The Defiler (18 page)

Ukko sniffed, a ribbon of snot dribbling down over his upper lip. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and sniffed again. He didn't want to hope. Hope hurt. He looked up at the druid, hurt in his eyes.

The hunt galloped on away from them, Sláine lost somewhere in the middle of it.

The druid planted his staff in the dirt, forcing it deep into the belly of the earth, and began a slowly rising chant, the words indistinguishable from one another until Myrrdin was shouting a single one over and over again: Annfwyn.

The first lick of mist rose like smoke from the heather ten feet beyond the staff, coiling lazily into the night air. A second and a third quickly joined it, tangling in the air. All around the staff wisps of mist rose from the field, fusing into a single spectral wall that shimmered beneath the moon.

Across the field the Moon-Torn celebrants screamed as the hunt took them.

"The path is open," Myrrdin said, grabbing hold of Sláine's wrists. "Help me. Take his feet."

"To where?" Ukko asked, sniffing back more snot.

"Through the mists, the path is open between life and death, darkness and light, the path between the El Worlds."

"And this will save him?"

"I don't know," the druid admitted. "But to remain here will damn him; that much I am sure of."

Together they dragged Sláine's corpse into the mist.

Sláine stood rooted to the ground as the Huntress bore down on him, her silver blade parting the moonlight like fine silk.

Brain-Biter was still buried deep in the Night-Mare's neck.

Thinking about the axe was enough; he felt its weight in his right hand and smiled. He held the fragment of the Cauldron in his left. He could grow used to being one of the dead and the damned.

The thought sent a shiver through his soul.

He looked beyond the Huntress to his corpse, and saw his friends dragging it into a shimmering wall of mist. One moment they were there, the next they were gone, swallowed by the swirling wall of white.

A moment later a black smear swooped low across the open face of the moon, and banked, disappearing into the mists: the Morrigan's bird had followed them.

Already, he saw, the mists were beginning to recede, the edges fraying as the enchantment binding them together lost its hold and they came undone.

And then the huntress was on top of him, her blade scything low to claim his head.

Sláine threw himself to the ground, rolling on his left shoulder and coming out of the tumble in a run.

The Huntress shrieked, wheeling her beast around, spurring it on wildly. The Night-Mare answered, surging forwards, its huge gait devouring the ground between the Huntress and her quarry.

The mist was failing quickly now, dissolution eating into it.
Run, my beautiful boy, run!
The Maiden's voice echoed inside his mind, and hearing it, Sláine knew that to be stranded on this side, separated from his mortal flesh, would doom his spirit to eternity with the hunt. He did as the Goddess begged. He ran.

The Huntress's blade pierced his back, lifting him off his feet. He fell hard, bleeding, then looked at the blood with confusion and it ceased to flow. He scrambled back on his arse, hands and feet digging at the dirt - he could feel the earth screaming at the Night-Bringer's violation as she stepped down off her huge mount to bring an end to his wretched existence - and into the mists as the Night Bringer loomed over him.

SEVEN

Ukko stepped out of the mists into a world bereft of any colour.

It was not that it had been leeched of hues, of subtlety and beauty.

The beauty was there, austere and unforgiving, but it was the beauty of a grey world.

The grass, the moon, the rocks, the trees, even the rolling breakers of the water on the nearby shoreline were all shades and layers of grey between black and white.

It was a grim, alien place, utterly unlike the land it mirrored on the otherside. The dwarf struggled to orientate himself. The landmarks were familiar but wrong, and their wrongness made it difficult for his mind to hold on to any sense of place.

They were on a road - a proper stone laid road, better than anything in Tir-Nan-Og. Each stone was an octagonal disc, worn flat by the passage of countless feet over millennia. The road was wide enough for ten men to walk abreast comfortably, even in full armour, shields interlocked. Ukko knelt to brush his fingers across the surface of the stones. The causeway was ancient, built, perhaps by the gods and goddesses themselves. No mortal hand had fashioned the road, of that he felt uncomfortably sure.

The road led two ways, the righteous path into the high hills, the sinister route dropped away quickly, down towards a stony beach and dead-calm waters.

And, more disturbing that all the rest, was the silence. Despite the fact that they had travelled barely fifty paces from the celebrants and the wild hunt there was complete and utter silence. There was no storm, no thunderheads, no lightning, no whoops and cries from the Moon-Torn, no rabid baying from the hunt's shoggy creatures.

They were under a different sky.

Everything was different here, even the taste of the air in his lungs. It was older, less alive.

"Where are we?"

"We have crossed into the Annfwyn, friend Ukko." The druid pronounced it
an-noon,
drawing the syllables out. "As I promised, we are between the land of the living and the dead. Here nothing can live and nothing can die."

"But we-"

"Will not age while we walk these grey paths, my friend. Time has no sway here. We could walk these roads a thousand thousand years and not age a day."

"So Sláine... ?"

"If there is a breath in his body, it is trapped and he shall live once more; if the death rattle has passed his lips, then he is dead."

"But his spirit? I mean... it rose, didn't it? From his flesh? He was a ghost so surely he had to be dead?" said Ukko, not understanding.

"It is out of our hand now, all we can do is move his flesh towards safety and pray that Danu preserves his spirit long enough for the two to become one again. Help me carry him. We must reach the water."

And so they took the sinister path.

It felt as though the road would never end. It cut through the fields of grey and the graphite hills, sloping gradually down towards the charcoal waters. Together the pair of them struggled with Sláine's dead weight, manhandling him down the causeway until the discs began to separate, forming a steep and uneven stair down the side of the hill to the beach five hundred feet below.

To make matters worse, behind them came the first chilling sounds of the wild hunt; its mistress having crossed over onto this side of the mists, its prisoners had no choice but to follow.

Ukko looked up at the druid, only to see that Myrrdin had not expected the Night Bringer to pursue them between worlds.

"This wasn't in her story," the druid whispered.

"Why don't you add some bit about her being defeated by some fearless dwarf... no better make that a bloody terrified dwarf. What am I thinking? Have her fall off her damned horse and bash her head in on a nice sharp rock. That'd do it."

Ukko peered down the giant's stair. It didn't so much as lead down to the pebbled beach as it did lurch down. Each step fell away two feet or more before it reached the next; only a huge man - a half-giant - would have negotiated the stairway with any ease. Ukko was looking at five hundred feet of bone-jarring agony.

"The moon," the druid said. "We have to get him out of the moon's domain," Myrrdin said, energised by their plight. "We go down, it's our only chance."

The first step was easy, as were the second and third, and for a moment Ukko fooled himself into thinking the tenth, eleventh and twelfth would be just as painless. By the thirteenth, the impact of dropping the two feet to the next plateau had a knot in the base of his spine burning. By the thirtieth step the fire had spread out through the trunk of his spine and out along the branches of his ribs. Sláine was heavy in his arms. Twice a misstep cracked the warrior's skull off a jagged spur of rock - but there was no blood.

Because there's no heartbeat to pump it out,
Ukko thought, struggling to adjust his grip and maintain his precarious balance at the same time.

He shuffled back an inch, trying to feel out the edge of the step with his heel. The octagonal stone crumbled beneath his weight, overbalancing him, and suddenly Ukko started to fall. A scream tore from his flapping lips. He wrapped desperate arms around Sláine's leg and clung on for dear life, praying feverishly that Myrrdin was doing the same thing two steps above him.

"Hold on!"

"Damn stupid thing to say," Ukko grunted, his face pressed into the dead warrior's thigh. "I'm hardly going to let go, am I?"

His words didn't carry up to the druid.

Mercifully there was no wind to bully him off the cliff face, only the weight of gravity urging him eagerly to fall.

Ukko scrambled to get his feet under him before the added weight of his momentum pulled all three of them off the stair. He tried to look down. His toe scraped against the rough stone. It was six inches above the next step, which meant he had to work himself slowly down Sláine's leg or risk the short fall. He closed his eyes, mumbling a litany of prayers to every god, goddess, demon and nether-troll he had ever heard of, and more he made up just to be on the safe side, as he edged agonisingly down until the tip of his toe touched the next step.

"We could just drop him you know, being as he can't die, right?" Ukko called up. "It'd make things a damned sight easier." Ukko twisted to look down over his shoulder. They were still two hundred feet from the beach, at least. Impact from a fall like that would make a mess of a body even if it couldn't technically kill it
again;
there wouldn't be a lot left for Sláine's soul to clamber back into. He imagined trying to explain all the broken bones to Sláine including - if he bounced off the giant's stair and landed face-down instead of on his back - the flat face. "Perhaps not," Ukko conceded.

Ukko lost count of the stairs as the pain transmuted from a fire to a raging inferno that consumed his entire body.

He leaned out, clinging on to Sláine's boots, and looked up at the moon impossibly far above them. He felt as though they had descended into the burning pits of the netherworld and that at any second the tiny light of the moon would be snuffed out, taking all hope of escape with it. It was a treacherous notion - the moon was their enemy, but darkness, true, utter darkness, scared seven shades of shit out of him.
And none of them are grey,
Ukko thought, bitterly.

The hunt reached the giant's stair, but there was no way down.

The Night Bringer sniffed the air. She could smell the warrior's spirit on it. He was running scared. They all were. The stench of cowardice was overpowering. It filled her nostrils. The Night-Mare shied beneath her. She reached down with a gentling hand to steady the noble beast.

"So much fear," she said. "Are we truly that terrifying, my beauty?" the Huntress whispered into the Night-Mare's ear, knowing that they were and relishing that truth. She wheeled around to see a half-man half-dog loping towards her. "We will find another way down, my sweet. Our quarry will not elude us."

"It never does, mistress," the tortured spirit of the man-dog crooned.

Ukko saw the spectre of the Night Bringer looming on the clifftop.

He didn't see her face properly; her eyes were sunken pits that transformed her visage into a Samain mask. The moonlight shone on the black plates of her armour, and showed him all he needed to see to know that everything Myrrdin had said about her was true. His head swam with fragments and half-remembered (or -forgotten) memories, midnight promises to whores and doxies pledging love in return for loving, grifts milking money from fools eager to be parted with their coin, buildings and faces, people, places, and then he was falling.

I looked upon the hunt! This is it, I'm dying! Oh you stupid, stupid dwarf! To look upon the hunt is to die. He told you that plain and simple and what did you go and do? You had to look! You couldn't just run. And this is it now, probably dead already and that was it, the sum total of your life flashing before your eyes. What a miserable bloody life it wa-urgh!

He hit the ground, hard, hundreds of unforgiving stones pressing into every inch and angle of his body.

Myrrdin was less than ten feet above him, still holding a dangling Sláine by the arms. The moonlight revealed every crack and crevice in the rock face all the way up to the summit.

The Night Bringer was gone.

Ukko started to laugh uncontrollably. The laughter was manic, a wave that crashed from the sea of dread that drowned his mind and finally spilled out of his mouth.

The laughter died in his throat when he rolled over to see a phalanx of fighting men crossing the stony beach - six abreast in a never-ending line that melted into the grey skies. They were heavily armoured, carrying shield and sword and spear, following the banner of a great rearing bull. Beneath the steel plates of their armour they wore flame-red tunics. They were the first smear of colour in this infernal place - and they were coming directly towards him, their leather-sandalled feet grinding the stones of the beach together. He counted heads, reaching thirty rows before they blurred into one. Beside the bull standard marched their leader; his plumed helmet marked him as different to his fellows.

Ukko couldn't move.

He lay on his belly staring at them.

Sláine's corpse hit the stones beside him in a whorish sprawl. A moment later Myrrdin was tugging at his collar: "Up dwarf."

"This can't be good."

"Just keep your mouth shut. If you get the urge to say something, bite your tongue off."

Ukko glowered at the druid, and then kicked Sláine's shoulder, taking his frustration and fear out on the body just because he could. Sláine had hit him often enough over the course of their travels. Thinking about it, Ukko jabbed two more quick boots in, hoping they left bloody great bruises.