Horns of the Hunter: Tales of Luah Fáil Book 1

by Frank Dorrian

  ‘Never would have sent me to do this alone back then,’ Náith muttered, sword clicking as he loosened it in the scabbard. ‘Never would have punished me for winning a duel, either.’

  A red light flickered upon the tallest, most jagged peak, snuffed out in a heartbeat. Náith sighed, and steeled himself for a long, long climb.

  Mag Cáitha’s head waited for Náith near the foot of Crath Gulfáil, impaled upon a Fomonán war spear half the thickness of his wrist. He swatted a gorging carrion bird from it as he approached. The wretched thing escaped with a scrap of flesh dangling from its beak, cawing its outrage.

  Náith wrinkled his nose as the smell of decay hit him. Mag Cáitha’s head had been picked down to the bone in some places. The rest of it was bloated with rot, pulsing with flies and maggots. Its remaining eyelid shuddered as he watched, shed its crawling skin and opened.

  ‘Still alive, are we?’ Náith’s laughter swiftly turned to coughing as the head’s stink sucked at the back of his throat. An eye turned grey with rot, quivered as it swivelled toward him. Jellified, weeping some yellow, crusting filth from its corners, yet it managed to look sorrowful all the same.

  ‘You weren’t one to die easy, even without your head,’ Náith coughed, waving a halo of gnawing flies away. ‘But this…’ He waved an offended hand over Mag Cáitha’s present condition. ‘Did the Fomonán do this to you?’

  The eye blinked, slow and awkward, a yellow tear oozing down one cheek.

  ‘I thought as much,’ Náith muttered, considering the spear’s long, winged blade. Wisps of Mag Cáitha’s hair drifted upon them, beaded by shrivelled bits of scalp. Poor bastard. The Fomonán had a disturbing fondness for dealing pain even in death.

  Náith squinted up the trail behind the head, its heather-lined path snaking near vertically into the mountain’s crags. The sun was weak today, and this place seemed to swallow what light broke through the clouds and spit it out as shadow. Plentiful hiding places for the sneakier Fomonán in Sreng’s thrall. The quiet that shrouded the mountain bristled with threat. Damned decent of you, Aodhamar.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Náith declared, fists thrust into his hips as he glared into Mag Cáitha’s remaining eye. ‘Use that eye of yours to answer a few questions, and when I’m done with these Fomonán rock-chewers, I’ll come back and burn you – a proper warrior’s funeral, rid you of their magicks. What say you, dandy-boy?’

  Mag Cáitha’s eye quivered in its oozing socket for a moment before it blinked and flickered toward something beyond Náith’s shoulder. ‘Oh, you boring –’

  The Fomonán’s axe split Mag Cáitha’s head in two as Náith slipped to the side, sword screaming into the grey air. The blade hacked through a pair of scrawny arms as the air blistered with the shrill thunder of Fomonán shrieks. The gangling thing spun, stumps spewing ochre blood and screaming through a mouth ringed with needling teeth. Náith’s backswing cleaved its eyeless face and sent it pitching to the ground, thrashing like a landed fish.

  Idiot! Should have seen it coming!

  How had he not? Why else would the Fomonán weave such a dark spell upon Mag Cáitha’s already ruined head, if not to use it as a gazehound? Foolishness. Arrogance! Ill luck had followed him here from the Enkindled’s court.

  No. It had followed him from Síle’s bed. From her tryst with that bastard, Luw. Náith’s hand found the patch of short hair on the side of his head, a bristling memory of their fight, and cursed the Hunter’s name.

  Fomonán screams shook the scrubland at Náith’s back. Misshapen things burst through tangled briar, leapt from shallow, stony dens in showers of grit and dust, their wedge-headed axes and war spears blackened with soot and grease. Náith made to bolt for the trail but held for a moment. Mag Cáitha’s eye was glaring up at him from a patch of heather beside the trail, quivering in its maggot-eaten socket. Even without a mouth, he swore the fucker was laughing at him.

  ‘You always were a prick,’ Náith sneered, and kicked what was left of Mag Cáitha into the lower crags of Crath Gulfáil. Sneaky bastard could spend the rest of eternity staring at rocks.

  Náith tore along the heather-lined trail, his roar echoing from crag and boulder as a ribbon of flame awoke on the mountain’s peak. His sword was levelled as the first gangling, eyeless creature scuttled out of the rocks and into his path. He slipped around the thrust of its spear and rammed his blade through the paunch of its gut, heaving it overhead and into the clustered Fomonán ascending behind him.

  He pelted on as they crashed back down the trail, tangled and squealing. Fomonán warriors lurked behind every crag, in every crack, their war spears and axes snapping as Náith streaked along the trail, making for the flame that waited above. The swiftness of his feet carried him through the narrower passes before their weapons could bite, left them shrieking and swarming in his wake, but as the trail opened onto a blasted shelf of rock, a harrowing roar shook the mountainside.

  Sreng.

  Its voice blasted down the trail with all the deafening power of a storm wind. Náith stumbled beneath its force, falling to his knees with hands clasped to his ears, a growl lost to Sreng’s bellowing. He dragged watering eyes from the ground and marked the Fomonán pouring down from the higher reaches, axe and spear glinting in their sinewy hands.

  Náith stood, shrugged the shield from his back down onto his arm, and roared his fury back against Sreng’s, springing forward as the first pallid creature drew back its axe. He slipped beneath the blow and opened the Fomonán’s gut from navel to ribcage, his shield checking a spear-thrust from the one behind it as he stepped through. Náith stomped on the stave as blade bit stone, snapped it halfway along its length, and stuck his sword through the cave-lurker’s chin. He turned, wrenched the blade free, and sheared off its face to parry an axe-strike from behind, shattering the rock-chewer’s ribs with a blow from his shield.

  The Fomonán from the trail were spilling onto the rock shelf, their chattering and shrieking drowning out the song of steel, wood, flesh and bone. Náith was surrounded. The Fomonán King’s trap so simple, yet his own arrogance and bloodlust had carried him straight into its teeth. Pale, twisted faces snarled on every side, thin skin stretched over sharp bone, lipless mouths that bristled with fangs like a beast hooked from the sea. Here and there, a dark, round eye or two glared amongst mostly eyeless heads.

  Náith turned as their circle tightened about him, a smile creeping onto his face beneath the rim of his shield. A hundred Fomonán crowded the rock shelf and the trail below, give or take. It had been a long, long time since he had faced such rotten odds as these. Not since the days when Sreng and its horde had first spilled from beneath the earth. Days of blood, of gilded fucking glory. It had been a too long since he’d had a real challenge.

  You’ll pay for this, Aodhamar. If I live.

  ‘Come, you ugly bastards! Your stink’s making me feel drunk!’ he cried and spat at the feet of the one nearest to him. It charged, shrieking like a belly-stuck sow, axe held low, scraping sparks from stone as it came at him. Náith stepped around its swing, kicked the thing in the small of the back and sent it stumbling onto the spear of another, squealing as the pair fell.

  An axe whistled through the air behind Náith. He turned and stepped aside in one motion, its head biting stone. Before the thing could recover, Náith trapped the haft with a foot, sprang from it and stomped a boot into the Fomonán’s face. He kicked off, leaping over their thronging, screaming mass as the creature went down, boot trailing blood. Landing, he tucked into a roll and burst forth into a sprint the moment he was on his feet, the Fomonán screeching behind him. The trail narrowed sharply ahead, choked by scorched stone blasted from the higher reaches. Náith scrambled up the mound. Wedging himself between a pair of boulders at the peak, he heaved with his legs. A blackened slab of rock groaned, lurched, went spinning and crashed down the pile toward the trail. The mound shifted at its loss, the stone at Náith’s back slouching forward. He rolled to the side, breaking into
a run as the pile collapsed beneath him. A wave of shattered rock poured down the trail, pulverising the Fomonán, the crash of stone smothering their screams. Náith pelted on, laughing hearty at the destruction below him as he followed the shadowed path toward the mountain’s crown.

  ‘Still alive, Aodhamar, you sly bastard!’ he spat at the sky.

  Another bellow shook the mountainside, and a wall of scalding air slammed into Náith. He ploughed through it, shield raised against Sreng’s assault. The force of it slowed him for a moment, made his feet grind against rock and filled his nose with the stink of hair singed from his arms. Sreng’s wrath ebbed, and Náith tore through the burning air, through snatching, biting crags, into a place where the very stones of the mountain smouldered.

  Skidding across smoking stone, he halted and looked about him. It was some kind of passageway. The crags above had melted, ran like wax, and they stretched across the grey sky like a dead man’s withered fingers. A yawning cave lay ahead of him at the passage’s end, its dark arch formed from blasted and melted stone that glistened like glass. It was as if something had bored straight through the flesh of the mountain, lanced it with demonfire.

  ‘Is this your lair, Sreng?’ Náith called, his voice ringing back and forth on its way toward the cave. Silence. He breathed in a lungful of pitch-stinking air, hawked, spat a wad on the ground. It sizzled and frothed. The heat was seeping through the soles of his boots, making him want to dance on his tiptoes like a fancy-boy. ‘A little less grand than the hall you forged at Sá Tailteann, if I do say! Reeks a bit!’

  He stepped toward that black cavemouth, shield raised, eyes raking the warped, melted rocks of this place. Smoke coiled from among them, the air shimmering as it rushed to escape the malformed crags above. ‘Come, Sreng!’ Náith bellowed. ‘Why so shy now our dance is here? King of the Fomonán! You know me! I am Náith! Greatest warrior in Luah Fáil! Champion of Aodhamar!’

  Champion. He could have scoffed at that, were it the time. There was nothing left between them now. No friendship worth saving. Not even shreds of honour from their days of blood and brotherhood, the years they cut a bloody path from the north with sword and spear. Aodhamar was barely even a man anymore. Too much Earthblood had passed his lips for that.

  A hiss swelled on Náith’s right, so subtle in its rise he nearly missed it. Spinning, he ducked down behind his shield as a ball of black filth splattered against the rock at his side. Its spray went wide, fizzing and fuming from everything it touched. Smoke curled from Náith’s shield where the stuff landed on it, the leather creaking and curling as it was eaten. A thin scream came blistering through the passageway – a gaunt creature was sprinting through the blasted rocks straight toward him. A mess of pale tentacles writhed about its lopsided head – a Fomonán spellweaver. Disgusting thing. Probably the wretch that had cursed Mag Cáitha.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d show,’ Náith muttered. He leapt from cover with a murderous roar. The spellweaver stopped, clawed feet scattering rock and dust. The tentacles of its face contracted, puckered, and spewed forth a rope of stinking black filth. Náith threw his shield up and charged through it. The stuff hit with enough force to slow him for a heartbeat and shattered his shield into a dozen fizzing, smoking pieces, searing like liquid flame where it found his skin.

  The thing cocked an arm back, a pair of misshapen eyes flaring yellow in their bed of tentacles. A shard of rippling, sickly flame appeared in its hand, flaring into being like oil put to the torch. Náith darted to the side as the thing hurled it at him, the shard exploding into a wave of diseased, stinking green flame that slapped him with its rotten heat as he charged through. The Fomonán screeched, tentacles bristling as it reared and summoned another shard of oily flame, its hands moulding it into the shape of a crude sword. It swung clumsily at Náith’s head, its unskilled strike hauling it off balance straight onto Náith’s rising blade as he ducked and countered. His blade split the thing in half and sent it staggering back, its torso flopping and writhing upon hips attached by a bare thread of black gristle.

  ‘Is this it, Sreng?’ Náith roared over the spellweaver’s shrieking, flicking its smoking blood from his sword before it devoured the iron. It was already stinging along the bare flesh of his arm and back. ‘A single Earthblood-suckling worm is all you have? How far you’ve fallen! Surely you’ve more of a fight for me than this? Or did Aodhamar’s spear rob you of your bollocks as well as your heart?’

  The mountain shook. A burning wind billowed from the cave as the Fomonán King’s roar battered the fuming air, a cloud of red sparks spinning through into the passage. Náith rounded on the cave, feet planted against the mountain’s shaking, sword raised. ‘Come on then, Sreng, you fuck–’

  The ground heaved upward on Náith’s left. Red cracks webbed its mound for the barest heartbeat before it burst, bombarding the passage with burning, molten rock. Náith swung his sword about him in a spinning parry, glowing shards pinging from the flat of the blade. Sreng’s monstrous arm slammed down on the crater’s edge, stone shattering beneath claws that tore foot-deep gouges through the ground. The Fomonán King dragged itself from the blazing deep of its burrow, its dark head mantled in red flame. The mountain shook as Sreng stood, stepped towards Náith on bent legs as thick as he was tall, straightening against the grey sky to tower over him.

  ‘How dare you, Son of Dáithan!’ Sreng’s bellow forced Náith back a step, using his sword as cover. About the edge of the blade, he could see the great hole torn through Sreng’s chest by Srengbolga, the other side of the passage visible through it. The edges of that wound still glowed, pulsing with the living fire that ran through Sreng’s flesh. A scarred heart thrummed deep in the cavity, a throbbing ember plucked from the hearth.

  ‘You trespass and butcher upon my mountain! My kingdom!’

  The sky itself seemed to burn in Sreng’s presence, clouds churning like smoke about flame. Sparks billowed from its twisted mouth with every breath, the muscled flesh of its body cracked and burnt, running and oozing ceaselessly. Foul heat poured from its body, so blistering that even behind his sword, Náith turned his face from it.

  ‘This mountain is in the Enkindled King’s realm, Sreng!’ he called, sweat pouring from his chin. ‘And Aodhamar has declared your life forfeit!’

  ‘Aodhamar?’ The ground shattered and shook as Sreng took a step toward Náith, melting where the beast’s feet lingered. ‘That worm sends his boasting lickspittle to finish what he started? You and that Earthblood-supping pretender are no match for me, Son of Dáithan!’

  Náith backed off again as Sreng took another step on blackened bowlegs. He had to tear that scarred heart from its chest, but the heat of the thing… How had Aodhamar gotten close enough to strike at it? There was no way the iron of his sword could stand it. The air blistered and billowed about the demonkin’s form, made it blur and waver, broke the light so its burning mantle glowed like a halo about its distended head.

  ‘I will not be pushed from this land, Nuankin!’ Sreng roared. A chunk of rock broke off from the fingers above the passage, glowing red as the demon crushed it beneath an oozing foot. A burning line awakened across its face, yellow flames lapping charred skin.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Náith muttered, turning his face to the ground. Sreng’s eye was opening, its putrid light chasing back the shadows of the melted passage. Its stare was slaughter itself. He’d seen its horror before upon the battlefield at Sá Tailteann, seen what it had done in moments to armoured men.

  ‘Your fathers tried to slay me, and your brothers fled before me! I am the ageless flame itself! And Aodhamar sends you alone to best me? What fool are you, Son of Dáithan, to throw your life away so recklessly?’

  Náith’s eyes scanned the ground for cover, the heat pouring from that eye growing, the skin on his hands and arms beginning to blister. ‘My father’s son, I suppose!’ he cried, biting back against the pain. ‘He had a bit of a thing for slaying giants!’

  ‘I crushed D�
�ithan against the rocks of Gol Mór! And I will burn you from this diseased earth!’

  Sreng’s roar blasted a wave of shattered rock across the passage. Náith caught a glimpse of Sreng’s pupil before he rolled to the side and slid into the cover of a rock – a vast, black vortex in a corona of yellow flame. A pillar of light burst from Sreng’s eye, cutting a glowing gouge through the flesh of the mountain. It swept the beam about, shearing off a section of the passage wall that crashed down the mountainside, exposing the scorched sky like the flesh beneath a torn scab. It was blinding, its heat malevolent, blistering the skin of Náith’s shield arm as it tore through the ground but ten paces away, reducing the edge of his rock to glowing sludge. The beam narrowed, flickered and vanished, a rank afterimage of it searing across Náith’s sight.

  ‘Have you lost your gall so swiftly, Son of Dáithan?’ thundered Sreng. It was panting, breathless, the sound of bellows driving the forge’s flame. ‘Crawl out from behind that rock like the insect you are, Nuankin, and stand before me! Or I will bury you beneath the wreckage of this mountain!’