The Eagle and the Sword (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 2)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Arthor rises from out of the dark interior, lode-knife in hand. "Did you hear a cry?" he rasps.

  "It's Fen," she answers, and tells him what has transpired.

  "Where's the gleeman?" Arthor asks, gazing into the torrent. The horses stand under the trees where they are tied, heads bowed, rain sparking off their wet hides. "The lamia must have killed him—called him out the way it called you."

  "I don't know," Melania mutters, teeth nattering from the chill. "But, I tell you, Fen stopped the lamia from attacking me. He wants help. He thinks I can help him."

  Arthor doffs his tunic and hands it to her. "Take off your wet gown and wear this. Don't let the cold seep to your bones."

  Melania accepts and thanks him. In the dark of the tent, she does not see his avid, crystalline look of ardor as she drops her gown and slides into his dry tunic, still warm with his body heat. Her mind is on Fen. The anguish she saw in his strong face brands her soul and fills her with boundless caring—for she knows painfully well the impossible effort he wielded to save her from the lamia.

  That was a strength she never found in herself during her possession. Then, when the lamia fed on innocents, she ran away, stoppering her ears with her hands to blot out their screams. Fen did not run away—not until she was safe.

  Sitting in the dark, staring into the relentless rain, she marvels that he called to her and she went to him. And she wonders where he is.

  There is no imagining his despair as he staggers through the night forest with the lamia teetering after him like a black fume loosed from a nightmare. He climbs and descends root stairs, bruising his bones in the dark, scratching his eyes, and lashing his body. The rain's cold feathers clothe his nakedness.

  Fen runs through the knives of hedges and crashes across streams with the night between his teeth. Time and again, he reaches for the guardian band at his throat, and each time screams his grip free. He wants to die as a warrior in battle, not like some cow split in half to cool in the rain. So he plows the night with his body, running through the forest of knives and arrows—until a hand big as the wind grabs him.

  The rain stops. Clouds open and display the glassworks of constellations. His head swings wide with wonder to take it all in, and he faces the one-eyed god above him, darkness coming through his empty socket like a falcon.

  "So, you have returned home to us, little brother," Cissa speaks, stepping out of the trunk of a sycamore tree. And around him, the Thunderers rise up from the earthsmoke like the dead.

  Chapter 20: Prince Bright Night

  Hannes the master builder departs Mons Caliburnus with the wizard's staff left standing in the star stone and looking like Excalibur in precise detail. The enchanted stick even blazes with the illusion of reflected sunlight.

  He must catch up with Brokk and Morgeu the Fey and take back the sword they have stolen. But he is afraid. He has spent his magic disguising Merlin's stave as the sword, and even if he possessed all the power that the wizard has opened in him, he would be no match for the dwarf and the sorceress.

  From the pocket of the robe, he takes out the small summoning glass that Merlin instructed him to burst if his troubles became dire. He looks at the tiny blue rose pressed flat inside the glass wafer, seeming to quiver like a blossom underwater.

  He lifts his gaze to the wind blowing through the trees and knows that he will have to travel that fast to catch his foes, who are on horseback and more than an hour's ride ahead of him.

  He drops the flake of glass onto a fist of rock and smashes it with his heel. When he lifts his foot, the starburst dust crawls away like smoke.

  The surprising scent of snow blowing off firs announces a presence, and Hannes peers into the morning's slanting rays and meets an apparition forming among the clustered trees. The figure of a tall man emerges from the dusty light, and the switching grass does not bend beneath him.

  He comes forward and stands before Hannes with red hair wild as the setting sun and long, green, Mongol eyes that light up his whole face. He wears no hat or sign of rank. By his cinched vest of animal velvet, royal blue tunic, leather leggings laced with scarlet braids, and yellow, tasseled boots, he looks noble.

  "Why have you summoned me, man?" the elf asks darkly, the harsh angles of his milk blue face lowered in threat. "Speak up. The fumes of the blue rose cannot long hold my image in daylight."

  Hannes grimaces as if gulping dark medicine. "I—I, uh—Merlin said that—"

  The elf eyes the wizard's robe with a quizzical grin. "You are Merlin's man?"

  "Yes—yes, I am. He told me—"

  "Ah, so you've lost the sword," the elf notices, looking up Mons Caliburnus, to where the illusory weapon stands in the stone, the air around it polished like a soap bubble. "That fancy bauble won't last long. But longer than I can stand visible before you under the sun. Speak, man, and tell me what has become of the sword Lightning."

  "The dwarf Brokk took it," Hannes blurts, "with Morgeu the Fey. They left on horseback before dawn—for Crowland—to work some dark magic on the king."

  "The king?" The elf thumbs his beardless chin inquisitively. "Oh, you mean Merlin's hope for a king. That would be Ygrane's son, Arthor."

  Hannes blinks with surprise. "Arthor—that is not a British name."

  "You would prefer a king named Eril, perhaps, or Lanval, Fand, or Cador? A good British name, eh? Ha! A name is but a scabbard. In time, the sword wears it to its own shape. And your name, old fellow?"

  "I? Oh, I am Hannes the master builder, apprentice to Merlin, wizard of Britain."

  "And I am Bright Night, prince of the Daoine Sid." Sunlight swirls through him like spirits-smoke. "You have heard of me?"

  "My lord prince, alas, no," Hannes answers in a nervous fluster. "I am a Christian man, of Christian parents, and their parents Christian before them. The priests discourage talk of elves."

  "Then perhaps you should summon the priests to find your king's sword." He glowers, sullen as a smoking lamp. "Though I think they will have little pleasure finding you in Merlin's robes working magic."

  "Please, Lord Bright Night, I cannot face my master with the sword gone. I beg of you—"

  "Do not beg anything of me," the elf says, raising a hand to silence him. "I have already sworn to aid whosoever summons me by this blue rose. That is worthy enough work for me."

  "Can you truly take Excalibur back from the hands of the wicked dwarf?" Hannes asks in awe. "He has the might of an ox in each of his two arms."

  "I fear his strength less than his cunning," Bright Night admits. "Brokk is the Furor's weapons master. He crafted the sword Lightning, which you call Excalibur. The dwarf wields a blade as well as any swordsman under the Storm Tree. I dare not fight him. And any faeries sent against him would be dispatched to oblivion."

  "Then what are we to do?" Hannes asks with chilly alarm. "Can't you shoot him with elf bolts? Kill him from afar?"

  "A dwarf is not so easily slain. He is a creature of the Storm Tree. If the Dragon were not asleep, Brokk would make a toothsome morsel." Bright Night gazes into the narrow avenues of the forest, and his green eyes float like a dreamer's. A moment later, the ground moves under a tremendous thump, and the air flares with a hot, sweet, and frantic fragrance of horse. "My steed is here. Mount up behind me."

  Hannes sees nothing yet feels steam rising from a huge beast and the earth juddering under its stamping and its great lungs huffing. Bright Night swings high onto a lithe, moving transparency that shimmers like shadows of smoke. He holds a hand out. Hannes takes it, and the steed rushes off, snapping him behind sharp as a flag!

  The prince pulls Hannes out of the wind and into place on the muscular, churning back of the elf-horse. They ride like clouds going by. Trees drift in loose green threads of speed, and the rush of their passing moans like the misery of the wind in pines. Even the sun in the high, open heavens floats along the horizon, a stately, fiery barge.

  The hills rolling under them slow, and the snorting horse prances to a
stop on the crest of a hummock overlooking a lake leveled with mist. Along the shore, Brokk and Morgeu ride colts, moving with alacrity toward a curtain of shaggy trees.

  Prince Bright Night laughs ominously. "They dare to run on the low path to Crowland! This is better than I had hoped."

  "Why?" Hannes asks. He relaxes his grasp around the prince's waist and shivers to notice how the inner flesh of his forearms gleams like abalone. Suddenly, the spirit horse rushes forward, and he lurches to hold on.

  "The ledge roads would have been slower for them," Bright Night shouts against the rushing air, "but on the high ledges there are no doors to the hollow hills!"

  Hannes does not understand until they blur past Brokk and Morgeu, and the lake mist swirls after them. The hammer of the sun vanishes. Night swarms from over the horizon, and orbs of orange and blue stars crowd the sky.

  "Where are we?" Hannes yelps.

  "We are in the hollow hills," Bright Night answers through a laugh. "And look—we are not alone!"

  Brokk and Morgeu struggle to control the wild fright of their sinewy colts. Mist blows around them like reckless wraiths, and their foul cries rush off in disarray under the preternatural night.

  Chapter 21: The Hollow Hills

  "I warned you to take the hill trails!" Morgeu cries above the screaming of the colts. The cindery sky glows with orange-and-blue spheres, the electromagnetic nodules of the Storm Tree's roots.

  With brutal force, Brokk reins in his pony, and its head pulls to its shoulder, eyes flinty with pain. "Silence, woman! And silence your mount or be damned! I must take the measure of our situation."

  "I'll measure it for you, dwarf," Morgeu cries angrily, chivvying side to side on her nervous mount. "We are an onionskin's thickness away from death. We are in the hollow hills!"

  "I know that," the dwarf barks at her, his lumpy ugliness bunched into knots of rage. He holds the sword Lightning high, ready to lop off her head. "But how? You claim the Dragon is asleep. Yet here we are in his lair! You lied!"

  Morgeu levels a mocking sneer at Brokk's accusatory scowl. "It's not the Dragon lured us here. Don't you see?" She points toward the wrought flames wavering on the jagged horizon. Against that seam of subterranean fire, she beholds Prince Bright Night and Hannes astride a magnificent tropical cloud, a cloud shaped like a steed with eyes of green African heat. "There, look! That is Prince Bright Night of the Sid."

  "The Sid?" Brokk gawks about in alarm. He sees only sharp boulders of slag under a night of spectral globes. The air is hot and full of the acrid nuances of burned rock. "Where?" The tight boreholes of his eyes scan the terrain of shimmering flame-shadows, and he thinks he sees in the distance sparks, ember motes, fire spray. "Those fireflies?"

  "Put the sword down, fool." Morgeu has steadied her colt and reins in closer. "He baffles you with a faerie spell. The sword is his target. Put it down, and the spell will fall with it. Then you'll see who led us here—to our doom!"

  Brokk lowers the sword, and where he glimpsed tenuous glitters, he spies a stallion shimmering like dawn and carrying two figures: a grinning elf and a startled old man in a wizard's hat. "I see him! He laughs at us! And beside him—beside him is that fool carpenter in Merlin's robes! Damn his eyes!"

  "They led us directly into the hollow hills, Brokk, and there is no escape." Morgeu watches in despair as the elf-prince and the carpenter vanish in a bounding streak of sunrise that lapses instantly again to the scorched night. She wipes a lather of sweat from her white brow. "We could wander these roots of the Storm Tree for ages and never find the way out."

  "You have been here before, witch," Brokk speaks through a snarl. "You must know the way out."

  "I have only been here with the demons who hunted Lailoken," she answers in a voice constricting with distress. "They had the might to come and go as they pleased. But they are gone from me many years now—and we are here alone. We are doomed!"

  "Silence." Annoyed, Brokk turns his attention from her despair to the thermal dust in the burned black sky. "I must think."

  "Think!" Morgeu screeches, near hysteria to find herself so easily duped by the Sid and led to death in the infernal depths. "Think on your foolishness in taking the low trails that led us here. If you had listened to me, if you had taken the hill paths as I told you, we would be on our way to Crowland. You were impatient to gloat about your success before your god. Now you will never see your god. Never. No one escapes the hollow hills."

  "Silence, I say!" Brokk reaches into his hip pouch with his left hand and unrolls the lamia. In an instant, he has shaped it over himself in an image stolen from her past, taken by the lamia's psychic pincers from her memory: the image glares at her as her father, Duke Gorlois, his big jowls quivering ragefully, his small goat's eyes slanted with anger. "I am not the fool you think me," Brokk scolds.

  "Pah!" she shouts at the scornful image in Roman leather and brass. "Take off that shape, dwarf. Do not torment me with my father's ghost."

  Gorlois's hostile face pushes spitefully closer. "Will you shut your mouth, then? Will you not speak until spoken to?"

  "Yes, yes." She averts her gaze, raising a tremulous hand to blot out the vision of her heartache. "It matters not. We are lost. The elf-prince has gone to gather the Sid. They will slay us."

  "Be silent this moment," Gorlois commands. When she lowers her head and remains mute, Brokk speaks, "Good. Now I shall get us out of this hole."

  "Out? We are in—"

  Brokk glares and shakes the leathery shroud of the lamia with its woeful eyeholes and downturned mouth, and sparks fly like drops of sweat.

  Morgeu's lips whiten, and she keeps her silence.

  Satisfied, Brokk returns the lamia to his pouch, and says, "We are not here alone as you claim, witch. Behold the sword Lightning." He wields the sword against the blotches of fire in the lightless sky. "I shaped this for the Furor's hand, and it served him well. Even now, it remembers him. With it, I will summon him, and he will lead us out of here."

  "He will not come." She says this quickly and shuts up.

  Brokk lifts the thick boot of his chin defiantly. "He will come. Why should he not? What is there for our god to fear? The Dragon is asleep, as you say."

  "He does not know that."

  The dwarf brushes her objection aside with a silvery streak of the blade. "Then he will send others to get his sword. One way or another, we shall be free of this hideous place. Now keep your silence while I concentrate."

  Brokk's hard features blur as he presses his ape-ledged brow to the mirroring blade and slides it back and forth, greased with perspiration. His prayer to the All-Seeing Father enters the weapon and goes deeper, beyond the crystalline matrix of atoms and molecular congruity, into the black that floats light, that creates space and time, that unifies all form and motion in the singularity whose depth is the universe itself—and instantly he is heard within the nuclear lattice of the Furor's being.

  Sprawled under an ash tree spangled with sunlight, listening to the singsong of whetting stones, Cissa's eyes deepen like tiny glaciers, and Aelle knows. The Thunderers know and stop their sharpening, sit up in the rusty grass, and listen for the commandments of their god. Fen, hanging upside down from a high branch, his face purple as an eel's, hears the lamia inside him calling to its twin.

  The cry goes down into the earth, full of need. And the cry comes back from underground, lorn and cold.

  "I hear Brokk," Cissa announces, his words twisting from his throat like a musical ache. "He is calling to the Furor."

  "Does he have the Furor's sword?" Aelle inquires, and leans forward on his sword, one thick-knuckled hand tugging at his hay-nest beard, anxious to please the one-eyed god and quit Cymru.

  "Yes."

  The word levitates the Thunderers. They stand around the viper-priest, loose in their joints, taut in their eyes. They, too, are eager to complete their mission here among the enemy's hills. They have retrieved their chieftain's unlucky son. Now only the war god's mis
sion needs be satisfied.

  "Brokk holds the sword Lightning," Cissa breathes. "He has taken it from Camelot."

  "Where is he?" Aelle wants to know, pushing to his feet.

  "In the hollow hills."

  "No."

  The Thunderers share small, dark looks.

  "He summons us from the hollow hills."

  "The Sid have him," Aelle concludes, and slams his blade into its scabbard. "Then he is lost. The sword is lost."

  "The sword Lightning is in his grasp," Cissa informs them in a tone that smolders with distance. "The Sid have not yet taken him. He needs the Furor's help to get out."

  "It is a deception." Aelle steps back to stand among his warriors, speaking for them. "If the Furor goes after him, the Dragon will devour them both."

  "The Dragon sleeps."

  "This I cannot believe," the chieftain says, and the Thunderers murmur agreement. "It is a trick, I say."

  "Brokk calls. He needs help to bring the sword Lightning out of the hollow hills."

  Aelle twists a braid of his faded beard. "What are we to do?"

  "The Furor wants his sword."

  Releasing the twist of beard, Aelle looks up into the ash at his hanging son. "We will send Fen," he decides. "If this is a Sid trick, we will know. If not, he will serve as our guide."

  Two men climb into the tree and cut Fen down. They lower him, gaunt and discolored, and he lies in the grass, with the flies visiting him.

  Hairless, viper-stained Cissa squats over him and adjusts the guardian band so that Fen can breathe easier.

  The Thunderers slink away, find watching places in the splintery sunlight under the trees, and wait to see if the lamia will rise.

  It does.

  Mist pools in the hollows of Fen's prone body, gathers to a second skin, and luffs upward in the summer breeze. Its face of pain with its burning tendons, its body fluttering in waves of heat, glisten. If the wind shifts, it will fly to pieces.