The Dark Witch and the Elemental

by Tabitha Scott

  A slightly stunned Ardan does as he’s told, after all, I’m naked in here. Just as well the sheets stayed on overnight, I might have had to fane humility otherwise. I spend a moment magikly dressing myself in my Dark Witch, Thantos Moerae, sexy battle dress. Complete with green-black leather and Kevlar body armour. I’m wondering whether I have time for that coffee though.

  Outside the room I can hear distant shouting. Then Ardan relays the words I want to hear. “Pulania says to hurry up, or your coffee will get cold.”

  I make my way downstairs to the kitchen. There’s lots of panting and grunting going on, as a contraction has set in. I ignore that and take the coffee Pulania hands me as I walk in.

  “How long do we have?” I ask.

  “Not long, Susan is a Daughter of Gaea, an Earth Mother, the birthing will be quick, and Ruby is timing herself to Susan. We’ve three or four hours at most, and then, one way or another, it’s going to be all over,” Pulania replies.

  Gil is there in the corner looking as frightened as a mouse. I wink at her. This is a bit real for her, I guess, I mean the whole world facing death thing, but I’ve personally faced death many times, and he’s my father, so it’s no biggie. I think my care free attitude might be calming her a bit.

  It’s been three weeks since Eppy was married. They had a Honeymoon for two weeks, I don’t know where, that was kept a deep, dark secret, but they had returned a few days ago to help with the preparations for battle. Everything is going to plan, except the timing of babies is a little unpredictable. In the end Pulania and I did attend the church ceremony between Arawan and Eppy. We both felt we had to, as we are Eppy’s only family, apart from Grandma and Samael, who I guess attended in spirit. We were both a little amazed that we could actually walk into church and not be struck by lightning, but that might just be because of our family connection to God. As it was, when bits of Holy water and Holy oils started getting splashed around, we conspicuously exited ourselves, ostensibly for a much needed toilet break. Well, that’s what we told the priest afterwards when were forced to converse with him.

  As the contractions ease, Pulania takes us all in hand, while I swig down my luke warm coffee and pour myself another.

  “Right, we all know our roles. Ardan, you’re with Ruby, you hold her hand and pretend it’s Susan.”

  That shouldn’t be too much trouble, I think, Ruby looks exactly like Susan at the moment, I can just barely see through the Faerie compulsion that Ruby has cast.

  “I’m with you and Ruby as well, it would look out of place if I weren’t visible at the battle, it’ll look slightly suspicious that Amura isn’t there as it is, but we can’t do anything about that, she’s Susan’s protector. Gil, you’re with Amura and Susan, for moral support. Are you sure you two are going to be alright helping birth a baby by yourselves?”

  That’s the scary part, neither Gil nor I have ever done anything like this. Pulania has given us a crash course on midwifery, and Gil has helped birth kittens before (real ones, not the magikal Temple of Bast sort), so that’s going to have to do.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be,” I answer between coffee sips.

  “Well, you won’t be completely alone anyway, there are protections for a daughter of Gaea,” Pulania says enigmatically. “Good, let’s go then.”

  With bags of towels and other gear for wrapping babies and making birthing mother’s comfortable, we exit Pulania’s toward the Faerie path that begins in the front garden. I still don’t know where Gil and I will be taking Susan, Pulania said she would keep that to herself until the last minute.

  “Okay, Ruby and Ardan, you go on, take the Faerie path to Tara, I hope you can concentrate to do that, Ruby?”

  “I’ll be fine, though you’d better start calling me Susan. So long as I don’t have a contraction, I won’t have any problem, and if one comes on we’ll just stop and wait until it passes.”

  Ruby comes over to me, and gives me a hug, whispering into my ear, “Goodbye my friend, when the moment comes, you must take control of time. Be determined, there can only be determination and death. Don’t give up until death comes, every second will count.” There are tears in her eyes as the sane part of Ruby pulls away from me. For a second, I think she’s going to say something else, but then, she just turns to leave with Ardan.

  Ruby’s words have rocked me to the core, she’s a Faerie, and they have some ability to see the future, but they only reveal anything in half-truths and riddles. I don’t like where her riddles are heading though, ‘don’t give up until death comes’. Crap. Has Ruby seen my death? It doesn’t sound like I come out of this, her goodbye was very final, like it would be the last time that I see her, or something. I look over at Susan, I’m her protector, I guess that Tadpole the Loyal, and I, have our own roles to play, only they will be filled with Greek tragedy. Ficketty feck, it doesn’t sound like I’m going to make it to being a mum, though I guess I can help Susan make it there. There is that, and if I’m going to die anyway, I guess I want to die well.

  Pulania is waiting there for me, watching, and probably reading my mental processes, but I’m okay now, I know the score and I’m not going to hesitate in the task. This is it, I’m ready, and this is when Pulania will finally tell us what distant hidey hole she’s picked out for us. I’m assuming it’s somewhere I’ll know, as the Faerie paths are difficult to navigate if you don’t know where you’re going.

  “It’s nowhere you’re going to know,” Pulania answers my thought.

  “What? What do you mean?” Crap. What is she doing? The panic in my voice is a little less than obvious.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t have to take the Faerie path, instead, you want to follow the path into the Princess Street Gardens, below the castle. I’ve pointed out the entrance to a tunnel there to you in the past. Do you remember?”

  I take a second to rifle through a hundred years of memory, sometimes that can take a while, but yes, yes, I do have that memory, I remember seeing the entrance to a tunnel below Edinburgh Castle, I nod my head.

  “It has an ancient iron grate door blocking it, but I’ve made sure the lock is undone. Go there into the tunnels, there’s a chamber there, you’ll know it when you see it. It is magikly protected by ancient spells cast by my original coven of White witches, they were much more powerful than any White witch coven that are around today. Under the castle, the chamber will be shielded so that no one can feel that a Daughter of Gaea is there giving birth. It’s where I was born, and where I gave birth to you more than a millennium ago. It is the safest place on Earth for Susan to have her child. You’ll be safe enough getting there too, no one knows where this house is. Go now, and go quickly.”

  So, somewhere under Edinburgh Castle there’s a secret chamber protected by White magiks. It only takes a second to take that in. It makes sense, and now I know why Pulania didn’t tell anyone but us, it’s a family secret, and one that’s just been handed down to Susan and I. It also might explain why Pulania has always lived in Edinburgh, for her, it was always close to home, as it were.

  I give Pulania a quick hug. “Good luck,” I whisper in her ear.

  “And to you,” she whispers back. We don’t say anything more, we both know this might be our last day together.

  Susan and Gil take a moment to say their goodbyes, and then Pulania disappears along the Faerie path, toward a battle that must shortly begin on the Hill of Tara.

  “Well, I guess we’re on our own now,” I say to the other two girls. “No point dawdling.”

  We head out the front gate of the yard, and along the streets to one of the entrances of the Princess Street Gardens. It’s an incredibly pleasant day, I’m wondering if Gaea has provided that as a present for the grand daughter who, if all goes well, will shortly enter the world. There’s no one else about in the gardens at this time of day, which is good, because I didn’t want to have to kill any witnesses who might accidentally observe us descending into the tunnels.

  We have to stop at a p
ark bench for a while as a contraction takes hold of Susan, it passes quickly though, and we continue to the place Pulania described. A rusted iron grate bars the way, as Pulania said it would, but the padlock is not actually done up. Not something you would have noticed from a distance. We move into the entrance and I pull the grate behind us, and put the lock in position to make it harder to follow us, and so that our entrance is less than obvious.

  We step down into a dark hole of a tunnel where the outside light is quickly swallowed by a twist in the cave walls. I’m about to magikly light something so that we can see where we’re going, but as my eyes adjust to the dimness, I can see that a form of light has already been provided for us. With my true seeing, I can make out the auras of a group of women. White witches! Out of habit, I grab the hilt of my dagger, but then, as I try to determine their intent, I notice something else, there are no bodies attached to those auras, they’re ghosts.

  “Can we have a bit of light,” Gil asks. “I can’t see a thing.”

  I don’t answer for a bit. As I think about it, I realise that these must be ghosts from Pulania’s long dead White witch coven, but White witches are only slightly more social than solitary witches, for the most part they don’t even gather into covens. White witches hand down their lore from mother to daughter, or from mistress to apprentice. Yet there are a lot of ghosts, dozens that I can see. I think there must be generations of ghosts here, that’s the only way there could be so many.

  “Can you see them, Susan?” I ask.

  “Yes, I can. There’s lots, I don’t think they’re here to harm us, I think they hope to help.”

  With that, the group nearest us bow, leaving a path, which I guess they expect us to follow.

  “What do you guys see?” Gil asks, puzzled.

  “Ghosts,” I reply. “Lots of them, hold Susan’s hand, she’ll lead you, Susan, you stay behind me.” I take out my obsidian blade, just in case I’m wrong about this situation, and then I follow the path that the wispy white auras seem to be indicating to us. Still, I think I now know what Pulania meant when she said we wouldn’t be alone down here.

  They lead us for a couple of hundred metres through twists and turns that I’m sure I could never have found without their help. It is awkward with Gil being pulled along by Susan, she keeps bumping into walls and things. Then as we enter what I take to be a large chamber, where there seems to be nowhere else to go, a few candles sputter to life, yielding enough light for Gil to see by.

  “I guess this is it. This is where Susan gives birth.”

  I rummage around in the backpack of supplies I have, and pull out a bottle of French pink Champagne, and three plastic glasses. “This is for afterwards. Something to wet the baby’s head with, care of Pulania, she said we’d need it.” I put the bottle down on an Earthen hollow, and then start putting down blankets and towels for Susan in a patch of ground near one of the walls. This one spot is mostly sand, and probably has some give. Thinking about it, this is probably the same patch of Earth that Pulania laboured on when she gave birth to me, everywhere else is solid rock, and would be damn uncomfortable.

  Gil gives me a hand. A solemn line of white auras encircle us, I think these ancient spirits may actually be providing the protection that is shielding Susan from the world. If it weren’t so freaky, it might actually be a little comforting, it’s like all the generations of Pulania’s coven before us are here to watch over and protect us. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what’s happening. I guess in a way, they’re our magikal ancestors. Perhaps, when Tadpole the Loyal is a bit further along, I might return to give birth to her here. I feel as though I would be welcomed, but of course, my fate is not to survive this day. Something happens, something I have to be ready for.

  I’m distracted by muffled cries from Susan, as she tries to stifle the pain of another contraction. This is going to take a while.

  “No point holding it in, honey, we’re so far beneath the surface that nothing is going to hear you, just let it out.”

  Susan grits her teeth, trying to keep it in, but as the pain builds, nature bids her to take my advice, and the pain of childbirth begins in earnest.

  Chapter 52: I feel no grief

  “Holy grandma, this birthing caper takes forever. I wish you’d just pop the little pooper out so we can crack open that bottle of champagne.”

  Susan is digging her finger nails into my arm… again. Every contraction brings me a new set of nail marks. Gil isn’t fairing any better.

  “She’s getting there, her cervix is getting bigger,” Gil comments. “Less than an hour to go, from what Pulania said.”

  “Thank heavens,” I mutter. “You keep watching that end, Gil. If any intruders appear, I’m on it.”

  “Mawwahalllarrhh,” Susan wails. “Do you think I don’t want this over, too?” She does a bit of panting after that.

  I’m actually assuming she’s enjoying the attention, in a totally masochistic way, of course. It’s hard for me to deal with the blood curdling screams in any other way. I mean, why would you put yourself through anything like this otherwise? This has been going on for almost three hours now. When does it end? At least there are no complications, things are going pretty smoothly, and I guess if there were some trouble we have a whole bunch of ghostly midwives here to help us out.

  “Can you feel that?” Susan asks, as she momentarily returns to sanity.

  I think she’s magikly tied to this place. She may be able to feel a disturbance here sooner than I can. There is something wrong, though. The ghosts are stirring, they look uneasy, they’d been pretty much just hovering around us until now, rocking around a bit, in Ruby-like fashion, now they seem agitated.

  “Yes, something’s wrong. Get ready for whatever is coming,” I tell Susan and Gil. “Push that baby out as quick as you can, Susan.”

  “Like I have a choice?” But just then another contraction starts, so conversation pauses rather abruptly.

  I’m doing circuits around Susan and Gil, waiting for whatever is going to happen, to happen. The spirits about us are getting more and more agitated, they’re flitting around, in near frenzy now. There’s nowhere an attacker could come from apart from the way we entered. The walls are all of a volcanic like rock, and they don’t afford a lot of hiding places. If there were anywhere I could shift Susan to make her less visible, I would, but there’s nowhere to go.

  “Gil, if I go down you do whatever you have to stall whoever is coming and help get that baby out of Susan, cut it out if you have to.” I’m trying to make myself heard over another bout of screams. “Susan, you do whatever you have to make sure you have time to have that baby.” I hope she heard that, Gil gave me a pretty scared but determined type of look, so I know she’ll do what she can.

  Something is definitely about to happen and it’s not going to be good. Ruby’s last words to me just keep running through my mind. I have to buy time, I have to do whatever I can to buy whatever seconds I can – until death comes. But who am I kidding, Susan is almost an hour away from giving birth. I’m just going to have to kill any creature that tries to get near and hope there aren’t too many of them.

  As these thoughts roll through my head, a part of the chamber’s floor starts to steam, and then it begins to turn a dull orange. It’s heating from beneath! The spirits of the White witches are going wild, they’re flying over the spot. I think they’re somehow trying to cool it, and for a moment I think they might be succeeding, but then the ground erupts into a little pool of bubbling lava, which just seems to drop away into some sort of abyss. That’s when ‘they’ enter, coming up through the door they’d created. Two very familiar looking demons wing their way up to the rim of the hole, some twenty feet from where Susan is. Crap. I remember these guys, I had a dream about them months back. I remember seeing them eating some dude called Tommy, and plotting against Susan. It was a dream of true seeing, because I don’t dream, I see things, and what I saw was these low lifes. They’ve been behind
everything.

  When they appear, in a matter of a few ticks of the clock, several things happen at once. My mind is sharpened by adrenalin, so I take it all in. My first thought is that Susan’s birthing place isn’t at the centre of the chamber, it’s at the back, so we have a wall that stops them from encircling us, meaning that they aren’t going to be able to come at me from behind. I can fight from one direction. My second thought is to draw my knife, but one of the demons is grinning lecherously at me, he’s done something! I can’t get the blade from my thigh holster, he’s doing something so that I can’t get it out. It’s the only weapon I have that is going to help us against two demons. Then the third thing I notice is that these guys aren’t really demons at all. My true seeing can see right through the disguise they’re wearing. They’re angels.

  They’re huge too, twice the height of a human, and grasped in the hand of one of them a crumpled mess of flesh is limply struggling to be free. There are familiar clothes on that figure, otherwise she would have been unrecognisable. It’s Pulania. The creature holding her raises her up in his claw, and with one quick twist of that hand, breaks Pulania’s neck, before tossing her broken body off to the side. In a shock of rage, I pull the obsidian blade through its holster ripping away whatever magikal hold the other creature had placed there, I hardly notice as I slice through part of my thigh, until… until things change.

  I’m still in the rock chamber, where Susan, Gil and the demon-angels had been, but they’re all gone, even the White witch spirits are gone. But there is one small spirit here with me, the spirit of my blade whom I had called once before, with blood magik. Oh, crap, when I cut my leg I must have called her again.

  “Where’s Susan? I don’t have time for this.”

  “Calm yourself, Amura the Dark, time has stopped at my bidding. Susan is still under your protection. I have given you a moment to think.”

  Amura the Dark, that’s the title that the Faerie people give me. “For your people, I’m an angel of death, because I wield you, the obsidian blade.”