Paper & Blood

by Kevin Hearne

  “How do you know it’s Caoránach, specifically?” Nadia asked.

  Connor chucked his chin at the milling chimeric figures below. “Because of them. Caoránach was known as the Mother of Devils, or the Mother of Demons. Unlike Nessie or other oilliphéists, she can spawn Fae monsters at a pretty decent clip, and that’s why we’ve seen this disturbance without feeling a draw on the earth’s power.”

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Well, that brings us back to what Al was suggesting. She’s here for me. Caoránach died in the fifth century in Loch Dearg, her spirit residing somewhere beyond the veil in Tír na nÓg. Ogma had to travel there to convince the spirit of Miach to teach him how to regrow my right arm—that was the favor I required to square accounts. And I can tell by your faces I need to explain who that is.

  “Miach was a remarkable healer who in ancient days was able to grow a new arm for an old Irish king, Nuada. And that was necessary because ancient Irish society was horribly ableist, and after Nuada lost his arm, he wasn’t allowed to be king. Once Miach fixed him up in a nine-day ritual, Nuada became king again. His brain and leadership skills never changed; it was all ableism, which of course I had absorbed myself growing up in that culture. I called in my favors with Ogma last year when I was still shocked and depressed and hadn’t even begun to adjust to my new life. As you can plainly tell, growing a new arm for me didn’t work out. Caoránach’s appearance here might be Ogma’s attempt to get out of the obligation. If you look at it the way a homicide detective might, Ogma had motive, means, and opportunity. Caoránach is the murder weapon he brought back from the land of the dead.”

  “What the everloving fuck are you on about, mate?” Officer Campbell said, and Roxanne chuckled softly, but no one felt like bringing him up to speed on the fact that he was surrounded by people who all used magic to one extent or another. And while Roxanne’s laugh drew an odd stare from Ya-ping and Connor, neither of them decided to confront her about it, but rather appeared to tuck her reaction away under a burgeoning mental file labeled “Weird.” They had bigger concerns than her strangeness to address at the moment.

  “Begging your pardon, Connor,” Ya-ping said, “but I’m unclear on the motive part. You’re saying Ogma created this situation—the kidnapping of Sifu Lin and all of it—to get out of doing you a favor?”

  “Yes. That’s the theory, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand. If he couldn’t get Miach to teach him anything, why would he not simply return to you and say you have asked for the impossible?”

  “An excellent question. If it was truly impossible, he could say that and be excused from the request. But I know—and he knows, and others know—that it’s not impossible. It’s just spectacularly inconvenient, because in order to satisfy his debt to me, Ogma must go into debt with Miach, who—it cannot be stressed enough—is dead. The dead do not typically ask for easily obtainable items like chocolate or videogames or kitchen gadgets. Whatever Miach demanded in return for the knowledge he needed was something Ogma didn’t want to do, or it was a price he didn’t want to pay. But refusing to follow through on his obligation to me would have real consequences for him. He would suffer an extreme loss of face among the Tuatha Dé Danann and all the Fae if he did so, and we are in fact past the time when I could publicly call him out and dishonor him, because it’s been more than nine months.”

  “Someone skips out on a debt, you have to wait nine months before you can call them on it?” Officer Campbell asked.

  “Well, some multiple of nine, depending on the debt they owe you. If it was a very simple request, they’d get nine minutes or hours to make good. Nine days or nine weeks are typical for more-difficult things, and nine months are needed for tough stuff like what I asked for. Nine is a big deal in Irish paganism. But honor is a much, much bigger deal. Without your good name and a reputation for keeping your word, you’re basically unable to function in the Fae realms.”

  “So he did all this instead? How did he manage it? Is he a god of resurrection?” Ya-ping pressed. “Sifu Lin had me study the Tuatha Dé Danann, and I thought Ogma was a god of writing and learning.”

  “He is—he loves to learn, and he’s apparently learned how to bring Caoránach back from the dead. Or someone has, if it wasn’t him. But regardless of who’s behind it, I think Al’s right: This is a trap set for me. I can’t shift planes around the world like I used to, so they needed to set up in Australia, where I could travel easily and they could lure the sigil agents in. They knew that something sufficiently weird would eventually draw my attention, and it did.”

  It occurred to me then that the Morrigan could have also set this trap. She had more opportunity and means, certainly, than Ogma had. The motive, however, was a bit unclear: I’d seen no indication that she’d ever even disliked the Iron Druid, much less hated him enough to plot something like this. She’d even told me she loved him. And the plot itself seemed out of character for her. The Morrigan would come for you in battle, if she was going to come at you. Plus, she’d said she didn’t know why Caoránach had returned, so if she was behind it, that meant she had lied to me, and she had been scrupulous thus far about telling the truth—or at least not telling a direct lie. Her honor, like Ogma’s, would be tied to telling the truth. And, besides all of that, the arrival of a god on Shu-hua’s map predated the death of Thea Prendergast and the rebirth of the Morrigan. That white dot that had set off the Ward of Imbalance and alerted both Shu-hua and Mei-ling had most likely been the arrival of Ogma. He didn’t belong to any of the active pantheons in this part of the world and would have an outsized impact.

  “So we’re pawns to him in this chess game,” Ya-ping said. “Or at least the humans he sacrificed to those monsters were. Maybe sigil agents are knights or something, and he knew that if he captured enough of them the king would come running eventually. I am not especially apt at extended metaphors. My point is, he’s not a terribly noble fellow.”

  “No, but he wants to be seen as one,” Nadia said. “He wants out of his obligation but doesnae want tae pay a price for it. Arranging for it tae happen out of sight would let him save face.”

  “It’s a good thing you came along,” Connor said to Nadia. “The more that I think about it, the more I’m sure one of those traps would have gotten me. Or one of my dogs. Especially that meadow of poisoned darts triggered by cold iron. I wouldn’t have been able to avoid that, so I’m genuinely grateful to you and say in all sincerity, if I can ever do you a favor, I will.”

  Nadia nodded in acknowledgment. “Awright,” she said.

  “So where is this guy, this Ogma? Is he the terrorist leader? Is he down there?” Officer Campbell asked, desperately latching on to something that fit the world he knew. “If he’s responsible for…all this, we gotta take him in, right?”

  We all sort of stopped and blinked at him for a few seconds, processing how ill-equipped humans were to deal with reality. Nothing in popular culture prepared people to confront situations like this. Movies and television trained people to look at such things as fiction. He’d been trained to arrest people, so that was how he would try to solve every problem.

  “We’re not here to arrest anyone, Officer,” Ya-ping said. “The objective is to rescue the hostages and eliminate hostiles.”

  “Eliminate?”

  She gestured at the chimeric creatures milling about the stockade. “The hostiles you see are not human. They’re not even natural. There is no zoo that will take them in, because they eat people. And Ogma, if he is here, will not allow himself to be arrested.”

  “Well, we’re not going to give him a choice.”

  Ya-ping frowned. “I know that if you’re a hammer everything tends to look like a nail, but perhaps it would help to recast this. You’re a hammer and Ogma is a lake of lava. The only way for you to win is to not fall in.”

  “He’s…lava? So not really a
terrorist, then. You called him a god earlier.”

  “Yes. That wasn’t a metaphor. He’s an actual pagan Irish god. He could crush us. Codes of behavior and the consequences he would suffer at the hands of other gods are the only things holding him back.”

  His gaze flitted among each of us, and I could almost see the weight of accumulated facts squash the lingering effect of the authority sigils in his mind. “You’re not really federal police agents, are you?”

  Ya-ping rolled her eyes and let them settle on me, pleading for a measure of patience. I held up a finger to let them know I was going to respond and then typed on my phone.

  [We are equipped to handle this situation, and it needs to be handled. You may stay here—in fact, I’d rather you did—and let us engage the targets.]

  “No, no. I’m with you. Even though you did something to my head, didn’t you? And maybe something to her as well.” He gestured to Roxanne at the end and a corner of her mouth quirked in amusement. “She used to be Thea and now she’s someone else who is strangely calm about all this.”

  “Oh, you’re profoundly mistaken, Officer,” Roxanne replied in a pleasant tone. “I’m quite excited.”

  “Well, whoever the hell you are, I can see that you’re all as ready for this as anyone can be, and I can see that people need to be saved down there, and that’s what the job is all about. I’m just trying to understand what’s really going on.”

  “Even if you understood everything, you couldn’t report any of it,” Ya-ping pointed out. “You’d be referred for a psych evaluation.”

  “God, you’re right. What am I going to say?”

  No one had an answer for that, so Connor spoke into the silence. “Hopefully Ogma won’t be a problem. If he confronts me directly, he’ll do irreparable damage to his reputation. And believe me when I say that is foremost in his mind—I know from personal experience how deeply that conditioning is ingrained. My own obsession with personal honor led me down a path that two gods advised me not to walk and I ignored them and paid the price.” His eyes dropped in the direction of his missing arm. “I would have paid a different price if I’d broken my word, and it might have been a smaller one in physical terms, but at the time all I could think of was coming out the other side of things with my honor intact. Right now that’s where Ogma’s head is at, so I doubt very much he’ll wade into things personally.”

  “But we cannae convince him tae call things off either, right? We still have tae go down there and punch some pieholes,” Buck said.

  “Right. There’s no avoiding this scrap, unfortunately, if we want to get the hostages out of there. I was thinking I’d take Nadia and go after Caoránach. Attacking her will draw off some of the guards. The rest of you can head for the captives, but watch one another’s backs. Those guards look nasty.”

  “Just you two against—all that?” Officer Campbell said.

  Connor shrugged. “Gaia’s on my side. Pretty much the ultimate silent partner.” He looked down at the dogs. “Oberon, I’d like you and Starbuck to remain here. Your teeth won’t be able to help me, and knowing you’re safe will let me fight freely.”

  They whined softly, and he gave them each some pats on the head and no doubt added some additional words mentally before glancing at Nadia.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Aye. Boss man gave me some sigils earlier.” She looked at me to check on something. “That Iron Gall sigil ye painted on my straight razor—that’s gonnay work on these creatures, eh?” When I nodded, she favored us with a rare grin. “Then let’s order up some carnage with a side of mayhem. Ma favorite takeaway.”

  Ya-ping was frowning, and I wondered if she was having the same doubts as me. Was this scrap truly unavoidable? That is, if we could avoid it, shouldn’t we try?

  Perhaps Caoránach would be open to negotiation, if she was capable of carrying on a conversation—I wasn’t sure about the verbal skills of great wyrms. Nessie never offered more than an affable grunt when I delivered her yearly shipment of sardines, but I assumed at some point she’d communicated to the sigil agent who’d drawn up her contract in the nineteenth century.

  It was likely that Ogma would at least consider negotiation now. Since we’d successfully worked our way past his traps and he needed to avoid direct conflict with Connor, he might talk if we could just get him to show himself. As far as I could tell, we hadn’t fully exhausted our diplomatic options—or ruled out why those options weren’t available to us.

  Ya-ping raised an eyebrow at me and murmured, “Al, do you think picking a fight is the best way to go here?”

  I did not. Fights are messy and often end up spilling blood you’d rather keep contained.

  [No, but Connor hasn’t shared why he thinks violence is the best option.]

  “It’s probably because it solves things one way or the other and he tends to win. But there’s a lot of unknowns here and a huge risk. We do okay in a fight, but we’re kind of unco compared to him. This can go bad super quick.”

  That was enough for me to suggest some rethinking. My thumbs weren’t fast enough to ask the question, though, because Nadia and Connor had already put some significant distance between us. We couldn’t raise our voices without alerting the creatures below that we were up here, so it looked like I’d missed my opportunity to counsel diplomacy.

  My manager and the Iron Druid soon melted from view as Connor cast camouflage on them. They’d move fast, and Caoránach wouldn’t know what hit her.

  Roxanne finally spoke without being spoken to first. “Wait for the delicious cry of pain, then descend as the monsters are drawn off.” That would have sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing to say for the Morrigan, but it struck a strange note to everyone’s ears coming from the mouth of a friendly Australian woman who had signed up to find missing persons and pitch in against bushfires and other disasters.

  Officer Campbell bristled, and I could see he considered saying something about how she wasn’t in charge here, but since he was doubtful about who was, exactly, and understanding that it definitely wasn’t him, he instead asked: “Are you going down there unarmed?”

  “It is the purest form of battle.” Her lips twisted into a smirk. “Not that I require purity, you understand. Just battle.”

  “I don’t think I can emphasize this enough: What. The. Fuck?” he said. “Since when do SES volunteers talk about their need for battle?”

  Roxanne just laughed at him, low in her throat, and I could practically see the hairs rising on the back of his neck. Ya-ping opened her mouth to say something but reconsidered and shut it. She shook her head as if to dislodge a distraction; her focus was on rescuing Shu-hua, and everything else would be shunted to the periphery until that goal was achieved.

  Since the fight train had left the station and there was no emergency brake for me to pull, I crooked a finger at Buck and typed, [Can you pop into the cage and deliver some sigils?]

  The hobgoblin swayed on his feet, rocked by the mere suggestion of further exertion. “Aye, maybe. But if I do that, I probably cannae get out again. That would be ma last move.”

  [A safer one than confronting what’s outside the cage. Do it, please. Take these and give them to the sigil agents, with my compliments.]

  I handed him three copies each of Agile Grace and Muscular Brawn—all I had left except for a pair for myself.

  A pink finger jabbed at my face. “Ye better no leave me in there!”

  [I won’t. Go when you hear the scream.]

  “Wot scream?”

  A shriek of agony rose into the air from the right, and the monsters surrounding the stockade paid attention and began to stream toward the noise.

  “Oh, that scream,” Buck said, and popped out of sight.

  The Iron Druid must have hit Caoránach pretty well. Or Nadia did—either was equally likely. I saw Buck appear in the midd
le of the cage and extend his hands with the sigils in them. His voice floated up to us clearly.

  “Oi, I have some sigils for ye from Al MacBharrais, but never mind him. What ye need tae remember later is that I’m Buck Foi, a living legend, and I’m saving yer arse right now and I look fabulous.”

  The captives moved to take the sigils and we started moving too, heading downhill, even as the monsters became aware that something unusual was going on inside the stockade and maybe that scream had been a distraction.

  I opened my sigils and felt strength and quickness surge through my muscles, my joints shedding years of wear and tear and becoming limber again. The charge downhill seemed almost joyful after that, rather than incredibly perilous.

  Almost.

  It was, in fact, incredibly perilous. Especially because we were charging toward creatures who looked upon us as snack food. And as we got closer, we got a better idea of how badly outnumbered we were—for there were four of us, since the dogs stayed behind, plus Buck and the hostages in the stockade.

  There were probably two dozen different demons down there, even after some of them ran to investigate what had caused that unholy scream. Caoránach had indeed been busy.

  Most of them were on the other side of the creek, where the stockade was; a few were in the creek itself, but these were all cassowaries with cobra heads atop their necks. On our side of the creek were only three chimeras, which looked to be cheetahs with the oversized heads of stag beetles, the ones with the ridiculous mandibles.