A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Burn the body?’ Bladud asked. Guidgen nodded. Both of them turned to look at Tangwen.

  ‘That was one of our scouts. We are out of time,’ Guidgen told her.

  ‘Remove the ghost fence,’ Tangwen told Guidgen. ‘Give the Red Chalice to Germelqart.’ Muttering started up among the crowd. ‘We have no more time! Challenge now or keep your tongue still behind your teeth!’ Everyone went quiet. Britha noticed a lot of the older warriors nodding. ‘What do you need of us?’ she asked Germelqart.

  ‘Protection,’ Germelqart said. ‘And someone to go with me.’

  ‘Go! Go where?’ Ysgawyn snapped. ‘We give this foreigner the chalice and it will be—’

  Tangwen said nothing. Instead she drew her hatchet and her dirk and faced Ysgawyn. The rhi of the Corpse People fell silent. Madawg took a step forwards but Ysgawyn put a hand on his shoulder. Tangwen turned back to Germelqart.

  ‘In truth, I don’t like the idea of you going anywhere with the chalice, either,’ she told the Carthaginian.

  ‘My body will be right here with you,’ Germelqart said. ‘It is only my spirit that will travel.’

  Tangwen nodded as if she understood. Britha suspected it was more to ease the minds of those who watched than out of genuine understanding.

  ‘Before you leave, the chalice must change the weapons that we have so they can harm the spawn of Andraste,’ Tangwen told him. Britha was sure the other woman was making it up as she went along, but it made sense. ‘Who will you take with you?’

  Germelqart turned and looked at Britha. Britha nodded. It was right. Whatever her losses, however selfishly she had behaved, she had to begin to serve again. There was some muttering, but it was silenced by Tangwen’s angry stares.

  ‘Then I will stand over you,’ Tangwen said.

  ‘Should we drink of the cup?’ Bladud asked. Britha was impressed that as a king he had the sense to listen to those who knew more than he did. ‘I ask only because this will be a fierce fight.’

  ‘I think that will make you a slave of Crom Dhubh,’ Germelqart said, ‘though I cannot be sure of this. The same is to be said of the weapons, but there is less risk when the devils are in wood and metal than when they are in the flesh … I think.’

  Bladud nodded, as though satisfied with the answer.

  The fort was chaos as they prepared for the fight. The youngest of the children and the oldest of the elderly were against the wall of the fort furthest from where the spawn would attack. They were to be defended by the eldest of the children and the more capable of the elderly. Everyone carried spears.

  Germelqart had cut himself and bled into the chalice, then placed it on the ground, its red liquid contents churning. The Carthaginian told them to dip their weapons into the chalice. A long line had formed. Some of the warriors had insisted on precedence. Tangwen spat in the face of the most vocal one. It was a quick fight. Tangwen was still carrying around his dripping severed head. Britha had not approved of the death. The warrior, one of the Iceni and a friend to the huge warrior Bress had killed, would be missed. She did, however, understand the necessity of it. Bladud and Guidgen had then gone to stand at the end of the line.

  They had, however, given precedence to spears and arrows. The more distance there was between them and the spawn, the more chance they had. As soon as swords, spears and arrows were placed in the chalice, the red-gold filigree shot out of the vessel and started wrapping itself around the weapons. The arrow tips, the spearheads, the blades – all came away with a red sheen to them.

  Then the weapons began to speak to them. They thirsted for blood. They wished to feel flesh around them. The first killings came as the weak-minded, to Britha’s thinking, succumbed to the whispers. They attacked other defenders and had to be put down themselves. Again Tangwen had been there to take heads and display them as warning to others. Most kept their weapons to hand but would not touch them until they needed to. Britha noticed that some of the warriors had looks on their faces that suggested they relished what they were hearing.

  Britha had too much time to think. Short of a few harsh words to those who were proving difficult, there was little she could do to help until the weapons had been prepared.

  Since she saw the moon, she had begun to feel the change within herself. She knew it was true. She understood what Bress had meant, the great crime against the future of which he had spoken.

  ‘Britha?’

  She looked up to see Tangwen standing in front of her. She was covered in mud and blood and now carried three severed heads in her left hand. Her right held her dripping hatchet. She wore woad on her face, like the majority of the warriors present. The Corpse People had limed themselves and painted their eyes black, but Britha struggled to take them seriously now. She herself wore the reds and darker dyes on her face, ritual rather than war-markings for her skin. Though she did not think it mattered now, perhaps it gave comfort to those who watched, made them think she knew what she was doing.

  ‘I’m sorry—’ Britha started, but Tangwen was shaking her head.

  ‘We do not need a weak Britha now,’ the younger woman told her. Britha had been standing under one of the palisades, sheltering from the rain that had started again and turned all to mud. The rain was dripping down Tangwen’s face, making her woad run. ‘We need the daughter of Andraste, we need the cannibal hag, the throat-cutter, the bear-slayer.’

  Britha closed her eyes. Tears trickled out unbidden, only to be sucked back in through her skin. She opened her wet eyes and nodded.

  ‘You used to frighten me. Do so again.’ Tangwen moved to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ Britha said. Tangwen hesitated. ‘You are going to stand over us?’

  They could both hear shouts from the wall. The woods beyond had started to move. Tangwen turned back to the other woman. Britha handed Tangwen her spear. It wasn’t the one she carried to Oeth. That weapon she had left in her lover’s chest. This had belonged to Brys. The grey-bearded warrior had dipped it in her blood but left it at the top of the chasm before they climbed down. Britha had taken it to defend herself when they fled Annwn.

  The hunter looked to the spear, and then to Britha. ‘When this is done I will come with you,’ Tangwen told the other woman.

  Britha almost burst into tears. Instead she made a hiccoughing sound and immediately admonished herself.

  ‘My blood has not come,’ Britha blurted out. She was not sure why she told Tangwen, particularly now.

  Tangwen looked taken aback.‘Whose?’ Tangwen asked.

  ‘Bress’s.’ Britha resisted the urge to look away from the other woman as she said his name.

  Tangwen considered what she’d been told. ‘Better decide if you want this one to live,’ Tangwen said. Then she turned and walked towards Germelqart. Britha walked with her.

  Germelqart was sitting cross-legged in the centre of the fort. They wanted to be far from the wall, but not too close to the children and elderly. He was soaked through and covered in mud, the Red Chalice on the ground in front of him. Britha sat down opposite him. Tangwen drove three casting spears into the mud in a triangle around the pair of them and the chalice. Then the young warrior impaled the severed heads she had been carrying on the points of the casting spears. Next she drove the spear Britha had given her into the ground so she could grab it easily. She would have done the same with her arrows but rain was not good for flights or bowstrings. The arrows stayed in their quiver, covered, though this would only protect them from the damp to a certain degree. Her bow remained unstrung for the time being.

  ‘I have given this a lot of thought,’ Germelqart said, looking up, rain dripping down his face. There were more shouts from the palisades. Britha heard the sound of bows being loosed. ‘I really hate your land.’

  Britha smiled. ‘What do we do?’ she asked. She realised she was afraid, though she knew she must not show it. None of her dealings
with the Otherworld had ever gone particularly well.

  ‘Blood,’ Germelqart said.

  ‘It always is.’

  There was more shouting. Those with bows loosed again and again. There was a horrible screeching noise, and then a shadow fell across them. Britha glanced up to see something deformed in the sky above them.

  ‘Britha!’ Germelqart said. Britha glanced back down. Tangwen was staring up, stringing her bow. ‘The blood will form a … connection between us and the … spirit of the chalice.’ He drew a copper blade across his palm. The blood welled up and he made a fist over the chalice. The blood began to drip into the vessel.

  Quickly Britha drew her iron-bladed dirk and did the same. The sharp blade cut through her skin as if it wasn’t there. She clenched her fist over the chalice, dripping blood.

  ‘How do you know these things?’ Britha asked.

  ‘I have drunk of the Milk of Inanna.’

  Britha heard the demons in her blood, their cries in her head and her vision was suddenly divided into tiny squares. She saw Tangwen, an arrow nocked on her bowstring, raise the weapon, aim up and then loose. Everything stopped. There was the sensation of falling backwards. Then darkness.

  For a moment, Britha thought she was still in Oeth. She was standing in a tower of bone, except these bones were red and made of metal. She could see through the bones but outside there was only darkness. There were metal stairs within the tower of red, but they stopped and started randomly and didn’t connect. Britha was standing on such a set of stairs. She peered over the edge. The tower went down as far as she could see. Looking up, it was just the same. Germelqart was not with her.

  Tangwen loosed the arrow into the strange thing in the sky. It looked to be a hawk with the legs and head of a stag. She shot it with two of her arrows. The thing tried to continue flying, but instead plummeted to the earth, impacting in an explosion of mud. It was still flapping around pathetically. Tangwen walked over to it and put her bare foot on one of its antlers to hold it still. Like many of the warriors, she had gone barefoot because of the wet conditions. This way her toes could grip the mud and wet ground. She brought her hatchet down on the thing’s head, again, and again, until it stopped moving.

  She put her bloodied hatchet through her belt, then stood on the thing’s deformed carcass and tried to pull one of her arrows out. The other had broken in the fall. She managed to yank it free and looked at the head. It was a mass of still-writhing little metal tendrils, which receded and re-formed into a red iron arrowhead.

  She glanced up at the palisade as she returned to where Germelqart and Britha lay in the mud. Beyond the walls the woods were moving more violently now. She could hear the bellows, roars, howls and other strange sounds from the spawn. She could see more shapes in the skies, and shadows of the largest of the monstrosities beyond the wall. The archers were firing constantly now. The air beyond the walls was black with arrows.

  She could see Germelqart now. He was far above her on one of the steps, but he was upside down from her perspective. He looked strange. A trail of images of his form followed behind him on the stairs, as if his every movement had left an echo in the air. As Germelqart gesticulated, his movements left after-images. Britha glanced behind her and realised the same thing was happening to her.

  He appeared to be deep in conversation with something she couldn’t quite make out, a thing of shadow. There was the suggestion of a twisted, stooped, dwarf figure, with eyes and a mane of red metal.

  ‘Germelqart!’ Britha shouted. She expected her voice to echo among the metal. Instead it was as if the sound had been swallowed.

  Then Bress walked over the platform at the top of the stairs she was on. He seemed to have come from underneath the platform.

  One of the landsfolk defenders on the palisade succumbed to the spear she was wielding. She turned on the archer next to her, putting distance between them so she could run him through. Tangwen shot an arrow through the back of her head. The writhing arrowhead burst out of her face.

  Another staggered away from the wall with something trying to grow its way out of his spine. Tangwen put an arrow through the growth and into the man’s chest. He collapsed to the ground, his dead flesh still moving. The arrows were too far away to retrieve.

  Beyond the wall she could see more distinct shapes, monstrous heads, flailing tentacles, huge deformed limbs. The archers had almost run out of arrows. She wondered how many of the spawn lay dead on the other side of the wall. The warriors were throwing their casting spears now, but they were running short, too. Tangwen could not see many faces but she knew she was looking at the backs of people in terror. Most were shaking, even the warriors. For many this was the first time they had been confronted with the true insanity of Andraste’s spawn.

  ‘You’re not Bress,’ Britha said. Bress did not have eyes that were pools of liquid red metal, and his hair was not made of strands of living, moving red filigree.

  ‘Is Bress your god?’ the figure asked. He sounded like Bress, except there was an odd metallic quality to his voice.

  ‘No,’ Britha said sharply.

  The figure looked at her quizzically. ‘Usually people see their gods,’ the figure told her.

  ‘My people do not have gods,’ Britha said. ‘Are you the spirit of this place?’

  The figure considered the question. ‘I will say yes.’

  Britha looked at him suspiciously. ‘Is it the truth, though?’ she demanded.

  ‘Is it your way to come to someone’s home and call them a liar?’ the figure asked.

  ‘No,’ Britha said. ‘I apologise. My name is Britha, I am a dryw of the Cirig, of the Pecht. We come from the North.’ Though we are no more, she thought.

  The figure narrowed his eyes, concentrating. ‘I have heard these names before. They are soft, warm things inside which hard metal can live,’ the one that looked like Bress said.

  Britha flinched at his words. ‘What would you have me call you?’ she managed.

  ‘Goibniu.’

  Tangwen actually ducked when she heard the tearing, crashing noise as something leaped onto the wall. A sound that was half-squawking and half-human cry rent the air as the thing was done great violence by the defenders.

  Some kind of liquid splashed against part of the wall, and there was more screaming as the defenders staggered back, falling off the palisade, flesh and armour smoking, skin bubbling as it slewed off them. There were things clambering over the wall, and larger creatures behind them, grabbing at the top of the spiked palisade with massive deformed limbs and pulling it down. Tangwen started loosing arrow after arrow. The demons in her flesh and the demons in her arrows whispered to her where to place each shot. It was difficult to miss despite the rain, wet flights and a wet bowstring.

  On other parts of the wall people were staggering back, their flesh twisting, growths sprouting from their skin. The walls were beginning to warp. There was a whooshing noise and another part of the wall was engulfed in sickly green flame. Panicking, the defenders ran, falling from the palisade into the mud, their flesh transforming as they burned. Others untouched by the flames fled as well. Tangwen could understand that. She felt the need to run, felt her bladder turn to ice. But others stayed. They stabbed their longspears at the things on the other side of the timber wall. When the heads of their spears pierced the spawn they grew into the wounds, tearing up the spawn from inside. They slashed at the things reaching for the wall with swords that bit deep. Tangwen helped where she could, loosing arrows into creatures that were about to take the defenders unaware.

  ‘Why do you look like that?’ Britha asked Goibniu.

  ‘So you will understand,’ the spirit wearing Bress said.

  ‘Why do I look like this?’ she asked, waving her arms, leaving echoes in the air.

  ‘So I will understand.’

  ‘What are you?’ Britha asked, frus
trated.

  ‘Perhaps I am your god,’ Goibniu said.

  Britha glared at him. ‘Why do you serve Crom Dhubh?’ she demanded.

  ‘Because he found us, and because he is strong.’

  ‘We have taken the Red Chalice from him. That makes us stronger.’

  Goibniu smiled. ‘Or more cunning, or luckier, or he was merciful, or he played his own game. I am aware of things beyond this realm.’

  ‘Is he a god?’

  ‘He is a servant. Or a victim.’

  ‘Of what?’ Britha asked. Her curiosity was getting the better of her.

  ‘Something born of the light.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means. Can you speak plainly, in true words?’ she said forcefully.

  Goibniu’s face screwed up in either consternation or concentration. ‘I am trying. We came from before. We have little in common, and I am but a remnant.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of our creators. Those who forged us. The Lloigor.’

  And then he showed her. He unfolded in front of her. His form was both growing and collapsing into impossible places of lines and angles she couldn’t quite see, which were painful to look at. Light poured from him. Pain lanced through her head. She started weeping blood, but she could not turn her eyes away. She was in awe. It was like the first time she saw Teardrop, his crystalline mask, only this was more than some hungry parasite. This was beautiful.

  ‘And we are but a poor changeling to them.’

  Tangwen fired her last arrow into a one-eyed, one-legged, one-armed creature that had hopped up onto the wall. It fell off, disappearing from view. She was vaguely aware of the terrified children crying behind her.

  There was another whoosh and most of the front of the fort was engulfed in the sickly green fire. Behind the wall, Tangwen could make out the shadow of something with a head like a horse’s skull and the neck of a serpent. It spread its crow-like wings, flapping them, emitted shrieking sounds that made her wish she had arrows left. She dropped her bow and pulled Britha’s longspear from the mud. Immediately it started to whisper to her. Immediately Tangwen felt less frightened. The spear told her of its hunger.