Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4)

by D. L. McDermott

  “If you had to choose between saving Davin and concealing whatever this Druid was up to, which would you choose?”

  The Prince sighed. “If you had asked me in Finn’s house, I would have said Davin, but now that I see where we are, I might be forced to answer differently.”

  “Where are we?”

  “An island in the Irish Sea.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Maybe it once did, or perhaps it never had a name. It doesn’t have one now, and it’s not on any map. This place is cloaked in magic, and with good reason, because of that.”

  The Prince nodded at the slope behind them.

  At first Ann thought she was looking at a grassy hill. The dunes stretched inland a mile, climbing steadily to a green plateau. The grass was unnaturally verdant and lush. Atop the plateau stood a mound faced in small white chips of sparkling granite, ringed by elaborately carved standing stones, and topped by a manicured grassy dome. The structure had to be several hundred feet across. Ann couldn’t conceive of how such a massive thing had been built in such a remote place.

  “What is that?”

  “A Druid mound.”

  “You mean one of the mounds where they held the Fae captive?” asked Ann, feeling a shiver run down her spine.

  “Yes. The Irish called them fairy forts, long after they had forgotten what they really were. They were where the Druids held us captive, where they conducted their experiments, where they cultivated their dark arts. We thought we had found all the mounds,” said the Prince. “Miach and Finn and I. We thought we had destroyed their laboratories and workshops, burned all of their libraries and shattered all of their implements of torture, but evidently we were wrong.”

  “How did your Druid know about this place?”

  “Some of them have an ability to find Fae and Druid sites using maps and photographs. Miach has such a Druid working with him, but she’s never found anything like this, a mound we never knew of. One the Druids took a great deal of care to conceal.”

  “But why the secrecy?” Ann asked. “If they’d already conquered you, what would they hide here?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Prince. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  Finn had thrown himself across the table to get to her, but Ann and the Prince disappeared before he could reach them.

  “What the fuck was she thinking?” he screamed, overturning the table and a row of chairs.

  “She was thinking of Davin,” said Nieve. “It’s what I would have done, too.”

  “Or maybe,” said Nancy, “she decided the Prince would make a better protector than a war leader who can’t protect his own.”

  “Nancy,” said Sean in a warning tone.

  He should have anticipated this. The questions Ann had asked him about passing hadn’t been about passing with him. She’d planned this, his crazy, brave berserker. He was so angry with her, he wanted to scream the house down. And her stupidity only made him admire her more.

  And she might be dead, left inside a mountain, at the bottom of the sea, atop a glacier by the Prince Consort. His chest constricted. Scenes of horror reeled through his mind.

  “Dad!”

  Garrett was speaking to him. “We’re going to track the Prince. We’ll find them.”

  “He could kill her as easily as breathing,” said Finn.

  “He won’t,” said Miach. “The Prince is an ardent collector, and Ann is unique. The first berserker to manifest in two thousand years. He wants her for himself.”

  “Nancy is right,” said Finn. “Everything that has happened, has happened because my leadership was lacking.” Private self-recrimination was not enough. Not for the leader of the Fianna. If he wished to avoid Cú Chulainn’s fate, if he hoped to save Ann, he had to make a full and public confession and begin carrying the true burden of his responsibilities.

  “I failed my son by setting him the worst of examples. I taught Garrett to take whatever he wanted, with no thought for the consequences, and Nieve nearly died on account of it. That was not how Brigid and I lived or loved, and I’ve dishonored her memory with my behavior. If my son has grown into a good husband and father, it was his own doing, and none of mine. I failed the Fianna when I abducted Miach’s stone singer and his right hand for my own ends. And I failed Sean long before we ever came to Boston. I should have given him paper and ink and a cabin beside a lake after we pulled him out of the mound, not put a sword in his hand. If he made mistakes with his son, they are the mistakes I drove him to.”

  The room was silent, but Miach looked surprised, Nieve and Garrett cautious, and his followers for the most part relieved.

  He felt no different when it was over, because these were words, not deeds, but he hoped that they would turn the tide of his fate, and Ann’s with it.

  Chapter 14

  Ann struggled up the dune behind the Prince. She had misjudged the distance to the mound. It was more than a mile, with every step a slipping, sliding fight. Even the Prince’s supernatural grace was challenged by the rough terrain. They scaled one side of a dune, only to find themselves slithering down the other to begin another, higher, more torturous ascent.

  “Keep up, little berserker,” said the Prince, turning to offer her a hand as they emerged at last onto the grass-covered plain. “The best part is yet to come.”

  Up close, the mound had a sinister aspect. Ann couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something about the site, the proportions of the structure, the angles of the slope, that made her feel deeply uneasy. She didn’t like the standing stones one bit. They were set up in pairs every thirty feet or so, towering roughhewn monoliths covered in whorled carvings. There was enough space between each pair for three people to walk abreast. Drawn to and repulsed by them at the same time, Ann approached the nearest pair and walked toward the opening, only to be struck by a blinding pain behind her eyes and a horrific vision.

  She knew she wasn’t seeing the present, but the scene before her was so vivid, so real, that her gorge rose and her eyes watered. Ann saw two black-robed figures in front of her dragging a third between them. They passed through the standing stones, robes fluttering, their backs to Ann, but the body they carried was facing her way—and the poor wretch was alive. Naked, bleeding from dozens of wounds, their victim was Fae, or at least part Fae, and male, and somehow he seemed to be staring straight at Ann, his eyes entreating her for help.

  She knew then what he was and why she could see him. Berserkers. Her people.

  The figures faded and vanished as they drew near the mound, and Ann swayed from the horror of the vision.

  “Ann!” barked the Prince, snapping her back to the present. “What are you looking at?”

  “Ghosts,” she said.

  He cocked his head and raised his hand to her face, brushing moisture off her cheek. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying.

  “Save your tears,” he said. “The Fae who suffered here are long past caring. We did not know of this place. No one here was rescued.”

  “Not just Fae,” she said. “Berserkers. I saw one of them.”

  “An echo, no more. He is two thousand years dead.”

  She did not want to go inside. Even if it was only an echo, it was an echo of pain and suffering shared by people like her. She could feel the despair clinging to the place. It made her chest tighten and her throat constrict and her stomach revolt.

  She went anyway, because she was here to get Davin out.

  Up close the granite wall was dirty and weathered. Three massive stones framed the entrance to the mound, with a light box above to let a shaft of wan sun into the passage.

  The shaft sloped down into the earth. The temperature dropped almost instantly as soon as they crossed the threshold, and the damp seemed to penetrate her clothes and make her bones ache. She could feel the crushing weight of so many
tons of earth above, pressing down on her. A dozen feet inside the passage Ann felt a wave of nausea and halted, pressing her head to the cold damp stone to relieve the dizzy churning.

  “Don’t stop,” snarled the Prince. She felt cruel hands grip her wrist and shoulder and thrust her forward along the passage. She stumbled, fell to her knees. The Prince dragged her another twenty feet, and suddenly the nausea broke and she lay panting on the dirt floor as the walls and ceiling stopped spinning.

  She sat up slowly. Only dim light reached this far into the passage, but she could see the Prince’s pale face, streaked with blood. It ran from his eyes and his nose, trailed from his ears down his neck.

  “What just happened?” she asked.

  “We passed through the wards. Very nasty, very Druid wards. Let me see your wrists.”

  “My wrists? Why?”

  “Look down,” he said.

  She did. The stone floor was patterned with some kind of writing beneath a thick but much disturbed carpet of iron dust.

  “The floor is inked,” explained the Prince. “We passed over a geis. My skin won’t take ink, but yours has no such protection. If the wards were active after all this time, very likely the geis was, too, and it will have found purchase on your skin somewhere.”

  Ann pushed her sleeves up. There was nothing on her wrists.

  The Prince reached for the hem of her sweater, but she stepped back.

  He held his hands up. “Suit yourself. But if the Druid marks found purchase on your skin, you might not like the consequences.”

  “What sort of geis would it be?” she asked.

  “Impossible to say without seeing it. Druid ink can rewrite itself. It might leap onto one Fae’s skin and become a means of tracking him, or controlling him, or robbing him of his voice or his ability to cast. The sophistication of such a trap depends on the skill of the Druid that laid it.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” said Ann.

  “There isn’t much to like about Druids.”

  “How is it that you’re bleeding?” she asked. “I thought you couldn’t be cut.”

  “Cut, no. Poisoned, yes. Iron filings, most likely, scattered on the floor. Our passage probably disturbed them. The wards slowed us down enough for me to breathe in more than is good for me. We should proceed cautiously from here. I won’t be able to pass any great distance until the iron leaves my body.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “A few hours, as long as we don’t encounter any more.” He climbed to his feet and hauled her up with him. “Did you bring a weapon?”

  She shook her head. He produced a silver knife from one of his pockets and handed it to Ann.

  “Now the real fun starts,” he said. “Stick close to me. I don’t want to waste energy lighting our way, but these passages can be tricky. The Druids didn’t like mortals interfering in their business, so they made their chambers as inaccessible as possible. And of course they didn’t want their prisoners getting out, on the rare occasions when they weren’t chained to the walls.”

  “I’d rather not hold hands.” She fished her cell phone out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, turning the flashlight application on. Two bars of signal flashed briefly at the top of the screen, kindling her hopes, only to disappear again a moment later. She handed it to the Prince. “It’s not doing me much good as a phone; it might was well be a torch.”

  “Useful,” he admitted. “But next time, I advise you to bring a blade.”

  There wasn’t going to be a next time. If she got out of this alive, Ann vowed that she would never even set foot in a basement again, let alone an evil Druid mound.

  The Prince led the way. They passed dozens of dark openings, some disturbingly shaped, others impossibly narrow, some just strange channels cut into the earth. The Prince ignored them all until the passage forked and they were faced with a choice: left or right.

  “Left,” said the Prince. “Druids always choose the left-hand path.”

  She kept her eyes on the Prince’s back, because she didn’t want to think what might be down the strange passages that kept opening to her left and right. One was no more than a foot wide but taller than the Prince, and Ann couldn’t imagine the horror of shimmying down such a narrow space.

  They walked perhaps another dozen yards, and finally the passage opened into a large chamber. The ceiling rose high above them, and wan light filtered through an opening cut into the rock. Somehow that glimpse of the world above should have comforted her, but the tall chimney only reminded her of how deep underground they were, how buried in the earth, and the light from it failed to illuminate the shadowy corners of the room.

  The Prince used her cell-phone light to strobe the space, and Ann didn’t like what she saw. The walls were covered with the same whorled carvings as the standing stones outside the entrance, but they had deep shelves and wide niches carved into them, filled with corroded iron boxes and heavy earthenware vessels. There were smaller glass jars as well, with things floating in them. But they weren’t the worst part. The worst part was the chains hanging from the walls and black iron trestles pushed up against them, crusted with something that looked an awful lot like old blood. That, and the instruments. The air had a burnt, chemical tang that seared the back of her throat.

  “What was this place?” asked Ann. Part of her knew but didn’t want to believe it.

  “A prison, a laboratory, a repository,” said the Prince. “The question is, why was this one so hidden? So far, this is no different from a hundred other Druid mounds in the British Isles.”

  The thought turned her stomach.

  “What did they hope to accomplish with all this?”

  “Power,” said the Prince. “The Druids started out human. We gave them a little magic. They taught themselves to acquire more. Their ultimate end was to surpass the Fae, to discover what set us apart from other races on the earth and take it for themselves.”

  Ann peered at the grisly jars. “This doesn’t look like research. It looks like dissection.”

  “Vivisection, actually,” said the Prince. “That was their favorite method. It has proven difficult to wean even their descendants of the practice.”

  “You say that like it’s a minor inconvenience. This Druid has your nephew.”

  “Yes,” said the Prince. “And you’re here because you think I’ll place killing the Druid ahead of rescuing the child. Now you understand why I might make that choice.”

  “If they’re so dangerous, then maybe you shouldn’t be seeking out their descendants and training them to be sadists.”

  “The sadism is a side effect of the training, not the goal. It’s difficult to find Druids young. The ones who survived our revenge went deep into hiding and their descendants forgot entirely their power.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best. Who would want to be this?” she said, gesturing at the horror around them.

  “Not all Druids develop a taste for blood, but unfortunately it’s difficult to predict which ones will survive their training with sanity intact.”

  “Once they learn their history, once they learn that you want to bring down the wall they built, why on earth do they want to work for you?” she asked.

  “They don’t. That’s why I never tell them their history.”

  “But this one found out,” guessed Ann.

  “This one found out,” agreed the Prince.

  It occurred to Ann that he was only telling her this because he assumed that eventually she would be on his side. She couldn’t imagine that outcome. The Druids had been evil, but the Fae hadn’t been much better, and she didn’t like the idea of living under the Queen’s rule.

  The passage continued on the other side of the chamber. They walked in silence until they reached another turn, this one leading into the heart of the mound. It widened and spilled out into a
chamber of shocking grandeur, roughly circular, with a diameter of at least fifty feet. The ceiling was domed in jagged rock, and at its center a stone chimney admitted light and air.

  The Prince switched Ann’s cell phone light off, and she realized that the chamber had its own subtle illumination emanating from the walls. Some of kind of pattern, distinctly different from the whorls and dots in the rest of the mound, was etched into the stonework, and the lines were filled with a substance that glowed softly. Ann followed the carvings for a stretch, trying to decipher the strange design. She had seen something like it before.

  “They look like architectural drawings,” she said. “Like blueprints.” Only she couldn’t quite figure out what they were blueprints of.

  “They are,” he said, his voice resonant with wonder, as he ran his slender fingers over the lines on the wall. “The Druids only ever built one thing of note. These are the plans for the wall.”

  In the dim light she could make out his smile of delight. It made the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Your Druid didn’t find this by accident, did he?” she asked. “You had him searching for it.”

  “Among other projects. Yes. It’s one of their particular skills, related to scrying, but different. They can feel Druid and Fae sites through maps and images. My Druids have been at it for decades, with no success, and I gave them nearly unlimited resources. But I’d long since given up hope of finding this. When we started, I sent them to steal the rarest and most obscure charts and drawings from the greatest libraries in the world. They spent years poring over ley lines and longitude and latitude, but all they ever came up with was trinkets or old mounds, long since pillaged and abandoned. The trouble with maps drawn by human hands is that human eyes have to see the places first. Satellites don’t. I started giving my Druids access to real-time maps as soon as the technology made it practical, but evidently my devious acolyte did not feel the proper gratitude and decided to keep this from me.”

  Now that she knew what the plans were supposed to represent, Ann started to understand what she was seeing. The wall wasn’t just a barrier between the worlds. It was a machine, an engine of sorts. The etching was two dimensional—it had to be; she knew that—but the lines created an impression of infinite depth, as though the towers and pillars that supported it stretched to infinity. It was impossible to determine what the defenses were intended to be built out of, but there was an undeniable sense of texture created by the rendering, as though the thing had both been carved out of the heaviest elements and was light enough to float away on the air. If she looked too long at any one detail, her teeth started to ache and her vision blurred.