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Authors: Frank P. Ryan

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BOOK: The Sword of Feimhin
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‘Lovely.'

She was wondering if she dared to think it all the way through. ‘I know that this is the sign, Gully.'

‘Wot kind of a sign?'

All this time waiting and now it was here she hardly felt ready for it. There was so much she still didn't understand.

‘For the moment, I must keep it safe in its case.'

‘You talkin' nonsense, gel.'

She couldn't make herself draw it, even though she so desperately wanted to right then. Her hands would shake. She laughed at the thought, a sudden explosive belly laugh. Then she saw herself laughing like an idiot, and imagined her teeth glinting whitely in her face.

‘There you go, Penny.' He was handing her the steaming mug of tea, so hot she had to put it down next to her on the floor. ‘One poached egg comin' up.'

Penny nodded her thanks, but she couldn't stop herself trembling.

She stared at the cluttered austerity of the single room that was living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom for them both. There was no real furniture at all, only the two camp beds shoved against the opposing walls, the two gas
rings, the basin on a piece of rigged-up chipboard that was their sink, and the circular iron staircase that went up to the roof. Everything was make-do, constructed out of salvaged crates and oddments of wood. The engineers' shelves – the only thing of theirs that had been left behind – were of brown-painted steel; shelf after shelf running from floor to ceiling, all packed with Gully's hoarded treasures. Her eyes turned to the door on her left, which led out onto the dolly cupboard and then to the other door, which led out onto the map room. She so wanted to go to the map room. She so wanted to draw the pictures in her mind that were screaming to be drawn, but she was too giddy, her hands too trembly even to think about it.

She said, ‘I might have to lie down, Gully.'

‘It's okay – eat yer poached egg first.'

She accepted the egg, which he had covered with salt and sandwiched between two thick slices of buttered bread.

‘Go on – 'ave a bite!'

She took a bite.

‘Good?'

‘Delicious.' She took another bite, her mouth dripping saliva. She'd had nothing else to eat all day and only then realised just how hungry she was. She took a swig of the tea and scalded her palate.

He was staring at her like he wanted to hug her. She warned him off with her eyes. Not another confrontation.
Not now!

His voice was resigned. ‘Now, you gonna tell me about it?'

‘There were two people – two beings. They looked like a young man and a young woman, but they couldn't have been what they seemed because they reached right into my head and tangled with my mind.'

‘Where's all this goin' on?'

‘At Oggy's place.'

‘Wot you sayin'? Like they wasn't human?'

‘They were looking for a church. I helped them. They were attacked by a Scalpie and Grimlings.'

‘Now you talkin' fairytales, gel.'

‘The woman, the one that looked like a woman, she killed the Grimlings. The man – he killed the Scalpie with some kind of magic blade.'

Gully shook his head. Then he laughed. ‘You been out of your 'ead with nuffink to eat all day.'

Penny stared down at the wooden box. The trembling was so bad that her voice slurred as she spoke. ‘I stole it from the dead Scalpie.'

Gully reached out. He was going to touch it, to open the box and take a peek, but she held onto it grimly. He didn't know how dangerous it was.

‘They weren't people.'

‘Wot's that supposed to mean?'

‘They were aliens.'

He laughed. He almost reached out and hugged her, but her eyes warned him off again. ‘They had black triangles
right there in the centre of their foreheads. They reached out with their minds and got inside my head.'

Gully snorted. ‘How could you tell they was aliens?'

‘The woman – Nan, he called her – she moved her lips when she talked to me, but the words I saw on her lips weren't the same words I heard in my head. She talked to me in her alien language, but I heard her words inside my head.'

‘And the geezer – he talked alien too?'

‘No, he spoke English like somebody who came from here.'

‘So 'e wasn't no alien?'

‘He had a triangle in his head, just like she did.'

‘So, what you reckon then?'

‘Oh, I know exactly what he is. He's a warrior. And he's left-handed, just like me.' Penny saw him clear as day in her mind. ‘The coffin exploded and some kind of weapon flew out of it. It spun through the air and landed in his hand. A weapon shaped like a stretched out letter S with blades like scimitars at each end. The blades were glowing with runes along their edges.'

‘Hot shit!' Gully screeched with laughter.

‘I saw him, Gully. He called the weapon by its name – Vengeance. And it came to him right out of the exploding coffin.'

Gully had tears of laughter in his eyes.

‘I saw him kill the Scalpie.'

‘Strewth!'

‘The alien woman – she did something magical too. There was lightning – not white, but a kind of blue-black – coming out of her head. She burned up the Grimlings with the lightning and the warrior chopped off the Scalpie's head.'

‘It's just them hunger dreams, Penny.'

Penny couldn't explain any further. She lifted the lid off the box on her lap. ‘You can look for yourself.'

He peered into the box and she looked with him. Something gleamed: the strange symbol, like a triple infinity, with three overlapping circles, glowed with a silvery light. He saw them pulsate and glow.

His hand reached down so fast she barely had time to slap it away.

‘No touching it, Gully.'

He was staring at it, disbelieving. Rivulets of green lightning were curling up over the wood. Penny slapped the lid back down over it, sealing it tight.

She could feel her skin tingle, right to the ends of her fingertips, where her hand had come into contact with the lid.

Gully wasn't laughing any more. His eyes lifted from the box to hers. She could see the fear in them.

‘Oh, Penny, gel – wot you done?'

A Weave of Darkness

Kate had lost track of how long she had been comforting the Momu within the enormous roots of the One Tree. She was sitting back against one of the roots, with the roar of the ocean growing ever louder in her ears. How elegantly simple it had all seemed when she had journeyed here. And even after she had arrived and witnessed for herself all that was happening, a residuum of that hubristic over-confidence had remained right up to the moment she had demanded entrance here to the Momu's chamber. All she needed to do was to cure the Momu and the survival of her people – the Cill – would somehow be assured.

The seed of self-confidence had been sewn when Granny Dew had pressed the Oraculum of the Second Power into her brow. She had sensed its growing presence within her: a portal of enormous power, linked to the holy Trídédana and more specifically to Mab, the goddess of birth and healing. The portal, an inverted triangle of the purest
emerald, had served her incredibly well, faithfully restoring life and fertility to the wasted lands of the Gargs. All she had had to do was to bathe the seeds, or the land, in its emerald glow and impart her desire through the oraculum.

The oraculum really was a source of magic. But that same magic linked her to an equally awesome and terrible entity the people of Tír called the Fáil, which the Tyrant sought to control. She had been able to do good for both land and people with astonishing speed and effect, but now, when she tried bathing the body and brow of the Momu in that same healing light, nothing happened.

A shiver passed through her.

What am I to do?
Nothing in Kate's previous experience gave her the slightest inkling of an answer.

There had also been a sense, in her conversations with Alan, that an oraculum-bearer, such as he and she now were, somehow could not die. But that wasn't quite as comforting now: Ulla Quemar was a long way below the surface of the ocean and was being reclaimed by that deep and tumultuous tide. What use was immortality if you were obliged to live it out trapped forever amid the watery ruins?

She was forced to think more broadly – as her Uncle Fergal used to insist she do when he invited the younger Kate to share a scientific dilemma. The key thing, he would patiently explain, would emerge from looking at the problem from a variety of different angles.

The problem facing Kate was assuredly big. She watched as a root slithered and curled its way around the Momu's
left thigh, then burrowed back into the rock. Kate wondered at the implications. The dying body of her friend was being cocooned within an enormous shroud of roots. It was as if the One Tree was constructing a living mausoleum around her body.

Look at the problem from a new angle
.

Could the failure of her oracular power imply that there was something different about the Momu?

Kate thought back to their first meeting – a true meeting of minds and spirits, as it had seemed back then – when they had reclined together within these same roots. The air had been filled with the sweetest scents, every nook and cranny vibrant with sea creatures.

She recalled her own eyes lifting to see that amazing face for the first time. It had shocked her to discover that it was much larger than any human face, and yet still delicate and slender – the face of a natural queen. The Momu had greatly elongated ear lobes widened to take ornamental spools of highly decorated ivory; the spools alone a full six inches in diameter. What a wonderful surprise to see those mother-of-pearl eyes for the first time, the irises performing a slow expansion and contraction that was a welcome in the culture of the Cill. And the invitation, extended to Kate as she waded through the birthing pool.

Come – sit here beside me
.

The Momu had looked at home among the roots and she had invited Kate to join her within the same embrace. Here, reclining together, the long webbed fingers of the Momu
had extended to stroke Kate's cheek. And here, as if she had needed reminding, she had recognised that the Momu was not like any other creature she had previously seen. She was some kind of telepathic hive mother. A crystal of greenish-blue decorated the Momu's chest; an oraculum of sorts, in the depths of which motes of golden light pulsated and metamorphosed.

The Momu doesn't give birth to her people like humans do. Her spirit, her being, is unlike anything else. She draws the power she needs to nourish and protect the Cill through her crystal
.

Kate remembered her earlier musings as she laid herself down among the same roots beside the dying body of her friend. She peered in, searching the web of writhing roots, and saw the gleam of the Momu's crystal. She probed it, quickly, pouring the strength and power of her oraculum into the shadows where it lay, and registered …

Nothing
.

Even the Momu's crystal was not responding to her oraculum.

But what did it mean? She really had no idea, and the implications of her ignorance were truly frightening.

If the Momu was unlike any other being that Kate had come across in Tír, why shouldn't her death and the circumstances surrounding it be equally unique? The Momu's chamber – which she rarely left, even over the millennia she had lived there – was encased in the One Tree, but what tree could possibly grow to such an enormous size within a cave deep under the ocean? Kate recalled her awe as she
saw it for the first time and had traced the boughs and branches that ramified all over the roof of the chamber. She had also marvelled at the roots, realising that they extended widely throughout all of Ulla Quemar. Even the leaves were not what she would have expected of a tree: they were curiously pink – fleshy. And now that tree, with its creeping and crawling roots, was growing around the dying Momu, strangling what was left of her life. It was as if the Momu were being taken back to some immense and unknowable place to be reclaimed by some alien and unknowable power.

How am I possibly going to stop this?

The Momu dying amid the ruins of her beloved city seemed so very natural. It also seemed predestined; so all-powerful it was almost a blasphemy even to consider interfering with it. But if she did not interfere, the Cill, those beautiful and gentle people, would be no more.

Kate didn't think she could live with that grief.

A thought – it didn't merit the word ‘plan' – was growing in her mind. It was such a desperate idea, but she couldn't think of anything better.

She wanted to stop the Momu being taken by the roots, but she had realised that she couldn't stop it by willing it so. The only thing left to her was to accompany the Momu. Wherever the roots were taking her, Kate would go, too.

The thought of doing this prompted a shudder of fear to ripple through her.

She looked around. The only light in the chamber was
the emerald glow from her oraculum; an illumination – no matter how great the power within that mental portal – that was as feeble as a candle in the enormous gloom. She clenched her eyes shut as a renewed roar of the ocean burst upon her ears, a roar accompanied by the sounds of buildings tumbling nearby, the vibrations shaking the rocks that formed the floor of the chamber.

She had to grit her teeth to stop herself screaming as she lay down within the roots and allowed them to grow over her. She refused to think too much about what was happening to her, fearful that her innate cowardice would force her to flee. But she was unable to suppress a rising panic that she wouldn't be able to breathe. A strange unknowable darkness had settled over her, writhing, slithering, and coalescing around her body, around her limbs, about her breast and neck – her throat.

The roots!

Oh, God! Was it too late to escape?

She had to try to control her terror. Her desperate mind sought sanctuary within the oraculum, but the darkness was overwhelming her, body and spirit, like a tidal wave.

I'm drowning … I'm drowning
…

*

She was lost in a terrible memory of a nightmare experience that had haunted her all of her life since. She had been just nine years old, and she had been drowning, deep underwater in the powerful current of the River Suir. Although she could swim, at least a little, she was too
shocked and hopelessly lost in the murky depths, unable to determine what was up or down. The breath had burst from her mouth and nostrils because she couldn't hold onto it a moment longer, and there had been a tangible awareness that that was how she was going to die.

Yet the day had started out so happily. It was a Saturday morning and Kate had been returning home from the milk shed in the Presentation Convent. There, they still made butter the old-fashioned way. Kate had watched with fascination as the nun, wearing the white habit of the novice, turned the handle of the butter churn, a clod of butter slopping in the staved wooden barrel. The unwanted milk was what Kate had come for. Bridey had sent her to fetch a half-gallon of it so she could bake the soda bread that Kate loved.

In a strange pantomime of slow motion she did her best to hurry and keep up with her puppy, Darkie, swapping the half-gallon jug from hand to hand. She had been heading – skipping – for the hump of the second stone bridge.

The bridge …

She hadn't even needed to look over the bridge to her left to see the main body of the River Suir running south of the island, swollen from a week of storms that had filled it with uprooted trees and the bodies of drowned cattle. Nuala Farrel had been waiting for her on the bridge. Mad Nuala, with her wire-rimmed glasses with the sprung sides that wrapped around her ears. Nuala with her bully boyfriend
Tee-Jay Flaherty, who had been wearing a Big Apple T-shirt and faded blue jeans. He had been pretending to fight with Brendan Logan and Micky Hoolihan, pushing and shoving and delivering fake kickboxing leaps.

It had been too late to head back to the convent and Darkie had scampered on ahead. Flaherty had whistled and called him, and then grabbed Darkie and lifted him bodily off the ground by the scruff of the neck.

‘What d'ye call this, Nuala?'

‘Sure, I don't know if it's a cat or a fish!'

The jug of milk had fallen in slow motion from Kate's hand, shattering against the pavement. The milk had been so white in the arc of its spilling, then it had scattered slow and sticky as blood over her birthday shoes, and sloshed down into the gutter before trickling down the slope.

‘How do we see if it's a cat or a fish?'

Mad Nuala, squeezed the answer out through screeches of laughter. ‘We can test it – see if it will swim!'

Heart pounding in her chest, Kate had run, hurling herself into the mess of bodies and raining blows on Flaherty, who was reaching out his long skinny arm to dangle Darkie over the river.

‘Stop it! Please don't!'

It was Nuala who grabbed her, twisting her arm behind her back and making her watch.

‘Little rich girl Katie Shaunessy gets all she wants for Christmas!'

The glee on their faces and the mindless chanting of
their taunts had been terrible. Then Darkie's body had been hurled into the air; a tiny ball of fur, spinning and kicking.

‘Quick – the other side!'

They had dragged her across the road and rammed her face against the stone of the bridge, breaking her nose. Her fright was so great she clung to the wall with her fingernails and the nails cracked as her hands were torn away. The noise of their taunts rang in her ears, urging their leader, Flaherty, on.

Flaherty had hoisted her up onto the top of the wall and forced her to kneel on the big cracked stone. Nuala had laughed, but Flaherty was not laughing any more. He was leering at her, with a sweaty look on his face. She had seen, with absolute clarity, where he had cut himself with his father's razor attempting to shave.

Her knees were bruised and her right ankle twisted. She had stared down into the rush of water far below, dark and swollen. Nuala shouted in her ear as Darkie's body emerged in the swollen stream, thrashing and whining.

‘Ah, Jaysus – ye can hear it screeching!'

Even now, in her dream, Kate kicked back hard, just like she had done at the bridge. Her heel had smashed into Nuala's wire-rimmed glasses. She had freed her ankles, then her whole body as she jumped. There had been a terrifying fall then the almighty slap as she hit the water. An agony of pain blasted the whole front of her chest and abdomen, as if she had landed on concrete. The impact caused her to black out for a moment, until the deadwall
of panic came and she fought her way back to the surface and tried to scream.

She tried to squeeze from her throat: ‘I'm drowning … I'm drowning.' But nothing came out. The faces of her tormenters were looking down from a long distance away, pallid yet nervously triumphant. Then they were gone, leaving her alone to sink into the freezing silence of the water.

Kate remembered the darkness.

She had woken up in hospital. A fisherman had saved her – had saved them both, her and her beloved Darkie, but ever since then she had been haunted by the experience of drowning. Now it was happening again and this time she wasn't drowning in the River Suir, this time she was drowning in a more malignant darkness, one with a vast and terrible mind of its own. And the dreadful, terrible thing was that she was lucidly aware of what was happening, moment by moment.

She was lost in darkness that was blacker than the sky at night, darkness that was intent on robbing her of sight. It was also robbing her of her other senses. She reached out to touch it, but it swallowed her groping fingers and left nothing of her behind. It robbed her of hearing, of her sense of smell, of her sense of taste. The only way she knew it was there was through the absence of those senses, leaving her with the ghastly feeling of being swallowed whole by it until there was nothing left of her at all.

There would be no fisherman to save her here.

Kate felt, desperately, that she had to pit herself against it. She tried to outsmart it, she tried to beat it, she tried to slap her hand against some imaginary object – a wall, a floor – just to feel the pain. She tried to pull her hair, or even bite her tongue, but nothing happened. She felt nothing – just the endless darkness swallowing her up.

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