The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘You have no authority in our circle. You are little more than a slatternly landswoman, complicit in the murder of your betters, as far as I am concerned. Your presence insults me and I tire of it. For all of your mortal bleating you seem to forget the trouble that you have brought us. There are more important things.’

  Suddenly Britha felt very tired. ‘Then what difference does it make?’ she demanded. ‘It is easily within your power to grant me what I ask, isn’t it?’

  ‘Have you forgotten that we were as they are?’ Teardrop demanded.

  ‘No more! Now leave this place!’

  ‘Stop hiding!’ Raven’s Laughter screamed at the woman. ‘We slatternly landsfolk have our ways as well. I know that Sainrith was your lover for many years.’

  ‘We were drui, at festivals and rituals …’ Grainne started, the authority in her voice faltering slightly. This was starting to make more sense to Britha. Sex was fine between dryw, or with warriors, mormaers, and even landsfolk and foreigners, for ritual reasons, or even just pleasure, but bonds could not be allowed to form, as how then could they deal fairly and impartially with all? Grainne had been guilty of a crime herself, it would seem.

  ‘Take off the skull,’ Raven’s Laughter shouted, ‘or I will come up there and slap it off you!’

  ‘How dare you … !’

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more!’ Raven’s Laughter was almost bent double screaming at Grainne, drool dripping from her mouth. ‘Complain all you want to the medicine societies, we will all be in the bellies of the serpents before they can punish me. You, her, my husband, me, my children! All of us!’

  Britha looked nervously around as the trees seemed to shift slightly. Tangwen screamed. Britha’s head shot round. It took a lot to make Tangwen scream. Bristly spines were growing through Raven’s Laughter’s skin, piercing the simple dress of deerskin she wore.

  ‘You’ll be dead before the first branch touches us,’ Raven’s Laughter said. Britha actually took a few steps back. The horse’s skull fell to the ground. Grainne lifted an arm and pointed a finger at Raven’s Laughter. It was a simple movement, the curse behind it obvious.

  ‘Please, both of you,’ Teardrop said, glancing at his wife, clearly worried. ‘We should not be fighting among each other, not now.’

  ‘Where is the child?’ Tangwen asked, continually glancing at Raven’s Laughter’s now animalistic features. Then she cried out as the branches of the oaks moved sinuously closer to her. It was more than enough for Tangwen. She had her hatchet and dirk in hand now.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Britha muttered. ‘She is held by magics and was unborn when she was taken.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tangwen said, trying to move away from Raven’s Laughter and the moving branches without showing too much fear.

  ‘We protect our people. The child was taken because she has the key to the red realms, where the Naga hide from us, inside her. It was a decision made by the Circle for the good of all in the Ubh Blaosc,’ Grainne said. ‘You do not defy only me in this, you defy all.’

  ‘It can’t make any difference now,’ Teardrop said. ‘It’s too late.’

  Grainne’s smile was full of malice. ‘Then speak to the Circle. They may be busy with the attack. It might have to wait until afterwards.’

  Britha found herself looking around. There was certainly no evidence of an attack. She turned back to find Grainne shaking her head with a look of contempt.

  ‘Why?’ Teardrop asked. Britha knew why. She could see it written all over the other dryw’s face. She knew that she would never see her child while this woman had anything to do with it.

  ‘As I burn it will give me great pleasure to know that she too burns, as does her child, forever apart!’

  Raven’s Laughter turned and stalked back to the chariot. Britha knew that she should be as angry as the small Croatan woman was, but she couldn’t muster it. She knew she should scream and rant at the other dryw, threaten her, strike or even kill her. A mother’s child had to outweigh corrupt authority like this, surely? Instead she just felt tired and sad. Sometimes it felt, even when the land burned, that men and women were only capable of making decisions through spite.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Teardrop said. He sounded as sad as she felt. He turned and followed his seething, spiny wife. Britha felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned around to see Tangwen. The younger woman was obviously terrified of everything she saw in this strange place, but she was here for Britha. The Pecht dryw didn’t think she had ever felt more grateful. Britha turned back to look up at Grainne. The horse’s skull may have been gone but now the old dryw wore a mask of malice.

  ‘I’m sorry for your pain,’ Britha said. Then she turned with Tangwen and walked away.

  The night surrounding the Ubh Blaosc burned, as did parts of the shell itself, as the largest of the serpent dragons breathed on it. Thorn-like spores rained down on the shell, bursting into seeds of fire, seeds that warped the shell, ate into it, or transformed it, infecting it with hideous new life that then started to feed.

  The huge vessels, piloted by the minds of Lug’s children, sped towards the giant dragon. They lit up the night with bright lances fuelled by the suns that beat at the vessels’ hearts. The lances blackened the armoured flesh of the dragons, and ruptured impossibly ancient flesh.

  The behemoths turned on Lug’s children, wreathing them in fire like gods of the sun, night becoming day. They made the black bleed, tricking Lug’s children into their red realm. Into traps laid when all was yet still young and easier to manipulate. They sent the ghosts of serpents to crawl through their enemies’ minds.

  The barrel-like ravens sought out the smaller dragons, their own swords of light reaching for the swarming flesh of the Naga creatures like grasping fingers. Or they worked together against the larger dragons, dying in their fiery breath, or like exploding stars if they reached the flesh of their ancient enemies.

  ‘I am not sure I was needed here,’ Tangwen said as they walked towards the back of the chariot. Britha stopped and turned to the hunter. Tangwen’s features looked gaunt, hollow. Britha reached up to touch the other woman’s face. Tangwen’s face softened a little.

  ‘I cannot repay this debt,’ Britha said, letting her hand drop. Tangwen shrugged.

  ‘It’s better than having a cave land on you,’ she said. Britha wasn’t entirely sure that the serpent child believed this. They could hear Raven’s Laughter as they continued towards the back of the chariot.

  ‘She is a mother!’ the Croatan woman shouted as Britha and Tangwen climbed into the comfortable cupola at the rear of the chariot. The back of the vehicle had opened in a way that reminded Britha of a beetle’s carapace. ‘We have done this! It is our people who have wronged her …’

  ‘But what were you thinking, threatening a drui?’ Teardrop asked, more exasperated than angry.

  ‘She would not have given me back my child,’ Britha said, climbing up into the back of the chariot. ‘But I thank you for trying.’

  The rear of the chariot folded shut.

  ‘How can we steal this unborn child?’ Tangwen asked. Teardrop was shaking his head. Raven’s Laughter’s spines were retracting as she climbed into the neck of the chariot and started crawling along it.

  ‘What are you … ?’ Teardrop started.

  ‘There is one more that we can ask,’ she shouted behind herself.

  ‘Over this? He would not see us now.’ But the chariot was already rising into the sky. Teardrop turned to Britha and Tangwen. ‘I think you should get some sleep.’

  Ibic ÓLug was a progeny grown from the body of the ship that the mind Ebliu MacLug inhabited. Focused gravity propelled the raven through vacuum as he wove through beams of plasma aimed at the larger ships and the burning breach point on the vast shell of the Ubh Blaosc.

  The barrel-shaped construct knew his life would be short, but oh so bright, if he could just break through the defences and reach one of the vast biomechanical ships. The rage, the programmed
fury, at the serpents’ transgression, their attack on his creator’s home, their wish to consume everything, drove him on.

  He was on the edge of a vast swathe of plasma projected from the hive godship, Níðhöggr itself. Ibic ÓLug felt his own armour start to melt and run. The raven left near-invisible molten drops of himself as a trail behind him, like burning tears, but the frenzied need to hurt the enemies of his people drove him on.

  Beams of fusion lanced out at the smaller, faster, biomechanical craft that closed with him, and the thorns that chased him. He banked hard, shooting beneath a large, ponderous dragon, his fusion beams doing little more than scoring a line in the millennia of dead skin built up as armour protecting the behemoth’s flesh. He saw Níðhöggr ahead of him in all its multi-spectrum glory, but the godship, now subjectively above him, fired a hail of thorn-like spores that rained down on the barrel-like construct. He burned with an inner light, so many fusion beams shooting out from him he must have looked like a tiny sun for a moment, but one of the thorns made it through and exploded.

  Ibic ÓLug screamed, more from his failure than the pain of the burning plasma, as he tumbled away from the battle, away from his home, and into cold space.

  Teardrop had given them something to drink. He had told them it would enable them to sleep through the journey. When Britha awoke she could not see through the material of the chariot’s cupola. She suspected that was for the best. Tangwen had jerked awake suddenly. She had fallen asleep next to Britha on one of the benches in the back. Britha was aware of the chariot moving. She didn’t think it was moving quickly.

  ‘You do not think this is a good idea?’ Britha asked Teardrop, who was sitting opposite her. She did not think this was a good idea. It was not the sort of thing that the Pecht did. In fact they avoided it.

  ‘It bothers me that with everything going on he agreed,’ Teardrop told her.

  The chariot had stopped. Raven’s Laughter pulled herself out of the neck and into the cupola as the rear of the vehicle split open. Tangwen was sitting up. She had the look of a wild animal that could bolt at any moment. Laughter and Teardrop stepped down from the chariot. Britha followed, cautiously, Tangwen more so. The air smelled of copper and fire. The floor was a flat plain of copper stretching out into the distance. They were in a massive, odd-shaped chamber that reached up farther than they could see. There were clouds high above them. Behind them they could see a huge opening that looked out on blue sky but was surrounded by a nimbus of fire. In the distance they could make out chariots, and other, larger, craft, surrounded by tiny-looking figures.

  ‘We are inside a god, aren’t we?’ Tangwen asked, her voice sounding small. She bent her legs slightly, like someone who wasn’t sure of how steady the floor was beneath her.

  Everything stopped. Tangwen, Raven’s Laughter and Teardrop were perfectly still. Everything was melting, even the air itself. Britha took a step back as the figure appeared. It was difficult to look at, painful, not least because of the bright glare coming from it. Its head shone like the sun, but he appeared to be a beautiful Goidel warrior, equipped for war. He was more attractive than Fachtna, even more so than Bress, but there was something unreal and therefore false about the beauty. The figure seemed to be constantly folding in on itself, and then rebuilding its form.

  ‘You will never see your children.’ The voice was like music in her head. The figure’s mouth had not moved. The other three were still frozen. They had not reacted to Lug’s appearance. Britha felt the lurch inside her at his words, but tried not to show any response. She was also resisting the urge to avert her eyes from the light. ‘But they may live if you will it.’

  ‘Why will I not see my children?’

  ‘Because your enemy still lives, and your people, all people, need your service still.’

  ‘You mean serve you? We do not do the bidding of gods. We do not want their attention.’

  ‘There is nothing here to serve. I am no god. I am mostly imagination, an echo of a ghost. I cannot even remember what I once was. I merely have perspective.’

  ‘What would you have of me?’ Britha asked, swallowing hard. Her eyes felt wet.

  ‘I would have you kill that which you call the Llwglyd Diddymder, the Hungry Nothingness, the black screaming that eats the sky.’

  Britha spat and made the sign against evil. It was not something that she had done much recently, but she remembered the squirming blackness in the sky over the burning wicker man.

  ‘I cannot fight such a thing …’ she started. ‘There are others, stronger than I … the power that you have here in the Otherworld.’

  ‘You will not fight it. You will poison it. You will die. You will be consumed. All will be destroyed. That does not matter. If you could see things as I do you would understand.’ In front of him a glittering structure that looked like a very complex spider web made of fragile crystal appeared. Its strands did not seem to exist fully in the world and, like Lug himself, it hurt to look at. Parts of it were obviously missing. ‘My Croatan Children call this Grandmother Spider’s Web. The Hungry Nothingness lives where the arrow of fire is weak, where all is cold chaos, and its pain is the least. It lashes out from the end of all things, collapsing and consuming the strands of the web. It is not the way of things. It stops those who would, those who can, from becoming the sublime, from becoming as gods. It threatens not just this realm, but all realms. Its insane servants travel through the holes in the web, spinning new strands, each intrinsically more corrupt, more resistant to resistance, worse than the one it branched off from, and more conducive to its inevitable destruction.’

  Britha did not understand what Lug was saying. This was clearly the work of the gods. She had no business being involved. She wanted to scream, bolt, finally break down. Instead she tried to hide the trembling from him as she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she finally managed.

  ‘Then your children and mine have no chance anywhere,’ Lug said.

  ‘How will my children live if this place falls?’ she demanded. ‘If I am gone?’

  ‘They can be carried from this place. I will make a sacrifice for them.’

  Britha found herself looking at Tangwen, frozen in place.

  ‘Then send someone else,’ she said desperately. She knew it was cowardice, but now the tears of red metal ran down the side of her face only to be sucked back into her skin. After all of it, the battles, the betrayals, and the sacrifices, suddenly she knew what it had been for. Why she was still fighting after her people had been killed. Two unborn children. Two people she did not know and might never meet. For whatever reason, to her, they were all that mattered.

  ‘You are a weapon now. One of the Llwglyd Diddymder’s children sewed part of their essence into you. You can become one with the city.’

  She had heard the word city before, from Germelqart, but it was unfamiliar. Cities sounded like hateful places.

  She shook her head. It made no sense. It was too big. Her head felt as though it was about to split.

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head again. Lug held up a closed fist, and then opened it. The crystalline tendrils reached for her. The other end of them was in unseen space, difficult, painful to look at. She knew that they did not come from here, not from the Otherworld, or her realm. They were parasites from some other place, Cythrawl perhaps, like Bress. They had granted Teardrop his power when she had first met him in her world. They had consumed him.

  ‘You will do this. We understand you. You want your children to live. This is the only way.’

  She did not move away but she tried to keep her mouth shut. Her nostrils flared in panic, her eyes widened, but at last she succumbed to her fear and opened her mouth to scream and the crystal tendrils forced their way into her eyes, up her nose.

  ‘You are a poison. You must consume the Llwglyd Diddymder from within. You must truly learn to hate.’ Lug’s words were lost among the agony. The crystal tendrils silenced the scream as they surged into her mouth. The
n they started to eat.

  Tangwen’s eyes rolled up into her skull and she collapsed to the warm copper ground. Britha was convulsing nearby, her eyes turning silver. Teardrop looked down at the Pecht drui, pity and guilt warring on his face.

  ‘Did you know?’ Raven’s Laughter asked, his wife’s voice filled with disgust. The veins on Britha’s head bulged as something pushed its way through her veins, her head already starting to swell.

  ‘We have to take them both to the Cauldron,’ Teardrop said.

  ‘Did you know?’ Raven’s Laughter demanded. Teardrop turned to his wife.

  ‘Do you think I would do this? That I could?’ he shouted.

  ‘We could defy him,’ Raven’s Laughter said, but Teardrop could tell his wife knew that it was already too late. He crouched down and gathered Britha into his arms, carrying her back towards the chariot. He was disgusted with the gods, his people, and himself. Moments later he heard his Raven’s Laughter pick up Tangwen and follow.

  The seas surrounding the continent boiled first, then they turned to steam. Internal pressure, and water rushing in from further afield, sent plumes of water vapour shooting thousands of miles into the sky. Then the land, the entire land burst into flames. Fountains of blackened slag, ash and lava flew into the atmosphere as though from a continent-sized volcano.

  Níðhöggr, the behemoth, the living ship, the Nagas’ biomechanical hive god’s serpentine, maw-like prow emerged first through the breach, surrounded by vast jets of molten matter. Other smaller craft, looking like shoals of fish in the fire, shot past the huge ship, spreading out quickly, sporing.

  The eggshell had been cracked.

  38

  Now

  Lodup was shaking, though he didn’t feel the cold any more. Germelqart’s severed head, on the end of the pole, was linked to the breathing stone by tendrils of flesh: a hardwired connection. The Mwoakilloan salvage diver had watched the tendrils grow through Germelqart’s head, pushing themselves beneath the skin, cracking through skull. The severed head was still screaming in glossolalia. It was little more than an interface for them. A mutated larynx had grown from the now organic-looking pole that the head was impaled on. It did not look like a human organ. It was clearly designed to accommodate the twisted vocabulary of an alien language. It worried Lodup that he was starting to understand the words.