A Terrible Beauty

to do? Shoot her?

Katie felt as if a huge dark presence swept over them, or perhaps it was only a katabatic gust of wind. But Lucy threw her head back and stuck the boning knife into her chest, right up to the handle, and drew it downward, not hurrying, as if she were relishing the way she was opening herself up. For a long, calm moment she stood in the rain with her intestines sliding out of her, all down her thighs, and her face was as strange and pale and beautiful as the face of Mor-Rioghain herself.

'Now, Mor-Rioghain, you have your sacrifice!' she cried, even though her voice was shaking with pain. 'Come through, O pitiless one, and take my offerings! Come through, maker of widows and orphans, carrier of grief and shadows!I call you once, I call you twice-'

Katie thought,God, this is the final summoning. Mor-Rioghain's coming-she's actually coming through!

She stumbled toward Lucy through the muddy furrows. She fell to her knees once, but she managed to pick herself up again. Liam shouted,'Katie! No! For Christ's sake!'

But Katie picked her shining revolver out of the mud, raised it double-handed, and fired it almost point-blank at Lucy's face. Lucy pitched backward in a spray of blood, and a slap of an echo came back from the trees.

Almost at once there was a loud sucking noise, like closing a car window at high speed, and a sudden increase in pressure that made Katie's ears pop. The soil beneath her feet physicallyrippled, a shock-wave of earth that ran all the way back to Iollan's Wood. The trees dipped and thrashed as if something wild were tearing at their roots, and then they were suddenly still.

Katie stood where she was, panting. A small ghost of gunsmoke hurried off into the woods. Liam cautiously came up to her, still pointing his revolver at Lucy's bloody white body.

'It's all right, Liam. She's completely dead.'

Liam looked around him. The wind had died down already, although the rain continued to fall across the fields.

'You only fecking topped her,' he said, in disbelief.

'I didn't have any choice.'

'Jesus Mary and Joseph she was past saving already.' He peered at the body. 'Itwas past saving already.'

'You don't know that. She was going to ask Mor-Rioghain to bring her back to life.'

'Katie, thereisno Mor-Rioghain. Did you see any Mor-Rioghain? There was wind all right, but it was only a squall.'

'You're probably right. But I wasn't prepared to chance it. And I wasn't going to let down any of those thirteen women, not now, not after everything they suffered. Lucy's dead, Mor-Rioghain's back where she belongs, in the Invisible Kingdom, even if you don't believe in her. Those women have got their justice now. That's all that matters.'

Liam holstered his gun. Katie looked away. The duty garda was running up toward them, up the field, like the back marker in a marathon, plodding on, plodding on, even though he's never going to win.

56

'Hermaphrodite?' said Dermot Driscoll, putting down his half-eaten cheese-and- pickle sandwich onto his blotter.

'Yes, sir. It appears so. We've sent to America for any medical records.'

It had stopped raining and the sun was glittering on the drops of water that clung to Dermot's office window.

'So?what do you think we tell the media?'

'I don't think it's going to pay to complicate things, sir. Let's say that a disturbed individual tried to copy the ritual murders from 1915 and 1916, and killed himself to escape being arrested and charged.'

'Killedhimself? Orherself?'

'We don't know yet, sir. We know that she wasn't Professor Lucy Quinn. She's a seventy-six-year-old living in retirement in Mill Valley, just outside San Francisco. But quitewhoshe was we're still not sure. Not everybody in this world has an identity, do they? I think that was Lucy's problem. She was neither a man or a woman, and from the way she talked, she had never had anybody to help her come to terms with it. Not even God. That's why she went looking for somebody magical like Mor-Rioghain.'

'And poor old Gerard O'Brien found out about her, and suffered the consequences?'

'Yes, sir.'

'How's John Meagher?'

'He'll live, but he won't be singing opera for a while. And I don't think he'll ever be farming again, I shouldn't wonder.'

'Horrible case, Katie. Gives me the shudders. Do you think you can play it down, when you talk to the press? You know, forget about the witch bit?'

'Yes, sir.'

'As for Tomas O Conaill?well, I think we can forget about any charges against him. Never pays to upset the Travelers' support people.'

'No, sir.'

?   ?   ?

Katie left Dermot's office and walked along the corridor. Jimmy O'Rourke was waiting for her, with his hands