Kennel, Kingdom and Crown
Page 7
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Gareth swooned as he looked upon the king's inner chamber. His knees wavered. Had Asguard not been at his side, he would have crumpled upon the hall's flagstone.
The tale of the basilisk Markus had shared with him so many years ago sounded so terrible then that Gareth did not suspect the existence of creatures more dangerous. The sights of that chamber shattered such foolish thoughts. A creature far more wicked, far more cruel, than any hissing basilisk had slithered into that chamber and left behind horror and gore.
The body of Luke's youngest daughter, Cassandra, hung from the chamber's high ceiling, the noose contorting her neck into an awkward, broken angle. Dried blood smeared her face. Dark red gore stained her hands and ran to her elbows. A small knife, a child's blade that could barely be considered a dagger, lay on the ground beneath her feet, a few inches beyond the last bloody footprint from the feet hanging overhead.
Luke's body sprawled on the stone near the shadow of his hanging Cassandra. He lay face-down in a glistening pool of blood, clearly drained from the violent, deep gash that severed his throat. Both of Luke's eyes were missing. Nausea rolled Gareth's stomach. Fear rattled his knees. Yet Gareth forced himself into the room to kneel at his older brother's body. Memories of Luke flooded his thoughts – Luke's tutelage through numbers and letters, his encouragement after each of Gareth's many failures with his martial training, his support when Gareth chose to keep company with Ebon's mighty war dogs instead of with his fatherless, but none less royal, family. Gareth closed his eyes as Asguard pushed against his side. The knife lay only a few inches away from Luke, lay in the shadow of his hanging daughter. Gareth swallowed. His heart could not accept what his mind suspected.
The body of Luke's only son, Kyle, leaned against the foot of the chamber's wide bed. Bloody gashes covered the boy's forearms. Gareth shuddered as he looked into the black cavities that once housed the child's gray eyes. The hand of Luke's other daughter Michelle extended out from beneath the bed. Blood spilled across the floor beneath that hand as well. Gareth's courage wavered, but he forced himself to look at the girl's face shoved beneath the bed and discovered Michelle's eyes as well carved out of her visage.
Horrendous carnage rested upon the bed's mattresses. Gore covered and stained the bedding, the sheets once counted among the sparse luxuries the Stonebrook keep offered. Katherine, Luke's love and Stonebrook queen, stretched across the bed's center. Her long black hair rested upon a pillow beside her head. She had been scalped, and the bone of her skull screeched in Gareth's sight. She had been stabbed repeatedly, until her chest turned into a pulp of ragged flesh. Gareth saw that Katherine's green eyes remained, the emerald sparkle that had been so cherished by the Stonebrooks for offering a color besides gray no longer filled with life glow.
During a single night, the Stonebrook family had been slaughtered. No invader had challenged the keep's walls for centuries. Yet now, carnage visited the Stonebrook rulers in their most intimate of family chambers.
Gareth did not doubt what weapon the killer had yielded. Only, he could not believe that Cassandra could have been the murderer.
Wren spoke from the threshold. “That's why we didn't touch anything. It's too horrible to believe if you've not seen it yourself. It had to be her hand that wielded that blade.”
“How can I believe it?”
Wren's gray eyes didn't flinch.
“You'll believe it,” she answered. “You've yet to look at the walls. But look upon them, brother, and tell me that you don't know who summons the fog.”
Somehow, the gore was worse on the walls. Glistening, dark blood smeared across the chamber's walls. Gareth would not have believed so much blood could have been harvested from those butchered in that room. Such stain would have been enough to shatter the strongest of wills. But the blood was still more terrible. The blood implied intent. It expressed a purpose. Gareth shivered as he looked upon the walls and recognized the signature left behind in Stonebrook gore.
Cassandra, though so young, had impressed the stoic Stonebrooks with her artistic talents. Many of her tapestries hung throughout the keep's hallways. Recent mosaics assembled by her hand currently surrounded the Stonebrook throne. Cassandra's art had lent color to the gray keep, had helped soften a home first built as a fortress. Now, as Cassandra's corpse hung from the center of the king's inner chamber, her last, and most technical effort glistened upon the walls, painted in her family's royal blood.
Gareth pulled Asguard close to his side.
“Markus.”
Faces of Markus stared from the walls. Cassandra's fingers had smeared and stroked the walls with blood to capture resemblances of Markus upon the stone. Gareth marveled as he turned and considered so many images of his brother. Cassandra had painted faces low to the floor. She had painted them close the high ceiling. Some of Markus's faces frowned fury. Others smiled cruel cunning. For centuries, no army or assassin had penetrated the Stonebrook keep to threaten those gray-eyed monarchs who reigned within the stone walls. But those walls had not been able to keep out the fog, and the face of Markus surrounded Gareth with threat.
Gareth held his breath as he turned to regard the faces of his brother. So many eyes jeered back at him. They were Markus's eyes. They were the eyes the basilisk's glance had so transformed. Following Markus's encounter with the basilisk, his gray eyes, those Stonebrook eyes, had morphed into orbs alien to both the stone rulers and man. The gray deepened into a golden hue. The round iris's narrowed into slits. His eyes expanded and grew large. And those were the eyes Cassandra captured in crimson blood. Those eyes glistened as Gareth stared upon them.
“He makes sure we can no longer deny that his hand is behind the fog,” Wren still did not cross that chamber's threshold. “The fog extends his touch. Markus seeps through our keep's stone. He trespasses into the king's inner chamber, and he moves daughters to slaughter their families during the night.”
“How could Cassandra do such a thing?” Gareth shook his head.
Wren's shoulders sagged. “The dark magics still exist. None have practiced them as Markus does now since this keep's walls first stood. Markus has rediscovered those powers and wields them against us.”
“Your point has been proven, Wren. Time we honor our dead.”
Gareth lowered Cassandra's body into his arms as Asguard whimpered. Gareth found he could not remember the sound of Cassandra's voice. He could not recall how any of Luke's children had laughed. Gareth had shunned life within his ancestors' keep. He had chosen the company of dogs over that of his own family. He could not recall any conversation he might have shared with Queen Katherine. He could not remember the last time he had shared bread at Luke's table. His dogs had grown closer to him than had any of his kin.
The chamber's carnage sickened him, and the realization that he would have no chance to mend his family's rifts was too bitter to swallow. He had wished that his retreat from the Stonebrook keep would have protected him from the lure of the Stonebrook throne. He never desired to feel the stone crown's weight upon his head.
Yet that self-chosen banishment had failed him. He was a Stonebrook king no matter how much time he spent training dogs in a muddy field.
And Gareth winced to think how desperately another of King Harold's sons desired that stone crown now waiting to rest upon his head.
“Instruct the guards to gather the dead in the courtyard.”
Wren blinked. “They're not to be taken to the crypt? We have prepared their stone mausoleums next to those of their ancestors as Stonebrook rites demand.”
Gareth's gray eyes did not waver. He was now a Stonebrook king.
“We battle the old, dark magics, Wren. I fear Markus's touch is far more foul than that of the basilisk that delivered father into his tomb. I fear what other powers Markus wields through the fog. I can only guess how far Markus has strayed into those dark arts. Terrible as the sight of this chamber might be, the horror well swell if the undead shuffle along our kee
p's halls.”
Wren's lips quivered.
Gareth rested his right hand upon his sister's shoulder and prayed to the Maker that the three fingers there remaining would be enough to offer the needed courage.
“Instruct the sentries to burn the bodies, Wren. Though we cannot grant the dead the stone graves of our ancestors, we can at least secure their peace. We can light the flame that will release them from Markus's grasp.”
“And how will we release ourselves from those magics?” Wren asked.
Gareth stroked Asguard while the remaining fingers on his right hand itched.
“I don't know,” Gareth answered, “but we will find a way to fight the fog. I doubt that we can rely only on steel, but we'll find a way.”
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