Besieged

by Kevin Hearne

  Greta’s projecting a cone of silence and it’s fecking boring, so I reach out with me mind to connect with Siodhachan’s hound, Oberon, and find out that there’s at least a conversation there, even if it’s beyond my understanding—and I’m only hearing his side of it anyway. I can’t hear what Siodhachan is saying.

 

  Fecking modern slang. I have had plenty of conversations like that with Greta.

  We have the windows down—a hound and a werewolf practically make that a requirement—but even I am noticing that the air here is much different. There’s no pine, for one thing, but plenty of dry grass and eucalyptus in the wind, and a hint of salt from the ocean. Damn loud bugs drone on about their desire for sex, and the occasional chatter of mammals or the chirp of birds whips past our ears.

  Siodhachan’s driving, and he pulls us into a parking lot that’s almost deserted, some lights giving us just a dim glimpse of what lies beyond. I see some brick buildings, painted white or maybe a sickly cream, and they must be old or have suffered a disaster at some point, because they look like they might be ruins, with roofs and chunks of the walls missing. The lawns in between them look like they’re better kept.

  “What’s this place, then?” I says.

  “This is Port Arthur.”

  “Not much of a port. Or am I unclear on the concept? Where’s the boats?”

  “Port Arthur was a penal colony for the British. One of the worst.”

  I know I can’t be hearing that right; I’m still building me English vocabulary. “Penile colony, as in lads walking around with their cocks out?”

  “No, penal, as in penitentiary, as in prison.”

  “Ah. So it was a colony of prisoners, then?”

  “A favorite practice of the British. They would ship their undesirables from England to Australia’s main continent and use their forced labor to establish infrastructure for settlers. The worst of those prisoners they sent here to Port Arthur. They practiced ‘advanced’ methods of rehabilitation here.”

  Greta tilts her head to the side and speaks civilly to him for the first time. “You mean in the same way the United States used ‘advanced’ interrogation techniques?”

  “Yes, very similar. It was thought at the time that if prisoners were forced to reflect on their crimes, this would somehow inspire true repentance. So they were given the silent treatment for an hour every day: a black bag over their heads and an admonition not to speak but just reflect. Naturally, few of the men could remain silent in such conditions, so they made some noise, and as punishment they were thrown into a dark cell for solitary confinement. This drove many of them mad, and they had an asylum built right next door.”

  “Gods below, why didn’t they just club them with a branch and get it over with? Fecking cruel.”

  “Why are we here?” Greta says.

  “Aye, lad, I know ye didn’t want to speculate earlier, but I think now is the time.”

  “Let’s head over to the grass,” Siodhachan says, “and get in touch with Tasmania. See if there are any devils around.”

  “Fine. But fecking speculate already.”

  “A lot of people died violent deaths here, Owen. The prisoners, yes, but the native Tasmanians before that—the British pretty much wiped them out, so there are no longer any full-blooded natives, and nobody talks about it. Regardless, I don’t think anyone who died here was in a happy place, you know? Not even the guards. It wasn’t the time or place for peaceful living. There are more than fifteen hundred bodies buried on a little island over there,” he says, pointing to the southeast, “called the Isle of the Dead. But they all died right around here.”

  “So you’re suggesting this area is haunted,” I says as we step onto the grass. “Big fecking deal. Maybe one of those unwashed crews of nervous lads can film a ghost-finding show here in the dark and jump at every little noise they hear.”

  I really should not have said that, because right then a chorus of ragged, smoky screeches tears through the night all around us, as close to the harrowing cry of a ban sidhe as anything mortal might get, and if we hadn’t all clenched as tight as we could, I’m sure we would have shat ourselves, and that’s no lie. I have never heard anything so fecking awful, like claws on steel, shearing away me sanity and all me muscles strung tight as a harp string, expecting a brief final visit from the Morrigan before the darkness takes me.

  I’m not the only one who feels it. Siodhachan’s eyes practically pop out of his skull, and Greta crouches and snarls as if she were cornered, and the hound barks.

 

  “Those are Tasmanian devils,” Siodhachan says, answering the question for all of us.

  “They didn’t make noises like that when we were healing them,” I says.

  “Something has them upset.”

 

  “You’re being serious, Oberon?”

 

  “You can see them?”

 

  “Not yet. Which direction are they?”

  The hound turns around in a circle.

  I can hardly think with all that racket going on, so I asks Tasmania to calm down the devils in the area and stop them screaming. When the night goes quiet, the hound’s ears lie back flat against his head.

 

  “Nothing, Oberon.”

  “It might have been something I did,” I says.

 

  “What?”

  We see them, finally, a few seconds before they’re on us, silent pale wraiths with yawning mouths gliding across the grass from all directions. We’re in the eye of a fecking spectre hurricane, but it’s a quiet, creeping menace coming for us instead of howling fury. Greta shucks off her pants and curses because she knows she’ll be changing when they hit us, and they do hit us. Ye wouldn’t think they could, not physically, but they hit ye in the ether, where they exist entirely and we exist only partially.

  “Quick, Siodhachan, summon a mist!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because o’ the ghosts, ye blistered tit! Didn’t I teach ye that?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  They slam into us then and pass through, one by one, and then circle around for more. We’re chilled to the core by every pass as the cold of the void they occupy seeps into all the tiny in-between spaces within us, and it fecking hurts, a burning freeze that tears cries out of Siodhachan and Greta as I begin to chant a binding to collect a fog about us—though maybe Greta’s cries are the first pains of her transformation, because her skin’s rippling and bones are starting to pop and rearrange themselves.

  Perhaps I didn’t teach him after all: Spirits are beings of the ether, a netherworld between planes, so that they are half here and half somewhere else. Water impedes them, which is why ye don’t find a bunch of ghosts haunting the ocean. I’ve seen some o’ these modern movies with water spirits in them—those elven lads in the fecking bogs outside Mordor, for example: That was all bollocks. The truth of it is, back in me own time, if we didn’t want to be haunted by some shite of a human, we’d bury him in a bog. Water kept that spirit inside or, if it was already out, from reaching its anchor or safe harbor before dawn.

  The water in the air begins to condense and fog around us when I complete me binding, and then I’m simply rocked by the pain of the spectral attack, and I give voice to it as well, my throat joining Siodhachan’s. That’s why the devils were screaming: The fecking ghosts were attacking them, and as far as I can figure, they did it precisely for those screams
, to make living creatures give a voice to their long-suffering pain. Those mad prisoners given the silent treatment would want nothing so much as a voice now, and they had figured out how to make living creatures give them one: Tweak them hard enough in the ether and they’d feel pain in the physical world.

  Except why now exactly?

  The hound is immune to the attacks, and once Greta is in werewolf form, so is she. They tear into the apparitions and their substance dissolves, unbound by whatever innate ability hounds have to affect spirits. Seeing this, Siodhachan sheathes his sword, strips, and shifts to a hound himself, leaving me the only human plagued by the haunts. Oberon is actually having fun, and I hear his cheerful voice in me head as I freeze from the inside.

 

  The attacks slow down once the fog forms and the hounds and Greta take their toll, thank the gods below, but it’s not enough; there are too many apparitions. I know they’re chewing through the ghosts as fast as they can, but it feels like maybe all fifteen hundred o’ the tortured souls buried on the Isle of the Dead are having a go at me. I can’t stop shivering and feeling little ice picks of pain stab through me guts as clouds of dirty dishwater pass through me with silent screaming faces on them. Soon I’m convulsing too much to keep me feet, and I’m helpless to heal what’s happening. I collapse to me knees and the canines form up around me, which does help, but some ghosts are still getting through and the assault continues.

  The only thing I can think of is to bind vapor closer and condense water on me skin, letting it bead up like a sheen of sweat—it’s either that or run over to the ocean and jump in. Except I don’t think I can make it. Nerves fire involuntarily and muscles contract unpredictably. I shove the pain into one headspace and use the other to craft the binding. The fog thickens and collects about me, and I hear the hound complain about it once to Siodhachan—hard to pick his targets in such soup, or something like that. But soon the mist settles about me, seeps into my clothes, and I feel like a hand towel that’s been used too many times, discarded on the floor, an unwanted mess.

  The spooky shites don’t want me anyway, and that’s the point of it. The stabbing cold stops, the hounds and Greta move away in diminishing growls—chasing stragglers, I guess—and I’m left alone to shudder in me own private cloud, trying to recover and warm up.

  At first I think there’s no use in trying to heal anything, because I’m cold more than anything else, but after checking meself out I realize that I do need to heal. That prolonged assault with multiple ghosts tearing through me did have some side effects: Mutated cells in me pancreas, liver, lungs, and spleen. Cancer.

  I see what Siodhachan was getting at now: The cancer in the devils spawned from a malignant spectre looking for a way to scream his defiance into the night. I say as much when Siodhachan returns some time later and shifts back to his human form.

  He nods and says, “I figured it was something like that.”

  “Where’s Greta?”

 

  “Ah, yes. She gets hungry when she goes wolf. Siodhachan, didn’t ye say this devil cancer appeared in the nineties?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How could there be that many ghosts around here since then and no one ever noticed?”

  “The obvious answer is that there weren’t that many actively haunting the area. Just one or two ghosts could have started it all back then, and that would be considered almost normal for a place like Port Arthur. This mass haunting, though, with so many spirits delighted to attack anyone near the prison, must be a recent development.”

  “How do ye fecking develop a rumpus like that, and why would ye bother?”

  “My guess is that Loki has been busy stirring up trouble in the planes—him or one of his surrogates. He’s preparing for Ragnarok. The more chaos he can create to distract from his true objectives, the better. I think we’ll start to see much more of this sort of thing. I would bet there are already all kinds of unusual things happening, but this is the first one to interfere with Gaia’s wishes and therefore the first we’ve really seen.”

  “Do ye think ye got ’em all? The ghosts, I mean.”

  Siodhachan shrugs. “We’ll keep an eye out. In the meantime, if you’re up for it, we can start healing the devils on this peninsula.”

  “Oh, I’m up for it,” I says to him, though I’d much rather lie down with a blanket and a bottle of fiery whiskey.

  We get to work, going in opposite directions to heal the nearest devils. I head in the general direction of where they say Greta is doing her thing, and once I find her she spends the night guarding me from any further ghosts as I work, though we do not see any.

  Working quickly and running between our patients, we heal most of the peninsula’s devils before sunrise, and Greta shifts back to human at dawn and gets dressed.

  We meet up with Siodhachan and Oberon at the inn in Dunalley, where they tell us over a breakfast of sausage and eggs that they did find a couple more phantoms and destroyed them.

  The apprentices healed a den of devils each in our absence and have plans to move farther afield after breakfast, while catch some much-needed sleep.

  Siodhachan and I attend to the rest of the peninsula’s devils that afternoon and wait for nightfall to see if any of what Oberon calls the “Ruckus Rumpus” shows up. A few do, and Oberon sends them to whatever cold oblivion awaits them. Should the cancer reappear on the peninsula after we’ve gone, we’ll know that we didn’t get all the ghosts and we’ll return.

  It’s a good start—and I don’t just mean for the wee ones. It’s a good start for me, to learn how fecking huge this planet truly is and what an astounding variety of creatures live on it, because Arizona and Tasmania are about as far from Ireland as bull bollocks are from a popular breakfast food.

  It’s also a good start for Greta, methinks, to realize that maybe Siodhachan isn’t all bad.

  Or maybe I’m imagining a shred of goodwill there when in fact there isn’t so much as a firefly’s bright arse winking in the darkness. She may be simply putting on a mask of civility because she knows he’ll be going in a different direction from us soon.

  He does that a lot—go in a different direction, I mean. I sometimes think if it weren’t for Oberon, Siodhachan would be the loneliest man alive.

  But I wonder if he can’t be thought of as a sturdy bridge, who connects people for good or ill but always remains, unshaken by storms or floods, serving his function.

  The idea, once I have it, sticks with me, and after we’ve said farewell and separated to tackle the devils on the island as a whole, I look at me apprentices already serving Gaia and see that he’s a bridge between the old Druids and the new. We would none of us be here if it weren’t for him.

  Greta may only see what he’s destroyed, but I see what he’s created too, and I have to admit: It makes me proud.

  The events of this story, narrated by Atticus, take place immediately before the events of Scourged, Book 9 of The Iron Druid Chronicles.

  I have never thought that winds howled so much as moaned. My imagination gives them reasons: They moan because they’re weary of their never-ending journey around the globe and are haunted by what they’ve witnessed—species extinction and coral-reef death and miles of trash floating in the ocean and a strange collection of humans who keep saying the earth is doing just fine, in spite of clear evidence to the contrary.

  And the weather has been vicious in recent years, Gaia’s way of forcing people to consider that maybe there will be some consequences for their careless behavior. The moaning began in late afternoon after first sliding through the eucalyptus leaves of Tasmania in a dry whistle. The sky roiled with thunderheads colliding like rams, and the boom rumbled for miles. Lightning flashed and speared the ground with blue-white pitchforks. The rain would come soon, and
not a wee sprinkle either, dribbling out a few drops like an old man with an enlarged prostate: It would gush down and splatter like a diuretic rhino voiding his bladder on a flagstone.

  Oberon and I were near the eastern shore of Tasmania but nowhere near adequate shelter. We had left Owen and his grove of apprentices behind the day before; they were moving to the west, curing Tasmanian devils of transmissible cancer at the elemental’s request, while I was moving north on the same errand. Together we’d save a species, but it was going to be a project of weeks or even months. No need for us to get wet when we could shift planes home to Oregon and wait it out for a couple of hours. Besides, there were friends to be met. And it was past time Tasmania got tethered to Tír na nÓg. To get here I’d had to shift to Australia and then take a ferry to the island.

  “Let’s go home for a little while, Oberon,” I said to my hound. “We need some camping gear if we’re going to keep at this the way we should, and we have to check up on Starbuck and Orlaith.”

 

  “I’m not sure, buddy. Orlaith probably shouldn’t plane-shift much now that she’s getting closer to having puppies. That’s why we left her and Starbuck together at the cabin, so they’d have each other’s company.”

 

  “More like two months, Oberon.”

 

  “No, that’s sixty days.”

 

  “Gods below, Oberon,” I said, shaking my head, “you’ve become too pampered. We’re going to be hunting and cooking over the fire when we cook at all. Very basic meals. Nothing gourmet. And no gravy.”