Drag Hunt

by Pat Kelleher

  Weyland and Gobannon crashed together like bull elephants.

  Outside of the melee, Coyote spotted Kubera, hedging his bets and doing a runner. Coyote smiled to himself. Let him run. Coyote never forgets.

  He then turned his attention to the cauldron platform where Cerridwen and Osiris continued their incantation of making.

  Before he could get there, Morrigan waylaid him. He reached swiftly into his war bundle, pulling out a weasel skin and tying it round his neck. In battle, it gave him the ability to evade trouble. Every swipe and thrust of Morrigan’s blade he was able to weave and dodge, until she grew furious at his luck and impudence. Her strokes became wild and careless until he ducked a blow that bit deeply into an iron pillar. As Morrigan struggled to free her sword, Coyote slipped away toward the cauldron.

  Cerridwen was continuing to chant in an almost trancelike state, but Osiris he might yet reason with. He grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him round.

  “Coyote!” the Egyptian spat. “You’re too late. We have defied the Great Usurper and our birthright is ours to claim once more. I shall sit in my Halls of Judgement, with Ammit at my side.”

  Okay, Coyote was going to have to try the unthinkable here. No tricks, no lies. Just the plain unvarnished truth. It felt a little odd. “Osiris, listen, if they succeed they will have their new heaven, yes, but at the expense of everything else. Do you see what that means? As it grows, it will devour reality around it. There will be no more mortals. There will be no souls to judge. There will be their heaven and you, sat in your empty Hall of Judgement alone. Forever. Is that what you want?”

  Osiris’ eyes flickered with doubt.

  AS CERRIDWEN CONTINUED to chant, her mind was totally focused and Richard was able to slip easily from her psychic grasp. He was free. Blinking, as if he had been doused in a bucket of ice-cold water, he took a moment to get his bearings. He saw the cauldron and Cerridwen, lost in her art. He saw Coyote remonstrating with Osiris.

  And he saw Lugh.

  Lugh seized his spear and, with a roar of rage, flung it across the warehouse at Coyote.

  Richard had been here before on Hillstone Howe, knowing he was out of his depth and that in a battle between beings of myth, there was nothing he could do. But that was then, this was now. Now he could buy Coyote time.

  He threw himself towards Coyote. Lugh’s spear tore through Richard’s abdomen and vitals, impaling him.

  “Interesting choice,” Richard thought as he glanced down at the shaft of spear projecting from his stomach, and at the blood fast spreading across his shirt.

  Still, his luck hadn’t changed one bit. Bloody Coyote.

  He convulsed once and died, his body toppling through the yet insubstantial proto-heaven into the cauldron.

  COYOTE TURNED AND saw Richard fall through the expanding nimbus of light. Soon it would be too large to be contained and too voracious to stop. Once the proto-heaven was birthed, nothing could stop its expansion, and this dimension would be destroyed, gods, monsters and men alike would perish.

  Ah, crap. Shu owed him one.

  Coyote leapt into the mouth of the cauldron.

  LUGH ROARED TRIUMPHANTLY. The trickster was gone. There was nothing now that could stop the birth of their new heaven.

  He turned and forced Bran to his knees. With the blade of his sword beneath his chin, he lifted the old man’s head up to look at him.

  “See, old man? You were wrong to oppose us. We have beaten the Great Usurper. We have our own Otherworld again, at last. Our own realm once more, where our laws will be sacrosanct.”

  “I know what you have done, and it is monstrous,” said Bran, his voice shaking, but its tone of reproach unmistakable. “I have failed to protect this land as I once swore to do, so if you have won, then I am ready to die.”

  For a moment, there was a flash of steel in the old man’s eyes.

  Lugh sneered. He raised the sword, brought it down and cut off Bran’s head. The god’s body flopped lifeless to the floor and Lugh tossed the head aside.

  COYOTE FOUND HIMSELF between worlds. All about him, in whatever direction he looked, he saw an almost featureless roiling soup of potential and possibility cooling, coalescing and expanding. It had been like this in the beginning times, before the worlds were formed, so the Earthmaker had said.

  The temptation to fiddle was almost too much, but he resisted.

  Somewhere in the celestial miasma, he heard a weak voice cry out, “Older brother, older brother!”

  He moved towards the sound and looked round. There he saw his younger brother, penis, limp now and spent.

  “I am here, younger brother. I have been looking for you,” he said.

  And he gathered him up and put his penis in a pouch around his neck.

  He went a little further, but whether it was on two legs, four legs or wings he could not say. There, he came across Richard’s lifeless body. He pulled the spear from it, cast the weapon aside, and stood astride the corpse.

  Then Coyote closed his eyes, reached out his hands to either side, like wings, and focused his awareness. Here, now, he could perceive the limitless heaven coming into being around him. He shifted his perception repeatedly, up and down the thread until he found himself stood within the cauldron and his hands felt warm metal. He braced them against the sides and pushed.

  IN THE WAREHOUSE, the birthing was almost complete. Rising above the neck of the cauldron, the slowly expanding heaven, patterns of fractal light roiling across its surface, was now all but free of its artificial womb.

  Weyland recognised the sounds of stressed metal. He took hurried shelter behind an iron column as tortured shrieks and bangs rang out from the cauldron. His foot kicked something. It was Bran’s decapitated head. It opened its eyes and blinked.

  “It seems my work is not yet finished, then,” said Bran. Weyland hastily gathered the head to him and bent over to protect it.

  The light of the coming heaven began to flicker like a cheap light bulb until, without even a pop, it abruptly contracted as the cauldron warped and shattered in shards and twisted fragments.

  A shockwave of psychic energy followed, blasting shards and cauldron fragments out in all directions.

  Gods screamed as they were pierced and cut by the sacred shrapnel.

  Amniotic potions, spilt from the shattered vessel, sluiced Richard’s body and Coyote across the warehouse floor.

  Coyote coughed, raised himself up on his arms and took in the scene of devastation. Flung across the far side by the psychic shockwave, Cerridwen lay slumped and broken against the wall. Nothing she wouldn’t heal from eventually, but it would be painful. Psychic wounds always were. Coyote was glad. Shards of cauldron had partially crucified Lugh against the opposite wall.

  Of Osiris, there was no sign.

  At the epicentre, amongst the doused ashes of the fire, Coyote spotted the remains of the potential heaven. Without the ritual or the power of the cauldron to sustain it, it had collapsed in on itself. All that remained was a small glowing sphere the size of a hen’s egg, a sphere that dimmed slowly, turning black as the final spark of potential at its core winked out and it died, stillborn.

  Watched by Bran’s head, Weyland had salvaged the silver casket used to imprison Coyote’s penis from the wreckage of the shattered platform, its wards and sigils still intact. Carefully, with all the delicacy of a smith used to handling hazardous items, Weyland lifted the stillborn heaven and placed it within the casket before closing it. He would take it to his forge and seal it properly. Although the proto-heaven seemed inert, there might be those who would seek to divine its mysteries. As far as he knew, as a magical artefact, this was unique and that alone made it worth possessing for some. It would be better hidden.

  COYOTE GRINNED, EVEN though it hurt to grin. The world was still here. The thread was intact, the Tapestry in one piece. Chalk up another one for the Kai-man. Shu would be pleased, not that he would ever show it, or thank him for it, but hey, that’s trickste
rs for you.

  Coyote’s grin evaporated when he turned and saw Richard’s lifeless body.

  Shit. Despite everything, this mortal had made the interesting choice and that choice defined him. He had to respect that.

  Coyote wondered whether he should say a few words. Give a eulogy. It seemed fitting.

  Richard coughed.

  “You’re alive!” said Weyland.

  “Well I am, but he shouldn’t be,” said Coyote, getting to his feet.

  Richard looked up. “What-what happened? How the hell am I here? I was dead... wasn’t I? I remember... dying.”

  “It was the cauldron,” said Weyland. “Birth and rebirth. Bran used to immerse his best dead warriors in it and they would be restored to life.”

  Coyote clamped his hands on Richard’s upper arms. “You, my friend, are what we call in the trade, one lucky sonofabitch.”

  Richard looked down at his stomach and scrambled to pull open his bloodstained shirt. There was no wound underneath. That shouldn’t be possible, but this was a new world. A world not just of men, but of gods and monsters. The question was, which one was he now?

  “There is one thing you should know, Richard Green,” said Bran’s head. “Though your life is now mythically imbued, those reborn in the cauldron return to this world without their soul. That is the price of being Twice-born.”

  Richard frowned. It was odd, losing something you never believed you had. He didn’t know quite how to feel about that, or what the consequences were.

  Coyote beamed and put an arm round Richard’s shoulder. “Don’t listen to him. You got lucky! For a brief moment, it was a time of creation. Different laws of physics. I did tell you, remember?” Coyote’s smile vanished. “The shock of your death has permanently shifted your awareness. You now perceive the worlds of both gods and men. Which path you walk from here on is your choice—make it an interesting one.”

  Richard rubbed the back of his neck and tried to take it all in. He was sure shock would set in soon.

  “On the plus side,” continued Coyote, brightly. “I’ve recovered my penis and I’ve given your life back, as I promised. I’d say we were quits, wouldn’t you?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pat Kelleher is a freelance writer. He has written for magazines, animation and radio. He served his time writing for a wide variety of TV licensed characters, translating them into audio books, novels and comics. Yes, he’s written for that. And that. And even, you know, them. He has several non-fiction books to his credit and his educational strips and stories for the RSPB currently form the mainstays of their Youth publications. Somehow he has steadfastly managed to avoid all those careers and part-time jobs that look so good on a dust jacket.

  @patkelleher

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