The Kyra repeated her opinion: ‘Even so, we cannot let it stop us now, not when we are only twenty miles from the city walls.’
Kate turned to her. ‘It will kill you all, Ainé, every last Shee.’
‘Then we shall die fighting and not sit in the dirt with worried brows while the battle for the city is a few day’s march away!’
‘We have to think afresh. This is a different Legun from what you encountered at Ossierel. Maybe the difference matters? Maybe there is a way we can fight back against this one and win?’ She sensed the depth of Alan’s despair. He was terrified that he would make a mistake at this very late junction, a mistake that would end all of their hopes so close to the end of their march. ‘Please, Ainé, don’t risk your Shee. Not at least until I can try to help you. I might, at the very least, get a better idea of how uniformly the poison is spread. I might find places where the air itself is not so lethal. I might even be able to fight against the poison.’
Bétaald confronted Kate. Those amber eyes, the feral gaze of a panther, met Kate’s gentle green. ‘Do you really believe you might be able to counter the poison?’
‘I might be able to find a way to neutralise it with the power of life, as I replenished the Forest of Harrow.’
Bétaald nodded to the Kyra, and to Alan too. ‘We should take heed of Kate’s advice. However pressing time is, we must make use of it to examine every possible avenue, both for the protection of the warriors and – if Kate can work the miracle – to cure the blighted land.’
The Kyra hissed with frustration. ‘All I am aware of is how, moment by moment, the opportunity to attack the walls is slipping by. I fear that an enforced wait, even for a single day, may prove our undoing.’
Kate nodded. ‘Ainé is right. We can’t afford to waste time in debate. Any further delay might cost us the war. I’m the only one among us who is capable of sensing it, of targeting its presence. So I’m going to have to try.’
Alan took hold of Kate and hugged her tight. ‘You’re not going out there to face the Septemvile on your own. I won’t agree to it. It’s too risky.’
Kate allowed him to kiss her brow, but she still insisted: ‘I don’t need your agreement, Alan. I have to take the risk. We are in this together. I was given my power to fight the same evil as you have.’
‘Then you won’t go alone. I’m bloody well going out there with you.’
*
Kate’s eyes lifted to where Alan was suspended once again from the leather harness borne aloft by four powerful Gargs. But this time his focus, through his pulsing oraculum, was on Kate as she took her first tentative steps out onto the poisoned landscape. She had promised him that she would proceed with care. The Garg prince, Iyezzz, also hovered just a hundred feet above her, risking his own life in preparation for snatching Kate off the ground if her mission failed. Kate looked down at her naked feet and then back up. They had to be bare because she must feel the poisoned land directly, sense its suffering; and deeper still, she must confront and defeat the terrifying enemy that would already be rousing itself in anticipation of new prey.
She took another step, then several more. Her eyes fell from her two protectors in the sky to look at the sulphurous wasteland, criss-crossed with streams of defilement, as if a legion of giant snakes had fought over it. She examined it deeper still, her oraculum pulsing strongly.
Already she sensed movement deep below.
Kate bathed the ground and the air above it with her oraculum, starting to heal the tormented landscape. She sensed life return, however limited, to her immediate vicinity. Minute by minute, then hour by hour, her footsteps were surrounded by a spreading river of life.
She had no clear vision of the monster that lurked there, but because her bare feet were in contact with the ground she now sensed the myriad fibrils that were its sensory organs. Bit by bit, she probed the Legun’s mind. There was something coldly logical about that alien being: as if its predatorial instincts had been constructed to a simple but carefully planned blueprint. At first her senses struggled to separate the different elements within the calculating structure, but then Kate recalled how the supposed fallen succubus, Elaru, had used colour in some peculiar but very vivid way to help Kate in her hunt for the serpent-dragon, Nidhoggr.
You must consider the colour blue.
She reached out through her oraculum and filled her senses with the purest, primary shade of blue, the blue of the sky in the sunniest day of summer. Then she extended the idea. She willed her view to dissolve into a spectrum of beautiful, primary shades . . . The blueprint of the Legun, its calculating mind, appeared before her as two great trunks of pure blue fibres, which arose from two bulbous swellings and spread out into myriad fibrous lines, then connected to a labyrinthine network of yellows, vermilions, greens, oranges and violets.
A new whisper entered her consciousness: Structure is function.
The two blue bulbs fed into a dense yellow bridge – the communication centre between two lobes. The receiving fibres extended out, exploding upwards. The receiving fibres were probably condensing sensations from the bristles that were its sense organs above ground and turning them into signals . . . A logical network of interconnections: a simple brain.
She probed deeper still, her invading oraculum provoking reaction wherever it entered, until it was fiercely opposed by the same sulphurous yellows she witnessed in the tormented land: blood reds and oranges, and icy cold blue – the calculating layers of this utterly murderous mind.
she whispered to it, mind-to-mind.
A rising fury emerged through a cloaca at the centre of a gigantic ring of tentacles, which rustled and expanded, ripping though the tunnels in a seething mass. They were responding to her challenge, searching for Kate, attempting to assess her threat to it, as she had just been assessing its threat to her. She had become the focus of its rage.
All to the good!
Kate probed still deeper into the Septemvile’s lair. Her mental fingers were hurrying now, racing closer to the dead centre of that storm of malice. It sensed her probing its mind. It boiled with rage.
A shout from Alan: mind-to-mind.
Kate opened her eyes to observe the first eruption of fine dust in a wide circle, perhaps several hundred yards wide, but rapidly closing on her. This was too violent to signify the sensory tendrils. This had to be the feeding tentacles breaking the surface and heading towards her.
Another shout from Alan:
She squatted down to sit cross-legged in the dirt, her every nerve and fibre braced with anticipation.
The plumes of rising dust were now all around her as she called out, through her oraculum:
In an instant, seeds of every size and shape and colour were spilling from Kate’s raised hands. Her oraculum was blazing emerald fire. Kate took a breath and blew, scattering the endless twin fountains of seeds far and wide through the spoiled land.
She dared not switch her attention to the sky, where Alan dangled high overhead. At once, the skies filled up with thunderheads. She saw flash after flash of lightning fall to earth from his ruby oraculum. The heavens opened and rain deluged over the blasted land.
Kate sensed the outrage deep below, followed by an earthquake. But this earthquake did not come from the Septemvile. It came
from Alan, who had released another thunderbolt of the First Power. Now he released more, cleaving open huge clefts and ravines into which the downpour ran, letting the seeds fall into the myriad tunnels.
Kate studied the pattern of the outraged brain, deep underground, to see how it was responding to her challenge.
The colours were helpful. She saw that the violet hues were the tentacles. And these were now closing around her in a vast pincer-like movement. But something else was happening. At first she struggled to make it out. It was as if the structure she assumed to be its mind was expanding rapidly. And then, with a tremor of fright, Kate understood what this had to mean: the Legun was much bigger than Kate had seen in her vision. The increasing size was its getting closer to her – rising up directly underneath her.
Kate heard Alan’s shout of shock.
A gigantic curtain of steely sharp spikes erupted out of the ground: its teeth. The maw they emerged from was truly gigantic. It sucked at the ground beneath her, the teeth curving down towards her. There was no possibility of Iyezzz coming to her rescue now. And no possibility of Alan striking back at the Legun with his bolts of lightning. The Legun was now directly above her, all around her, underneath her. The stink of its poisonous exhalations bathed Kate’s exposed skin and burned like acid in her mouth and nostrils. The proximity of its malice weighed on her heart. The ground beneath her had begun to slip and drain away, as if a gigantic plug had been pulled. The ring of spikes came towards her like a thousand giant scorpion stings, dripping venom.
A memory of Africa came into Kate’s mind, specifically the murder of her parents and her brother, Billy. She was a child again, hiding in a pit in the ground where the convent nuns had stored root vegetables. She felt the horror of hearing the shots and the screams, felt the overwhelming feeling of shock, loss . . . despair.
Mo’s unmistakable form was seated opposite Kate, within the gaping hole. But this was a very different Mo. She was not with Kate in person, but her soul spirit was.
Mo’s whisper:
Dromenon?
The wall of spikes grew rapidly closer until they met overhead, throwing Kate into a murky darkness. Then the Legun itself appeared; the Septemvile incarnate – a vast tentacled thing, as large as a football field; a hissing obscenity devoid of eyes; a baleful intelligence, intent on examining Kate and probing her mind and spirit, before drawing her in.
Kate sensed its mind, now so close it was an overwhelming battery of sensations, calculations, lusts . . . Lusts now even more aroused, even as they were somewhat confused, by the additional presence of Mo.
Mo’s face was longer and the chin more pointed than Kate remembered. And her entire figure glowed with light, spectral. Kate was aware, even though she had not commanded it, that her own presence was equally spectral: not her physical being, her soul spirit.
Kate was astonished. Alan had tried to explain something about Mo during that confrontation with the Legun incarnate at the Battle of Ossierel, but he hadn’t fully understood, and he’d had difficulty explaining it to her. Mo had saved him, saved them all, but at a terrible cost to herself: her soul spirit had been wounded by the Legun.
Kate struggled to come to terms with what was happening, but there was no time to think it through.
The Legun roared. It attacked Kate again, not with its fangs but through her grief, her memories of loss.
A day . . . A day long ago . . . A day – oh, it seemed so very long ago now, a day in a different world, and a gate she was holding open with one hand as she wheeled her bicycle through it. A gate that led into the garden of the Doctor’s House, the home of her uncle, Fergal, and Bridey . . .
A kiss. Alan leaning across his bike to kiss her. Their first kiss. Her feet no longer feeling the ground under her as, in that moment of bliss, she returned his kiss. Nothing would be the same. The world had changed. Nothing would ever be the same again . . .
The darkness of the Legun’s maw was being invaded by light. Through the oraculum Kate glimpsed a triangular shadow that silhouetted Mo. A figure, impenetrably dense and resolute, dark as obsidian, yet cowled in a brilliantly glowing spider’s web dress. Granny Dew!
Stars invaded the Legun’s maw. One huge star hovered over Mo’s right shoulder. Kate realised it had to be Magtokk: Magtokk as a leader among the True Believers. The stars were a vast proliferation of True Believers, like an invading galaxy. And she recalled what those True Believers could do. She had seen what they did to the Titan, Fangorath, a being that had been half-divine, who had brought to an end the Age of Dragons.
There was a shriek that was as loud as a thunder clap, then a profusion of rending and tearing, as the True Believers began their graceful arcs and spirals.
To Be Reborn
‘Hi – stranger!’
Mo smiled at the gangling Olhyiu shaman, Turkeya, as he moved through the ramshackle chaos of the camp, treating a trail of people for their pains and woes with his herbs and potions. It was only a day after she had helped Kate destroy the Septemvile, Earthbane. All around them was the chaos of the camp now on the move. The Shee were determined to lose no more time, and the movement of a hundred thousand or so heavy feline feet, claws ripping at the ground, had already excited a dust storm. Turkeya, left behind to attend to the lagging camp followers, had hardly lifted his eyes to look at Mo since her arrival.
‘Won’t you look at me, Turkeya?’
He hesitated, raising his eyes fleetingly. ‘I’m very tired, Mo.’
‘Then let me help you.’
He shrugged, as if to tell her to do whatever she willed. Waiting next in line in the queue was the little girl, Moonrise, together with her brother, Hsst. Mo said hello, squatting down to be on the same eye level as the urchins. ‘The aides have clearly helped you. Your eye is looking improved. How does it feel to you?’
‘Is feelin’ better, Milady.’
As always the two urchins looked more in need of food than medication.
‘Are you getting anything to eat?’
‘We gets a bit o’ soup . . .’
‘I know – from Soup Scully Oops.’
Turkeya came over to join Mo. He squatted down next to all three of them and instructed Mo on mixing a salve for Moonrise’s eye. He said, ‘The stye’s healing, but it has inflamed the envelope of the eyelid. The salve can be dropped into it by her brother. If you could show him how to cup a leaf to guide the flow.’
‘Of course.’
Mo showed Hsst how to apply the salve. When she was finished Moonrise looked strangely relieved. ‘Thanks, Milady.’ Mo glanced over her shoulder at Usrua, whose close attention was the source of the little girl’s anxiety. ‘Off you go now. I must speak to my friend, the shaman.’
Mo stood up to watch them scurry away, then turned to speak once more to the young shaman.
‘I know I’ve neglected you lately.’
‘Why bother with the likes of me? You’re the hero of the day, you and Kate – you saved us from the Septemvile.’
‘It was Kate who really saved us, not me. I was in no physical danger. I only helped in soul spirit form.’
‘Your modesty only makes me feel worse, Mo.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
/> ‘Are you?’
‘Yes. Of course I am. I know you must be really missing Siam and Kehloke.’
‘I hope to see them soon. Prince Ebrit himself recruited my father to navigate his war fleet around the coast and past the many reefs that protect these dangerous waters. My mother, Kehloke, chose to travel with him – in some style, I gather, as guest of the prince.’
‘You poor thing! I can see you’re exhausted. You must be so looking forward to getting together with them again.’
Turkeya gave her the ghost of a smile. ‘I intend to get blind drunk.’
Mo smiled too. ‘You know I’ve really missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you, too.’ Turkeya hesitated, his brown eyes appraising her anew. ‘You’ve changed.’
‘You tell me that every time we meet.’
‘No, not like before. Since we last met.’
She sighed, looking into his dark eyes, his downy face. He had allowed his fair hair to grow long – the hair of his paternal polar bear ancestry – and had tied it back in a ponytail. He too was changing, becoming burlier in the mould of his father, Siam. She said: ‘I know I’ve been changing. We need to talk. You are the only one who really listens to me.’
‘Am I?’
‘You are my true friend.’
He dropped his head. ‘And you mine.’
Still, she sensed that he was somewhat wary of her, even as he talked to an old woman with a bent spine. He mixed the woman a concoction of leaves to be ground into a confection to be taken with a little beer.
He said, as if it were the most natural thing to say in the world: ‘Why are you really here, Mo?’
Her voice was equally calm in replying, though her eyes were filling up with tears: ‘I am obliged to go on a journey.’
‘What sort of journey?’
‘One that I have to make on my own. It’s hard to explain. I am being born again, Turkeya.’
Turkeya stopped what he was doing to look at her. He pursed his lips, exposing powerful teeth. ‘You’re clearly upset. When people are upset they can allow their imaginations to run away with them.’
The Return of the Arinn Page 18
