Mage of Clouds (The Cloudmages #2) (66 page)

“You can’t be here,” Treoraí said. He floated alongside her. “You can’t affect this, not with my heart.” Icy fingers clutched at her, tearing and grabbing. “It’s mine!” the Créneach shouted. “I want it back!” he shouted, and they were falling from the sky toward the nightmare landscape, struggling. Meriel screamed, fighting to keep it from tearing away the clochmion. She waited for the horrible impact of the ground; it never came. Instead, they seemed to fall into a thicket with thick, hooked thorns that scraped and tore at Meriel’s skin, but that also gouged away huge chunks of the Créneach as they plummeted through them, until it was only Meriel falling, falling . . .

. . . she was surrounded by cloudy night on the slopes of Knobtop, and before her there was a young woman who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. Meriel could not see her face, for she held a shield of polished brass before her, peering over its bright edge. In the curved, warped surface the world around them was reflected back distorted and changed. Meriel knew her, though. She knew her because she could see through those eyes and see herself standing there. “Mam,” she said. “I came to help us, if you’ll let me.”

“Can’t help me,” Jenna said. “Can’t. They’re all around me. They all hate me. They all want the cloch and I won’t give it to them.”

“Mam, you don’t
have
the cloch.”

“No!”
The denial tore from her throat as the shield dropped so that Meriel could see Jenna’s face. Flecks of blood and spittle flew at Meriel, spattering her, but she blinked them away.

“Aye,” she insisted. “It was taken from you, Mam.”

“No!” she screamed again. “It’s here! It’s right here!” She held out her scarred and stiff hand and the hand was also Meriel’s hand. She dangled a chain from her fingers. There was nothing on the end, but in the surface of the shield, Meriel could see Lámh Shábhála, larger than it had ever been and gleaming. She saw it, and she felt the deep, terrible connection to it. She saw her soul attached to it, throbbing and bloody.

“It’s not there, Mam. I know you want it to be, but it’s not. Mam, let me help us, let me try to heal us . . .” She closed one hand around Treoraí’s Heart and held out the other, but Jenna didn’t reach for her. Instead, she clutched at the chain as if she were wrenching open Lámh Shábhála itself, screaming like a Black Haunt calling for a dead soul. The shield she carried swelled, growing huge and rushing toward Meriel with a sound like a smithy’s hammer on glowing iron. She threw up her hands too late; the shield crashed into her: bearing her down, crushing her into the ground. Stones ripped upward from the earth, stabbing into her back and spine like blades. She screamed, and she could see her own face wide-eyed with terror in the shield as it pressed down, down, forcing her onto the unrelenting points of the rocks, relentlessly crushing her.

She was at once Jenna, crushing her daughter under the shield’s horrible weight, and Meriel, underneath.

“Mam!” she screamed, pushing futilely at the shield. “Mam! You’ll kill me!”

“You can’t have Lámh Shábhála!”

“Mam!”

The world darkened as pain ripped through her, as she felt the heat of her lifeblood seeping from her body from dozens of punctures. She could sense a glowing azure thread, snaking through the darkness: the connection to Treoraí’s Heart and reality. It was fading, thinning, and she somehow knew that once it was gone she would be trapped here, lost in her mam’s madness, one with Jenna and lost. She pushed again at the shield, desperate, gathering the remaining energy of Treoraí’s Heart. The shield slid aside and Meriel grasped desperately for her mam with hands glowing blue. Her finger found her and released the clochmion’s power, and at the same time she let her awareness travel the path back even as it began to fade and fail.

She didn’t make it.

Her mam’s mind had quieted; the ghosts haunting her settling into wisps and vapors, but it was still dark with whispering voices and the path had faded, the clochmion emptied. “No!” she cried, and the word came back at her, mocking:
“No!”

The night surrounded her, empty. Meriel flailed in terror.

Scarlet light, different from the blood-drenched sun she’d found inside Jenna, pierced the veil. “Here,” said a woman’s voice. “Feel the mage-power. We’re here . . .”

Meriel forced her awareness that way; with a gasp, she found herself back in Keira’s cave, held in Owaine’s arms as Edana released the cloch around her neck. “I was lost,” Meriel sobbed, her voice ragged. “Inside . . .”

They were all there: Keira, Edana, Doyle. Her mam stood a step away, her expression confused. She came to Meriel, blinking as if waking from sleep, and brushed Meriel’s hair with her scarred and stiff hand. “Thank you.” Tears tracked Jenna’s cheeks. “You saved me, darling. You did.”

“Mam,” Meriel said. “I can’t do that again. I can’t.”

“I know,” Jenna whispered. “I understand. But thank you, darling. Thank you for bringing me back again.” Her skittering eyes found Doyle. “Brother,” she said with a mocking little laugh. “I see you didn’t hold Lámh Shábhála long.”

“I didn’t hold it at all,” he said. “And now I hold nothing. It was all taken from me.”

If Jenna felt any empathy with him, Meriel didn’t see it in her face. “And you,” Jenna said to Edana. “You were at Inishduán, with Demon-Caller.”

“Aye, Banrion. I was. And you defeated me.” She nodded to Meriel. “And your daughter brought me back, just as she did you.”

Meriel shivered in Owaine’s arms. “That was your voice I heard,” she said to Edana, “and your Cloch Mór that lit the way.”

“I didn’t know what else to do. We all saw your panic, and we couldn’t get you to release your cloch and were afraid that if we just forced your hand away, we’d harm you ...” She lifted a shoulder. “I thought feeling a Cloch Mór’s power might somehow draw you back.”

“It did.” Meriel inhaled deeply, held it, let the breath out again. She hugged Owaine, then let go. His arms loosened around her, though one hand stayed gently on her back.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Owaine told her. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

She smiled at him, her lips closed. She could still feel the darkness around her, the sounds of madness, the fear, the face of her da . . . “I’m not safe,” she said. “There’s no safety for us anywhere now. I think I’ve finally realized that. What’s inside you, Mam, is also all around each of us now and we can’t sit here. Edana, you were right. We can’t hide here forever, because everything we love will have died out there while we cower under the trees. Then even Doire Coill will fall.” She nodded, feeling the resolution harden within her: fatalistic, grim, and certain.

“We go into the storm itself,” she told them, “and we’ll either fall to it or not.”

“Y
OU’RE certain this will work?” Meriel asked nervously, and Keira laughed.

“No,” she answered. “But no one seems to have a better idea.”

They stood at the northern edge of Doire Coill with the Mill Creek rushing by to its meeting with the Duán. Each of them had a well-stuffed pack alongside them except for Keira, who carried only an oaken staff. A deep, steep-sided valley creased the land there. In the belly of the cleft was a thick marsh, the trees of the wood remaining high on the sides of the surrounding hills. Old Ragan of the Bunús Muintir had come with them, along with a hand of the people from the village. Following Keira’s directions, the Bunús stationed themselves around the fen in the predawn light and began chanting in their own language. The chant was long and sonorous, continuing for what seemed a stripe or more as the eastern sky slid from violet to orange to pink. While the sky lightened and the low, droning mantra continued, Meriel and the others saw a thick, white mist rise from the black waters and clumps of rushes and ferns, sliding over the hummocks of grass and loam. The fog was thicker than any natural fog, and when it first rose from the marsh the shapes it made were like those of people that slowly dissolved into the greater cloud. They could all hear whispering, laughing voices.

“Sióg mist,” Meriel whispered.

“Aye,” Keira said.

Meriel could remember Sevei, holding her back before she jumped into the fog. “The Taisteal . . . my friend Sevei . . . she said that people who go into the fairy mist don’t come back out.”

“They were right. Usually they don’t.” The mist was rising now, the Bunús Muintir moving with it, almost as if they were herding it like a flock of insubstantial sheep. The fog climbed, moving against the wind and—impossibly—up the slopes of the cleft toward them.

“You’ve done this before, though?” The rising inflection at the end of Meriel’s sentence made it more hopeful question than statement.

A grin flickered on the woman’s lips. “Never.”

“Then how do you know it will work?”

“Because Seancoim once told me that it would and Ragan knows the slow magic for it.”

“So Seancoim did this?” Keira’s face gave Meriel the answer to that. “Or Ragan?”

Another grin. “No. Neither one.”

“Wonderful.”

“If you want to move quickly and hidden to where Lámh Shábhála is, then you have no choice, at least none that are available to me. If you have another and better plan, now’s the time to think of it, before the mist reaches us.”

Meriel stared downward at the rising whiteness. She could already feel its chill, like the air during one of Talamh an Ghlas’ rare snows, the faint laughter in the air growing louder. She shook her head.

Edana and Doyle were huddled together a few feet away. Jenna stood well away from them, with Owaine beside her. Meriel saw Owaine say something to her mam before coming over to Meriel and Keira. “What’s
in
that mist?” he asked Keira. “I hear voices, and look at my arms.” He pulled back the sleeve of his léine, showing them the hair rising in goose bumps.

“The fog contains the Corcach Siógai, the swamp folk. Jenna—or rather, Lámh Shábhála—awakened them from a long sleep as it did many things. Until now they were creatures from old legends. The sióg mist is their breath, and they feed on the hard bones of the living. Dusk and dawn, they sweep out of the bogs and marshes moving faster than the wind and bringing back those who become lost in their mist with them, and there they feed. That’s why when you find bodies in the bog, there’s nothing left but an empty skin of leather.” Meriel shuddered at Keira’s solemn tones. “That’s enough to know about them,” Keira finished. “We’ll stay together, and if the warding-and-release spells work, we’ll come out again.”

“And if they
don’t
work?” Owaine was staring at the mist as if daring it to come closer. It did.

“Then, Owaine, all your questions about what is inside the mist will be answered.”

Meriel saw Owaine shiver. “I’m finding I’m not really all that curious.” The mist was approaching rapidly, and Ragan waved to Keira from the edge of the bog. The chanting of the Bunús Muintir had stopped as the sióg mist snaked between the trees toward Meriel and the others. “It’s time,” Keira called, gesturing to the others. “Put on your packs. We need to hold onto each other, or we may be swept up in the mist and lost forever.”

They each picked up one of the packs and slung it around their shoulders. They made a small circle: Meriel took Owaine’s hand and Keira’s; Owaine grasped Jenna’s, but when Edana—one hand intertwined with Doyle’s—held out her free hand for Jenna to take, Jenna wouldn’t look at it. “Mam . . .” Meriel said, as Edana reached again for Jenna’s hand. Jenna gave Edana a look of scorn and pulled her hand away. Edana glanced at Meriel questioningly.

The sióg mist was only a few strides away and rushing toward them; Meriel let go of Keira’s and Owaine’s hands. “Take Keira,” she told Owaine, then moved between Edana and her man. She grasped Edana’s hand. Jenna’s free hand was still down at her side. “Mam, please . . .”

Jenna slowly lifted her hand as the first tendrils of the mist curled around their ankles, the white cloud of it rising, rising in front of them. Meriel could feel something like the touch of small fingers on her ankles and legs and hear the tinkling sound of high laughter.

Then they were inside.

It would not be the last of the Great Sióg Mists (which would haunt Talamh an Ghlas for long generations), but it was the first. Those who witnessed it said that the fog rolled out of Doire Coill like a boiling white wall three men high, with outrider tendrils that seemed to creep along the ground like tentacles. The wind was blowing hard east that morning, but the sióg mist was slave to no wind and moved northward along the route of the High Road, gaining speed as it went. It swept over Ballintubber first, enveloping the tiny village in a white cloud so dense that those who were caught in it couldn’t even see their hands stretched out in front of their eyes and the sounds of the village were silenced, as if fingers had been placed in their ears. In the muffled silence within the cloud, enchanted, high voices called to the villagers, and those who listened or who allowed the grasping fingers of the Corcach Siógai to pluck them away were taken with the mist. In Ballintubber alone, two children were snatched from their cradles and four adults were never seen again, including Eliath, the owner of Tara’s Tavern.