The Fire Opal (28 page)

“There are wheels and pipes in a room connected to the chapel of the frozen mothers,” Gudrun said. “And a lot in the vestibule that leads to Uria’s lair, guarded by the spiders and that other creature. But without a narcotic on the air current, it is too dangerous a place to go.”

“Danu gave me something,” I said. “This shawl is woven with true firelight and can even ignite without injuring me if I need it to. I will look in the vestibule, and you two go to the other room.”

We crept quietly out into the corridor and to our respective places to search. At the threshold of the vestibule, I stepped into a shadow. I rubbed one of the beads on my shawl, and it glowed, illuminating everything around me in vague reddish light. There were dozens of defunct rust-encrusted wheels, warped wood pieces and metal pipes. The spiders with the women’s faces stared at the red light, paralyzed. The chimera awakened and turned, looking wide-eyed at the redness, which soon faded. Feeling bold, I entered farther into the vestibule and was about to rub the bead again for another moment of light when I felt a succinct, powerful blow at the back of my neck and an explosion of astonishing pain. Everything faded to black.

CHAPTER 23

I
awakened in a torrent of confusion, shaky and nauseated.

I turned toward a blur of brightness and focused until I saw a log burning false fire, and I thought for a moment that I was in the bedroom where I had stayed and the snow had fallen. My nerves began to prickle when something moved. On the floor, the fleshy cord snaked and slid, knotting and unknotting itself, winding and unwinding in a pile. Attached to it was Uria’s emanation, bent over my shawl, examining it cautiously. Sensing I was awake, her head whipped around and she peered at me with her falcon eyes. The shawl was all that might protect me from her, and it was out of my reach.

The flesh walls around us began to breathe and contract.

The emanation did not move its mouth, the voice low
and booming and disembodied as she asked, “Weren’t you told not to trespass here?”

“Yes, Goddess.”

“What were you looking for?”

“I was looking for you, Goddess,” I said.

She paused as if considering something, and then asked, “Where did you go when you left the barge?”

“I tried to escape. I’ve always hated Tom Cavan. His mother brought me here under false pretenses. I never wanted to marry him, Goddess. I tried to find the Holy Isles.”

“Did you reach them?”

“No, but I saw one of Danu’s servants, a Swan Woman. She sent me back here.”

The emanation loomed suddenly very close, her golden eyes large and staring. But it was the cord of flesh that struck me as the more sentient part of Uria, quivering and attentive. The emanation at some moments looked like nothing more than a doll. The flesh cord brushed against my leg, and my nerves prickled cold, my body stiffening so intensely that I could not breathe. The shawl was too far away for me to reach.

Pit them against each other, I thought, remembering Danu’s words.

“Tom has gone to retrieve a very valuable weapon, but he made me promise not to tell you.”

The emanation deflated slightly for a moment, then swelled up, and the disembodied voice boomed, “Why are you telling me?”

“Because I hate him, Goddess. He has trapped my
mother’s and sister’s ghost souls in two black iron boxes. I have come to you to ask you to release them, and I will do anything for you.”

The cord of flesh shivered, and traces of foaming saliva appeared at the corners of the emanation’s mouth.

Her voice tolled like a low bell of doom as she asked, “Where has he gone to find the weapon?”

“This place,” I said, my hand shaking as I reached into my pocket for the other map.

The emanation grabbed it, and her fleshy cord rose up in a high undulation, then slapped the ground like a heavy whip.

She held the map near the blue fire and studied it.

Something occurred to me. “His mother is also trying to help him. He wants to be a god, you see. He wants to usurp you.”

For a moment, the fleshy cord itself seemed to dis integrate into particles. I remembered what Danu had said about anger weakening Uria, and I took it further. “Tom’s mother is guarding my mother and sister in the iron boxes. It was originally her idea to betray you. He has also persuaded some of the vulture women. He says he will have the weapon soon and he will be a god.”

The fleshy cord and emanation both began to shudder uncontrollably. Suddenly a deafening crack sounded from the other side of the lair, and I saw ice thawing and dripping at an unnatural rate. All I could assume was that the heat of Uria’s rage was melting the cocoon. At the same instant, I heard ice howl and break outside from
the barge, groaning as it crashed into the sea, its echoes causing the floor and walls to shudder.

I watched with awe as Uria’s original body, releasing gusts of steam, broke free of the frozen bed. The ice frosting her hair and clothes melted and trickled away. She was more massive than the emanation, standing and struggling to move her limbs, still wounded with red and open sores that Danu had inflicted seven centuries before. The life went out of the emanation. It remained attached to her by the long cord, floating and bobbing above, like a balloon. Uria noticed the crystal apple in its cage of threads meant for the Fire Opal. She stared horrified at it, then tore it out and threw it against the wall, shattering it. She seemed, in her swollen fury, to have completely forgotten me.

Making a horrific noise and clutching the map, Uria moved heavily out of the lair. I grabbed the shawl, then followed as she stormed clumsily through the vestibule. The vulture women who were still true to her flanked and swarmed around her. I watched as she made her way through the corridors, groaning like the ice around her barge. In slow motion, and with a low-pitched, drawn-out roar, she ordered the barge steered south and inland toward Rosscoyne.

Uria knocked down the door of Mrs. Cavan’s room and grabbed the sleeping woman by the hair, dragging her after.

When the boat was close enough to shore, the giant Uria walked across the rocks still dragging Tom’s mother, who kept screaming out her son’s name.

I ran out to one of the decks, where I found Gudrun, who handed me the shifts and veils meant for Mam and Ishleen. They folded up quite small, and I hid them in the pocket where I had carried the Fire Opal.

“All the girls have laid the ethereal dresses over the ice carvings of their mothers,” she said excitedly. Then, eyes opening wide, she pointed out past my shoulder toward Ard Macha. The mist that usually encased the ice barge had broken up and dissipated, and from the decks where we stood, we could now see Uria climbing the hill to Rosscoyne. I told Gudrun that she should get a group of tundra and ash girls to help her unhinge the dormitory of their mothers’ bodies and let it fall into the water. Just as she ran off to do this, I saw Wheeta.

“Get girls to help you prepare a group of small boats so everyone can flee into the surrounding water and wait there for their mothers’ ghost souls in the dresses to float down to them!”

I rushed inside, back to the vestibule, where I breathed on my shawl. The garment ignited, and immediately I saw the triple spiral on a wheel glowing red in response to the fire. The spiders crouched in a back corner looking for refuge in a shadow.

The firelight illuminated the face of the chimera, and with a shock I recognized for the first time who he was: Michael Cavan, Tom’s father.

“Mr. Cavan!” I said. “How did this happen?”

He looked sadly at me in his bizarre form. “I am too ashamed to say.”

“You don’t have to. I think I know, and I am very sorry for you.”

I struggled to twist and turn the wheel from its locked position. “The awful magic is sustained here because of this wheel,” I told him.

“Let me help you, Maeve,” Mr. Cavan said.

In order to melt some of the ice, I rubbed a bead and held fire directly up to the wheel, so that the frost disintegrated and dripped away from it like a waterfall. When we tried to turn it again, it gave suddenly, with a great hissing exhalation accompanied by gusts of mist and condensation. The ice-locked walls began to dribble and steam, and release eerie, echoing screeches.

“Come with me,” I said.

Encased in my shroud of red and orange flames, I moved through the corridors of rapidly melting ice. Through a big arch in the passageway, I saw the hull that comprised the dormitory of mothers adrift in the tide, and felt a pang of joyous satisfaction. In spite of the wetness everywhere, numerous self-contained fires broke out as I passed. Mr. Cavan followed closely after, breathing noisily, awkward on his four thin, stiff legs.

I got on the floor in Mrs. Cavan’s room and searched under the bed, but the iron boxes were not there.

“Tom has put my mother’s and sister’s ghost souls into two iron boxes,” I told Mr. Cavan. “I’ve got to find them.”

He helped me search, tossing things aside, pulling drawers from bureaus and emptying them.

The fire was overtaking the corridors, and even Mrs. Cavan’s room was now going up in flames. “We can’t stay here, Maeve,” Mr. Cavan said.

The smoke began to blind him and burn his eyes, and he gasped, choking for breath. I grabbed a folded blanket off the bed, and as I offered it to him to breathe through it to block the smoke, something fell to the floor: the two boxes.

“Mr. Cavan, I have them!” I cried out.

We rushed out the nearest open arch into the clearer air of the deck.

Most of the ancient ghost souls from the statues on the outer deck fled upward into the sky like startled herons, but some floated just above the dripping statues, then dispersed in the firelight.

A school of misbegotten mermaids, panicking at the chaos and disaster, swam in undulating trails into the distant water and disappeared beyond the mist. That’s when, to my relief, I saw the tundra and ash girls standing in little boats on the water, drifting to a safe distance from the barge.

As their boats rose and dropped on the massive waves, the girls began singing “The Canticle of Fire,” their arms open as they gazed upward. I braved the flames and ran to the entrance of the chapel of the frozen mothers. Looking in, the floors covered in melting ice, I saw clouds of light releasing from collapsing ice figures, wriggling and finding their way into the ethereal clothes. As the ghost souls streamed steadily out wearing their pale, glimmering ethereal shifts, they floated down upon their daughters, embracing them in particles and light.

Seeing this, I was flooded with hope. “Mam! Ishleen!” I said quietly to the boxes. “I’m going to see you both soon.”

I looked toward Rosscoyne bog. Vultures were circling and screeching wildly, many of them departing in terror. I stood and bent into the wind, and it lifted me and carried me a few feet above the water until I reached the shore. I climbed the hill quickly and saw Tom and Uria facing each other at either side of the bog. Uria still had hold of Mrs. Cavan, who cried out now and again in pain. Tom stood tensely in a defensive posture, filthy with peat and bog water, while embers flew wildly around Uria.

“Get away from this bog, Tom Cavan!” Uria’s demand boomed across the landscape.

“I won’t,” he shouted back.

“I have your mother here, and she will suffer if you do not go.”

“I’m not going,” he said matter-of-factly.

In a sudden fit of rage, Uria tossed Mrs. Cavan into the bog.

Tom reacted very little, only to take on an even more defensive stance, never taking his eyes off Uria.

Swans circled and screeched, slews of them coming in from the western sea along with herons and gulls. Falling feathers and floss met the fire around Uria, singeing to ash and floating away.

To my shock, the wind caught my skirts and lifted me high on the air. The shawl began to burn, so I was encircled in an aura of fire. The wind carried me until I was floating directly above Uria and Tom. Both looked up, in
complete shock. Tom was too dumbfounded to move, while Uria grabbed for me several times. But the wind held me aloft just out of her reach. In her frustration, the skin of her face and arms began to blister and scorch.

“The ancient weapon, the Answerer, is not here in this bog,” I called down to them. “Danu’s return to Ard Macha is imminent.”

“Maeve O’Tullagh!” Tom cried out. “You will suffer for this!” Seeing him so distracted and off his guard, Uria stepped across the bog, lifted Tom and hurled him into the peat where she’d thrown his mother. Sparks flew from her arm. Watching him sink, she fumed and her hair burst into a crown of fire.

Soon Uria’s entire body was engulfed in flames. She stood with her arms raised, becoming less and less substantial, until all that was left of her was her spinal column, a massive blackened relic lying on the earth.

I was surprised by the pity I felt for Uria, blundering monster that she was, helpless against her own nature.

I descended slowly from the air, and the flames on my shawl went out. The iron boxes I held sprang their lids, and as Mam and Ishleen issued forth, I covered them immediately in the shifts and veils. They embraced me, two spangled, animated ghosts.