Dies The Fire

BOOM!

The deep throbbing note of the drum echoed out across the empty fields, seeming to quiver in the hot still air, fading into distance. The noise from the road dropped away; the crossbowmen halted their mechanical rhythm of aiming and firing, looking over their shoulders. So did the heavy infantry preparing to charge.

It was the sound of a four-foot Lamberg drum, beaten two-handed with split canes; the instrument her Scots ancestors had employed to shatter the spirit of their enemies. She had only one here, rather than massed ranks, but the sound rippled up her spine and seemed to jolt in her skull.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM "And now for the second great instrument of Celtic psychological warfare," she muttered.

Her voice sounded distant and muffled in her own ears, as if the part of her mind that dealt with rational thought and speech was withdrawing from the waking world.

Dorothy's bagpipes started then. It wasn't the mannered, cultured version you could hear on most CDs before the Change, or at a festival in Edinburgh. This was a raw eerie wailing; the same music the old Gaels had used to lash themselves into frenzy, until they ran heedless into battle, stark naked and shrieking and sheerly mad.

That too played along her skin; yet the anger that followed was not hot, but cold: as if a wind blew through her from a place of ice and bones, sweeping away all that was human and leaving only incarnate Purpose.

Six months ago, what had these men before her been? Criminals? Perhaps; or perhaps auto mechanics and computer salesmen and clerks.

But now they come to kill, to rape and steal and destroy, to starve our children and take the works of our hands and the Goddess' blessings and drive us out on the road to die or turn cannibal.

Her voice was a whisper; cold and small in her own ears:

"In the name of the babe beneath my heart, I curse you. And Your curse upon them: you Dread Lord, wild huntsman; you Dark Goddess, raven-winged and strong! Come to me, in power and in wrath! May Anwyn take them, and ill may be the house to which You lead them!"

The rage was enormous, beyond all bearing; her hand scrabbled at the catch of her cloak as if it choked her. She cast it off and rose, ignoring Sam Aylward's cry-this wasn't in the plan. She ignored his second cry, as well, of stark terror when he saw her face: turned bone-white, white as the rim all about her staring eyes. The pupils expanded to swallow all else, depthless pools of night. Teeth showed bright beneath lips drawn back in a she-wolf's killing grin.

When she shouted the sound was huge, loud enough to strain even her trained singer's throat, loud enough to shock the drummer and piper into silence for a moment:

"Scathach!"

Even her coveners recoiled in horror, as she invoked the Dark Goddess in Her most terrible form.

Scathach, the Devouring Shadow.

She Who Brings Fear.

Shrieking it, standing with feet planted wide apart, her red hair bristling like the crest of a fox at bay, bow in one hand and arrow in the other as her spread arms reached skyward and completed the double