“That may be true, good merrow, but I still seek a guide.” Hexy forced herself to meet his eyes. “Can you help me?”
His tail twitched. “You are daft, mistress, bespelled by yer selkie. And I’ll not help ye to yer doom, or my own. Ye’d best seek out another who has lost her wits.” He jerked his head toward another rock. “Talk to the finwoman yonder. She’s got the finman’s blackhand upon her anyway. Mayhap she’ll help ye to yer death if ye truly seek it.”
With a violent smack of his tail, he flipped himself backward into the sea, taking his crate and bottle with him.
Not certain if she was ready to face an insane finwoman, but feeling she had little choice, Hexy turned slowly toward the nearby granite upthrust the merrow had indicated and tried again to smile welcomingly.
Before Ruairidh had awakened her magic, Hexy was certain she would not have seen the finwoman. The mermaid was sitting quietly on her rock with her tail in the water, blending in with the sea wrack on the stone. Once Hexy managed to discern her outline, she could see that the mermaid was pretty in a way no human could be. Hexy could not even find fault with the silvery scales that covered the thin web between her long fingers, or the scent of the red and purple seaweed she wore as a gown and twined through her dark hair, for both were lovely on her.
The only disconcerting thing about her was her gaze. Eyes as black as the merrow’s, but far wiser and prettier, studied Hexy with unblinking attention.
“You seek Ruairidh O’Uruisg?” the musical voice asked softly, barely audible over the shushing sea. Hexy had a feeling that this was a talismanic question and once again answered formally.
“I do.”
“Because you love him?”
Hexy nodded, not trusting her voice to avoid a quavering pitch when she spoke of Ruairidh. She sent her inner eye to look over the pretty creature, but it couldn’t see anything. It was as though she wasn’t even there. The sensation was dizzying, and for a moment Hexy wondered if her desperate mind had conjured a hallucination.
“And you know where he has gone?”
Hexy nodded again, though with less certainly. “To Sevin’s lair, I believe. He was seeking a lost soul when last I heard from him.”
The mermaid shivered, and for a moment it seemed as if the sun blurred above them.
“Do not say that name again. Do not say any name. Not yours, not mine. He listens. And every time you speak his name, you give him power over you. Already he is large with it and ready to attack the selkie.”
It was Hexy’s turn to shudder. Though she had misgivings about this alternate guide, she still asked, “I won’t speak of him again. But I need help. If you cannot take me to—to that place, can you take me to the selkies?”
“Nay. It is said this morning that the selkies and the finfolk are to go to war because of wizardry practiced on the People’s dead. Being of the finfolk, I dare not approach them at this time.”
“There is to be war? But what can I do?” Hexy asked, allowing herself to plead as the dread inside her grew. “He said that he would be gone only for a day and it has been seven.”
“He was gone for the dark of the moon?”
“Yes, and I thought perhaps that this was what delayed him, but there is a new moon now and he still hasn’t come. And I—I dream.”
“Selkies leave women,” the mermaid said gently. “It is their nature, their way.”
“Not without their babes,” Hexy said flatly.
“You are with child?”
Hexy nodded.
“And so it is something more. I pity you. Truly I do. Seeker, I lost my love once. A finman drowned him in the sea and stole his soul away.” The mermaid did not weep, but Hexy thought she wanted to.
“I’m sorry,” Hexy answered, and meant it. Tears filled her own eyes.
The mermaid nodded. “Thank you for your words—and for the tears I cannot weep. No one else has cared.” She bobbed her head and hummed something sad beneath her breath. After a moment, she stopped singing and said reluctantly, “I can take you to his hateful promontory if that is where you want to go.” The mermaid’s gaze was unhappy as she offered to do this.
“Yes?” Hexy prompted.
“But that is all I can do, for he has power over me as well. And we must use every caution. You do not understand, perhaps you cannot understand, what you are asking yourself to do. Everything about the finman’s domain is dangerous and ravening, and it eats women.” The merwoman rolled off her rock and disappeared into the water. After a moment she reappeared, carrying several red blobs in her arms as she swam toward shore. “Come here to me, seeker, for I cannot go to you. The king of sorcery has enchanted my limbs and pierced them with cold iron so I can no longer walk about on two legs.”
Hexy swallowed and waded out into the cold water, which was chilly but not unpleasantly so. As she got closer, she could see that what she had taken for decorative scales on the half-submerged tail was nothing of the sort. The mermaid’s fin was punctured in several places with wicked iron hooks.
Hexy looked at the raw wounds and was filled with compassion, but before she could speak the mermaid said briskly, “Take off your dress. The wool of sheep is too heavy to swim in. And then tie these sponges into your hair. Most sea creatures cannot abide the taste of them, and perhaps if I swim fast enough we will arrive unmolested.”
“But—” Hexy protested, a hand going to her bosom. She hadn’t thought that she would actually be going to confront the monster this day, and had never considered that there could be other things in the ocean that would try to kill her. Her worry had all been for the evil Sevin. The thought of swimming in the deep without even the protection of clothing was unnerving.
“Keep your shoes, but leave your dress up on that rock. It will be safe from the tide there.”
“My underclothes?” she asked hopefully. “I can keep them?”
“If they are heavy they will only slow us. I am already weakened by the weight of iron. If I tire before we reach shore, you shall surely drown and I will be captured. If he finds me again, he will not stop with torture.” The mermaid frowned and said harshly, “Be honest, seeker, before we risk our lives—and your soul. Do you wish to find your lover or not? Have you the resolve to face great evil without flinching? Decide now if you cannot, and spare us both this journey.”
Hexy swallowed and abandoned modesty and her fear of the unknown deep. “Of course I want to find him. But my lantern?” she asked. “I’ll need at least that.”
“I’ll put it in a bag and keep it dry, but you shall have to hold it while I swim,” the mermaid said impatiently. “We must hurry. The merrow is indiscreet. The drunkard will find someone to talk to. And if he knows that you are coming, he shall lay a trap—and I tell you now, seeker, I will not let him catch me again.”
“I understand,” Hexy said softly, wishing that she had thought to bring one of Mr. MacKenzie’s ancient pistols. Chances were that the old gunpowder would not have worked, but a firearm would have been comforting. At the very least, she wished she had a knife.
Hexy began to strip, feeling more than merely naked when she peeled her dress and chemise away. For the first time in her life, sun and wind were able to thrust themselves upon her bare skin and touch her at will. Under other circumstances, it might have been enjoyable. As it was, it merely reminded her of how tender was human flesh.
The bag in which the lantern—and her silk chemise—was stowed looked a bit like a sheep’s stomach, but Hexy did not ask from which creature the bladder came or how it sealed up so tightly.
The nameless mermaid had to help Hexy bind up the sponges to her hair and limbs with strips of fish skin, but as soon as they had the sponges tied, the mermaid seized Hexy by the arm and towed her out into the deep water. Her fingers felt like a giant snake coiled about Hexy’s limb. The mermaid’s strength was terrifying as she forced them both out into the sea in opposition to the tide, but Hexy did not struggle against it. If what the legends said was true, then this woma
n was risking more than her life to take Hexy to the lair of her nemesis.
In what seemed a very short while they arrived at a gray peninsula, which was guarded by an unwelcome offshore wind that caused discord among the waves and did its best to push them away. The breeze’s unhappy susurrations increased the closer they came to the island, and it finally became necessary to swim under the water to escape it.
Hexy did not close her eyes, since the water did not seem to bother them at first, and she felt the need to watch for danger. It was difficult to judge from beneath the waves what was happening above the surface, but it seemed that Hexy and the mermaid passed under a band of pure black clouds, which suddenly dropped an unpleasant sousing rain upon the water’s surface. It was a painful rain that did not dissolve when it hit the sea, and though she did not breathe, Hexy could still tell that it smelled strongly of sulfur. So bitter and caustic was this water that it forced Hexy to close her eyes against it. After a moment, her skin began to sting. The hand on her arm tightened and jerked her deeper into the ocean.
Finally, when she thought she must cry out from the pain and lack of air, they moved into a place of eerie calm and clean water, and their pace slowed to one less frantic. They came back to the surface and, realizing that she had not inhaled for some impossibly long time, Hexy took a great gasp of air. Beside her, the finwoman’s breathing was also fast and labored.
Hexy treaded water and looked up at the sky. It was quite impossible, as it was full day and the skies were again clear, but it seemed as though something had swooped over the face of the sun and blotted out its healthy light. An evil veil separated them from the real world. There was illumination in this strange monochromatic land, but no heat. Around them, the water was completely clear, but it was also dead—as sterile as water boiled for tea.
As they drew into the shallows and Hexy found her feet, she was able to see that it was not simply the rock of the peninsula that was the unhealthy gray of blotched accumulations of seagull lime. There was also some scabrous and diseased seaweed that thrived there, growing all over the steep-sided banks, all but masking the narrow entrance to a cave.
“Beware the crabs,” the mermaid said softly, her tired voice hardly louder than the breeze. “They pinch viciously and will eat you if they get a chance, for they are trapped here and always hungry.”
Hexy stared at the rock. The hermit crabs, if that was what these creatures were, were scuttling along under scorched pans and cracked jars and other human-made castoffs. The brief flashes of their pale corpulence when their borrowed shells wobbled were revolting.
“What’s wrong with them?” she asked, grateful that she had chosen to keep her shoes. “Why do they use those things instead of shells?”
“They have gotten ferocious and fat off the finmen’s poisoned leavings. They don’t fit in their own shells any more.” The mermaid met Hexy’s eyes. “Now, listen carefully. You must go quickly to the cave and get out of sight of spying eyes. The crabs probably will not follow you inside, for even they fear the finmen.”
Hexy glanced at the scuttling monsters and then looked back at the nameless finwoman. Her face was paler than it had been when they first met, her skin completely without color in spite of her exertions. Hexy wondered if she herself wore the same shade of ghastly white, or whether the finwoman was ill.
“Thank you for bringing me,” she said softly.
“I’ll take no thanks for this,” the mermaid answered, reminding her of Padraig. She took the bag from Hexy and, opening the bladder, showed Hexy the dry lantern and her chemise. “I’d not go in here even to save my love. Howbeit, the decision is yours.”
Hexy nodded.
“Here,” the mermaid said. “I leave you with this gift. This is fresh water from one of your people’s holy fountains that I have been using on my wounds, hoping that it would help heal them. It is supposed to banish evil and cure disease.” She reached down and detached a vial from one of the hooks that marred her tail. She paused a moment before handing it to Hexy.
Hexy hesitated before accepting it.
“What will happen to you without this?” she asked. “Will your wounds get worse?”
“If you have the chance, kill him,” the mermaid advised, not answering her question. Her eyes burned with a mixture of hatred and pain. “You’ll not get more than one chance with that soul-sucker. Good luck, seeker. Kill him and you’ll set us both free.”
The mermaid melted back into the clear, dead water and was suddenly gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Ruairidh looked closely at the pearl mussels clustered on the rock. Millions of them abutted one another, fighting for space on the ocher stone. The tiny crevices between their shells hissed as the foaming waters pushed through them, bringing them their almost invisible prey.
He knew by smell which of them had the pretty bits of layered grit that the lasses liked. It would only take a moment for him to retrieve an appealing gift for Hexy, which perhaps would help sweeten his apology. His long absence caused by the dark of the moon and the slow deliberations of the council would perhaps be forgotten in the shimmer of pearls. The meat from the mussels would be good for their babe, too. Her craving for flesh from the sea had to be strong now.
He had plucked open several mussels and was harvesting their treasures when he noticed a wounded skua sitting atop the rock staring at him with small black eyes. It had a tiny lace bandage wound about one leg. The bird trilled at him as soon as he looked up.
Ruairidh dropped the mussel and started forward. The bird grew alarmed at his approach but did not flee. Slowly, Ruairidh bent over the trembling body and drew in a breath. The bandage had come from Hexy and bore both her and the bird’s own blood.
Suddenly anxious, he nevertheless spoke softly to the little bird. “Where is she, winged one? Where has she gone?”
After a moment the bird blinked and then answered in the way of its kind.
Its words made Ruairidh’s heart leap into his throat. With the greatest haste he had ever used, he reached for his skin, shoving his arms into it even as he ran.
“Keir!” he called, his voice echoing over the water like a lighthouse’s alarm. “The finman has the NicnanRon!”
Hexy pulled the sponges from their moorings, dropping them into the water, then ran up onto the beach, picking a hasty path among snapping crustaceans until she reached the mouth of the cave. Once inside its empty shadow, she paused to catch her breath and light her lantern. The smell of the kerosene was awful enough to upset her stomach, but less awful than going into the darkness without it.
As she dressed in her tiny bit of useless silk, she looked about, trying to orient herself to the strange and horrible place. She was surrounded by confusing disorder, which reminded her of the fisherman’s chapel. Heaps of rotting grasses were tumbled together with shattered boards and what looked like bones. Every inch of putrescent flotsam abounded with pale, misshapen crabs as yet too small to compete with their husked brethren in the open stretches of the beach. It was like being inside a stomach.
And the finman now lodging there was a maggot, a cancer, growing inside the stony island and eating it away bit by bit.
The thought sickened and terrified her. Every particle of Hexy’s nearly unclothed being wanted to cry out for Ruairidh to come to her, because she sensed that he was nearer than he had been in days. But she also recalled what the mermaid had said about Sevin listening, and kept silent. The soft patter of water from her sodden hair followed her as she walked and a thought came to her: It could be that Ruairidh was nearby because he was a prisoner, and it was she who would have to free him.
Hexy didn’t allow herself to consider the idea that she might already be too late to save him.
She noticed a small pile of red rocks shoved to the corner of the cave. They looked almost molten in the trembling light of her lantern, so different from the other stone of the island. Dimly recalling Ruairidh saying something about the red rocks being weapons a
gainst sea monsters, she opened the bladder bag and dropped seven fist-sized stones inside. Her fingers were burning by the time the last had been added. Apparently iron ore was now anathema to her as well.
No obvious path presented itself, but she kept searching. After several minutes, Hexy began to fear that there was no exit from this insane cave and that she would have to return to the beach to search for another entrance. She might also have to go out into the water and look for an entrance from under the waves.
This thought made her shudder and renew her efforts to find some entrance, and she finally did discover a tunnel concealed behind the fractured prow of a shattered rowboat. It was low and dark and sloped downhill at a steep angle. The odor that floated up from below was a miasma of terrible smells.
Repulsed, she nevertheless started inside. It seemed for an instant as she bent her head nearer to the ground that over the sobbing of the tide she could hear the distant barking of seals, but when she stilled her breath and listened, there was nothing left in the air except the sound of waves and hermit crabs’ clicking claws.
A green darkness clutched at her as she descended into the earth. The tide had cleft out a passage from the heart of the stone by millenniums of torrent, and the channel she was traveling was not made for those who went about on two legs. Hexy was soon forced to her hands and knees, her burdened fingers and bare limbs making reluctant contact with the green phosphorescence of the walls that was her only light aside from her lantern. The near darkness was Plutonian and cold as death itself, and the tunnel soon wound back on its own length and headed away from the land and down toward the dead sea.
She was deep in the cave now, and the weight above her was oppressive and the green darkness was horrid and dank. She had to fight off paralyzing claustrophobia as the tunnel continued to shrink in diameter.
The silence around her was as profound as the grave, and why shouldn’t it be? If she were correct in her suspicions, and this was Wrathdrum, then she was venturing among the dead—or at least among souls that belonged no more to the living.
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