of death and huge beaks.

  she explains,

 

 

 

 

  I promise her, and then the elemental summons me. I’m needed somewhere in Europe because some daft donkey cock has gone and messed with powers he shouldn’t have. I says to Slomo.

 

  The sun wasn’t down yet, so that’s an alarming estimate. I shoot her some more juice and her eyes pop wide.

 

 

  I float down to the forest floor and shift to human, and Slomo is ready to hop on after a few seconds. Careful with those claws, now. Wrap your arms around me neck and I’ll catch ye.

  She leaps and lands with a grunt, and I grunt as well. She’s a bit prickly, not as soft as she might look, because that fur is matted and filthy. My skin begins to tickle; she wasn’t lying about the bugs living on her, which I guess are now having a look around at this new thing she’s hanging on that isn’t a tree. I take time to reach their tiny brains—nothing more than a few nerves—and tell them to stay on Slomo. Not sure they’re going to make the shift, honestly, but they might, as Slomo considers them to be a part of her.

  I have to jog through the brush and get used to the weight, and it’s bouncy for both of us.

 

  A bit. It’s also called riding piggyback, though I don’t know why. Never seen a single feckin’ pig do this. Language is strange.

 

  I’d like that. Okay. Here we are. This tree is special. We can use it to shift to Tír na nÓg and from there to practically any other place on the planet. But I need ye to put one of your hands on that tree.

 

  It’s many things. Mostly magic and bollocks, but not magical bollocks, if ye take my meaning.

 

  Just hold on.

  We shift through, pulling along the tether, and I hold the wonder of Slomonomobrodolie in me second headspace, hoping I don’t cock it up, for it would be a tragedy if I brought her to any harm. I pause on the other side to check on her.

  How was that?

 

  A hot juicy something lands on me shoulder and drips down me chest.

  <—Be sick. Yeah. Uuaagh. It’s a sure thing, actually. Sorry. Those were good leaves too. You know, I think I recognize one of them! I guess I didn’t chew that very well because I was so excited about how delicious it looked.>

  How are your bugs?

 

  Great. This is Tír na nÓg. Full of trees, but not the kind you’re used to eating. We’re going to do that one more time, so hold on to yo
ur stomachs.

  I shift to the tether point that Gaia wants me to use, though I’m not sure precisely where it is. Somewhere to the north and east of where I was before—in Europe, certainly, but north of the mountains and east of Germany. I might actually be in Poland—I’m not sure where the modern borders are drawn. All I know is that it’s quiet enough to hear Slomo barf wetly on me shoulder again.

 

  It’s okay, lass, I tell her, brushing it away. Maybe ye will get used to it. And maybe we won’t shift very much from now on.

 

  On the other side of the world from your jungle. This is across an ocean or two.

 

  Wait until you feel a desert. Okay. I have to find out from the elemental what we’re here to do, and then there may be some action.

 

  This might be the kind of action where ye have to defend yourself. You’ve done that before, haven’t ye?

 

  Don’t worry about energy. I’m going to give ye all ye need. Just make sure whatever ye see goes down instead of you. Those claws of yours can do some real damage if ye put some muscle behind it. Move fast as ye can and don’t give anything the chance to hurt ye.

 

  We’ll find out soon enough.

  The elemental tells me where to go: It’s a decent jog of a couple of miles, because there aren’t any tethered trees closer than that, but after only a wee while Slomo asks if she can follow along in the trees. We’re running through some woods that are close enough to allow swinging in the branches, and she argues that it will probably be a smoother ride for both of us. I agree, and the weight soon lifts from me back and she hoots as she takes to the branches, her long arms propelling her from tree to tree.

  Have fun but try to do it quietly, I says. We don’t want to announce that we’re coming.

  The objective, I’m told, is to close a portal to the Christian hell that someone has managed to open. Hell was supposed to stay out of this fight, I thought, but some gobshite didn’t get that particular memo. Which means I have to deal not only with whatever’s coming out of that portal but with whatever sorcerer had the moxie to open it.

  Perhaps I’ll get lucky and find that the sorcerer got eaten by what came out of hell. Siodhachan’s stories about it suggest that happens as often as not.

  Slomo tells me.

  Oh, aye? After a moment I see and hear them too. I’m glad you’re in the trees. Stay up there unless ye have good reason to come down.

  I’m a bit more worried about her being here than I was before, because Siodhachan’s stories about hell are flooding back and they’re not the shiny happy sort. I’ve never had to deal with the Christian hell meself, because that whole religion came along and flourished while I was stuck on that Time Island. The day Siodhachan told me that Christians drove the Druids out of Ireland and then the Irish wound up killing one another over different versions of Christianity centuries later was an especially dark stretch of a dark feckin’ day. A notable detail about the religion is how much effort is spent on imagining eternal punishments after death. Plenty of faiths have richly imagined hells, Siodhachan assures me, but apparently the Christian one deserves the biggest slice of bread pudding at the end of the night. So many demons and devils eager to torture souls—so eager, in fact, that they want to trade for them and are willing to deal with sorcerers to get what they want: more deaths, more corrupted souls. And should they be set loose on this plane, they will never hesitate to kill anything living in hopes that it might increase their own power, especially since it reinforces the idea that they are hellish and to be feared, a circular thought pattern within the faith that they exploit. It’s no place for a sloth to be dangling around.

  I come to a small clearing in the forest that’s been turned into a battlefield with multiple light sources. One of them is the moon and stars above. There’s an orange-red glow coming from the open portal to hell, which is rapidly draining the elemental’s energy—the entire reason I’ve been called. But there are also other lights, purple cones surrounding thirteen women as they battle the horrors coming out of hell and the white light of whips they’re using like scourges to banish the horrors from this plane.

  I have to stop to take it all in, because it’s as intense and alarming as a chopped ghost-pepper poultice applied directly to the genitals—with forethought, and malice.

  What I’m seeing fits with stories Siodhachan has told me before. These must be the Polish witches he told me about, the Sisters of the Three Auroras, who derive their powers from goddesses called the Zoryas. The purple cones surrounding them are protective wards, and those weapons they’re lashing around are hellwhips. And that smell is entirely from hell.

  Slomo says,

  I file that information away to share later with Granuaile.

  That’s the demons. Stay away from them, all right? If any come near, I want ye to get away if ye can, take off their heads if ye can’t.

 

  The ones that smell bad and try to kill ye.

 

  The sorcerer is on the far side of the portal: Some sad scabby punk of a lad who thinks the world owes him something, and he’s come to collect. I put on me brass knuckles and call out the name I remember from Siodhachan’s stories—the leader of the coven, if I’m not mistaken. “Malina! Can I help?”

  Most of the witches do not react, but one of them looks in my direction after finishing off some monstrosity that looks like an ambulatory slime mold with eyes.

  “Who are you?” she shouts, backing up and flailing the hellwhip around in front of her in a defensive pattern. She has long straight blond hair falling over her shoulders, most likely the finest hair I’ve ever seen in me whole life, and like the rest of her coven, she’s dressed in something black that I suspect must be fashionable these days. I don’t know how to describe it in modern terms, but basically, if I were a wee lass, I would look at Malina and want to grow up to be her someday, and even as a grown man I’m more than a bit sad that I will never, ever look as good as she does destroying evil. Kind of glad, actually, that me young apprentices aren’t here to see this, or else they might not want to be Druids anymore.

  “Owen Kennedy, Druid of Gaia. The man who taught that O’Sullivan lad!”

  She squints at me for a moment, probably confirming that I have the requisite tattoos and am bound to the earth, and then she nods. “If you can take out the sorcerer, that would be helpful.”

  Helpful, she says! That would end the whole fecking game, the way I see it, but it’s not the sort of thing to raise a fuss about. I’m here to close that portal, and everything else is a distant second to that. I just don’t want to get mistaken for an enemy in this bloodbath and get lashed with one of their hellwhips.

  I circle around to the left, running clockwise, as they say, and plow me fist through the face of something orange and toothy that tries to stop me. It explodes under the knuckles and falls over in a shower of its own ichor, but that only draws the attention of four more horrors. I realize that none of them are flying and I might be able to avoid some messy bollocks by shifting shapes. I strip off me shirt and shift to a red kite, soaring above the demons and circling around behind the sorcerer. The clever bindings Creidhne worked into the knuckles mean the brass has flowed down to me talons, and I’m thinkin’ as I glide behind the sorcerer that it’s going to be so easy to simply latch on to his neck from behind, clutch, an
d tear away his throat. Easiest mission of the whole day, and on top o’ that, I get to look cool in front of the cool kids of the coven.

  Except it doesn’t work out that way. Nope.

  Instead, I run into an invisible wall like a fecking dumbass sparrow assaulting a glass door and flail in a mess o’ feathers, head buzzing from the impact, until I hit the dirt outside a ring of salt.

  Ah, the protective ring. That’s what happened to me. When I’m shape-shifted, I’m precisely the sort of thing the sorcerer’s wards are designed to keep out. The ring detects the magical aura of my bound shape and denies me access. Well, lad, good on you. But I can shift back to human and obliterate your fecking salt, can’t I?

  I perform the shift and grunt, and he hears it. He whirls around and it’s a face of blue-eyed madness I see, paranoid testosterone that’s been let out of the barn. Some young punk who’s either never had the shite beat out of him, so he doesn’t understand that there will be consequences for his actions, or who’s been beaten so much and so badly he doesn’t give a blistered tit what happens to him next. He’s poxy as a baby swaddled in poison ivy and as incensed about it as ye might expect. He shouts something at me—in Polish, I suppose—and I don’t understand a word of it but I sure feel whatever it is he casts my way. His hand thrashes and clutches and I suddenly feel like all me muscles are clenching at once except for me arse, which is relaxing at precisely the wrong time. It hurts more than anything is rightfully supposed to and I can’t think of what to do except to cast healing on meself before he kills me. I’m spraying shite around the forest, thinking this is not the way I wanted to die, and also that maybe Siodhachan had a point about the uses of cold iron, when something savage bugles above me head. I throw up a forearm, hoping to protect meself from whatever it is, but it turns out that it’s not some hellspawn come to snack on me spleen. I’m not even the target—that would be the poxy sad sack who’s draining Gaia with his festering hellhole.

  It’s Slomonomobrodolie, leaping down from high up a tree to grasp on to the lad with one long arm around the back of the neck while she plunges the three long claws of her right hand directly into the blackguard’s throat. She rips up and out, screaming in his face, and he manages a panicked gurgle and a surprised pair of eyes before he topples backward, ruining his salt circle and breaking who knows how many concurrently running spells. I guess the binding I used to give Slomo her energy wasn’t enough magic to trigger his protective ward. All I know for sure is that I’m grateful to get control of me own arse again while the rest o’ me relaxes. The lad was keeping the portal open through force of his own will, and with that gone, the portal closes on its own.