The Return of the Arinn

by Frank P. Ryan

  Padraig smiled. ‘It’s been a long time since I heard you play a tune.’

  Mark sighed. He doubted he would ever play his harmonica again. The last time he had played it was engrained on his memory – the tune, Cajun Girl. He recalled the setting as if it were yesterday: a snowy embankment during the journey down the Snowmelt River on board the Temple Ship. It had been a time of great danger for the company, as well as great hunger. It had also been a time of personal darkness for Mark, when he had been under the influence of a succubus called Siri. She had pretended to love him. He had hated himself for his weakness even while he could not bring himself to confess his deceit to his friends. A group of Olhyiu children had been delighted with the tune, laughing and dancing while he played it. Their delight had been a ray of sunshine for Mark in that time of tormenting guilt.

  In particular he recalled a little Olhyiu girl called Amoté, who had bright red poppies painted on her cheeks. She had screeched with laughter as she ran her fingers through Kate’s auburn hair. She and her friends danced to Mark’s harmonica tune. Then, during the fighting at Ossierel Mark had been guarding the cellar where the children, including Amoté, were hiding. He had killed the succubus who had attempted to divert him. He had also killed a Garg, but not before the Garg had poisoned him with its wing talon. Then, as he attempted to stop them entering the cellar, he had been stabbed a second time by a preceptor’s poisoned blade. He would have died there had it not been for the battleaxe of Qwenqwo Cuatzel.

  That had been the end game of his former life.

  He had been instructed by Qwenqwo to climb the Rath of the Dark Queen, to fulfil his destiny. It had been a horrible struggle for him, suffering from two poisoned wounds. At the summit he had collapsed under the statue of the so-called Dark Queen, Nantosueta. In his dying breath, he had become one with her – but he had since discovered that she was no dark queen. She was a young woman, confused by the circumstances of battle, as he was confused in the company of Padraig right now. She became his beloved Nan, a girl whose life, and soul spirit, had been taken and enslaved, as had his own, by Mórígán, the goddess of death.

  Mark took a deep breath to control his palpitating heart.

  Since then neither he nor Nan had known for certain if they were alive or dead, manifesting bodily and spiritually at the forbearance of the dark goddess. Even Mark’s repeated recovery from serious wounds was not as comforting as it might appear. It might be the confirmation that both he and Nan were already dead.

  In his mind he heard a familiar voice call out his name:

 

  Mo’s voice . . .

  Mark jerked back to the present. He had been daydreaming, his eyes gritty with tiredness.

  Mo’s voice – but Mo was not here. He had left Mo behind on Tír. Mark experienced a feeling close to panic. What had he heard? Had he merely dreamed the voice of his adoptive sister?

  He pressed the thought abroad through his oraculum:

 

  Was he dreaming this strange conversation?

  Adoptive sister – was that how he really felt about Mo? He didn’t think so. Mo was closer, if anything, than a sister. But even as he realised it, he felt the dream withdraw, and Mo’s mind with it. He resisted the withdrawal. He wanted the dream to persist. There was so much he wanted to ask her about what was happening, so much he wanted to tell her.

 

 

  His heart missed a beat with her words. And then she was gone. He felt her absence like a wound to his spirit.

  Confusion upon confusion! Had he just experienced a real communication with Mo? If so, how? Mo had no oraculum. She had never even been given a crystal. But perhaps she hadn’t needed one? He had needed the oraculum, just as he had needed the crystal, which had been born in the hands of Granny Dew. All three of them had needed crystals: Alan, Kate and he. Their crystals had been fashioned by Granny Dew from their mobile phones: communication. But Mo had hated mobile phones, just as she had hated all thing mechanical all of her life. What did it mean? Mark had no idea.

  Just what level of communication was his oraculum really capable of? The oraculum had not been given to him by Granny Dew. The oraculum had been given to him – and to Nan, who shared it with him – by Mórígán.

  Mark spoke to Padraig: ‘I think I just had communication from Mo.’

  Padraig stiffened.

  ‘You recognised something in Mo. You felt something from the moment you first met her.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure she was the one, but I saw the signs – those remarkable drawings in her notebook – and sensed the power in her. But I was just one of many generations of guardians. I couldn’t be sure that the time of prophecy had arrived.’

  ‘What prophecy?’

  ‘A story, a legend, purportedly passed down from the great mage of the Fir Bolg, Urox Zel. Something written down a thousand or more years later in the Ogham you saw in the chamber.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A prediction of doom and terror that would threaten the entire world. The Sword of Feimhin would rise again. All hope would depend on the coming of The Heralded One. In the Ogham, this saviour was called the Léanov Fashakk.’

  Mark shut his eyes. It all sounded so very unlikely. Legends from an age of ignorance.

  ‘You are unconvinced?’

  ‘I’m too exhausted to think clearly.’

  With a sigh, Mark ceased his daydreaming and toyed once more with the harmonica that was the only connection he had ever had to the man he believed to be his biological father.

  ‘Go ahead! There’s a tune demanding to come out.’

  ‘Would you put your arm around me, Padraig?’

  The old man chuckled, then reached out his long bony arm, and encircled Mark’s shoulders as he played the tune that was demanding to come out: he played the tune Little Red Rooster, tears rising into his eyes. He played it with feeling, looking out at the sheer wall of the rose that soared into the misty heights in the distance, with what appeared to be strange, deeply menacing furnaces within its crystals.

  ‘I’m terrified that I’ll never see Mo again.’

  ‘You don’t know that. Perhaps you will?’

  ‘I can’t imagine how.’

  Padraig hugged him a little closer.

  Holding Hands

  ‘Strewth!’ Gully wiped his nose on his sleeve. He was too frazzled to look for a rag. ‘We ain’t never gonna find Penny.’

  ‘Would you abandon hope, now that you are close?’

  Gully didn’t reckon they was close. He didn’t reckon so at all. He found himself looking at his reflection in a pool of oil. He felt wearier than he had ever felt in his life. What an outfit they amounted to: his ragamuffin self, Bad Day and Owly Gizmo. They was climbing up a sloping strut as thick as the girders of Tower Bridge. Right there, in the middle of nowhere, they’d had to make way for an army of slug beasts the size of single-decker buses, standing aside to watch their undulating progress as they slithered by surrounded by buzzing Grimlings.

  Gully flopped down on his bum, exhausted. He rubbed at his throbbing elbow. At least it was getting better in the sense that it only hurt when he used it. In the air overhead, Owly Gizmo was making a racket because a Grimling had come too close. That was what the hooting was about. Owly saw off the Grimling with a fury of pecking and fluttering.

  ‘I just want to find Penny.’

  ‘You will not find her by pulling faces and sighing.’

  From the looks of it, they were wandering into yet another valley with high rocky cliffs all covered with spiders’ webs. The webs was aglow with the same greenish slime as the rocks.

  ‘All this wanderin’ about, it ain’t never comin’ to
an end.’

  Bad Day laughed, a deep booming laugh, though to Gully it sounded suspiciously half-hearted. ‘Surely our exploration has hardly begun.’

  ‘Give it up. You ain’t foolin’ nobody.’

  Owly alighted on Gully’s shoulder. She was staring at him like it was a conspiracy between the two of them. ‘That’s it. I’m downing tools.’

  ‘What tools?’

  ‘Me fagged out legs is wot.’

  Gully caught a glimpse of multifaceted eyes in a nearby spider’s web. ‘Gawd in ’eaven, them fings is vicious.’

  A memory inside his head whispered: All drawn to de Sword.

  They moved on to find a rubble-strewn path that ran along a sheer cliff face. Wraiths and spectres peeped out at them from the cracks as they plodded along the path, their weird little heads wobbling to and fro, like weeds moved by the currents under water. With a flutter of its metallic wings Owly pounced on one of them, yanking it out of its hole, and she laid it at Gully’s feet as an offering.

  ‘Get outta here!’

  Owly screeched and fluttered up onto the wall immediately above Gully’s head. She was pecking wildly at things, provoking a storm of writhing movements.

  ‘Tell ’er to bring me a pigeon or somefink.’

  Bad Day took no notice of him. The daemon bot had reached the plateau at the top of the cliff where it was pacing around, provoking clouds of dust as it rooted through the rubble of some fallen walls. Gully wondered if maybe it was sniffing. It sure was making a weird mechanical snuffling through them grilles that passed for a nose.

  Looked like something odd up ahead.

  Owly flapped down to within a few feet of Gully. She hooted, then clawed her way up to his left shoulder.

  ‘Wot’s up, little birdie?’

  Even Bad Day had fallen silent.

  Gully peered into the gloom. Something was approaching them, floating through the air. It looked like a star wrapped up in wobbly rings of colour. Rays of coloured lights were coming out of it; yellow and orange and a muddy jade, then some shade of plum purple, and then bright blood red.

  Gully’s eyes sprang wide open as he felt it sneak into his mind. He began to count to twenty. His hands was patting down the pockets.

 

  The voice was coming from inside his head.

  ‘I know you ain’t no daemon bot. How’d you do that?’

 

  Gully wondered if he was so exhausted he had fallen asleep and was dreaming. He knew who he was talking to, that voice inside his head. It was the mad old bat, Henriette, who had met him in the caravan with the rags all over the floor.

  ‘I got noffink to say to you.’

 

  He very much doubted it.

  Gully looked ahead to where Bad Day looked like it had run out of oil.

  ‘Shit! Shit, shit, shit!’

 

  Gully began to laugh.

 

  ‘Wot game you up to now?’

 

  ‘You’re talkin’ riddles.’

 

  ‘Wot do you know about Penny?’

 

  His heart was beating twice as fast as it had a moment ago. ‘You know where Penny is? Take me to her.’

 

  ‘Wot does she know?’

 

  ‘Wot do you know – you know noffink?’

 

  He heard her voice inside him. But she wasn’t really there. It was a star talking to him inside his head. Nothing made sense no more.

 

  Gully didn’t want to close his eyes. But he didn’t dare not to close them.

 

  He was looking at some kind of a vision of Penny. She was standing in the middle of a bunch of kids, a bunch of ragamuffins whose faces was all painted up in charcoal and coloured pigments. Their bodies was wrapped in white feathers and leaves. On their brows was tiaras of yellow flowers.

  ‘Penny!’ he shouted.

 

  ‘I ain’t got a clue. But I really want to see you.’

 

  He didn’t get it. What was going on with Penny? He didn’t like the fact that her face, her head, was in the air above some bizarre drawing of a city, like a dream of wheeling lines and soaring shapes. He didn’t like the fact everything had gone crazy and slug beasts was taking pieces of the dream out of her head and weaving it into streets and buildings that looked like a fairytale.

  ‘I miss you, Penny.’

 

  Penny hesitated. She had to be some kind of ghostly ’allucination, but still it felt like Penny. And she was saying the kind of crazy things Penny would say.

 

  ‘Like wot, for instance?’

 

  ‘Yeah?’

 

  ‘You know I will. But only if you mean it this time.’

  Her voice filled with emotion as she replied:

  ‘So wot you learned then?’

 

  ‘Uh-huh?’

 

  Gully shook his head. ‘I ain’t got a bleedin’ clue wot you’re on about, gel.’

 

  ‘Come where?’

 

  ‘How the ’eck . . .?’

 

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  Penny just reached out and, spirit to spirit, they touched hands. Ghost or spirit, or whatever exactly they were, it was the most wonderful feeling Gully had ever experienced.

 

  Gully couldn’t believe that there were tears in Penny’s eyes – ghost tears in her ghost eyes.

 

  ‘Bleedin’ Norah!’

 

  ‘Now you’re talking bullshit. You can’t just spend your life scribblin’ up there on the ceiling no more, gel.’

 

  Gully felt Penny squeeze his hand. It felt real. The shock of it caused him to tremble. He went close to fainting, even as his world became dark.

 

  ‘You do?’

  There was a thrill running through him, from his
head to his toes, to his arms and legs, right to the tips of his fingers and toes.

 

  Rage

  ‘Get out – out! Find me some useful information.’ The Preceptress discharged her rage at Snakoil Kawkaw. It came out of her eyes, wide and bloodshot; out of her face, aflame with a passion close to insanity. ‘The time is approaching. The Master commands it. He must control what is happening! It’s imperative!’

  ‘What am I? A mind reader?’

  She was becoming more unravelled by the minute, pressing her already blackened and fissured lips so frequently against the sigil in the dagger that they were openly bleeding. What was her confounded Master’s will? Was he to kill the huloima brat called Alan? Or would it serve Him better if he were to disembowel the auburn-haired witch called Kate? What did it matter to Snakoil Kawkaw? Why should he be interested in spying in the wastelands out there? What was the point? The metropolis, with all of its fabled power and riches, was reduced to cinders. If rumour among the camp followers were true, the witch warriors were scouring its very bowels, to annihilate the remaining sewer rats.

  ‘Out!’

  ‘I’ll go when I please.’

  ‘Out now you perfidious wastrel and liar! I will follow the Master’s last desire. What must be done . . .’

  He spun around to glare at her, fingering the blade deep in his right pocket. ‘What then must be done?’

  She wasn’t listening to him. He watched, appalled, as she pressed another bloody kiss upon the glowing hilt, a kiss so passionate and violent that he could smell the burning flesh of her lips.

  Suffering hogspiss!

  Dark days! Oh, such ruinous days in which anguish wheeled through the tormented soul of Snakoil Kawkaw! The unfairness of it was unbearable. What new frustration loomed over his plans to humiliate Siam the stupid? What cruel blow to his yearning for the love of Kehloke? He was so buried under a blanket of despair he no longer cared about the Preceptress’ rages. He said: ‘Do you have no idea what is happening? You keep imagining you’re getting some message through that execrable dagger. But the truth is that he’s abandoned you.’