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‘And I need him – do you think I would not protect him?’
‘Once his use is past, no. You won’t give him a second thought.’
He studied her, curious. ‘What do you think is about to happen here, witch?’
‘What did she offer you?’
This night was not going as planned. Build me a fire, she’d said. I will guide you to the First Forge. A sceptre must be made. And a crown … or did she say that could wait? She’d made me drunk on her. Not wine, not ale, but her strong grip on my damned cock.
A goddess of some sort. A demon of the fire. Flame bitch? That will do, I suppose.
Fucked up my memory, to be certain. Sceptre, crown … throne?
‘You are addled,’ Hale said. ‘Already lost in the unnatural heat of Bilikk’s forge – see how nothing burns away? How the flames grow even unfed? She’s coming—’
The forge behind Bilikk suddenly erupted. A tongue of fire arced out like a whip, striking Witch Hale, who shrieked as she was flung back through the doorway of the house, landing crumpled on the wooden floor, where her body began burning like resinous wood. In moments the floor and then one wall of the house were alight.
Stunned, terrified, Hunn Raal sought to back away.
Impossibly fast, the entire house was wreathed in flames. From the second level came screams.
His apprentices.
Fires now rose along the low walls of the smithy, encircling Raal and Bilikk. The stacks of charcoal raged, the buckets of water boiled and spat, the woodshed vanished inside an incandescent maelstrom.
Their clothes burned, and yet neither man was harmed, even as the heat engulfed them, and the air itself was devoured by the torrent of flames.
She spoke then. ‘This will do. Two young lives in the rooms above. Cousins to a slain man, both of them filled with grief. I have purged their torment, taken away the feel of poor Millick’s fists. Now that was a senseless thing, wasn’t it? But all ashes now, all bedded in peace.
‘And the witch! Delightful sacrifice!’
Bilikk cried out something then, but his words were lost in the roar of the conflagration surrounding them.
Tentacles of flames snared the smith, dragging him screaming into the forge, where he vanished inside the white fire.
‘Come along then, Hunn Raal. I was summoned to the fashioning of one sceptre, and now another. I attend the flames. I feed the First Forge all that it needs. The blood in my womb, the lust we ignite between us, the seed you and your kind all spill into me. Step forward, it is time. We await you.’
He was helpless against her invitation. Suddenly without need to draw breath, his skin untouched by the heat and flames, Hunn Raal strode forward.
Where the smith’s forge had been there was now only white incandescence, and yet, at its core, there waited something like a gateway, framed in flickering flames.
The Mortal Sword stepped through.
The world beyond was a thing of ashes and blasted earth, the sky blindingly white.
She spoke in his head, her being filling him, like folds of flesh closing about his soul in a mockery of an embrace. ‘Love remains at the heart of this, Hunn Raal. It is shapeless to begin with, a thing of sensations. Warmth, comfort, safety. So it resides in the newborn child, fanned to life by the one who bore it. This bond takes time, but once made, it is unbreakable, and to challenge it is to awaken fire.’
‘You are a goddess of the hearth,’ Hunn Raal said. Raging flames marred the horizon, as if they had come upon an island in a sea of fire. The ash filling the air drifted on sullen currents. ‘You devour, and behind your warmth there is the promise of pain.’ He saw Bilikk, kneeling a short distance ahead. Just beyond the blacksmith the ground lifted into a rough cone, and from its ragged mouth smoke rose in sinuous coils, shimmering amidst intense heat. ‘Goddess,’ Hunn Raal continued, ‘you know nothing of love.’
‘Every gift of warmth awakens memory of the womb, Mortal Sword. But the child within you drowned in wine long ago. Shall I raise up its tiny corpse? Here, look upon what you have killed.’
He saw before him the body of a small child. For a moment he thought it sheathed in blood, and then he realized the fluid dripping from its limbs, running lazy tracks down its round face, was not blood, but wine. He staggered back a step. ‘Go to the Abyss!’
‘I can return it to life, Hunn Raal. This dead child within you. Dead and deadened. Stained beyond all innocence.’
As he stared in horror, the creature opened its eyes, revealing the perfect blue of the newborn. ‘Stop this! Why do you torment me? This speaks not of love, you cursed bitch!’
‘Oh, we are all mothers to what spawns inside us, for us to nurture or neglect, to love or cast away, to comfort or abuse, feed or starve. To worship as life, or sacrifice with death. No soul exists, Hunn Raal, that does not kneel before a private altar, blessing in one hand and a dagger in the other. What choice do you make for your life? Do you mark each morning with gratitude, or death?
