The Defiler (3 page)

"We will build a fire. You are welcome to join us later if you wish," Sláine said, offering the harper a few moments of solitude.

Siothrún met his eye, and nodded his thanks. "I appreciate your kindness, friend Sláine. As, I am sure, Caoilfhionn would."

"Think nothing of it, the kindness of strangers costs nothing, Siothrún."

"And yet it can be the most precious kindness of all."

"The pair of you have gone soft in the head," Ukko rolled his eyes. "I'm off to find some faggots to feed to the fire."

They bedded down a short distance from the cairn. The fire burned low, crackling and spitting sparks. Shadow dancers flickered and writhed across their makeshift camp. The wind carried its eulogy across the night.

When it came, Sláine's sleep was restless. He tossed and turned fitfully while Ukko snored, oblivious, his lips rattling against his teeth.

He dreamed a thousand fragments of dream, but one rose up within him, fevered by the edge of prophecy. A woman knelt by his side, her face close to his, her lips leaning in to taste him. He gave himself to the kiss though their lips never touched. He felt the invasive presence of her mind within his, scratching around through all the memories that made him who he was.

Who are you?
He gasped but he knew - because just as she touched him, so he touched her, melding with the woman of his dreams.

Caoilfhionn,
the name sang through his head. Whether it was Sláine, the voice of his dreamself, or the Weatherwitch naming herself, there was no way of knowing.

Her ethereal fingers slipped inside his skull, pressing deep into his mind. He wanted to scream but this dream-self had no mouth. He bucked and writhed, trying to dislodge the witch but it was as though bonds of iron tied him to the earth. He could not fight her.

Do not struggle, Son of the Sessair. Let me inside you. Deeper. Surrender.

If you weren't already dead, woman, you would taste my axe.

I would taste so much more, warrior.
Her icy hand reached down to cup the silver tusk of his boar's head codpiece, tugging it aside. There was no tenderness in her touch when it came. It was hungry.
Such anger in you, such pain. Let me take it away. Let me help you. I can, with just a word.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD, WITCH!

He concentrated on his hands, even as his body responded to her touch, forcing them to reach out and grasp either side of the witch's head. Her grasp on him tightened. An elemental charge, like lightning, coursed through his body as he pressed and his fingers sank into her insubstantial skull. Sláine screamed out against the charge wracking his body, the agony fierce enough to tear a raw hole where his mouth ought to have been. The pain was visceral, his response to it primal. He struck out, looking to batter the witch until she relinquished her hold on his flesh.

Such sadness consumes you, warrior,
the ghost of Caoilfhionn said, feeding off his pain. She licked from his nose to the centre of his brow in a parody of erotic sensuality. The greater his suffering the more substantial she became beneath his hands, the more forceful her grip. She threw her head back, relishing the spasm that shook his body. A sheen of perspiration clung to her too-pale skin. Her lips parted hungrily, eager to devour more of him. Ribbons of mist leaked out between sharpened teeth, coiling lazily down towards his nose and mouth and slipping easily into him. The mist clogged in his throat. Sláine thrashed about wildly, retching and choking on the ethereal ribbons as they delved deeper inside him. He tried desperately to reach out for the Earth Serpent, to harness its power with his mind, to surrender to it, but the witch's fingers drew more exquisite pain from him, and the serpent recoiled, leaving him alone with Caoilfhionn, helpless against her invasion.

What do you want from me?
It was more of a plea than a question. The final spasm wracked his body.

And in answer to it she offered him a sunburst of images; places he did not know, names he could not grasp or understand flashed through his mind. Spiralling towers of ivory and bone clawing up into the red sky, a city of wonder and fear populated by the pale ones, burning giants brought low, The Morrigan and Blodeuwedd, black hounds and crows and scaled monstrosities all blurring into one as her final words floated like a ghost beneath, behind and between everything that he saw:
find the Skinless Man
.

Sláine came awake with a start, gasping and sweating in a tangle of fur where he had become embroiled with his cape. The fire was dead, charcoal and ash all that remained. He looked around, trying to focus. Dawn had brought a fine mist with it.

The tenuous fingers of the dream-witch clung to him even as he blinked back the sleep, feeding on his guilt and sorrow. And still the trailing edge of her voice echoed inside his mind: find the Skinless Man.

"Where?" he asked, but there was no one there to answer him - not that he needed an answer. The city he had seen belonged to the pale ones: the Sidhe. Ukko's bedroll was empty and the harper was gone. Sláine rose unsteadily, the dream had drained him more than it had any right to. The mist made it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. On the verge of panic he spun left and right, and stared running. "Ukko!" he called out, "Ukko!"

He staggered, turning his ankle in a rut in the dirt, and cursed. The curse was met by childish laughter.

And a moment later he saw the runt with his britches around his ankles relieving himself against the side of a roadside marker.

"Were you worried?" Ukko grinned. "You were, weren't you? Oh, I'm touched, Sláine. I am. I'm touched."

"Just pull your britches up."

There was no sign of Siothrún.

Sláine wandered over to the Weatherwitch's cairn. It was no burial mound. It was nothing more than a pile of chipped and broken stones. He kicked at them, toppling the stones. There was no body buried beneath.

The tang of pocheen was still bitter on his tongue.

The charade bore the hallmarks of the Sidhe.

Ukko came to stand beside him and pointed up at the sky, "Look." A lone black bird watched them from a high branch. "I've got to say I've no liking for the way this day has started. None whatsoever."

TWO

Ukko hurled a stone at the bird's head.

"Go on, scat! Get out of here! Shoo!"

The crow burst into flight in an explosive flurry of black wings.

It cawed angrily.

Ukko gestured obscenely at the creature as it flapped in circles around his head. Its beady yellow eyes glared back at him malevolently.

"Bloody creepy birds," Ukko grumbled. "Go on! Hie! Hie!" He bent down and picked up another shard of rock and hurled it at the bird, missing by a good yard and a half. The crow, mocking him, circled lower and lower until its wings beat at his head. Ukko lurched backward spluttering and swatting at the air, nowhere near close enough to threaten it. "I hate the damned things. If I get my hands on it I'll wring its bloody neck!"

Sláine watched the bird as it evaded Ukko's miserable attempts to catch it. It banked low and swept high, its trajectory forming a rough circle around the pile of broken stones once, twice, deosil, and on the third counter-sunwise pass vanished into thin air mid-wingbeat. One moment it was there, the next it wasn't. Sláine stared at the air it had disappeared into. There was nothing remotely peculiar about it. The bird had simply ceased to be.

"Go on, disappear, you damned bird!" Ukko cursed, aggrieved. He sat down on the grass and grabbed his pack, rooting through it until he found a chunk of hard cornbread which he broke off with dirty fingers and started to eat. He threw a nugget of cornbread to Sláine. "I am so tired of this damned bread. I'd kill for a good bit of goat, nicely charred over a fire, still dripping fat and juices."

"That was... unnatural."

"You always did have a way with words, big man. It was peculiar, uncanny, outlandish, extraordinary, bizarre, mysterious, inexplicable, remarkable, you could even say astonishing but let's be honest, it was just plain
wrong
."

"That's what I said," Sláine walked across to the stones, half-expecting to feel something, a charge in the air, a peculiar static, anything that could offer a hint as to how the bird had disappeared. He knelt, touching one of the stones. It was cold beneath his fingers but otherwise utterly unremarkable. He turned it over. There were no markings on it. He tossed it up into the air and caught it, then dropped it back onto the pile along with the other stones. "I had a dream last night."

"Sounds like a confession. I'm not sure I really want to hear about it. It's been a long time since you had a woman. What I don't know won't hurt me and all that," Ukko said. "If you did unspeakable things to me, or a goat, I think you should just keep them to yourself."

"It wasn't that kind of dream," Sláine said, explaining how the Weatherwitch had melded with him and the visions he had had in response to her invasion of his sleep.

"It wasn't natural," he finished, as though that explained everything, the harper, the dream of the dead witch and the disappearing bird. "By that I mean not a dream as much as a prophetic vision. I am not even sure the harper was real."

"Well his drink was real enough. My head is still throbbing, thank you very much."

"If he was, he was not a mortal man. His skin was too pale, face too thin, fingers too long. No, I'd wager he was one of the Sidhe."

At the mention of the fey folk from beyond the veil all colour left the dwarf's face.

"We need to follow the bird."

"You don't really mean that."

"The bird is the key, thrice doesil around the broken stones and it left. We must follow it and find the Skinless Man."

"Have you listened to yourself? Find the Skinless Man, because you had a dream. And now you want to track a vanishing bird. Now I know why I am not a hero," Ukko shook his head. "And the best part is you say that as though disappearing into thin air is the easiest thing in the world. Why is nothing
ever
simple with you?"

"Probably because, as you like to remind me, I am a hero," Sláine said, a hint of mirth reaching his eyes.

"Lug save me from heroes," Ukko muttered. "I just want to mention again, just in case you missed it first time, this whole thing makes me very uncomfortable."

Sláine walked back to the bedrolls and gathered his possessions together. Slough Feg's accursed book lay open on Ukko's cloak. Sláine could not make hide nor hair out of the spidery scrawl of Ogham. "Found anything of interest?" he asked, not that he trusted Ukko to tell the truth even if he could decipher the runes. That was why he had decided to take the book to Tall Iesin. The wanderer would be able to interpret the full implications of Feg's plans and the impact they would have on the Land of the Young if they ever came to fruition.

"Enough to know I don't want to go chasing after some vanishing bird," Ukko said, closing the book and stowing it in his pack. "Ever heard of the word 'trap'? No, didn't think you had," Ukko answered himself before Sláine could. The dwarf had an annoying habit of running off at the mouth when he was nervous - which was more often than not. "Let's just say there is a reason Throt called it Feg's Ragnarok book. You
do
know what Ragnarok is, right? End of the world stuff. The cataclysm. We're talking about epic storms riving the world asunder, oceans rising to swallow the land, wiping out humanity. Feg's spewing his bile onto vellum. It's little more than a monotonous screed denouncing the depravity of the world. After reading a few pages of his book I can see why so much of the south has gone sour; it must have withered beneath his tongue. Feg is one bitter old cuss, believe me."

Sláine had no liking for what he heard. But could the ravings of a lunatic really be the key to regaining his honour amongst his people? It was doubtful, but then it was equally doubtful Ukko had understood one word in ten and was doing anything but fabricating a lot of stuff and nonsense to justify his fear. The bird's disappearance had unnerved Sláine, but coupled with the things he had seen during Caoilfhionn's violation, it only served to pique his curiosity. Who, or what, could the Skinless Man be? No man could live without skin to seal his flesh; surely he would bleed to death. He had seen a burned man die because his skin could not breathe. No, this Skinless Man he sought could not be a literal Skinless Man. An entity, perhaps? A wraith or revenant shade? A statue or even a story? The Sidhe were fond of tales. Perhaps that was it. The notion just confirmed his need to find Tall Iesin; if there was such a being in the stuff of stories the wanderer would know.

"Tell me."

A yellow-jacketed corn fly buzzed from dead head to dead head of corn. Aside from Siothrún it was the first living thing he had seen since leaving Dardun. It was such an unremarkable thing, yet watching it drew a smile from the young warrior. The minutiae of life did not stop. Once more he thrilled at the sheer wonder of creation. Even now, with the reek of Slough Feg's Sourlands spreading, the smallest of Danu's creatures sought to flourish. The fly would lay eggs in the corn, the eggs would hatch into maggots which in turn would bloat on the dead corn and transform into flies themselves - a perfect cycle of life. Even the ash from the victims of the skull swords would nourish the earth, enriching the soil and so feeding the Goddess, just as he himself would one day: from dust to dust returned, as the druid, Cathbad, had liked to say. In time the air would be thick with flies.

"What is there to tell? He uses the word vile a lot and babbles about the need for cleansing the sickness from the carcass of the Danu. No, that's not quite what he said... the pox-crusted carcass, that was it: cleansing the sickness from the pox-crusted carcass of Danu. I get the impression he is none too fond of your Goddess. Then again his weirdness is not overly enamoured with anything," Ukko tapped at his temple with a dirty finger. "He is a raving loon. Some words - even complete sentences - appear over and over. One he fixates on is deluge; I found five separate pleas for tidal waves and lashing storms to savage the land. Like I said, cataclysmic stuff. If wishes were fishes, we'd all be very wet. So how about we forget about the bird and forge on towards your old homestead and surprise that chief of yours with the ravings of this homicidal lunatic?" Ukko said, hopefully.