They barely had a chance to see the thing that came up out of the water before the slammed into them. It was sinuous, covered in pearly black, green and purple scales. For a head, it had something like a the head of a fish, something like a lizard. It thrashed into Dapplegrim, and the boy fell from the saddle. When he hit the water everything went black–the candle had followed him and was snuffed out. For a long, painful moment he was underwater, ice-cold, unsure of which way was up and desperate for air. He broke the surface by luck, managed a gulp of air, found the bottom of the stream and tried to stand. He could hear Caewen yelling and Dapplegrim yelling and an awful, cold, hate-filled shrieking and hissing. Before he could scramble out of the water, hard, muscular coils closed on him and he was lifted off the sand. Air was crushed out of him. His arms were pinned at his sides and the thing seemed to be moving, trying to drag him into the cave-opening it had come from.
When light flared and filled the room, the boy felt a rush of hope. When he clearly saw the face of the thing that had him in its coils, that hope drained away just as fast. Its mouth was round, sort of like a lamprey, and it had circular rows and rows of sharp teeth. On top of its head were nine round, black shining eyes that stared unblinking like a fish.
Caewen was now screaming: “Burach-bhadi! Burach-bhadi!” over and over, and then she was yelling, “Kill it! Kill it!”
Dapplegrim tried to get close, but shied at the last moment as if he had been stung. “It burns,” he cried. “Hur. Its slime burns!”
The boy could feel his life leaving him. Every breath he took was a little tighter. It would crush him to death before the others could do anything. But then Caewen was thrashing into the water with her sword singing wildly. The eel-snake-thing snapped at her a couple times and tried to retreat with the boy in tow, but she snuck in one blow, and then another, and then she took her sword clean through the thing’s trunk. The head and neck and good part of the body flopped forward and began to thrash around madly. The boy was thrown into the water by the death-throes, and he was lucky not to be crushed. Though hurt, he was able to half-scramble, half-swim to the shore and drag himself away from the creature. He fell on his back in time to see Caewen driving her sword through the creature’s neck and pining it to the sandy beach that skirted the stream on their side. The water was tinted a deep black-red with blood.
Dimly wondering how he could see at all, he looked around and saw that Caewen had dropped another candle into a convenient wall-sconce and lit it. He didn’t pass out but he felt he must have come close. The world spun and he had to drag forcefully at each breath as if his lungs had forgotten how to work on their own.
Caewen crawled up onto the shore and sat with her head draped forward over her knees. “Burach-bhadi,” she muttered.
He managed to wheeze out, “Is that what the thing is called?”
“Yes. A wizard’s shackle. They were bred in the north during the Wars of the Sorcerer-Kings. Bred for fighting mages of war. They have a powerful unmagic in them. You can’t cast a spell at a wizard’s shackle and anything with too much magic in its blood finds them painful and burning to touch.” She kicked the dead head with a heel of her boot. “I guess this one was feral.” She seemed to sag a little more. “There might be a whole nest of them here.” She then got to her feet, uneasily, picked her sword up, and looked at it, before letting it slip from her fingers onto the sand in disgust. The bronze of the blade flashed in the candlelight as it fell. “The woven charms are all gone. Cursed thing’s blood sucked the art right out of the metalwork. Nothing but an old bronze sword now.”
“Maybe feral,” said Dapplegrim, wheezing, “or maybe left here as a guard.” He sounded more suspicious than Caewen had. “Can you move, both of you? If you can get up on my saddle, then we should get away from here as quick as we can. No part of me likes being underground. Not the horse part of me. Not the wood-demon part of me. I want open air. I’m feeling more and more suffocated. And that thing’s slime left streaks of burns and scalds along my flanks. If there are more of them, they’ll kill me without a moment’s pause, and then where will you two be?”
“Dead too, no doubt,” said Caewen. “I just have to do one thing.” She stood and taking out a knife she dropped to a crouch beside the thing’s head. She then cut out the eyes, plopping them in a pile beside her.
Dapplegrim snorted. “What are you doing? That’s the worst part of them. Don’t let those touch me.”
“I won’t. I’ve an oiled leather pouch. They’re for the child anyway.”
He was in pain, cold and confused. “Why?”
“Because you don’t have a name. Not a proper name.”
“Why does that mean I need to have a bag of creepy eyeballs?”
“Because them who are without names are difficult to set a spell on in the best of circumstances. Magic needs a name to… I don’t know… how do I put it? It needs to ‘latch onto’ something. Things are tamed, dominated, understood and mastered by their names. But you are nameless. And if you have a pouch of shackle-eyes about your person, you’ll be nigh invisible to magic. A wild god could put a curse on you, and it’d just slip off.”
“Oh.” That did seem useful. “It seems like maybe I shouldn’t ever get myself a name. It seems useful.”
She shook her head. “Some tribes in the far north do that. They withhold naming ceremonies until a person is sick or near death. They just use nicknames and bynames instead. But that’s risky. Dying nameless is a risk. You don’t want to die nameless. There’s too much of a chance that your spirit won’t find rest.”
The boy felt coldness run through him. A deep cold shiver of soggy wetness and ice. “Like… a ghaist. You mean if I die without being properly name-given I could become something like those ghaists?”
“Not absolutely,” said Caewen, “Not certainly… it just makes you more vulnerable to that sort of thing.” She finished carving the creature’s eyes and dropped them into a purse that she threw to the boy. As she washed her hands in the stream she said, “We could do a naming. There are a hundred naming ceremonies. It’s not the ritual that matters, it’s that you know you have a true, proper name, all of your own, yours for your own use.”
“Can we then? I don’t want to come back as something uncanny-like. What if I’m killed? What if I catch pox and die?” He swallowed. “And excuse me for saying, but travelling with you two isn’t exactly the safest of pastimes.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The best names are names that are earned. Being without a name makes you phantasmal to the forces of magic, but having a name you’ve earned can be a brick wall against certain evil things just as surely. I guess, I was waiting… just waiting to see what name you might earn. But we don’t have to wait. We could give you a name, any name, if you like?”
He paused a long time and thought this over hard. “I suppose…” thoughts of being cold and dead and tortured ran through his mind. “Well, I suppose I’d rather earn a name, if it is better to do it that way.”
She stood up. “It is.” He could hear her trying to make her voice sound strong, but mostly failing. “Alright–come on now. We need to keep moving or we’ll freeze to death down here. Standing still in a cave can kill you if you’re wet.” She stooped and picked her sword up from the sand. “A sword is better than no sword at all, I guess, magic or no.” Cleaning it first, she slipped it back in its sheath.
When he was closer to her, the boy could see that her face was now ashen, and her veins a livid blue colour under the skin. “How are you feeling? You look worse than you did.”
“I lit the candle with magic. With the burach-bhadi so close it was nearly impossible for me, but I did it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry I dropped the candle.”
She laughed and the laughter echoed up and down the tunnel. It was a fey laugh, the laugh of a person so near death they no longer cared about the world of the living. “You survived an attack by a monster out of the ancient days of warring and sorrow. That’s enough for one day, child. No need to be sorry.”
They went on in silence after that.