The Sword of Feimhin (20 page)

That was why he couldn't help Penny. The dyslectrica, but she stayed friends with him in spite of it. They lived together, in Our Place. An' there was ways in which she wasn't so clever herself. Streetwise ways she was kind of dyslectric. An' that meant he had to take care of her.

Kate wasn't quite sure if she was dreaming or if she was experiencing visions more dangerous than a dream. Her body, her entire being, felt weightless, borne along in a thick drifting ether. In this dream, or vision, she was meandering through an eerie landscape constructed out of crystals resembling black ice, passing through streets that didn't run true but wandered about in the organic ways of streams or tracks made by animals in a wilderness. But wilderness was too benign; these streets and the buildings that lined them with their scratchy-edged darkness, had an overwhelmingly threatening feel to them. Her every movement through this landscape violated her being, as if she were being forced to do it.

I'm lost
, Kate thought.

Her last memory was of lying down next to the Momu within the entwining roots of the One Tree. But this was a different place entirely. Wherever and whatever this place
was, there was a dreadfully cold and calculated quality to it, as if it were the territory, deliberately planned and constructed, of a hostile mind. A trap – a trap as deliberate and deadly as the web of a spider. And its intention, she sensed, was equally dreadful.

‘What?' she whispered, uncertain who, if anybody, had spoken to her.

Kate looked around, but the words had come from nowhere. The notion of such a place and the sense of grief and hopelessness that those words carried, struck Kate like a physical blow. She shivered. How was it possible that she could feel herself shiver, when she knew she had no physical substance here? She looked around again, but there was nobody close, no presence she could see that might have accounted for the voice. She was no longer sure that she had heard it. The silence was unnerving. A sense of threat clutched at her heart.

At first she thought this new creepy city was uninhabited, but then she began to see figures, or imagined she did. They looked so wan and pale, little more than skin and bone, their clothes hanging from their wasted limbs like the wind-blown rags of scarecrows.

She was blinking rapidly, as if she were waking up after falling asleep for a while, or perhaps she merely imagined it.

Kate didn't know if it were possible to sleep, but she was
aware, somehow, of the passage of time. During the time she had arrived and the present, a shade had come to stand before her. The shade had a slender feminine shape, as grey as a shadow, but with a definite face in which two almond-shaped eyes, black and liquidly glistening like bubbles of tar, were regarding her. Her clothing, including the hood that enfolded her head, was filmy, like cobwebs, with an uncertain separation between material and the underlying flesh.

‘Who are you? Was it you who spoke to me earlier?'

‘I am all that remains of a poor succubus.'

Kate studied the creature's pallid blue and grey face, struggling to find any focus in the amalgam of planes and angles it presented. Open wounds of some past injury were livid scarlet lines on the flesh.

‘You're what? Did you say succubus?'

‘A truly undeserving creature was I. Punished for my imperfection.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I was blemished by kindness.'

‘You were punished because you were kind?'

‘My Mistress – the Great Witch – she would test us, examine our faces, our bodies as we developed, our voices, our reactions. We were created to seduce. When she discovered one that was imperfect, she drove the flawed one out of her tower. Out into that terrible place.'

Kate's heart fell. She remembered the dreadful hinterland that had surrounded the Tower of Bones.

‘But men – they would have been attracted by your kindness.'

‘Men were attracted to me. I was a most diligent succubus, but I could not hurt my prey. Such was my flaw.'

‘What happened?'

‘I was expelled and hunted by the stealers of souls. I tried to save my soul from them, but then she punished me further – I was condemned to become what you now see of me, a wraith, haunting the Land of the Dead.'

‘Do you remember dying?'

The tormented spirit shook her head. ‘I have no memory of the actual moment – only of waking to find myself here.'

‘Then you don't really know if you are alive or dead?'

‘I know this is the Land of the—'

‘Dead.' Kate interrupted her. ‘So you say, but perhaps they only intend for you to believe that. How do you really know you're dead?'

‘I don't recall … only my name, Elaru.'

‘Elaru?'

The spectre blinked.

Kate reflected on this for a moment. ‘My name is Kate.'

‘Kate.' The shade smiled, a haunting wisp of a smile, as if it were the most precious thing in the world merely to exchange names. ‘Have you, Kate, looked around you? Have you seen what place this is?'

‘It could be designed to mislead – a trick.'

‘Can you remember your journey here?'

Kate didn't need to think about that. ‘I have no memory of it at all. All I can recall was that I was lying in the roots of the One Tree.'

Kate was now suspicious. Elaru was a succubus – a being who would make a sly use of her wiles. Was this so-called blemish of kindness a trick intended to ensnare her? She said: ‘But I know I'm not dead.'

‘You think not. And yet you find yourself wandering through this terrible landscape, as if lost. It is not safe to wander in this place.'

‘Elaru – what are you, really?'

‘You mean, what have I become? I fear I am a phantom.'

‘But here, what is your purpose here? Why have I met you? Are you some kind of spirit guide?'

‘I might be, if you so wish. You drift into danger even as we speak. The shadowed doorway, which beckons you, Mistress, it is not a place you should enter.'

Kate's breath caught in her throat. She realised that the succubus was right. She was being drawn towards the enormous arched doorway of a cathedral-like edifice in the distance. She sensed danger emanating from it; a dreadful malice.

‘Oh, Mistress – you must be newly dead.'

‘I'm not dead.'

This provoked that haunting smile again, a rictus on those fissured lips in the ravaged face.

‘Why else would you be here, in this terrible place?'

Kate felt her heart miss a beat. Was she dead? How could
she feel things so physically if she were dead, like the succubus? She summoned up her courage, willing her heart to beat normally.

‘Did somebody send you to find me?'

‘I … I do not know.'

‘Is there somebody – some being – in control of this dreadful place?'

‘I cannot explain.'

‘You cannot, or dare not?'

The lips of the succubus trembled. ‘It is not safe to ask such questions here.'

‘Why not?'

‘Be wary, Mistress. Oh, do be wary. I have learned – and 'tis a lesson learned from the bitterest of experiences – that tormented though one's existence might be, it might become more terrible still.'

A wave of fear moved through Kate's breast. She considered what the succubus was telling her. ‘I'm looking for a friend.'

Her words provoked a ripple of emotion in the damaged succubus. ‘Such devotion, if you speak true! To pass through death's portal for the sake of a friend! Would that I had such as you for a friend!'

Was Elaru playing a game with her? Kate wasn't sure. Elaru spoke as if she were terrified even though her eyes were utterly flat, unchanging. It reminded Kate of the time she had seen a dead lamb in a ditch back home. Its face was crawling with bluebottle flies but, being dead, it did
not flick an ear or blink. There was that same lack of reaction on the succubus' face; as if all interest in the world, all curiosity and all feeling, had been abandoned.

‘This friend I'm looking for isn't dead, or, at least, I don't know if she is dead or not. She was taken – absorbed – by the roots of the One Tree.'

‘I know nothing of such things.'

Kate looked at that ravaged face again. She wondered what those all-black eyes had seen, what strange and frightening things. She guessed, for no rational reason at all, that Elaru's eyes might have been a pearly grey in life. And since succubi were, by birth, both beautiful and deceptive, Kate had to guess that those grey eyes would have been well practised in reflecting emotions not actually felt. This unfortunate being had been designed to be cruel and devoid of empathy for the men she seduced – but she had crossed the paths of a being much crueller still.

‘Please – will you be my guide? Will you help me to find her? I must save my friend. A whole people, a whole civilisation, depends on it.'

‘What do such considerations matter here?'

‘Perhaps you might direct me where to look?'

‘What would you do for me in return?'

‘I can't promise anything.'

The spirit of the succubus smiled again with a terrible twist of her charcoal-lined mouth, exposing black fangs.

‘I have nothing to give you. If I had I would.'

‘I cannot help but notice that bauble in your brow. Why, it appears to glow a perfect emerald. How beautiful it is, how lovely. It's the only thing of loveliness in this cheerless place.'

Kate shook her head, or thought she did so. ‘With or without your help, I'm going to search for my friend. Come with me, or don't bother. If you won't guide me I'll find her on my own.'

*

She was lost –
lost!

The feeling of desolation had returned the instant she discovered this. Kate was angry with herself for engaging in argument with the succubus. And now, dear God, she had no idea what trouble she was in. It felt as if the prevailing darkness had swallowed her whole. As if … No – she refused to be cowed.

I demand to wake up!

There was a pinpoint of light that expanded, within the splinter of a moment, into a figure she recognised. A kneeling figure that might be female, or one that only appeared so in her mind, one whose eyes reflected a nacreous opalescence inside a veil.

A keeper.

‘I'm just beginning to realise that.'

Kate became aware of confrontations and enormous rivalries all around her; the slithering movement of titanic
powers embracing, or fusing with another, or maybe slithering by one another. Powers belonging to beings of such magnitude they were unknowable. Kate felt ordinary and defenceless in such proximity. She felt humanly vulnerable, and alone.

She felt impelled to explain herself.

‘The Momu asked me for help to save her world. I refused to help her because the safety of my friends came first. So I blame myself in part – I contributed to the ruin of the Cill's last surviving city. I feel obliged to make amends.'

‘I must save the Momu. Save her people, the Cill.'

Kate thought:
What was it Elaru said about asking questions in the Land of the Dead?
‘I'm not a deity. I have some power of healing. How then am I going to achieve that?'

‘Why don't you put me right?'

Kate blinked, exhausted. Why was the keeper telling her these things? She wasn't sure that she understood any of this. Did the key to the great mysteries lie in the ordinary?

‘Why would a keeper help a mortal?'

Her question provoked a lengthy silence from the keeper – one in which Kate imagined those reflecting eyes change. For a moment they became blue-black; mirrors of darkness, seeing through her.

‘What do you mean? Oh, I imagine you are talking about the Tyrant.'

‘Can you not advise me?' Kate looked around her, but still there was nothing solid to use as an anchor. She was engaged in this perplexing conversation in a place that, seemingly, did not exist.

‘You said I was being too naïve.'

Kate was startled into thinking about what that might mean: good versus evil, life versus death? She didn't know what to think.

‘Please help me. Tell me what to do.'

Those auger-like pinpoints of darkness penetrated the opacity of that terrible gaze again.

‘I don't understand.'

‘But they are all dead. Their mistress, the Great Witch, is destroyed. I saw Alan destroy her with my own eyes.'

‘But even so …'

‘What are you implying?'

Kate tried to figure out what the keeper was telling her. Was the succubus still guided by her instinct to seduce?