The corridor reeked with the harsh metallic smell of blood.
Heart racing, Sláine put on the earmuffs, stifling the damned song so that he could at least begin to think straight. He knew the voice. He was excited at the prospect of seeing her again, of surprising her and together breaking out of this infernal place.
Sláine reached out and opened the door.
She was chained to the wall, the black iron collar secured around her throat.
"Blathnaid," Sláine gasped as he came crashing through the door. A huge wave of selfish relief washed over him - this was why she hadn't joined up with him. Bragg had turned her over to Kendrick and she'd been locked up in this hellhole like some common thief.
She hadn't abandoned him after all!
He stumbled forwards to free her, sagging to his knees as he pulled at her chains, trying to yank them out of the wall or break the metal bolts securing them. He realised that she was talking to him, but he couldn't hear a word because of the muffs. He reached forwards, taking Blathnaid in his arms, overcome. She hadn't left him. She wasn't like the other women in his life. He hugged her close, so close that she began to squirm in his arms.
He closed his eyes.
His hands tangled in her hair, his lips kissing with a passion that could hardly contain the hurt, the anger, the joy, and the pain of all the thoughts that had gone through his head since they had parted. She squirmed beneath his touch, moving more and more as if she was trying to wriggle out of his grip. He just held her all the more tightly.
There was no passion in her lips. The texture of her tongue against his felt wrong. It flicked rather than licked, its movement too frantic, desperate.
He felt Blathnaid's arms coil around him, her fingernails dragging down his back, sinking in painfully.
Sláine opened his eyes.
It was Blathnaid and yet it wasn't, as if some shimmering glamour had been laid over something so hideously evil that even the illusion couldn't quite mask it completely. Blathnaid's face slipped. That was the only way his mind could rationalise what it was seeing. For a moment Blathnaid was there, in his arms, kissing him, and then something shifted and she wasn't and this thing, this scaled reptilian thing was in her place. Sláine recoiled from the beast even as the glamour of Blathnaid's face struggled to reassert itself, a façade over the creature's true and hideous visage.
He tried to pull away but the creature that wasn't Blathnaid held him in a vice-like grip.
The cold-blooded narrow slits of eyes stared back at him hungrily. They were inhuman, the pupils reptilian ellipses. A long forked tongue laved across his face, lingering over his eyes before it darted down, back into his mouth. She held him immobile, her tongue exploring, probing, her fingers sinking deeper into his flesh.
The she-beast - for by no stretch of the imagination was it the cutpurse, Blathnaid - reached up, pulling the muffs from his ears and exposing Sláine once more to her enchanted song.
"What are you?" he yelled, thrashing in the she-beast's arms. Her grip was incredible. Sláine felt his anger rising, but there was no answering surge from the earth in his blood. He was alone, cut off from what made him.
Her only answer was a slithering hiss, her forked tongue lashing across her lips and curling almost seductively around a wickedly sharp fang that dripped with ichor. Sláine recoiled, writhing in the creature's grasp. He felt something cold coiling around his legs. He kicked out at it but it continued snaking higher, wrapping itself around him and, when it reached his waist, constricting.
Sláine tried to look down but the she-beast held him firm.
Her song slipped into a mournful refrain, leaching the fight out of him.
He wanted to be with her, with Blathnaid. He wanted to sink into her, to feel her heat around him. He wanted to give in. Surrender.
She drew him into a kiss, and he sank into it.
He sank his teeth into the creature's forked tongue and yanked his head back, tearing the meat apart. The beast's blood spilled into his mouth. He spat the tip of the tongue out as the she-beast howled and hissed in pain, the hypnotic lure of its song broken.
Blathnaid was gone.
He knew that she had never been there, but her loss was palpable. His own shriek dwarfed that of the she-beast.
Reacting instinctively Sláine grabbed the loop of black iron chaining the she-beast to the wall, whipped it around her neck and braced it around his forearms. He heaved back on the chain and began throttling the creature as it clawed all the more desperately at his face. The beast bucked and writhed desperately, its serpent-like tail tightening around Sláine's waist, choking the life out of the barbarian even as Sláine choked the life out of it. They were locked in a deadly embrace.
The beast shuddered, once, violently and the fight fled its body.
Sláine stood over the she-beast, bleeding where the rough metal of chains had cut into his forearms.
For the first time, he could see what it was - a huge part-snake part-woman abomination. Mannix had told tall tales of such a beast: a creature that lured men in with its seductive charms and fed on their blood and their spirit until they were empty. What had he called it? The word came back to him as he shucked off the dead she-beast's coil of tail.
A lamia.
He dropped the earmuffs on the she-beast's corpse and turned in time for Nudd's club to cannon into the side of his face and send him reeling back. His foot came down on the fat flesh of the lamia's tail, rolling his ankle as it gave way beneath his weight. Unbalanced, Sláine sprawled across the dungeon floor. Nudd stepped over him, grunting as he prepared to deliver another crushing blow with his club.
Sláine rolled to the left, barely getting out of the way as the wooden club hammered into the stone floor. He grabbed Nudd's legs and used them to jack-knife his feet straight up into the looming simpleton's chin. Nudd staggered back. Sláine rolled and came up onto his feet in a fighting crouch. He had no weapon. There was nothing close to hand that he could improvise with.
Nudd's club whistled dangerously close to his ear. The blow smacked off his shoulder and sent a surge of pain bone deep.
"You hurt the princess," Nudd growled. "Nudd hurt you."
"No, Nudd, you don't nee-" he didn't get to finish the sentence. Nudd's club ricocheted off his jaw, snapping his head back.
Sláine collapsed to his knees. The world lurched. There was no focus, no form. Blackness threatened to overwhelm him. Nudd came in for the kill, club raised. Sláine rammed his fist into the simpleton's groin mercilessly, doubling Nudd up in agony. The club slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor a second before Nudd did.
Swaying precariously, Sláine reached out for the fallen club. It slipped between his fingers but he got it after a second fumble, and brought it round in a vicious arc. The meat of the club split Nudd's skull. He didn't need a second blow. The simpleton wouldn't be getting up any time soon.
He dropped the club and forced himself to his feet. He managed four steps before he lurched into the wall and four more before he fell again. He stumbled along the corridor back to the woodworm raddled stairs and slumped down on to them. He stayed that way, with his head in his hands, until he had mastered the nausea.
Sláine reclaimed Brain-Biter from Kendrick's chamber. The broch's owner was nowhere to be seen, but then, it was night and no doubt the man knew all about the lamia's seductive charms come sundown.
Shouldering the axe he headed towards the drawbridge.
He had almost made it when he heard a wheedling voice cry, "Let me out, you big muscle-bound lummox!"
He stopped in his tracks. "Is that any way to beg, Ukko?" he called back.
"Let me out of here!"
"You really haven't got the hang of begging, have you?"
"Please let me out!"
"Better, but not good enough." He walked five more steps much to the dwarf's consternation. "All right, give me one good reason why I should let you out."
There was silence for a moment, then, "I'll starve if you don't."
Sláine thought about it for a moment. "Nope, not a good reason. One less thief in the world is a good thing, I think."
Five more steps. He stood under the stone arch, one foot on the drawbridge, one on the broch's threshold.
"Don't leave me!" Ukko wailed.
"One reason. That shouldn't be too difficult, should it?"
Silence.
"Got nothing to say?" Sláine called up.
"Every hero needs a sidekick, someone to record their heroic deeds otherwise who remembers them if you go around being a hero all by yourself? Come on, think about it Sláinie, who better to help you dodge your king's hunters and rescue fair maidens and stuff than a thief like me?"
"Pandering to my vanity? I don't think so."
"Okay, okay!" Ukko cried. "I know! I know! I've got it! You need me! See, I know this place like the back of my hand! You're a stranger but I know every inch of the Sourland inside out. I know where the Drunes are, but more importantly I know how to avoid them. You'll never make it more than a few miles without me!"
"I know I am going to regret this," Sláine muttered, turning back to climb the stairs and free the dwarf.
THE THIRD TRISKELL
CRONE
Sixteen
Dry Land
Sláine crushed the dead twig between his fingers. "This place is hellish, dwarf."
Ukko had, of course, lied through his teeth. He had no idea where they were, that much was painfully evident.
"I know, I know. It wasn't as if we had a choice though, your warpishness."
"I don't like it." He didn't say what he didn't like, because it was painfully obvious that the land around them had turned sour. He hadn't felt the presence of the Earth Mother in a full three months of wandering. He didn't like it at all. Danu had always been with him. He felt as if he was abandoning her, although a nagging voice at the back of his mind kept goading him on quietly, insisting that he was wrong, that it was the other way around, that she had left him... like all of the women in his life had.
The choice to turn south had not been an easy one to make.
The Land of the Young had always been his home. Leaving it behind just felt wrong and the wrongness of that decision was making itself apparent in every withered tree and parched meadow. Salt bubbled up from below ground, the earth itself rancid as if nature had become a plague, a pox on the Goddess's body.
It was as if they had stumbled into an endless winter where the Earth Mother had no chance to recover her strength in spring for a glorious summer, but instead wallowed in the depravity of winter as it sucked her dry.
"It is not like this where I come from."
"So you've said, Sláine, a land of milk and honey where the belly of the earth is the most beautiful thing in all creation, the birds fly backwards and the flowers are always in bloom."
"Stop being stupid, Ukko. This disturbs me. Where are the druids who tend to the land's needs? Where are the farmers who work the land, tending to the Goddess's flesh? This is wrong, dwarf. This is wrong on so many levels. Do these people not know what they are doing?"
"I don't think they have a choice, Sláine," Ukko said seriously. "You've seen them. They aren't like you or me. They live in fear. They are always looking nervously over their shoulders as if they expect someone to punish them for some imagined transgression. Well, maybe they are a little like you, because you are always looking over your shoulder as well."
"Then they should stand up for themselves against these cruel taskmasters, dwarf. No Celt should bow and scrape to another man. We are the Goddess's chosen people. We are proud, noble. We are the fiercest warriors, the most passionate lovers, the fastest friends."
"And you've got the thickest skulls," the dwarf muttered. "Take a look around you, Sláine. Do you think... Scratch that thought, of course you don't, that's why you have me. You saw them in Crag Furlough, Sláine. They're beaten men. They slouch around like empty shells sucked dry of vitality. That last village was a graveyard of the living where a town once stood. The place gave me the creeps."
"These are my people, Ukko. Do you expect me to just accept this... this abuse?"
The dwarf sighed. "No, I expect you to bring down a world of hurt on the oppressor's heads with that bloody great axe of yours."
For the first time in weeks Sláine smiled. "You said you wanted to chronicle the feats of a hero, little man. I'm just giving you something to write about."
"I was rather hoping I'd get to make most of them up, I have to admit," Ukko muttered under his breath.
They saw signs of another village a few miles down the road. The fields had been turned but the crop hadn't matured. A few brittle straws of wheat were broken, their seeds little more than hollowed out shells. White stones and flakes of flint were the only crop now.
"Smoke!" Sláine said, seeing a dirty grey plume rising in the sky. The road skirted the barren field but took them more than a mile out of their way. Eyes fixed on the ribbon of smoke, Sláine started to run. He vaulted over a low stile, cutting across the field.
"Slow down!" Ukko moaned, struggling over the stile. Sláine was already two hundred paces across the field by the time Ukko was on the other side. Ten steps on, his foot crunched down on one of the bigger shards of white rock, only it wasn't rock at all, it was a splinter of skull bone; the curve where the jaw met the head. Rotten teeth were still set in the bone. Sláine saw more and more white stones that weren't stone. He stopped running. He looked around the field taking in all the flecks of white on the churned brown of the earth. There were literally thousands and thousands of them.
He realised sickly what the real crop of this field was: bones.
It was a mass grave. Thousands of people were sewn across the soulless earth. They weren't buried. No effort had been taken to actually cover the dead with earth so that they might nourish Danu. The corpses had been scattered carelessly and left to be picked clean by the birds. The bones were white. This slaughter was not a new thing.