A hot juicy something lands on me shoulder and drips down me chest.
<—Be sick. Yeah. Uuaagh. It’s a sure thing, actually. Sorry. Those were good leaves too. You know, I think I recognize one of them! I guess I didn’t chew that very well because I was so excited about how delicious it looked.>
How are your bugs?
<My bugs? I imagine they’re fine. I still feel them and stuff.>
Great. This is Tír na nÓg. Full of trees, but not the kind you’re used to eating. We’re going to do that one more time, so hold on to your stomachs.
I shift to the tether point that Gaia wants me to use, though I’m not sure precisely where it is. Somewhere to the north and east of where I was before—in Europe, certainly, but north of the mountains and east of Germany. I might actually be in Poland—I’m not sure where the modern borders are drawn. All I know is that it’s quiet enough to hear Slomo barf wetly on me shoulder again.
<Urrrgh. Sorry, Oaken.>
It’s okay, lass, I tell her, brushing it away. Maybe ye will get used to it. And maybe we won’t shift very much from now on.
<I like that second idea. So where are we?>
On the other side of the world from your jungle. This is across an ocean or two.
<It’s drier here. I mean, I can feel the air is dry.>
Wait until you feel a desert. Okay. I have to find out from the elemental what we’re here to do, and then there may be some action.
<More action? I have already experienced more today than I have in my whole life!>
This might be the kind of action where ye have to defend yourself. You’ve done that before, haven’t ye?
<Once or twice. So much energy, though!>
Don’t worry about energy. I’m going to give ye all ye need. Just make sure whatever ye see goes down instead of you. Those claws of yours can do some real damage if ye put some muscle behind it. Move fast as ye can and don’t give anything the chance to hurt ye.
<What are we going to fight?>
We’ll find out soon enough.
The elemental tells me where to go: It’s a decent jog of a couple of miles, because there aren’t any tethered trees closer than that, but after only a wee while Slomo asks if she can follow along in the trees. We’re running through some woods that are close enough to allow swinging in the branches, and she argues that it will probably be a smoother ride for both of us. I agree, and the weight soon lifts from me back and she hoots as she takes to the branches, her long arms propelling her from tree to tree.
Have fun but try to do it quietly, I says. We don’t want to announce that we’re coming.
The objective, I’m told, is to close a portal to the Christian hell that someone has managed to open. Hell was supposed to stay out of this fight, I thought, but some gobshite didn’t get that particular memo. Which means I have to deal not only with whatever’s coming out of that portal but with whatever sorcerer had the moxie to open it.
Perhaps I’ll get lucky and find that the sorcerer got eaten by what came out of hell. Siodhachan’s stories about it suggest that happens as often as not.
<There are lights and grunty fighty sounds ahead, Oaken,> Slomo tells me.
Oh, aye? After a moment I see and hear them too. I’m glad you’re in the trees. Stay up there unless ye have good reason to come down.
I’m a bit more worried about her being here than I was before, because Siodhachan’s stories about hell are flooding back and they’re not the shiny happy sort. I’ve never had to deal with the Christian hell meself, because that whole religion came along and flourished while I was stuck on that Time Island. The day Siodhachan told me that Christians drove the Druids out of Ireland and then the Irish wound up killing one another over different versions of Christianity centuries later was an especially dark stretch of a dark feckin’ day. A notable detail about the religion is how much effort is spent on imagining eternal punishments after death. Plenty of faiths have richly imagined hells, Siodhachan assures me, but apparently the Christian one deserves the biggest slice of bread pudding at the end of the night. So many demons and devils eager to torture souls—so eager, in fact, that they want to trade for them and are willing to deal with sorcerers to get what they want: more deaths, more corrupted souls. And should they be set loose on this plane, they will never hesitate to kill anything living in hopes that it might increase their own power, especially since it reinforces the idea that they are hellish and to be feared, a circular thought pattern within the faith that they exploit. It’s no place for a sloth to be dangling around.
I come to a small clearing in the forest that’s been turned into a battlefield with multiple light sources. One of them is the moon and stars above. There’s an orange-red glow coming from the open portal to hell, which is rapidly draining the elemental’s energy—the entire reason I’ve been called. But there are also other lights, purple cones surrounding thirteen women as they battle the horrors coming out of hell and the white light of whips they’re using like scourges to banish the horrors from this plane.
I have to stop to take it all in, because it’s as intense and alarming as a chopped ghost-pepper poultice applied directly to the genitals—with forethought, and malice.
What I’m seeing fits with stories Siodhachan has told me before. These must be the Polish witches he told me about, the Sisters of the Three Auroras, who derive their powers from goddesses called the Zoryas. The purple cones surrounding them are protective wards, and those weapons they’re lashing around are hellwhips. And that smell is entirely from hell.
<Oaken, something smells really bad. Like even worse than jaguar poots,> Slomo says, <and in case you didn’t know, there is no poot in the world worse than a jaguar poot.>
I file that information away to share later with Granuaile.
That’s the demons. Stay away from them, all right? If any come near, I want ye to get away if ye can, take off their heads if ye can’t.
<Which are the demons?>
The ones that smell bad and try to kill ye.
<Got it.>
The sorcerer is on the far side of the portal: Some sad scabby punk of a lad who thinks the world owes him something, and he’s come to collect. I put on me brass knuckles and call out the name I remember from Siodhachan’s stories—the leader of the coven, if I’m not mistaken. “Malina! Can I help?”
Most of the witches do not react, but one of them looks in my direction after finishing off some monstrosity that looks like an ambulatory slime mold with eyes.
“Who are you?” she shouts, backing up and flailing the hellwhip around in front of her in a defensive pattern. She has long straight blond hair falling over her shoulders, most likely the finest hair I’ve ever seen in me whole life, and like the rest of her coven, she’s dressed in something black that I suspect must be fashionable these days. I don’t know how to describe it in modern terms, but basically, if I were a wee lass, I would look at Malina and want to grow up to be her someday, and even as a grown man I’m more than a bit sad that I will never, ever look as good as she does destroying evil. Kind of glad, actually, that me young apprentices aren’t here to see this, or else they might not want to be Druids anymore.
“Owen Kennedy, Druid of Gaia. The man who taught that O’Sullivan lad!”
She squints at me for a moment, probably confirming that I have the requisite tattoos and am bound to the earth, and then she nods. “If you can take out the sorcerer, that would be helpful.”
Helpful, she says! That would end the whole fecking game, the way I see it, but it’s not the sort of thing to raise a fuss about. I’m here to close that portal, and everything else is a distant second to that. I just don’t want to get mistaken for an enemy in this bloodbath and get lashed with one of their hellwhips.
I circle around to the left, running clockwise, as they say, and plow me fist through the face of something orange and toothy that tries to stop me. It explodes under the knuckles and falls over in a shower of its own ichor, but that only draws the attention of four more horrors. I realize that none of them are flying and I might be able to avoid some messy bollocks by shifting shapes. I strip off me shirt and shift to a red kite, soaring above the demons and circling around behind the sorcerer. The clever bindings Creidhne worked into the knuckles mean the brass has flowed down to me talons, and I’m thinkin’ as I glide behind the sorcerer that it’s going to be so easy to simply latch on to his neck from behind, clutch, and tear away his throat. Easiest mission of the whole day, and on top o’ that, I get to look cool in front of the cool kids of the coven.