Through conduits and corridors that had more in common with veins and arteries, the spear sought out the Naga symbiotically fused with the craft and the other semi-autonomous organisms/weapons that lived within it and killed them all.
Fachtna drew his sword again, cut through the framework and dived into the now-empty seventh level of the wicker man. He rolled forward onto his feet and ran. The dragon breathed once more. Fachtna felt the heat on his back; his hair caught fire as the shoulder of the wicker man was turned to slag.
Through the layers of psychoses, the spear recognised the craft as a manifestation of its ancient enemy. It sought out the craft/organism’s beating heart and slew the dragon.
Fachtna glanced behind him. The Naga craft was listing badly to one side. Then the disruption in the air at its tail, caused by the craft’s Real Space drive, simply stopped, and it plummeted towards the sea.
Fachtna stopped running and headed back to the edge of the fused area of the wicker man’s seventh level, patting out the flames in his hair as he went. He ignored the burning sensation from his feet and the smell of flesh cooking as he looked out and watched the dragon crash through one of the curraghs below. Even frightened, even deafened, the captives still managed to cheer.
Now comes the hard part, Fachtna thought. The program had taken up an enormous part of the memory within his internal nanite headware. The program was complex, intelligent, ancient and had its own personality. It was designed to do just one thing: soothe the spear enough for it to return and be replaced in its case. To the spear this would feel like the betrayal of a lover played out in moments that for the AI stretched out for lifetimes.
Possession by the spear was a definite threat. Fachtna activated protective programs, mystic sigils that would look after his internal systems; he dropped calming narcotics into his augmented systems to try to suppress the psychotic rage spillover into his consciousness. He ran through calming mental and physical exercises taught at warrior camp and later by the technomantic dryw.
The spear returned to Fachtna’s hand, its haft receding. Fachtna tried not to hurry as he sent the various codes designed to make the AI sleep. He placed it in the case and with a pronounced sigh of relief closed it.
The foot caught him dead centre in the back with a force that would have snapped a non-augmented spine. Instead it sent him sprawling across the soiled boards.
Bress let go of the framework he’d used to swing in and dropped down onto the floor behind the prostrate Fachtna. Behind him the framework that had opened for him with a thought was growing shut.
‘You’re a long way from your Eggshell, little man,’ he said evenly. Fachtna rolled over to face him. He felt a little thrill of fear. He wished he hadn’t used the riasterthae frenzy to kill the giant. He couldn’t withstand another frenzy today. He wished his arms and shoulders weren’t still in agony despite the best efforts of his augmentations to repair them.
‘I thought we were a myth to the likes of you?’ he asked for the sake of something to say.
‘Long gone perhaps, but Crom has a long memory.’
Besides fear, Fachtna also felt excitement. He really wanted to kill this man. He was less happy when Bress leaned down and picked up the case with the spear in it.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
Fachtna skipped up onto his feet, sword in hand.
It was warm in here. Her internal breath felt like the dry desert wind from a hundred lives ago. Except in her breath was moisture. He stood in a cave of bone and flesh, his hands and the side of his head sunk into the wall. He shared the thoughts and feelings of a creator. He was perverting them. He had fed her pain and fear and hatred, and she had given that form. From her womb they had grown like blisters through her skin. Skin that was strong enough to survive the deepest abysses the oceans had to offer. Slowly she was waking. Unlike her sisters, her creator had not driven her irrevocably insane, but the pain of the sacrifices would be enough to harm her mind. That would allow him to influence her to open the way.
The pain and the fear lessened significantly. She could still feel it, even asleep, but it was not being fed directly to her via the transmissions of crystal parasites. He had felt the interference but thought nothing of it. Small people with small minds. They could not be allowed to stop the sending, however.
Smoke poured up through the planks in the floor of the fourth level, obscuring most of their view and the people waiting by the steps. They were just coughing, sobbing shadows now, cursing those who moved so slowly beneath them.
Teardrop was a bleeding mess, still sitting cross-legged, his arms held out, no part of him unwounded. If his skin was not cut then it was burned. His gibbering had long ago ceased to be language, and blood came from his mouth as crystal oozed from his eyes. He was now just making a rasping rattling noise.
The first thing she noticed was that the cursing, sobbing and coughing had stopped. The captives came through the smoke towards them, arms outstretched, enslaved by the magic of the crystal seeds in their heads again. Britha moved in front of Teardrop. She heard him coughing and spitting out blood behind her. Crom apparently wanted Teardrop and Britha dead more than he needed the captives’ fear.
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.