The Sword of Feimhin (35 page)

Qwenqwo took the pipe from his mouth and contemplated its empty bowl. ‘We have made important progress. The peaks were the main barrier that had to be crossed. Methinks, for all of today's tribulations, we may be cheered by the fact we have completed the most difficult half of our march and still have the bulk of the army intact. But we must still make the descent, which will take at least another week. At the foot of these slopes we will then face the first of the defensive fosses that guard the Tyrant's city.'

Alan glanced from Qwenqwo to Magtokk, who was poised to flick another nut. ‘How do you think the Tyrant will react to our progress?'

Those eyebrows lifted, deepening the trapezoidal depression that took up the centre of Magtokk's brow. ‘From what I have seen thus far, the Tyrant is paying remarkably little attention to our progress. He appears content to leave it to the landscape to slow you down.'

‘What do you make of that?'

‘It would suggest that delaying you is sufficient for his purposes.'

Alan fell silent. What Magtokk said made sense, but it still left him wondering what longer game the Tyrant might be playing.

The dwarf mage took a swig from his flagon, belched, then laughed, waving it between Alan and Magtokk as if
asking which of them wanted it most. ‘A toast, then, to courage – and to victory over the elements!'

Mo roused herself at Qwenqwo's toast. Though still sleepy-eyed, she laughed at the bright expression that creased the dwarf-mage's red-bearded face. ‘Oh, Qwenqwo's surely right. We've crossed the peaks. Hopefully that will be the worst of this journey.'

‘Aye!' Qwenqwo roared. ‘Sup up and be merry. Tomorrow we shall face the day refreshed with food and rest.'

Alan toasted that thought with the flagon before passing it on to Magtokk's outstretched hand. He thought about the slope of freezing shale they would soon be descending. He wished that he could share Qwenqwo's and Mo's optimism. As the burning liquid set fire to his heart, he couldn't help but wonder about his absent friends. Looking with affection on Mo's sleepy but contented face, he asked himself:
where is my Kate and your brother, Mark? What dangers are they facing? Is the Tyrant playing that waiting game with us while he focuses all of his malice on Kate and Mark? Is that why we haven't had any word of sign from either of them for such a long time?

He saw Mo's face lift towards him: he saw how fright had scared the sleep from her eyes.

Kate was staring, wide-eyed, at a monochromatic landscape. All essence of
being
was black, but its darkness did not derive from a complete absence of light. It was more like entering the world of a photographic negative. She had no idea why colours were so important, but in this strange perspective of the world, the roots had assumed a powerful solidity. They ramified everywhere, seemingly to infinity. They were trails that blazed through the heavens, like nebulae. She also realised how shrunken and shrivelled up they were; as dry as the husks of insects her Uncle Fergal had shown her, in places where once-living creatures had abandoned their skins. But there had been no metamorphosis here, no change from one living form to another. She heard a booming sound – oh, merciful God – the sound of a great heart pulsing a single heartbeat. A struggling heart, fighting for its existence.

She heard the voice of Elaru inside her mind.

Kate was so overwhelmed with the horror of what she was sensing it was difficult to focus on it anew. Perhaps she should close her eyes and try another sense, like hearing, tasting, feeling … Oh, lord, she didn't know if it would make a jot of difference. Yet, now she did feel something new, a pattering, like the sensation of rain falling upon her naked skin. She heard it too, now that she was aware of it: a continuous, liquid rushing. And she smelled it: a foul, obscene deluge, as if she were being showered in a cascade of filth.

The feel, the sound and the stink of it overwhelmed her senses, but she couldn't afford to be squeamish. It had to mean something, but what?

Through the oraculum she opened all of her senses at once.

And saw the truth.

Her heart almost stopped with the shock of realisation: the roots were black not because they were dying, but because their surfaces were completely submerged in a teeming infestation of parasites; a vast proliferation of black worms, each worm gigantic, yet minuscule against the scale of the roots. They were packed so tightly around their prey they completely obscured its substance, gorging unceasingly like a monstrous brood of insatiable leeches. Everywhere the parasitic worms fought one another to pry open a space for attachment. Now she had seen the
worms, she urged the power of her oraculum to bring her closer. Kate saw that the worms had no head other than a gigantic ring, like the sucking mouth of a lamprey. In battling one another for space, they ravaged each other's flesh with the fangs that lined their sucking mouths. Their slimy bodies were contracting and expanding as they sucked and filled themselves with the sap of the roots. The sap inside them then moved in peristaltic waves from mouth to anus. The obscene shower was the rain of their excrement, deluging out into space and time, spreading their putrefying filth and stench into every avenue of the living universe.

‘I don't think the Witch could have done this.'

‘Oh, Elaru! This means that the wasting lies much deeper than the tentacles of the Great Witch; she was controlled by Fangorath, but the Tyrant must have been manipulating them both.'

Kate felt faint with shock. She could hear the thunder of lapping sounds made by millions upon millions of feeding worms and the continuous squelching of their excretion. How could she not have heard it before? Now that she was aware of it, it was omnipresent and utterly deafening.

‘But how can I stop this?'

Kate thought back to Granny Dew, of her own feeble body trapped in the roots within the Momu's chamber, still being fed by a host of tiny creatures. Where was she going to find the power to undo this obscenity?

‘If only Alan were here, with his Power of the Land – or Mo, with her Torus.'

‘Who?'

‘What do you mean?'

Kate sensed a weakening in Elaru. Though she was determined to help, Urale was equally determined to silence her. The message was weakened to the merest whisper:

Kate thought about this. ‘Quickly, tell me, what's the relationship between Nidhoggr and the Tree of Life?'

‘How? What fruit does it bear?'

‘Elaru – you mustn't fade now, I need your help. I need you to explain more of this to me.'

Kate was only beginning to sense a deeper meaning to all that was happening. A meaning that might fit with what she had learnt from the company of the Momu. ‘But where can I find this serpent-dragon?'

There was no reply, only an ominous silence.

Kate turned her oraculum inwards, searching for the soul spirit of the helpful succubus. She discovered a wisp of being, as insubstantial as smoke. She poured what was left of her strength into it, saw it thicken and strengthen somewhat, then assume the familiar shape.

‘I feel lost. I just don't understand.'

‘What … Another dragon?'

Kate was dumbstruck for a moment. Elaru could only be referring to Driftwood. But Driftwood was more obviously a dragon than anything she detected here. She had met him as a baby dragon. Though he professed a fondness for eating her, she had been confident in ignoring his childish threats. Here, with Nidhoggr, she had no such confidence. And if she had learned anything from her dealings with the maturing Driftwood, it was that she knew little to nothing about dragons. But it was also true that she had restored him to life from being long dead. He had been no more than a black fossil buried in the rocks of the island.

‘I wasn't aware of reviving him, Elaru. It happened when I was asleep – when I was too exhausted to have been aware of what I was doing.'

‘Yes.' Kate reflected on what little she could recall. ‘I was carried to the island by a wolf that had the soul spirit of a
man. I fell into a stupor with my head against the black rocks. Later, after the dragon was reborn, I noticed that the black rocks had disappeared. I assumed that they must have been fossils – the bones of the dragon fossilised into stone over time.'

‘But how did I do it?'

Kate's soul spirit brought her hands to her lips and her brow furrowed. She was thinking the impossible, of something Alan had said as he held her in his arms on their first night by the fireside, after they had been reunited in the City of the Ancients. Kate had been unconscious when she was taken prisoner by the Gargs at Ossierel and carried across the Eastern Ocean to the Tower of Bones. She hadn't witnessed what had happened to Mo, but Alan had told her about it in an awed whisper. Mo had saved them all at Ossierel. She had delayed the Legun for a precious while, but at terrible cost to herself: the Legun had ravaged her soul spirit. Mo had been deeply unconscious, unresponsive even to Alan's oraculum. In desperation he had joined spirits with the Temple Ship to call upon the Goddess of the Second Power, Qurun Mab, to help Mo. The Goddess of the Second Power – Mab and her daughters – had actually manifested and it had taken her to heal the ravaged soul spirit of Mo.

Kate felt an urge towards caution.

Both Driftwood and Granny Dew had warned her to be
careful. To call upon a goddess – she hardly dared even to think what that might mean. She was just an ordinary girl. And she was all too aware that the succubus whose advice she was listening to was the alter-ego of a malevolent minor god, currently implanted within her own soul spirit.

Yet if I fail here, not only will the Tree of Life be consigned to rot, but the Momu will die and the Cill will be lost
.

How she wished she had been there to witness Mo being healed by the goddess. But hadn't Alan explained to her, how he had engaged the help of the Temple Ship and then, jointly, they had pleaded with the goddess.

I don't know how to call on the Temple Ship – if ever it could hear me from here. But I do have a friend who might hear me
.

‘Driftwood!'

Kate allowed her desperation to overwhelm her heart and mind as she called out his name – her friend, the King of Sea Dragons, who was revered as a living god by the Gargs.

It couldn't work. She felt exhausted by the effort; it was asking for the impossible. Her spirit flailed, sinking into the hopelessness of her situation in this dreadful corner of this impossible spirit world.

Was she dreaming? She sensed something enormous – a soul spirit utterly unlike herself – swell into being close beside her.

‘Oh, Driftwood – if you are really here, please help me. The Tree of Life is being sucked dry by these horrible
worms. I must stop them, but it's beyond my ability. I need to revive Nidhoggr.'

‘What are you afraid of?'

‘Life, it seems to me, is nothing other than chaos – and that's certainly true if what I saw in the black cathedral is the Tyrant's vision of order.'

‘There is danger everywhere I turn. But there's so much at stake – not just the Momu. These black worms are vast and there are millions upon millions of them. They're sapping the life out of the Tree. I dread to think where this might lead.'

Kate hesitated then, sensing how even the great dragon shuddered.

Kate recalled Alan's words about the healing of Mo:
‘As far as I could see, no ordinary healing could cure Mo. The Legun had hurt her too deeply. The damage was spiritual.'
Alan had explained how the ship had shared a communion of spirit with him. He had told her of the golden heart he had discovered in the inner chambers of the burned-out hull. It had helped him enter into a consummation that then enabled them to call upon the goddess.

‘I – I wonder if I should call upon the goddess, Mab, the Second Power, whose crystal I bear in my brow.'

‘What then? Will you help me?'

Kate could no longer speak. Mentally and spiritually her arms reached out to the giant presence that she sensed nearby. She was aware of the sigh of awe from the succubus, Elaru, and the curses of Urale as she turned the power of her oraculum inwards. She sensed her union with Driftwood: one soul spirit minuscule in scale, but brilliantly radiant, the other enormous and darkly powerful. The fusion resulted in one gigantic source of power, like a waking sun.

‘Now what are we to do?'

‘Then it's already too late?'

‘Open my vision – let me see.'

‘But how can I wake an almighty being, a dragon, when I can't even see him?'

‘I don't understand.'

Kate struggled with the vagueness of this explanation. Was Driftwood asking her to grasp the concept of a universal being? She wasn't sure she was capable of understanding all that he was telling her, but perhaps she understood enough of what it implied. She focused on the healing power bequeathed to her by Granny Dew. She let it flower in her now – let it be through feeling, instinct, caring.

She saw nothing at all, at first. Her vision was too focused, too local. But when she opened her awareness through the oraculum, she saw the astonishing nature of the being that was Nidhoggr. His soul spirit seemed infinite, but she saw how emaciated his physical being had become. He had shrunk to little more than a diffuse shade of scarlet, like watered-down arterial blood that was wrapped and coiled around every visible root, at one with the vast proliferation of the One Tree throughout all worlds. He wasn't a sea dragon, like Driftwood, with the golden blood of magic circulating through his heart, but a serpent-dragon, with the carnal sap of Life circulating though his being.

To escape the limits of her imagination, Kate closed her eyes and wished that it be so through her oraculum. She wished that the power of the goddess Mab and the Daughters of Mab should bathe the roots, all roots, through all dimensions of time and space, through all worlds.

The violence of Nidhoggr's awakening swept through her like a lightening strike, forcing her eyes wide open.

Kate's vision, her every sense, recoiled from the immensity of the killing as the worms were annihilated. It was as if, with a single great swallow, Nidhoggr had reversed the flow of their parasitic infestation and sucked them all dry. The parasites were reduced to feather-light husks that blew away in the fire of his exhalation to become dust, and then nothing at all.