A Quantum Mythology (39 page)

Vic nodded. ‘But your mind will know,’ he told her. ‘It always knows.’

There were tears on her face now. She sat up. ‘I don’t want to be a slave. I don’t want to be vivisected. When the time comes, will you kill me?’ she asked earnestly through the tears.

Vic looked at her for a very long time. ‘No,’ he said eventually, holding her stare. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Fucking coward!’ she spat and turned away from him. ‘Get out.’

‘Talia!’

‘Now! Or are you determined to drive home the fact that I’m utterly powerless?’

Vic got up and headed for the door. He wanted to tell her that they were in a total surveillance environment. A panopticon. Whatever he said, Scab would find out. Vic would kill Talia if that was what it would take to prove himself to her, but he hid that decision deep down where Scab couldn’t find it with anything other than the most thorough mental audit. But he set certain parameters on what would need to happen before this decision – his resolve to kill Talia for her own sake – would come to the fore.

27

Ancient Britain

Fachtna stood transfixed, bathed in the red glow, looking at the flames. He was different now. Things didn’t make sense and hadn’t for quite some time, but what he was seeing now didn’t make sense even in terms of the transformed land, the land that had changed to suit the fevered nightmares inflicted on the Muileartach. This land that seethed and churned with new life. This land that he now served. There shouldn’t be any people left. There should only be the goddess’s children.

There were just enough roundhouses to form a small village. They had built a deep defensive ditch around them, then fed it with wood, peat, oil and other fuel. Then they set light to it, surrounding the village with a ring of fire. Behind the ring they had made a rough palisade wall of earth, stone and wood. It might have been enough to keep out some of the Muileartach’s smaller children, but the village should have fallen quickly. Instead one of her giant idiot children, something part-worm, part-slug and part-insect, lay across the burning ditch, patches of its flesh bubbling and bursting from the heat of the flames. Its head had destroyed part of the palisade.

The land around was so fecund with plant life – much of it animated – and blister-like growths in the earth itself gestating more monstrosities that it was difficult to tell what the land was like before the spawn came. Judging by the people manning the ramparts, he suspected it had been rich land and their granaries had been full. To protect themselves from the seeds in the air they would have needed their own wards, and powerful ones, for not even those of the
Ubh Blaosc
, gifted to his people by the Lloigor, long since gone, had been enough to fully protect him. Though he could still feel the war being fought within his body between the Lloigor magic and that of Muileartach.

Around him, the idiot living dead that followed him – though he was not sure if they obeyed him – swayed in the warm wind and the smoke from the fire. Fachtna felt some of his now-living armour grow deeper into his flesh. He had become used to the pain.

‘I am Fachtna, the Gael!’ he shouted.
I am Fachtna the outcast, Fachtna the
drui-
killer
,
he thought bitterly. ‘Why did you not flee when you could?’
And why do I care?
he wondered.

‘This is our home!’ one of the defenders answered. He was a fleshy man with no beard or moustache. He wore good armour, perhaps a little too small for him, though he had the air of a landsman rather than a warrior. He held a longspear and had a sword at his hip, but all of it looked somehow uncomfortable on him.

Fachtna studied him carefully, trying to decide if he carried the blood of the gods in his veins, but he was too far away to tell and the fire was already kicking up too many sparks to be sure even if he moved closer.

‘You cannot hold here!’ Fachtna told them. ‘The whole land is changing – you will be consumed, or changed!’

‘Like you?’ The man demanded. Fachtna noticed that more of the defenders were becoming interested in this exchange. Most were like the man he was speaking to, wealthy farmers wearing quality armour and carrying warriors’ weapons they did not know how to use.

‘I do not serve her in any way. I understand, and I would do you no harm, but you cannot stay here!’

‘You would do us no harm, but you would force us off our land!’ one of the other villagers shouted, a woman. She was not just fleshy, she was fat. Other than chiefs and the odd very successful merchant, there were few fat people in a land as harsh as this, not even in the richer farmlands of the south. He could see no children manning the palisades. This was also unusual – in times of warfare or raiding, the older children in a village would fight alongside their parents. The flames crackled and there was a popping noise. Fachtna wasn’t sure if it was a log snapping or a blister bursting on the worm-creature’s flesh, spewing more seeds into the air.

‘Look around you. Does this still look like your land? Tell me how you can farm this.’ The only sound was wood crackling in the flames. Even that was unsustainable. They would quickly run out of wood – they had to.

‘I am a warrior of great renown.’
Or I was before I betrayed my people and committed the worst crime possible.
‘To relate my many deeds to you would take more time than we have left.’ Fachtna knew that in the past he had been geased to enjoy the boasting part of a warrior introducing himself, but now he merely felt foolish. ‘Yet I think I would struggle to kill a creature such as this.’ He nodded towards the massive worm-creature.

‘Perhaps we are greater warriors than you,’ one of the other defenders shouted, a younger man than the first, he too was well fed. There was laughter from the defenders.

Fachtna looked down, considering the man’s words. ‘Perhaps you are. I have certainly been bested before.’ He looked up at the man. ‘But I do not think so. I think you made an agreement with something, a bargain, a sacrifice. I think you’ve grown fat on your betrayal, and I think you exist here on borrowed power.’

All of them were glaring at him now. He felt his living armour flex inside his flesh, responding to something unseen. It was sufficiently painful to make him grimace. The bargain had been struck far enough in the past that there was no guilt on the faces made red in the firelight. They had probably justified it to themselves a long time ago. Perhaps there had been a famine.

‘And while I have introduced myself to you, I still do not know who I speak with.’

‘We owe you nothing. You are a low thing that walks with the dead—’

‘Enough.’ Fachtna said it quietly, but he made sure his voice carried. ‘Why do you fools stay here?’

The fleshy man opened his mouth to retort angrily, then his face contorted and writhed unnaturally. Fachtna watched as his eyes went black.

‘We’ve been waiting for you.’ The man’s voice was different now. The words appeared to crawl up his contorted skin and out of his mouth, each one an effort. Fachtna knew that he now spoke with Crom Dhubh.

‘What do you want? You’ve lost. Look around you. Life has won out.’ Fachtna found it difficult not to smile. The people in the fort were moving differently now. Through the flame and smoke they shifted from side to side like predatory animals looking for an opening to strike. They had paid the price for their bargain. They had opened themselves to Crom, and now he would take what he was owed. Fachtna understood why they were fat now: for the same reason that he gorged himself before and after a fight. Crom would feed on them for power when he changed their bodies.

‘This isn’t about life or death. I am parent to these creatures as much as the Muileartach. The traitor to her kind is the Mother. Life is suffering, life is pain.’

Fachtna started laughing. ‘I should have known when I saw the wicker man. Is that it – the actions of a spiteful child writ large because you stumbled on power?’

‘You do not stumble on power like mine.’

Fachtna jerked his head around at the sound of the woman’s voice.

‘You seek it out.’ The other man uttered Crom’s words.

‘You foster it in you.’ Another of the villagers. They were starting to burn with an inner light.

‘Where you find it, you take it,’ a different villager intoned.

‘Why were you waiting for me?’ Fachtna asked.

The villager who had spoken first stepped onto the rampart. It looked as if there was fire under his skin, in his blood. His fat belly was deflating even as his legs swelled with new muscle. The man started to scream, and it sounded like his real voice now. Crom Dhubh had released control of the man’s speech but not his body. Fachtna would have felt sorry for him, but he was pretty sure there were no children in the village for a reason. He felt a sort of detached calmness descend over him as he stepped back and drew his sword. It shimmered until it became a white blur, a ghost in the night.

Fachtna glanced over at the reborn dead. They had regrown flesh, sucking the dirt from the earth and using it to make mockeries of life. They looked like hastily formed effigies of the men and women they had once been. Fachtna had no idea what they would do.

The gate spokesman was no longer fat as he leaped high into the air on new muscles. His body was changing shape even as his leap carried him over the burning ditch, his longspear pointed down at Fachtna. The other defenders were doing the same. They were in obvious agony as Crom Dhubh’s magic transformed them into more capable warriors.

Fachtna had all the time he needed. At the last moment he moved out of the way of the spear point. The villager who had done most of the speaking tried to shift the spear as he fell. Fachtna swung his sword two-handed and the blade cut through the man’s midriff before his feet touched the ground, bisecting him. Some of his flesh turned into glowing ashes, consumed by the magics of his transformation.

More of the villagers had leaped through the fire towards him. Fachtna spun and swung his blade through another. The reborn dead fell upon them, tearing the villagers apart even as they burned with an inner fire.

Fachtna wasn’t fighting. It felt more like a murderous dance. He found himself laughing as he spun and slashed. The air was full of sparks illuminating the alien landscape.

Too late, he looked up. Blackened flesh glowing from within, black eyes steaming, the figure dropped out of the sky. The spear pierced Fachtna’s flesh at the shoulder, running through his chest and out of his lower torso, pinioning him to the ground. Fachtna cried out. He was still human enough to feel the pain of iron and wood forced through his body.

The figure landed in front of him, stinking of burning fat. Fachtna felt hot fingers on the armour that had become his skin as the villager started to search him. With difficulty, Fachtna reached down and grabbed the haft of the spear that was pinning him to the ground. His fingers curled around the wood. He could feel the demon in it, put there with blood magic. His own blood flowed out of the wound and around the shaft of the spear, weakening and corroding the wood. He snapped the haft and staggered back, collapsing to his knees.

He felt hot fingers find the control rod Teardrop had given him. It was pushed through the back of his belt.

Fachtna reversed his grip on the haft of the broken spear, turned and rammed it up into the villager’s head, through the bottom of his jaw and into his brain in an explosion of sparks and papery ashes.

The cool ground came up to meet him as blackness filled his vision and he began to lose consciousness. His body, which now encompassed the living armour that had fused with him, responded to his last thought: to protect the control rod. It sank into his flesh, succumbing to the Muileartach’s power, reconfiguring itself into something resembling a cross with multiple crossbars. The brass-like metal became malleable and started to wrap itself around the back of Fachtna’s ribs and his spine.

The last thing he saw was the confused reborn dead moving between faintly human-looking piles of glowing ashes, disappointed at the lack of carrion to harvest for new flesh.

‘This is no way to behave,’ Bladud said.

Tangwen was forced to agree with him, but little was surprising to her these days. They had continued moving north, chased by the inexorable advance of Andraste’s spawn.

Bladud spoke to the people of any settlement they came to, asked them to gather all the food and livestock they could manage and join them. If they chose not to heed the warnings of what was coming, the Witch King burned their homes and took their food and livestock. This encouraged most of them to join the other survivors.

The bodies hanging from the trees had been flayed. Their heads were gone, and there was something else wrong with them that Tangwen could not quite put her finger on.

‘Their blood has been taken,’ Kush said in his deep, mellifluous voice. Germelqart was nodding in agreement. ‘Is this a thing your people do?’

‘No, we cut their heads off and drink ale from their hollowed-out skulls like normal people,’ Bladud said, and then looked somewhat irritated when Kush could not keep a smile from his face.

‘They have taken the heads,’ the tall black man pointed out. There were more than twenty decapitated bodies, a mixture of landsfolk and the warriors who were riding escort for them. They had been at the head of the massive ragged column when they stopped for the night. Someone had taken them from where they camped, either dead or alive, and carried them into the woods.

They had come to what appeared to be an uninhabited area of woods and shallow river valleys. To the north lay a wooded plateau. There was little evidence of settlements or farmlands, but it looked as though someone had claimed these lands as their own.

‘We will hunt them,’ Sadhbh said. Tangwen glanced over at the warrior, and the smile on the Iceni’s face only made Tangwen dislike her more. She wished she did not feel so indebted to the other woman for the bow. She also had to admit that Sadhbh was probably her equal, if not better, as a scout and hunter.

‘I would seek them as allies,’ the normally quiet Germelqart said. Kush raised an eyebrow and then nodded. This had been done right under the noses of the rest of Bladud’s forces.

‘I don’t think they are interested in being our allies,’ Nerthach said, scratching his beard.

‘They came in the night like cowards,’ Bladud spat. ‘They dared not face us.’

‘If this is their land, they have seen a massive army invade it. If they are fewer in number than us, they are forced to fight like this,’ Tangwen said, with no little exasperation in her voice.

‘Spoken like the child of a cowardly people,’ Sadhbh said. Tangwen bristled but did not rise to the insult.

‘Spoken like a shrewd and clever foe,’ Kush said. ‘And I have witnessed Tangwen’s bravery proven time and time again. All I’ve seen you do is sneak off into the woods.’

‘And return with game that you are happy enough to eat,’ Bladud said. ‘But Kush has the right of it – there’s enough fighting among ourselves.’

‘Who claims these lands?’ Tangwen asked. It was too far inland for her to know much about the local peoples.