The Sword of Feimhin (Frank P. Ryan) » p.27 » Global Archive Voiced Books Online Free

But then she remembered the despair of the Cathedral of Death, its pitiless cycling of life, the keening cries.

As she closed her eyes she felt her spirit departing the chamber. It was a feeling of weightlessness and a dizzy, endless falling. She recalled what Granny Dew had told her. She must search for the serpent-dragon, Nidhoggr, in the roots of the One Tree – the so-called Tree of Life.

Granny Dew had snorted a reply, as if the question were so childishly naïve, it hardly merited an answer.

Kate was becoming all too familiar with the disquieting world of the dead and the power of her oraculum that allowed her to separate her physical self from her soul spirit in this way. She was also becoming familiar with the concept of Dromenon, an in-between world. A domain where magic, dark and light, ruled. It was a place that didn’t physically exist. It was more a landscape of the spirit, capable of being modified by powerful forces – and an exceedingly dangerous landscape. Of course, it made perfect sense that if the Cathedral of Death existed anywhere, it must be in Dromenon.

Kate recalled the tormented face of Elaru and her sad entreaties.

Kate had no confidence in her cunning – or her oraculum.

The same words as the Momu had spoken.

During the time she had been forced to lie still and allow the bizarre nourishing of her trapped body, she had alternated between panic and refusal to give up. Even now, as she tried to imagine the place into which she was descending, she knew that whatever she did, whatever happened to her here, would have consequences in the real world. That was an intimidating thought. And others, perhaps more powerful and dangerous than she was, even with her oraculum, would be capable of seeing her, confronting her and hurting her – and that hurt would also be real in the same way. With a heavy heart Kate called the presence of the succubus into the full light of her oraculum.

The shadowy figure squirmed before her, and Kate once again looked on all-black eyes in a face of splintered flesh, bruised and bleeding; a mask of torment constructed out of clots of suffering. Elaru did not appear any more pleased than Kate to meet again. She struggled as if determined to escape her grip. Then she shrieked and Kate witnessed a bizarre and astonishing change. In Elaru’s place was a flamboyantly feathery creature, its plumage a piebald melange of dazzling white and deepest black, puffed up with umbrage and as tall as a Garg. Two malevolent black eyes glared down at her from a vulture’s head.

‘What in heaven’s name are you?

‘Urale – who else, dearie!’

‘Urale – but that’s …’

In Kate’s imagination the being metamorphosed to Elaru, then changed back to Urale again.

A caution came to mind: If Elaru is female and friend …

Kate’s eyes widened with astonishment. ‘Urale is … is male and enemy?’

A screech pained her ears, a sound that was a discordant mix of opprobrium and anguish. ‘Elaru – Urale! You takes your pick and you makes your choice.’

‘Is this some malicious game?’

A sigh that was also, somehow, a cackle. ‘Ooh! She is observant, is she not? Some game indeed. Oh, no. Oh, dearest Mistress!’

‘Stop this – stop it this instant!’

Urale clacked his cruel beak. ‘Such penetrating insight! We cannot bandy irony with this one.’

‘Are you some minor deity?’

‘Minor? Would you care to kiss these raptor lips?’

‘Would you like to kiss my green fire?’

‘Touché!’ The vulture-being bowed mockingly low. ‘I present myself, grandson of Loki the fickle, born of a conjugal dance with the goddess Hel of the nine worlds who was cast by Odin into the deep sea of Nifelheim. There she brooded, acquiring the graces of slovenliness, famine, cold and hunger. Skills calculated to vaunt her ambition of the goddess of misfortune.’

Kate hesitated, unable to make the slightest sense of it. ‘You are – what? The offspring of some goddess of misfortune?’

‘Oh,’ he coughed into a fluff of fanned feathers, then wheezed what might have been a dramatic overture. ‘The Mater is the most venerated of what you so disparagingly referred to as the minor divinities. Many indeed are the supplications to visit bad luck hither and thither in liberal measure.’

‘To visit bad luck?’

‘Would it be too odious to pray for someone to lose a bet? Or more odious still,’ he cackled, with a heave of feathered shoulders, ‘that a certain nuisance should forfeit a limb? Or, to raise the stakes a mite, that a rival should forfeit life, or a treasured offspring? How popular do you now imagine my dearest mamma! Cast your imagination a smidgin further. What prayers might emerge from bended royal knee for the gift of plague and pestilence at your service?’

‘Your mother sounds perfectly odious!’

‘How kind. But pray tell me, have you been so fortunate that you have never been insulted, beaten, slandered, raped – or otherwise traduced to an extent so grievous you would not treasure vengeance?’

‘Oh, I think …’

The memory of Flaherty invaded her mind: that mocking gap-toothed sneer as he looked down off the bridge to relish her drowning in the Suir. Maybe, in that moment, or in the shocking recall of that moment …

‘I need to know more about you. Were you sent to spy on me?’

Those vulture shoulders shrugged. ‘A trifle melodramatic, dearie. I may have inherited a weakness for theatre, but is not the most celebrated of actors the most sublime of deceivers? I so treasured my role of poor little succubus. Did you not relish her flaw of kindness?’

‘It wasn’t altogether convincing, but I need to know your purpose here. Are you – and Elaru too – are you servants of the Tyrant?’

‘Oh, bless you, dearie! Tyrant – Great Witch – I’m anybody’s friendly little goblin. Ever willing to strike a bargain. Even the ignoblest minor divine has its needs.’

‘What needs?’

‘Why, the need to please oneself. Is there ever any gratification more unctuous than serving oneself?’

‘Then you must be selfish in the extreme.’

‘Why, thank you, my luscious.’

‘It wasn’t meant to flatter you.’

‘What could be more gratifying than the exercise of power? Why, would you pretend to claim no pleasure in exercising this bauble welded to your brow? Have you not gloried behind the camouflage of those caring green eyes in wielding the green fire to inflict pain and damnation on those who most deserve those afflictions, while affecting such gentle benevolence on the poor and deserving?’

‘No! I mean … that isn’t …’

That insidious cackle came again. ‘Oh, come, come, now. There – in the Cathedral of Death – surely you bathed, as we all did, in the reflected glory of that deceitful lord. Such a brazen splendour! Why, the exaltation of darkness still provokes the old feathers to a quiver. Did not a tiny part of you thrill to think: thank the powers it isn’t I who cycles here?’

‘How I must disappoint you.’

‘Must you deny the most interesting facet of your being, the part that skulks in the deepest, most secret, crevice of your soul?’

‘Why did Elaru try to dissuade me from entering the Cathedral?’

He – it – yawned. ‘Did she truly, dearie?’

Kate hesitated. ‘I think she did. So perhaps in some crevice of your alter-ego, there is some potential for good?’

‘How dull you would traduce me! Yet now it is time to choose. Call back that mediocre factotum. Or trust in me?’

Hobson’s choice, she reflected again. Choose between Elaru, who pretended to want to help her and Urale, who openly admitted the opposite. ‘Then I will choose to have you both as guides, since it would appear that I cannot choose one or the other.’

That sneering squawk of a laugh again.

‘By all means, let us go.’

She blinked, awaiting her fate. And then, in a great sweep of plumage and claws, Kate found herself hauled into the air by her hair.

‘You may scream if you like.’

Kate wanted to scream; she wanted to scream her lungs out if it would calm the rising fear that filled her being.

In moments she found herself entering a threatening landscape, green-tinged as if putrescent, inky black but with salient features etched in maggoty white. A great leafless tree stood in the far distance at the end of a dreadful valley of jagged tors and meandering rivers. Kate shivered, the Tree of Life. The rivers, as they soared closer to them, became as wide as oceans, while under their glimmering silvery surface they moiled with desperate movement. As they neared the Tree it became too gargantuan to encompass, its branches streaming out to infinity in the black of sky.

In a moment they were plummeting, like a stone cast over a precipice.

‘What game are you playing now?’

‘Even a mind as prosaic as yours must savour the melodrama. There is ecstasy even when tragedy prevails. What is the loss of a friend, a city, a people when compared to the dying of a universe?’

The screaming of her senses, even in soul spirit form, was altogether too in tune with the mad glee of Urale’s spiral. They fell faster, more terrifyingly by far than the frantic descent to Ulla Quemar on the back of Driftwood. The distances through which they plummeted felt cosmic: never-ending voids of space between whole galaxies of stars.

‘You may open your eyes.’

Kate hadn’t realised that terror had clamped her eyes shut until she had to overcome that same terror to open them again.

Roots!

Like everything about the Tree these roots were vast, even from a distance. They were not still, but constantly moving, sliding and slithering over one another, twisting about themselves – writhing! The more she examined them, the more she realised that the word movement was inadequate to describe their slithering. They were constantly changing within themselves, as if refashioning their essence over and over, desperately metamorphosing from moment to moment.

‘You are, perchance, awed?’

She was dumbstruck by the colossal wrongness of what she was seeing, by her utter ignorance of what it might all mean, and by the likelihood that her mission would fail.

The roots were vast, much broader in girth than even the mightiest tree on Earth. They were fleshy rather than woody, and malodorous with rot. It was impossible to assess their extent since, wherever she turned, they appeared anew, as if manifesting out of some stygian darkness. They confused her senses so she had no idea whether she was moving up or down or across in any dimension. The roots were a maze so vast that they created innumerable secondary ecologies within them, evolving into other worlds, other universes, as many as there were imaginations to inhabit them.

A maze she now had to negotiate, and she could not trust her guide – or guides – one iota.

‘Wakey, wakey!’

‘What is it?’

‘Your first challenge, dearie.’

‘What challenge?’

Again she heard that infuriating cackle. ‘Did we imagine that entry to the labyrinth would be unguarded?’

‘You will stop this nonsense at once.’

‘Oooh, masterful – or should we say, mistressful!’

She was looking at two beings who had twinkled into the air immediately before her. They looked like non-identical twins; one male, one female. They were squatting, naked other than their elaborate headdresses of enamelled gold and chunky plaited collars of many woven colours. They had elongated heads, like those of horses, and vestigial limbs. Their skins were a uniform copper in colour. Their faces bore grave expressions despite childishly plump cheeks, broad lips, snub noses and bulging chestnut eyes that looked peculiarly vacant. The reason for this, Kate noticed, was that there were no pupils. She knew, instinctively, they were not to be trusted.

‘Who are you?’

The male replied, ‘We are the Yoolf.’

The female said, ‘We do not answer questions.’

‘We ask them,’ the counterpoint continued.

‘And woe betide those who fail!’

‘Or falter.’

To Kate, the Yoolf resembled the ultimate spoiled brats. They were bobbing slowly up and down in empty space against the background of endlessly writhing roots. Her eyes lifted to see that she was still suspended by her hair from the horny claws of the vulture-being, Urale.

The male spoke in a malicious monotone. ‘What is the direction of time?’

The female added, ‘The direction here – not there.’

‘What is the direction of time – but only here?’ Kate asked.

‘We ask the questions.’

‘And woe betide—’

‘Those who fail – I know,’ Kate said

They stared at her, blinking slowly in unison.

Kate heard Elaru’s whisper enter her mind:

But could she trust the alter ego of the obnoxious vulture?

She said, ‘Upwards.’

The two chubby faces looked at one another, their features creased with rancid displeasure. Their mouths gaped, exposing rows of sharp fine teeth.

‘Wrong!’

‘Doubly wrong!’

Elaru was right. Kate knew from their wrathful expressions that her answer had been right. The questioning began again.

The male and female alternated:

‘What is right when wrong?’

‘And wrong when right?’

‘A parody of truth?’

‘When seen, a delight?’

Elaru’s whispered answer:

‘Irony,’ Kate said.

The male screamed, ‘Wrong, wrong – a thousand times wrong.’

The female screamed, ‘Bite it – rend it! Cast it into the yawning void.’

‘Oh, Elaru.’ Kate felt nips of teeth on her arms and legs. ‘What are these little monsters doing to me?’

But it was Urale’s voice that answered: ‘Poor darlings – they cannot help lying and cheating.’

Kate’s heart was full of dread as the interrogation began again:

‘What is a song without voice?’

‘Hera’s torment?

‘Zeus’ delight?

‘An answer without question?’

‘As here to there.’

‘As darkest day to blessed night.’

Kate felt a fury of nipping and biting all over her arms and legs. The Yoolf had multiplied. She struck out with her oraculum at the hordes of brat faces with their myriad snapping teeth.

‘Help me, Elaru.’

Elaru’s voice whispered so quietly that Kate could not hear the answer. The snapping grew rapidly worse. Although she had no flesh here, the Yoolf gorged on her spirit and were intent on devouring her.

‘I can’t hear you.’

‘What?’

Then she realised what it was. She screamed it, at the top of her voice. ‘The answer, you miserable wretches, is echo!’

‘Wrong!’

‘All wrong!’

‘Wrong from start to finish.’

‘And from finish to start.’

‘Consume her.’

‘Devour her.’

‘Nnnngg! Toothsome.’

‘Nnnnngg! Bloody.’

‘Liars!’

Kate’s oraculum erupted. She tore herself free from the claws of Urale.

‘Liars! Cheats!’

She plummeted through the void, her auburn hair flapping around her face, twirling and twisting in the bottomless abyss.

But the fall came with a sense of liberation. She screamed to her twirling, falling self, ‘I am free of them.’

There was a second being, broken free, detached from Kate’s own spirit, a figure of smoke with a tormented face, twirling and spinning beside her. Kate turned, to hold the figure steady.

‘Thank you, Elaru – for helping me.’

‘Oh, Mistress.’

‘We’re certainly in a pickle. And I don’t quite know how to get out of it.’

‘Then we are lost. We shall plummet into the abyss forever.’

‘Not if I can help it. Your alter-ego has wings. From what you say, he made you. But then you allowed him – Urale – to control you. You allowed him to entrap you, make you dependent upon him. You must break free.’

‘But how can I do so? I exist only as a manifestation of him.’

‘He created you. And he’s a god, even if only a minor one.’

‘I do not understand your reasoning.’

Kate chuckled, though she felt curiously dizzy, almost inebriated. ‘I’m not quite a goddess – but a goddess certainly empowers me.’

‘Oh.’

‘I still need a guide.’

‘Oh?’

‘He was you – and you he. You must, somehow, abandon his control.’

‘But how?’

‘I don’t know. But we’ll find a way.’

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The Sword of Feimhin, page 27

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