The Sword of Feimhin (39 page)

For a time she felt overwhelmed by it all and so she sat down, cross-legged, in the creative furnace of the City Below. She let the Grimlings buzz about her hair and brush closely by her flesh. She offered no resistance to their scrutiny, allowing them to touch her with their feathery palps, to nip and taste her with their scratchy side-to-side jaws.

She moved on through tunnel after tunnel, turning left or right at whim, exploring a tiny fraction of the labyrinth with its stretching lines of hawsers and Grimling hives. She peered in through waxy membranes at their young being incubated in cells like wasps and bees. She even glimpsed an enormously rotund queen, being attended to in an incubation chamber lined with crystals. There were so many
different structures, so very alien and wonderful, all constructed out of the gleaming black crystal: tunnels, living quarters, intersecting planes and oblongs, soaring structures that might be monuments of the City Below. This was the city she had always known existed, whose reality was now confirmed to be so deep and extensive it took her breath away.

Only then did she see Jeremiah. He had materialised out of the air before her and was smiling at her. Penny opened her mouth to ask what he was doing here, but when she drew closer she saw, to her astonishment, that his eyes were all black.

Kate didn't know if she was rising or falling – but she was moving. Whatever was happening to her, it involved colossal forces. There was an impression of screaming velocity. She thought perhaps she had fallen asleep for a while. More likely, she might have fallen unconscious. Frantically she tried to figure out what had led her to this.

I'm not here … not in the flesh. I'm present as a … a soul spirit
.

But where was here?

I freed Nidhoggr. I freed the enormous dragon, or serpent, or whatever it really is. Once freed, it destroyed the legion of parasites that were feeding off the roots, weakening the Tree. And then
…

And then there was a sudden rush of recovery. A feeling that flooded all of her senses – what senses she retained as a soul spirit – of soaring panic.

‘Elaru – help me!'

But there was no reply.

Kate had to force her panic down to recover control of
her mind. What was really happening to her? The truth was she had absolutely no idea. Her surroundings were blurred, as she moved through them at colossal speed. It was bewildering. Was she still within the roots of the Tree of Life? She had previously glimpsed the immensity of what that implied. Her soul spirit felt sick – massively out of kilter. She remembered something Alan had tried to explain to her when they were sailing down the Snowmelt River amid the thrilling but awesomely cold landscape. When they had entered the gate of Feimhin on Slievenamon, he had felt his
being
come apart. She felt something very similar. It was mentally harrowing, but without the extreme physical pain Alan had spoken of. This felt as if her soul spirit had dissolved into … she knew not. As if she were no longer the sum of all that made her, the organs, and sinews and tissues, and brain.

Kate felt like screaming.
How in heaven's name am I to grasp anything that might be important here?

The impression of movement was so intense she felt giddy, hopelessly confused, by it.

Where had Elaru gone?

Surely she couldn't have abandoned her?

Elaru was somehow within her. Kate had subsumed her, but then she had released her again. She was bewildered by her own role in what was happening. This was a terrible world, a vast and utterly incomprehensible world, in which forces too powerful for an ordinary girl to comprehend fought one another for supremacy.

‘Elaru – please!'

‘Tell me what to do. Tell me quickly.'

‘What?'

‘What does that mean?'

‘But I didn't do anything other than to waken it.'

‘What can I do? Please help me?'

‘How in heaven's name am I to do that?'

‘Where – where must I direct it?'

The voice in her mind deepened to a mocking laugh.

‘To the Land of the Dead, idiot.'

‘Urale! Elaru – you're still bound up with that trickster?'

A vulturish cackle: ‘A miscegenetic marriage, in my humble opinion.'

‘There is nothing humble about you, Urale. But I don't care what your differences are any more. I need to know what to do here and now.'

‘Could it be that even at this critical juncture, you have forgotten your miserable mission?'

‘I have not forgotten it.'

‘If any must undo the folly of your recklessness it must be you yourself. Abandon this foolish enterprise immediately.'

‘I will never abandon the Momu.'

Urale was never going to help her. He would revel in the opportunity to lead her into a trap. But did she dare to direct Nidhoggr to the Cathedral of Death? Or to where her own selfish instincts bade her – the Momu's chamber, where Granny Dew might save her?

‘Elaru – help me! Tell me if the Land of the Dead is where we must go.'

‘You must force yourself to be unselfish, Elaru.'

Sense what for herself? What it felt to be subsumed by another being, one whose spiritual essence felt elemental and terrible; a soul spirit that was as dark as obsidian; a serpent-dragon that did not flap its wings to fly, but to rip and tear its way through the fabric of existence.

Kate felt a lump in her throat, as if something was caught there that was too terrifying to swallow. But she had to swallow it.

I have unleashed chaos
.

The notion of uncontained destruction terrified her. Would it be a widening chaos that, once liberated, might extend beyond Dromenon?

Oh, lord preserve us!

What was it that Elaru had suggested? That she sense a way out of the terrible dilemma for herself.

Am I being asked to guide the destruction?

Surely, if ever there was a direction she would have wanted such a chaos to visit, it was the Land of the Dead. She brought the awful landscape into her mind, then focused her entire being on that dreadful memory, urging it to become the single, all-consuming focus of her oraculum until the image crystallised into being. And then it was as if a single great glowing eye were tearing its way through veils of existence, searching for the eerie streets of black ice that she now held fiercely in the focus of her oraculum.

Her spirit hands reached for her spirit mouth in dread as her vision was invaded by that graveyard of putrescent green. A moment in which she felt the same heart-sinking dread as before, and then …

Chaos!

The strangely etched streets and buildings crumbled before the elemental storm that was Nidhoggr. There was a vast, slithering succession of collisions, as if the great serpent-dragon were tearing through the ethereal substance of Dromenon itself. The damage of their coming was everywhere to be seen: the Land of the Dead was being rent asunder. Horrible as its malignant oppressiveness had been, its ravishing by Nidhoggr was even more horrifying still. Kate closed her eyes against it; she closed her senses, attempting to calm her disordered thoughts. But even with closed eyes she could not block out the rising cacophony of screams. When her eyes blinked open again the immensity of the Cathedral of Death was looming. Collision, gargantuan and terrifying, was imminent.

She screamed, ‘Please stop!'

Then, realising the hopelessness of appealing to Nidhoggr, she curled herself into a ball, focused every ounce of her energy on the oraculum and, through its window into this madly disordered world, issued the command with all of the force of her oracular power, even as the Lord of Chaos erupted through the adamantine walls of the Cathedral of Death.

‘Halt!'

Nidhoggr's arrival had destroyed the entire atrium, making a gigantic rent in the Cathedral wall. Kate's vision was filled with the shimmering cascade of blue-green needles, each one of them a soul spirit of the dead. The screaming that was the sum of a billion motes of terror flooded her being. The light no longer coalesced on what had been the floor. It whirled about her, the structure of the Cathedral now caught up in the chaos.

Kate's mind was frozen with grief. That terrible sense of exhaustion was back, leaching into her spirit, her will.

Despair!

She heard the outraged shriek of Urale. ‘In mere moments you have destroyed the wonder of ages.'

‘A wonder to you – but a never-ending torment to so many souls.'

‘What matter mortals?'

‘I am a mortal.' Kate dismissed Urale. Rage at his cruelty revived her. Her mind, her thoughts, struggled back to consider why she was here. She sought his gentler twin. ‘Elaru – where is she? Where is the soul spirit of the Momu?'

Kate's senses were overcome by the rising torrent of destruction. She could smell the despair – the sulphurous stink of it was invading her nostrils. But then she felt drawn to a dreadful centre of gravity within the chaos. She willed her being towards it, assuming that only the pentagon, with its kneeling keepers, could explain the ominous attraction. She glimpsed the focus of her purpose and her
spirits lifted. The soul spirit of the Momu hovered in front of her, dignified as she recalled it, ethereal and still at the eye of the storm.

When Kate manifested in the ruin of the Cathedral she felt tremors of uncertainty running though it. She turned to look back at the thing that had borne her and saw something like the foothill of a mountain – a mountain over which a dreadful crackling energy sparked and ran in cascades of blue-black lightning.

Reaching out, Kate stroked the elongated face of the Momu, the tips of her fingers brushing the eyelids down over those mother-of-pearl eyes. She felt the rush of tears and knew that, back in the chamber of the Momu, her physical self was weeping. The flesh of the Momu was still transparent as smoke. The whirling, screaming fall of the crystals still passed through her soul spirit, even as the Cathedral of Death disintegrated all around them. Kate wondered if, back in her tomb of roots within the chamber, that great heart was still beating, however slowly and faintly. She prayed that there might be a mote of life still holding on there, desperately waiting for her help.

And now, as she gazed with love at the soul spirit of her friend, she realised the truth of it all. She sensed the purpose in the mad glee of the serpent-dragon. She trembled amid the moiling cyclone of chaos, absorbing the lesson that she should perhaps have grasped instinctively from the start. The Momu, the Tree, Nidhoggr – all were somehow linked together in some extraordinary cycle of existence.
Kate recalled how the Momu had drawn her attention to this in their first meeting. ‘
Nidhoggr, the serpent – who gnawed at the roots of the world – fertilised a seed of the Tree of Life. That seed grew into the One Tree, a chimera of serpent and tree, in whose roots we converse. Sadly, the One Tree is dying, as is her beautiful city, Ulla Quemar. I, the first child of Ulla Quemar – who am almost as old as the One Tree herself – am dying with her
.'

Kate stared into the eyes of the nearest kneeling figure of one of the keepers. But surely there was a vital lesson here still, a very needful lesson? Were they consciously, or even accidentally, pointing out the lesson to her? Then she heard the voice of Granny Dew in her mind.

‘What?'

‘The flesh …?' Her eyes returned to the insubstantial yet graceful form hovering in space before her.

Elaru cried out.

Through the oraculum, Kate communicated her need to Nidhoggr. ‘The Momu pointed out your plight and the plight of the sacred Tree to me. She begged my help. I came to you through great danger, and woke you from your poisoned slumber. I made you aware of the peril that infested the roots of the Tree of Life. You had been starved to a husk of your former self. Now you have recovered your strength, and the Tree its power. It is time you completed the cycle. Help the Momu in turn. Or are the powers of being that …
watch over worlds … themselves devoid of gratitude? Have you no conscience? No responding grace?'

Kate waited.

There was no response from the titanic serpent.

‘Very well, then. I will enter your mind, with or without your will, and I will compel you to subsume my friend.'

Her anger mounted so that she didn't truly understand what she was doing, other than the fact that she was turning the power of the oraculum inwards, on herself, which, in what little she understood, was now an integral part of the soul spirit of Nidhoggr himself. In a fraction of a moment she felt herself become part of the maelstrom. She was opposed by an obdurate resistance, ponderously slow, but leviathan in strength, which threatened to engulf her.

‘Granny Dew …'

‘Elaru – if you wish to survive?'

But Kate knew it did matter. She recalled the advice of both Driftwood and Granny Dew.

‘Elaru – please! There is so little time. Advise me now.'

But it was Urale's mocking voice that answered. ‘She has already advised you. Abandon the worm. Flee for your life!'

‘I will save the Momu. All that I have ever wanted in coming to this dreadful place was to save her and her people, the Cill.'

‘Foolish mortal. Why do you think the keepers are here? You have released Chaos in Dromenon. Pray that you have not released it into your own world.'