A Quantum Mythology (67 page)

‘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, frustrated.

‘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.

As she watched, the Brigante turned as one and leaped from the palisade. Bladud wasn’t wearing his robe now. He was wearing iron mail and a bearskin cloak like the rest of his warriors. The skull of a bear that he had killed himself was set onto his helmet. His cloak caught fire as he leaped. Bladud landed and tore it off, stabbing at the cloak as the green fire imbued it with deformed life.

‘Hold here!’ Bladud cried. The wall across the entire front of the fort was torn down. The monstrosities crawled, ran, slithered and flew into the fort. Behind her the children screamed. In front of her, some of the warriors and landsfolk screamed as well, fleeing the line.

Tangwen pushed her feet deeper into the mud. There was a smile on her face. She could feel the demons in her blood fighting against the magics of Andraste that filled the air. Ahead of her, in the line of warriors and landsfolk, she could see flesh and armour start to warp. There were things growing out of them, bursting through skin, changing them. Some lost control and started stabbing at new mouths, eyes, entire heads. Others stood and held even as they were being transformed.

Goibniu resembled Bress again, which made him easier to look at, in some ways. The blood was still drying on Britha’s cheek. Her head still ached.

‘Who is Germelqart speaking with?’ Britha asked.

‘Ninegal,’ Goibniu told her.

‘Who is Ninegal?’

‘Me.’

Britha shook her head. None of this was making much sense. ‘You are aware? You know what is happening outside?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘It has driven its own children mad,’ he said.

Britha stared at him for a moment but had no time to go into it. ‘Will you help us?’

‘What would you have of me?’

‘Can you …’ Germelqart had spoken of this but she could not see how it might be done. The land would not fit in the Red Chalice. ‘Can you return the land to what it was?’

‘Yes,’ Goibniu said simply.

Britha stared at him. ‘That’s it? No bargain? No price?’ All dealings with the Otherworld had a price.

‘I am a tool, nothing more.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and cursed her weakness as the relief surged through her and tears sprang to her eyes again. ‘Can you return me, and my friend?’ she asked.

He nodded. Then: ‘Britha?’ he asked. She looked up at him. ‘I am alone. All my people are gone.’

‘Mine, too,’ she told him, but then she remembered the little girl.

Tangwen rammed her knife into something’s head and there was an audible crack as the point of the blade pierced the skull. The mouth growing from Tangwen’s own neck and shoulder was cackling insanely. She put both hands on her spear and rammed it into one of the beaked walking-tree monstrosities, running at it, pushing the spear in as deep as she could. The spear howled through her blood, into her skull. The spearhead branched out through the tree-thing’s body, hungry for the slaughter, searching for a way to kill it.

A one-legged monstrosity landed in front of her. It clawed at her with thick, ragged nails on its single hand, tearing deep rents in her face. Tangwen barely felt the pain. She spat her own flesh into its eye, yanked her hatchet from her belt and used it to open the thing’s head, splashing herself with its gory contents. She grabbed her knife from the dead thing’s head and jammed it into neck of another. Iron branches exploded through the bark-like skin of the tree-thing and it fell to the ground, crushing spawn and human alike. Tangwen bit the nose off whatever it was she had just stabbed in the neck and spat it away from her. She embedded her hatchet in the head of something slithering towards her with a thousand tiny legs and a human face. Then she grabbed for her spear, tearing it out of the tree-thing.

A flailing tendril hit her hard, sending her spinning through the air. She landed close to where Britha and Germelqart lay. She could see their flesh starting to transform now. Britha’s arm was slowly turning into a tentacle. Feathers and eyes were growing from Germelqart’s head.

The Brigante and the
gwyllion
were fighting next to her, trying to keep Britha and Germelqart safe for as long as they could. Many of them were just being stomped into the ground by things too large for them to fight. The rest of the warriors were in a ragged line across the fort, trying to keep the creatures away from the children, though many had run. Tangwen wondered if those who stayed had done so because they were damned or driven mad with battle lust by the cursed weapons they carried, or were just the bravest people she had ever met.

Bladud was fighting like a demon, moving with speed and ferocity, cutting down anything that got close to him. All the more impressive when Tangwen remembered he had not drunk of Britha’s blood. His sword arm, his entire body, must ache, he must have been gasping for breath, soaked in sweat. He cut at something that looked like a twisted man with antlers, driving it into the ground and then striking down, again and again, with his red iron blade until the thing stopped moving and started to come apart. Bladud had another face growing out of the back of his bald head. He tore his shield off his arm as it grew teeth and bit at him.