Wolfking The Omnibus: Books 1-4

by Sarah Rayne

  The Mugain, who had the feeling that things were slipping from their control, said, ‘Well I don’t think there could be any objection to that, of course. And I daresay that one more mouth at table, and one more bedchamber to be prepared makes little difference.’

  He looked to Cerball for confirmation of this, and Cerball at once said, ‘Oh, no difference in the world.’ And supposed he might as well be made bankrupt this year as next.

  ‘But,’ said the Mugain firmly, ‘we have not resolved the matter of Murmur,’ and Iarbonel said nor they had, and oughtn’t there to be some kind of reparation made.

  ‘The High King Erin,’ he said cunningly, ‘once made a law in this country that the punishment given for an offence must fit that offence very exactly.’

  ‘Well, what do you suggest in this case?’ demanded the Mugain, who was beginning to think they should never have included Iarbonel, silly old fool. ‘We can hardly arrange for the boy to be shafted to death — dear me, I beg your pardon …’

  Maelduin, suppressing the amusement he was feeling at the way the Humanish squabbled, said smoothly, ‘When I have refound the Cadence and restored it, and when I have set in action the means to save my people, you should pronounce sentence on me for Murmur’s death in accordance with your laws.’

  ‘How can we trust you not to run away while we aren’t looking?’

  ‘You have my word on it,’ said Maelduin, raising his brows at Cerball in surprise, and, as Cerball was to say afterwards, there was such frosty hauteur in the look, that you found yourself believing the boy — and even trusting him.

  ‘It may be,’ said Maelduin, ‘that in your House’s present turmoil, there will be a service I can render. Perhaps a danger will threaten which I can help you to avert at some cost to myself. That I would consider a just penance. To risk my life to help your House, and to avenge the death of the Lady who died in my arms.’ He looked across at Iarbonel Soothsayer, and said, with silken courtesy, ‘Your High King Erin would have considered that just.’

  ‘Would he? How do you know he would?’ demanded Iarbonel suspiciously.

  ‘My father once had the great pleasure of meeting him and speaking with him,’ said Maelduin with immaculate politeness; and the Mugain whispered gleefully to Cerball that that should show Iarbonel Soothsayer where he stood in the pecking order, silly old fool!

  Iarbonel Soothsayer, who was not going to be squashed by this cold-eyed upstart, said sepulchrally that he could foresee a danger.

  ‘You always can,’ said the Mugain.

  ‘A journey,’ said Iarbonel, portentously. ‘An exile.’

  Maelduin looked at Cerball very intently. ‘This is so?’ he said. ‘One of your people wishes to embrace exile?’ Cerball thought he said this as if he found it entirely natural, and as if a self-imposed exile was not in the least unusual.

  He said, ‘It was something that occurred to me; I had not discussed it with the others …’ He stopped and frowned, and then said, firmly, ‘The creature called the Gristlen assaulted one of the Ladies, and it is possible that a child will be born as a result.’ And thought that this explained it as neatly as anything could. He did not see the look the others exchanged, which said quite clearly: so he did know!

  ‘And — you would wish to exile the child?’ said Maelduin. ‘If it should bear the mark of the Gristlen, you would wish it to be imprisoned? Cast into some dungeon where it could not trouble you?’

  Cerball said, ‘That is putting it rather starkly …’

  ‘What else would you do with it? If it is in truth the spawn of a Gristlen, you could not kill it, for it would possess necromantic blood. It would be difficult to kill it.’ He looked at them, waiting, his head tilted to one side. Cerball looked at the others and saw that they were watching him closely. He thought: they knew it may be a son of the Gristlen that Laigne carries! Of course they knew! But he clutched at the remnants of his dignity, and said firmly, ‘Yes, that is what I … what we would wish.’

  Maelduin said, ‘I understand.’ And looked at them and thought that, if the Gristlen had indeed left its pawmarks on an Amaranthine lady, the results could be horrifying in the extreme. Had they any concept of what such a child might be? He thought: I have injured them by the death of the one called Murmur, and I should make reparation. He did not fully understand death, but he knew that it was something that the Humanish regarded with extreme awe. If a Humanish caused a death, reparation had to be made. Supposing he offered to cage the Gristlen’s creature when it was born? It would fit with their laws, it would gain more of their trust. And the further they trusted him, the more he could use them.

  Aloud, he said, ‘If you consider it fitting: firstly, I will work to find the Lost Language of Cadence, not only to save my people, but to re-present it to yours.’ Were they accepting this? He listened with the level of his mind that was above speech and beyond words. Yes. They had been ashamed of losing the Cadence, and they were ready to be grateful to him for restoring it. Good! He had judged them accurately.

  ‘It will take some time, I think,’ said Maelduin, softly. ‘I have not your measuring of time, but I think you would say … many weeks.’ His eyes held Cerball’s unblinkingly like a cat’s. ‘If your lady is in truth to bear the fruit of the Gristlen’s seed, then that fruit could be more horrendous and more monstrous than anything your Humanish minds can encompass. You will know that the creatures who become Gristlens were once necromancers in their own right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They are outcasts,’ said Maelduin, very seriously. ‘Evil, warped beings who had offended the Dark Lords. They are called, and rightly, the damned of the Dark Realm. Many of them carry the taint of old and evil lineages: there is goblin blood in many of them, and giantish blood also. Some of them are descended from the terrible Northern Houses of necromancers.’ He studied them. ‘If the House of Amaranth is about to witness the birth of the seed of such a one, you’re in very great danger. The creature will assuredly have to be caged and bound.’ He paused. ‘I will do that for you,’ he said. ‘I will take the child to the strongest of all Ireland’s many strongholds, and to the blackest and most remote of all the many fortresses.’

  There was a silence, and then Bodb Decht said in a horrified voice, ‘The Grail Castle?’

  ‘The Grail Castle,’ said Maelduin, grimly. ‘It is sited in the loneliest part of all Ireland, and it is surrounded by thick stone keeps and guarded by iron yetts and jagged-toothed portcullises. There is nowhere else in Ireland where the walls are so thick, the dungeons so deep, and the bars so strong.’

  ‘How do you now so much about it?’ asked Iarbonel Soothsayer suspiciously. ‘It is said that no living creature ever returns from journeying to the Grail Castle.’

  ‘My father has journeyed there and returned,’ said Maelduin. ‘But,’ said the Mugain, quite as horrified as Bodb Decht, ‘my dear young man, to attempt that journey is almost certain death. Iarbonel is right; no living creature has ever returned from the Grail Castle.’

  ‘I am aware of it. But I pledge to you that I will do it. If a monster-child, a spawn of the Gristlen, is born, I will carry it along the dark road that is said to end in the Grail Castle, and I will cause it to be caged and imprisoned in the deepest of all the deep dungeons so that it can never escape.’

  He looked at them all, his eyes blazing. ‘Even if I forfeit my life in the process,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  Laigne had become accustomed to being left by herself for long stretches at a time. It was all of a piece with their treatment of her; she no longer expected anything better. It was heartless of them to say she must join in the life of the Palace, emerge from her bedchamber. They did not understand. They did not know that she was becoming engrossed in the creature growing inside her: the Fisher King’s son.

  The memory of him was still with her. Not the poor, piteous Gristlen thing the curse had made of him, but the strong, powerful Sea Prince with his pale, compelling eyes and hi
s extraordinary dominance. The remarkable sleek being who had called to her and whose embrace she had suffered to dissolve the ancient curse. She no longer saw it as a suffering, but an honour and a privilege. And he had chosen her to bear his son, he had chosen her out of them all to receive his seed and give birth to his spawn. It was something to hug to herself, something to enjoy in deep, dark secrecy. It was something to gloat over. The Chosen One …

  Cerball visited her and he was dutiful and kindly and well-meaning, but he was dull and plodding as he had always been dull and plodding. He tried to talk about the pain and the ugliness of the Gristlen’s attack, never once guessing that the pain had been fleeting, and the ugliness had given way to the shining creature of the ancient legend. He did not know, and Laigne was not going to tell him.

  The others had talked uneasily of finding a spell to free her; if she harboured the Gristlen’s fearsome seed, they said, it ought to be dispersed. It ought to be killed before it could live, even though the killing of an unborn creature was a risky business, they added worriedly. Even when you used sorcery it was risky.

  ‘Especially when you use sorcery,’ said Great-aunt Fuamnach tartly.

  Laigne thought vaguely that it said a good deal about their opinion of Cerball that they had all jumped to the same conclusion. And of course they would be fearful of the Gristlen’s spawn. But she would not tell them that she would never let this child go; she would birth it even if they subjected her to torture of the most extreme kind. It was his child — Coelacanth’s — and he would return for her and for it; she knew it quite surely and quite definitely.

  She did not let any of them suspect the true identity of the Gristlen because it was nothing to do with any of them. She remained in her bedchamber, lying on her bed most of the time, dreaming of the child, watching the days slide past, waiting for the Fisher King’s return.

  Her body thickened and became swollen and gross, and she began to suffer odd, slithering pains, as if the child within were moving in an unnatural fashion. She clasped her hands to her body when that happened, trying to hear it, feeling the child circling in exactly the way a forest beast circled when it was making a nest or a lair … Coelacanth’s spawn circling within her womb, moving and sniffing to find its way out into the world …

  After a time, it became possible to shut the others out completely; to lie quietly on the bed, but to withdraw the real part — the small central core that was her real self — into a dark, safe cave.

  She thought that the cave had been there for a little while, almost as if somebody (something?) had prepared it. It was faintly disturbing to think of a ‘something’ preparing a dark cave for her; but then people could not get at you if you lived deep in a cave. They could call in things to you, and sometimes you heard and sometimes you did not; they could leave food at the mouth of the cave, which you did not need to eat if you did not want to. The cave was safe and dark; she could stay in it for as long as she liked. Perhaps she would never come out. She retreated into it, liking the dry darkness closing about her. She need never bother with the absurd people of the Palace again.

  The strange creature whom they had told her was attempting to revive the Cadence came sometimes. He did not say very much; he stood at the opening to her cave and watched her. Laigne wanted to ignore him, but he was more difficult to ignore than the others. She could not work out why this should be, and it puzzled her. But she always looked up at him, by this time so deep in the grip of the dark insanity that was creeping over her, that she saw Maelduin framed in the cave’s mouth with the light behind him, a clear, silhouetted figure.

  He upset her. He seemed to know things and to see things that the others could not: the memories of Echbel, for instance, over which she brooded sometimes and which she had so painstakingly buried in the floor of her cave so that no one else should share them. That night in the Gristlen’s cell. The circling child inside her. Once, she even thought he had known about that wild, dizzying pleasure from the Fisher King’s body; that deep, scalding wash of delight.

  It was all plainly absurd but, just to be sure, Laigne scuttled further back into the safeness of the dark, and began to bury the treacherous pleasure, scrabbling at the hard-packed earth with her hands until a cache had been scooped out; laying the memory in the earth until she should want to dig it up again. It should be a twice-buried thing, and it should be buried so deeply that no one would ever know it had existed.

  *

  Maelduin found the sight of Laigne unexpectedly distressing. She was so plainly in the grip of a dark madness, and he had the feeling that she was retreating into some sinister shadowland. And then he thought: retreating? Or being pulled?

  Darkness worried him. Even the suggestion of it was almost like a physical pain, lancing through that part of him that was still pure sidh. He felt it surrounding Laigne, swallowing her, blotting out her mind. At times he could almost see it, stealing slowly and inexorably over her.

  By offering himself as gaoler for the Gristlen’s spawn, by striking that strange bargain for Murmur’s death, Maelduin knew he had taken Laigne’s plight on his shoulders. He had almost felt it descend on him physically; a heavy, stifling weight, dark and turgid, shot here and there with dull crimson. He thought he might have been absurdly foolish: what the

  Humanish called ‘chivalrous’, and he knew as well that to journey to the Grail Castle would hamper his real quest, and delay the time when he could return to Tiarna with the means to revive the sidh.

  But as a Prince of an ancient House, he could have done nothing else. Murmur’s death had been his fault and reparation must be made.

  It had been an odd experience to feel the life suddenly drain from Murmur. It had been a rather dreadful reminder that the Humanish lived only for a short time. Maelduin had felt no sense of loss for Murmur, but he had felt something. Coldness. Sadness at the briefness of Humanish lifespan. How could you accomplish anything, how could you leave any kind of imprint on your world if you had only a few short decades? And he had shortened it further for the pretty, feckless creature. That he knew to be unforgiveable by the Humanish belief — and perhaps by my own beliefs also, he thought.

  A life for a life. The High King Erin had lived by that creed, and Maelduin, living in the Ireland that had once been Erin’s, would live by it also.

  Even if, said a sly, silvery voice within his mind, even if it means journeying to the terrible Grail Castle and incarcerating the monster-child in its dungeons?

  Even if it means that.

  He had commenced the task of reviving the Cadence at once, going alone to the Cadence Tower, the fearsome, legend-ridden Tur Baibeil, at the time the Humanish called the Purple Hour. The Amaranths had wanted to accompany him; the Mugain and Bodb Decht had wanted him to allow the reciting of the Chaunt of Banishment, and perhaps the Cadenzas of Light. Didn’t he know that the Tower was where the Fomoire had found a bridge from the Dark Realm?

  Maelduin was not swayed. He knew the legends and he knew the tales. He did not quite say that he would be able to deal with the Fomoire, but he indicated it. To himself, he thought that a single creature slipping through the shadows would be far less likely to attract attention than half the Amaranth clan chanting spells and brandishing torches. It was strange how they spurned solitude, the creatures of this Humanish world. Were they afraid to be alone for any length of time? He remembered again the shortness of their lives, and thought perhaps they clustered together for assurance.

  But to Maelduin, born to the near-immortality of the sidh, long periods of silence and solitude were very natural indeed. He was well used to lonely towers and dark citadels soaked in sorcery.

  But the Cadence Tower gave him pause. He stood in the great cobbled courtyard, with the creeping shadows reaching out purple and black fingers, and stared up at the immense black citadel, and thought: yes, they are right to be afraid of it, and to approach it with the protection of Light and Banishment Rituals. It is steeped in evil and it is soaked in ma
levolent necromancy. Profane Evil is here, thought Maelduin, his eyes narrowed in concentration. Profane Evil and also Eclectic Evil. Had it leaked through from the Black Ireland? Yes, perhaps.

  The darkness was a deep ache in his mind, so that he wanted to put up his hands to shield his eyes from the suffocating, pain-filled blackness. But he stayed where he was, remembering Tiarna, remembering that by reaching the Cadence he might save his people, and presently thread by fragile thread, cobweb by cobweb, he felt the silver and gold filaments of the Cadence, the Lost Language of Magic filter through the darkness. Excitement gripped him, and he thought: yes, I was right! It is here! The ancient sorcerous tongue, the runic language of mysticism and enchantment and magic. The talismanic chronicles of sorcery.

  They have lost it for their people, but it is still here! It is still here and I can reach it! he thought. I could recapture it and take it back to Tiarna!

  And little by little, their powers — the ancient, flame-like vein of sorcery that they are so proud of — would erode, and the House of Amaranth would die …

  I could steal the Cadence from them and they would never know.

  *

  The smile that was so uncannily not Human curved his lips, and he slipped through the shadows and into the Cadence Tower.

  At first, he thought that after all he would not be able to do it. The Cadence — the beautiful, intricate enchantment, woven by the long-ago nimfeach, taken by Aillen mac Midha for his people, and polished by them before it was given to the Amaranths — was so deeply buried that it was almost impossible to reach.