It’s Always Darkest Before It Goes Completely Black
Morrigan’s encampment, Black Hill four miles from Lanark
Cooper regained consciousness, wondering if he’d spent more time sleeping or unconscious in the last few days. He was lying on the grass watched by witches and warlocks who stood a healthy distance away giving him nervous looks. Glaring thralls stood farther back, weapons at the ready, they didn’t like mages because they fought for rewards, not love, and they hated him with a vengeance for spurning their beloved goddess.
The dragons overhead were in a flight pattern that allowed diffused sunlight to filter into the camp and keep up air support at the same time. As he sat up, the people in front of him moved to one side so he could see that he was a few yards below Morrigan, who sat on her throne of skulls at the peak of the hill.
“Hiya!” he said with a high-pitched squeal, waving his open hand enthusiastically from side to side when he saw her watching him.
“Art thou being insolent, Warlock?” she said, raising an eyebrow quizzically.
“‘Insolent’ how come only super-villains use that word? But, no, I’m definitely not,” he said resting an elbow on the grass in a relaxed pose.
“I wilt not waste mine time with thine weasel words, I giveth thee a choice: joineth me or perish.”
“Of course I will, I thought you’d never ask!” he said standing up and brushing the grass off of his clothes, “But, here’s the thing, I have a couple of weeks off booked in New Zealand, and you won’t know this, but when you start a new job, these days employers will honour any existing holidays, so I’ll see you when I get back in a fortnight, batteries charged and raring to go.”
“Mocketh me If thou wilt, Warlock, if thou doth not fear for thyself what of thine woman?” she said, beckoning to her one of her personal guards as he wondered how paranoid she had to be to have bodyguards when she was surrounded by what was probably close to three hundred thousand devoted followers by now, each and every one of whom would gladly die for her. His face fell when he saw Cassie being pulled out of a nearby stone temple, as he’d thought she’d gotten away when she wasn’t there when he woke up.
The big thrall led her up to the throne and stood her beside it; her hands were ties behind her back with rough rope and a filthy rag was stuffed in her mouth. There was a patch of dried blood on her forehead, from the crash, but she looked well apart from that, although her “Warlocks are Dicks” sweatshirt wasn’t going down too well with the magick community.
“Honestly, Cassie, this is the third time I’ve caught you doing this sort of thing, if I’d known you were into bondage I’d have been happy to tape your mouth shut for you days ago,” he said before turning his attention to Morrigan. “She’s not my woman, in fact she hates it when people call her that, which happens surprisingly often. She’s just an advisor and I can replace her with a library card tomorrow, so do what you want with her.”
“Deceiveth me not, warlock, for I canst see into thine soul.”
“When did I grow one of those? I’ll be in trouble if I get a conscience next.”
“Thou couldst have stood thine ground, felled thousands with a single spell and, mayhap, escaped in the confusion, but instead thou tried to lead mine thralls away from her. Thou risked thine life to save her’s.”
“You, of all people, shouldn’t believe in that romantic nonsense; I was getting well away. I look after number one, ask anyone, always have, always will.”
“As thou wisheth,” she said, looking offended at being called a person, as she beckoned another bodyguard over, “gut her an hangeth the carcass from the nearest tree.”
“No!” he shouted, making his staff rattle against the inside of the temple wall as thralls close enough to him stood ready to beat him unconscious if the next word out of his mouth called it to him. “You win, I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t hurt her.”
“Then thou wilt be mine general?”
“Absolutely, as soon as you let her go.”
“Mistaketh me not for a fool, Warlock, but I shalt gift her to thee as thine thrall, to warmeth thine bed,” when Cassie heard that her eyes shot wide open, she gave a muffled squeak of outrage and almost fell over.
“Great! Now can I have my staff back?”
“Once thou commandeth a mighty army of mages.”
“You mean when there are more than enough trained warlocks and witches to take me down easily with or without it?”
“Mayhap thou art not so dull of wit as thou first appeared to be but remembereth this, thou think thou art great as thou hast swatted a few troublesome fairies and demons but I am thine goddess and shalt not succumb to thine childish trickery!”
They had assigned him accommodation befitting the rank of general––a family sized tent from a camping centre; inside was a wooden bedstead topped by a mattress made of sackcloth stuffed with straw.
Cassie’s hands had been untied by one of the soldiers at Cooper’s insistence and she was trying to gargle the taste of dirty rag out of her mouth at the wash-hand basin opposite.
“This bed needs warming, just saying,” he said sitting down and patting the mattress beside him when she’d finished.
“It’ll be warm enough when I’m in it alone and you’re sleeping on the floor.”
“You’re a terrible thrall,” he said, pulling a couple of straw-filled pillows and rough blankets from a pile in the corner and settling down on the groundsheet beside the bed.
“We both know you were bluffing,” she said, as she climbed under the covers fully dressed, “or you wouldn’t have got that thrall to fetch the pillows and blankets earlier.” She went quiet for a few seconds then said, “So, what do we do next?”
“We get as good a night’s sleep as possible, then you can tell me everything you know about Morrigan that you didn’t put in your briefings, right down to the smallest, most insignificant detail. After that you leave me to do what I do best: hone in on people’s weaknesses and use them against them. But whatever we do we’ll only get one shot at it, if it doesn’t work we won’t be alive to try again.”
Sombre silence filled the air before he spoke again, “I see there’s a chamber pot under here, which is handy, it’s a bit chilly outside for a trip to the toilet,” he said with a mischievous grin.
“Don’t even think about it!”
In the morning, he took a stroll, looking up at the uileupheist covering the sky and hoping that those giant dragons didn’t share the same mid-air toilet habits as birds, he might be up to his neck in it, figuratively, but he’d rather that it weren’t a physical fact.
He ambled all around the camp, seemingly aimlessly, whilst checking for the best escape route, a task that was made a lot harder by Morrigan assigning him what his adjutants called an entourage based on his new rank, but was in reality an armed guard consisting of six apprehensive mages and another half-dozen soldiers who were hoping he’d make an escape attempt so they’d have an excuse to beat him up.
Up above them, the catering corp was spread out around the middle of the hill as thousands of thralls busied themselves making and serving breakfast, the smell of cooking porridge oats drifting down, reminding him of how long it had been since he’d eaten.
Besides clearing the stock out of supermarkets and food warehouses they’d slaughtered all the farm animals for miles around, what they didn’t use would be cooked and salted to preserve it for the journey to the next town.
He couldn’t see Morrigan on the summit because of the long queue, taking her tribute that wended its way up to her throne and would be there as long as daylight lasted. At the bottom of the hill, in front of several abandoned military vehicles, was a new loch. It had taken most of the mages, working in shifts all night, to create it by raising an underground stream using a series of diverting and excavating spells.
They started that after his capture and Morrigan had postponed the assault on the town whilst she assessed and tested the newly promoted General Cooper, rather than have him betray her at a crucial moment.
Despite the coldness of the water, it was filled with nude bathers, Cassie had, unsurprisingly, opted for the more modest option of washing in the tent, and he’d left to give her privacy.
Farther away, down towards the road, a narrow, exposed part of the underground stream had hundreds of rows of planks over it that passed for toilets. The thralls didn’t have any sense of privacy, so, as a new general, he’d had to order his mages to erect a tent over the one he’d designated as his and Cassie’s. Four of them had spent five minutes arguing about the best incantation to use before he handed them tent pegs and a mallet and told them to do it in the normal fashion.
He bathed and washed his clothes in the loch after throwing away his empty belt and ankle holsters, deciding he would never see his guns again. His body should have been covered in cuts and scrapes from recent days and jagged scars from falling out of the plane, but his magick had healed them all, although he didn’t know it, an X-ray would have shown that he’d never had a broken bone, despite the obvious truth of the matter. He dressed, and, forgetting himself for a moment, whispered, “Tioram,” an incantation that made him and his clothes instantly bone dry. He hid his elation from his guards as he realised he still had his magick, with or without his staff.
After shouting to check Cassie had finished her ablutions, he walked into the tent with two bowls of porridge. “I don’t need my staff!” He said excitedly, handing one over.
“That’s demonstrably untrue, what makes you think that?” She said, suddenly ravenous when she smelled the food.
“I had a wash in the loch and dried myself and my clothes with magick, without using my staff!”
“Oh, is that all?” she said, after she’d finished devouring the food in seconds. “I’m still hungry, where did you get this?”
“Wait a minute! What do you mean ‘is that all’?”
“If you hang your clothes out on a washing line, the sun will dry them (on the few occasions we actually get some sun in Scotland) but if you wanted to use it to burn a hole in them you’d need a magnifying glass and that’s how the runes work, they magnify your natural ability, without them you only have enough power for a few, very rudimentary incantations, like drying your clothes or summoning your staff.”
“That’s disappointing, oh well, back to the old drawing board, maybe I can steal a staff from one of the other warlocks,” he said hopefully.
“No, each one carves his own runes, they’re not interchangeable. Now eat your porridge and show me where to get more,” she said, pointing to his bowl.
He spent all afternoon teaching the mages rudimentary battle magick, which wasn’t easy as he always had to talk someone else through an incantation he couldn’t do himself without his staff.
In one lesson where they were practicing a disembowelling spell on the carcass of a pig, borrowed from the catering corps, he was surprised to see that only about three-quarters of them either threw up or fainted when one of the Harry Potters completed the conjuring, sending blood and guts splattering over everyone, except for Cooper, who’d made sure he was standing far enough back.
After that he picked up the carcass and threw it over his shoulder to take back to the cooks, dismissing the class to clean themselves up before dinner. He and Cassie had chicken, potatoes and peas as the smell of the roasting pig drifted into their tent, “I might get a bacon butty yet,” he said.
After that they took a stroll outside with his usual guards in tow, as what seemed to be a never-ending queue of gift-givers crept up the hill, blocking their view of the throne.
“So, Gerwyn,” he said, turning to the face the biggest and most brutal looking of the thralls who followed them, “did you ever think about giving Morrigan one?”
“What did you say?” he shouted, in a Welsh accent, enraged.
“You know, bumping uglies, horizontal jogging, jumping her bones, making the beast with two backs, rumpy-pumpy,” he finished by making squeaky bedspring noises with his mouth.
“Don’t you talk about her like that!”
“You have to admit that she has a nice body, although I prefer my women with clothes I can see through, rather than skin and that missing nose is a bit of a turn off, but you could always put a paper bag over her head.”
“Shut your foul mouth!” he shouted, almost apoplectic, as the others glared at Cooper with hatred in their eyes, “She is beautiful and virginal.”
“Oh, C’mon, she’s had at least a half-dozen children, so she’s definitely not a virgin, and she’s not going to win a beauty contest anytime soon, do you think she enjoyed all those conceptions?” he said, making the squeaky bedspring noises again.
“Vile blasphemer!” Gerwyn screamed as he swung a vicious right cross, but Cooper had been watching his eyes and ducked just in time. As the big man put his head down and charged in a blind rage, Cooper sidestepped, tripping over his own feet, rolling down the hill before smashing into a rock at the edge of water, blood pooling on the ground under his head.
“Cooper! Callum!” Cassie cried out as she ran down to him, she knelt beside his limp form, cradling his head in her arms, “He’s dead,” She sobbed, holding up a hand dripping with blood, “you murdered him!”
The mages all vanished behind veils or just plain ran away. “That was you,” another of the guards said, “you heard Morrigan’s orders, she said she was the only one allowed to kill him.”
“It was an accident,” Gerwyn said, the blood draining from his face, “I never touched him, you saw that.”
“She won’t care, she’ll tear your skin off one strip at a time,” a third one chipped in, “that’s not going to happen to me I’m going to tell her what you did,” he said, suddenly sounding like an oversized child.
“No, you’re not,” Gerwyn said, landing a vicious punch on the side of the man’s head as he turned to leave. The other four jumped on the Welshman who fought back, giving as good as he got.
As they collapsed in a heap, punching and kicking, Cooper jumped to his feet, rubbing the shoulder he’d hunched up to take the impact from the rock instead of his head. On the ground was a flattened pig bladder that had been filled with the animal’s blood that was seeping into the grass.
A cry of, “Fusada!” summoned his staff as he wrapped an arm around Cassie’s waist, pulling her tight against him. He slammed it down with a roar of, “Crith!” they rose into the air, levitating six feet above the surface, as the earth bucked and cracked beneath them. Thralls and mages alike tumbled down the hill as the pig, still impaled on the spit, disappearing into the loch with a hissing sound, along with any hope he had of getting a bacon butty. The ones who missed the water rolled over and over again to flatten the trees at the bottom.
Suddenly, Morrigan was in plain sight, hanging onto her throne as the quake subsided and they floated gently to the ground. She stood, threw back her head and screamed; it was a terrifyingly inhuman sound. Up above them a circular gap swirled open in the flight of dragons, the weak evening sun shining through it.
Then it was blocked out again as hundreds of boobrie ravens, the size of houses, swooped through the growing gap. “I was sure she’d have sent the dragons first, oh well, here goes Plan B, hold your breath,” he said to Cassie as he pointed his staff behind them and whispered, "Leum,” sending them flying backwards into the middle of the loch. The instant their backs hit the water he screamed, “Fìneagach!”
As they disappeared beneath the surface, the sky grew black with millions of midges, tiny, itching, biting bugs, attacking anything warm-blooded as Morrigan stood unaffected. Her thralls, who were climbing back out of the water, ran down the hill clawing and scratching at their flesh as the insects, so thick in the air that no-one could breathe, followed them.
Under the water Cassie was struggling to get to the surface as Cooper held her by the leg, her lungs bursting with the need for air, cool, sweet air that he needed as well, more than anything else.
Up in the sky, the gigantic birds swerved erratically inside black clouds of bugs that were burrowing under their feathers and beneath their skins.
Underwater, white lights flashed in front of his eyes as he watched Cassie thrash about drowning, he wanted to tell her it would only be a couple of seconds more, as he wondered if either of them had that long. A few feet away a dying raven hit the water with an almighty splash, the wave washing them up onto the shore just in time to see the dragons closing ranks as the surviving birds fled. Several boobrie lay on their backs dead, claws pointing up as the midges winked out of existence one by one.
Morrigan looked at them with a burning hatred as they knelt on all fours spewing up water. He was desperately tired, and it looked like this was the closest he was going to get to the summit. With his strength failing fast, gasping for air and about to pass out from exhaustion, he had to hope it was close enough.
He rammed his staff into the muddy ground with a heartfelt cry of, “Beathaich!”
Power like he’d never felt before surged through him. Every nerve in his body pulsed with an energy that few humans had ever felt, and none for hundreds of years.
“What doth thou think thou art doing?” she screamed as the ley line that had boosted her power was syphoned off before it reached her.
He suddenly cried out in pain, he looked down to see Rattus Rattus Rex slashing at his ankle with his razor-sharp, ring-pull tin lid, as the witches circled above on their brooms, waiting for the warlocks to arrive so they could all attack at once.
As cry of, “Scort!” came from behind he turned to see a young warlock take aim again as Rattus Rattus Rex drove the point of his darning-needle sword at Cooper’s eye. Above the witch Tracy McInally fired a withering spell, that would have atrophied all the muscles in their bodies if it hadn’t, quite literally, missed by a rat’s whisker.
Pulling Cassie hard against his side again, he batted the rat back with his staff and gave a cry of, “Dheich!”
A repulsor field surrounded them, as Rattus Rattus Rex hit it with his sword it blew him back at ten times the speed, landing him in the middle of the loch. Above them, the witches swerved frantically as they hit the repulsor field, blasting them into the water. Morrigan’s thralls were leaping up the hill yards at a time, and would be on them in seconds.
On the left thousands of fairies and pixies appeared out of mid-air and flew towards them, low beneath the dragons’ bellies, a familiar figure in the lead, the blue bruise made by a tennis racquets string still on her forehead. After them ran giants, demons of all shapes and sizes followed by the shape-shifters.
On the right fifteen hundred elf warriors rode in on their white chargers, aiming bows with arrows tipped with poisonous elf-shot. Behind them, and to the side, were the dwarves, ghouls and trolls.
As the repulser field faded he let go of Cassie, but instead of running she stood beside him, her tiny fists clenched defiantly. She was five foot three tall, weighed nine stone soaking wet and had no chance against even the weakest of those coming to kill them, but she was still ready to go down fighting and he loved her for that, and for so many other reasons.
“Thine doom approacheth, Warlock, thou art naught but cattle to me!” Morrigan sneered, her voice amplified to be heard over the din of approaching battle.
“Moo,” he said, the ley line boosting his voice to the same level, then he slammed his staff down with a cry of, “Dogail!”
A red mist appeared, swirling around the tip of the staff, rising high into the sky and burrowing down beneath the ground as it spread out in all directions. Morrigan shrunk back in horror as it engulfed her, then she roared in laughter as it passed through her harmlessly, “Thou hath not the power to hurt thine goddess even at such short a range!”
“I wasn’t aiming at you, in fact, I was aiming at everybody but you.”
“What doth thou meaneth?” She said looking confused.
“It’s gone quiet, hasn’t it?” he said.
She looked past him to her thralls who were milling about aimlessly, looking at their uniforms in puzzlement as she noticed that all the magick creatures had vanished without a trace.
Up in the sky, the uileupheist dragons and boobrie ravens were fading out of existence, Morrigan looked at her hand in wide-eyed horror as it became increasingly transparent.
“What hath thou done unto me?” she screamed as she started to fade away.
“Since you never bothered to learn Scots Gaelic, I’ll tell you: I used a spell of cynicism. Every conspiracy theory in the world spreading out for two hundred miles in all directions. As it touches people, one at a time, they stop believing in magick and so they stop believing in you.”
“Nooo!” she screamed, her voice fading until it sounded like a whisper in the wind, then it was gone. He staggered, suddenly exhausted, aware of the dozens of stinging scrapes and cuts he’d sustained in the battle for the first time as the last of the magick left his body.
As he started to relax, he heard, “Coops!” drifting up from down below. Jackson Smith and Oxford were climbing out of the abandoned armoured personnel carrier they’d been hiding in during the battle. They started running up the hill and as they got closer, he could see Smith was waving a Beretta M9 pistol. Cooper lifted his sweatshirt, reaching for his Glock, until he remembered he’d lost it. Morrigan’s former thralls, still totally confused, scattered at the sight of the gun.
“Your coming with us, Coops,” Smith said, aiming his weapon when they were only a few yards away.
“Mr Oxford,” Cooper said, “if you have your notebook handy, can you look up duplicity for me, please? If you don’t have that, try deception, dishonesty, falsehoods, or just plain lying.”
“Found it,” Oxford said seconds later, looking pleased with himself.
“What the hell are you doing?” Smith said to Oxford, who was too busy with wordplay to listen to him.
“Now, keeping that in the back of your head for a moment,” Cooper said, hoping there was room for two thoughts in there at once, “Smith must have told you and your employer that the money was never on the flight or you wouldn’t have thought I still had it in the first place, but since the plane was destroyed the only one who would’ve known that for a fact would’ve been the one who left it off, isn’t that so, Mr Oxford?”
“Your dead, Coops,” Smith said, steadying the pistol in a two-handed grip.
“Duplicity, right, Mr Oxford?” he said, not having the strength to run as he watched the cogs in the big man’s brain turning painfully slowly.
“Yeah, how did you know that?” Oxford said knocking Smith’s gun to one side just as he fired, sending the bullet harmlessly into the hillside.
Smith turned and bolted, firing back wildly as the big man chased him back towards the road, returning fire with the roar of a Smith & Wesson Magnum.
Ahead of them, climbing out of the loch, was a big, black rat, Rattus Rattus, but Rex no more, that scurried for the cover of the long grass. Over to their right a soaking-wet witch in full costume was straddling her broom, desperately bouncing up and down, trying to start it, “It’s over, Tracy,” he said, “go home.”
“She tried to kill us, shouldn’t we arrest her… or something?” Cassie said, glaring at the former witch as Cooper sat down before he fell down, no longer propped up by adrenalin.
“And, what, tell the police that a witch waved her magic wand at us? That might have worked an hour ago, but now they’d just roll about the floor laughing,” he said rubbing his ankle that he suddenly realised he must have been sprained during the fight. “anyway, it wasn’t personal, it never is.”
“Then I suppose we should get back to the office, see how things are there,” she said, reluctantly changing the subject as she sat on the grass beside him, “do you think you can walk?”
“I’ll have to, unless you can hail a passing taxi, but give me a few minutes. Then, when we get back, I’m going to sleep for a week,” he said, lying on his back and resting his head on the grass.
“What about after that, what are you going to do next?”
“What I always do: whatever the world runs out of, there’ll never be a shortage of people with too much money, greedy to get their hands on even more.”
“Or, you could come and work for me, instead… if you want,” she said disapprovingly.
“If I do, will you threaten to fire me?”
“Almost certainly on a daily basis, but will you do it, anyway? It doesn’t pay much, well, not by your standards, but it would be fun.”
“I’m not sure, wouldn’t that make me one of the good guys?” he said, sounding reluctant.
“This is the government we’re talking about, even on its best day goodish is the most we can hope for, and look on the bright side, it’s the home of the bureaucratic, pompous and self-serving, just the kind of people you like to annoy the most.”
“I’ve taught you well, grasshopper,” he said with a smile as he forced himself to sit up, before he fell asleep. He glanced at Cassie, her wet hair plastered against her head, and thought about a few days time, or a few days after that, when he’d be hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away, never to see her again. Pursing his lips he looked at the smoke rising from the town below and thought back to the cracked streets and damaged buildings in Edinburgh, “Okay, but I am not joining one of the clean-up crews.”
“Mr Cooper?”
He looked around to see a tall, good-looking man in his thirties with short, brown hair, dressed as one of Morrigan’s generals striding up the hill.
He looked familiar but Cooper couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before, then his face lit up with recognition as he got closer, “Colonel Charles Grant, the world’s politest kidnapper, I haven’t seen you since Jackson Smith demolished my house.”
“I must apologise for my appearance, I seem to have over imbibed at a fancy dress ball and blacked out,” he said looking wide-eyed at the dripping-wet Cooper’s cut face, hands, and hair stained with pig’s blood, “perhaps you did the same thing?”
“Can you drive an APC, Colonel?” Cooper said, pointing at the armoured personnel carrier down below.
“I can indeed.”
“Then give me a hand up,” he said, prompting Grant to help him to his feet, supporting his weight on one side as Cassie put his staff in his