The Sword of Feimhin (10 page)

Mark brought his arm around through a horizontal arc, hardly registering the contact between the blade and the Scalpie's throat. No mortal flesh could have withstood the ferocity of the strike. He knew he had beheaded the Scalpie without needing to look. His own proximity to such terrible
power frightened him. He felt his consciousness waver, felt his heartbeat so fast in his ears and throat it seemed impossible that he should survive, then he felt the release, which was so debilitating he fell to his knees.

He was unable for the moment to rise to his feet, blinking repeatedly, wondering what it all truly meant.

Nan spoke. ‘We cannot delay here.'

‘No, you're right.' Mark forced himself back onto tottery legs. His voice was husky as he called out, ‘Henriette – are you still here?'

‘Here – I been hidin'.'

‘Father Touhey – is there someone who could look after him?'

‘His friend – de dean at Christ's Church.'

‘Then we'll help you get him there.'

Nan called out, ‘Your wounds!'

Mark's wounds were self-healing. He looked at Nan and saw the whites of her eyes reappear and the irises contract, returning them to a more normal chocolate-brown. But her eyes had not just changed superficially, they had metamorphosed into something else. He felt the sense of fright again: the sense of wonderment at what they had become.
She can see the same thing happen in my eyes too
.

He sensed the same fright in her.

He stared at the rubble-strewn nave of the church with its wrecked coffin, a coffin in which there had never been a body, just his Fir Bolg battleaxe. Mark needed a few more moments to take it all in: the beheaded body of the Scalpie
and the dead bodies of Grimlings that littered the small church aisle, and then Father Touhey, who was sitting, head bowed, in one of the pews, and the housekeeper, Henriette, who had her arm around the elderly priest but was staring at Mark and Nan open-mouthed. Only then did he notice that the feral girl was nowhere to be seen.

‘Where's Penny?'

‘Gone.'

‘The Scalpie's dagger?'

‘Gone too. She took it an' ran.'

How very differently Kate Shaunessy felt now, standing on the same stone ledge as on her last visit to Ulla Quemar, the sole surviving city of the Cill. The same waves broke against the cliff face below her feet, the same sea-breezes wailed like banshees through the rocks. But the foul air rising from the opening in the cleft was ample confirmation of Driftwood's warning. Things had changed for the worse since her last visit. Had she left it too late to help the Momu?

The dragon had been too large to drop her off as before and had been obliged to hover in mid-air while allowing her to descend the staircase of his tail. Now, as the down-draught of his take-off blew her auburn curls around her face, Kate's heart pattered with apprehension. She steeled herself in front of the cleft before letting herself go, tumbling down the chute she recalled from before. This time, there was no soft bed of moss at the bottom, only a stinking
morass of rotting seaweed. There were no welcoming eyes waiting for her in the dark, no Shaami to greet her. She had to make her own way using the green glow of her crystal that permeated the smooth-walled cavern; in actuality, a carved entrance chamber leading to the hidden openings that led to the water locks, which in turn protected the city from unwanted visitors.

The complex doors of finely-carved stone, which had irised open at Shaami's musical incantation, now stood agape, and the guardian water-locks had been allowed to drain away, with just a residue of stinking brine at the bottom of every fall, making her headway difficult and smelly before she eventually emerged into a world abandoned to ruin. Even the light in the city had decayed, with only a misty glow permeating the open spaces. Pools of darkness made sinister the twists and turns of what had, so recently, been entrancing labyrinths of organically-shaped buildings. Previously, the buildings had been like nautilus shells, the curving beauty of oyster shells, or the lovely radial symmetries of sea urchins and starfish, all bedecked with a proliferation of colourful plants, butterflies and damsel flies.

All too soon she discovered the explanation for the failing light, as well as the sulphurous smell, as she made her way through the warren of streets and waterways to the great seal. It had once been a marvellous construction that united city and ocean, but now the coral reef was overwhelmed by red growth.

She came close enough to examine it, holding her nose against the stink of decay, and noticed that a toxic scum had spread everywhere. It had suffocated the brilliantly-coloured life of the reef, choking the underwater sunstealers, whose life-giving oxygen bubbles were no longer rising.

‘Poor Ulla Quemar!'

Kate looked about at the buildings and streets, lustreless and untended. And even here Shaami was nowhere to be seen. All that she encountered were the fierce warriors, with their massive heads, protruding jaws and huge interlocking canine teeth, who wandered, disconsolate, here and there amid the despoiled streets, and who regarded her passing with indifference. How could it have deteriorated so quickly? Was there nobody sensible she could ask?

Kate made her way along the ruined shoreline, gazing around in consternation. She looked upwards, towards the point where a transparent curtain-wall fell in a graceful arc from the roof and filled three-quarters of the entrance, extending out in a wide semicircle into the ocean. A series of fractures had appeared over the quartz of the wall. It looked as if the seal might give way at any moment and the pressure of the ocean would swamp the city. The thought was so frightening that Kate reached up to touch the oraculum in her brow. She needed to be reassured that she still possessed the power of healing and restoring life. Now she closed her eyes and cast those powers about her,
as if testing the pulsating green oraculum against the ravaged scenes that she was witnessing. But she soon realised that, even with the Second Power, she was helpless to cure the city. No power was capable of making it well again. The beautiful city would not return to healthy life.

The finality of it caused her to fall to her knees.

‘Greeneyes – is it you?'

Kate's eyes lifted to be confronted by a distressed figure, standing several yards away in the reddish gloom. The voice addressed her in a way she would have expected of her friend, but the figure didn't look like Shaami at all. The voice was so hoarse it was little more than a croak.

‘Oh, Shaami – is it truly you?'

He had looked so delicate and graceful when last she saw him, but now he more resembled the hurt and tormented figure she had first encountered in the Tower of Bones. His flesh was so wasted it had become as transparent as smoke and those gorgeous turquoise eyes were now shrunken and abject within wells of grief.

‘Come closer to me.'

Kate watched the lovely irises contract and open again with what she knew must be deep emotion. ‘I cannot.'

‘Why not?'

‘I am not worthy.'

‘Then I shall come to you.' She climbed back onto her feet, went to him and hugged him to her breast. How scarecrow thin he had become! He resembled a wraith.
This is the despair the Momu talked about when she begged me to help her
and her city
. Kate hugged him more fiercely. ‘I have come back to help you.'

‘It is kind of you – as indeed you have ever been kind. But it is too late for Ulla Quemar. Too late for the Cill.'

How it ground her heart into the dust to hear no music in his voice. The despair of loss had robbed him of that spiritual delight. Even the cruelty of Faltana, and the Great Witch herself, had not been capable of that. Kate felt tears moisten her eyes.

‘Please don't say that. Oh, Shaami, I hardly dare to ask you. But please tell me the Momu is not yet dead.'

‘I don't know.' He began to tremble in her arms.

Kate comforted him, but even as she did so she was struggling to come to terms with all she was witnessing. She tried to think beyond the contagious despair. She must find a way to help the Cill.

Lifting her own tearful face, she was startled to be confronted by a kneeling creature, whose shrouded arms were crossed over its breast and whose face was coldly indifferent. Its eyes were reflecting grey mirrors, its octopus-like head shrouded in a heavy veil that trailed to the ground.

She kept a protective arm about Shaami's shoulders. ‘What is this creature?'

‘It is a keeper.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘I do not know.'

Kate felt a shiver of dread.
I should have listened to Driftwood
.
How often had Bridey warned her about jumping into things with both feet.
Oh, Bridey – how I miss you and Darkie, and Uncle Fergal. How you must all be worrying about me, after I've been missing for so long. What must you be thinking? I couldn't blame you if you were assuming the worst?

Kate gritted her teeth. She took a breath or two to make herself calm down. The truth was that there were dark forces at work here that she didn't understand one bit. She had sailed on towards calamity like … like what Bridey would have called the very worst feckin' eeejit. The Kate Shaunessy who had returned from Africa, alive but wrecked, wanted to run. The Kate who lost her mammy and daddy and her brother Billy – that Kate was screaming in panic, deep inside her. She felt so weak she couldn't have taken a single step. Her hope withered.

‘You must go now,' Shaami whispered.

No! She was done with being afraid. She was done with running. She refused to be cowed by her rising panic. She stubbornly shook her head. ‘Shaami, take me to the Momu.'

‘Please listen to me. Ulla Quemar is doomed. You must abandon it while there is yet time to save yourself.'

‘Shaami – from what I can see, we don't have time to argue about it. You must take me to the Momu right now – to the chamber of the One Tree.'

He reluctantly led her deep into Ulla Quemar, to the chamber that opened into the solid rock in the oldest quarter. But even though Kate kept her oraculum
searchingly open, there was no choir of harmonious voices to flood her mind, none of the hauntingly beautiful atmosphere she had sensed before. Their way was blocked by more of the aggressive warriors who seemed drunk on grief or, worse still, on the verge of losing their reason.

Shaami tried to hold Kate back when she arrived at the entrance to the chamber. ‘Oh, please – I beg you for a final time. Don't enter there.'

‘Why not?'

‘I fear what you will find.'

Kate remembered with a cruel clarity her previous welcome arrival into the chamber of the Momu. But now the warriors' eyes were flatly hostile, half-shaded under bulging brows. Their armoured limbs, with powerful lobster-like claws, were tensed against her entry. They knew who she was, but still they obstructed her.

‘I must go in. I have to speak to the Momu.'

‘The Momu cannot speak.'

Kate saw a hint of madness in their eyes – a madness born out of the loss of the hive control, which depended on the central focus of the Momu.

‘Be careful.' Shaami raised his hands, with their podgy nail-less fingers. ‘The warriors are apt to strike without warning.'

Into Kate's mind came cautionary words spoken with a gentle voice:

‘Oh – Momu! Is it you speaking?'

There was a long pause, and then she heard it again, though terribly faint, the soft, deeply musical voice:

Kate didn't understand the meaning of the strange words, but she was sure that she was speaking mind-to-mind with the Momu.

‘Please address the guardians. Make them let me through to you.'

The door was probably the last to be under any formal control in the city, but now it irised open. With a jarring crash of their distorted right arms against the shell-like carapaces of their chests, the warriors made space enough for Kate to squeeze between them, but then they crossed arms again to ensure that Shaami could not follow her into the chamber. The great door irised shut behind her, casting Kate into a terrifying gloom.

She searched the large cavern through the eye of her oraculum; the chamber had been transformed with dark energy. Flickering arcs of lightning flared over the natural rock walls. Where the Momu had hailed her arrival across the birthing pool, Kate now faced a freezing shower of sea water falling from the roof. Wading through, she discovered the Momu lying on her back between the massive roots of the One Tree, which had proliferated around her body, entangling her limbs. There was no sign of the hand maidens who had cared for her on the last occasion Kate had come here.

The Momu's lips flickered, to allow the softest whisper. ‘My dearest Greeneyes. I regret that you should witness my final humiliation.'

‘Oh, Momu – I have come back to save you.' She came close to whisper into her elongated ears, the lobes perforated and widened to take spools of ivory a full six inches in diameter.

‘There are creatures out there. Shaami called one a keeper, but he couldn't tell me what that meant.'

‘When a civilisation is about to end they come. They observe.'

When a civilisation is about to end?

‘On whose behalf do they come and observe?'

‘The Keepers of Night and Day have their duty to observe.'

‘Oh, Momu, you're talking in riddles.'

Kate had no idea who, or what, the Keepers of Night and Day might be, but they sounded ominous. She desperately wanted to help. She had learned so much from the Momu's friendship, their mental and spiritual communion. She recalled waking from a restful sleep in the sea-urchin-shaped chamber where she had slept, whose walls had glowed. She had hugged the eiderdown bedcovers to her nose and mouth, with no idea just how long she had been immersed in this dream-like state, her mind still floating in a kind of ecstasy of revelation with the Momu. The level of communion had been altogether deeper than what would have been possible with words alone. Through the love and kindness of the Momu, she had acquired an understanding
more complex than any other she had ever encountered before, a sense of wisdom.

This understanding had changed her, made her aware, physically and spiritually, of her own role, of the power and use of the emerald triangle in her brow. But in absorbing such a level of understanding, in being immersed, mentally and spiritually with the Momu, Kate had also come to understand that the Momu was dying, that her time was limited, and that she, Kate, was being asked to accept the responsibility that such knowledge brought with it.

A new female – young, vigorous – must be born. But before the Momu could give birth to her successor, she had to rise from her despair. And to do this she must have hope – hope for the future for her people, so that her successor could bring a new joy of life, and communion, into the world.

But how, in the circumstances Kate found herself, could she promise hope for the future of the Cill?

Kate sat down among the roots, willing herself to be one with the strange and wonderful being who had befriended her when her need had been equally great. The falling brine had caused the Momu's hair to adhere to her elongated skull. Those beautiful mother-of-pearl eyes were drifting closed, and now that Kate was close enough to hold the great webbed hand, she saw that the tree's roots were not merely growing around the Momu, the rootlets were invading the flesh of her legs, and rising to cocoon the rest of her.

‘Oh, no – they're devouring you.'

‘There is no unkindness intended. The roots of the One Tree merely respond to their own growing hunger.'

Kate gazed down at the heavy crystal of greenish-blue hung on a gold filigree chain around the Momu's neck. The crystal of power retained but the faintest glow.

‘Please advise me. Tell me what to do.'

The Momu's golden eyes performed that slow blink, and she placed her hand on Kate's arm. ‘The One Tree is a mere twig of the Tree of Life. Like me, it is dying. Long ago it called upon Nidhoggr, the serpent who gnaws at the roots of the world, to give it life. Now Nidhoggr demands its return. He would also take me back.' She sighed, a long, mournful sound. ‘You must not stay here. It is too dangerous. My reason is ebbing fast. I cannot save you, any more than my people, for my mind has been invaded by the phantoms of despair.'