The Sword of Feimhin (44 page)

‘Reproduced?' Penny was reluctant to visit that terrifying scene, even in her mind. The creature of smoke with all the heads ate people up. Then she had seen how it had broken up so each head was surrounded by its own little cloud of smoke.

‘But how could that monster possibly serve you?'

‘You saw it give rise to sixty-four beings, each the fruits of its original hunger. And each of those began the cycle again.' He paused, allowed her to look directly into his all-black eyes. ‘There is a beautiful, if cruel, mathematics to it, Penny, as you will already have calculated in your extraordinary mind.'

‘The sixty-four will give rise to four thousand and ninety-six.'

‘When the cycle will begin again … and repeat itself again and again.'

‘The people, the army, will stop it.'

‘Do you really think that their guns, their machines of war, will overcome the power of magic?'

‘That's what you – through the Akkharu – are creating here. You are creating a weapon of magic.'

‘You do not disappoint me.' He – it, perhaps – smiled. It was a frightening smile.

‘How can you do these cruel things?'

‘Do you imagine that humans are not cruel?'

‘I thought … I thought you were offering me something wonderful.'

‘Oh, but it will be wonderful. You will discover truths that even your most learned would have died for.'

Penny didn't want to be part of some plan that hurt people. She found it hard to think. She didn't know how to deal with what was happening. She felt a clutch of panic invade her stomach. Tears welled up into her eyes.

‘Are you concerned about your City Above – the city you have been venerating in your art?'

‘Yes.'

‘I will save your city – if you will serve me.'

The tears were streaming down her cheeks.

‘I don't want them to hurt Gully.'

‘Your street urchin friend?'

‘I know they're hunting for me – the Skulls. He'll be much easier to find. Our Place won't be safe for him any more. I don't want anybody to hurt Gully.'

He turned those terrible all-black eyes on hers. ‘And if I promise to save your friend?'

She hesitated. She could barely whisper the words: ‘I … I will do what you want me to do.'

‘That can't be an easy thing for you to promise.'

‘No.'

She felt so faint she might have died. She might have preferred it if she had died.

He put his arm around her shoulders. He was still wearing Father's body. Neither of them spoke. Then the landscape disappeared. They were hovering as if weightless under a black sky over a white empty space. She saw him extend large diaphanous wings. The wings should have shocked her, but she accepted them without question.

‘We're flying!'

There was a part of her that exulted in the fact that she was flying through veils of light and dark, oblivious of what was to become of her or where she was heading.

Kate attempted to open her eyes, but her lids were sealed shut. A jolt of alarm shot through her. She struggled to scream, but her lungs felt solid, as if laden with concrete.
Help me … Help me … I can't breathe
. A well of nausea rose from her stomach. She needed to retch, but her stomach, her gullet, even her mouth were full …
Not full … My mouth, my throat … they're blocked
.

Memories of where she was …

Oh, lord! I'm back in the Momu's chamber. I'm trapped within the roots of the One Tree
.

The need to scream rose in her again.

Those things … the creatures
… they had fed her and kept her oxygenated. She could still feel them crawling through her open mouth. A stream of tiny living creatures, packing her mouth, lungs.

She was attempted to gasp for breath, but she couldn't even do that. She could neither move, nor retch nor
breathe. All she could do was try to suppress her rising panic. She had to think, to remember what had happened. The dying Momu … The journey the Land of the Dead, the terrifying cathedral of lost souls, the serpent-dragon Nidhoggr.

She screamed her need with every fibre of her being.

The power in her exploded. Her body twisted and turned, writhing in a furnace of green flame. She tore herself out of the blazing fragments of dirt and roots, vomiting the writhing a stream of living bodies out of her stomach and gullet and mouth. It took several wretched minutes just to clear her vital organs and tubes. All the while she huddled in the dirt on hands and knees, her fingers clawing the hot ashes of her own conflagration from her face. Her mouth and nostrils streamed as the final creatures were ejected in fits of retches and coughs and sneezes. Her clothes had been ripped to shreds. Staggering to her feet she felt as thin as a scarecrow, but inside her, in every tissue and organ, every living cell, the Second Power was rampant. When she gazed at her hands and turned them over, they were marbled with livid green. Her flesh glowed and pulsed with the power of the oraculum.

But there was something still to do.

She tore away all that was left of the singed rags that still
clothed her and, still gasping, she looked around, flaring her oraculum to illuminate the fire-blackened chamber. The grey, flat outline of the birthing pool and the decayed remnants of what had once been the fleshy branches and roots of the Tree were still. A tremble, registered through her bare feet, warned her that the walls and streets and caverns of Ulla Quemar were collapsing. The city was being reclaimed by the ocean that had once succoured it.

I must act … Do it – now!

She put as much power as she could command into her voice: ‘Elaru! Are you still here? We have little time.'

No reply, but why should she be surprised. Was not Elaru the alter ego of the spirit of duplicity, Urale?

‘If you abandon me now, I will feed you, the scheming pair of you, to the hunger of Nidhoggr. You will be permanently subsumed to chaos.' Kate felt the power of the oraculum flare again, but this time it exploded throughout the chamber, invading roots, trunk, branches. She called out again.

‘Granny Dew!'

Kate remembered: she had subsumed the soul spirit of the dying Momu. She looked at the chamber, where the green pulse of life was surging back into the One Tree. Where was the body? With a cry of panic she scoured the reviving roots with her oraculum. A whirlwind of green swept over the ground, blowing fragments of burnt wood, ash and scorched dirt away.

There!

Kate stood before a pit in the dirt, where the giant figure lay withered, still half enmeshed in the burnt and shrivelled roots. She looked so wan, so unmoving, she could have been dead already. But Kate would have known, she would have sensed the death of the Momu within her soul spirit.

‘I … I don't understand.'

‘But how do I make that happen?

Kate moaned with frustration. ‘For goodness sake – what am I to do?'

She threw herself onto the body within the pit of dirt and ash and hugged it to her breast. She attempted to drag the Momu towards the pool, but even in her emaciated state, the Momu was too heavy for Kate to move without help. She sat in the cinders and dirt and wept.

‘Help me – Elaru! Granny Dew! Somebody!'

A dishevelled and emaciated body squeezed through the broken doors and into the chamber. Kate's eyes glanced across the grey murk of the soot-filled air, unable to make out who it was that was wading across the birthing pool, followed by a rising wash of sea water – the ocean that was now flooding the streets and hidden chambers of Ulla Quemar.

‘Greeneyes!'

Kate wasn't sure if she really had heard the voice. It was little more than a moan creeping into her terrified mind. But it was a familiar voice, soft and musical.

‘Shaami? Shaami – is it you?'

As he came closer, the face and the eyes looked like Shaami's, but there was little resemblance to the childish face Kate remembered. This figure was taller, the features thin and wasted. And yet the voice …

‘Shaami! You've survived.'

He had waded to her side, but looked too exhausted to clamber out of the pool. He looked around, a mixture of grief and wonder filling his turquoise eyes.

‘Is anyone else left?'

‘Some warriors, they are hard to kill. When they went berserk and sacrificed all, I hid and waited. I waited for so long I had given up hope.'

Kate reached out to help the dripping figure to climb out of the water. ‘Oh, come here. Let me hug you.'

‘You are afire, beloved Greeneyes. The light of your bravery is illuminating the entire chamber.'

Kate was blinking away tears, thinking furiously. ‘If the Momu must produce a daughter, then you … It must also need you, Shaami?'

‘Yes, I must be the seed.'

His body felt as light as a ghost as Kate threw her arms around him, one naked emaciated body embracing another. He sighed. ‘Is she … Is the Momu … ?'

‘No – her spirit survives in me.' Kate released Shaami
from her embrace, then took hold of his skinny shoulders. ‘Do you have any strength left? Can you help me to get the Momu into the pool?'

‘I will try.'

As they attempted to slide and manoeuvre the long, wasted body over the ash-strewn ground, the reclaiming ocean came to their aid. It flowed around the body of the Momu, lifting it so it became almost as weightless as her dying spirit. As the Momu floated into the pool, the crystal about her breast began to glow, faintly at first, but in slowly rising pulses.
The crystal!
Kate switched the focus of her oraculum onto the crystal as she and Shaami waded out into the middle, where the water was also beginning to pulse in time with the crystal.

‘Shaami – help me to bring her head against my breast.'

Kate felt the body of the Momu come to rest against her own, her upper back against Kate's belly and legs, and her brow just below Kate's chin. Cradling the elongated head within the embrace of her arms, her hands cupped the Momu's chin, Kate bent forward to kiss the brow. Then she turned the oraculum inwards, searching for the soul spirit of the Momu within her own being. She found it, sensing little more than a whisper of life. Kate kept a firm hold of that wisp of hope at the focus of her being, then turned the force of her oraculum onto the Momu's crystal again, pouring green fire into its pulsing matrix.

She whispered, her lips close to the brow, her mind in touch with the mind of the Momu. ‘The Tree of Life is
cured. Here in the chamber, the One Tree is recovering. Now you must find what little strength is left to do what is necessary.'

She heard Shaami's cry.

A turquoise light diffused into the water around the figure of the Momu.

Kate felt a shiver run though the flesh of the Momu as it withered and dissolved, but it wasn't the release of death. In that same moment Kate felt her own soul spirit swell and grow, even as the face she cupped started to shrink. She watched it become tiny, vulnerable within the fold of her cupping fingers. The entire pool glowed with a shimmering mother-of-pearl opalescence.

Kate felt her own being pervaded by the thrill of change. All around her the water of the birthing pool became alive with darting movement and an apparently rapacious feeding. A swarm of tiny beings darted everywhere like tadpoles, mouths clicking in a feeding frenzy on the crustaceans and other tiny creatures that had formerly been food for Kate. Tiny limbs whirred with movement, their bodies covered with the glittering reflections of what looked like shells.

‘What are they, Shaami?'

‘Milawi.'

The darting, hunting movements were all around and over Kate's skin. She recalled the discussion around the pool in the City of the Ancients. The Gargs had called the Cill the people of the shore. If ever she needed reminding,
the Cill were not human. They were an amphibian race that were one not only one with the shore, but also with the tide. Kate heard the faintest of keening sounds. It might have been the beginnings of the song of the Cill, but this was more primitive, a sound made through gills between creatures bearing shiny carapaces, with the big eyes of octopuses and tiny feeding tentacles.

Then she heard a different cry – a deeper, strangely musical one. She could not fail to recognise a baby's cry.

‘Oh, blessed mother!'

Kate was cradling the New Momu, a strange and willowy baby, in her arms. Already it was as big and as heavy as a human child of two years. In the background Kate heard a growling acknowledgement emerge from Granny Dew.

Kate said: ‘Did she know, the Momu, before … ?'

The new Momu!

Kate felt her body rise as the pool deepened with the incoming tide. She threw her arms around the baby, still curled up in its foetal embrace with its eyes tight shut, the Momu's crystal dangling around the baby's throat.

‘Shaami, you might survive the ocean, but I won't – and
I doubt that she would at this stage. We have to get out of here.'

The head and shoulders of Shaami surfaced beside Kate. The delicate fan-like fronds were opened wide over the dome of his head, gills that enabled him to breathe under water, now sheening with rainbow reflections like a freshly opened shell. His turquoise eyes were shining with panic. ‘I fear there is no way out. The chambers that would normally allow entrance or exit are all flooded. The water seals have lost their purpose.'

Kate heard an almighty crack, followed by a resounding, echoing thunder. She turned to discover a squat triangular shadow lift a heavy staff in a grimy fist. Granny Dew struck the stony wall of the cavern with her staff again, pausing a moment as if harking to the thunderous echoes for signs that only her ears were attuned to. She struck the wall a third time. There was a much louder, thunderous crack and the wall of the cavern split open, the rocks cleaving into a fissure wide enough to allow entry. But entry to what?

<
Pah
!>

The all-black eyes in that heavily lined face glowered back at Kate and Shaami and the newborn Momu. A wider glance around the Momu's chamber warned Kate that the roots of the One Tree were writhing and moving, the trunk and the boughs filling and swelling, the fleshy leaves sprouting into new life. She glimpsed the presence of others: a new danger breaking through into the chamber from the ruined city.

‘But where can we go?'

‘What?'

Kate felt a powerful body crash into her own. An arm, hard as iron and carapaced with a thick iridescent shell, lifted her off her feet. Her breath was squeezed from her lungs. Turning to look behind her she saw the ugly, elongated skull of a Cill warrior, its eyes glaring with madness. It thrashed out with its webbed feet and one free arm, hauling her through the water of the pool into which the roots of the One Tree were already invading, quickly, thickly, as if intent on filling the entire chamber before it was filled by the arriving ocean.

‘Shaami! The baby!'

‘Greeneyes!'

Thrashing within the iron grip of the warrior, Kate was forced to hold her breath as she was borne through the widening fissure, already several feet under water. As her terror rose, her face submerged within the moving torrent, she heard a musical exclamation, mind-to-mind. It didn't sound like Shaami's voice. The mind she sensed was inchoate, a confusion of curiosity and terror and dawning awareness. Kate had been expecting the growth to be more gradual, more like a human baby only recently emerged from its mother's womb, its mind empty of anything other
than the need for nourishment, love, sleep. But this baby was already different and much more aware of the world – a fury of growing sentience.

Kate's face broke the surface of the water and she gasped for breath, aware that they were being swept along through a system of winding tunnels. Still gripped by the powerful arm of the warrior, they were carried along by the churning rush of water. But she had not been harmed, if anything the warrior's arm was holding her head above the racing current. Was it possible that the warrior had recovered his senses with the birth of the new Momu? That he was in fact protecting the baby and the nurturing arms that held it – Kate herself?