The Sword of Feimhin (50 page)

Grimstone lifted the sword aloft for a third time and the alien light invaded the entire sky, flared with green and blue and carmine brilliance. It burned beyond their eyes into their brains, overwhelming all thoughts and desires other than that coruscating emblem of malignancy.

The power of the sigil descended over the arena, overwhelming the force of Mark's oraculum.

sacrifice. The torment of our enemies is the ichor of its need.>

With horror, Mark saw the white-robed acolytes light their flame-throwers. There was a shimmering in the air above the pit, a twisting and turning, as if a dreadful force of hunger were rising.

Where the hell was Cal?

Mark smashed his fist into the sickening grins of the faces immediately below him, those who barred his progress. A Skull with the glaring eyes of mania tried to grab hold of his jacket. Mark slammed his knee into the groin.

Grimstone was looking in his direction. There was a lubricious smile on his lips, as though he savoured Mark's dismay. The magma reeling overhead was centred upon the body of Padraig. It weighed upon Mark's spirit like a malignant ocean. Grimstone still held the Sword of Feimhin as high as he could reach. The drums were rolling.

Mark screamed for Vengeance. He hurled his call with all of his might, through the blazing oraculum in his brow. Within moments there was a screeching through the air as the battleaxe found its way to his upraised palm. Already he was carving his way through the obstruction of Skulls, moving forward in a fury of motion.

‘No!' He heard Nan's roar shake the arena like a sudden great squall of wind. The flame-throwers were extinguished
as the men holding them were thrown bodily against the sides of the pit.

Grimstone's face was impassive, the sword still aloft, a monolith against the tempest gathering in the sky overhead. Mark followed Grimstone's eyes to the sky, which was nascent with foreboding. Mark smashed his way down through the remaining rows of Skulls, toppling down through several of the lower tiers into the pit where he regained his feet in the bloodied sawdust and snow.

A wash of sweat erupted over his skin. As he turned towards Padraig he heard the flame-throwers coming back into action. His lungs searing from the effort of breathing, he stood before the petrol-soaked figure of the elderly druid, defying any man to approach.

There was a thunderous crash high above him, to one side of Grimstone's rostrum. The guillotine blade of the Mamma Pig appeared like a glittering new gate between the tangled wreckage of tiers. The cab windows had disintegrated. Mark saw Cal and Bull come running down the tiered steps. Then Bull's heavy machine gun crackled into the reeling and panicking mob.

Mark infused all the power of his oraculum into the battleaxe, from his left arm to its twin curved blades ensheathed in blue-black lightning. With all of his power he hurled the battleaxe, its twin blades casting lightning at the figure of Grimstone on the platform above him.

He saw the Sword of Feimhin drop to confront the whirling blades. His eyes were blinded, his ears deafened,
by the massive detonation of force as the battleaxe struck the blade of the Sword. He saw the battleaxe disintegrate into sparks and splinters of glowing dust.

He thought:
Cal was right
.
We're dead
.

Then Mark saw a bespectacled, ragged figure tearing down the aisle between the tiers of screaming Skulls. He stared disbelievingly as Gully ran into the arena and confronted the figures on the platform.

‘Penny!' he cried.

Mark saw how the slim girl on the rostrum lifted her head. He heard her answering cry, ‘Run, Gully. Run from the City Below!'

*

Time roaring past him, fractured, so he was uncertain of the passing moments. Bull still wheeled the spent machine gun around himself. Cal, his face a mass of tiny bleeding points with splinters of glass glittering in his brow and cheeks, cut Padraig free. With the torches extinguished, the daylight was fading into twilight and was further darkened by the black clouds obscuring the sky from horizon to horizon. He glimpsed Bull throw Padraig's emaciated body over his shoulder. Cal gripped Mark's shoulder, half-pushing, half-dragging him back up to where the pig's steel nose poked through the stands. Nan followed close on their heels.

‘Why aren't we dead?' he shouted to Nan.

‘The girl – Penny.'

‘I don't understand …'

‘Don't ask me how, but I know she saved us, I saw it in her mind, but I think it might have been more as a result of her trying to save Gully.'

Mark was struggling to regain control of his limbs. He still couldn't credit the fact that they were still alive. ‘Where is Gully?'

‘He's fine – he's here with us.'

Mark shook his head. He had clearly lost several minutes of memory.

There had been a moment, as Cal was hauling him back from the platform, when Grimstone and Mark had come within yards of each other. Grimstone was oblivious to the spitting machine guns, making no effort at all to take cover. His flesh was numinous, etched in a nimbus of green light. Then, in that moment of contact, Mark had witnessed his look of triumph.

Triumph!

‘You were right, Nan. Grimstone is a Legun.'

‘Even if he is a Legun, do you imagine him capable of what you have seen? Is he capable of destroying your battleaxe, powered by the goddess? Why is he now ignoring you and me? Why is he clearly unafraid of us?'

‘What are you saying?'

Nan was speaking urgently into his ear. ‘Did you not see – up there, on the platform? The third figure—'

‘Yeah – I saw him.'

‘You know who …?'

Mark nodded. The Tyrant was here in London. But now,
through his continuing bewilderment, he also recalled that the Tyrant was standing close to Penny, resting a hand upon her shoulder.

Mark felt his entire body begin to shiver, but then he realised that it was the ground underneath the Mamma Pig that was vibrating. The whole arena was shaking as if an earthquake had struck.

Nan shouted to Cogwheel, who was brushing a rain of glass off the driver's seat, ‘We must get out of here – now!'

The arena was disintegrating. The wooden tiers were pitching and tumbling, crushing and rending the bodies of the audience. A monstrous eruption shook the ground in the centre of the excavated wilderness to the east. The thunder of it went on and on, increasing from moment to moment. The ground fissured over a vast area, extending eastwards to the monolithic outlines of the financial district. Mark saw one of the buildings implode, as if from some dreadful internal calamity; the windows disintegrated and the skeletal steel shook from side to side before collapsing in an avalanche of concrete, steel and glass.

Something enormous, dark and glittering with incandescent power, was forming at the heart of the disturbance. It grew rapidly, like the birth of a sun, ripping and tearing itself into being from the tormented air. A series of thunderous explosions numbed the senses, provoking a storm of energy rapidly expanding like a maddened ocean: a tsunami of blood red, sulphurous yellows, incandescent
greens; a seething maelstrom of monstrous birth, growing outwards and upwards into the frenzied sky.

The Pig lurched and shuddered as Cogwheel gunned the engine. With a huge jerk they slewed backwards in an arc, then accelerated forwards, smashing through one obstacle after another. Cogwheel was whistling between his teeth, performing a five- or six-point turn amid the carnage. Then he accelerated madly, ripping through the tail ends of tiers adjacent to the aisles. Mark glimpsed Bull pulling open a crate of ammunition, then staggering, almost falling, before he managed to secure the heavy machine gun to its pin at the rear porthole, where he began to open up. Nan had taken Gully under her wing. Tajh was ministering to the unconscious Padraig. Cal was up front, in the seat next to Cogwheel, using the lighter Minimi on anything that moved. Front and back, Mark saw the spent shells pattering out of their discharging guns. Cogwheel smashed his way out of the car park, cleaving through barriers and vehicles driven by panicking drivers, their machine guns firing and firing, the cabin of the Mamma Pig a choking fog of cordite …

They were through the gates, smashed asunder by the guillotine blades. There was the sound of following vehicles: bikes and four-wheel drives, struggling to escape the exploding hell of the arena. Then they were thundering through burning streets. Cogwheel turned to look back at Mark from the cab, his pupils big in his glittering eyes. He
battered through a series of road junctions, heading, as far as Mark could determine, anywhere he could.

*

Night was falling. Or, at least, it looked like the darkest night, devouring what was left of the day. They were driving through the grassy slopes of a park, the wheels of the Mamma Pig gouging deep ruts in the snow.

‘Oh, Jesus – man!' Cogwheel's voice came from the cab. ‘Hey, everybody …' He braked, slowing the vehicle down to a halt.

Bull slid the door in the side open and jumped out, helping Nan and Gully to follow him. Mark climbed stiffly down to join them, leaving Tajh by the side of the deeply comatose Padraig. Cal then jumped out of the cab and Cogwheel hung out through the window, intent on missing nothing.

‘What the bloody hell is going on?'

Even from what must have been ten miles away, the sight of what they were witnessing awed them to silence. A black rose a mile high was forming over what had been the financial district. Where the skyscrapers had stood, ring after ring of concentric petals were coalescing, their surfaces and edges glittering darkly, as if constantly changing, infused with nascent power. Torrents of indigo, carmine red, virulent green and sulphurous yellow – frightful rivers of energy – were deluging out of the constantly metamorphosing petals and seething through the streets of the city like the flow of an erupting volcano.

They stared, spellbound, at the stricken city, the shock of what they were witnessing reflected in their eyes and faces.

‘What in God's name …?'

Nan was barely able to whisper, ‘The Tyrant has declared war on Earth.'

Mark was too devastated to reply. He felt Nan's hand enter his own, her fingers crabbed and cold.

Waves of blue-black lightning deluged from the giant petals of the rose as a storm battened and thickened at its core. Mark thought he heard something through his oraculum, a rumbling voice monstrously deep, speaking words as ancient as the universe. He sensed, even before he saw it, the blade of an enormous sword several more miles high, rising out of the heart of the rose; a vision of immense gravity and power, with the spectral brightness of a star. It, too, was constantly metamorphosing, turning slowly in the gigantic curled tunnels of power that were erupting between the petals of the rose. Streaming, dazzling tides of energy, finally took up the shape of a vertical infinity, bisected by a horizontal infinity, bisected again by a third infinity at right angles to the second: a triple infinity three miles high. It rotated and glittered, shimmering, its elements reforming from moment to moment, shockwave after shockwave emanating from it in every dimension.

Human Characters on Earth

Alan Duval
– One of the four friends. Bears the Oraculum of the First Power, the Power of the Land, in his brow

Bethal Grimstone
– Adoptive mother of Mark and Maureen Grimstone. Wife of R. Silas Grimstone

Bull –
Member of the ‘Crew'

Caleb Dunne (Cal)
– Leader of the rebel Crew

Cogwheel
– Member of the Crew

Father Noel Touhey
– Retired Catholic priest in London

Fergal Shaunessy –
Paternal uncle and guardian of Kate Shaunessy

Field Marshall Marcus Seebox
– Ally of Grimstone

Gully Doughty –
Shares the London squat, Our Place, with Penny Postlethewaite

Jo Derby
– Sociologist

Kate Shaunessy
– One of the four friends. Bears the Oraculum of the Second Power, Life and Healing, in her brow

Mala
– Maureen's (Mo's) biological mother

Mark Grimstone
– One of the four friends. Bears the Oraculum of the Third Power, the Power of Death, in his brow

Maureen (Mo) Grimstone
– One of the four friends. Bequeathed the Torus of the True Believers by her Aboriginal mother

Nantosueta (Nan)
– Mark's girlfriend and co-sharer of the Oraculum of the Third Power. Queen of Monisle on Tír

Padraig O'Brien –
Alan Duval's maternal grandfather

Penny Postlethwaite
– Shares the London squat, ‘Our Place', with Gully Doughty

R. Silas Grimstone
– Brutal adoptive father of Mark and Maureen (Mo)

Sharkey
– Member of the ‘Crew'

Tajh Madine
– Member of the ‘Crew'

Non-Human beings on Earth

Henriette Boleyn
– Father Touhey's Belizean housekeeper

Jeremiah
– Darkly spiritual being with a secret agenda and identity

Humans on Tír

Ebrit
– Prince of the City of Carfon

Milish –
Councilwoman and Ambassador for the High Council-in-Exile

Non-Human Beings on Tír

Ainé
– Hereditary leader, or Kyra, of the Shee

Bétaald
– Spiritual leader of the Shee

Elaru
– Spirit being, linked to Urale

Granny Dew
– Earth mother

Iyezzz
– Garg Prince

Kehloke
– Wife of Siam

Kemtuk Lapeep
– Original shaman of the Olhyiu

Layheas
– An aide

Magtokk
– Wizard of legend, said to have great wisdom and powers of prediction

Mahteman
– Garg high shaman

Momu, the
– Leader of the Cill

Nidhoggr
– Dragon of chaos coiled around the roots of the Tree of Life

Qwenqwo Cuatzel
– Dwarf mage and sole survivor of the Fir Bolg

Qwenuncqweqwatenzian-Phaetentiatzen
– Garg word for the Dragon God

Shah-nur-Kian
– Garg queen and mother of Iyezzz

Shikarr
– Great serpent and queen of the Snowmelt River

Siam –
Chief of the Olhyiu

Siri
– A succubus

Snakoil Kawkaw –
Olhyiu traitor and spy

Soup Scully Oops
– Preceptress and spy for the Tyrant

Thesau
– a True Believer in the form of an eagle who can ferry people through Dromenon and across time and space

Topgal
– Siam's brother-in-law

Turkeya –
Son of Siam and new shaman of the Olhyiu

Urale
– a minor god in
The Sword of Feimhin

Usrua
– the Shee who protects Mo on the journey to Ghork Mega

Ussha De Danaan –
Last High Architect of Ossierel

Valéra
– Shee-in-novitiate

Yoolf, the
– Demon twins

Zelnesakkk
– Garg king and Iyezzz's father

RACES, CREATURES & GROUPS

aides, the
– Assistants to the Shee, skilled in herb-lore and healing battle wounds, and weaponry

Akkharu
– Creators of the City Below

Cill, the
– Amphibian race who inhabit Ulla Quemar

Fir Bolg, the
– Dwarf warrior race of ancient times, extinct but for Qwenqwo Cuatzel

Garg, the –
Winged warrior race, also known as the Eyrie people

Grimling
– A flying goblin

Keepers of Night and Day, the
– beings who witness the ends of races and worlds

Leathers, skull squads
– Thugs under Grimstone's control

Olhyiu, the
– Warrior fisher people of bear origin

onkkh –
Enormous flightless birds carrying high-walled baskets of food and shelter for the invading army

Paramilitaries
– Mercenaries under Grimstone's control

Shee, the –
Race of female warriors who can metamorphose into great cats

Scalpie
– Sacred warrior and servant of the Tyrant