by Gavin Smith
‘Well, it’s been a pleasure,’ Vic said, ready to die and yet still absurdly proud of how much sarcasm he had managed to get into what he assumed was his parting shot. The ’sect felt the Basilisk disconnect from Arclight.
The night lit up as all the batteries on Arclight shifted to fire at the St Brendan’s Fire as per their hacked orders. So many batteries fired in such a small area that it looked like a grid of fiercely defined light. The ’sect was aware of the acceleration: constant sensor feed from the Basilisk made the ship seem more real than his own slaved body. The burn of the engine, the Basilisk’s own batteries firing, the racks of kinetic shots silently emptying. All aimed at the St Brendan’s Fire. The Church ship’s energy dissipation grid lit up, making it look less like a solid, more like a ship of painfully bright light. Reactive armour blew out, trying to dissipate the energy of hypersonic kinetic shots, destroying the engraved scene as the carbon reservoir struggled to replace the armour.
The St Brendan’s Fire’s manoeuvring thrusters burned bright as it tried to rise above the firestorm. Vic knew that all over Arclight security coordinators, pet hackers and weapon operators were desperately trying to regain control of their weapons. Arclight’s PR team and spin doctors would already be apologising to the frigate and assuring them that the Queen’s Cartel was not initiating hostilities against the Church.
The Basilisk soared through the fire, taking minor hits from a few opportunists in independent craft. Scab made a note of every shot and added the ships to his enormous opportunist kill file. The pursuit craft that the cartel had launched were too far away; however, all the bridge points were covered by picket ships.
‘This is Woodbine Scab in the Basilisk. If you’re going to fire then make sure you get it right,’ he told the light cruiser waiting by the bridge point he wanted. A Corsair, even one as high spec as the Basilisk, was no match for a light cruiser. The picket ship didn’t fire. The Basilisk’s bridge drive did violence to the fabric of space/time. The Basilisk left Real Space.
Only when Scab had locked the Basilisk onto the closest Red Space beacon and linked into the beacon network did he pull out the grisly objects the dead self-mutilator had given him. To Vic they were looking more and more like the eyes of some kind of properly alien species, not those of uplifted animals like themselves.
‘How’d they know you’d need that?’ Vic asked.
‘Are you going to behave if I give you your body back?’ Scab asked instead of answering the question. Vic nodded. The human gesture still felt uncomfortable but he was pretty sure that he had it down.
‘Who was the Church Militiaman you killed?’ Vic asked. Scab was staring at the alien organs pulsing in his bloody hand as he used a sophisticated neunonic surgery program to reconfigure his internal nanites in preparation for a xeno-graft surgical procedure.
‘Scab,’ Vic said.
‘I need to find the template and kill it.’ Scab said it in the same tone as everything else he said.
11
Northern Britain, a Long Time Ago
She was moving, floating to the sound of waves gently lapping against the shore. There was a bump as she hit the beach. She enjoyed the gentle movement of the sea. It was a moment of peace before her nostrils were assaulted by the charnel smells of aftermath. Her eyes flicked open. Carrion eaters wheeled in the grey, blank, nothing sky above her. She sucked in air in a long ragged gasp like the first breath of the infants she had delivered. She didn’t scream though. Britha just didn’t understand why she wasn’t dead.
The beach looked red. The sand crawled with flies that rose into the air in thick black swarms when the ravens landed to feast. The carrion that used to be her people had enticed a pack of wolves out of the forest, their maws red now.
Britha’s hand went to her chest and she traced the line of scar tissue. It was as if the wound had been received years ago. She understood that her magics were getting stronger, perhaps because of her relationship with Cliodna bringing her closer to the Otherworld and its wellspring of power, but it had been a mortal wound. She had felt the head of the spear grow through her like the sharp roots of an iron tree.
She had dreamed of Cliodna. The selkie had been strange, frightening and hateful. In the dream Cliodna had done cruel and agonising things to Britha’s body. Her eyes hurt but felt dry. She couldn’t cry. She ached but she could stand, though it seemed like the beach was trying to tilt up to meet her, nausea washing over her. She felt different somehow, hot, feverish.
The warriors and landsmen of her tribe were gone, all that was left was their empty shells making red patterns on the sand. Britha could not bury them all. She would not try. The sky would be their burial place. There was no shame in that. The ravens would carry their flesh there. The beasts of the land had nurtured them and they would do the same for the carrion eaters.
There was a low growl. The wolf pack scattered. Britha watched the bear lumber across the beach towards her, its maw already red from feasting on the dead. Normally all gave way to the king of the forest, but Britha felt nothing. That included fear. The beast got up on its hind legs but did not roar at her. It just stared. It was as if the bear didn’t think she belonged.
‘Maybe I am just a shade now,’ Britha said quietly to herself. She had failed to protect her people. This was the ban draoi’s main responsibility – to live apart from the tribe but use her knowledge, wisdom and skills to keep them safe. Britha could not imagine a more complete failure. But how do you protect against the likes of the Lochlannach? she wondered.
Among the bodies Britha only found one of their dead. She had killed him, she knew, but she had killed more than one. They must have taken the rest of the bodies with them. As well as the hungry wounds she had drawn on his flesh with sword and sickle, she saw thousands of tiny cuts on his skin.
Britha cut into his cold dead flesh with an iron knife she had found. The strands of filigree were gone. His armour and weapons had been taken as well.
She heard the voice, soft and weak, barely audible, carried to her by the breeze.
He was lying on the beach propped against some rocks. He had stained the sand red underneath him. He spoke the same words over and over: ‘I fought well, I deserve to die in battle. I fought well, I deserve to die in battle. I fought well, I deserve . . .’
‘Feroth?’ Britha said softly. He turned to look at her. Tears sprang to his eyes. She could not recall anyone looking happier to see her. He had been old, Britha thought, but always full of life; now he looked all but a corpse. The life had been taken from him by what he had seen. It had left him a long time before he would actually die.
‘Britha.’ Then he became more guarded. ‘Do demons ride you?’ he demanded, trying to hold in his guts with one hand and reaching for his sword with the other.
‘It’s me, Feroth,’ she said. He relaxed though more blood ran through his fingers from his exertions.
‘Too old and too wounded to take, they told me. The demons would not even grant me an iron death,’ he managed. ‘Even the wolves wait until I am too weak to fight.’
‘I will give you an iron death,’ Britha managed, her voice cracking, the tears coming now.
‘I saw them leave. The black ships, the demon ships. They grew . . . then they sailed against the tide and the wind . . .’
‘Which way?’ Britha asked.
‘All the while Cruibne’s head was screaming from that monster’s shoulder.’
He was just raving now, Britha thought, but then they had all seen things. It must be true.
‘Where did they go?’ Britha asked again.
‘West, up the Tatha.’ He was sounding weaker and weaker.
‘Hold on,’ she told him gently.
She found one of the invaders’ longspears. It had been driven deep into the sand and must have been overlooked. She grasped its wooden haft. There was screaming in her head. She felt hot and feverish again as she staggered back still holding the haft. She watched as tendrils of filigree gre
w, writhing from the spear’s silver-coloured metal head and crawling towards her flesh. Britha understood now: all their weapons were alive, prisons for the demons locked inside. She wrestled for control of the spear, knowing that her magics were stronger, that she was stronger. The demon in the spear shrank before her, the fever subsided and the red-gold filigree crept back into the spearhead.
Britha was relieved that Feroth was still alive when she returned with the spear. He made a weak attempt to attack her with his sword as she drove the spear through his chest, burying it in the sand beneath him. She twisted the spear and tore it out. Her eyes never left his. She watched the life leave him, ready for his next journey.
She felt nothing.
Britha woke suddenly, her face raw, sore and covered in sand where she had collapsed face first onto the bloody beach. She felt so weak. She had dreamed of Cliodna again. She had dreamed of being dead, a corpse, and Cliodna making her walk to her cave and laying her in a pool of blood. Then the selkie had danced around her and made her drink blood. Cliodna had been angry. Only the moon had lit the cave, the shadows the moonlight threw were horrible to look at.
Cliodna had looked different: her skin had seemed harder, her features more angular and predatory, her lips peeled back to accentuate her wicked rows of blade-like teeth.
Britha rolled over and sat up. She felt frail, emaciated, all skin and bones, as if she had been feeding off herself just to survive, or her magics had. She used the spear to push herself to her feet. Slowly she made her way across the corpse-dotted beach back towards Ardestie.
Nobody falls further than a proud people. Were they slaves now? she asked herself, but she knew the answer.
In the village most of the food had been taken. The stone-lined storage pits next to each house were empty. The salted and smoked meat and fish, the fresh vegetables that had been harvested for the feast, the grain, all had been taken. Britha guessed this was to feed her people on their journey. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that some of the sheep and cattle were missing.
All the horses had been killed, presumably to stop pursuit. In normal circumstance she would have mourned Dark Cloud’s death but she was already overwhelmed. This and the beach would mean fat ravens.
Still, she knew where more food was kept and she was ravenously hungry. She gorged herself on heath pea, the tuberous root of the bitter vetch plant; she fried up oatmeal with blood and water; she found the last of the meat in the smokehouse that the raiders had overlooked; she raided the salt pits for fish and more meat. She ate more than she had ever eaten in a single sitting before. No matter how much she ate she was still hungry.
She knew that it should all go to her belly, but instead she felt herself start to bulk out again, to return to the shape she had been only last night. It was wrong, unnatural – she knew this – but still she kept eating, enough for five at a feast. She was eating in a way that would have shamed her in front of the rest of the tribe as others would have had to go hungry for her gluttony, but that did not matter now. Something had changed inside her. She felt different.
Finally she was sated. She did not feel bloated or uncomfortable but more awake, healthy; her wounds had healed and the only pain she felt was a dull ache from the branches of scar tissue on her stomach. She had the same heightened awareness of the night that she had felt the night before, when she had thought it was the woad.
Britha went to her roundhouse, set a little aside from the rest to show her position in the tribe. She took the ritual tools and materials, the herbs, medicines and poisons she thought she might need, those that could be carried easily. Her hearth fire was mere embers now. She swept them carefully into a hollowed-out horseshoe fungus and blew on it, letting it burn. It would smoulder for hours and the fungus was proof against water and wind. She found an old robe and hood and put them on. Her usual robe was still back in the circle of oaks in the woods and she did not have time to fetch it now.
Britha took one last look around her home. It felt strange and foreign to her. It was nothing without the sound of her tribe outside.
She made her way tiredly towards the Hill of Deer. Even as she made her way across the fields towards the hill, she knew the broch had not kept her people safe.
The carrion eaters took to the air on black wings as Britha approached the broch. There were only a few bodies, mainly those of landswomen. Grandmothers who had died trying to protect children, Britha guessed.
The broch was sundered. Britha guessed it had been the giants. It looked like they had punched through and then torn apart the ancient moss-covered blocks of stone. She imagined what it had been like for the children inside. Stone walls ripped open, the monstrous heads pushed through to stare at them. Their fear. That was when the pain really hit her. The magnitude of her failure, the failure of Cruibne and the cateran. They were gone, all of them. Many dead, the rest taken by an enemy that they, that she, could not fight. They were probably already being ridden by demons. The tears came. Sobs racked her body. Their life, her life, children being born, the old dying, the councils, the harvests and the planting, droving, raiding, battles, feasts, laughter, tears, life – the raiders had taken all that.
‘No.’ Sharp nails dug into flesh, drawing lines of red on weather-beaten skin. ‘No!’ Louder, more forceful. Those who were dead had lived and died well; they could not have asked more from life. The memories of them could not be stolen from her even if the demons came for her flesh. This was weakness, self-pity. She still had responsibilities. Some of her people were still alive. She could fight the Lochlannach. She was the only one who could. She needed to find a way for others to do the same.
Britha stood on the shore and watched the fire arrows arc into the night air on the other side of the Tatha. In flight they were mirrored in the black glass of the river before studding the demon curraghs with points of orange and red light. It was a good plan but she knew it would not work. She watched the Fib villages all along the river’s north shore burn.
Then because she did not feel tired she turned to the west and started walking. She walked all night, tireless, no pain in her muscles or her feet despite a steady, fast pace.
She passed the black rock on the shore of the Tatha. In the distance she could see the hill fort. The height it sat on was just known simply as the hill. It would be locked up tight but only the younger children and the older landsmen and -women would be there. They were Cirig – their clan elders owed fealty to Cruibne – and all of the elders had been at the feast with their warriors and would have died on the red beach.
Beyond the hill fort were the Sidhe Hills, where the fair folk slept in their mounds and her people chose not to go. Best to leave the Otherworld alone. What if it would not leave you alone? she wondered.
In the woods just west of the black rock she met some of the older children from the fort. They had chosen to go out scouting. She told them to return to the fort and that if they saw the black ships land on this side of the river they were to flee, with everyone, carrying the old if they had to, into the north and stay away from the coast and the wider rivers. They knew her – she had delivered some of them – and would listen and do as she asked.
Watch fires on either side of the river flickered into red life, Cirig and Fib alike warning of the black ships. Still she headed west. She was sure that Bress would take his people raiding as far up the Tatha as they could get where there were still villages and settlements worth raiding. This time she wouldn’t hesitate. She would kill him and that monster, Ettin, as well.
Under the wooded grey cliff-lined hills to the west, the Tatha narrowed considerably and there was an island in the middle. Britha tied her robe around her. She had taken as much food as she could carry – oatmeal, heath pea, salted meat, anything that wouldn’t spoil quickly – and wrapped it in hide sacks. She tied the sacks and the horseshoe fungus carrying the embers of her hearth fire to the end of her spear and waded into the cold river.
She had taken off her fur leggings
. Barefoot she was better able to grasp the smooth stones on the riverbed with her toes. Even so, halfway across, when the water was over her stomach, she began to feel as if she had made a mistake. The sacks of food tied to the end of her spear threatened to unbalance her. She managed to compensate and then slipped, going down on one knee. The fast-moving current nearly tore her off her feet. She fought to hold on to the spear, dipping the sacks slightly in the water but regaining her balance. Eventually she managed to stagger to her feet and take another step, knowing that if it got any deeper she would have to ditch her food and spear and swim for it. But the water got shallower.
The island was important to the Fib. It was a place of power for their dryw. It was said that the Auld Folk had come here to worship their terrible and uncaring gods. To the Cirig it had been a convenient place to cross when they went chasing Fib cattle, though they always had to ford the beasts further upstream on the way home.
From the island she watched another of the Fib’s villages burn. She was close enough to hear the screams but it was how quickly and efficiently it happened that got to her. The Fib were not as strong as the Cirig, but how quickly their resistance was dealt with shocked her. Standing on the shore of the island, she watched the Lochlannach, black figures silhouetted against the flames, herd their captives to the curraghs. The black ships were much larger than they had been when Britha had last seen them. If they came further west to make for the settlements on the Tatha further inland then Britha could try to sneak on board, either by swimming or via the branches that hung over the river.
