The Age of Scorpio

29. Southern Britain, a Long Time Ago

‘It can’t be done,’ Morfudd said. Britha had to admit that she was probably right. They didn’t have nearly enough people. They would need ships and they had no way to kill giants.

‘We have to try,’ Fachtna said grimly, but Britha could see that he did not hold out much hope. To have come this far, she thought helplessly.

‘We are all going to die,’ Teardrop said, matter of fact. ‘Come to terms with that.’

‘For nothing?’ Morfudd asked.

‘Stay here if you want,’ Fachtna said.

Tangwen was leading the way. Behind them, riders crested the hill. They were Corpse People. The horses they rode were large and well built, their coats white in colour, their mouths and lower legs red – steeds from the Otherworld.

Ahead between the two islands they could see the massive wicker man rising from the waters, though Britha knew it was not made of wicker. Despite being several miles away she could make out its iron and wood framework. Above the line of the water its legs were filled with what looked like firewood. Its torso had different levels, each containing people. Her eyesight was now good enough to make out the arms of the frightened people inside the structure. After having the little crystal seeds pushed into their skulls they might have been docile enough, but now the seeds’ magics seemed to have worn off. What was worse was that somehow she could feel their fear. It was like a background noise to her thoughts. Worse still, she knew that there was something in those waters, something that called to her. She wanted nothing more than to wade in and let the dark waters cover her. She knew they would not be cold, somehow.

Teardrop came to stand next to her.

‘They hope this will bring their god? This Llwglyd Diddymder?’ she asked.

‘What we call the Muileartach and what the Atrebates worship as an aspect of Andraste is the last goddess who has not been corrupted by the sky gods. They will use the pain and fear of the sacrifice to drive her mad.’

‘How?’

‘She would feel it anyway. The goddess is not unkind, but the crystal seeds you saw in your dream are magics that will carry the suffering directly to her. Already what is happening will be affecting the goddess’s servants.’

To Britha this seemed like cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Like those warriors who enjoyed hurting people more than victory, like the mormaers who abused their position. It was not the way to act, and it was the job of those with responsibility, the dryw, the cateran, to stop such things. As she watched the black curraghs around the wicker man and the giants wading in waist-high water close to the shores, she wondered how they could take all this on with only fifty warriors.

‘This.’ She nodded at the wicker man. ‘This is the man that Crom Dhubh must kill as the Serpent Father said?’ Teardrop nodded. It was foolish and weak to worship the gods, she knew, but she found herself feeling sympathy for the Muileartach. ‘Why do this to her?’ They were talking in the language of the Pecht, so Morfudd would not understand and realise that she was not the daughter of Andraste, though the warrior was watching them suspiciously.

‘Because they are low men,’ Teardrop said. Was there a hint of anger in his voice? ‘And because as a goddess, the one we call the Muileartach has magics far more powerful than anything you or I could imagine. She can open the way for this Llwglyd Diddymder.’

‘That name was not taught in the groves,’ Britha told him.

‘I do not know of it either.’

‘It is not a good name.’

‘Agreed.’

Tangwen came running back, keeping low.

‘I have found a causeway onto the island and hopefully through the marsh.’ The east side of the western island looked boggy.

They could hear the sound of hoof beats behind them. Britha glanced over her shoulder. The Corpse People had made their way down and were now galloping towards them but were still some distance away.

Tangwen turned and headed off. Britha went to follow. Morfudd stayed still and her people did likewise.

‘This is a poor place to fight warriors on horseback,’ Teardrop told her. ‘On the causeway they can only come at you a few abreast.’

‘Though if you run you may live longer as a craven,’ Britha said impatiently. She was sick of having to coax them every step of the way. Morfudd stared at her. Britha realised then that the other woman hated her and would quite like to kill her.

‘Your people are dead; your rhi is dead,’ Fachtna said grimly. ‘All any of us have left is to sell our lives dearly to the monsters that did this.’

Morfudd turned to Fachtna. The warrior had been getting steadily grimmer. The choices they had made, the sacrifices, Britha’s killing of the boy and the changes in Teardrop had all taken their toll. The swaggering bravado was gone.

Finally Morfudd nodded and they all made their way down onto the causeway.

‘I think they know we are here,’ Tangwen said nervously.

‘I don’t think those that matter care,’ Britha told her. The hunter had been scouting ahead. She had now decided to stay closer to the main group.

They had crossed the causeway to the east side of the western island and were now following it past channels of water and reed-choked islands of viscous mud. It smelled of low tide and decay. The shore of the eastern island was hundreds of feet away but they could still make out the bodies tied to poles. They were above the waterline now, but at high tide the poles would be partially submerged. Each of the corpses tied to the poles was a red ruin below the waist. They had also had their faces cut off. Gulls picked at the cadavers.

All along the shore of the eastern island the mad had come to jeer and scream at them. Clad in rags or naked, many of them bearing self-inflicted wounds, they looked wretched. Britha didn’t like it and it was clear they were making the Cigfran Teulu nervous. They spat and made signs to protect themselves from evil. They saw their future on those poles.

Standing among the army of the wretched were what Britha guessed were their dryw. They wore soiled robes that might have once been white. Leaning on grisly decorated staffs, each of them wore a flayed skin mask of someone’s face over their own features. If once they had cared for the unwanted, moonstruck or other unfortunates, then that time was long gone.

Some of the mad ran across the mud, threw themselves into what was now quite a small channel between the two islands and swam towards them. Some of the warriors readied their casting spears.

‘Save your spears!’ Fachtna’s voice rang out over the mud. The authority in it had them hesitating. Fachtna was at the front of the column with Britha, Tangwen and Teardrop. Morfudd was at the rear because that was where they were expecting to be attacked first. Morfudd glared at Fachtna, who cursed himself. The Cigfran Teulu glanced at Morfudd. She motioned them to lower their spears.

‘Horsemen!’ Morfudd’s voice carried to the front of the column. Britha, Tangwen, Teardrop and Fachtna turned to look. Sure enough, Corpse People on horseback were approaching three abreast along the causeway.

It was an interesting choice, Britha thought. She would have dismounted to attack. The back three rows of the column formed up. Their longspears became a wall of pointed metal enchanted with Fachtna and Britha’s blood magics.

‘Make way! Move!’ Fachtna was pushing his way through the men and women of the Cigfran Teulu towards the rear of the column.

Ysgawyn rode in the third rank of horsemen on the causeway. Under normal circumstances he would have attacked on foot, but the horses they rode were from the Otherworld. They would not shy from iron spearheads like normal horses and he was impatient to taste the meat of the last of the Atrebates. The slaughter at the Crown of Andraste had been a fine thing, but there had been no challenge, no warriors. They had sneaked away like cowards, and he wanted the power of the four who had defied his army at the gate.

Ahead they could see the three lines of Atrebates. Six abreast, they had levelled their longspears but had no armour or shields. Gwydyon rode in the second rank. The squat, massively built, scarred war leader held up his hand to bring the column to a halt.

‘Sound the carnyx,’ Ysgawyn whispered to the man next to him, who lifted the long curved brass instrument to his lips. The head of the carnyx was in the form of a horse’s skull in bronze. Normally they would not sound the horn. Normally they were as quiet as the dead when they attacked.

The deep bass note of the carnyx sounded out over mud, marsh and water. Bress moved to the side of the curragh and looked north towards the two islands and the mainland. Ettin joined him. Bress noted that he now carried a great axe with a double head made of two crescents of bronze. On his shoulder Ettin’s second head, that of a painted man with a lacquered beard and dark hair, remained silent. The tall pale man glanced at his second with distaste.

‘If he has told you all he can, let him die,’ Bress said.

‘There,’ Ettin said pointing. Though some miles away yet, they could make out the horses on the causeway.

‘Cowards! Your king begged for mercy while we ate his flesh, raped the corpses of your women and fed your children to our wolves!’ one of the Corpse People shouted, a rider in the front rank. He opened his mouth to shout again. The casting spear broke his teeth on its way through his head. Fachtna kept moving through the ranks of the Cigfran Teulu borrowing another two casting spears as he went. He stopped just behind the last three ranks.

‘They will charge,’ he said.

‘Horsemen will not charge a wall of spears,’ one of the warband replied.

‘They will charge. You must not break. You must hold. Those of you not in the front three rows, lend your strength and push. Put your spears in the horses. Push them deep and up – make them rear – you understand me?’

The warriors around him did not look happy but they nodded. Morfudd was otherwise occupied in the rearmost rank preparing to receive the charge.

‘First give me some room.’ Fachtna had seen who had given the order to halt the horses and the man behind him who had given the order for the carnyx to be blown, presumably to warn the black curraghs. Across the channel on the other island the mad jeered and called for their blood.

With a simple gesture Gwydyon ordered the advance. The three horses in the front rank, one of them now ridden by a truly dead man with a casting spear through his head, charged. The line of horses behind them moved forward at a slower pace.

Hands changed their grips on the hafts of longspears. Feet shifted for better purchase on the causeway. Despite Fachtna’s words, they expected the horses to shy from the spears at the last moment. Closer, the horses becoming larger, their colouration told of their heritage, known from dark tales told around the campfire or late at night when the warriors were children. Those they had thought, until recently, to be unkillable dead rode the Otherworldly steeds.

As the horses reached the spearheads they all but leaped into them. Spears pierced horseflesh. Horses screamed. The spears soaked in the blood of the daughter of their goddess and her champion held, somehow, and did not splinter. Men and women slid back on the causeway; those behind them pushed, stopping the slide, adding their strength to the three rows of spears, giving them the strength to hold their ground.

One of the horses, the one with the dead rider, a longspear nearly all the way through its body, opened its mouth impossibly wide. Its teeth were those of a predator. It bit the face off the spearman who’d run it through. The dead man, his face a bloody ruin, did not fall. The press of the melee held him up. A warrior in the third rank, who’d just seen her lover’s face bitten off, screamed and despite the press lifted her spear and pushed herself forward to run the weapon through the horse’s skull.

‘And step!’ Morfudd cried. And somehow they did. The two remaining horses reared. Spears forced them back. One of the riders fell off his steed, impaling himself on three spears, but they did not drop due to the press of bodies.

The other horseman in the front row stabbed out with his longspear as his shield caught blow after blow. His spearhead ran through the head of the woman next to Morfudd.

‘And step!’ Morfudd screamed, furious now as her friend’s hot blood splattered her face. And again they did, holding their dead up in the press of bodies as they went.

Fachtna had pulled his boots off. He climbed up onto the shoulders of the spearmen and -women and ran from shoulder to shoulder over the warband, his bare feet giving him more purchase. Then he leaped. Powerful leg muscles, infused with what Britha would have thought of as the magics of his people, carried him over the heads of the first rank of horsemen as the spears in their flesh forced the rearing horses over and into the mud of the marsh.

Fachtna threw both his casting spears in mid-air. The rider next to Gwydyon died, a spear in his chest. Gwydyon raised his shield just in time, the spear meant for his head hitting the shield, its point piercing the wood.

Fachtna tore his sword out of its scabbard. His spear had made Gwydyon raise his shield so that his face was covered. Fachtna swung as he came in. The ghostly singing blade cut straight through Gwydyon’s shield and then continued its path through his body and then through his screaming horse’s flanks.

Ysgawyn watched the warrior he had seen from afar the other night land in front of him as his warband leader’s torso slid diagonally off the rest of his body. The man spun and sliced upwards with his sword, held two-handed. Ysgawyn threw himself back off his horse as it was decapitated. The warrior kicked at the horse as it toppled and came straight for him. Ysgawyn lost interest in the fight and leaped from the causeway onto an island in the marsh.

None of the horsemen near Fachtna seemed interested in fighting him. He watched the Corpse People’s king flee across the marsh as he tried to recover his breath.

Behind him the Cigfran Teulu charged the second rank, butchering the horses and killing the last remaining rider. Soon they were killing the third-rank riders as they tried to turn their horses. Morfudd was next to him now.

The rest of the horsemen were turning their horses as best they could to make their escape. Those close to the front were in disarray. Horses reared; others jumped into the marsh and got bogged down or broke their legs. There was no battle now, just killing. It could have gone very differently. The Corpse People could have ridden straight through them, but the Cigfran Teulu had held.

There was a savage grin on Morfudd’s blood-spattered face. The warband’s blood was up. They were feeling the rush of combat.

They had lost three fighters. Fachtna had respectfully suggested to Morfudd that they recover all the weapons that had been blessed with the blood magics. He, along with some of the warband, took discarded Corpse People’s shields. Unfortunately they did not have time to strip the dead of their armour.

Fachtna was impatient to get going. Tangwen had scouted ahead a little. The hunter could see that one of the curraghs had come close to the shore and warriors, the tips of their spearheads glinting in the sunlight, were making their way across sandbanks to the island. The giants were moving too, but none were approaching them.

Morfudd and Fachtna joined Britha and Teardrop at the front as Britha moved ahead to keep an eye on Tangwen. Some of the moonstruck wretches had made it to this side of the channel and more were following, but they seemed happy to wade around in the mud, occasionally throwing it at the warband but not getting any closer.

‘We need to move more quickly,’ Teardrop told Morfudd, who nodded and turned to hurry her warriors.

Britha was coming to the conclusion that she hated beaches, or indeed any body of sand close to water. She wished for night. She wished for enough woad to cover herself and the warband, and she wished for a warband who would fight naked.

Instead what she saw was a line two deep of a hundred demon-ridden Lochlannach spearmen standing on a sandbank, a curragh in the water behind them and behind that two of the horribly misshapen giants towering over the ship. She remembered broken chariots and horseflesh and the mangled bodies of the warriors of the Cirig. What were they thinking? They could fight the spearmen, just, with the help of blood magic, but the giants?

‘Each one of us only has to kill two of them,’ Morfudd said. ‘With your help we will triumph.’ But she was looking uncomfortably at the giants. They knew them to be excellent swimmers despite their deformed limbs and the horrific growths that sprouted from their rough skins.

‘We will not fight with you,’ Teardrop told her. To Britha’s surprise this seemed to come as a relief to the warband leader.

‘You will fight the giants then?’ she asked. The Cigfran Teulu had acquitted themselves well, but the giants were something else. The dead looked like people and subsequently were found to be so, and fighting them had been comparable to what they had done in the past. The giants, however, were things that should not be, things from stories told by the bards out of their colleges to the west beyond the plains of the dead. Giants were thought to be long dead.

‘No.’

Fachtna frowned at Teardrop, who had been staring at the giants as if searching for a way to kill them. The warband had spilt onto the sand at the end of the causeway, and the two forces were eyeing each other. There had been no point in hiding.

Morfudd turned on Teardrop. She did not flinch away from his strange eyes. ‘Then I call you craven, demon!’ she spat.

‘We need you to carry the fight as close to the water as you can, and indeed into the water if possible,’ Teardrop told her.

‘And then what?’ Morfudd asked.

‘Die well.’

Morfudd stared at him. Then she started laughing.

‘Your sacrifice will not be so that we can escape.’

‘I will fight with you, at the start,’ Fachtna told her. Teardrop opened his mouth to object. ‘Don’t worry. I will meet you in the water.’

‘The water?’ Tangwen said. ‘Did you see the people tied to the poles?’

As the discussion went back and forth around her, Britha could not shake the feeling that the water was her home. Where she should be. She knew that beneath its surface she would hear a song calling her back.

‘What about stealing a boat?’ Tangwen asked.

‘We don’t have time to break the magics that control them,’ Fachtna told her.

‘We’ll be fine in the water,’ Britha said. ‘I’ll protect you.’

Teardrop was looking at her, almost smiling. Britha did not see what they had to smile about. From here the wind carried the smell of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people kept in close captivity, the cries, their pleas. From here they could better appreciate the sheer size of the wicker man as it towered above them.

Britha stripped off her robe and cut her rope belt in two with her sickle. Half of it she tied to her spear as a sling. The other half of the rope she tied to the sickle, which she slung over her shoulder. Tangwen took off her trews but tied the long rough-spun shirt she was wearing between her legs. She had left the bow and looked sad to see it go. Teardrop used some thong to make a sling for his staff, but both he and Fachtna assured the others that they could swim fully clothed and in Fachtna’s case armoured, though both removed their boots.

The Atrebates marched out, their shield wall a little sparse as they only had the shields they had taken from the dead Corpse People. The Lochlannach stood between them and the water. At first it looked like the Cigfran Teulu would close in the usual style, but they then picked up the pace a little, though Fachtna dropped back and then stopped. The warband charged. As they did, they screamed the name of their dead king. Morfudd had reminded them of everything they had lost. She had told them how all those who had died by the hand of the invaders were watching them now from Annwn. She had reminded them that the Cigfran Teulu were not the pretend dead of the Corpse People; they were walking dead and the only thing left was the formality of actually dying. She told them that they did not have to care about their lives any more.

As they charged, many of them with wide smiles on their faces, few with any fear, their feet kicking up wet sand as they ran, they shifted direction to concentrate on the left flank of the Lochlannach line, as they looked at it. Because they were outnumbered, this meant that the Lochlannach could wheel around and hit them in the flank and eventually the rear, but that did not matter today.

He would need more matter. Fachtna felt the sand beneath his feet as his flesh grew roots and started sucking it in, cycling the sand through conduits in his flesh to the implanted assembler in his stomach. The assembler converted it at a molecular level to L-tech nanite-augmented flesh. He would only be able to handle the vast increase in mass and the large amounts of energy needed to sustain it and still move for a very short period of time. Already as he grew, his flesh warping and becoming monstrous, the heat bleeding from him was turning the sand around his feet to glass. The pain was becoming unbearable. That was the reason for the berserk fury. If not for the riasterthae frenzy, no warrior would be able to survive. He started to glow from within. Fortunately his armour was designed to shift with his warped riasterthae form and was able to deal with the extremes of temperature. His last action before the agony forced him to lose himself to the frenzy was to draw his rapidly oscillating thermal blade. His last thought was, Kill the giants.

The thing that was once Teardrop became aware of the glow first. He turned and saw what Fachtna had become. The warrior was huge now, a mountain of unsustainable muscle mass that glowed from within, contorted, no longer human, features that told of the agony of his flesh, steam shooting from a blow hole in his head. There was a look of horror on Teardrop’s face.

‘Too soon!’ he shouted. Britha turned and glanced behind her. She had a moment to see what Fachtna had become. The glance was not nearly long enough for her to understand.

The warband threw their casting spears at the last moment. Few hit their mark; that wasn’t the point. They aimed high, then, still running, swapped the longspears or swords that they had in their free hands into the hands they would wield them with just as they hit the Lochlannach line. The casting spears made the Lochlannach raise their shields high.

Morfudd led the charge. She closed only slightly ahead of the rest of her people. Her shield got her past the spear point on one side. She held her spear vertically and slid it down the spears on the other side, pushing them away from her. She kicked up the shield of the one she had hit. Couldn’t get her spear to bear, so she let go of it and dragged her sword out of its scabbard and opened up his chest. Her shield was stuck so she let go of it. She kicked out against the Lochlannach spearman in front of her, knocking him back into the second line. Since she had drunk the blood of the newcomers she had felt stronger, faster and more powerful than ever before. She held her sword two-handed, and as the already wounded Lochlannach was pushed back towards her, she cleaved him open with a cut from shoulder to hip. She then became furious that she could not get the corpse out of the way quickly enough to get at the second rank. The force of the charge had carried them forwards. Morfudd was standing in water now. She had not noticed.

It was hard not to get caught up in it. Inside her, the urge to disappear into the water and the burning in her blood that wanted to kill competed. Whispers from her spear – even now its haft was burning – agreed with the lust for violence that burned inside her.

She ran at the line, wet sand under her bare feet, the salt smell of the sea strong in her nostrils despite the stink from the wicker man, the screams and pleas of the captives now drowned out by battle cries and iron and wood meeting flesh and bone.

The Cigfran Teulu line hit the Lochlannach just ahead of her. Spears slid under shields, searching for bodies to bury themselves in. As the enemy spearmen lifted their shields, Atrebates leaped onto them, riding them as they threw themselves sword and spear first into the Lochlannach’s second rank.

Britha leaped high and far. For her there was a moment’s tranquillity. She heard nothing, the din of battle lost for a moment. There was just the sea and the bright blue sky as her salmon leap carried her over the heads of the Cigfran Teulu and the Lochlannach. Then the bloodlust was back as she stabbed down with the spear in mid-air. She felt the spear’s craving for flesh as it was driven home into the chest of one of the Lochlannach in the second row. Britha almost lost her grip on the spear but managed to hold onto it as the weapon’s head split into branches and grew through its victim’s ribcage. The path of her flight pulled the spearman over backwards into the water. Britha landed with a splash. The spearhead reformed and she wrenched it out of the dead man’s chest.

Screaming as she hewed her sword from one side to the other into anyone foolish enough to get close to her, Morfudd suddenly found herself knee deep in bloody red water with no enemies in front of here. They had fought their way through, she thought exultantly.

She turned. The ferocity of their attack had demolished the two lines of Lochlannach on the flank they had hit, but the other was wheeling to hit them in the back, presumably in response to some unheard order from some unseen leader.

Suddenly, on a sunny cloudless day, Morfudd found herself in the shade. She turned and looked up.

The giant reached down and grabbed Morfudd. Lifted her up, its fingers curving around her to make a fist and punched that fist into the shallow water. She was dead instantly. The giant threw her broken body at her own people and lifted up a foot to stamp. Lochlannach or Atrebates, it made no difference.

The stamping giant splashed everyone with bloody water and was close enough to Britha for the impact to knock her off her feet. She was underwater for a moment and for that moment heard the song. There was a sadness to it. The Muileartach knew pain on this day.

Britha sat up in the red water, fighting all around her. To her right something monstrous and glowing with an inner light hit the Lochlannach line. Enemy warriors went flying. The ban draoi knew that had this been a mortal army they would have broken and fled. There was an explosion of steam. Lochlannach and Atrebates alike fell away from the massive creature, their exposed skin red and blistering from the heat.

The monstrous thing that Fachtna had become barrelled into a giant’s leg, swinging the ghost blade at it again and again, hacking at it, each cut going deeper. The giant reached down for Fachtna, its skin seeming to melt and run as it did so. It grabbed him apparently oblivious to the pain, but then staggered and finally fell into the water.

Fachtna leaped high out of the steaming water and landed on the giant’s chest. He hacked with his sword and tore with bare burning hands at the thing’s chest as if he was burrowing into it. The giant grabbed at him, but the heat had sunk Fachtna’s monstrous form into the creature’s flesh. Strange fluids squirted out of the giant’s chest – Britha guessed it was blood – and lumps of its flesh were flung out. Some of it floated, other bits sank. There was an explosion of red liquid, much of it turning to steam as it sprayed close to Fachtna’s deformed glowing body. This looked more like the blood Britha was used to seeing.

Distracted by the death of the giant, she didn’t notice the Lochlannach moving towards her until she felt his foot on her chest pushing her down as he raised his spear. She reached for hers, but a shape rose out of the red water behind him. Teardrop grabbed the man’s head and pulled it back as he stroked his black-bladed knife across the man’s throat. A red smile appeared on the man’s neck and he fell. Britha realised that she knew him. His name was Dubthalorc. He was one of her people, a landsman. He had been known for raising the best sheep and his wife had been very good with a loom. Britha watched him slide into the water sadly.

Another Lochlannach charged but suddenly fell, yanked under the water. Tangwen appeared. She was red from head to foot, like the dirk she’d just rammed through the Lochlannach’s leg. She pushed his helmet forward and then repeatedly hit him in the back of his head with her hand axe until he stopped moving.

‘We have to go!’ Teardrop shouted over the din of battle and glanced angrily at Fachtna, who was wading through the Lochlannach, breaking them like toys. Just then there was the unmistakable sound of a large fire catching. Britha glanced behind her. Both the legs of the wicker man were in flames. Now the screams of the captives over the water far exceeded the sounds of the battle. Teardrop grabbed Britha and dragged her into deeper water.

They dived. It felt like home to Britha. She could hear the mindsong. It took every shred of willpower that she had not to turn and swim to the west.

Fachtna dived into the water in an explosion of steam. All around him the water boiled as he bled off heat and excess matter. He was tired, bone-weary, pained and hungry. He swam as fast and hard as he could. Surfaced to take a breath, long enough to see flames and hear screams, then beneath the surface again. He did not look behind him. He knew that the Cigfran Teulu would fight as long as they could.

With its legs on fire, Britha was wondering how they would climb up into the wicker man, but as she surfaced for another deep breath she saw a rope hanging from it. Presumably it had been used to hoist people or materials up. A casting spear hit the water close by. She glanced to her right to see one of the black curraghs. She dived again and watched more spears quickly lose their speed in the water. Teardrop was level with her but they were leaving Tangwen behind. She had no idea where Fachtna was. The water here was much deeper. As she swam she was aware of dark shapes darting through the water beneath her.

An exhausted Fachtna reached the wicker man first. The water above him looked orange as a result of the flames licking up the legs of the giant figure. He could hear the screams even under the water now. Worse still, when he surfaced he could smell burning flesh. Anger overwhelmed fatigue and the despair he felt as he looked up at the climb he had to do. He surged out of the water, grabbed the rope and started pulling himself hand over hand, not using his legs.

The climb was always going to leave them exposed. As he pulled himself up, Fachtna saw one of the black curraghs surging through the water towards him. The Lochlannach on board started throwing spears, but the wind that carried the wicker man’s stench and the screams of its prisoners also blew smoke around him. He still felt some spears pass close by him, making eddies in the smoke, but soon he was too high for thrown spears to hit him. Fachtna knew that the wicker man would not collapse. The metal drawn from the earth would have been seeded with smart matter designed to stand up to the heat. The wood would burn and so would the people.

Britha did not want to leave the water. It was better down here, safer. She certainly did not want to climb hundreds of feet into the air on a rope. Teardrop shamed her by grabbing the rope and pulling himself out of the water and up into the smoke. She quickly lost sight of him. Before the magic entered her blood, she would not have been capable of this. She surged out of the water, grasped the rope and started to pull herself up.

Fachtna felt others on the rope beneath him. As he reached the metal framework and the thick wooden planks at the base of the wicker man’s torso, he saw other ropes. His shoulders and arms were just extensions of pain. He had little idea how he was still hanging on, but he knew that he had to collect as many of the ropes as possible so that people could use them to climb down. For what? he asked himself as he swung hand over hand around the framework, excrement and urine dripping down on him through the cracks between the planks above. So that they can be massacred by the spearmen in the black curraghs, so they can hacked to pieces by mad men, so they can be swept out to sea? Fachtna was a strong swimmer and augmented, but even he’d had trouble with the currents. It felt hopeless, but he didn’t have any better ideas, and the flames were rising quickly up both legs of the wicker man. Above him the screaming and pleas for help were starting to be replaced with the sound of coughing. He himself was covered in soot but the smoke would not affect him.

Pulling a handful of ropes with him, Fachtna climbed over the lip of the torso’s base. Soot-blackened arms stuck out through the metal framework, reaching for him.

‘Back!’ he shouted. Eventually a large man pushed a circle clear on the inside. He did so not without difficulty, they were packed in so tightly. Leaning back, Fachtna drew his sword and easily cut through the frame. There was a surge towards him that threatened to knock him off the framework. He brought the singing burning blade forward. ‘Back!’ he shouted again before turning to the large man. ‘Listen to me.’ He handed the man the bundle of ropes he had collected. ‘Tie these off against the framework so they don’t swing back under. There are people coming up behind me. Don’t climb down this rope; let them up. The strong have to carry the weak and any children too small to climb themselves. When you think you can jump, do so. The moment you hit the water, swim away from the ropes or others will land on you. You have to stay here and make sure this is done. If we give into fear then everyone will die. Do you understand me?’ The man was staring at him. Then he turned and started climbing down the rope. Good. I need an example, Fachtna thought. He kicked the man in the face. The man flew backwards off the rope and disappeared into the smoke. A hand grabbed his arm. He turned to see an elderly but formidable-looking woman.

‘It will be done as you say,’ she told him, and then immediately began organising people. The smell of the people was so overwhelming that it brought tears to Fachtna’s eyes as he pushed his way through them, but to their credit they did not panic as word spread of what was happening.

The wooden steps that led to the next level were gated and barred. His sword cut through the gates with ease. At each level he appointed gatekeepers and told them what they had to do, that they had to try and keep the calm or all would die. In as much as he could judge, he chose the strongest personalities. Examples were made. He didn’t want to do it – they’d suffered enough – but panic would kill them all.

Tangwen was exhausted when she reached the rope dangling down from the wicker man. She had grown up in a marsh and close to the Grey Father. If you wanted to survive then you had to be a good swimmer, but the currents in the channel between the two islands were vicious. She was not chosen of the gods like her companions, and it had taken every last bit of her strength to stop herself from being swept out to sea. As she looked up at the rope, tears in her eyes, she knew that she could not make the climb. She’d let Fachtna, Teardrop, Britha and all the people in the wicker man down.

Tangwen felt something bump against her from below. She looked into the water and saw a dark shape darting away. The large man plummeting into the water from above startled her. The surprising thing was he didn’t come back up, but nearby the water turned red.

‘Move now!’ Teardrop said in a voice that brooked no argument, and people backed out of the way for the swollen-headed creature with the bulging veins and crystalline eyes. He was followed moments later by a naked soot- and bloodstained woman with a spear slung over her back. Britha sat down on the soiled planks, her upper body a mass of pain. She didn’t think she could move her arms and she was so hungry. She looked at the wretches around her, collected herself and then stood up and painfully slipped the spear off her back and readied it. A woman was organising the captives’ escape on the ropes, savagely berating anyone who tried to push ahead while the strong took the frail and the smallest children down. The woman was doing this through fits of coughing. Britha could feel the smoke in her lungs but somehow still found herself able to breathe. She was not surprised to find that Teardrop was unaffected by the smoke as well.

Britha looked questioningly at Teardrop. The creature that used to be a man had taken his crystal-topped staff off his back. Teardrop turned and headed towards the steps.

With a thought Bress brought one of the black curraghs in as close as he dared to the wicker man. The craft might be able to fit between its legs but he didn’t want to risk the fire and he had a feeling that it would be raining captives soon. Ettin stood next to him as both of them stared into the smoke. They could see the ropes hanging down.

Ettin went first. He backed up and then ran along the deck and leaped into the smoke, his second head berating him as he did so. Then Bress did the same, his cloak trailing out behind him as he ran and then leaped, the smoke swallowing him.

Long, strong fingers grabbed the rope, cloak billowing as he started to pull himself up, following Ettin. There were captives climbing down the rope as they ascended. Ettin told them to jump. Most did, plummeting past them. For those that didn’t, Ettin grabbed one of the bronze torture blades from the front of his apron and slashed at them until they let go.

As he climbed, Bress woke the dragon with a thought.

Seven levels. Each level packed with captives taken from many different tribes. Fachtna rushed up, cutting through bars and metal gates. Spoke to the people, told them how to help themselves.

It was selfish, he knew. He should be down there helping keep the calm, helping people climb down. Or he should seek out Teardrop and watch over him, but he wanted a moment. He climbed onto the head, standing up on it, his bare feet gripping the metal framework. Just a moment above the stench. Just a moment free of the smoke. Just a moment with the clear blue sky. Looking out over the two islands, the third behind him. The long ridge of the hill on the mainland, much of it wooded except for the ugly clear scar where they had taken material to build this abomination and the fuel to fire it.

He did not want to look down to see the curraghs, to see the fate of the captives who had managed to climb down. He did look down, however, when he heard the sound of huge amounts of water pouring off something. He watched the dragon rise out of the water.

Britha was amazed by how orderly it was. While most were terrified, they were holding themselves together long enough to act in their own best interests and those of the people around them.

They had found a place on the fourth level clear enough for Teardrop to sit down cross-legged, his staff across his lap, and close his eyes.

Then she heard the panic start, the screams, the sounds of struggling, cries of pain mingling with fear. Britha ran to the edge and looked down. As the dragon rose up level with her, water still pouring off it, she nearly soiled herself.

Behind her, Teardrop had started to beg and gibber, talking nonsense rapidly and pathetically. He was weeping openly. Britha forced herself to turn away from the monstrous form of the rising dragon and back to Teardrop. She watched in horror as blood leaked out of his clothes and wounds appeared all over his face, his skin blackening and blistering as if it was being burned. Some of the cuts on his face and head, the lower ones, leaked blood. Ghostly tendrils of what looked like crystal emerged from the cuts higher up. His features were racked with agony of the like Britha had never seen before. It was with mounting horror that she realised what Teardrop had come here to do. All the pain and suffering that Bress and his master were trying to use to drive a goddess insane, Teardrop was going to take unto himself.

Tears sprang into her eyes.

It was easy to mistake it for a dragon. The Naga craft had its membranous wings extended for atmospheric operations. It had a main body, which housed the craft’s biotech drive and the other organs that provided life support, and a long neck, which led to the craft’s brain and the Naga who ostensibly melded with it to act as overseers as much as pilots for the brute organism.

Fachtna watched it rise from the water, almost oblivious to the screams of panic from below. It was overkill. After all, what could one warrior do against such power. He felt gratified that Bress or his master felt that he warranted such a grand death.

Then he smiled and reached for the case on his back as his internal targeting systems locked on to the dragon, plotting targeting solutions and preparing to transmit them. He took the case and opened it. It was heavily shielded and constantly transmitting narcotic, soporific programs to the spear inside.

Fachtna lifted the drowsy spear out of its case. A demonic face formed in the smart matter of the lower part of the weapon’s long bladed head. The haft of the weapon extended to over six feet. He felt the psychotic AI in the weapon start to wake. The Lloigor had always felt that function followed form. If you were to make a weapon, then the weapon, to fully fulfil its purpose, should hate because its purpose was carnage. Even allowing for that, the AI in the spear, which some called Lug, had far exceeded its initial programmed hate and gone into the realms of near-uncontrollable madness on battlefields eternities ago. If some of the stories were true, then the weapon – like its makers – could have been older than this universe. Fachtna himself was nearly overwhelmed by the weapon’s hunger for slaughter. He almost lost himself in its myriad rage-filled psychoses.

The dragon breathed and engulfed the top of the wicker man’s head in fire. Superheated plasma turned the smart-matter-seeded metal into a melted and fused mess.

Fachtna’s leap took him high above the wicker man just as where he had been standing moments before was turned to slag. Fachtna was aiming for the wicker man’s shoulder. He almost overshot. His bare feet failed to grip as he slipped painfully onto his arse and started to slide off. He grabbed the framework of the wicker man with his left hand and used it to swing around until he was facing the dragon again. The Naga ship tilted to one side as it circled the wicker man, looking for another shot.

Fachtna pulled his right arm back and threw the spear at the dragon. He transmitted his targeting ware’s firing solutions to the insane AI at the same time. The spear’s AG drive kicked in, accelerating it to hypersonic speeds, the resultant boom deafening the screaming captives below. The thermal head superheated to white hot as it hit the Naga craft in an explosion of burning biotechnological armoured skin and flesh.

Through conduits and corridors that had more in common with veins and arteries, the spear sought out the Naga symbiotically fused with the craft and the other semi-autonomous organisms/weapons that lived within it and killed them all.

Fachtna drew his sword again, cut through the framework and dived into the now-empty seventh level of the wicker man. He rolled forward onto his feet and ran. The dragon breathed once more. Fachtna felt the heat on his back; his hair caught fire as the shoulder of the wicker man was turned to slag.

Through the layers of psychoses, the spear recognised the craft as a manifestation of its ancient enemy. It sought out the craft/organism’s beating heart and slew the dragon.

Fachtna glanced behind him. The Naga craft was listing badly to one side. Then the disruption in the air at its tail, caused by the craft’s Real Space drive, simply stopped, and it plummeted towards the sea.

Fachtna stopped running and headed back to the edge of the fused area of the wicker man’s seventh level, patting out the flames in his hair as he went. He ignored the burning sensation from his feet and the smell of flesh cooking as he looked out and watched the dragon crash through one of the curraghs below. Even frightened, even deafened, the captives still managed to cheer.

Now comes the hard part, Fachtna thought. The program had taken up an enormous part of the memory within his internal nanite headware. The program was complex, intelligent, ancient and had its own personality. It was designed to do just one thing: soothe the spear enough for it to return and be replaced in its case. To the spear this would feel like the betrayal of a lover played out in moments that for the AI stretched out for lifetimes.

Possession by the spear was a definite threat. Fachtna activated protective programs, mystic sigils that would look after his internal systems; he dropped calming narcotics into his augmented systems to try to suppress the psychotic rage spillover into his consciousness. He ran through calming mental and physical exercises taught at warrior camp and later by the technomantic dryw.

The spear returned to Fachtna’s hand, its haft receding. Fachtna tried not to hurry as he sent the various codes designed to make the AI sleep. He placed it in the case and with a pronounced sigh of relief closed it.

The foot caught him dead centre in the back with a force that would have snapped a non-augmented spine. Instead it sent him sprawling across the soiled boards.

Bress let go of the framework he’d used to swing in and dropped down onto the floor behind the prostrate Fachtna. Behind him the framework that had opened for him with a thought was growing shut.

‘You’re a long way from your Eggshell, little man,’ he said evenly. Fachtna rolled over to face him. He felt a little thrill of fear. He wished he hadn’t used the riasterthae frenzy to kill the giant. He couldn’t withstand another frenzy today. He wished his arms and shoulders weren’t still in agony despite the best efforts of his augmentations to repair them.

‘I thought we were a myth to the likes of you?’ he asked for the sake of something to say.

‘Long gone perhaps, but Crom has a long memory.’

Besides fear, Fachtna also felt excitement. He really wanted to kill this man. He was less happy when Bress leaned down and picked up the case with the spear in it.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

Fachtna skipped up onto his feet, sword in hand.

It was warm in here. Her internal breath felt like the dry desert wind from a hundred lives ago. Except in her breath was moisture. He stood in a cave of bone and flesh, his hands and the side of his head sunk into the wall. He shared the thoughts and feelings of a creator. He was perverting them. He had fed her pain and fear and hatred, and she had given that form. From her womb they had grown like blisters through her skin. Skin that was strong enough to survive the deepest abysses the oceans had to offer. Slowly she was waking. Unlike her sisters, her creator had not driven her irrevocably insane, but the pain of the sacrifices would be enough to harm her mind. That would allow him to influence her to open the way.

The pain and the fear lessened significantly. She could still feel it, even asleep, but it was not being fed directly to her via the transmissions of crystal parasites. He had felt the interference but thought nothing of it. Small people with small minds. They could not be allowed to stop the sending, however.

Smoke poured up through the planks in the floor of the fourth level, obscuring most of their view and the people waiting by the steps. They were just coughing, sobbing shadows now, cursing those who moved so slowly beneath them.

Teardrop was a bleeding mess, still sitting cross-legged, his arms held out, no part of him unwounded. If his skin was not cut then it was burned. His gibbering had long ago ceased to be language, and blood came from his mouth as crystal oozed from his eyes. He was now just making a rasping rattling noise.

The first thing she noticed was that the cursing, sobbing and coughing had stopped. The captives came through the smoke towards them, arms outstretched, enslaved by the magic of the crystal seeds in their heads again. Britha moved in front of Teardrop. She heard him coughing and spitting out blood behind her. Crom apparently wanted Teardrop and Britha dead more than he needed the captives’ fear.

Fachtna and Bress stared at each other. Fachtna held his sword two-handed in a mid-guard; Bress, his bastard sword in one hand, the spear’s case in the other, was much more relaxed.

‘You have done a lot of damage by coming here,’ Fachtna said. Bress’s laughter was devoid of humour.

‘Have you painted yourself the hero here?’

‘I’m not trying to kill thousands of people.’

‘Not here perhaps, but tell me how you live outside the laws of causality. Because you have decided that you are a good man? Your actions as much as ours, well maybe not as much as ours, have rewritten the future. What you left is no longer there, not that either of us would ever remember what has been.’

‘Assuming that time/space does not crack.’

‘Time/space is more rugged than you give it credit for, believe me.’

‘What you’re doing is monstrous.’

‘Only from a very limited and selfish perspective. What we are doing is speeding up the inevitable. If you had really wanted to stop us, then you should have sent more than two.’

‘Limited resources,’ Fachtna told him. ‘Are we going to fight?’

‘This isn’t a fight, it’s a murder.’

The tiny part of Teardrop’s psyche that was alive no longer resembled anything even remotely like a sane human mind. The crystal parasite was a kaleidoscopic spider’s web, straddling planes of existence and non-existence, trapping the suffering of the vessels of pain and feeding it back down into the electric signals that surged through biological existence.

Then the pain stopped. What had been Teardrop struggled like a broken thing in his own fractured and hellish mindscapes filled with impossible things that humanity had not evolved enough to perceive without their minds shattering.

The crystal network reached out for an instinctive understanding. What it found instead was darkness surging back, feeding down to the pain vessels, controlling them, enslaving them. The darkness was a tiny part of something immense, but its power nearly overwhelmed the parasite’s web. Then the parasite shifted until it found the right path and started to tentatively taste the dark thing.

Crom Dhubh could not even remember pain. He savoured a sensation that to him was as new, but he still screamed as he tore his hands and face from her flesh. He could destroy the parasite, he knew that. After all it was the creature’s unfertilised eggs, or at least what they could make of the eggs in three-dimensional space, that they had at great expense harvested to put in the heads of the pain vessels.

He could destroy the parasite, of that he had no doubt, but he needed his power and he did not want to give it any more access than it already had. Let him block the fear. There was blood in the water now. It would mean expending more of his power than he had wanted, but he could force her to open the way now. He could induce the horrible birth.

Blades flickered out at a bewildering speed: strike, parry and counter-strike. Bress had a bad mixture of speed and strength; his blade had more reach, and he defended himself too well for Fachtna to get inside that reach without losing significant amounts of flesh.

Smoke billowed up through the planks as if they were over a volcanic vent. Every swing of a blade caused eddies in the smoke. No blood had been drawn, but Fachtna was the one being forced back. He felt his back hit the framework of the wicker man. Bress swung. Fachtna ducked under the blade and threw himself into a forward roll. He felt Bress slice a layer of flesh off his back, the other man’s sword going straight through his armour. Bress’s sword cut through the wicker man’s framework and swung through the smoke-filled air outside the cage.

Fachtna rolled to his feet. He knew that the wound on his back would not be healing any time soon, as the nanites that impregnated Bress’s blade attacked the nanites that would normally knit his flesh together again.

Bress hit Fachtna with a back kick that he had no business trying in a sword fight where incredibly sharp implements were being waved around at speed. The kick took Fachtna off his feet and sent him flying over the planks. Bress stalked after him. Fachtna scrabbled to his feet and turned just in time to parry a powerful strike.

‘I could make the metal come alive and hold you down,’ Bress told Fachtna.

The massive two-handed strike that almost forced him to his knees shouldn’t have been so fast, Fachtna thought. With just enough strength to hold Bress’s blade away from him, Fachtna kneed the taller man. Bress showed no sign of having felt it. He threw Fachtna back and kicked him in the stomach, causing him to stumble. The arc of Bress’s sword somehow looked lazy to Fachtna but he knew that he could not get his blade up to parry it. Bress opened up Fachtna’s thigh but did not sever anything vital. That was when Fachtna realised that he was being played with.

It had gone quiet below but then the screams restarted. Sounds of true panic. Moments later, the smell of human flesh cooking. Fachtna knew that the bottom level had caught fire.

Britha fought like she had never fought before, her spear striking at any that got too close. Then there had been too many and they had pulled the spear from her. Then she had fought with the sickle. Then she had fought with her hands, feet and forehead, and finally nails and teeth, desperately trying to keep them away from Teardrop. But they were all over her. They were going to tear her apart with their bare hands and they were going to do the same to Teardrop.

Then it was over. Then they were people again, not demon-ridden slaves. They dropped her, confused and frightened, many of them wounded. They dropped her onto the soiled planks and she curled up into a ball, sobbing. They backed away from her.

‘Ban draoi?’ The words spoken in her own language, the familiarity of the voice, made her open her eyes. She recognised the child despite her soot-covered face and red-raw eyes. A girl from Ardestie, a daughter of one of the landsfolk families. What made her cry harder than anything was that she could not remember her name.

Through the grief and the panic, the girl’s concern made her remember why she was there. A monstrous force was fostering fear and pain in her people and drinking it to poison a goddess. She sat up and looked over at Teardrop. His mouth was moving but he was beyond language now.

Panic. Screams from below as the lowest level of the wicker man’s torso caught fire.

The massive bronze crescent of one of the great axe’s blades bisected Teardrop’s skull. He collapsed sideways, well and truly dead.

‘You fucking whore!’ Hanno screamed at her in Carthaginian. ‘You did this to me! You soiled my luck with your blood sacrifices on a ship holy to Dagon!’ His was the second head on Ettin’s lopsided and broad shoulders.

‘I’ll mount you up here so you can watch me rape your corpse,’ Ettin told her. ‘You’ll learn to stay dead when I kill you.’

Grief and fear was gone. Ettin swung Kush’s axe down at her. Britha rolled away, grabbing her hungry spear as she came up onto her feet. Cold anger had replaced everything.

‘Come and die,’ she told the monster. He stalked through the smoke towards her.

Fachtna was grinning, laughing. It was easy now. He knew he was going to die. He stopped caring about winning, stopped caring about getting hurt. Any blow that didn’t look like it was going to kill him immediately, he took.

Bress opened up his upper left arm from shoulder to elbow, severing tendons, making it useless. Fachtna spat blood at him and laughed as he screamed in pain and made a reckless backhanded upwards cut. The hot ghost-like blade cut through Bress’s armour, piercing flesh and carrying on up to cut into his face.

Bress lurched back. Fachtna side-kicked him, staggering the tall thin man, though he lost some of his right leg doing it. He moved forward after Bress, but his leg gave out under him. That didn’t matter. He left himself open as he chopped down at his opponent’s head. Bress got his blade up barely in time to parry, but the force of Fachtna’s blow brought the tip of his blade down onto Bress’s head, opening it up. Blood poured down his pale face. Bress had finished humouring Fachtna.

She felt the force of the axe blow reverberate down her arms as she blocked it with the haft. Had the spear not been Lochlannach magic, the axe would have cut straight through. Britha kicked out under the spear. It was a solid blow, but Ettin barely felt it. Instead he brought the axe back for a two-handed sideways blow. Britha hit him with the butt of the spear in the face. Except it was Hanno’s face. The Carthaginian’s eyes rolled up into his head but he did not lose consciousness. Instead he drooled blood as he continued screaming obscenities at her.

She needed to put distance between her and Ettin so she could use the spear. Ettin swung at her. Britha leaped, bringing her knees up. The axe swished under them. She landed and moved to the side and away from Ettin, through the smoke.

The captives were trying to give them as much room as they could, though from the screams they knew that all that waited for them below was fire and death.

Britha stabbed out with her spear. Ettin parried it with the haft of his axe, knocking it away so hard Britha almost lost her grip on it. She went with the momentum of the parry and swung the spear around her head as she backed away from Ettin’s approach. She turned the circular movement of the spear into a thrust. He was ready for her. He caught the spear with the axe and, one-handed, yanked it out of her grip, dragging her forward. He dropped the spear and punched her in the face, sending her staggering back to the sound of Hanno’s cheers. Britha grabbed for the sickle still hanging from her side by the remains of her rope belt. Ettin side-kicked her and took her off her feet. She hit the floor hard as he raised the axe above his head to Hanno’s exultant shouting.

Bress caught Fachtna’s sword hand at the wrist. He smashed the warrior in the face with the hilt of his sword, then brought the blade down on Fachtna’s sword arm, severing tendons. Fachtna’s sword fell away from unfeeling fingers. Fachtna spat at his foe, and Bress flung the Gael away from him. Fachtna landed on the edge of the still-hot area that had been destroyed by the dragon. He tried to get to a kneeling position but now both his arms were useless. Bress helped him to kneel by pulling Fachtna up by his hair. Bress took several steps back. The wind caught the smoke and Fachtna saw clear blue sky. It’s a really nice day, he thought, and I have accomplished much.

Bress swung his sword.

The two halves of Fachtna’s body tumbled out of the wicker man into clear blue sky, only to be swallowed by smoke.

Even as she grabbed for the sickle, she knew it was too late. The axe fell. Ettin was yanked back, the head of the axe biting into the planks just in front of Britha. Kush and Germelqart each had one of Ettin’s arms and were dragging him away from her. Hanno screamed at them to stop.

With one arm, Ettin threw Kush off, sending the large powerful man flying into the framework. Kush bounced off and hit the floor. Ettin grabbed Germelqart with the other hand, lifted the Carthaginian off the floor by his head and then started to squeeze. The navigator screamed.

Britha was searching around desperately for her spear.

Tangwen jumped high into the air behind Ettin and buried her dirk deep into his real head. Ettin roared and tossed Germelqart away. He turned. Tangwen was backing away. Ettin cuffed the hunter so hard that she too was flung into and bounced off the wicker man’s framework.

Ettin turned back to Britha, who rammed her spear into his fat stomach and drove it up into his ribcage, all the while staring straight into his eyes. She wanted to watch the light go out.

With a roar Kush brought his axe down on Ettin’s shoulder, driving the bronze blade diagonally into his chest, where it met the metal branches growing out her spear’s head.

‘It’s my axe!’ he screamed.

As Ettin sank to the floor, Britha knelt down with him to watch death come to his eyes.

Satisfied, she stood up and went to check on Tangwen. Kush put his foot on Ettin’s body and wrenched his axe free. Then he lifted it high and cut off Hanno’s head.

‘I’m sorry, old friend. You deserved better.’ Then he decapitated Ettin just to be on the safe side.

Tangwen was in tears.

‘I’m so sorry. The swim, the climb…’ She stared at Teardrop’s body, guilt all over her face.

‘It’s okay,’ Britha said.

Germelqart was getting unsteadily to his feet, aided by Kush. Both of them bore the ravages of their captivity.

‘I told you I heard Hanno,’ Kush told the navigator.

‘Do you still want my power?’ Teardrop asked, though his voice sounded wrong. All of them turned to stare. His lips were moving; the rest of his body looked very dead. The muscles on his face were slack, making the movements of his mouth all the more obscene, particularly as his head had been cut in half and one set of lips was slightly out of synch with the other. Inside his swollen skull they could see the crystal moving like it was alive, or rather like it was many living things.

‘That should not be happening,’ the normally taciturn Germelqart said. ‘I do not like Ynys Prydein and will not come back here.’

It took Britha a moment or two to realise that the odd rasping noise was Teardrop’s laughter. Kush raised his axe.

‘The dead should be still,’ the tall black man insisted.

‘Wait,’ Britha said, though she almost completely agreed with him.

‘You so wanted my power,’ Teardrop said. He was right. Now she could not think of anything she wanted less. ‘It’s a heavy price. You have no idea, but you are not done yet.’

Britha felt tears spring into her eyes but knelt down by Teardrop. The crystal tendrils that reached for her from his ears, nose, mouth, eyes, that flowed from the grisly split in his head, did not look wholly real.

As they pushed into her head, touched her mind, shattered it, rebuilt it so she could at least perceive – though never understand – she screamed until her throat bled, then they felt very real.

She became a border. She saw the rest of everything that was this tiny space. She drooled blood as the meat part of her mind tried to shut down. Her mind grew beyond the stinking sweet prison of her flesh into other space beyond the ken of the people around her, who cowered away as her cranium bulged and the crystal parasite consumed the meat of her brain and forced its tendrils into her veins and arteries, making them swell.

It wasn’t just Britha who opened mercury eyes.

Bress stalked out of the smoke, bloody sword in hand. Kush raised his axe; Tangwen, her dirk still in Ettin’s skull, grabbed her hand axe from her belt.

Bress glanced down at Ettin’s body. There was a slight smile on his lips. The smile disappeared as he looked at Britha’s inhuman eyes. She stood to face him.

‘It’s still me,’ she told him.

‘For now. Your friend is dead,’ he told them, and then, so there was no confusion, ‘I killed him.’ He nodded outside. Kush, Germelqart and Tangwen turned to look. Britha did not; she had felt the violation opening. Circles of blue pulsing light, and through it living, squirming, black, bacteria-like nothings, reached for its antithesis. To what was left of Britha it was like the sky was being eaten by maggots. It sought to touch the Muileartach and make her the same as her sisters, to corrupt the last progenitor.

‘No,’ Germelqart said and sat down hard. Kush was praying to the gods of his childhood, forgotten until now. Tangwen started to weep again.

Blister-like growths broke the surface of the water to the west and vomited forth monstrosities into the water and onto the land, the fruits of a womb poisoned by Crom Dhubh.

Beneath the wicker man the water was a red froth as the captives from it were attacked from beneath the surface.

Britha could not bear to turn to look at their failure just yet.

‘Will you make me kill you?’ Bress asked.

‘We will take our chances in the water,’ Britha told him as quicksilver tears rolled down her face.

‘Go lower. I have opened the way for you,’ he told her.

Britha stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

‘I must kill you,’ she told him when they had finished, though she was still holding him, looking up at him. He nodded. She noticed that he was carrying the case that Fachtna had borne since he’d known her.

Bress turned and walked into smoke and flame.