The Exile Read online

  The flames sucked back through the opening in a powerful backdraught that bowled Sláine off his feet. It was only the sheer thickness of the rug that saved him. The roaring tongue of fire stripped the fur down to the coarse hide but didn't burn through it. Moving instinctively, Sláine threw the ruined rug over the rising fire and stepped into the middle chamber, using the ruined hide as a bridge.

  A woman and two children huddled in the corner, petrified by the rapidly spreading conflagration.

  "Quickly," Sláine called above the snap and cackle of the fire. He reached out for her. She pressed her back against the wall holding out her two bairns for the warrior to take. He hoisted them up, one in each arm.

  The ceiling above them buckled, the tying joist splintered and dumped its load. In a second the flames intensified, spreading across the doorway he'd just brought down. He backed up a step. There was no other way out. He didn't have a choice in the matter. "Come on, woman!" he yelled and plunged through the flames. He had to move quickly, running to the bed where he wrapped the youngsters in the bedding as protection from the rising heat. "You're fine," he promised them as he carried the children to the window. "Out, now. I'm going back for your ma." The older of the two nodded and helped his brother out through the window.

  Sláine didn't wait to see them out.

  The fire stung as he forced himself to go back through it once again. The woman stood on the other side of the sheet of flame, staring in mute horror at the all-consuming fire. There was no way she was moving, not by herself. Sláine didn't wait for her to move. He grabbed her, threw her bodily through the flames and then ran through behind her.

  She fell, sprawled across the floor, gasping for breath and kicking out at the flames that had caught her skirts and burned up her leg. Sláine threw himself on her, smothering the fire before it could do any serious damage. A criss-cross of burns scarred her bare leg but she would be all right.

  "Up," he said. "Your children are outside. They need you to hold yourself together, woman."

  She nodded, gathering her wits, as he boosted her up through the open window and followed her out.

  She ran across the street and swept her bairns up in a huge embrace. She turned to him, tears staining her soot-smeared cheeks, to say thank you, but he was already gone, moving on down the street.

  He was going home.

  He saw one of the monsters coming out of a burning building.

  It didn't look much like a monster, save for its face.

  It looked disturbingly like a man, in fact.

  The thing certainly had the musculature of a man, the arms and legs, but its face was masked like some huge shoggy beast.

  Masked, Sláine realised.

  It was no beast.

  Some wore masks to hide what they were, but not this man. He wore a mask to become what it made him. It was nothing more than a guise worn to terrorise, in the same way that the Sessair warriors painted themselves with woad. The creature wore a horned helmet, the design mirrored in the antlered stag-head loincloth it wore. His leather shield bore the stain of the sinister triskele, a perversion of the Goddess's triskell (mother, maiden, and crone); the triskele symbolised wrath, despair and ultimately, doom. Its sword bore a silver skull for a pommel.

  The triskele marked the skull-sword warrior for what he was, a follower of Carnun come to defile Danu's sanctuary. The Horned God was a hungry master, never satisfied with his lands, but then how could he be, with the vile practices of his worshippers leaching the very essence of the earth's power from its dirt and turning the land sour with their greed.

  Now they had come to Murias and Airghialla the Fair.

  They would not sour the Goddess's flesh, not while he had a breath in him.

  The beast saw him.

  He could have sworn he saw the thing smile through its foul mask as it brought the skull-sword to bear.

  Sláine matched its grin with a manic one of his own.

  "Come on then, ugly. There's dying to be done," he mocked, cracking his knuckles.

  The skull-sword rushed him, seeking a quick kill. Sláine stood his ground and in the moment before the blade could cut his legs, he sprang, leaping like a salmon. He landed lightly on his feet as the beast struggled to regain his balance. The skull-sword spun, lashing out with its blade, cutting high this time, expecting another leap where Sláine dropped low and swept his leg out, kicking the skull-sword's feet out from under him. The beast fell back, his sword spinning out of his hand. Sláine stood over him, and then placed his foot on his throat, stamping down until the airways were crushed and the dead skull-sword's corpse had ceased spasming. It was a clean kill. Sláine claimed the beast's sword and ran for home.

  You're too late, my love, always too late.

  The maiden's words followed him.

  He tuned out the screams as he ran. He couldn't save them all, not before his own: his mother and father. He ran, gasping and coughing as he choked on the smoke of the burning homes, and skidded around the corner.

  Six skull-swords ringed his home. The flames had already caught in the thatch. Two more threw bottles of naphtha stuffed with oil-soaked rags into the house even as his mother bolted out of the front door.

  He ran towards her, sword out, swinging, screaming as he ran.

  It was too far.

  You're too late, my love, always too late.

  Blind panic seized him as Macha saw her son and started to run towards him. He saw the fear in her eyes, saw the skull-sword loom behind her and ram his foul blade through her back even as his drunken father stumbled out of the round house and was clobbered insensate by the skull-pommel of one of the masked warrior's swords. Sláine was three steps too late to save her. Her hands came up, closing around the sword's tip protruding from her breast even as her legs buckled beneath her. Macha's eyes met his, pleading for him to save her, but he couldn't and she knew it.

  Worse, he knew it.

  She stumbled forwards and fell short of his arms.

  The skull-sword levelled its blade, keeping it between them as if a piece of iron could possibly save the murderer from the fate he had earned for himself.

  Sláine felt something snap inside him. He hurled the stolen sword, taking his mother's murderer through the chest. The momentum of the throw punched the skull-sword off his feet. He hit the floor dead, but he hadn't paid. He hadn't paid nearly enough.

  Sláine felt the kiss of the earth's power coil through him like an angry serpent, its forked tongue driving thought from his mind in place of the twin demands of blood lust and fury. He felt this righteous anger explode. His rage was primal.

  "Come on boys, I'm unarmed, let's see what you've got. Can you get to me before I get to them swords?"

  As they came at him, Sláine stretched down, fingers closing around the dead man's blade and drawing the second one protruding from his chest. He rose, twin blades weaving a hypnotic dance as he moved forwards menacingly. "Not fast enough." Five killers remained. It was not too many. It was not enough. Not for him. Not now. Not enough to sate the fury burning inside his skin.

  They came at him as one, five in a line, their hideous masks making them appear to be a drunken blurring of the same killer weaving in and out of focus.

  "I don't need no stinking swords," he snarled. "You die too easily that way." He hurled both blades simultaneously, taking two of the skull-swords in the guts even as they tried to throw themselves out of the path of the deadly blades.

  Sláine arched his back, the vertebrae stretching agonisingly as he did so, his arms warping into huge trollish knuckle-dragging appendages as the earth power ravaged his flesh, thickening his skin, distorting bone and cartilage into something monstrous. His cheek and jaw distended, as he reached out for the first of the butchers.

  The skull-sword was like a rag doll in his arms as Sláine tore him limb from limb. He beat another to death with the bloody stump of the dead warrior's arm even as the last man fled in terror.

  Sláine ripped the h
air mask from the dying man's face and rammed the head of the ball joint into his face over and over, destroying all sense of shape and feature, and turning it into a bloody pulp. Blood gurgled as the skull-sword sucked in a last breath and bubbled out as a death rattle.

  It was not enough.

  The last man cast a panicked look back over his shoulder. Sláine grinned and chased the coward down. "Let me give you a hand," he mocked, smacking the man across the face with the dead man's hand. The skull-sword staggered back, stumbling. He hit him again with an open-handed slap, and then he reversed the arm, turning it into a fleshy cudgel and beat the skull-sword senseless with it. The warrior tried to fend off the blows but was powerless against Sláine's warped strength. He didn't stop until the skull-sword was beaten beyond anything recognisably human and still he continued, driving the head of the bone into the warrior's face, splintering the bones, cracking open the eye sockets, pulverising the nose until it was all one bloody raw mess and the man was dead.

  Sláine lurched to his feet, looking around for something to kill.

  He saw that Roth Bellyshaker had crawled across the dirt and was hunched over, cradling his mother's body to his chest.

  His anger failed him, turning into despair.

  He stumbled up the street, the world blurring more and more with every step. He fell to his knees beside his father.

  He had killed them all.

  He did not think it too many, but it was not enough.

  THE SECOND TRISKELL

  MAIDEN

  Nine

  The Sins of the Father

  His grief was absolute and inconsolable. It was a sense of loss that a young man like Sláine couldn't hope to comprehend, and it afflicted the entire community. The slaughter of women and children had been indiscriminate. Murias had suffered horribly at the hands of the skull-swords, although the warlord, Gorian, was certain that there was more cunning involved than a few renegade bandits ought to have been able to muster. It smacked of organisation and planning far beyond that required for a simple skirmish. That meant that there were more of them out there, somewhere, watching how Grudnew and Gorian reacted to their threat.

  He couldn't stop blaming his father. The man's drinking had been the death of her. Had Bellyshaker been able to stay away from the ale for even a night she might still be alive. It was unfair thinking because of course had the old man been anything other than a drunken sot he would have ridden with the Red Branch to hunt the outlanders and Macha would have died alone instead of wrapped in the arms of her husband and her son.

  It didn't matter that it was unreasonable.

  Grief didn't demand reason. It demanded a scapegoat. It demanded answers that weren't there. It demanded retribution.

  "I want the corpses taken to the nemeton," Cathbad told the warlord as the pair of them walked through the ruined town. The smell of blood was still strong in the air, so strong that even the smoke and char of the wood couldn't mask it completely. The warriors had returned home at sundown to find the devastation. The first hour had been hellish, men running through the streets, calling out the names of loved ones only sometimes to be answered. The sky cried for their loss, its grey matching their grief. "A slab has been prepared. I will drag the truth out of their bones, my lord. Believe me, even the dead cannot hide from my mistress. They will tell us all we need to know to avenge our loved ones," Cathbad explained. His usual supercilious sneer was replaced by a look of grim determination.

  Regardless of whether the druid truly had a gift, or if he were going to find the answers he so obviously needed, Gorian didn't doubt for a moment that the old man was going to try and raise the dead if needs be to find them. For all that he disliked the old man, he couldn't help but respect that. That was the kind of strength they would need to survive the coming days.

  "It will be done," he promised, his thoughts turning to young Sláine. "How is the boy bearing up?"

  "The warped one is strong, Gorian. He understands that it was Danu's will that he should bear witness to the slaughter. We have talked. He told me of a maiden with garlands in her hair that led him a dance through the trees. I think he knows in his heart that it was the Goddess that led him to the hillside so that he saw the smoke. He doesn't deny it, even though it marks him for something special if the Goddess has taken an interest in him. You and I both know that events shape us. He will grow from this."

  "Aye, druid, but into what? I don't know what to believe when it comes to Danu and your mysticism, old man, but I do know that the lad is hurting. Macha was an arm's length away when the bastard cut her down. Put yourself in the lad's place for a moment. He has to contend with the minutes wasted saving Bethan and her pair. Had he not heard her screams - or if he had chosen to ignore them - Macha would be alive now. In his head he bought their lives at the cost of his mother's. That's a bargain none of us would willingly strike. So of course the boy's hurting. We all are, but we were helpless to change circumstance. The warriors were still five leagues away. Grudnew's guards made good account of themselves but they were outmatched and outnumbered. Had we been here things would have been different. So every one of my men lost someone and blames himself for not being there when he was needed. It's different for Sláine. Sláine was here. While the rest of us torture ourselves with how things might have been different had we been there, Sláine has to cope with the reality that he was there and couldn't save Macha. He couldn't make a difference. He saw it and yet for all his strength he was helpless. His mother as good as died in his arms, Cathbad. He didn't come across her in a ditch."

  "How I wish I could change the way of it for him. No son deserves that," the old druid agreed, "but the lad must know he did make a difference. He saved Bethan and her two boys, and they weren't the only ones. Alone he did what the king's bodyguard could not, he slew the outlanders. Without him our losses would have been much greater."

  Gorian bent down to retrieve a tarnished silver disc that he saw half-trodden into the mud. It had come from the belt of one of the corpses they had dragged out of a burning building. The metal was still warm to the touch. He turned it over in his fingers, hoping it would reveal some mysterious secret, but its smooth sides had nothing to tell him.

  "I know that, old man, but I'm betting it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to Sláine. As far as he is concerned he failed his mother. If I was him, I would be punishing myself in a thousand different ways, and I'd be looking to hurt Bellyshaker, too. How could I not be? I had failed the one person I would have saved even if it meant damning the entire town in the process while my father just got drunker and hoped the world would go away with the ale."

  "You paint a black picture of the inside of the boy's head, warlord."

  "I fear for him, Cathbad. Touched by the warp, the way he is, he is already different, set apart from everyone. With his grief unfettered, who knows what tortures he is capable of inflicting upon himself."

  "I will send Dian to find him, they have a bond. It will be good for them both, I think, to share their grief."

  Gorian nodded. "Aye, the lad needs friends now more than ever before, so thank you. I'd send word to Iesin if I had a clue as to his whereabouts."

  "Word will spread fast enough, warrior, it is its nature. Tall Iesin will be home before the turning of the season, and with him, young Fionn."

  "Stop reading my mind, old man, it's most disconcerting." Gorian grinned. It was the first time a smile had touched his lips since returning from the hunt.

  "There's no great magic in it, Gorian. You're a decent man. You wouldn't be what you are without caring for the men who serve you. I don't need a geas to tell me young Sláine's wellbeing is forefront in your thoughts."

  "Well stop it anyway."

  Sláine needed answers - better ones than he could give himself.

  He had thought he understood.

  That was the bitterest irony.

  He had thought she had led him to the hillside to save them, but she hadn't-

 
You're too late, my love, always too late.

  She had lured him there to witness the attack, not prevent it, not to save lives but to see them lost.

  He needed to know why, but the simplest of questions have the most complex of answers.

  Why?

  Why would Danu do that to him?

  A world without answers was one devoid of limits and boundaries, and a world without boundaries was one without safety or the promise of justice for its people.

  His mother's killers were dead, killed by his own hand. There was no comfort to be had in that. There was no comfort in knowing that he had crushed them, not when he knew there were more of them out there with their skull-pommelled swords, and their monstrous masks. Just thinking about it made his blood roil and his mind rage. He wanted them dead, every last one of them. He wanted them gutted. He wanted to turn the plains of Airghialla into a vast sea of blood, their blood. He wanted to bathe in it, wanted to do to them what they had done to him. He wanted to go to their homes and root out their family trees with his axe, and wanted to string their tongues from his belt. He wanted to so badly it hurt.

  He knew in his heart of hearts that Danu had led him home. That wasn't his question when he thought about the maiden. What he couldn't understand was why she had done so if it wasn't for him to save his mother? Why go to the trouble of leading him through the dance in and out of the trees, the coy glances and the tantalising glimpses of flesh to lead him on, if not for him to strike back against the butchers? Surely the Earth Mother didn't delight in his grief? Surely she didn't seek to cause him pain? What kind of cruel bitch would she have to be to take delight in forcing him to witness his own mother's death? No, there was a reason, a why, and he wasn't seeing it. Still, her words haunted him:

  "You needed to see, to understand." He felt her shade kissing the side of his face even as he tried to push the memory of it away. "You're too late, my love, always too late."