Before Church could open his mouth, Veitch saw in his face what he was about to say. With a contemptuous shake of his head, Veitch stalked over to the other side of the room where he stood with his back to them.
Tom pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. "Now that's out of the way-
"Have a little heart, for God's sake," Church snapped. "Just because you're right doesn't mean you have to stamp all over people's feelings."
Tom eyed him coolly. "Keep a level head," he cautioned.
"Let us examine the evidence," Shavi said diplomatically; his smile was calm and assured. "Do we have enough to move forward?"
Church sighed wearily. "Every time we try to get some information from anything supernatural it always ends up as mysteries wrapped in smoke and mirrors, so vague you can never be sure you've deciphered it correctly."
"They do it on purpose," Tom said. "They want to see us misinterpret their words and fail or suffer. It's a power thing. Good sport. But they have given us enough." He nodded to Shavi. "You did well." Coming from Tom, it was like a cheer.
Shavi looked down shyly. "`Seek out the stone from the place that gave succour to the plague victims.' Do you have any idea what that means?"
"Something particularly relevant to the residents of St. Mary's Close. A little research should turn it up."
"Then that will lead us to the Well of Fire," Church said. "And if we can find some way to bring that back to life, then we stand a chance of disrupting the Fomorii stronghold which we now know is somewhere beneath the castle."
"Destroy that," Tom said, "and we will prevent Balor returning. They would not have guarded the place with something as terrifying as the Cailleach Bheur if this was not the location for the ritual of rebirth."
Since they had been in Edinburgh they had all felt a darkness pressing heavily at their backs. It was something more than a premonition, almost as if the threat of Balor were reaching out from whatever terrible place his essence inhabited; as if he were aware of them. It left them desperate to win the struggle ahead, and dreading what would happen if they failed.
"And then we get Ruth," Veitch chipped in pointedly without turning from his investigation of the mini-bar. He pulled out a bottle of lager.
"But the spirits said the blue fire was not enough," Shavi noted. He stretched out his legs and rested his head on the back of the chair. "They said we should call for the Good Son, whatever that means."
Out of the corner of his eye Church saw a flicker cross Tom's face; it was like a cloud obscuring the sun. "What is it?" he said to Tom.
"Nothing." Tom looked at his feet. "A story I heard once long ago."
"Oi. Spit it out then. You were the one who said all those old tales were important," Veitch said irritatedly.
Tom walked over to the window where he seemed to be eyeing the rising sun suspiciously. "The Good Son was the name given by the ancient worshippers to one of the most important of the Tuatha De Danann. The Celts knew him as Maponus or Mabon-which simply means Son-or Oenghus. He was, in their stories, the son of Dagda, the Allfather, and the Great Mother. The Son of Light. When the Romans came into the Celtic lands he became associated with Apollo. When the Christians came, he was the Christ. He was linked to the sun, the giver of life. More double meanings, you see. The Good Sun."
"What, you're saying Jesus didn't exist?" Church asked.
"Of course not," Tom snapped. "I'm simply saying Maponus was an archetype. An original imprint that other cultures drew on for their own myths."
"Well, I'm glad you answered that one, then," Veitch said sarcastically.
"He was widely worshipped throughout the world," Tom continued. "The Divine Youth who would lead the world back into the light; he was a great musician, the player of the lyre, a great lover, a patron of the arts, worshipped at the sacred springs and seen as a direct line to the powers of creation. Beautiful, witty and charming. But there was another side to him." He paused. "The Irish used to call him the Lord of Love and Death."
The sun broke through the window, casting his distorted shadow across the wall; Church had a sudden vision of something monstrous moving across the room. "What happened?" he asked quietly.
"I have no idea. After the great sundering, when all the old gods and creatures of myth left here for Otherworld, some of them, the ones with the greatest bond to our world, returned. Maponus was one of those. His links were possibly the strongest of all. There was a reason he, of all the Tuatha lle Danann, was seen as a saviour by mortals. And then, suddenly, he disappeared."
The others waited for him to continue. "What happened?" Church prompted.
"The Tuatha lle Danann would never speak of it," he said hesitantly. "In all my time in Otherworld it was the one question I dared not ask." A shadow crossed his face. "That's wrong. I did ask it once. But never again." Church caught a glimpse of the same terrible expression Tom had worn when he had first told them about the suffering he underwent during the gods' ganger. "The Tuatha lle Danann indulged me. I was an amusement, a curiosity, but certainly not an equal. They considered me so far beneath them they would never discuss something they considered important. And this, whatever it was, was obviously of vital importance."
"If he disappeared, how the hell are we supposed to find him?" Veitch asked.
"When I returned to this world and was inducted into the secret knowledge of the land by the Culture…" He looked at them sharply as if he had given something away. "… the people of the Bone Inspector, I learned another strange story which perhaps shed a little light on it. One of the great old gods had been bound by the Culture in a place just south of Edinburgh, sealed in the earth for all time."
"I don't fucking understand." Witch's irritation was growing. "If this geezer was so loved, why was he banged up?" He glared at Tom as if the hippie was personally setting out to confuse him.
"I never learned why. That information was kept by the highest adepts within the Culture. I never stayed with them long enough to rise that high."
"The Culture… the people of the Bone Inspector… they seemed to have a lot of influence. Power," Church noted.
Tom nodded. "Supposedly eradicated by the Roman forces, they simply went underground, for centuries. But in the time when they bound the old god, they were at their strongest, worshipping in their groves, tending to the people, turning to face the sun at the solstice, standing proud, no longer stooped in hiding."
Veitch drained his lager and tossed the bottle into the waste bin with a crash. "I don't get it. I've seen these things in action. You can't just stand up and wave a sword at them."
"At that time, the keepers of the knowledge had unprecedented control of the lifeblood of the Earth. They used the blue fire to shackle a god."
"Then he is imprisoned still," Shavi noted, "waiting to be released?"
Tom merely looked out of the window towards the sun, closing his eyes when the light caught his face.
"Sounds a bit dodgy to me," Veitch said suspiciously. "He's not exactly going to be of a mind to help us after being underground all that time."
"I thought you were the one prepared to risk anything for your lady-love?" Tom said curtly.
"Can we control him?" Church asked. "How do we know the dead weren't lying to us, playing another of their games so we'd actually get into an even bigger mess? Like having an angry god giving us a good kicking for his unjust treatment."
"We don't know." Tom sighed. "But it makes a queer kind of sense. If the Fomorii are preparing for the rebirth of Balor in their fortress beneath the castle, it will have been deemed impregnable. They will not risk losing their sole reason for existing. The Cailleach Bheur…" He swallowed hard; his mouth had grown unfeasibly dry. "She is a power of nature, greater even than many of the powers you have already witnessed. Of all the gods, Maponus is possibly the only one who could hold her at bay, contain her so she didn't unleash the fimbul- winter. And if, at the same time, we could awaken the Well of Fire then the shadows might finally be turned back."