The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  Scab started to move. There was black light. Ash fell to the ground like snow. Mr Hat, the automatons, the butterflies, were all gone. There were no more target lock warnings on his neunonics. Even Scab was staring at Ludwig. Vic did not think that he had ever seen his partner look surprised before.

  – I wish to come with you. Even though the words had been ’faced, they were deafening. Vic and the Monk cried out, clutching their heads. Scab grimaced. Their perception had shaken with each syllable.

  ‘What if we say no?’ Scab asked.

  ‘Don’t engage him in conversation!’ Vic cried.

  – I wish to come with you.

  ‘Don’t do that again!’ the Monk shouted at Scab. ‘Yes, fine, whatever!’ she told Ludwig. Vic could hear an edge of hysteria in the Monk’s voice that he’d never heard before. Vic was desperately running diagnostics on his neunonics to find out why the incoming ’faces were hurting as they turned and walked quickly back towards the elevator, accompanied by Ludwig. Vic noted that Scab couldn’t even be bothered to kill his own clone.

  The orbital defences, the fleet, all of them had left the Basilisk II alone, presumably because they thought that Ludwig was escorting them somewhere, but Talia remained in charge of the craft.

  ‘Em …’ Talia said when she saw the machine Elite hovering in the Basilisk II’s lounge. They were stationary, close to one of the less visited beacons in Red Space. ‘Did we get the information?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vic answered.

  ‘Okay. Can we keep him?’ Talia asked.

  ‘No!’ the Monk and Vic said at the same time.

  Vic was pretty sure that Talia didn’t fully appreciate just how dangerous the augmented alien killing machine was.

  ‘But, I mean, it’s going to be easy now. If we have the information we need, I mean. The flying bin can destroy anything that gets in our way.’

  Vic stared at her, appalled. ‘“Easy?” Why would you say something like that?’ The ’sect wondered when he had become so superstitious. It was pleasingly human.

  Scab was stretched out in an armchair, a cigarette with a long ash tail hanging precariously off it held between two fingers. He had stripped to the waist but still wore his hat and braces. He was immersed, looking at Ertl’s mindscape.

  Finally Scab emerged from the immersion. The Monk, giving Ludwig a wide berth, moved closer to Scab.

  ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Do you know the way to the Ubh Blaosc?’

  ‘No,’ Scab said. Now Vic knew his ex-partner had lost it. Scab was smiling.

  34

  Ubh Blaosc

  The inevitability of the fall. More like riding over a cliff than into a lake through ice. The water was gone. Everything seemed to slow down, thanks to the gifts of the blood she had drunk from Britha. The instinct was to hold onto the chariot but, thinking quicker than she ever had before, Tangwen knew that would just mean she would join the collision of horseflesh, wood and metal. She leapt off the chariot.

  Everything was moving too quickly for her to process. What she saw in the air, over the Lochlannach warriors, made no sense. Below the ice was another world wreathed in blue fire. A stone circle, but not the one she had seen in the crystal clear water during her previous visit to Oeth. There were dark armoured shapes just beyond the light. She had seen the blank-faced figure with the single serpent eye, and somehow she had known it was Selbach. He had been cursed by the magics of her Father’s people. All the Lochlannach were trying to protect him.

  She practically landed on several of the demon-possessed warriors, carrying two of them to the ground. Once the impact would have broken her body. Now she rolled. She felt the impact of the chariot and its horse team, an explosion of dirt, screaming horseflesh, the mangled bodies of the Lochlannach. Britha?

  She had less than a moment to think. Her body was already healing the damage she had taken in the fall. She kicked out, her foot contacting with one of the Lochlannach, and rolled away from him and onto her feet. She still had her bow in hand. She grabbed at an arrow from her quiver. It was broken. She grabbed at another as one of the Lochlannach tackled her around the waist, picking her up off the ground and slamming her into one of the stones. She screamed out as her hair and exposed skin burned. The stone was hot. Her furs were smouldering. She heard shouting in the language of the Goidel, and another language she understood but didn’t recognise. There was screaming from above. She saw the monstrous burning spear that had slain the giant speeding towards them, and above the spear the toothed roof of the cavern Oeth was in. Cracks appeared in the rock far above them and raining stone crushed several of the Lochlannach. The screaming spear was caught in a net of lightning. This only seemed to make it angry. Tangwen dropped her bow and arrow. She grabbed the hilt of her dagger and dragged it from its sheath. She rammed the chalice-re-forged blade into the Lochlannach’s head. Her furs and hair caught fire. The Lochlannach dropped her and she shoved him back so she could move away from the stone. She dodged a spear-thrust from another Lochlannach. She closed with the man, drawing her hatchet as she did. He dropped the spear and reached for his sword, but the hatchet impacted into the side of his face. Tangwen kicked him into two more of the Lochlannach who were trying to get to her. She dropped the hatchet and the dagger, reached back for her bow, at the same time finding an unbroken arrow in her quiver by touch. Then she charged the Lochlannach.

  ‘Not the women!’ a familiar voice shouted in the unfamiliar tongue. Tangwen was moving too fast to register the pain of the flames yet. The Lochlannach had formed a circle around Selbach, protected by their large shields, bristling with spears. She spun, dancing past the spearheads, getting inside their reach. Something had been done to Selbach, something bad, but more obviously something important to Crom’s plans. She leapt up. Her foot touched the rim of one of the Lochlannach’s shields. She bent her knee and then threw herself into the air. The cavern, the falling rock, the ice and the water above her disappeared, and with it the blue fire, and suddenly she was falling up into a twilight sky. Panic came close to overwhelming her. The bowstring was already drawn back. She loosed. Then she was flying back towards the ground and Lochlannach blades. She saw Britha close to the stones, curled in a ball, trying to protect her stomach. The arrow took Selbach in the head. He disappeared under his guards. Lightning arced out, joining the stones to the Lochlannach warriors, their flesh blackening, their eyes cooking, their armour fusing in an instant. They collapsed in rows beneath her as she hit the ground. She tried to burrow her way through the smoking dead, to grab at the earth so she would not fall into the sky beneath her. Above her the living spear screamed, and tried to force its way down through the lightning to kill her and all else.

  A figure walked between the stones, a woman in the robes of a dryw. Tangwen wanted to spit and make the sign against evil, but she didn’t dare let go of the earth lest she fall into the sky. The dryw wore the skull of a horse on her head. It covered her face. She was the Láir Bhán, the White Mare, the horse that was death and winter. A flickering light glowed within the skull. She carried a staff in one hand, her other was raised up towards the spear. Tangwen could feel the magics in the air on her skin. It was like the moment before a storm. She was still burning. Tangwen rolled onto her back. Panic nearly overwhelmed her again as she found herself looking down into the sky below her, and at the god whose wings blocked out the sun.

  With difficulty she managed to put the flames out. The lightning had gone, though she still saw remnants of its light in her vision. The spear was no longer in the sky above them. She crawled through the smoking bodies, feeling little of the pain of her burned back, clutching at the earth, making her way towards Britha. Tangwen grabbed one of the Lochlannach’s swords as she went. She tried not to look at the wreckage of the chariot. The horses had, mercifully, been hit by the lightning as well. The blonde charioteer’s body lay broken, her limbs arranged at horrible angles. Tangwen made it to Britha, and all but lay across her, sword at the ready to defend her pregnant f
riend. Trying not to look down into the sky.

  The figure that walked slowly towards them looked too bulky for a man, even a man wearing armour. He was clad in thick plates of ornately decorated metal, the likes of which Tangwen had never seen before. His helm was that of a metal raven, and it covered his entire head. She screamed as the helm folded away from his face, over his head and disappeared into his armour, seemingly of its own accord. His face was in shadow, but it looked like he had long, dark, braided hair, with feathers, bones, and other items woven into it. Behind him the Láir Bhán held the writhing spear in one hand. The spear was shrinking, as other armoured figures helped wrestle the weapon into a case.

  ‘Are you well?’ The familiar voice again. She pointed the sword towards him. ‘I mean you no harm, and you are not going to fall into the sky.’ He knelt down, his features in light now. The entire bottom part of his face was painted with black dye, and there were red and white markings painted around his eyes.

  Tangwen’s eyes flicked to the Láir Bhán. She had walked to the centre of the circle, and was kneeling over Selbach’s corpse, knife in hand. There was a wet crunch as the horse-skulled figure cut into Selbach’s head.

  ‘Teardrop?’ Tangwen asked, her eyes welling with tears.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘That is my name, but I am not the man you knew. When we die we come back in the spring.’ He smiled at her. ‘I think that both of you have wounds that need seeing to.’ Tangwen could feel Britha uncurling beneath her. She moved so the ban draoi could sit up.

  ‘My child,’ was all Britha said.

  ‘We will see to it,’ Teardrop said.

  ‘Like you did the last one?’ Britha demanded. Suddenly the ban draoi had a dagger in her hand.

  ‘That was … regrettable,’ Teardrop said. He glanced behind him at the horse-skulled dryw.

  ‘Anyone who tries to harm or steal her child, I’ll kill them,’ Tangwen spat, sounding more fierce and less afraid than she felt.

  Teardrop just nodded, though Tangwen suspected that he wasn’t particularly worried. She felt a thrill of fear run through her as the Láir Bhán approached.

  ‘Just kill her,’ the horse-skulled dryw said. Her voice was not that of a woman. It was strange and full of authority and hate. She held something dripping in the hand not holding her staff.

  ‘She is with child,’ Teardrop said, exasperation in his voice. The Láir Bhán said nothing. The moments stretched out uncomfortably. Light flickered within the skull around the impenetrable black eye sockets. Then the dryw removed the skull from her head. She was one of the oldest people that Tangwen had ever seen. Her skin was like leather, but she still looked vital and full of life despite the sheen of sweat covering her face.

  ‘Whose child?’ she demanded. Her voice sounded normal now, though still angry.

  ‘Fachtna’s,’ Britha lied. Tangwen tried not to react. It wasn’t often she heard fear in the northern woman’s voice. Falsehood was a little more common. The dryw studied her. ‘We’ll harvest this child and then she burns.’ Tangwen was aware of Britha tensing, but she said nothing.

  ‘I do not know how things are among the sons and the daughters of Mael Duin, Grainne, but among the Croatan there are laws,’ Teardrop told the old woman.

  ‘We have laws against murdering a drui, for example,’ the dryw, apparently called Grainne, spat.

  ‘Fachtna killed Sainrith,’ Britha told the other woman evenly. ‘And I killed him for it, and you will give me my daughter back because there is no law that says you had the right to take her.’ Teardrop had sagged as he heard of Fachtna’s death.

  ‘She had her part in it!’ Grainne said.

  ‘I was asleep when it happened. He killed Sainrith trying to stop you both from stealing my child!’ Britha shouted at the other dryw. Teardrop held up his hands.

  ‘Peace, please.’ He turned to Grainne. ‘They are under my hospitality. Don’t we have more important things to do this night?’ He nodded at the bleeding thing in Grainne’s hand. It looked like a stone of some kind.

  ‘I will lodge a complaint with the Medicine Societies.’

  ‘That is your right,’ Teardrop said.

  ‘And by coming here they have killed us,’ Grainne said. ‘The changed one sang his mindsong. The Naga now know where we are.’

  It had taken some convincing but Tangwen finally knew that she was not going to fall into the sky when she stood up. There was a remarkable difference between what she knew, and what all her senses were screaming at her. She was walking very carefully on the ground. She had retrieved her weapons, though re-forged in the chalice or not, they looked small and frail in comparison to the oversized spears, swords, clubs, hammers, and axes the bulky armoured figures bore. Some of the armour was decorated in ways similar to the metalwork of the Gauls, the Goidels, and her own people. Other armour, like Teardrop’s, she didn’t recognise the patterns of at all, though parts of the decoration seemed to represent beasts; some she recognised, others she didn’t. Those who wore the more strangely decorated armour were darker skinned, and had dark hair. She assumed that they were from the Croatan, the same tribe as Teardrop.

  Tangwen had cried out again when Teardrop’s armour had folded away, like his helmet had, into a small metal pack attached to the back of his belt. Underneath his armour he wore deerskin leggings, soft-soled boots, and a loincloth. His shoulders, upper arms, and parts of his back and chest were decorated with tattoos that just formed shapes. If they represented anything, then Tangwen couldn’t work it out.

  The circle of stones was nestled in the mouth of a canyon surrounded by sandy coloured rock. An outcrop gave views over a vast plain that reminded her a little of the reeds in her marshes at home, though without the hidden, and sometime treacherous, water channels.

  They had been given food, which Tangwen hadn’t wanted to eat until she had assurance that it came with no obligation. It was known that you shouldn’t take food from the fair folk. After watching Britha get stuck in, however, she had followed suit. It had been delicious, filling, and had helped her body heal itself.

  Teardrop had touched Britha’s belly and closed his eyes, concentrating. ‘I think if you were a normal mortal you would have lost the child by now,’ he had told Britha ruefully. ‘But all is well, as far as I can tell. Though you would do well to let a drui, or a medicine woman, examine you.’ Britha had just shaken her head.

  Later, Britha had recovered her spear. She had asked Teardrop if Calgacus’s blonde charioteer, whose name neither of them knew, could be put in the cauldron. Tangwen had heard of such things, magical cauldrons that could bring the dead back to life. Grainne had refused. She had claimed that they would need all their magics for the war. To Tangwen’s ears the refusal had sounded partly motivated by spite, but it seemed that her Father’s people were coming to this land, and her Father had always feared his own kind. He had said that they had been turned mad and evil.

  Tangwen hadn’t wanted to get on the ‘chariot’. Magics were one thing, but the vehicle was a crime against sense, and all that was natural. Made of smooth dark wood on the top, and lighter wood underneath, it was roughly shaped like a long-necked, short-bodied amphora, of the sort they traded for when the ships came from the lands to the east of the sea. It was sleek, however, reminding her of an arrow as well. The back opened for them, but she knew that people weren’t meant to fly like that. Britha wasn’t happy about it either, but it was the ban draoi who eventually talked Tangwen into climbing on board. She had almost soiled herself when it dropped away from the earth and into the sky.

  The Otherworld was a strange inside-out place so vast it was difficult to understand. The sun was in the middle of the Otherworld, closer, larger, and warmer on her skin than Belenus, the sun god who shone in the sky high above Ynys Prydain. The land sloped up and away from her on all sides. She saw seas high above her, and she could not work out why the water was not running down the side of the huge curving land. It looked empty. If it hadn’t been so
strange it would have been beautiful. She saw distant mountains. She had never seen mountains before. They must have been huge but they looked tiny. White lands, presumably covered in snow.

  Tangwen could see through part of the chariot’s cart, though it covered them completely. They were rising up, the vehicle turning in the air. It shot forwards, but she didn’t feel a lurch. She knew that the charioteer controlled the vehicle from a small area at the other end of the neck. She was sitting on a comfortable seat, in fact one of the most comfortable that she had ever sat on. They were soaring through clouds now. Her eyes widened as they passed floating rocks, and spherical trees. Strange creatures, some like birds, others not, flapped or glided through the air, many of them much larger than any creature in the air had a right to be. Entire lands shot by beneath them.

  ‘I know it’s difficult, but you must understand that you are completely safe up here,’ Teardrop said. He had referred to the comfortable compartment in the rear of the chariot as the cupola. On some level she knew this was wondrous, thrilling even, but she couldn’t quite shake the fear. Britha looked uncomfortable, but not as frightened as Tangwen was.

  Now more than ever she found herself missing the reassurance of her Father’s mindsong. With everyone looking to her, with all of the killing that had been necessary, the guardianship of the cursed chalice, she had never felt more lost. She had hoped to go home and see if her Father still lived. That did not seem likely. They were travelling so fast now.

  ‘I was saddened to hear that Fachtna is dead,’ Teardrop said. ‘I understand what he did, though I do not condone it. I had hoped that you had found a place away from here to live your lives in peace.’

  ‘There is no peace in a land with Crom Dhubh in it,’ Britha said.

  ‘He is the cause of much suffering, I think. Did he send the changed one?’ he asked.