The Defiler (17 page)

The celebrants were untouched by the weather, even as the storm broke and the rain came down in driving torrents, they danced on, they thrust towards satisfaction and release, they whooped and cried out and lost themselves in the pure physicality of the self and the small deaths of the spirit that came with release. The rain did not soak them. The cold did not freeze them. They were living between worlds.

Another fork of lightning rent the sky asunder.

The thunder when it came was deafening.

The Moon-Torn froze mid-motion, captured in the moment, bodies locked, limbs sheened with lust, eyes turned to the sky in adoration.

The entire scene was both haunting and voyeuristic, as though they were somehow spying upon ghosts trapped in those last precious memories of love.

But here, now, Sláine was left with the distinct impression that it was the land that had died, and the ghosts themselves that were more alive, more vital where the land was a spectre of itself. He wondered which the Night Bringer would be drawn to; the ghosts or the wounded land? Was that what the ritual was truly about, the joyous defilement of Danu's flesh?

He turned to Myrrdin, but before he could share his thoughts, he felt the hunt nearing, the earth herself trembling at its approach. He pressed his hands flat against the dirt, feeling it shiver at the approach of the Night Bringer. "They are coming."

The druid nodded, once, looking beyond the young warrior. Sláine turned to follow the direction of his gaze and saw the huge hounds leading the charge. They were enormous, their powerful muscles bunched beneath slick ebon coats of fur, eyes the smouldering red of coals, glowing with all the hate of the underworld's damned fires. Their coats were impossibly black against the night, deeper and richer than the darkness. They came out of the black at a frightening pace. In their wake came the others, great shoggy beasts, lupine and feline, fanged, horned, boar-headed, but all of them spectral - these were the outriders of the hunt. There were hundreds of the beasts, thousands. The hunt came on and on and on, the macabre procession never-ending.

Seeing them, Sláine felt panic rise inside him and tasted bile in his throat. It was replaced a heartbeat later by a surge of absolute and compelling hatred that swept over him. He recognised the taste of fear.

The roars of the Moon-Torn swelled behind them, drowning out the thunder.

And then he saw her, the Night Bringer. He knew it was the Huntress immediately.

She was beautiful. He hadn't expected that.

She was not some vile wizened witch with warts and weals and thick sprigs of wiry grey hair sprouting from her chin. She was glorious, majestic, mighty. She radiated death - not the cold blackness of eternity but a
vital
death. Silver hair cascaded halfway down her back and streamed out behind her. The hair framed an elegant sepulchral face of harsh angles and deep shadows augmented by sulphurous eyes. She was a beautiful demon astride a power Night-Mare. The Night Bringer wore skin-tight black leather armour trimmed with thin silver. In it, Sláine knew instinctively that the newly dead could see their own lives - what they had been, those they had loved, others they had wronged - played out within the immaculately lacquered plates of the Night Bringer's armour as she passed judgement on them.

He shuddered to think what she would see in them.

Her mount was at least eighteen hands high, bigger, more powerful than any roan or stallion. Its nostrils flared, steaming smoke and licks of sulphurous flame gathered around its night-black hooves as they struck flint and stone beneath the heather.

The fire singed the gorse, steaming, but the huge downpour prevented wildfire from consuming the meadow.

The sight of the Night Bringer drove the Moon-Torn into ecstasies, their cries charged with the raw sexual energy of their coupling. Waves of passion emanated from them like some massive psychic charge. Sláine felt his own lusts stirring in response. It took all his willpower not to shed his cloak and tear aside his boar's head codpiece and step out of his trews and charge down the hillside to join them as they rutted in mindless ecstasy.

He looked up at the moon, delighting in its radiance.

He wanted so desperately to feel its pull as he felt the earth within him, firing his blood, making him whole, but there was nothing. He pressed his hands to the earth, relishing the sensation of the rain as it slapped his face and squirmed beneath the trim of his cloak, spilling down his back. He breathed deeply, savouring the storm as it dampened his lust.

Down below, Sláine watched as the Moon-Torn pressed themselves into the dirt so that they could not see the mad procession of creatures. And he understood the full extent of the druid's words and the Morrigan's curse; to look upon the hunt was to invite death.

Through the dance the Moon-Torn embraced their mortality. They worshipped not from love but from fear of the Huntress. They summoned the Night Bringer so that more of them might be put out of their displaced misery, but they were the few, not the many. When it came down to it the Moon-Torn feared the ultimate surrender of life. They rutted in the dirt like animals to remind themselves what it meant to be alive, revelling in the physicality of the flesh, losing themselves in the passion of living because a moment later, if they had the strength to break their curse, they intended to join the hunt.

A lone black crow circled above, riding the worst of the storm with ease.

The bird did not fall from the sky, did not turn to stone, did not die. Sláine watched its erratic flight with grim fascination, immediately sure it wasn't a part of the hunt. Sláine watched the Morrigan's creature swoop low, weaving between the ranks of shoggy beasts, too fleet of wing for them to snag it and feast. The bird stirred strife through the beasts of the hunt. They scented its vitality. The bird taunted them with its mortality; they thirsted for its blood.

"How are we supposed to stop
that
?" Ukko breathed, all the usual bluster gone from his voice.

"We aren't," the druid said. "No mortal can stop the hunt. It is a danse macabre, a huge funeral procession that never ceases. It roams the land in torment. It, like the Goddess, is eternal. Whatever the hunt captures, it kills."

"Well, excuse my stupidity, but what in the blue hells are we doing here, then?"

"We've come to steal the Night Bringer's fragment of the Cauldron," said Sláine.

"
Finally
you are speaking my language," said Ukko with a malicious grin. "What do you want me to do, big man?"

"Nothing," said Sláine flatly as the moon broke free of the clouds, bringing the ghosts of the Moon-Torn back to vivid life before them. "This is my task. The Night Bringer keeps the relic near?"

"It is tied like a fetish to the saddle of her Night-Mare," the druid confirmed.

Sláine nodded. "Do you have a plan, then, druid?" Myrrdin's wooden eyes didn't meet his gaze. "Good," Sláine said. "You said it yourself, druid, to look upon the hunt is to die. I know what I must do."

Ukko watched in mute horror as Sláine charged, sky-clad, down the hill, brandishing Brain-Biter over his head.

Lightning crashed, illuminating the full horror of the hunt's mutated pack. Muzzles dripped saliva and blood, eyes blazed with madness, muscles contorted, flexed, bunched, heads thrown back, mouths roared. And the Night Bringer rode in their midst, Queen of the Hunt.

A spear of lightning forked into four spars, each one hanging in the sky even as they arced into the earth. Ukko felt his heart beat wildly against his ribcage; he lost count of how many times. The lightning refused to relinquish its hold on the Goddess's flesh.

The thunder when it came was immense - but it was no match for Sláine's savage battle cry as he threw himself bodily into the writhing mass of the hunt, swinging Brain-Biter madly left and right. The Sessair warrior hewed through the insubstantial spectres of the damned creatures, cleaving a path towards the Huntress. The beasts shrank back from the axe's bite, but even from his vantage high on the hill Ukko could see that it wasn't actually wounding them.

The crow cawed excitedly, swooping low enough for its wings to graze the heather before it rose high into the night sky.

"By Crom's hairy gonads, what the hell does he think he's doing?" Ukko breathed. He put his hands over his eyes because he couldn't bear to look, but as another jag of lightning split the sky he peeked through his fingers, unable not to. "Why isn't he warping? They're going to kill him."

"That's his plan," the druid said sickly, finally grasping Sláine's foolhardy scheme. "He isn't trying to draw on the Earth Power, he's sacrificing himself! We've got to run! We've got to get down there before he kills himself!"

The next fork of lightning highlighted the slaughter: the unearthly hounds hit Sláine, fangs and claws raking at his flesh. Brain-Biter spun from his hands. "
Taaaake me, witch!"
Sláine bellowed. "
End it noooooow!"
At the centre came a huge albino shoggy beast bounding forwards. The creature, part man, part wolf, launched itself, slamming into Sláine's unprotected chest.

Ukko screamed as the warrior fell back, buckling beneath the weight of the beast's assault. He disappeared beneath the savagely snapping fangs.

Without a thought for his own safety, Ukko set off running after the druid.

Myrrdin was already halfway down the hill, slipping and sliding in the mud as he raced to Sláine's aid, but it was too late.

Even before he was halfway across the mired field Ukko saw the spectre of the warrior's essence rise from his corpse to join the hunt.

Even in death Sláine felt the bond with Danu burning within him - it went beyond flesh, Danu was joined with his spirit, his soul, his very being. They were bound by ties stronger than death.

"Thank you," he breathed, surging up from beneath the press of hell hounds.

Only his body remained on the floor, trampled by the thundering hooves and the stampeding feet of the hunt's lost souls. He looked to the right, up the hill to where Ukko and the druid were screaming, and knew they saw him, now, like this, and knew they understood and could make good his sacrifice. He thought about Brain-Biter, and suddenly the axe manifested in his hands, cold and deathly. He kissed the twin heads of the axe and turned to face the Huntress as she bore down on him on her furious Night-Mare.

The Night Bringer's steed scorched the heather and gorse, burning a black scar through the heart of the meadow.

Sláine rocked back on his heels, then sprang forwards, one, two, three huge strides, before he brought the axe whistling around in a brutal arc, slamming it into the Night-Mare's thick neck and burying it deep. The blow would have decapitated a mortal beast - the Night-Mare didn't falter so much as a single step in its powerful gallop. Sláine maintained his grip on the axe and swung around so that he was clinging on, being dragged by the grotesque horse.

The Night Bringer looked down at her uninvited passenger with distaste on her aquiline face.

Sláine met her hate-filled gaze for a moment, then broke eye contact to follow the line of leather traces dangling from her saddle. A score of fetishes and other gewgaws dangled on the silver chains, obscuring the one thing of value that hung from the thirteenth chain - the rust-corroded fragment of the Cauldron of Rebirth. Sláine smiled coldly and pulled himself hand over hand up the length of the axe's shaft until he could reach out and grab the chain securing the metal shard.

He reached out and snatched the chain, shocked at the sudden cold that thrilled down through his fingers into his heart. The Night-Mare reared, trying to dislodge him. The Huntress sneered, drawing a wickedly curved blade from the sheath at her side. "How many times do you wish to die, manling?" She thrust down, the blade piercing the hollow between his neck and shoulder and plunging down through his heart and lungs. The cold seared his body, the pain enormous until he remembered his corpse was lying in the dirt fifty yards away and it was only the ghost of agony that pierced him. It took every ounce of strength the young Celt had to relinquish his hold on Brain-Biter and grasp the freezing chain that held the fragment of the Cauldron.

The Huntress threw back her head and shrieked, the cry whipping her creatures into a frenzy of tooth and claw.

The Night-Mare shied, kicking the air, its smouldering hooves cracking the earth and stone beneath them as they came down.

And still Sláine clung to the chain.

His feet dragged on the ground.

The Huntress's blade pierced his throat, sliced into his arm, sank deep into his gut, and still he refused to relinquish his hold.

And then the chain broke and he fell, clutching the fragment of the Cauldron.

He hit the floor hard, his spirit form sliced in a score of places, each blow fatal for mortal flesh, and started running.

Overhead, the Morrigan's huge black-winged bird seemed to grow in size, its mocking caws melding with the raging thunder until it became impossible to distinguish one from the other.

The Huntress wheeled her Night-Mare around, spurring the beast on, her silver blade vicious in the moonlight. In that instant all thoughts of the Moon-Torn were forgotten. The hunt would claim more souls, but this one, this warrior was the prize. She would claim his head and the impetuous fool could run at her side without it for eternity. She would feast on his eyes and string the empty head from one of her saddle chains.

He was hers, forever. Her creature.

The Huntress loosed a war cry that matched the crow's, rending the night in two.

And then she rode for the warrior, savouring the invigorating moment as the thrill of the hunt surged through her cold, cold flesh.

"He's dead," Ukko moaned, disbelieving as he cradled Sláine's head in his hands.

He felt... empty.

"Heroes die," Myrrdin said, kneeling beside the dwarf. "It is what they do, but do not weep yet, friend Ukko. Spirit and flesh are still close and may yet be reunited, Danu be willing."