What Dusk Divides

by Clara Coulson

  “And any punishment the Morrígan dishes out,” Orlagh added, “will be a great deal more unpleasant than a trek through…whatever fresh hell this is. The scene of a massacre, I suppose.”

  “It’s certainly no dumping ground for the dead.” Boyle descended the hill toward the streambed, hand on his hilt. “No one would travel this far into the old forests to deposit bodies, as there are plenty of safer places designated for that purpose. And you cannot portal bodies here, as you cannot pinpoint specific locations within the forests using portal spells.”

  “Some sort of merchant caravan, maybe?” Graham theorized, following in Boyle’s literal footsteps, the soil in and around the streambed still soft. “An ill-fated attempt at taking a shortcut from one court to another?”

  “There are easier ways than that to traverse the court border.”

  Orlagh slid down the bank on her heels and jumped the last few feet, landing beside Boyle. “I think it’s more likely they sought out something within the forest, and paid the price for the folly of challenging the good will of its denizens.”

  “Hope we don’t pay the same price,” Odette said, rolling up her left sleeve to expose the assortment of glowing “buttons” on her conduit arm, each of which corresponded to a “preprogrammed”

  spell. I swore it had more options than it did the last time I saw it, even though Odette had had no breaks in between the failed raid on Vianu’s coven and the start of this risky jaunt.

  The arm’s capabilities are so robust, I thought, that they’re challenging her to improve the speed and skill of her spell design.

  For a woman who wasn’t even thirty, Odette was already a frighteningly skillful witch. I couldn’t imagine what a fearsome force she would become by the time she hit middle age, given the rate at which she was currently advancing.

  I only hoped she lived long enough to reach her full potential.

  Down on the streambed, our steps light and careful on the soft, unstable ground, we followed the trail of wisps through the killing field. The corpses were so old and dry, they no longer gave off any reek of decay. But there hung in the air a hint of that telltale smell of death, an echo of what had once been a stench foul enough to make even the hardiest of soldiers lose their lunch.

  As we wound through the loose clusters of corpses, I leaned to and fro, trying to catch a glimpse of the facial features of any of the bodies to see if I could identify exactly what they were.

  But strangely, every corpse’s face was completely buried in the mud, almost as if they’d deliberately shoved them into that position. Or someone else had done so, perhaps as a method of

  torture or humiliation before they were coldly executed by whatever had sealed their fate.

  Now that I’m thinking about it, how were they killed?

  I examined a few of the nearest bodies, searching for signs of critical injuries. Puncture wounds in the chests or backs. Slit throats or broken necks. Major skull fractures or spines severed at just the wrong vertebrae. Critical injuries that the weaker healing factors of the lesser fae could not mend.

  But I didn’t see any injuries like that. I didn’t see any injuries at all. Not a single corpse had recognizable damage, other than the emaciated frames. And that could’ve simply been the result of some natural process resembling mummification.

  If these people weren’t injured in a typical way, then how did they die?

  A spell that choked their lungs or induced catastrophic brain or heart damage? A poisonous gas emitted from the drooling mouth of some slimy forest entity? A trap ward that imprisoned them here in the streambed and caused them to starve to death or die of dehydration or drown when the last flood came through—?

  McDermott came to an abrupt halt and unsheathed his sword in a flash. “Movement up ahead,” he said brusquely.

  Ten feet farther along the trail of wisps, one of the corpses twitched. At first, it could have been mistaken for a trick of the light, the shifting shadows of leaves swaying in the breeze.

  But then, as if someone flipped a switch and restored power to a machine that had been left dormant for years, the corpse’s arms and legs began to thrash, flinging dollops of sticky brown mud left and right.

  Then, the corpse’s hands found purchase against the ground, followed by its knees, and in a jerky motion, the corpse pushed itself into a sitting position. Its head popped free of the mud with a loud squelch as the pressure released. That head turned toward us like the ticking hand of a clock, finally revealing the face of the creature.

  Or rather, finally revealing it didn’t have a face.

  The entire front of the creature’s skull was a plane of shriveled skin, nothing but a pair of shallow depressions where the eyes should’ve been, the nose a single slit as thin as a razor. The only real facial feature the creature possessed was a mouth. A very wide mouth that stretched from nubby ear to nubby ear, bordered by peeling lips covered in sores and filled with needle-like teeth.

  The creature rose to its feet with a strength that belied its emaciated frame, sniffed the air with its slit nose, and opened its abhorrent mouth, releasing the foulest of odors onto the air.

  The smell of rot. The smell of death. A mix of rich copper and organic decay and something sickly sweet.

  Only one creature looked like this.

  Only one creature smelled like this.

  All these corpses weren’t corpses at all. They were fear gorta, the physical embodiments of famine. Creatures that stalked the scenes of great tragedies and atrocities, and devoured the bodies of the fallen.

  In times of peace, when their preferred meal was scarce, fear gorta fell into a state of dormancy. When they were woken from that state, they demonstrated a great deal more aggression than usual, and they became partial to producing the corpses upon which they would later feast.

  But the worst trait of the fear gorta wasn’t their physical eating habits—it was their spiritual eating habits. Instead of hosting their own innate magic energy, the souls of the fear gorta somehow consumed outside energy. They absorbed it from their immediate environment and transformed it into metabolic energy, similar to the way the physical digestive process worked.

  If a fear gorta touched you, it was like your soul got trapped in the gravity well of a tiny black hole. All your magic energy drained right out of you in seconds, reducing you to life force only. This absorption process was disorienting, as well as exhausting, and it often left people too weak and dizzy to run away while the fear gorta moved in for the kill.

  Fear gorta were considered a menace by fae society, and practically every town and city on the continent had defenses built specifically to deter their trespass. There had also been several purges of fear gorta over the preceding millennia, but no matter how many the sídhe slaughtered, their numbers always replenished.

  Those numbers were never high enough to threaten the fae on the daily, but every now and again, some hapless travelers stumbled upon a group of napping fear gorta and wound up a lot more dead than the emaciated creatures who wore death’s visage like a playful mask.

  Apparently, we were meant to be the latest cautionary tale.

  We’d walked straight into the Morrígan’s next trap.

  “Fear gorta! Don’t let them touch you,” Orlagh yelled in warning, a split second before every single other false corpse sprang to its feet and lunged at us.

  Turmoil engulfed the group as shields went up and swords unsheathed and unsteady feet scrambled to carry people out of the trajectories of the oncoming creatures.

  Indira was too slow on the draw, and the hand of a fear gorta brushed the side of her neck before her shield fully resolved.

  She moved out of its reach immediately, but even that barest touch siphoned away a great deal of her energy. Her shield collapsed in on itself, and she dizzily staggered toward Odette.

  Odette saw her coming, opened a section of her own shield for a matter of milliseconds, and tugged Indira inside before any of the fear gorta could tou
ch her again. Indira sank to her knees beside Odette, clutching her head and swaying.

  Growling, Odette shot off a volley of energy blasts. Green flashes zipped through the air and sucker-punched every creature that dared to approach.

  Fear gorta, however, were not wholly affected by pure energy attacks, because they could so quickly absorb a significant fraction of any magic energy they came into contact with.

  Odette’s brutal boxing glove blasts were, at best, half as effective as usual. Most of the fear gorta who got whacked in the face were merely stunned and bruised.

  If she wanted to disintegrate their heads, like she had done to that dark elf during our tour through the creepy cavern in the Divide, she would have to use a lot more energy per punch to achieve the desired impact. But as a human witch, Odette didn’t have enough energy to throw spells that strong at so many enemies at once.

  And if she stopped throwing punches at half of the fear gorta in her vicinity in order to kill the other half, the unhampered ones would mob her shield and suck the energy out of that. Then both her and Indira would be left defenseless.

  “I could use a little help over here,” she shouted at the sídhe soldiers.

  The soldiers were faring better than her and Indira, using their swords to cut the creatures down. Orlagh came in low and chopped off the legs of six fear gorta back to back, sending them all crashing to the ground in a flailing heap. But six more replaced the fallen before Orlagh had a chance to solidify her stance, and they piled on top of her shield.

  Their combined weight was so heavy that Orlagh lost her footing and fell to one knee, right next to the fear gorta with the

  severed legs. All of them also touched her shield, and she gasped as twelve at once drained the energy from her spell faster than she could replace it. The shield flickered and nearly collapsed.

  Boyle landed atop the shield and shouted the activation word for a wind spell. A concentrated vortex of fast-moving air ripped all the fear gorta away from the shield and flung them across the streambed. The twelve creatures crashed into the dirt walls of the embankment, which crumbled under the force of the impacts, burying the creatures under hundreds of pounds of dense earth.

  Boyle slid off the top of Orlagh’s shield and landed beside her in a crouch, tipping up his chin to silently ask if she was all right.

  Orlagh gave him a curt nod and opened her mouth to thank him.

  Only for her appreciation to morph into panic. “Eamon, beneath you!”

  The fingers that Orlagh had seen poking up out of the mud were followed by an entire hand that punched through Boyle’s shield and wrapped around his ankle. The hand gave a hard tug, and Boyle fell over.

  The ground beneath him imploded to reveal a system of underground pockets, like an anthill, each one packed with more fear gorta.

  Boyle tumbled into one of the pockets, and the rest of his shield flickered out as a half-dozen creatures grabbed hold of him.

  Orlagh, strengthening her own shield, jumped into the pocket and struck down the creatures with a flurry of blows. With her help, Boyle managed to shake off all the creatures that had latched onto him, but he was breathing hard and barely able to stand upright. Even though he was a full-blooded sídhe, the fear gorta had eaten most of his magic energy in the moments it had taken Orlagh to rescue him.

  If that was all it took to bring down a sídhe, then I was in big trouble.

  I’d been between McDermott and Graham when the fear gorta first attacked, and their initial defenses had covered me. But Graham had peeled off to assist Indira and Odette, leaving me to face thirteen fear gorta on my own.

  Instead of bolstering my shield, I pumped energy into my arms and legs, quickening my movements and improving my balance. Deftly dodging all the grabby hands, I formed a field of ice spikes just outside my shield and shot them off in precision strikes.

  I couldn’t use the shrapnel feature that had so effectively maimed countless dark elves in the recent past because all my allies were in close proximity. But I hit each creature with as

  many spikes as I could manage without hitting anyone else, driving them deep into chests and skulls and spinal cords.

  Some of the fear gorta fell, but their bodies were extremely hardy—the emaciated appearance was nothing but a ruse—so none of them would die unless I dealt catastrophic damage. Like decapitating them. Or burning them.

  Or freezing them solid.

  I have enough energy to perform the quick freeze spell, I thought, but if I want to catch them all at once, I need to give the spell my full concentration.

  “McDermott, can you cover me for thirty seconds?” I called out to the major.

  McDermott lobbed off the head of the fear gorta in front of him and kicked its limp body into three more oncoming creatures, knocking them down. He spared me an irritated glance and sneered,

  “What for?”

  “I’ve got a spell that can solve all our problems”—I ducked, and an ambitious fear gorta sailed over my head and crashed to the ground behind me—“but I can’t manage it effectively while I’m preoccupied with other things.”

  McDermott spun one-eighty and bisected four creatures at the waist. “Something with pinpoint accuracy?”

  He asked me that because accuracy was the handicap that was holding back the soldiers from ending this battle in one fell swoop. All of the sídhe had enough raw magic energy to blast the fear gorta to bits. But if they utilized that kind of power in an imprecise manner, their own allies would be caught in the blast radius and seriously injured.

  That was why the sídhe favored fighting on open fields. They could arrange units in formations with sizable gaps between them, giving them the space they needed to unleash pure and absolute destruction on their enemies.

  On this streambed, with everyone so haphazardly arranged, there simply wasn’t enough space for the sídhe to go all out. So they had to fall back on using spells that either had a very short range or relied on very precise directional controls.

  Problem was, the latter were complex and often had to be partially created on the fly to adjust the parameters for the specific layout of the battlefield. Crafting spells of that complexity in a hurry was difficult at the best of times. And the fact that the positions of all the combatants kept changing made casting a lethal, jury-rigged spell a high risk to your allies.

  McDermott was asking me if I was confident that I could throw my quick freeze spell without killing anyone who wasn’t a fear gorta.

  “The highest accuracy you’ve ever seen,” I answered, skirting past yet another swiping, wrinkled hand. “I killed a bunch of vampires with this spell a few hours ago.”

  McDermott beheaded another creature, and as its body collapsed before him, he said, “Do not make me regret this, Whelan.”

  Jumping the distance between us, McDermott took up a defensive position in front of me, erecting a fresh shield that encompassed us both. With only a few muttered words, he invoked one spell that raised ice spikes from the earth around the base of the shield, and a second spell that created a rapidly rotating wall lined with ice blades, reminiscent of a massive saw.

  Another wave of fear gorta assailed us, undeterred. They were gorily maimed, bloody chunks of flesh piling up outside the shield.

  But there were so many fear gorta that McDermott had to keep building new spikes and re-sharpening his icy saw blades, the creatures drinking up the energy inside the ice, leaving it weak and brittle. Also, every now and again, one of the fear gorta made contact with the shield, draining it of power and forcing McDermott to redirect more energy to that spell as well.

  He had a lot of energy to spare, but the fear gorta were insatiable.

  Confident that McDermott could hold them off long enough, I closed my eyes to help myself ignore the melee, then sent out a faint pulse of energy across the entire streambed. It pinged off the souls of my allies, but was absorbed by the fear gorta, and that process of absorption provided me with a distinct impression of t
heir souls: a sort of hollowness that made it feel as if each creature represented a hole that some knife had sliced into the walls of reality.

  With that impression firmly fixed in my mind, I sent out a second, stronger pulse, and with it tagged each fear gorta the same way I’d tagged the vampires. Then I prepared to invoke the spell, and as my magic rose up, drawn yet again from that mysterious funnel, the temperature around me dropped to freezing, and frost spread across the ground beneath my feet.

  I was two seconds from casting the spell, killing all the fear gorta, and saving the day…when I heard the spear zinging through the air.

  Reflexively lurching to the right, I wrenched my eyes open. Only to discover that the Spear of Lugh wasn’t heading for me. It

  bored through McDermott’s weakened shield and struck the man dead center in the chest.

  The tip of the spear rammed all the way through him and tore out of his back. Stunned, McDermott lost his hold on all three of his active spells. The shield crumbled in a bright blue flash, and the ice defenses fell to pieces.

  I altered my course and caught McDermott as he collapsed, blood violently spurting from his mouth. Recalling my last encounter with the spear in stark, painful detail, I grabbed hold of the part of the shaft sticking out of McDermott’s back and deftly tugged the rest of it through his body so the head of the spear wouldn’t do more damage on the way out.

  But just as I was working the end of the spear out of the ragged exit wound, I found out that was a moot point. My grip on the blood-slicked shaft slipped, and my hand slid up toward the pointy tip. There, it bumped against something that burned even through the fabric of my glove. Something that hadn’t been attached to the spear the last time I saw it.

  Iron.

  Someone had fashioned an iron overlay atop the spear’s true head.

  I was shocked—that someone had brought an iron-tipped weapon into Tír na nÓg, that someone had used it to critically injure an Unseelie soldier.

  The spear started vibrating in my hand, and I barely released it before it sprang back in the direction from which it had come. It vanished into the shadows beneath the trees that lined the high bank of the streambed.