Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Fachtna and Bress stared at each other. Fachtna held his sword two-handed in a mid-guard; Bress, his bastard sword in one hand, the spear’s case in the other, was much more relaxed.

‘You have done a lot of damage by coming here,’ Fachtna said. Bress’s laughter was devoid of humour.

‘Have you painted yourself the hero here?’

‘I’m not trying to kill thousands of people.’

‘Not here perhaps, but tell me how you live outside the laws of causality. Because you have decided that you are a good man? Your actions as much as ours, well maybe not as much as ours, have rewritten the future. What you left is no longer there, not that either of us would ever remember what has been.’

‘Assuming that time/space does not crack.’

‘Time/space is more rugged than you give it credit for, believe me.’

‘What you’re doing is monstrous.’

‘Only from a very limited and selfish perspective. What we are doing is speeding up the inevitable. If you had really wanted to stop us, then you should have sent more than two.’

‘Limited resources,’ Fachtna told him. ‘Are we going to fight?’

‘This isn’t a fight, it’s a murder.’

The tiny part of Teardrop’s psyche that was alive no longer resembled anything even remotely like a sane human mind. The crystal parasite was a kaleidoscopic spider’s web, straddling planes of existence and non-existence, trapping the suffering of the vessels of pain and feeding it back down into the electric signals that surged through biological existence.

Then the pain stopped. What had been Teardrop struggled like a broken thing in his own fractured and hellish mindscapes filled with impossible things that humanity had not evolved enough to perceive without their minds shattering.

The crystal network reached out for an instinctive understanding. What it found instead was darkness surging back, feeding down to the pain vessels, controlling them, enslaving them. The darkness was a tiny part of something immense, but its power nearly overwhelmed the parasite’s web. Then the parasite shifted until it found the right path and started to tentatively taste the dark thing.

Crom Dhubh could not even remember pain. He savoured a sensation that to him was as new, but he still screamed as he tore his hands and face from her flesh. He could destroy the parasite, he knew that. After all it was the creature’s unfertilised eggs, or at least what they could make of the eggs in three-dimensional space, that they had at great expense harvested to put in the heads of the pain vessels.

He could destroy the parasite, of that he had no doubt, but he needed his power and he did not want to give it any more access than it already had. Let him block the fear. There was blood in the water now. It would mean expending more of his power than he had wanted, but he could force her to open the way now. He could induce the horrible birth.

Blades flickered out at a bewildering speed: strike, parry and counter-strike. Bress had a bad mixture of speed and strength; his blade had more reach, and he defended himself too well for Fachtna to get inside that reach without losing significant amounts of flesh.

Smoke billowed up through the planks as if they were over a volcanic vent. Every swing of a blade caused eddies in the smoke. No blood had been drawn, but Fachtna was the one being forced back. He felt his back hit the framework of the wicker man. Bress swung. Fachtna ducked under the blade and threw himself into a forward roll. He felt Bress slice a layer of flesh off his back, the other man’s sword going straight through his armour. Bress’s sword cut through the wicker man’s framework and swung through the smoke-filled air outside the cage.

Fachtna rolled to his feet. He knew that the wound on his back would not be healing any time soon, as the nanites that impregnated Bress’s blade attacked the nanites that would normally knit his flesh together again.

Bress hit Fachtna with a back kick that he had no business trying in a sword fight where incredibly sharp implements were being waved around at speed. The kick took Fachtna off his feet and sent him flying over the planks. Bress stalked after him. Fachtna scrabbled to his feet and turned just in time to parry a powerful strike.

‘I could make the metal come alive and hold you down,’ Bress told Fachtna.

The massive two-handed strike that almost forced him to his knees shouldn’t have been so fast, Fachtna thought. With just enough strength to hold Bress’s blade away from him, Fachtna kneed the taller man. Bress showed no sign of having felt it. He threw Fachtna back and kicked him in the stomach, causing him to stumble. The arc of Bress’s sword somehow looked lazy to Fachtna but he knew that he could not get his blade up to parry it. Bress opened up Fachtna’s thigh but did not sever anything vital. That was when Fachtna realised that he was being played with.

It had gone quiet below but then the screams restarted. Sounds of true panic. Moments later, the smell of human flesh cooking. Fachtna knew that the bottom level had caught fire.

Britha fought like she had never fought before, her spear striking at any that got too close. Then there had been too many and they had pulled the spear from her. Then she had fought with the sickle. Then she had fought with her hands, feet and forehead, and finally nails and teeth, desperately trying to keep them away from Teardrop. But they were all over her. They were going to tear her apart with their bare hands and they were going to do the same to Teardrop.

Then it was over. Then they were people again, not demon-ridden slaves. They dropped her, confused and frightened, many of them wounded. They dropped her onto the soiled planks and she curled up into a ball, sobbing. They backed away from her.

‘ Ban draoi? ’ The words spoken in her own language, the familiarity of the voice, made her open her eyes. She recognised the child despite her soot-covered face and red-raw eyes. A girl from Ardestie, a daughter of one of the landsfolk families. What made her cry harder than anything was that she could not remember her name.

Through the grief and the panic, the girl’s concern made her remember why she was there. A monstrous force was fostering fear and pain in her people and drinking it to poison a goddess. She sat up and looked over at Teardrop. His mouth was moving but he was beyond language now.

Panic. Screams from below as the lowest level of the wicker man’s torso caught fire.

The massive bronze crescent of one of the great axe’s blades bisected Teardrop’s skull. He collapsed sideways, well and truly dead.

‘You fucking whore!’ Hanno screamed at her in Carthaginian. ‘You did this to me! You soiled my luck with your blood sacrifices on a ship holy to Dagon!’ His was the second head on Ettin’s lopsided and broad shoulders.

‘I’ll mount you up here so you can watch me rape your corpse,’ Ettin told her. ‘You’ll learn to stay dead when I kill you.’

Grief and fear was gone. Ettin swung Kush’s axe down at her. Britha rolled away, grabbing her hungry spear as she came up onto her feet. Cold anger had replaced everything.

‘Come and die,’ she told the monster. He stalked through the smoke towards her.

Fachtna was grinning, laughing. It was easy now. He knew he was going to die. He stopped caring about winning, stopped caring about getting hurt. Any blow that didn’t look like it was going to kill him immediately, he took.

Bress opened up his upper left arm from shoulder to elbow, severing tendons, making it useless. Fachtna spat blood at him and laughed as he screamed in pain and made a reckless backhanded upwards cut. The hot ghost-like blade cut through Bress’s armour, piercing flesh and carrying on up to cut into his face.