Drag Hunt (13 page)

From other passages, strange whispers issued, while others still reeked of unfamiliar sour musky odours.

Cerridwen stopped and threw out her arms. The passage was lined with barred cells cut into the rock. “This is where we keep the monsters and misbegots,” she said, “and this is your stall.”

She thrust him into an empty cell with a hand in the small of his back and the bars clanged shut behind him, setting off a cacophony of howls, bays, barks and growls as things paced and rattled their stall doors around him.

Richard, face against the bars, peered into the shadows. “What... what’s down here?”

“Things that aren’t gods,” she said, “things we don’t want wandering around free. Things you don’t want to see. Things you wouldn’t want to see.” She paused, a mischievous smile playing across her petal soft lips. “Do you want to see?”

Richard shook his head in fear. “No.” Then, despite his terror, desperate to impress her, he blurted out, “Yes!”

She swung a skull lantern towards a barred cell. The swinging light set the shadows dancing wildly.

Richard screamed.

The last thing he heard as she left was Cerridwen’s scornful laughter. It tore him apart, as sure as any beast.

H
E MIGHT HAVE
been there minutes, or hours. Not days. No, not days, surely.

There were things down here, not just corporeal creatures, but creatures of ideas and concepts, on the edges of perception, that could not be bound by bars or chains. He’d noticed them before when Shu jolted his awareness and when he fell asleep in Nataero’s car. The rough stone beneath his feet vibrated with a rumble that he hoped was the Underground deep below, but he knew wasn’t.

Outside, in the passage, there was a flicker of light. He shuffled his way to the barred door, saw a floating light approach, and heard footsteps behind it.

“Hello?” Osiris stopped in front of his cell. “You. Shouldn’t you have a crop and a flail and one of those long beards?”

“The Egyptians imagined me after their own image. The myths aren’t the full story. They’re spin. PR. Just as this isn’t my true form. I’d show you, but I don’t have the gift of transformation like Cerridwen. Be thankful for that.”

“What do you want with me?”

Osiris smiled at the impudence. “You? Nothing. I came down here to feed Ammit.”

“Ammit?”

With a wave of his hand, Osiris sent the glowing nimbus to a nearby cell. Behind the bars, there stood a creature that should not exist. Richard saw a large crocodilian snout, larger than it had any right to be, questing towards the god with a mucus-ridden snuffle. Behind it, acquisitive reptilian eyes watched the pair, while the clawed front paws of a lion pawed the ground of the passage within its reach. In the shadows, its rear legs were heavy and covered with thick hide, like a hippopotamus.

“The Eater of Souls,” Osiris said by way of introduction. “Ammit sat with me in the Hall of Judgement, devouring those unworthy to join me in the afterlife. When the Great Usurper’s winged abominations swept across our realms, she was lost in the fall.

“For years she had to fend for herself. They found her roaming the world, devouring souls indiscriminately. They brought her here for her own good, and for that of humanity. Until the Halls of Ma’at are open once again, Ammit is a danger.”

Osiris reached into the pocket of his jacket, retrieved something small and tossed it towards the creature, like a doggy snack. The elongated jaws caught it and snapped shut on the feeble glowing gobbet. Ammit shuffled against the bars, hungry for more.

“The soul of a small time gangster and rapist,” said Osiris. “It’s the souls that concern me. The halls of Ma’at have been sealed and empty since the Exile and since then the Great Usurper has sought to gather all the souls to himself, for what purpose I cannot say, but in recent times souls have not been passing on. Good and bad, they have been backing up. Something has changed.

“And now there are pantheons that seek to trade in these surplus human souls, indiscriminately, the good and the bad, like a celestial commodity. There are others who buy them, flensing the souls, sifting and refining them to a concentrate, to make a form of synthetic Ambrosia. Others traffic it. It’s impure. It’s addictive. An opiate of the gods. It hurts me to see it. It’s what they feed Bran to keep him quiescent.

“Lugh came to me with a proposition. Should I choose to aid them, and their plans succeed, then I shall once more be able to sit in judgement and all souls will come to me, as they should.”

“And you’re down here justifying yourself to me because...?”

“I don’t have to justify myself. I am a god. You are a mortal.”

Richard curled his lip. “Well, that’s a parasitic relationship.”

Osiris cocked his head. “I was going to say symbiotic.”

“You prey on us.”

“You pray on
us
.”

“Without humans, what would you be?” said Richard.

“Without us, what would
you
be? Do you shape us, or do we shape you?” Osiris was amused by the question.

He turned and looked Richard straight in the eyes. He felt as if Osiris were examining him under a microscope, that nothing lay hidden to his gaze. “You have an interesting soul. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I don’t threaten. I judge. You are young enough that the balance has not yet tipped. Watch the weight of your heart, Richard Green.” He began to walk away, retreating into the dark. He called back, “Make sure it does not grow too heavy for, if it does, I shall be waiting for you.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Coyote on the Warpath

C
OYOTE PACED ABOUT
Weyland’s lock-up. He scratched his head. “How is it that Richard is a worry now? He’s gone. The choice was his.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Weyland. “He’s been taken.” He sniffed the air again. “You smell that?”

Coyote gave him a quizzical look and tilted his head back. His nostrils flared as he inhaled. There was a smell. He didn’t know about mechanics or forges; he just assumed it was some kind of air freshener. After all, the place certainly needed it.

“Bergamot and vanilla,” Weyland informed him. “Cerridwen’s essences.”

“And who’s Cerridwen?” The name meant nothing to Coyote.

“Cerridwen, of the Celtic pantheon. She is a threefold goddess of rebirth and transformation and she is a member of the Club.”

In other circumstances the thought of a threefold goddess—maiden, mother, crone—would have stirred Coyote’s baser instincts, but today he wasn’t interested, which was a first.

“They have my younger brother, penis,” he said in a petulant tone. “They have him confined in a box and want to use him... force him to conceive something. Nataero mentioned a birthing.” He pulled a face.

Weyland went pale and sat down heavily on the workbench, crushed by the pressure of a sudden guilt.

He hung his head, unable to look Coyote in the eye. “I am afraid this is all partly my fault.”

“What?” That was the last thing Coyote expected.

Weyland sighed. “Cerridwen was the keeper of the Cauldron of Rebirth and Transformation, once used by Bran to resurrect slain warriors, until it was destroyed. A year ago, someone contacted me. A patron who wished to remain anonymous, wished to know if I could make an object to certain... specifications.”

“Well, you’re a forge god,” said Coyote, unsure where this was going.

“They wanted a bespoke piece made. It was a component, a part of a larger design, although what that was, I had no idea. I was flattered that they asked me, for it took a great deal of craft to forge. It was a challenge. I rose to it; they accepted my workmanship and I thought nothing more of it.

“When we last met, at Hillstone Howe, I went in search of the blade that killed my kin. I visited fellow smiths, Lepsch of the Circassian pantheon, Brontes, Hasemeli of the Hittites, Ogun and Ilmasepp. Some told tales of similar commissions, each piece different. Each by and of itself was odd, but innocuous enough. Commissioned in secret by a third party, one of the Slavic gods, we never knew our true patron, or their purpose. For what did we care? We were pleased to show off our skills, to have them acknowledged. None of us knew then that the others had been commissioned. Pooling our knowledge now, it’s clear that we were part of the secret reconstruction and recasting of Cerridwen’s cauldron.”

He lifted his eyes and looked at Coyote.

“That’s what all this is about. The cauldron is a symbol of the womb, of female fertility, a vessel in which things can be born and reborn again. Your member is a potent male symbol. I believe now that they mean to bring the two together, powered by the ichor sacrifice of my kin, to give form to this...
birthing
.”

“It’s a primal act of creation.” Coyote shook his head in wonder. “And that they dare all this in secrecy, without the knowledge of other pantheons, without the guidance of the All-Father creators, and with my penis! Unbelievable. Although they do have Osiris, who is a god of fertility, too. They said his part was crucial.”

“Aye,” said Weyland staring at the ground, as if he might scry the future there. “But to what end? Some elder entity with a prior claim to the universe, who might, reborn, overthrow the Great Usurper itself? Or perhaps some assassin god-killer, so they can eliminate their own competition? Who can say? The minds of gods are multifarious and perverse.”

“Old Man Shu hinted at something that threatens to warp the Tapestry. I see it now. A pattern forming from the slaying of your kin, spreading out, warped by the reconstruction of this cauldron. Richard was a loose thread. If we hadn’t have found him—” Coyote sagged with realisation. “Wait. If Richard didn’t leave of his own free will, I’m still bound to him. There are still laws.”

“I thought you didn’t care for rules?”

“He caught me in a moment of weakness. There are some things that should not be broken. A personal oath is one, the connection between a man and his manhood is another.”

“Richard might have to wait. We have to find out what they are doing first.”

“Back at the Club, I overheard the one called Gobannon say something about an old dock?”

“I know it. There have been psychic ripples from there recently, but nothing I thought untoward. If their scheme is this far advanced, then the place will be guarded.”

“Well, we do have one advantage,” said Coyote, brightly. “Nataero told me they need me alive, at least until the ritual is complete, so that my younger brother would live, too. That was why they wanted me out of the way in the belly of a wyrm.”

Weyland gave him a weak smile. “They underestimated you.”

Coyote chuckled. “They always do.”

He was silent for a moment, lost in thought, then Coyote’s face split like a ripe fruit, revealing a pithy grin.

“I have a plan to get us in there, but first,” he said, holding up a finger, “we need an elk.”

S
HORTLY AFTER SIX
in the evening, a fleet of black cars left the Club. Behind their mirrored glass, no drivers sat, yet still they drove east, the direction of the rising sun, towards a new dawn.

At the same time, a flock of ravens assembled from the leaden clouds that hung over London. They swarmed round the Club and headed out over the cars, swirling and surging in synchronous flight, pouring eastwards like a living entity.

As the murderous murmuration continued down the Thames, the ravens at the Tower of London abandoned their posts to join their brethren.

Richard was sat in one of the cars with Cerridwen and Lugh. She was in her mother guise again. The scent of vanilla and bergamot that he’d recently found so enticing, he now found cloying in the close confines of the vehicle.

Cerridwen was preoccupied. She seemed nervous and her psychic grip on him had loosened slightly.

Lugh sat in the seat facing her; he leant forwards and took her hands in his. He spoke to her calmly and softly.

“The time approaches. Gobannon is there, overseeing the final preparations. Morrigan’s battle ravens and Pwyll’s hounds patrol the site. Decades of planning and here we are, on the brink of our achievement, one Bran said couldn’t be done. You should be proud. You brought us to this and you shall take us further.”

He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them.

She gave him a distracted smile.

T
HE FLEET OF
cars pulled into the yard outside the abandoned warehouse, bought and owned by a front company for the Club. Already, the ravens were flocking on the building’s roof, their cawing filling the air. Gods and goddess deplaned from the cars as if they were celebrities arriving at some red carpet event. Mortal thralls of the gods, the servants and staff of the Club, provided another level of security.

Cerridwen got out of the car, Lugh escorting her, a hand on her back. The strain of responsibility showed on her face, all the years of searching for the scattered pieces of her cauldron, commissioning the missing pieces to remake the whole. Then there was the refining of the rituals so that it would bypass the need for the All Fathers, from whom all things came, then finding gods who were willing to die in order to fuel it, and last but not least a potent enough male member capable of fulfilling the role the cauldron and the ritual required of it. It was just unfortunate that the only viable organ belonged to a trickster, and there was just no way to deal with them. All this involved delicacy, secrecy, and a number of conspirators working quietly and covertly below the notice of the Farm’s protectorate. But, here, now, at the end, it all came down to Cerridwen. She sighed and tugged absentmindedly on the psychic leash.

Richard followed behind, like a duckling blithely following its mother.

Osiris and Morrigan came after, the goddess of war’s eyes ever alert; flashing up to where her battle ravens kept watch on the rooftops.

Pwyll’s red-eyed hunting hounds gathered round their master as he stepped from his car. He grinned, rubbed heads, patted backs and greeted favourites, before ordering them off. The Lord of Otherworld had a role to play in the night’s proceedings, too.