Dragons over england, p.12
Dragons Over England, page 12
"I hope so, for it's tonight we must end this. Shamus //
"Aye, I know what must be done. Watch yurself, Letty Blossomwalker."
He sprinkled gold dust on a large leaf lying nearby and, true to his name, rode off on it as it leapt into the wind.
Maurice Tourret, watching from an alcove behind the altar, was both pleased and annoyed. The church was filled to overflowing. Jeremy Bratton and William M'Kenna would provide crowd control, if it became necessary. But where was Ryan?
Suddenly, hushed whispering among the worshippers dropped into silence. Father Ryan had entered through the main doors and was slowly walking down the nave, Elizabeth by his side. They ascended to the altar together. Father Ryan gazed out across his congregation.
"In the twenty-fourth chapter of the book of Matthew," he began, "we are warned that 'false messiahs and false prophets will appear, performing signs and wonders so great as to mislead even the chosen, if that were possible.'"
Tourret stiffened. What was that fool up to?
"Like most of us," Father Ryan continued, "I dreamed of being more than the reality of my existence, harboring hopes that God's plans for me would more closely match my dreams for myself.
"So when I heard a thunderous voice calling me to the greatness I dreamed of, I was far too ready to let myself believe that the God of the Old Testament Who spoke directly to servants here on Earth had returned, and had chosen me as He chose the prophets of old. I didn't dare look too closely for fear the miracle I had hoped for would vanish. I convinced myself my willingness to believe was an act of faith, instead of pride."
Tourret clenched his hands and cursed. What to do now?
"Tonight, one whose childlike faith remained true opened my eyes — and ears — to the truth. 'Where the carcass lies,' Matthew's gospel also tells us, 'there the vultures gather' — vultures like Maurice Tourret and his Cyberpope! Their 'religion' is the way of deception and death! Forgive me, dear friends, for what I tried to lead you into. Dear God, forgive me."
"Heresy!" Tourret screamed, rushing onto the altar. "What have the devil and his servants in Rome done to you, Father?"
"It's you who have done it, Tourret. You and my own sinful pride."
Tourret turned to the congregation. "Satan has stolen the Father's soul! The Trickster knows what miracles will occur tonight and fights to prevent it!
"Come with me, girl," he said, roughly seizing Elizabeth's arm.
"Let go of her." Father Ryan placed himself between Tourret and Elizabeth.
"You forget yourself, old man."
"That's true, Tourret. I forgot I swore to serve a loving God. But you helped me to forget, didn't you, with your tricky little messages? 'Trust Tourret. Follow him.' How many times a day do you play that tape? Have you had the entire town listening to subliminal suggestions that we follow you like lemmings? I have heard your message, Tourret. I. Have. Heard."
The Frenchman's lips pulled back in a canine snarl. He swung at the older priest, but Father Ryan grappled with him and they fell together, struggling on the altar.
Churchgoers rose from their pews, muttering and shouting. Before they could act, William M'Kenna froze them by firing a machine pistol burst into the rafters. Bratton rose from his seat and stripped off his gloves menacingly.
"Stop!" Elizabeth cried, tears running down her cheeks. "Please stop. Why can't it be like it used to be when everyone was happy?
"Remember how we used to smile and shake hands and hug each other after Mass? How we'd help each other when we needed it? Remember when Mr. M'kenna used to smile and nobody carried guns? We loved each other!"
Her thoughts whirled as she sought a way to show them what she felt. Like makin' those stars or walkin' proper. All ye have to do is picture what ye want. But when she tried to latch onto the happy images that had filled her mind moments before, they fled to hide behind the black stone.
No, she thought, go away, stone, go away. In her mind she flailed at the solid black barrier . and found herself moving forward through a thick, dark fog. She could see nothing, but from somewhere voices were singing in the old language, their rhythm seeming to guide her as she moved through the blackness. Then she was entering a place of intense light and waiting in it like mislaid toys were the images she sought: Neary's Parish before Maurice Tourret came.
Inside the church, the air began to swim like heat waves before the altar. Elizabeth, now smiling brightly, eyes closed, moved her hands continuously as hologram-like scenes began to dance, fade, and reappear in the air in front of her.
The congregation watched a movie in which they themselves starred, with scenes of smiling worshippers shaking hands at Mass; neighbors working with one another to repair a car or plant shrubs; William M'Kenna and his wife, Janie, laughing with friends in their bakery.
With a snarl, Tourret tried to lunge for Elizabeth, but Father Ryan held him tightly.
"Bratton, M'Kenna! Kill the little witch!"
"Run, Elizabeth! Run for the side door!" Letty shouted from hiding. Elizabeth, snapping out of her dream state, began to run.
Jeremy Bratton was charging forward, tossing aside those who got in his path.
Elizabeth ran out into the night air, ran blindly along the side of the church, raced smack into a hedge bordering the road in front of the building, and fell to her knees. She looked up and saw William M'Kenna standing over her.
"Good job, M'Kenna," Bratton said, racing up, Tourret close behind him. "Now finish her."
M'kenna looked down the barrel of his weapon at Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the child he and Janie never had. The little girl they had saved the largest pieces of gingerbread for. The young woman who still brought her childlike awe and unquestioning love to him whenever she visited his shop. He turned to face the other two.
"You'll not harm this child, Jeremy Bratton. Go on and fight your war, but she's not to be a part of it."
"Then stand aside and I'll do the job, M'Kenna. Don't make me kill you, too."
M'Kenna laughed ruefully. "So much of me's been dead so long, any wee bit you might finish off wouldn't even be noticed. But you'll not harm Elizabeth." As he finished speaking, he triggered a burst from the machine pistol.
Bullets ricocheted from Bratton's interdermal plating. A few sent sparks flying from his head, punching
holes through the thinner armor of his cheeks and throat and shattering the ball of sensors that served as his right eye. The impact knocked him to his knees, silicone lubricant streaming down his face like tears. Then M'Kenna's pistol jammed.
"For that, you won't die clean, M'Kenna," Bratton said, his voice rasping like a file on metal. He fired the flechette pistol built into his index finger. Clouds of razor-edged triangles whined through the air, ripping into M'Kenna's legs. As the baker dropped, screaming, Bratton turned to Elizabeth.
Father Ryan, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, was running toward them, but Tourret dropped the priest with a single blow across the throat.
"Nothing personal, girl," Bratton said.
Suddenly, he was engulfed in flames. Hovering over him, a dragon spewed out a fiery breath that fused wires with muscle and bone, sending hissing steam spiraling into the night. With a high-pitched, keening wail of pain, Bratton stumbled out of the churchyard to disappear into the village below.
The dragon hovered, recharging its flame. Atop its head, clinging to one large ear, Shamus Leafflyer searched for Tourret.
With a sudden roar, the dragon twisted violently, its right eye gone. Below, Tourret stood pointing at the flying reptile, pseudoskin removed from one finger to reveal the laser concealed within.
The dragon spat fire as it roared in pain, setting the roof of the church aflame. Its tail whipped about, connected with a corner of the centuries-old structure, sending large stones and sections of crossbeams flying. One small piece knocked Letty to the ground. A minute later, the burning roof collapsed. Screams of parishioners still trapped inside echoed in the night.
Wildly the dragon spun about, disappeared in the darkness to the west. Minutes later, the ground shook violently as it lost its battle to stay in the air.
Tourret stood silhouetted against the flames of the church. In the village below, other fires were springing up, spread by the wild beating of the dragon's wings. Behind him, Father Ryan struggled to rise from where he had fallen, but Tourret's attention was fixed on Elizabeth crouched at the base of the hedge. A flying stone had scraped away part of the Frenchman's face, revealing the cybercircuitry beneath. There was a loud click as he closed one hand and three spring-loaded blades extended from the back of his wrist.
Elizabeth searched for magic, tried to make Tourret disappear, tried to find anything to make him stop, but her mind was again filled with the black fog.
"You little idiot," he growled, "you can't begin to know what you've done with your half-witted magic. I'll slit your belly like you were a rabbit."
"You'll have to kill me first."
The Frenchman spun around. Father Ryan stood breathing heavily, clutching the iron crucifix he had of Destiny pocketed earlier, the way a child clutches a teddy bear after a nightmare. His eyes had a glazed, half-mad look.
"I'll stop your devil's work even if I die in the process. My faith is solid now as the iron in this cross."
"The iron of your papacy against the steel of mine, eh, Father? I'm sure there's an allegory in there somewhere," Tourret laughed. In a blur of motion, he swept his arm up, burying his wristblades deep in the priest's side.
Father Ryan gasped. Blood began trickling from his lips.
"O Lord," he cried out, "do not desert me as I deserted You."
He grabbed for the cyberpriest, shoving the crucifix into the exposed wiring in Tourret's face.
Sparks flew. Electricity coursed through the iron molecules of the cross, travelled through the Father's body, returned to Tourret. The cyberpriest stiffened as wires short-circuited. Paralysis seized his cybermuscles and froze his diaphragm, shutting down his lungs. Mouth open, the crucifix burned into his face, he expired locked in deadly embrace with the Irish priest, both bodies sparking with what some would later call electricity and others would swear was holy fire.
Elizabeth stumbled to her feet. Dazed, bewildered, she wandered away from where Doctor O'Donoghue was desperately using magic to try to stop the bleeding in William M'Kenna's legs. Picking her way around stones knocked from the church, she found Letty grog-gily trying to stand.
"Oooh," the leprechaun moaned. "What happened?"
Letty's face twisted in horror as full consciousness came rushing back.
"Leafflyer!" she shouted. "He was ridin' the great beastie. I've got to get to m' people!"
Unsteadily, she began staggering toward the west. Elizabeth scooped her up and began to run, letting herself become the wind, her feet flying over the grass below.
In minutes, they reached what was left of the leprechauns' forest glade. Trees were broken and uprooted. A long, deep trench showed where the dragon had plowed the ground in its crash landing. The trough ran directly through the place where the meeting hall had been. Some ways off, the dragon's body lay, parts of trees sticking out from its scales, its blood soaking into the soil.
"Leafflyer!" Letty cried. "Grassweaver! Is anyone alive?"
"Not many."
A leprechaun hobbled from under a bush.
"Grassweaver!"
"We were dancin' the Sacred Rings when the beast fell among us. A few escaped, but most were right in its path."
"An' Leafflyer?"
"I had a glimpse o' him ridin' the creature down, tuggin' on one ear as if he could turn it away from us. It was a valiant death he had."
"Letty," Elizabeth said, "Can I —" "Go back to yur people now, Elizabeth." The leprechaun wiped away tears. "Go back to yur people an' leave me to bury mine."
Elizabeth trudged out of town under a listless grey sky, a pack slung over her back. The acrid smell from burned buildings still lingered in the air, over a week after the conflagration. She passed the church where repairs were well underway, supervised by priests sent from Arklow. Many new graves lay like raw wounds in the cemetery. Two of them contained her parents.
She had gone to visit William M'Kenna where he was recuperating, a sheet laid over the stumps of his legs.
"Gavin says he'll soon have the abracadabras cast on a platform he's building for me," he told her. "Swears I'll zip around better than I did on what he called my 'fat, middle-aged legs.' Guess I'll be using magic after all, if I want to get about. Some of the townsfolk are getting up a local guard to watch the coast road and the farms hereabouts, and they've asked me to coordinate it. They haven't found Jeremy Bratton's body yet and some of our village lads haven't been seen since that night at the church, either. We're thinking they may be off playing Warriors of Destiny and we don't want them stirring up more trouble around here. Ah, to think I threw in with that lot. What would Janie have said?"
He paused and looked into Elizabeth's eyes. "I saw her, you know, child. Not just a memory like Tourret showed me or what you conjured up in the church; I really saw her.
"When Gavin was working on my legs there by the hedge, I sort of floated above and watched him for a bit. Then I saw Janie, nothing separating us but a wee stream, her standing under the trees on the far side. But when I went to cross over to her, she just kept waving me back, saying 'Not yet, not yet.' Then I woke up here without my legs. But I almost made it to her, Elizabeth. I almost made it to her."
She left then and slipped out of town unnoticed. She stopped at the ruined glade.
"Letty, I've come to say goodbye."
With a rustling of leaves, the leprechaun emerged to sit on a jagged stump a little way off.
"So yur goin' travellin'?"
Elizabeth nodded. "I guess so. Maybe the people who made us unhappy will do the same thing in other towns and maybe I can show people how things used to be, like I did here."
"Aye, yur a dreamweaver, that's for sure. An' a powerful one, too. I haven't seen such a dreamweaver amongst yur people since long before ye brought in the machines an' we lay down to take our great nap."
"Doctor O'Donoghue says I have some extra something in my body. Is that where my magic comes from?
'Cause, you know, Letty, I feel different ever since that night —" Elizabeth hesitated, looking around at the wrecked glade.
"Anyway, I feel kind of like something inside me came unstuck, like water running through a drain after you unstop it. I still have trouble saying words sometimes, but when I try to remember how to do things, it's easier now. Most of the time, anyway."
"I suppose the magic might have been sleepin' in ye an' when ye needed it badly enough, it woke up. Makes no difference, long as ye got it."
They sat in silence while a butterfly flitted among the broken flowers. Elizabeth saw small mounds like the new graves in the churchyard.
"I'm sorry about your people," she said softly.
Letty nodded. "The fairies came to dance over them an' helped me plant seeds amongst them. Fairies aren't such a bad lot, for bubbleheads. Even the banshee came to sing a dirge."
"I heard it." Elizabeth said, shivering. She lifted her pack. "Well, I'd better go."
"Where are ye headin'?"
"I don't know. That way, I guess," she said, pointing west.
The leprechaun sighed and climbed down from her stump. Silently, she began plucking leaves from mint plants and slipping them into the pouch on her belt.
"What are you doing, Letty?"
"Well, I don't intend to put up with that abomination yur people speak all o' the time. It's bad enough I'll be hearin' it from the other Big Feet without listenin' to that squawkin' at night when we're alone."
"You mean you'll go with me?" Elizabeth was incredulous.
"Dreamweaver ye may be, but few Tall Ones are likely to pay much attention to what a young one is sayin', especially if they think she's a bit fairy-brained. Ye'll need someone with experience to teach ye the ways o' the world. Besides, without remindin', ye'll forget how to walk proper an' go squashin' every grass blade an' cowslip beneath yur great feet! Now hoist me up onto yur shoulder so I can slip into yur pack if we run into anyone."
From her friend's shoulder, Letty surveyed the broken glade one last time.
"I would like to return in the Spring, though, to see the flowers bloom over their sleepin' places."
"We'll come back," Elizabeth said. "I promise."
"Like the Fianna, we'll come home when Eire's shores are safe, eh, lass?"
"Who were the Fianna, Letty?"
They started off across the fields.
"Ah, dinna yur people teach ye nothin'? Let me tell ye about when I was a wee bit younger than I am now . "
Gypsor's Luck
Bill Smith
Aye, you're right, Fred. Gypsor's in fine form tonight."
Bakkeris had to scream to be heard above the sound of the crowd. He looked up and over the bar, squinting to try and see who Gypsor had targeted tonight. The smoke from the dwarven pipes interfered with his vision of the scene, but from the way Gypsor swayed and smiled, bouncing from hoof to hoof, Bakkeris could tell that Gypsor was trying his best to make a favorable impression.
Grabbing a pair of freshly washed mugs and trotting over to the keg, Bakkeris pulled the handle, allowing the ornately carved ceramic mugs to fill with thick, brown ale. He had to smile to himself. A filled tavern, a happy clientelle, Gypsor in rut again and a full cash box. What more could one ask for? "A few more weeks like this one, and we'll be back in the black. Soon the Satyr's Pub will be ours."
He looked back over at Fred, one of the regulars at the Pub. In the past few weeks, he had become a good friend of the barkeep, always drinking enough to justify his permanent spot at the bar, and never causing any problems. He also had a good nature about him, even if he was a little dull-witted and coarse. "I tell you, Bakkeris, you let that half-folk pester your paying womenfolk like that, and business'll go bad."
