"I'm coming for you, Maug!" Sláine roared, hurling a severed arm at the priest. A warrior lay at his feet, screaming and clutching at the stump gouting out his lifeblood. Sláine crushed him beneath his feet like a bug. The skull sword's face caved in, his eye rupturing, the viscous liquid dribbling down his cheek. He didn't scream. He was already dead.
The priest was a coward to the core: seeing the corpses of his men lying in pools of blood at Sláine's feet, he turned and ran, clutching Feg's precious book to his chest.
The rage within Sláine consumed him. He reached down, his huge fist tangling in the hair of one of the dead, and hauled the corpse up until its feet hung inches above the ground. Hooking his fingers inside its slack jaw he forced it apart, past the natural limits of the bone, until something beneath the skin snapped and the dead man's skull hung slackly on a broken neck. The jawbone came away in his hands. Grunting, Sláine yanked back on the top row of teeth, forcing the bones back until the skin split and the muscle tore and what remained of the head came away in his hands. He dropped the rest of the corpse.
Sláine hurled the skull at Maug's back. The Drune had staggered and stumbled fifty feet through the deadfall littering the glade. The dead man's skull exploded against the back of Maug's head in a spray of blood and brain and bone. The priest staggered on two more steps before his legs betrayed him and he fell. His arms didn't reach out to break his fall.
Earth Power thrashing through his system, Sláine stood over the priest. The back of his head was a mess. It was impossible to tell if any of the gore and grey matter was the priest's. He did not care either way. Sláine knelt, and thrust his hand down through the Drune's back, tearing out his spine to get at his heart. Vile magic sustained the withered organ. Roaring his triumph, Sláine plucked out the still-beating heart and crushed it in his bare hands.
Maug's death satisfied his rage.
With the blood of the heart spilling out through his clenched fist Sláine felt the mighty warp spasm begin to leave him.
He opened his hand and stared at Maug's ruined heart until the last vestiges of anger had left him and he felt diminished.
Ukko heard Sláine's primal scream of triumph.
The druid stirred in his arms, opening his eyes. His smile was tired but already the colour was returning to his face.
"He has triumphed," Myrrdin managed before his head fell back and his eyes rolled up into his skull.
"He always does," Ukko said to the unconscious man, "He's Sláine."
Ard Ri.
Ukko didn't know if he had even heard the words or if they were even words. They could easily have been a susurrus stirring amongst the dead trees. The words hadn't come from the druid's mouth; that much he knew. Ukko scanned the blackened branches looking for one of the Morrigan's damned crows but they were alone. He drew no comfort from the knowledge.
"You're hearing things, you damned fool." He peered back along the line of huge stones and then through the rows of twisted tree trunks, imagining an army of ghosts circling, closing in.
Deciding to keep the voices in the air to himself, Ukko reached out for a thick stub of a branch that had fallen near him, and sat with it in his lap, waiting for Sláine to return with their things.
FIVE
The druid's strength returned during their flight from the forest, as though each step away from the dark heart of Dardun was a step on the road to recovery. The correlation did not pass unnoticed by the three travellers, though of course it was only Ukko who dared mention it and his understanding was woefully wrong. Sláine had no wish to burden him with the truth - that it was his own warp spasm that had so brutally injured their companion.
Likewise, Myrrdin was disinclined to talk.
Guilt simmered away inside Sláine. He had known that it was different, that the power he was drawing on was not purely of the earth herself, and yet he had devoured it, sucking the very life out of the man who acted as a conduit between the distant Goddess and her champion. His greed had almost killed the man as effectively as his rage had done away with Slough Maug.
Worse though, by far, were the visions that had come to him through the merging - the memories of the druid, of his life before as guardian and Lord of the Trees, and then his flesh trapped within the wood, feeling the very stuff of the tree growing into him, dampening his thoughts until there was nothing within his mind but a decades-long scream.
It was horrific in the simplicity of its torture - and amazing that the druid had held on to any shred of sanity during it. The fact was that he had marked Myrrdin Emrys as a man of uncanny power and staggering will. But Sláine had felt it, there, a great formless shadow in the darkness lurking behind the druid's memories. He had recognised it as it touched him: hatred. Pure and dark and festering. It was that hatred that had warped so powerfully through his flesh, driving him to such extremes of naked savagery with his bare hands. And he knew, in some fundamental way, it had changed him. Even as it coiled back into the druid its taint remained, the shadow of anger worming its way beneath, behind and between his conscious and subconscious thoughts.
He walked a while in silence, brooding over the strange sensation that slowly crept beneath his skin. He was not comfortable with the invasion, with his unwitting violation of the druid's pain. Worse though was the sure and certain knowledge that the druid had experienced his life in return, the pain, heartbreak and betrayal that had made him what he was - if not who he was.
Sláine couldn't bring himself to look at the druid.
Instead, he looked at the dirt and the bracken, at the withered thorns and the calcified wooden tree trunks, at the gossamer threads of a huge web strung from branch to branch above their heads and at the insects trapped within it, cocooned in pupae to keep their meat fresh for the spider that ruled the beautiful web. The spider moved, scuttling forwards on its spindly legs, barbs clicking over the fine filaments of web, playing it like an exquisite instrument. Light caught and refracted in the dew as it spilled down, scattering a rainbow across the detritus of the forest floor. It would have been enchanting if not for the sudden fury of the kill, as the spider sank its fangs into its trapped prey and feasted, pulling away at the cocoon until it could gorge itself on the meat it preserved.
Sláine crunched through the deadfall. He wanted to put as much distance between them and the dead as he could. Dardun was no place to spend the night with the deaths of so many on your hands.
"Come on," he called over his shoulder, urging the others to hurry up. He wanted to be free and clear of the damned forest before sundown.
They finally escaped the oppressive clutches of the dead trees an hour before dusk.
Before they were even one hundred feet clear Ukko flopped down onto his backside and crossed his arms. "All right, that's it, I am done. Feed me. My stomach feels like my throat has been cut again. A dwarf was not made to go on fumes alone, as powerful as my farts are."
"We can't stop here," Sláine said, impatience creeping into his voice. He was tired, hungry and irritable, but he wasn't stupid enough to think that they were home free. He looked at the druid for support. Myrrdin nodded. "Come on, you miserable little runt, get off your arse. We don't stop until it's too dark to put one foot in front of another."
Ukko grumbled - loudly - but he did what he was told, dragging his feet, kicking up stones and tearing off a stream of profanities as he trudged along five paces behind them.
Myrrdin didn't say a word.
Sláine found himself obsessing over the druid's silence - convincing himself it was down to something Myrrdin had seen inside his memories. After all, he had found the druid's darkness - what presence had Myrrdin Emrys found within him? What darkness lurked within him? What taint did he nurture?
In the hour they walked it went from a nagging doubt to the size of a cow within Sláine's mind. The druid had seen something within him, something that had silenced him.
He clutched Feg's book to his chest as though it were salvation itself.
They struck camp on the lea of a hill, using its incline for shelter against the rising wind.
Sláine struggled with the fire, trying to strike a spark and fan it into a stuttering flame. The kindling was damp and refused to ignite. He gave up and sank back against the cold stone of the rockface their camp huddled up beneath.
Myrrdin leaned forwards, whispering a word that Sláine didn't catch but knew was one of power - a thin wisp of smoke coiled up from the kindling. The druid breathed on it gently, encouraging it to fan out across the wood and truly burn. Sláine watched in mute fascination as the druid brought the small fire to life.
Ukko hunched forwards and rubbed his hands briskly over the flame as though right up until that moment he had been freezing. He grinned at Sláine. "So, what are we going to eat?"
"Whatever you catch," Sláine said, holding out Brain-Biter.
"You cannot be serious..."
"I don't see an inn nearby, do you? Or perhaps you have some of that dry cornbread left?"
Ukko huffed as he pushed himself to his feet. "Fine, you just sit here; leave it to me to feed us. I thought the brutes were meant to be the hunters!" Grumbling, the dwarf disappeared into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight. In seconds the dwarf had blended in perfectly with the night. Sláine closed his eyes and leaned back against the rock, listening to Ukko's receding footsteps. Within a few minutes he was asleep.
The sweet aroma of dripping fat and the sizzle of crisping hare woke him. He kept his eyes closed, recalling a fragment of the dream he had been having - he had been watching a woman weave through the blackened trunks of Dardun, a bundle of blankets cradled in her arms. Within the blankets was a dead child. He knew it was dead, he could smell the decay in his dream. She looked at him, beckoning him through the trees, but as he moved to join her she faded. All that remained by the time he reached where she had been was the tattered shreds of the blanket her child had been swaddled in. She had simply disappeared before his eyes leaving him alone in the forest.
Sláine had no idea what the peculiar, haunting dream signified. Who was the fading woman? Who was the child? How had it died? What did they want from him?
He opened his eyes, the last remnants of the dream slipping away. Ukko had returned with a brace of hares, skinned them and was licking his lips as he blackened them over the fire. Myrrdin sat across the fire from the dwarf, Feg's book in his lap, lost in its pages. Whether it was a trick of the shadows and the erratic firelight or not was impossible to tell, but the druid looked every one of his three hundred and fifty-something years. Dark shadows hollowed out his cheeks and sunk his wooden eyes, bringing out every harsh angle of the skull beneath his face. Even the texture of his tattoos had taken on a disturbing bark-like quality, the heavy lines of age carving deep scores down his cheeks. The druid looked up from the book, somehow aware of Sláine's scrutiny.
"I can see why the Lord Weird would fear you, warrior," Myrrdin said, laying the book aside. For a moment Sláine thought the druid was hinting at the thing he had seen within their merging, but then the druid continued: "This book is more than merely the ramblings of some madman. It is his soul laid bare. Admittedly a lot of it is incoherent but that is not a sign of the author's madness, more a clue to his true nature - so much is going on inside his head and he is clearly determined to capture it all, but it is impossible to pour it all out onto vellum at once, and even as he struggles to do so his own thoughts and fears distract him from that singular purpose. Instead his words chase clarity but lose themselves in incoherence."
"Can you make anything of it?"
"More than Slough Feg would ever want," the druid said, smiling for the first time in days. It was not a pleasant smile. The terpsichorean shadows made him look quite mad beneath their erratic play.
"Will it help us?" asked Ukko, as he finished burning the hare. He tore off a hind leg and bit into it. Fatty juices squirted down his chin. He smeared them across his stubble with a grubby hand and then licked the grease off his fingers appreciatively.
"He is the enemy of our lady, Danu. How could his soul laid bare before us fail to serve our cause?"
"Then we have a chance," said Sláine, choosing to ignore the many and varied failures he could imagine even just off the top of his head.
"We always had a chance," the druid countered. "The difference is now, with this, we have what we need to craft a plan."
"We do?" asked Ukko between mouthfuls of meat. He ripped a second leg from the burned hare and tore into it with his teeth.
"We do, my little friend, we most assuredly do," Myrrdin said, his wooden eyes burning in the firelight.
Sláine raised a quizzical eyebrow towards the dwarf. "I thought you said you could read the book?"
"I didn't say that exactly," Ukko evaded, masticating a mouthful of piping-hot hare rump. He looked everywhere except at Sláine. "I might have intimated that I ahh understood it a little more clearly than I actually did... to add a little colour to our dreary lives... but I most certainly never claimed that I could read the madness of Lord Weirdo's beyond a few choice words, like deluge, if you remember? It's not hard to work out what it is all about when you keep reading great flood, elemental disaster, cataclysm, Ragnarok, and deluge a few times every dozen or so pages of rambling."
Sláine shook his head in disgust. He shuffled forwards, moving closer to the fire. "So what does it say?" he asked Myrrdin.
The druid scratched his chin. "Well the dwarf isn't wrong when he says Feg is obsessed with bringing on the deluge-"
"See!" Ukko interrupted, stabbing a greasy finger in Sláine's direction. "I said so, didn't I? Great flood, I said."
"But this book holds so much more than that. It is a confessional. The need to unburden is a common weakness of powerful men, especially ones as dangerous as Feg. He mentions more than once the treasures of Tir-Nan-Og. Are you familiar with the legends?"
"A little," Sláine admitted.
"Well, there were four great artefacts of legend that were divided amongst the tribes of the Goddess: the Cauldron of Rebirth, the Spear of Lug, the Stone of Destiny and the Sword of the Moon. These were no mere trinkets, far from it, together they symbolised the Land of the Young united. One was given to each tribe of Danu, in part to prevent their theft, but mainly to reduce the chance of corruption amongst the brother kings. The fear was that if one man held all of the treasures he would become the invincible king - and few invincibles possessed the strength to remain pure. Power on that scale can only serve as a breeding ground for greed, selfishness, covetousness, and ultimately self-aggrandisement, treachery and betrayal. How could it not? After all who can stop them? They are invincible. There is wisdom in the separation of the treasures. The Sessair were given stewardship of the Cauldron - but even before my imprisonment it was lost to them, shattered into four pieces and scattered on each of the four winds."
"Then what hope is there in these stupid stories?" Sláine said bitterly, a sudden sense of helplessness welling up inside him. They were chasing children's sagas. Great treasures scattered to the four winds. Myrrdin might as well have said they needed to pluck a single hair from the Morrigan's crusty lips for all the hopes they had of reclaiming the Cauldron. He knew all about the failure of his people. The Cauldron had many names, and purposes. They called it the Cauldron of Plenty, for any pure warrior who reached into the steaming pot would be fed. Others knew it as the Cauldron of Rebirth for its links with the kingdom of the dead and its restorative powers. It was also the home of the freak Avagddu, the Morrigan's foul child. Its sundering had trapped the monstrous child within whatever hellish El World the beast had been banished to. They had cost the Crone her child; was it any wonder the Morrigan hated his people?
"They are far from stupid, champion. They are our histories. These treasures are not some child's fantasy. They are our heritage. Do not be so quick to dismiss them. Feg refers to them repeatedly for a reason, I am sure."
"And what reason would that be?" said Sláine
, more harshly than he intended. The smell of the hare reminded him of just how hungry he actually was. He took the second animal from the fire and tore out its breast. The meat was stringy. The hare had obviously died running, muscles bunched taut with fear - he could taste it in the cooked meat.
"The very best one - he fears them."
"What is there to fear from a few trinkets long since lost?"
"Not the treasures, precisely, but what they represent to the people of Tir-Nan-Og. They are iconic. They remind us of who we are. Where we come from. They are focal points of our history, wielded by Lug himself. They bring hope because they signify the tribes united. Never underestimate the simplest of powers - hope is a mighty weapon against the oncoming storm. The treasures epitomise the power of the Goddess herself. To wield the sword, to hurl the spear, to feast from the Cauldron, to stand upon the holy stone of destiny and be proclaimed high king by right - all of that is ours! That is to be Danu's champion, to be her chosen one, her warrior! That is what Feg fears! He fears the very heart of our beautiful land. That is why he sours it so. He seeks to suck the marrow out of the very stuff of life, to drain the Earth Serpent so its power cannot thwart his dark master, the Wyrm God itself, Crom-Cruach. Only by killing the very land itself can he hope to prevail."
"There is no Ard Ri," said Sláine. "There is no unity between the tribes. What you speak of does not exist outside fireside tales."
The Defiler Page 11
