Conflicting emotions swept through him: annoyance that nobody here seemed to give a damn that he was dying, along with fear of what felt like the potential for almighty good or malice.
He felt imprisoned there, his own will taken away from him, as if his being had become trapped by his own terror. But then hands, grimy and powerful, took hold of his elbows and propelled him forward into the maelstrom of power. Her words growled in his ears. “Qurun!”
Into the spinning vortex those gnarled hands guided him.
“Daaannngerrr!”
The whispering of a name . . . Qurun Bave. Had her words been leaves, they would already have dried and decayed to powder in his mind. And then even in her voice there was a tone of caution. Qurun Macha.
One of the faces in the stone appeared to have come alive, a feminine presence. In the quaver of dread in that old voice, he felt a powerful reinforcement of her warnings.
The old woman was dragging herself back a pace from him, still hugging the ground on her age-old knees. Mark realized that he no longer needed the light of the torch. He was standing between two members of the petrified circle of trees, the upstanding trunks and branches lambent with an inner radiance. His guide was urging him deeper, yet she withheld herself with hisses and moans. Studying the stone figure at the center of the circle, he saw how its surface was deeply etched with grooves, as if hands of knowledge from ages past had scored some forbidding runes over its surface. Compelled by forces he was unable to resist, he stumbled closer to the cowled figure.
“Daaannngerrr!” He heard the old woman’s urgent whisper, as if she were reading his mind.
He glimpsed her at the margin of his vision, frantic with worry, scurrying about herself, dragging her finger in the damp earth, drawing at a furious rate, faster than he could register. As if incanting some spell.
Compulsion overcame dread, forcing him to stagger forward again until his outstretched hand could reach out and touch the surface of the luminescent figure. He pressed his finger over the runes. He couldn’t read them but instinctively he sensed their incredible power.
The old woman hung upon his progress, murmuring, incanting, despairing at his incomprehension in the presence of the powers that now confronted him.
“Mark, abide! The test—the test!”
What test?
But there was no time to wonder as he faced the figure, which had several faces above a body that was a conflagration of glowing runes. Falteringly, as if struggling through a mixture of faintness and dread, he forced himself closer. Standing before the triple-headed being, he forced his arms through the blizzard of force, so that he embraced its glowing outline. Distantly he registered the shriek of outrage as the old woman, who had been trying to wrestle him back, was herself thrown backward, forced to prostrate herself once more two paces beyond the circle.
Mark felt a shock of fright: there was no air in his lungs as, with clumsy fingers, he ran his hands over the first face. It was a stern yet not unkindly face. His mind opened, however timidly, to question it. The voice of Granny Dew was no longer in his ears but in his head. Qurun Bave! He was gazing at the ruby triangle on the brow of stone, even as the old woman’s voice was cautioning him, growling at him, to move around the obelisk—as if questions could be dangerous, and hesitation more dangerous still.
A ruby triangle—the First Power!
He was allowed mere moments to confront a second face—a much younger face, with lips parted in a seductive smile. This being aroused him far more deeply than the succubus with the merest wisp of touch, then shimmered away, as if reacting to his presence with a mocking laughter. A whispered name, like a sigh against his ear: Qurun Mab! Cold sweat drenched his brow. Yet still, seduced by the voice, he couldn’t resist the urge to place his kiss upon those second lips. Even as he was drawn to do so, a family of lovesome shadows danced and gyrated about him, brushing against his flesh, sighing and whispering, as if he only had to free his will, to lose himself in pleasure beyond imagining. He heard sibilant peals of laughter. She is the One, we are the daughters. These daughters were in competition with each other for winsome seductiveness. Come sport with us and you will know paradise . . .
Mark’s head spun, causing him to totter, almost to fall.
Child—heed the brow!
At the last moment, before his lips met those of the figure, he saw the triangle in the brow: a metamorphosing matrix of meadow-green, in which arabesques of gold ebbed and spiraled—Kate’s crystal.
With even the thought of Kate, the memory of failure rose in him. He was only vaguely aware of the voice of Granny Dew in his mind, growling, at the same time as her head was bowed to the floor—and her hand was reaching down, slowly, carefully, to throw a cooling handful of dirt on the second face.
Now, foolish child—back!
Only with all that was left of his will could he tear himself from their embraces, the temptresses that reluctantly drew back from him and faded into the sighing figure. He forced his legs to move on muscles of lead to the third face, hidden from the light of the atrium in shadows so dark it seemed that it could not even be illuminated by the torch’s flame. His fingers recoiled in dread. The third face was cowled in a hood, the face within it, however beautiful—and beautiful he knew it was, deeply, instinctively—felt colder than winter. Her perfect teeth parted in a smile.
Mórígán!
Terror threw him back against the ring of trees, his jaws chattering, his limbs weak and trembling.
Through his dread, he heard the old woman speaking. Her words addressed the third entity, whose icy lips he had refused to kiss.
Stay your fury over this frail coracle. Let failure or success now condemn or succor him through the peril that lies before him.
A wave of force caused Mark to wheel around, to stretch his arm toward Granny Dew. She attempted to come a yard closer to help his progress, her lips moving in a growling mantra. Then suddenly, with her eyes widely staring, she thrust her hand through the fringe of trees, pressing something hard and burning against his forehead, impressing it there, her lips writhing against each other, as if both an immense duty and a terrible sacrifice had been set in motion.
My crystal!
Pain exploded in Mark’s head. He was flung back against the circle of petrified trees, his eyes wide. A potent force was assuming form in the pillar before him. For a moment, in place of the cowled figure of the third face, he saw a constantly metamorphosing matrix of dark and light, before the cowled face with its icy beauty returned.
His brow, with its obsidian crystal, was forced into intimate contact with the brow of the face. He could smell the oils of Granny Dew’s anointing. He could feel the area of contact condense to form a triangle. An inverted triangle—he knew it would be black. The sensation of fusion was so agonizing that for a moment he lost consciousness, but the strength of attachment wouldn’t allow him to fall. Without the strength to hold back any longer, his lips pressed against the icy lips, tasting the old woman’s earth-encrusted fingers, the sweet aromatic oils . . .
A new shock of union rippled through him, scoring throughout his mind and spirit like an electrical discharge, thrilling to the very tips of his fingers and toes. A deep, animal part of him exulted. A whisper entranced his mind. He was aware that it entered through the burning triangle in his forehead, though he was no longer in contact with the being.
So the De Danaan blasphemy is now challenged? Yet is such an ordeal warranted? Are you worthy?
What was he supposed to reply to that? The question was too vague, too fantastic, for his comprehension.
He felt certain that it was from this dreadful face that the dark shadows crept, to glide and gyrate over the walls of the cave.
He heard the old woman reply on his behalf:
Mark is afraid. He has known fear of rejection for a very long time. Yet he will assume the powers of True Believer.
With his heartbeat roaring in his ears he heard the reply of the Third Power, like gl
aciers grating over the rubble of landscapes.
Does he understand that something which so terrifies him in ignorance will become a thousand times more terrible through understanding?
He murmured, “I’m here too, you know.”
The shockwave of direct communication threw him onto his knees. And so understanding, will you, Mark Grimstone, accept your destiny?
“I’ll accept it. Whatever you want of me.”
There was a pause in which that chilly face appeared to assess him anew. Then, as if to scorn him, he was shown a pinpoint of light in the darkness. A terrible despair cut through his awareness as Mo’s voice rose, like a plaintive cry, on the wind. “I am losing my strength, Alan! Leave me!”
Mo—Mo was in danger. Concern for his sister flooded Mark’s mind. “All I ask is that you let me do it quickly enough to make a difference.”
He knelt before Mórígán, trembling, in a dreadful silence. Then he felt a powerful throbbing from his forehead which spread so that his whole mind seemed probed. There was a quickening in him, as if a little of his strength was returning, barely enough to enable him to stand on his own and endure the shock of being cast out of the labyrinth.
Back on the pinnacle, and gasping once more for breath, Mark saw how the Legun had expanded its power. The sky was a maelstrom, ravaged by lightning. He swayed back against the rail, staring up at the gigantic statue far above his head. He sensed his newly acquired oraculum blazing darkness rather than light, focusing all of his concentration on the figure of Nantosueta, marbling its surface with rivulets of fiery luminescence, which sparkled and cascaded in a dense web of runnels and matrices throughout the crystals of the rock.
Moment by moment, as the figure grew ever more incandescent, weakness invaded Mark’s heart. Icy sweat dripped from his face. Yet still he held his trembling body erect as the Dark Queen blazed brighter—as if the crystals of granite took fire.
When she spoke, it sounded like the rattling of a sea of bones.
Speak—and quickly before you invoke my wrath. Why have you profaned my age-old slumber?
“Don’t you remember me?” He had to hurl his words with all of his strength from mind to mind, and even then they sounded like a whisper against the battening storm of force that whipped and tossed about the tor. “We met in the chamber—in a kind of dream.” He panted for every breath now, trying to overcome the growing giddiness in his mind.
Silence.
“I don’t have time left for explanations. Look at what’s going on around you!” His breath was shallow, rapid. “Down there . . . on the temple plateau. Innocent people are being murdered by the same evil you fought long ago.”
Weariness again, in a great wave of sorrow, swept through the very atoms of his spirit as that great head turned.
Mark’s teeth were chattering from the poisons coursing through his bloodstream, yet he refused to shift his gaze from those all-black eyes now beholding him from their wrinkled brow. He summoned up every last fiber of his reserve. “They’re my friends. Can you remember what it was like to have friends?”
A shudder moved through the figure. Pity? Is that what you expect of me? A groan, like the susurration of a dried-up ocean, buffeted Mark’s spirit. Would that I could feel pity!
His throat was dry. His tongue felt so swollen it was hard to speak. “I remember how lovely you looked . . . when we met in the dream.”
He sensed a pause for reflection in the figure of stone. Great anger at injustice was my undoing. Pride became my blood, and it hardened my heart to stone. Wrath has become my fate, and I must endure it until the end of time. But then her voice softened, so it sounded more human. Yet to communicate with a caring heart, though brief unto a single moment, is such sweetness.
His heart was misfiring in his chest, his body sliding down the parapet until he was slumped against the low wall, Vengeance a discomfort against his spine. Through a mist of confusion he thought of the real Nantosueta—the dark-haired girl laughing as she pirouetted among the slender trunks, as free as one could only wish to be. He tried to lick his lips with a useless tongue. “We held hands. I . . . I know you’re no older than I am. I know what it feels like to be that lonely.”
The voice fell to a whisper. Who are you?
“Mark . . . Mark Grimstone is my name . . .”
You could not love me, such as I have become?
His limbs shuddered. His body trembled so it took all of his strength just to lift his face up to look at her.
“I do—I do love you. I’ve loved you since that moment . . . in the dream, when you held my hand.”
A sigh fell from the figure, like the patter of spring rain entering a forest that had known only drought. A girl’s soft voice spoke to him then, gentle and lovely as he remembered her: In two thousand years, yours has been the only heart brave enough to love me. She sighed again, but this sigh had the sibilance of joy. How could I not love you in return!
Mark’s heart lifted with what felt like an impossible mixture of joy and hope. “Then prove it by saving them. . . . Save my friends!”
So let it be! Yet avert your senses lest dread rather than desire is the memory you would keep of me.
Mark found himself falling into darkness, melding into consummation with Nantosueta, mind for mind and heart for heart. He refused to avert his senses, gladly sharing her gaze as her right arm drew its awful force down out of the heavens, and that single white-marbled left arm extended with the fingers splayed to a spider-shape of bleached ivory. Suddenly, those fingers exploded in blue-black lightning. Her accompanying words were a summons that swept far and wide over mountain and river and through the forests . . .
Guardians of Tazan—awaken!
Resurrection
Qwenqwo Cuatzel felt the power descend over the plateau as if a sudden static charge of electricity had crackled over his skin, lifting his hair so it felt as if his helmet had risen half an inch higher on his head. After Mark had left him, the dwarf mage had gone down into the cellar to discover the shaman, Kemtuk Lapeep, dying from a wound inflicted by the Gargs that had taken Kate. There were children here too, many sick from a poison cast into the air of the chamber. The council woman, Milish, had arrived to join him in tending the children. Now she too lifted her head, startled: “What is it?”
“Salvation—by the merciful gods!”
The dwarf mage hugged the tall statuesque woman, and then ran for the steps. He came lumbering up out of the cellar, passing several Aides on the blood-soaked paving stones, then burst out into the alley with his eyes thrown wide open, singing a battle hymn he had thought forgotten. In his right hand he held aloft the runestone, which pulsated and glimmered with power.
“What’s happening?”
He didn’t have time to hug the spiritual guardian, Bétaald. He ran toward the central plaza, where he heard the unmistakable roar of a grizzly in blood-rage. Other sounds he heard over the din of battle: the roars of the enemy and a muted cheer from Olhyiu throats. With the oraculum cradled in his injured left arm, and the Fir Bolg axe twirling in his right, he made his way past Kehloke, who stood wounded and exhausted among a small circle of Olhyiu that fought alongside the giant grizzly bear against hundreds of legionaries and swooping Gargs. Qwenqwo Cuatzel ignored them all. He forced his way through soldiers and Gargs, until he reached the defensive wall and turned his face up to view the Rath of Nantosueta. Then he turned to peer down into the Vale of Tazan.
With tears filling his eyes, he murmured, “Ah, bravely done young Ironheart! For so long have I endured to witness this!”
Gigantic cataracts of blue-black lightning arced through the air, provoking luminescent rainbows throughout the valley, even as dazzling flares of light expanded and fused in the statue of the Dark Queen high overhead, transforming her figure into a furnace of dark power. The avalanche of lightning separated into myriad feelers and rivulets as it struck the slopes, where the thunderous reverberations seemed to go on and on. Vast and wide, a terrible co
nstellation of stars, dark as gunmetal against the light, began to glow in the war-ravaged valley. Tears made tracks down the cheeks of the dwarf mage as he saw the lightning bolts strike one stone head after another. On the forest floor a reluctant movement began. Here and there, sheathed in crackling spiderwebs of power, the horned heads of the Fir Bolg war beasts ripped a passage out of their snow-covered graves.
Armored with their thick hides, on their backs they carried the heavily muscled drum masters, bronze-armored and helmeted. Straddling their pommels, in a semicircle of diminishing size, were the six great kettle drums. The eyes of the drum masters were all pupil, black and bulging like beetles. From the broad flat feet of the war beasts, claws extended to take firm purchase on the slopes. Steadily, purposefully, the drums began to call out . . .
Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . .
The drumming of the masters set up a coordinated signal throughout the valley, discovering everywhere a second wave of response. The war beasts held their ground, standing eight feet tall, their tiny gray eyes of malice looking for bodies to toss with their triple horns, huge jaws open to snap and tear. The black-eyed drummers continued to beat out their rhythm, awakening into every nook and cranny, so that not a single warrior, other than the few heads destroyed by the Legun, would fail to heed the call. Death Legion and Garg alike hesitated as the drumming expanded, patiently, remorselessly, until it became an omnipresent thunder sweeping through the valley. And soon the first among an army of fifty thousand broke free of the grave, with a rattle of stones and a scattering of insects and worms, their eyes beetle-black, their shoulders weighted with heavy armor, struggling out of their entranced slumber to answer the call of the drums.
The emerging Fir Bolg warriors were giants among the race of dwarfs, the tallest no more than five feet, yet they were shouldered like oxen, with arms and legs muscled like roots of oak. They bore a great variety of weapons, swords, spiked ball-and-chain, and double-headed battle-axes with hafts bent and twisted for sigmoid patterns of flight and their blades embossed and silvered with runes of power. These terrible weapons were now rediscovering the bonds of weapon and master, turning, swirling, glinting ominously in the blue-black lightning that ran and hunted for the great stone heads close to the ground. In a continuously flowing machine of war, the arriving warriors were aligning to columns on either side of the war beasts. All in that same flow, the drum masters began to press forward, hammering out a new rhythm, some leading their columns down into the valley heading for the river, others wheeling their war beasts upslope, the clawed feet, sharp and strong as steel, biting deep into the slippery ground.
The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) Page 47