Movement downhill pulled his mind from the pain, ramming a hollow wedge of dread in its place. Náith staggered to his feet, shedding a coat of pulverised stone. The warrior’s flesh trailed smoke and steam as he clutched briefly at his head. He was unhurt. Bann’s skull leered upon his fat shoulder, the warding runes upon it glowing with the furious red of heated iron, trailing a blood-coloured vapour into the screeching storm.
The hooks of sorrow, of hate and loss, pulled Luw back to his feet, still clutching at his mutilated hand. Maebhara be damned. He would take that skull back from the warrior’s corpse and, with Síle at his side, he would bury it beside Bann’s body where it belonged. Náith watched him descend, glanced at the smoking, glowing shard that was left of his sword and cast it aside. He raised his fists and beckoned Luw forth.
Luw shuffled and stumbled toward the warrior, his charge broken as he slipped over loose rock. Cradling his ruined hand to his chest, he loosed a hoarse roar, swinging his other fist for Náith’s head. The warrior’s arm blocked the shot, snaked about Luw’s, and bound them together. Luw choked, Náith’s off-hand seizing him by the throat, hauling him into the air to dangle like a stringless puppet.
‘You were never a match for me, dandy-boy,’ the warrior snarled, the mask of Ancu all that Luw could see. ‘You should have turned back.’
The world lurched. Náith threw him to the storm, the warrior’s form fading like a ghost behind whipping cloud, a sharp ridge of stone rising between them as Luw fell, screaming, from Moírdhan.
Chapter 25
Courage
Náith watched Luw fall. Darkness swallowed the Hunter’s shrieking, flailing form. He turned away. Once, he would have taken joy in the kill, swigged its glory down as if it were sweet ruby ale. But there was only hollowness in the wake of those fading screams. There was nothing to celebrate here. His eyes found Síle’s silhouette just beneath the peak, the light before her growing with the quickening storm. This feud had cost both of them too much.
We’ve been fools, spear-swallower, Náith lamented. You were always going to die at the end of this.
His foot caught something as he took a step up the slope. It was the blade of that antlered fanny-boy’s spear. Golden runes flickered along its edge, winking in and out like glowflies as whatever magic was left in them died. What had the little spear-sniffer done to come by such a weapon? Náith wrinkled his nose. No use thinking about it now. It almost looked like the blade of Srengbolga. He hooked a foot beneath the smoking shard of its haft and shunted it off the same edge of the mountain as its master.
A last respect for a worthy foe, he thought, limping on. May it let you cross the bridge of blades.
Náith picked his way through the final stretch of blasted rocks between him and Síle’s ridge, glad of their shelter against the storm’s ceaseless tearing. Lightning pulsed as he took a moment of rest against a boulder, directly overhead. Its passing flare illuminated the bodies between the rocks. The last of Aodhamar’s men were scattered, twisted, dashed among shattered, fire-blackened stones. He sagged against the boulder as shadow swept back over them, exhaustion and agony tracing claws through every muscle, his bones aching as if stomped to splinters.
A shape shifted in the murk, lifting Náith’s head as despair seeped through him. A groan slithered beneath the storm’s roar – a survivor’s tortured wail. He dropped to his knees, crawled toward them, hands slipping on blood-slicked stone. A warrior sat amid the bloodshed and shredded remnants of his comrades, head hanging like a drunkard’s. Náith knelt at his side, reached toward him, paused as he saw the oozing stumps left of the man’s legs. The warrior jerked, whimpered, head knocking on the rock behind him, the splintered ends of bone grating on those beneath.
‘Can you hear me, brother?’ Náith spoke, laying a hand to the man’s shoulder. A trembling hand clutched at his arm.
‘Help me…’ came a whisper. ‘My legs… the giant took my legs…’
Náith looked away as the ragged stumps twitched and scraped again. He squeezed the warrior’s shoulder, tried to keep him lucid. ‘Aodhamar, my brother, where is he? Is he alive?’
‘Fell,’ the warrior whimpered. ‘She summoned giants, up out of the stone… it dragged him… down the mountain… my legs… it took my legs…’
Náith closed his eyes, embraced by dank sorrow as the warrior murmured on of his maimed legs. Aodhamar… it couldn’t possibly be so crude a creature could not have felled him. The Enkindled King was a crusher of men and beasts, of kingdoms.
A hollowness suddenly grew in him. But she… she was Tárchan’s Spearmaiden. The witch that helped slaughter Crath Bloodsinger.
Náith found himself staring at Síle’s silhouette, wavering against the light she cradled. The warrior beside him was still now, his pale lips moving but barely and without sound. He stood, striding through the rocks and all their death toward the ridge. She had to be stopped.
‘Síle!’
Her head lifted, turned slowly to regard him sidelong, her eyes blazing with the Earthbond’s light. Sweat was running down her face, exhaustion hollowing her features. Náith had expected an attack, another of her giants to tear itself from the earth, but Síle’s power seemed spent, worn thin, occupied by the ritual taking place over her shoulder. The Stormheart drifted above her cupped palms, pulsing with all the fury of chained lightning. It hurt to look upon, and he turned his eyes to the relief of her face.
‘Síle,’ Náith called again, hand outstretched as anger softened. ‘Stop this! You go too far! Come away from that thing!’
‘Leave me,’ she spat, turning back to the Stormheart.
‘Enough, Síle!’ He took a hesitant step toward her. ‘I’ve seen what that thing will do if you unleash it – what it has done before. Please! Enough have died today! Stop this before you kill us all!’
‘You are a handful of Nuankin worms! Unfit to skulk in his shadow! He will rid our land of you at last!’
A cold fist clenched somewhere in the deep of him. She was insane. Did she truly think whatever she did here would drag her dead lover back from the Otherworld? Somewhere, in the long years after old Nuan’s conquest, grief must have robbed her of wit, just as her madness robbed him of patience.
‘Tárchan is dead, Síle!’ Náith roared. ‘Dead! Nothing you do here will change that! You’ll die with the rest of us!’
‘I am the Maid of Mael Tulla,’ Síle snarled, pinning him with eyes colder than Ancu’s. ‘I am the giver of life to everything that walks this earth! Now leave!’
Her scream shook the storm, staggering Náith mid-step. Lightning flickered behind the clouds upon the peak, the winds barbed with static.
‘Síle!’ Náith mounted the ridge in a single bound, yanked her back from the Stormheart and threw himself atop her. A shrieking column of lightning punched through the clouds and struck the stone. It drifted higher, the storm trapped inside it swelling, white flashes spilling through the fingers of Náith’s screening hand. The winds shifted, tightened, ribbons of black cloud swirling about the Stormheart as it sucked down the catastrophe circling Moírdhan.
Síle shifted from beneath him and stood, holding back the glare with delicate hands. Náith rose, spun her about by the arms. ‘We need to leave!’ Her eyes softened as she looked upon him, anger fading into quivering terror. She laid her shaking hands upon his chest.
‘Thank you… thank you, my love,’ she sobbed, burying her face into Náith’s shoulder. A wave of longing cast down the scalding walls pain had built about his heart, his fury at her betrayal quenched as he drew her deep into his embrace. Hope’s golden flood came rushing through the hollows of his soul. It was stupid – all of it. He could forgive everything. The games, the abandonment, that bastard Luw and what she had done to Aodhamar. All of it, so long as she was his. There was naught that mattered save for that. What else had this all been for, if not for her?
Heart full, he cast a final look over her tousled head, to where the Stormheart blazed like a
vengeful sun against the peak. The sky was darkening above the stone, around it, and in moments it hung in a void as stabs of lightning struck it with the rhythm of a beating heart. Whatever Síle had done to the thing, a threshold seemed to have been crossed, every bolt a screeching herald for their final moments.
‘Come,’ Náith said, releasing her and taking her small hand in his bloodied mitt. ‘However long we have left, let’s make it worth the pain.’ She nodded, brushed away a tear and pushed storm-tangled hair from her sweet face.
‘A moment, Cu Náith, my heart,’ she called as he made to lead her down the slope. ‘Please? There’s something you must know.’
Náith quashed impatience. ‘What is it? Be quick, true-heart.’
Síle smiled gently upon him, a dark outline against the Stormheart’s glare. ‘My Tárchan would never hurt me.’
‘What –’
The light of Síle’s Earthbond flared in her eyes as she let go of his hand. The crag between them burst apart and sprayed him with tearing fragments. A boulder tore loose and thudded into Náith’s side, dragging him crashing and hollering down the slope, pelted by a dozen smaller rocks. Somewhere in the spinning terror and confusion of the fall, he saw Síle turn away, stepping back into the Stormheart’s maelstrom. But a heartbeat later darkness rushed to take him.
*
A metallic chime pulled Luw out of nothingness. He awoke to the distant howling of storm winds, a black sky hanging before him, veined with gossamer lightning. He coughed, tasted blood, felt it pool on his lips behind Ancu’s clinging faceplate. Pain… nothing but agony. Hurt too much to groan, to do more than just lie there and wonder how many bones were broken. Lightning flashed. Thunder wailed. He closed his eyes.
Síle… I have failed you. Forgive me.
Ancu had been right. There was only pain for him. Its face was its brand, not its crown, and that braggard bastard would have her in his arms by now. Náith had no way to save her, no way to shatter that wretched artifact before its sorcery consumed the island. The two of them would wither beneath its storm. And he, the last Hunter, would perish here, upon this jagged ridge and its cruel stones. It was almost sorrowful. A tragedy. Or would have been, were it not for the pain. He couldn’t tell if the tears that burned his eyes were for one or the other. Didn’t matter. Either way, it was over.
A chill wind blew across his body. A faint hum came from nearby, the sound of air parted by a blade.
Luw cracked an eye. Hurt to move it. The ridge was clotted with shadow, but something glinted near his splayed left hand. Maebhara’s blade. Too much pain to smile, but the sight of her, here with him at the very end… it was enough.
What a shame you were broken by a monster, he thought. The amber runes along her edge flickered in and out of being, the Earthblood in them dying, seeping back into the land. All for nothing. His friend, his love, his home – all gone – for nothing save a broken spear and a miserable end. He fought back a sob.
The runes on Maebhara’s blade finally winked out, and Luw’s heart sank with them. But, as another gale raked the ridge and sang about her edge, two of them awoke, burning gold and proud opposite one another. The sight of them set the tatters of his Earthbond shifting, groping desperately toward the last dregs of Earthblood still bound within those two Nuankin runes.
Neag. Crógain.
Strength. Courage.
Agony screaming through his arm, Luw reached for her.
Chapter 26
Tárchan Stormheart
Náith groaned, stone grinding as he pushed the boulder from his chest. A small landslide of rocks tumbled down to take its place. He sat up through it, clawed his way free and onto the ridge above, taking shelter from the storm behind a weathered outcrop. He wiped away the blood coursing from a split cheek, watched it congeal upon his palm.
She tried to kill me.
No agony cuts so deep and keen as a lover’s betrayal. It is a thing that lurks only ever a hair’s breadth from the heart, a thing thought known, until it tears itself into reality, its hooks and barbs dragging every fear, doubt and insecurity into sight, dousing the soul with their venom. Náith lay back against the rock, those horrors crawling through him, his body wracked by unebbing pain.
The pulse of lightning from the summit made him blink, turn his head on an aching neck to peer up at Síle’s silhouette before the Stormheart. The gem’s maelstrom was thickening. It drank down the storm winds and the endless lightning and still it wanted more. Síle knelt before it, hands raised exultantly to the black, empty sky.
It will be over soon.
The thought crossed his mind to stop her, strike her down end this madness before it consumed them all. But why, he asked himself, watching another bolt leap from the sky to feed the Stormheart. Why go on? Death. An empty life – a half-life – hollowed of meaning. He found they were one and the same, when forced to look them in the face. He’d held on to a dream so long, one whose end could not come slow enough. What use now, wishing for a way to change that ending?
An arc of blue-tinged lightning burst from the Stormheart, lashing at the stones behind Síle. Her delighted laughter tinkled down the mountainside. ‘That’s it, that’s it! Time to waken! Come to me, my love! Your Spearmaiden has missed you!’
Another blue bolt tore from the Stormheart and raked Moírdhan’s peak. Instead of breaking off, the arc anchored itself to a crag like a crackling spider’s limb. The stones it clutched began to glow, heated by the power pouring from the Stormheart. Another arc leapt from it, snatching at the stones opposite, leaving a pair of claw marks along a cliff before it found purchase. A roar rent the air, batting aside the storm and its howling winds, its shockwave blasting a wave of splintered stone down the mountainside.
Náith grunted, clinging desperately to his crag as he was knocked to the side. He squinted through the onslaught, and saw Síle dancing before the Stormheart, heedless of the lightning that raged about her. She spun in dainty circles as she had in the rain outside her home, a joyous look upon her face. Stone fragments exploded on every side, lightning raked the mountain, clenching like claws, its roots coalescing into a crackling, blue sphere about the gem. Another roar battered Moírdhan, and something dragged itself out of the Stormheart.
It was lightning twisted into the form of a beast of seething, arcing stormfire. It hauled itself up through the lightning encasing the gem, rising as a fulgurating titan to tower against the mountain’s peak. There was something of a man to it, almost, its shape changing constantly with the lightning that formed it. The crackling, searing mass of its head writhed atop arcing shoulders. Empty eyes glared above a snarling mouth, gone quicker than a heartbeat and then back again, their size and placement altering every few seconds. Arms flared and flexed, claws crushing stone either side of a broad web of lightning, its jagged torso joined to the Stormheart’s gathering power.
Síle was screaming delightedly beneath it, painted black against the beast’s glare, hands clasped to her heart as she leapt up and down like an excited child. Náith could hear her, just barely, beneath the shrieking chaos of the beast’s form and the sputtering terror in his breast. ‘Tárchan! Tárchan, my love!’
The thing’s face winked out, appeared again in a vortex of white sparks, empty eyes turned toward her. Is that you, Aráne?
Náith covered his ears, fought back the urge to cower, his stare trapped by disbelief as a fell legend blazed upon the peak. Tárchan’s voice was thunder, the crashing of the storm upon the mountain. The winds reaving across Moírdhan shuddered fearfully before it, bent and broke against its might, snapping back into their spiralling paths toward the Stormheart only as the being’s voice faded.
‘Yes! Yes, it’s me, my love!’ Síle was on her knees before Tárchan now, hands beseeching his living storm. ‘I’ve missed you so very much!’
Tárchan’s hollow eyes shifted from her, seared their way across Moírdhan’s slopes. The harrowing majesty of their gaze felt as if it swept across the entire i
sland. Náith felt every hair on his body rise as it passed over him, prickling as if the air about him were filled with lightning.
My land is changed, Aráne, Tárchan boomed, rats scurry through my halls. Where is Nuan, that slithering worm? Where is my body? My spear?
‘Nuan is dead!’ Síle laughed, hands clapping. ‘Hundreds of years dead! He took your body from me and burnt it near the Hill of Tán. But we will find a way to make you a new one, you have my word!’ Her head shook, reverent, joyous. ‘I knew he could not kill you! I knew he did not have the strength to take you from me!’
Nuan did kill me. I tasted death upon his spear. I have stared into the void beyond Ancu’s claws. I knew their abyss as I slumbered.
‘Ancu is gone,’ Síle tittered, ‘dead like all the rest of them! We’ve won!’
That one cannot die. There will be no victory until I can hold you once more, my treasure.
‘Then step from that stone, my love,’ Síle pleaded. ‘Come to me! We’ll go, find us a way to give you flesh and bone and make us one again!’
Tárchan’s eyes lingered upon her. With the tearing screech of lightning, he wrenched his legs from the sphere surrounding the Stormheart, clawed feet scorching stone. Síle stood, offering him her hand.
I cannot, he growled. This prison binds me to it. I am too weak to sever the ties. Do not touch me, Aráne! I would not see you hurt for me.
Náith saw them then – the shifting, thrashing threads of lightning that tethered Tárchan’s form to the Stormheart, like the tangled strings of some immense puppet. Síle pulled back, head shaking desperately. ‘There must be a way. There is always a way!’
Horns of the Hunter: Tales of Luah Fáil Book 1 Page 21
