The Sword of Feimhin (15 page)

It was the scariest thing she had ever encountered – scarier even than the drowning. But she
wanted
to be scared. She held onto that scary feeling as long as she could – but even the memory of the scariness melted away and leached out of her mind to leave only the darkness.

Kate thought:
maybe I'm dead – really and truly dead?

She hoped that she wasn't dead, but the fact that she was
hoping
she wasn't dead, told her that she wasn't – at least not yet.

I'm … I'm Kate Shaunessy. From the town of Clonmel
.

She held onto that memory even as the darkness pressed in on her from all directions. It leached away at her senses, her mind and spirit, as if to prove that all there was was this terrible all-devouring darkness.

Instinctively her mind reached for her oraculum and it flared in her brow, filling her eyes with a blinding flash of emerald green light. But when her vision cleared it was not reassuring. She was still confined within the chamber of the Momu, supine within the roots of the One Tree. Still, the feeling of darkness and suffocation invaded and spread. It accompanied her imprisonment within the roots of the One Tree as if it were malignantly parasitic. Trapped and
held in a growing lattice of roots encircling her body, she found her legs and lower body already half submerged in the freezing water.

With what little movement remained to her head and neck, she looked over at the unconscious and dying Momu. Her body was almost completely cocooned in roots, thick, gnarly roots that wove in and out of the long webbed fingers. Even as Kate watched, rootlets grew out of bigger roots, thickening and spreading over the Momu's head. Soon, not a part of her would be visible. Not even the half-closed mother-of-pearl eyes, which were fast disappearing in the slithering, extending weave.

‘Aargh!'

Snakoil Kawkaw tried to hold onto sleep as he was kicked awake, but his eyelids, caked with gunk, cracked open over gritty blood-shot eyes; the price of all that sand in the air. He pulled the thin, lousy blanket he had wrapped around his frozen body even closer – that was the difficulty of sleeping in a desert climate, it became as cold as an iceberg at night.

It was only just dawn in this shithole the Gargs called the Thousand Islands: an arsehole of festering sweat by day, and a scrote-shrinking icehole by night. That rat's dam of a preceptress must have a buzzing hornet in her bonnet, waking him at this hour. There she went, kicking him again, as if to remind him of his enslaved status, devoid of the dignity his poor, old, aching bones deserved.

‘Yes, beloved Mistress?'

The small, circular tent was illuminated by the murky
light of daybreak seeping in through myriad crevices in the sealskin patchwork that pretended to a weather-tight cover. The preceptress – vaunted priestess and the Tyrant's spy – was brushing her hair before a circle of burnished bronze. Kawkaw stood. His head pulsed with a venomous ague – a fit accompaniment to the nausea, which was the only result he could expect of the rancorous tipple he had stolen from a fish gutter last night. Dizziness caused him to totter into her stool.

‘Clumsy oaf! Watch my dress!'

He failed to suppress a belch, grimacing at the utter foulness of what came up into his mouth from the burning hell of his stomach.

Clumsiness be blowed! He was hopping awkwardly from foot to foot because of the icy cold bare rock while, with her dainty feet protected by fur-lined bootees, she preened herself in a cloud of vapours.

‘Mistress – you are celebrating?'

‘My bridal anniversary, if you must know.'

‘What?'

‘The celebration of my wedding to the beloved Master. What could a primitive like you know of such a wonder? It is the anniversary of the day I bathed in his radiance and was duly promised.'

Holy boggardly shit!

Squinting in her direction – a furtive disbelieving glance – Kawkaw felt nauseated by the adoring expression lighting up her face. Rapture – could you believe it!

In spite of his discomfort he couldn't help but sneer.

In a thrice, the spiral blade was a hairsbreadth from his right eye.

‘You would mock me?'

‘A thousand apologies, comely lady.'

‘Many have I killed in my Master's name. You do him a grave disservice to mock the sacrament.'

Sacrament!

A single bead of sweat erupted over Kawkaw's right eyebrow and trickled down over his cheek to the tip of his hairy chin. He saw it become the focus of her gaze. She watched its course towards his throat, as a cat watches a mouse, squeezing the handle of her dagger with a look of anticipation.

‘I most humbly beg your pardon, Mistress. Please forgive what is no better than ignorance on my part. I know nothing of how our beloved Master might take himself a worthy bride. But now that you introduce the idea, it entrances the imagination.'

She was hardly convinced. He watched her face as thoughts of strategy fought for supremacy over thoughts of murder. She withdrew the blade, though her eyes had not abandoned their fury. ‘To be selected is exaltation: the closest proximity to grace.'

‘I can scarcely imagine, my lady.'

‘Go ahead and mock what goes beyond your pathetic experience. But think you on this – darkness is as powerfully uplifting, maybe even more so, than the light.'

‘Forgive my lack of insight, loveliness.'

She snorted with contempt. ‘How could you even begin to understand the bliss that comes with such limitless power?'

‘How indeed?'

The danger had not entirely passed. He considered going down on one knee – never mind that, he considered prostrating himself – but he thought it more prudent merely to stand absolutely still. ‘I am lost in awe, Mistress.' His imagination leaped at the very idea of such power. She had almost seduced him with the possibilities now gambolling playfully in his mind, and other regions.

‘What would you, in turn, not give to be betrothed to a goddess? Oh, I warrant you, that in my master's palace there are many brides, but few have been granted the honour of serving him in the field.'

This was the moment to bow his head.
Shit!
He fell to one knee. Let her savour his servile surrender.

She used silence to keep him abject for longer than necessary before turning back, without further word, to tinker with her execrable appearance.

He judged it prudent to maintain his genuflection a minute or two longer, but there was no doubt at all in his mind as to her eventual intentions regarding his life – especially now he had unwittingly humiliated her on what she clearly saw as her special day.

Was his fate not ever thus?

Kawkaw was reminded of his youth and Porky Larrd.
Alas – the late Porky Larrd, the heavens bless him! Poor old Porky ended up with the fate that the bitch-preceptor and her unfeeling master, intended for me!
Yet, such childhood memories had he of them both: the two outcasts of the tribe, always in trouble. Had they not shared the experience of fathers who beat their innocent sons senseless for nothing? In his case for the small indulgence of pride and the delights of larceny.

‘You were out for half the night,' she said.

He was racking his brains trying to remember anything of it. ‘I have been recruiting spies, my lady, among the rabble of urchins.'

Surely she recalled the brats who took such joy in mocking her profession in soup-ladling.

‘Ah, your mighty army of urchins?' On her painted lips the words embodied a whole new chapter of contempt.

‘Urchins get everywhere. Nobody notices them. They feel hunger and they know the meaning of fear. They will prove useful to us.'

‘Then go frighten them some more.'

‘I – um – will meet with them presently.'

She pointed a finger towards the flap of the tent. ‘Now!'

As he struggled to pull on his broken boots, he bemoaned the uneven hand of fate that had dogged him even in childhood, when the youthful Kawkaw had gazed on the beautiful Kehloke with the eyes of one peering at forbidden fruit. How could such beauty be living in poverty on her mother's boat? Working her fingers to the bone to gut fish and skivvy for a few coppers to make ends meet? A mere
trinket would have seemed magical to her. '
Twas for you that I stole – at least that's how it started
. He had just wanted to see the light in her eyes when he presented her with some glittering jewel.
That day I saw you at the shingle, when the boats came in laden with catch. I saw that doe look on your face when that lumbering oaf Siam not only filled up your basket with plump catch, but handed you that bracelet of silver. No trinket of mine would ever be so adored on your slender wrist, not with the winsome looks you were casting at that brainless dolt
.

He cracked open the tent flap, then recoiled from the view.

‘Scabrous perversity!' He exclaimed.

‘What is it?'

‘The place is alive with witch warriors. Some kind of military exercise.'

‘Well, you're going to have to go out there.'

‘Would you have them in here asking questions of you?'

She relented, without grace, to renew her veneration of the blade, kissing the sigil, even though it would burn the red paint off her lips.

Oh Kehloke
, he reflected,
I was ever tongue-tied in your presence. And you, always polite with me – vilely, cheerfully polite. Did you know how your politeness cut me like a knife? Made the pain a thousand times worse?

Was it his fault that she had spurned him when he would have loved and cherished her? He who wouldn't have had her wear her pretty fingers to the bone.
I'd have given you more than cheap baubles. I'd have given you my heart
. Yet, as ever,
the mischievous devil, chance, had spurned him – spurned him as Kehloke did! And from that day, it seemed, it had ever been his lot to cheat and plot and squirm under the world's eye.

How many potentially great men, he wondered, had been dealt such a prejudiced hand as he? Who could blame him if, with the reluctant assistance of his boyhood friend, he had broken into her mother's boat and stolen the confounded bracelet? And who could blame him if the act had seemed so easy, so just, he had developed a fondness for it?

Kawkaw had worked himself into a temper. It was as well that the preceptress had eyes only for her reflection. He must learn to control his emotions in her presence. He knew his usefulness to her was limited and, when it was done, the dagger with the twisted blade would be the parting memory he had of her.

Loathing was not a strong enough word for his feelings towards her, but the opportunity to rid himself of her would duly present itself, of that he was sure. She would turn her back to him and he would take the chance to lunge at her with his knife. How he longed to do so. He dreamed of it, often. He felt the blade rub against the bone as he slipped it between her ribs, he heard the hiss of the parting flesh as he drew it clean across her throat; he savoured, most of all, the sigh of the point as it entered the small of her belly and then travelled up in a delicious sawing motion, his eyes on hers as her whole being was
paralysed by the agony that he would give his good arm to inflict.

One day – one blessed day!

His teeth clenched in a rictus of triumph, he scratched at his stubbly chin with the point of his hook as he relished the thought. His opportunity would come and oh, how sweet it would be. And he would take it, and crow over her like a trumpeting cockerel.

He had spent an hour, maybe more, daydreaming when her hiss, up close to his ear, cut through his musings.

‘There's something more than an exercise going on out there.'

He was instantly alert. Had he muttered during his musing? Had he given himself away? His heart missed a beat, fearful, no matter how implausible, that she might somehow be able to read his mind.

‘The Garg king, why does he hold out? He has already made an enemy of the master in helping the brat defeat the Great Witch. The master's revenge will be as inevitable as it will be terrible. Zelnesakkk has nothing to lose now.'

Kawkaw's mind spun with alarm. The last thing he needed was to be right in the middle of it all when the Tyrant struck. He recalled with a fearful lucidity how he had almost perished when he had been so foolish as to accept the deadly talisman from the Tyrant's spy, Feltzvan, back in Carfon.

‘What would you have me do?'

‘We have urgent need of information.'

‘Information?'

His lips squeezed out the word to convince her that he was listening hard, but he was thinking more than listening. Had not the preceptress made it clear to him that his life had no meaning in the machinations of her master? What could she have learned in her prostration before the black-bladed dagger? What madness was she about to unleash? And how was he to get out of it with his skin intact?

‘Go find your urchins. Put the fear of your blade among them. Set the scum an example, just be sure to discover what's going on.'

‘I cannot move openly. It would be suicidal.'

‘Where is your mettle? Do you not understand? They plot and plan to attack my master – my husband.'

‘But, Mistress …'

‘Desist from prevaricating. Are you not Olhyiu? Why, you even stink like the loathsome fish gutters.'

‘When you open the soup kitchen, the urchins will come to me.'

‘Now. This very instant.' The dagger had returned to confront his face, its spiral blade – that poisoned tip – too close for his eyes to focus on it.

He snatched up the wide-brimmed hat he had stolen, pulled it down so it shaded his features, and threw on his coat, lifting the collar so it closed above his chin. He stuffed the hook that his left arm ended in into a capacious pocket so it would not be noticeable.

‘Be off!'

‘Mistress, I'm gone.'

So it was that Snakoil Kawkaw, whose indomitable courage and resourcefulness counted for nothing in this world of schemers and liars and slime-tongued arselickers, was compelled to slouch out into the too-bright sunshine. And there exposed, blinking his red-veined eyes at the migrainous vision of black rock and searing white sand, he cursed her long and hard, fearing from moment to moment that it might be the ignominious end of his miserable existence.