Chapter 47
Chapter forty-seven
LOCKE
Holy gods.
Locke crouched at the base of the hill, his only coherent thought to make himself as small as possible, because the bocánach, the legendary monsters of the air – Rory’s monsters – were everywhere, shrieking and swooping through the raging tempest of wind and ice and fog that roared all around them.
Rory’s power, the Mórrígan’s power, unleashed upon the world – upon the Albions, who barely had a chance to scream before the shadow-creatures ripped out their throats and flung their still-twitching bodies to the all-devouring sky.
She stood high on the hill, arms lifted above her head, red hair whipping about her frost-bitten face like an unholy halo of fire, ice-blue lips a mere blur of movement as she chanted awful, unknowable lines of verse in a strange, bone-chilling language.
Locke remembered the tale from his boyhood – the battle of Moytura and the slaughtering of the gods, and then the Mórrígan, gliding into the battle with bare white arms raised high and a voice not of this world, rending ruination on her allies and her foes alike – an indifferent goddess, who cared nothing for the living nor the dead.
This – this was the same, the same cruel power, now unleashed on everyone who had ever dared to do harm to that which she loved.
As though she could hear his very thoughts, those awful eyes turned in his direction, unblinking and cold and utterly, horribly empty of all emotion or recognition or love, and latched onto his face.
Every element of Locke cowered, trembled, in bone-deep terror, in inhuman horror, at the sight of those eyes boring down into his own – no lingering trace of the woman whom he had known, who he had once tried to kill and who had longed to see him dead, who had rode by his side and had smiled at his jokes and healed all his hurts and had slept in his arms.
His wife, he thought. His wife was gone, and this terrible, deathless creature stood in her place.
And she was coming towards him, stalking down the once-green hill, now coated with glossy black ice that glistened with unnatural fire, her steps slow and deliberate, her silver gaze as empty and white as a winter wasteland.
Ríastrad. The half-forgotten word came to him in a terrifying rush, but he recognized the rightness of it immediately – the blood-lust, the battle-frenzy of the great heroes of old.
This was no mere warrior, but the Mórrígan herself reborn, and such a fury would surely freeze over the world itself.
Gods, he thought again, despairing and hollow this time.
She was going to kill him after all, all of them – this apocalyptic power, that drop of magic within her so amplified by that gods-damned roar of that gods-damned rock that it had consumed her, devoured all the parts of her that made her Rory, all her surreptitious kindnesses and secret softness, and only left the dark.
There was no sign of her now, that desperate-eyed woman who last night had stood before him and told him that she might die if she didn’t soon feel the touch of his hands on her skin.
“Locke MacMurchada,” this being that had once been his wife said, as the wind howled and the bocánach skreiched and men died by the dozen, by the hundred, an ocean’s worth of blood seeping into the earth, their home, the motherland that they had sworn to protect, whatever the cost.
Not this, he thought dully. Not at this cost, at this price, to see her like this, become this – the nightmare she never wished to be.
“Look,” she said. “The Fianna ride once more.”
Locke tore his horrified gaze away from her ice-bitten face to follow the direction of her raised arm – sure enough, a hundred ghostly gray horses were thundering across the plain, tossing their phantoms heads as their translucent manes streamed behind them, each one bearing a shimmering silver warrior, braided beards and battle-axes, made solid and real by whatever magic pouring forth across the land from the roar of the Lia Fáil, and at their head rode a tall, ethereal figure, wearing an antlered crown and a furred cape, a mighty broadsword as tall as Locke himself whirling in his phantom hand.
Fionn mac Cumhaill, the leader of the Fianna.
And there was his son, galloping at his side, his stallion matching his father’s wraithlike steed stride for stride as they bore down upon the fleeing Albion troops, and through the raucous din of the bocánach and the screams of their prey, Locke could just make out the sound of his sonorous voice, keeping perfect rhythm with the wild whirling howl of the wind as he sang his father and his brothers back to life, if only for a few precious, much-needed moments, with the force of his magic and the power of the Lia Fáil.
“Holy gods,” Locke said yet again, but this time with awe, watching as the Fianna broke over the retreating Albion armies a hundred silver scythes cutting through golden sheaves of wheat underneath the autumn sky –
He jerked backwards, terrified, when an icy finger suddenly glided down the curve of his cheek.
“Come with me,” she said, and without waiting for an answer, she was gone, gliding towards the battlefield, black ice crackling in her wake, the howl of the wind growing shriller as she approached the fighting, her ríastrad a terrible thing to behold as everyone she passed, both friend and foe, fell to their knees at the sight of her, foreheads pressed to the dirt.
Locke stumbled after her, too fraught with terror to dream of disobeying.
The Fianna retreated somewhat at her approach, the ghostly hooves of their horses dancing around the fallen bodies of the foes, their riders sitting eerily silent and still astride their saddle-less steeds.
Finn nudged his horse forward, sliding to the ground and sinking to his knees before her.
“Mo bhanríon,” he said, voice raw from the force of his song, his hands shaking strangely, Locke noted, where they lay splayed out against the blood-soaked grass. “Your enemies are vanquished.”
“Not all,” she said, and Locke saw Finn look up sharply at the sound of that preternatural, too-cold voice. “Some yet live.”
She raised a frost-bitten finger, and the bocánach ceased their skreiching, retreating back into the sky to hover, silent and savagely attentive to her every move, as she glided forward to where the Albion army still wept and screamed, a devastated mob of terrified men huddled amongst their dead and dying.
She swept her cold hand to the side, and Locke watched wide-eyed as the sobbing sea of men parted before her, crashing to the ground as though swept aside by an unseen blow from an all-powerful fist, over and over, wave after wave of men, until only one figure remained, kneeling on the ground, his shattered mace lying useless and broken beside him.
Ironstring.
Locke gave an involuntary whimper as she stood over him, her face as white and distant as a dying star as she reached down to slip a finger under the general’s bearded, blood-streaked chin.
“Look at me,” she said, and Locke’s stomach churned as the man looked upwards to behold the face of his own doom.
The flat, once lush and green plain of the battlefield was silent as a cairn buried deep within the earth when she let her finger drop away from his face, and struck, wordless and swift.
Locke stumbled on his knees, retching violently, as Ironstring barely had the chance to scream before his face – his face – was ripped from his skull, a brutal, bloodless scalping, his sternum rent from the top of his throat to the base of his gullet by an invisible blade.
A horrified murmuring broke out among the soldiers of éire, and even Finn turned pale at the sight of the mutilated corpse of the Albion general slumped – faceless, eviscerated, lifeless – on the ground.
Gods, Locke thought again, dully this time, hollow and without hope. He hadn’t understood, not truly, what she had meant when she spoke of becoming a nightmare, the full horrific scope of those powers that slumbered within her veins.
He did now.
“Mo bhanríon,” he heard Finn say, as she lingered over the corpse of the man who had murdered her brother, as though she were drinking it in – the sight and the smell and the taste of his blood, his terror as he died.
“You have your vengeance, your realm is saved – let it end, mo bhanríon. Let them flee, let them return to their land across the sea, and let it end.”
She turned in the direction of his voice, that blank, beautiful face the most horrifying sight that Locke had ever seen.
“There is no end,” she said, indifferent and cruel, and the sound of a thousand throats crying out in terror of what was soon to come echoed across the battlefield turned bloodletting.
“They are fleeing,” Finn begged, shaking palms outstretched in a suppliant’s plea. “They are in retreat, mo bhanríon, this is not justice, this is a slaughtering –”
“Kill them all,” the being who was not Rory whispered. “Kill them,” and raised her arms once more.
Thunder boomed, and black-and-green clouds rolled in from the far corners of the sky, and the bocánach skreiched anew, shriller and more savage than before, preparing to tear into the remnants of the Albion forces, and she slowly lowered one arm, a silent commanding.
The ghosts of the Fianna erupted, an unearthly viciousness overtaking their glimmering features. As one, they charged, phantom spears sharp and shadowy swords whirling, ready to strike.
“They’ve surrendered,” Locke forced himself to say, trembling from head to toe. “Don’t do this, Rory, do not do this.”
She made no response, and Locke watched in horror as a great black mist arose from the earth, shifting and shaping itself into a thousand nightmarish forms – huge, scaly serpents and sharp-fanged gargantuan wolves and winged monsters breathing smoke – surrounding the screaming and trapped men.
“A bhréone,” he heard Finn say, sharp and high this time, no longer pleading. “Stop.”
They came together in an earth-shaking howl – the shadow-beasts and the bocánach and the warriors of the Fianna – and through the dull roaring in his ears, Locke watched the blood spray and the bones break and the screaming begin anew.
“It’s not her,” Locke said, and Finn’s head swiveled in his direction, moss-green eyes dark and glassy from the strain of his song. “Something happened, when the rock roared – Finn, I don’t know what happened, but that’s not Rory –”
He stopped, heart juddering in his chest.
Finn’s beard, once a glossy black, streaked with white.
He raised his gaze back to Finn’s, who looked at him with a grim expression.
Another ominous crack of thunder, and Locke’s attention jerked back to the Albions, dying in droves at the claws and fangs of the bocánach, torn apart by phantom monsters of smoke and mist, upon the swords and spears of the Fianna.
“It’s the ríastrad,” he said to Finn. “Battle-frenzy – she cannot control it. It’s too much for her. ”
Finn’s face appeared to have aged years, decades, as his eyes fluttered shut, brow creasing.
“I have seen it before,” he said. “A madness all-consuming and terrible – but never like this.” His eyes opened, and Locke caught a glimpse of an old, old man staring back at him, silver temples and lined, wrinkled face.
It vanished a heartbeat later, Finn’s usual handsome features smoothing, realigning themselves, but Locke knew what he had seen.
“Locke,” said the bárd. “Whatever the Lia Fáil awakened, it will take and take, until there is nothing left of her.”
Locke rubbed his shaking hand over his face. “We have to stop her, to bring her back. We have to save her –”
He remembered suddenly, Rory standing before him, bereft of magic, of weapons, of any kind of power save that of her own two bare hands, threatening to rend him limb from limb should he lay a single finger on the monster who looked a little like her lost brother.
Come and take him, she had said, and find out what horrors I can awaken when that which I love is threatened.
A threat, he thought. Threaten that which she loves.
Little brother, she had said. I swear that you shall not die for my sake.
There was no force in any world, he knew, that would stop her from keeping that vow.
“Finn,” he said as the being who had devoured the soul of the woman he loved wandered deeper into the mud and the mire and the bloodshed of battle, the screaming growing louder, more strident, wherever she looked, whatever she touched.
With every step she took, he knew, with every death, the Rory he knew became further and further lost to the nightmare, further and further out of his reach.
“We need to find the cailleach, the Bright One. Right now.”
“She’s sure to be long gone,” Finn said grimly. “Her and the destroyer both. She would not dare linger long once the Lia Fáil roared.”
Locke remembered the way that she had stared, vacillating between Rory and the ó Flannagáin boy, how hungry were her eyes, how her red, red lips had salivated with wanting.
“I don’t think so. She won’t flee, not without getting what she wants – the heart she needs.
” He blew out a breath, looking back to scan the disheveled lines of the forces of éire, still celebrating the rout of their enemies.
“If she can’t have Rory,” he said, “then she’ll be hunting the boy even now. ”
The bárd sat back on his haunches, rubbing at his bearded chin with a trembling hand. “Then that should be our task. Rory – Rory is lost, but éire will never be safe until Meiche is found and the cailleach killed.”
“We do need to find her,” Locke agreed. “But she cannot die. Not yet.”
Finn frowned. “What do you mean?”
“We need Aoife,” Locke said, “to kill the king of Connacht.”