The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex

by Robert Holdstock

  “Tell us what you know,” the Coritanian asked. “Where are the others? What happened? Tell us whatever you can.”

  “I don’t know what to tell. Talienze had told us that we should scout the land for clues to the disaster on Alba. That our eyes and minds were sharp because freshly honed. That things hidden would be revealed. That we were to bring them back to Alba.

  “We followed an old track for a day and half the night. It’s a bright moon at the moment. And our eyes soon got used to the dark. But soon after we’d settled for the night, the woman creature rode into our small camp. She was terrifying, wilder than any mourning woman in my land. She was straddling a wolf, or some creature like a wolf, the size of a horse. It ran at Talienze. He flung his cloak across its face and shouted to us to run. I don’t know what sorcery he used then, but he kept the woman at bay with astonishing fury. Fire and ice seemed to flare and freeze between them. He howled words that were meaningless. The woman was screeching, but her gaze, a terrible look, was on the group of us who were running.

  “Talienze saved us. His last words were a scream of ‘Find a chamber! Find discs! Find Merlin!’

  “His abilities were limited. He seemed to droop, and the wolf leapt at him and took him in its jaws, grabbed him by the throat and bounded away. He was very limp. The woman’s hair was long, like a cloak of flails, tipped with bone. She shook her head violently as she rode off, and the flails whirled about her.

  “Then other creatures came, strange animals, neither wildcat nor hound. Kymon, Colcu, and I were making a better run of it, but Dunror and Elecu fell beneath the claws and were dragged away screaming.”

  “What happened to Kymon and Colcu?” I asked.

  “Lost on the hillside. We were hunted until the moon went down below the mountain. Then for a while we just ran. And the next night I slipped and tumbled into the ravine; I landed on the face of a giant metal man. I was able to hide there. He’s not hollow, but he has hollow parts to him. The creatures that pursued me prowled about the ravine until dawn. I suppose they hadn’t got my scent. I was too frightened to come out. There was a lot of movement in the metal man, from farther down. I didn’t care to find out what it was. That’s all I know until you found me.”

  Queller had taken Talienze, and by the sounds of it, killed him in the taking, and she had left it to her pack to hunt down the boys. There was a chance that Colcu and Kymon were alive, but now the matter was urgent. I had dismissed that urgency before, too anxious to hear what Argo would have to say, to try to understand the significance of events in her life. That had been a mistake.

  But those boys would be somewhere nearby, somewhere in these gouged hills and forests, perhaps close to a river, perhaps hiding like Maelfor.

  Maelfor had imagined that the hunting animals had failed to get his scent, but perhaps there was another reason why they hadn’t leapt in through the gaping eye of the giant and torn him to pieces.

  The talosoi was a Shaper creation. It had been a king’s guardian on the coast of this island. It had been hated by Lady of the Wild Creatures.

  And Segomos also was a Shaper invention, woodwork and bloodwork, fused and fashioned from the visionary mind of a man who had taken ideas flung at him from the heavens. He had constructed such virile figures of oak for the amusement of warlords, in Greek Land, when it was still known by its more ancient name. And he had constructed them again, centuries later, in Alba, from his prison in the Otherworld.

  It seemed that Queller was still afraid of Daidalos’s constructions, even when they lay dead and broken. Even in the breaking, then, perhaps they kept a certain power.

  And this is why Argo had brought along Segomos, with his faint flicker of a broken life: to be a shield for us. Perhaps.

  This is why Snake Lady had so swiftly savaged Talienze, a weaker creation.

  Perhaps.

  But first: to find a son and a nephew of two kings. One of those kings was also at large in these hills. Urtha and his uthiin would be a poor match for what Queller could throw at them, I imagined.

  * * *

  They had run like beasts, tripping and stumbling, pausing to gasp for breath and ease the pain in their lungs, then finding new strength in their limbs to carry them farther from the howling and screeching of the pack.

  Descending hillsides, crossing waist-deep through the crystal waters that flowed between the slopes, clambering through sparse woods, finding brief shelter in the crush of and hollows of rocks, they became lost in the land, disorientated and confused. There were times of quiet. These were the times when they heard the rumbling of their stomachs, the drumbeat of strong hearts pushed to their limits.

  Then, always, the pack.

  It was quiet during the day, and they made slower progress, even managing to scoop a large fish from a shallow area of a river. They cut it up and ate it raw.

  There was never any shortage of water.

  Then night, and the land began to bay. The cry of a woman was sudden and distant, shrill and songlike. It came and went on the breeze, but even the wind seemed to shift with each ululation. The clouds shuddered as if being commanded. The land rumbled deeply, as if shifting its hidden channels.

  The pack came closer.

  During that second night, as they scrambled in the darkness along a ridge, illuminated by the moon, vulnerable and terrified, Maelfor suddenly cried out. He had slipped and was rolling and tumbling into the darkness. His cry lasted a long time before he was suddenly silent.

  Kymon could hardly move from the shock of it. Colcu grabbed his shoulder. “He’s gone. We have to move fast.”

  “I know.”

  Kymon knelt down on one knee and stared into the ravine. “Make your way home as best you can. That was a good run, cousin.”

  “I didn’t know he was your cousin.”

  “Would it have made any difference? Let’s get off this ridge.”

  On the third day, in a valley, in woodland, Colcu spotted a young boar, and the two boys hunted it, Kymon stalking it from the side, Colcu from the front, both wary for bigger members of the family. When the squealing animal broke cover, they chased it hard, leaping fallen trees, somersaulting over rocks, jumping up to branches to get a longer view, signalling with whistles and hand signs which way the black, sleek creature was moving. This was the best run of all. They had been born for this particular chase!

  The pig was fast and well knew the shortcuts through the wood. It was up against experienced hunters, however, and no matter which way it turned, one of those hunters came racing up to it and flung his sword, narrowly missing, narrowly missing again, but the pig’s day was coming to an end.

  It turned, cornered against a tall face of grey rock. Squealed. Made a stranger sound. Summoned its guardians, begged its guardians to hear its call. Then squealed again as Colcu’s knife plunged down into its neck, sending the thrashing beast to the ground, its small tusks inflicting small wounds on the Coritanian’s left arm.

  “Well chased!” Kymon complimented the older boy.

  “Well chased yourself,” Colcu replied with a grin. “And well run, young pig,” he said to the dead animal. “You’d have been fit for the forests of Alba.”

  They had no means of making a fire, so they gutted the boar and shared the warm liver. Then they cut the softer meat into strips and chewed quietly for a while.

  Colcu removed the tusks, and the strip of bristles from its neck.

  “The pack will soon get the scent of this,” Kymon said, and Colcu agreed. He looked around nervously, wiping blood from his mouth.

  “We should wrap the carcase in moss and leaves and bury it.”

  Kymon had stood up to search around the area where the hunt had finished. He realised, looking up, that this was no ordinary face of rock, but a fashioned stone of enormous size. There were markings on it, so obscured by wind and rain that they could not be clearly seen. As he walked along its base he found a narrow passage, a mere slit between two faces of the stone. He edged inside. Th
e passage was mazelike, but he persevered until he could see to its distant end, where daylight illuminated an open space, and something gleamed there, bright, then dull, as clouds shifted across the sun.

  Edging back and calling for Colcu, he returned and completed the squeeze through the rocks, emerging into a small arena where the grass was dry and high, growing around a dozen or more stone, sleeping human figures. Five low openings in the curving farther wall suggested chambers or passages leading away from this sunlit space.

  The shining object in the centre, perched on a stone platform, was a crystal or glass amphora, with a curled human figure inside.

  Kymon waited for Colcu to arrive. He eased from the passage, grunting with the effort of hauling the boar’s carcase by its back legs. “That’s a girl,” he said in surprise as he saw the glass pithoi. “She looks dead.”

  He dropped the beast. Together they made their way through the grass and thistles to where the sweet face, eyes open, stared towards the entrance to the arena. The child was small, hands folded across her chest, legs tucked neatly below her, white tunic caught as if shifting in a sudden breeze. She was suspended in a pale yellow liquid, and Kymon intuited at once that it was the product of the bee.

  Colcu walked around the pithoi. “She has wings.”

  “Wings?”

  “Look at this.”

  Kymon stood by his friend and marvelled at the folded wings, black and white feathered, stitched and tied to the girl’s shoulders, neck, and waist by tethers and tendons of various hues and varying girths.

  The significance was not lost on either youth. They had both listened to Tairon’s tale of Icarus and Raptor.

  Colcu broke away, looking around him anxiously. “What is this place?”

  Kymon, though, had begun to study the pictograms on the edge of the round stone base. “That image again,” he said to the curious Colcu. “You didn’t see it, but I did. The same image as the shape of the entrances to the hostels at the edge of Shadow Hero Land. Look here.…”

  He showed Colcu the repeated pattern of two animals facing each other, on their hind legs, separated by a strangely featured woman, whose hands rested on their heads. There were ten such triplets of woman and beast. She held a pair of wolves, stags, tusked boars, bulls, hounds, cats, cranes, eagles, hares, and rearing snakes.

  “What do they mean?” Colcu said aloud, thinking out loud.

  “She’s quelling them, subduing them. These are images of that flailing woman who’s pursuing us. Lady of the Wild Creatures. This plinth is hers.” Kymon stood, scratching at his chin-cut, searching the openings in the wall. “But I don’t think this was always her place.”

  “Because of the wings.”

  “The wings puzzle me.”

  “He had started to apply his invention to his daughters.…”

  “I wish Merlin was here. He’d have a better understanding.”

  “But he’s not here,” said Colcu firmly. He tapped the blade of his sword gently against the glass pithoi. “If that is one of the Shaper’s daughters, and this—” He tapped the stone plinth. “—was put here by the Wild Woman, then—?”

  “Then this was his place, his arena, and she has possessed it in her own way. Made it hers. Sacrificed his daughter in honey.”

  “A honey child.”

  “Well put,” said Kymon.

  “This is the forecourt of a Shaping Chamber,” Colcu whispered. He looked round at the entrances to deeper caverns. “And those are the ways in.”

  “We’ve found what Talienze asked us to find, I think.”

  “Talienze is dead. Probably.”

  “And we don’t know what it was he wanted us to bring back from the chamber.”

  They were silent for a while, trying to see into the darkness of each of the doors in the wall. It was Kymon who articulated the thought that was in each of their minds: that it was into such an opening that Tairon, a labyrinth-runner, had entered as a youth and had not returned. They had heard his story, told on Argo. In the hills of Crete there were mazes beyond comprehension. And all or none of these five gaping invitations to mystery might have been the beginning of such a consuming, eternal journey.

  Colcu suddenly started to pluck long grass, whole handfuls. He knotted the dry ends with the moist roots and, strand by strand, he produced a thin and fragile thread. “There’s a story about this,” he said as he worked. “Can’t remember much about it. Traveller’s tale. It probably happened here on this island, though. It was all about mazes. Don’t hold too hard or tug too hard at either end, but this will be a guide back to the light.”

  “Which of us is going in?”

  “To be decided. Can you knot? We’ll need a long thread of grass.”

  * * *

  It was getting dark. I moved swiftly towards where the kryptoii were echoing Ariadne in their exploration of this Shaping Chamber. The dream was hazy, but the vibrancy of their words, the energy in their actions, the pure youthful sense of their own supposed immortality, had struck a profound chord in my mind’s eye as I absorbed their actions through the face of the Moon.

  I had forgotten how slow Moondream was in the pursuit. Cunhaval the hound would by now be wrestling with them—affectionately, of course.

  I had begun to realise, also, that I was behind in the chase. The screeching woman was ahead of me, song-singing her flock of predators, spreading them out across the hills as she scoured for these stranger-intrusions into her newly conquered land. Queller was determined to eliminate all that she did not comprehend.

  She was very close to them now.

  Again, I entered the dreamhunt, absorbing the experience that was Kymon’s as he explored the first of the chambers.

  This was a place that Shaper had used to draw on the past. It was a place I knew well, at least in its design: a gallery of painted images, some familiar, some obscure. Animals roamed and leapt and curled in upon themselves, as if asleep, or killed; in other parts of the chamber, lines of strange characters, squares and circles, densely painted signs and symbols: all suggesting an attempt at expressing a forbidden knowledge. I knew better.

  Kymon was astonished at the beauty of the animals, especially the horses. They seemed almost to move across the wall, some of their heads raised, others lowered, a motionless stampede of movement, vibrant reds and browns in the shaft of light from the entrance. He could hear the sound of their wild ride in his head; no doubt the ground below him shook with the gallop as his eyes engaged with this gorgeous panorama.

  The symbols, the circles and the lines of strange marks almost made his head swim. They seemed to draw him in, freeze him in his tracks. He was strong enough to pull away from this embracing charm.

  Deeper in the chamber, there was no light, just the moan of a distant wind, and he didn’t venture there.

  What Colcu had discovered I couldn’t tell. I was dreaming Kymon.

  In the fading light he had explored a chamber where, as in Jason’s memory, there was a workshop of moving parts, subtly moulded from metals, carved crisply from the hardest woods, cedar mostly, and whole sheets and cylinders of crystal. They were scattered everywhere. The walls where once designs had been depicted were savaged, scratched through. Only one thing remained intact, beyond ruin, to the boy’s hungry eyes. To look up, to look to the roof, was to see the night sky. It was still day outside, but here he could see the stars; and even as he watched, so a star shot across the night. There was a milky veil up there, a stretch of floating gossamer that drew him towards it as much as the older signs in the first chamber.

  He picked up discs of bronze, and thin lengths of silver, gathering them into his arms, adding several shards of crystal that appeared to be engraved, heaping up the ruins until his arms could hold no more weight. Then he followed the grass thread back from the deepest gloom he could manage to have entered, back to the dying day, and Colcu.

  “That’s a good haul,” Colcu said with a half smile.

  Kymon let it all drop to the grou
nd. “A good haul of nonsense. Talienze had something in mind for us to fetch. He should have told us what it was.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t know what it was,” Colcu observed quietly.

  Kymon sifted the spoils, picking up a small disc, no wider than his hand, turning it in the light, peering at the spiral of drawings on each face. “This means nothing to me.”

  “Why should it?”

  In frustration Kymon hurled the disc across the grass and sleeping statues of the arena. Flung from the wrist, the disc curved through the air and clattered from the rock wall, close to the entrance. “A good weapon, perhaps,” the boy observed.

  Colcu was amused. “I don’t think that was his intention. But if you and I have to fight in single combat again, I’ll be sure to have three or four of them in my belt.”

  He stood and walked through the grass, picking up the battered disc of bronze. Something caught his eye. “We’ve forgotten to cover the pig,” he called. “There are flies everywhere. Can we still eat it, I wonder?”

  “There’s a lot of that pig that the flies won’t have reached,” Kymon called back, still searching through the artefacts.

  He became aware of Colcu’s silence. The taller boy was standing over the dead animal, staring down. “What is this?” Kymon heard him say aloud.

  Suddenly alarmed, Kymon swept an angry hand through the trinkets from the chamber and walked over to where the carcase lay stretched out.

  Open-bellied, its hindquarters hacked to supply the earlier feeding, the young boar was a gruesome sight, stiffening and distorting as heat and time tugged at its dignity. Colcu had thrown it down so that its head was against the rock, as if slouched against the wall.

  A child’s face, etched in white, watched them now from the tusk-drawn skull. A child!

  “Urskumug,” Kymon breathed. He started to shake. The pallid features of the human face seemed to leer at him. “Urskumug.”

  Colcu just stared at him, understanding nothing except that Kymon was in a rage of intuition, and was frightened.