Curse of the Celts Page 9

  We moved slower now, carefully navigating our way in the dark, the crunch of our footsteps and heavy breathing unfortunately not the only sounds as we made our way, slipping and sliding down a steep incline. Occasional shrieks and screams split the air, as well as rustling in the undergrowth around us. Whether it was caused by real or imaginary creatures was impossible to tell. And none of us cared to investigate as we pushed relentlessly forward.

  When the trees were finally thinning, a frail voice came out of the darkness.

  “Help me…” I looked down to discover a teenage boy at my feet, the tell-tale signs of the illness on his wan face. I resolutely stepped over him. And the next one and the one after that – a small girl with the same dark skin and hair as Marina, the girl from the stews I had helped what seemed like a lifetime ago. The entire area was littered with the bodies of the dead or dying. None of them bore the signs of battle as the earlier ghost had. Instead, they seemed to be conjured up out of more recent victims. Looking behind me, I discovered Marcus had fallen behind. Devyn continued as if he didn’t see anything.

  I picked my way back to Marcus. While I knew I should step through the sick lying at our feet because Devyn had made it clear that acknowledging their presence increased their power, I couldn’t quite do it. Marcus was frozen when I reached him.

  “Come on, Marcus. We’ll lose Devyn if we don’t hurry.”

  “I can’t,” he said, his eyes scanning all the people on the ground. “I’ve got to try. Maybe I can save some of them.”

  “They’re not real,” I reminded him. I couldn’t afford to lose another of my companions to the phantoms. If Devyn was anything to go by, once persuaded that they were real, it would be impossible to convince Marcus otherwise.

  “I can’t just leave them,” he said. “I’ve got to try.”

  “Marcus, please listen to me.” I looked back to where Devyn was still possible to make out on the moonlit path ahead of us. “They’re not really there; you can’t save them.”

  I watched as Devyn continued to walk away from us. He was leaving me, but I couldn’t leave Marcus, even if the handfast weren’t tethering us. He was now wandering from patient to patient and I could sense him pouring his magic into the phantoms. Not a good time for the inhibitor we had been administered in the city to wear off. If merely acknowledging the existence of the spectres made them more potent on this plane, what would pouring his healing magic into them achieve?

  “Marcus, stop, please stop.” I pulled at him, trying to get his attention. “Damn it, please, Marcus. They’re not real, they’re not real.”

  “So many… I’ve got to help them,” he muttered, kneeling beside yet another who, if she wasn’t already dead, looked like she was knocking on death’s door. What was I saying? The form that lay on the ground looking up so beseechingly had come here from the wrong side of that door. He couldn’t help her; he couldn’t help any of them. They were already dead.

  I shook him, and he barely noticed. Devyn had utterly disappeared into the night, and I was left alone with a maddened doctor pouring magic into ghosts who were faking illness and were unlikely to reward his efforts with the offerings the poor in the city had. His patients in the city… Devyn said that the dead were closer to this world than at any other time of year, that they could walk amongst us. Would the recently deceased answer my call? Perhaps if I couldn’t reason with Marcus, someone else might have better luck. Someone dead. Someone who cared for the living still. I stepped away from Marcus. We were in a copse of ash trees; an oak had helped me see a vision before. Would the silvery ash respond to my plea for assistance? I squared my shoulders and walked over to the largest one in the area, laying my palm on its cold, pale bark. Only one way to find out.

  I leaned into the silvery white of the tree, closing my eyes, focusing everything I had on my call through the veil. It had been nearly two days since my last dose of the suppressant. Surely it had worn off. I pushed the greyness aside.

  Otho, I summoned, calling into the heavy darkness on the other side. Come to me, Otho. Marcus needs you. Please help.

  I could sense something stirring, a whirl in the sludgy air, and there he was, old Otho, whom I had met only once when he had asked Marcus to let him go. He was the first patient I had witnessed Marcus unknowingly treating with magic. His smile was kind as he approached and stepped through the chink in the veil that I held aside for him. I opened my eyes and found myself back in the copse of stricken ghosts once more. Otho looked at me and went to Marcus, needing no direction.

  “Boy,” he spoke softly, his accent as strong in the afterlife as it had been when he was flesh and blood. Marcus paused at the sound of the familiar and profoundly unexpected voice.

  “Otho?” he asked wonderingly, turning from the patient he was currently pouring energy into to the old man who stood over him.

  “Yes, boy,” he answered. “What new foolishness is this?”

  Marcus looked around him. “They’re sick… so many of them. I want to help them but I can’t save them all. I have to choose. I have to choose, Otho. What if I’ve chosen the wrong ones to save?”

  “You can only save them what can be saved. Some you got to let go.” Otho indicated those around him. “Too late for me. Too late for these people. You got to accept that. Or they’ll take you with ’em.”

  Marcus looked drained, as bad as he had been before he learned not to pour everything he had into the sick and dying. He looked desolate. I’d never thought about it before, but since we had told him that he had the power to save people – but only as long as he limited what he was giving – he had been made the saviour of a few and executioner to many. Fidelma had shown him how to protect himself, but he had been alone, alone to choose who to save. And who to let die. It must have been eating him up.

  That was it. That was how the ghosts were trapping us into believing that their version of the night was real. They were preying on our deepest fears, on the actions and decisions that twisted our souls. For Devyn it was the guilt that had skewered him since the day I was stolen. And that, having found me, he had lost me again. That his promise to keep me safe was as broken as his father’s to my murdered mother. It was a promise I knew he would gladly give his life to keep. He had given up everything to find me. His home. His family. He had spent years on the outside of my life waiting for proof that I was the girl he was looking for. Each day he had spent in the city, he had risked his life for the tiny hope that he was right, that I hadn’t been killed on that road with my mother. Losing me again was his worst nightmare.

  I looked around me. This, this endless glade of bodies dying of the illness that had swept the city, this was Marcus’s nightmare. He bowed his head in defeat. The city’s prince… All that charm and promise utterly broken on the forest floor. I remembered him as he had been when we had first started to get to know each other properly at the beginning of summer – his health and vigour, a young man aware of his good fortune and generous to all around him. Vital and joyful, his easy smile and golden aura had meant that none begrudged him any of the gifts that luck and genetics had bestowed. Despite his social status, he had chosen medicine, and trying to help others had nearly broken him. His early successes in treating the illness had turned his colleagues against him. His later awareness that it was magic that allowed him to do so meant that he had to hide his true self from the prying eyes of those who wondered how he did it. I had been so caught up in my own stuff – by which I meant the boy I had rejected Marcus for – that Marcus had been left alone. My gaze drifted across the glade. I could hear the cries and moans of those lying beyond what I was able to make out in the darkness. It was endless… So many sick. So many for one man to heal.

  I dropped to my knees in front of Marcus, cupping his cold cheek.

  “They’re not real.”

  He nodded, his head bowed. Talking to Otho had done the trick. He knew Otho was dead. Otho’s death had hit him hard, and no matter how far gone he had been, that unassail
able fact had remained true.

  “I know.” His voice was so quiet that I had to lean in to hear him, until we were leaning against each other, foreheads touching.

  “It’s not your fault,” I added, wanting to give him comfort beyond this moment, wanting to give him words to soothe the pain he must have been feeling for weeks while he had to decide over and over who to save and who he had to walk away from. “You can’t save everyone.”

  His empty eyes looked up at me, utterly drained, but aware.

  “I can try.”

  “No, no. Their deaths are not your fault; you’ve saved so many.” He had to see all the good he had done. Not just the ones he had walked away from.

  “Sure.” He pulled away from me and wearily levered himself up. “We need to keep moving. Find Devyn.”

  I knew he didn’t want comfort from me, but his rejection smarted all the same. I scanned the dim clearing while we pulled ourselves together. Otho and the carpet of ill people had faded away, hopefully gone back to wherever they had come from, never to return.

  “Devyn went that way.” I pointed in the direction I had last seen him go. It was as good an idea as any and was still in the same general direction that we had been moving all day. Even though we should have been nearer to our destination by now than we were.

  In Devyn’s absence, I felt hyper-alert, my eyes and ears on the lookout for the next threat. We hadn’t taken more than a few steps when Marcus stumbled; he looked a wreck. The magic had sucked out whatever strength he had left. I couldn’t do this. This was not what I’d been trained to do. I could host a party or shop for an entire outfit for any occasion at short notice. Dragging a six-foot man through a dark and incredibly creepy forest with who knew what waiting around the corner was not something I could do on my own. I squashed down the rising panic, taking a deep breath. Devyn was out there being led a merry dance because his fear was causing him to lose me again. If it was the last thing I did, I would drag our sorry arses through this nightmare and find him.

  “Come on,” I said, wrapping an arm around Marcus, sharing my living warmth with him and encouraging him to lean on me. “We’ve got to move. We can’t stay here. Procedite, centurion.”

  The old-school command to advance raised a glimmer of a smile and he put one foot in front of the other. We could do this. We had to do this.

  I tried to keep our path as direct as possible in the direction Devyn had taken. Devyn had feared we were going in circles before he had left us. What hope two bedraggled, ignorant city-dwellers had of doing any better, I wasn’t sure.

  I was gradually able to sift through the noise we made as we shuffled forward, and the sounds we were not generating ourselves. The occasional scream and clash of battle remained distant, but I had an increasing sense of wrongness. The silence around us was unnerving. Used to the constant background hum of the city, I thought initially that maybe this was normal. It hadn’t felt like this earlier, but now, when we stopped for a break, the only discernible sound was our own harsh and overly loud breathing. Not so much as a rustle was to be heard in our vicinity – no small animals, no birds. If there were worms in the ground, they were frozen in fear as we passed. I had been terrified many times in the last few days, but the very air seemed to be trying to warn me of our danger now. The sinister threat that seeped towards us was palpable, and yet nothing appeared.

  We kept moving. I could feel Marcus flagging, his weight becoming heavier as he leaned on me more and more for support, and yet, by silent agreement, we pushed forward, unwilling to pause, desperate to get out the other side of this forest.

  A flash of white slipped through the trees in front of us, causing us to stop still. Marcus looked down at me. I could barely make out his expression in the dark. I swallowed, a cold sweat breaking out on my face and back. We had to keep going. There was an increasingly foul smell; the forest no longer smelled of trees and fallen leaves but a gut-turning stench that had built up around us. Another pale streak snatched across the periphery of my vision as I looked at Marcus. I whipped round. There was nothing there, but whatever it was had allowed us to see it; it was coming for us, and it was fine with us knowing.

  We stepped forward again. We had to keep moving. We continued in the direction we had been going, despite the glimpse of something we had seen. Whatever was out there, we couldn’t outrun it anyway so why let it divert us from our path? We took the old-fashioned guns from our packs. The metal felt solid in our hands, even if the weapons’ effectiveness against whatever was out there was questionable. Each step felt like it could be our last before the thing attacked. Dread built up in my gut like a stone until I thought it might paralyse me. When the thing did come for us, I was almost relieved.

  Not entirely though… After all, who wants to meet a white hound the size of a small horse in a pitch-black wood, on a night when the dead can walk? We turned to face it as it slunk out of the night, its snarling visage dominated by teeth the size of my fingers. That was just what I needed, to put a visual of my delicate fingers and this otherworldly creature’s fangs together.

  It emerged silently out of the night itself. Its large feet padded towards us, its strangely prescient eyes malevolently fixed on us. There was an aura of death about it. The smell that had been heavy over the forest had its source here. Rotting and alien, the foetid, noxious stench was overpowering. It had a physical presence. My eyes watered as I held the blood-red gaze of the massive white hound slipping out of the shadows. It weighted itself backwards, its massive haunches gathering power before it leapt directly at us. We raised our weapons and fired in the direction of the pale beast. The sound of the gunshots snapped through the night. We fired again and again, and by sheer luck or horrifying proximity managed to hit the giant hound. We struck it mid-leap and it crashed sideways into a tree and lay there, unmoving. Another ghostly shadow lurked in the trees beyond it but with its partner down, the second one chose not to attack and slunk back into the night.

  “What was that?” Marcus’s hushed tones broke the returning normal quiet of the night.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I answered, shivering in reaction to the adrenaline still coursing through my veins. I had been sure we were about to die a truly horrible death under the teeth and claws of that feral beast. I glanced uneasily at it. Was it dead? Did anything remain dead out here in this bloody endless forest? “Let’s go before it decides to have another go.”

  We stumbled on, our near miss giving us a new surge of energy.

  “Look.”

  I paused at Marcus’s command and raised my head in the direction he pointed. Lights… or rather the glow of a town. We were finally out the other side. Now that I was paying attention to more than where to place my next step, I noticed that the trees seemed to be thinning. The hairs on my arms stood on end as I realised that the awful silence had started to gather around us once more. The hounds were stalking us again.

  “We need to move faster.” I urged Marcus on; whatever renewed strength he had shown after the attack had faded from him once again.

  He sank to his knees, completely depleted.

  “Go,” he said quietly. “You’ll have a better chance on your own.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” I whispered back. It was too late anyway. The putrid stench seeped into the air around us. It was here.

  We backed away from the approaching hound. Marcus was out of bullets. I raised my gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. Devyn told us that even the most basic mechanical technology was known to fail in the borderlands; little had I realised that fact was going to cost me my life.

  It was the same one as before. It was still alive. A dark wound marred the white fur of one shoulder. The beast was warier this time. It slunk towards us with deadly purpose, though not quite as confidently as it had done before. Marcus gathered a large stick off the ground and held it in front of us. I’m not sure it would hold the beast off for very long once it came at us,
but at least we wouldn’t go down without a fight. I would never see Devyn again, and all of this, making it out of the city and Marcus’s father dying, would be for nothing. We were going to die within fifty miles of the walls. We hadn’t even made it across the borderlands.

  A crash came from behind us and I whirled in its direction while Marcus continued to watch the approaching hound. I expected to find another one of the hideous slavering beasts attempting to come at us from behind, but the sight that met my eyes sent my blood pumping around my body once again. An even larger dark shadow was making its way at speed through the trees. As it got closer, I felt a sweep of determination and sheer bloody anger roll through me as Devyn strode purposefully across the clearing to us, never taking his eyes off the beast.

  “Begone,” he commanded, carrying a great staff in his hand and taking a stance that indicated he knew how to use it. But that was all, no sign of the pack Matthias had supplied with our last remaining gun which might have had more luck than mine.

  The hound took its eyes off the feast it had all but picked out seasoning for and took in the Celt, pausing in its approach. Weaving behind a tree, it contemplated the new arrival, its head low as it assessed our flimsily armed reinforcement.

  A new sensation pulsed through me,the energy in the natural world responding to my fear. The trees rustled in response and a wind stirred. I shook my head to clear it; there was something off, a strangely distorted note clawing at the edges of the energy, but I let it flow through me. The trees around the beast swayed, just flickers in the dark moving towards it until the creature finally turned tail.

  “You couldn’t have pulled that out of the bag a little sooner?” Marcus said drily. But my focus was on one thing only.

  “You found us.”