A Whisper of Darkness

by Troy A Hill

  I got the light to settle into a golden cast. It even had a flicker and a dance, much like torchlight.

  “Try not to laugh when you use your magic,” Iolo said. “You’ll make your effects waver with the mirth.”

  “Come on, lass,” Ruadh said. “Iolo be out here drawing all night. We might as well see what damage ye did to the cave.”

  “Give me a moment,” I said and unbuckled the sword belt I had crossed over my torso.

  “You think you need a sword here?”

  “Last time I let Bleddyn explore a cave, he got mauled by a shifter,” I said. “You never know what you might meet in a cave.” I winked at Ruadh.

  “Back or side, why does it matter where you put your sword?” Ruadh asked. “You still have it on you.”

  “This wasn’t made for over-the-shoulder draws,” I said and re-buckled my blade, Soul, around my waist. “Trust me, from the hip is much better. I didn’t want to bang her around on the way up that cliff, though, so I kept it on my back while we climbed.”

  “If there be anything in that cave you need to poke with your blade, we be in a heap of trouble.”

  My hiccoughing yellow ball of light drifted along above Ruadh’s head. The dark of the night gave way to the musty, inky black of the cave. A few paces in, the path curved to the right, and we walked down the gentle slope. There were a few patches where fresh rocks had tumbled loose.

  “Just small patches,” Ruadh said. He pointed towards the ceiling a few hands above his head. The golden glow of my light orb lit the area he pointed at. “No sign of stress. You didnae shake the land hard enough to make this cave fall in.”

  “Why do you keep blaming me for that blast?”

  “You be dancing with the wizard,” he said, laughing. “Course, seeing what he did to Lady Gwen, I’d have tried to split him top to toe the way you were gonna.”

  “His damn staff,” I muttered, still mad at the necromancer for the spell he cast at Gwen. “I knew he used it in his magic, I just didn’t realise how much power he stored in it. Seren is still trying to understand all of what he had in it.”

  Ruadh shot a smile at me over his shoulder and waved me on, deeper into the dark cave.

  “No one knew Lady Seren was so skilled with magic,” he said. “Her marriage to that…” He paused, searching for a good term.

  “Bastard isn’t the right word,” I said. “I don’t want to impugn Dylis nor Einion for his birth. Dewi was just a creep and a bully.”

  “Gwen said that Dewi and Seren’s marriage stifled Seren’s abilities,” Ruadh added. “Since she’s got no commitment to anyone but the goddess, Lady Seren can grow her skills.”

  “I’m not sure how much more she can grow,” I added. “Seren has outdistanced Gwen in understanding magical intricacies. Gwen sensed the residual magic on the fragments of the staff we recovered. Seren could tell, however, which glyph held which type of spell, and how long the spell had been stored in the ancient wood.”

  “Did she ever recover any of the magic inside it?” he asked as he stopped at another rock fall to examine the walls and ceiling around it.

  “No,” I said. “She says there is nothing that could be a complete spell. Snapping it like a twig with Arthur’s sword was enough to release any magic it held all at once. No wonder that blast shook the hills this far away.”

  “If we meet any more wizards, try to disarm them before you go slicing them.” My friend chuckled. “The cavern is ahead, just around the bend.”

  A dozen paces later, he stepped into the darkness and moved to the left.

  “Come in, lass, and bring more of those glowy balls if ye can.”

  I pulled energy from my connection and sent three more of the yellow light orbs up around him. I poked two of the balls and sent them drifting away into the cavern. Had I needed to breathe, the sight would have taken my breath away. This time I whistled in astonishment.

  The cavern was large. Dozens of paces across in any direction. The ceiling was white and jagged. I sent an orb up. Crystalline minerals from the damp in the air grew there. Generations of them protruded like a spike forest along the roof of the cave.

  But it was the column near the centre that drew my attention. Enough moisture flowed to make not just a pointed growth of minerals but a knifelike crystal that cut from the ceiling down to the floor. It had solidified and grown into a massive spike. At its apex it was almost as round as Ruadh’s chest.

  The column was beautiful in a rugged way. Water glistened along its jagged surface, creating several pockets where it was almost clear for a few inches. I moved around the column, and the clear spots shifted because of the faceted nature the crystal growth gave the column. I stepped close enough to touch it but held my hand back. Some wonders of nature should only be seen and not disturbed. My own eyes looked back at me, reflected in several of the moist crystal pockets.

  “Lass,” Ruadh said from across the cavern, “you did break the cave.”

  3

  A Gap in the Wall

  Ruadh stood before a pile of rock. I spied the bleached dusty hue of old bones among the dark of the Cymry rock.

  “Send one of yer lights here,” he called. I concentrated and pulled two of my orbs along with me. One I stationed above his shoulder, behind his left ear.

  Stay with him, I thought at the ball of light. It did so as Ruadh stepped into a pocket in the rock pile.

  “Looks like an old Celtic burial chamber,” he said. Beyond the opening, bones sat in niches, not laid out as normal corpses. The hole was large enough for me to squeeze through, but debris was piled up high enough that Ruadh would probably not be able to squeeze through.

  “Hold on,” Ruadh said. He bent to move several large stones out of the way, tossing each onto a pile of rubble farther to our right. He tossed aside rocks as large as his head, if not larger. A normal man would have strained to lift even one. But Ruadh was a shifter, a werebear. His large rough hands grabbed the hunks and tossed them as though they were a mere inconvenience. Each time he threw one, it landed with a loud crash. Misty fingers of dust rose into the air like undead hands from a grave and began a swirling dance in the light of my orbs.

  The floor there was still jagged, like the crack in the wall. A thin passage wound through the area. Nooks lined both walls, half a dozen to either side. The narrow passage turned abruptly about three paces in.

  “Look to be like your bone-rattling explosion with the wizard rattled more than bones here,” Ruadh said, and shot me a grin. “It fractured the back wall here.”

  “And rattled these old bones out of their nooks,” I said to finish his jest.

  “Let’s see where this leads,” Ruadh said and stepped towards the far passage.

  The narrow path led through more of the mountain, just wide enough for a single person to pass. No wonder the dead in here were bones. No way you’d get a burial litter all the way back here. It was barely large enough for a single person with a cairn of dried bones.

  Several other niches in each branch of the passageway mirrored the one we had entered. As we stepped through the chamber, we paused and looked into each niche. The farther we went, the more hairs on my neck stood on end. By the time we reached the second branch, my fingers were curled around Soul’s hilt, ready to draw my steel. The mystical black-and-gold cord that tied me to the goddess hummed. I must have kept it active after the last light ball. Normally it only hummed like this during the day, when I needed to pull energy from the goddess to allow me to walk in the strength-sapping sunlight.

  “Do you feel anything different?” my voice whispered into the deathly silence of the ancient tomb.

  “Be a bunch o’ old bones, Mair,” Ruadh said. “I not smell anything here other than dust, some mould, and old death.”

  His words didn’t validate my intuition. They weren’t much comfort, either. Perhaps I was imagining the sensations. Too many years. A couple of centuries, at least, had passed since the last time Aemi and I had explored an old
tomb like this, on another continent, in the middle of the desert. Things there hadn’t gone well for the humans we had hired to guide us. The spirits we had found there couldn’t harm me and Aemi. We were already dead.

  But I wasn’t sure how such a spirit and a lycanthrope like Ruadh could react to each other.

  We zigzagged through the chambers and alcoves until we came to a dead end, so to speak.

  “Walled up from the outside,” Ruadh said as he pushed against the rocks and old mortar that blocked any further progress.

  “Old tombs are like that,” I ventured. “Even in the deserts across the sea from Rome. They put the dead in, build a wall, and forget them.”

  “Let’s head back and tell Iolo,” Ruadh said. “There not be much he can draw back here except old bones.”

  An icy chill grabbed me. Death. Old, cold death was here. I could feel it in my bones. It probed against my flesh. It pushed into my body.

  My undead magic, my demon, flared awake. She snarled from deep within my mind. Red. My vision went red, which meant my eyes were glowing red. I hadn’t felt that much of a surge from my blood demon for a long time.

  Whatever the death force was, it seemed to like my demon. Almost like a puzzle piece finding its mate. They began a dance around each other. My breath hissed into the tomb.

  “Mair!” Ruadh’s voice jerked my mind back. I activated the mystical cord to the goddess, and it flared awake. My demon hissed, as did I. White light from The Lady, from the land, flooded my vision, blocking the dance of utter darkness trying to mix with the red of my blood demon.

  My fingers tightened around Soul’s hilt and jerked her from the scabbard. The passage was too narrow for much beyond thrusting. Instead of fighting, I pumped magic into the steel.

  Ruadh shielded his eyes.

  “You glowed, lass… first red, then white…” He swallowed hard, unnerved. “Was that beastie trying to take you?”

  “Aye,” I said, but I didn’t bother to mimic his tone like I usually did when I used his vernacular. “Black, darker than night.”

  “It be heading out, towards Iolo,” he added and pushed me forward.

  Running in this area was next to impossible. I moved as fast as I could with Soul in hand. Ruadh kept pace as we raced back, moving as fast as we could in the tight labyrinth of the old tombs. Soul lit our way. Even my two light orbs kept pace with us. The one that dogged Ruadh hadn’t been given another command, so I assumed it would stay with him.

  A rumble from behind me. More of a growl. As I turned one corner, I glanced back. Ruadh’s hands were long in the light. Red fur sprouted along his arms. I wasn’t sure what good his shifter claws would be against whatever this thing was. Hell, I didn’t know what good my blade would be. Maybe the magic of the goddess I was feeding the blade would help if we caught up with it?

  We rounded the final corner, and I ducked through the opening Ruadh had cleared earlier. Ruadh, who was several hands taller and wider than I, had to duck and turn sideways to enter. I didn’t stop to worry how he would get out if he had shifted forms. His half-bear form was still bulkier than his normal body.

  My other two golden orbs drifted in aimless circles around the central pillar of crystallised minerals. Right where I had left them. I almost slowed, ready to spend time searching the large cavern. The crackle of magic and a faint glow from the cavern mouth turned my steps that way. Iolo was still out there.

  The half-fae monk stood next to the entrance, purple fire dancing along his hand. His drawing board was cast aside, face down. The stylus was clenched in his hand like a knife, ready to slash or stab. Too bad it didn’t have an edge.

  His eyes stared down into the valley.

  “Death just passed me,” his voice whispered, almost silent.

  “What do you mean, death?”

  “Old death. Power my mother whispered about but never explained.” His eyes drifted towards me. “I felt a similar sensation the first time we met. But your magic is softer, contained within you. And your goddess guides your magic now. This was none of that. And more…”

  “Where did it go?” Ruadh asked, a pace behind me.

  “Down into the valley,” Iolo said, and he let the glow from his hands die off. He glanced at my sword. I, too, let the magic dissipate. “I lost sight of it about halfway down. It was a black cloud of nothing. The energy of death.”

  “Death don’t have energy,” Ruadh growled. He glanced at me and shrugged.

  My golden orb still danced and hiccuped behind his head. He had shifted back into his normal human form. “Well, not normal death,” he said.

  A dim glow from the cave mouth, where my other two orbs still circled the column, gave light beyond the stars. Another hour and the sliver of the moon would rise. Until then, the stars were the valley’s only light source. All three of us scanned the valley floor with our special forms of vision. Lycanthrope, undead, and fae.

  After a few moments of running our gaze around the ground below, I shrugged. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”

  “Show me where you found it?” Iolo said. “You didn’t open any doors or jars or chests, did you?”

  4

  The Forges

  Ruadh and Iolo waved back at me as they rode towards the abbey. I took the other fork in the road and coaxed my mare towards Caer Penllyn. Approaching from the south meant that I’d have to circle the hill to find the path up to the fort.

  The smell of smoke hung thick in the air. Caves dotted the rocky side of the sheer cliff at this end of the hill. Directly above was the grove of ancient oaks Gwen and I liked to spend time in. Down the hill from that would be the weapons practice field, then the main yard with the keep and other buildings.

  Here at the base of the hill, though, I spied men working near the cliff. Three of the men moved up and down near a large rounded mound that belched smoke and sparks. From his size, I could see that Sawyl was working the bellows that pushed air into the rounded mound. He looked up and watched as I approached. He called over his shoulder, and another man took Sawyl’s place near the crucible. He grabbed the handles on the wooden plates and moved them up and down in alternating strokes, just as the two other men were doing. Each rise of the leather sack of the bellows sucked air in from behind. Then the downstroke forced it to wheeze into the clay dome.

  Sawyl tapped a large man, Guto, lead smith of Caer Penllyn, and they walked to meet me. I swung out of the saddle. Another of the men brought a bucket of water over to my mare.

  Guto was smaller than Sawyl but with reddish hair, and he had a close-trimmed beard like Ruadh’s.

  “With a fire that hot, you’ll singe your whiskers,” I teased the smith.

  “Aye, Lady Mair. Welcome home,” he said and held his arm out. I grabbed it and leaned in to slap his back. “Me whiskers protect me face. I can’t be having the sparks damage me good looks, can I?”

  “I’ll ask your wife when I see her next,” I said and repeated the ritual of welcome with Sawyl. “How’s Haf?” I asked him.

  “No baby yet,” he said. “Even Lady Enid is still waiting. Lady Seren says she wants the babies to wait as long as possible before they birth.”

  “Your wife needs another month. Lady Enid had a head start on her pregnancy,” I said, then pointed towards the crucible. “Any luck with the silver?”

  “No.” Guto shook his head, which shook his tangled red hair. “Lord Emlyn sent another work party out to get more wood to make charcoal with. We’ve run the caer down to meagre supplies trying to melt these weapons from the Witcher army.”

  “How long have you had the fires going on this one?”

  “Three days.” Guto pointed back down the trail I had ridden. “This still be the same sword I had in when you and Brother Ruadh rode off with the prior to visit your holding.”

  He waved me towards the mushroom of clay. The heat coming off the crucible was intense at three paces. The smith donned a leather jacket and pulled a leather mask across his face. A young boy,
perhaps ten winters old, held thick leather gloves for the smith. Once attired against the heat, he took his tongs and moved in towards the opening in the bottom. He scraped and scratched in the coals and ash and plucked a few bits of metal out. He dropped them in a bucket that hissed as the red slug hit the water.

  After a moment, he brought the bucket to me. I took it and peered in as he pulled his mask off.

  “That be regular steel. The hardest I had on hand,” he said. “I put it in this morning, so I’d know when the fire should melt the Witcher blade.”

  “No silver?” I asked.

  “No, milady. None.” He shrugged. “I’ve got enough coal in there to last through the afternoon. When that’s gone, we’ll let the crucible cool, and fish the blade out. Just like the others, it will still be sharp and ready to swing in battle.”

  “Do you have any…” I searched my memory for the terms that might still be around. “Gagate?”

  “The black rock that burns?” Guto asked. “Some lords in far southern Cymru have old mines. But it burns too dirty. Most folks acquaint it with the Underworld and won’t burn it.”

  “It also burns hotter,” I said. Coal use had fallen off throughout Europe as the Roman Empire had collapsed back towards Rome. With the odour and gasses, I could see why it was associated with devilry. But the Witch Hunters were unlikely to show again in Penllyn for a few years. “I’ll speak to Lord Penllyn and the abbot about locating some for you.”

  “Might as well get The Holy Lady to bring you fire of the Dragon of Cymru,” Guto said with a chuckle. I wasn’t sure if he was laughing at the improbability of me getting him coal or of a dragon arriving.

  “I’ll ask Lady Gwen to forward your request to Her,” I said and echoed his laugh.

  Guto looked startled, then grinned large, his teeth breaking through his beard. He cuffed me on the shoulder.

  “If anyone could get a dragon to show in Penllyn,” he exclaimed, “it be Lady Gwen. She does have the Holy Mother’s favour.”