Chalice 2 - Dream Stone

by Tara Janzen

  “Shadana,” she prayed, trying to watch her back and her front and both sides at once. She’d ne’er seen Dockalfar before—all of them supposedly having died in the Wars—and they were more awful than anything she’d imagined, sharp-toothed and dirty, with a faint green cast to their skin. The biggest one had no nose, only a rough piece of silver to cover the hole in his face. Trolls, she might have thought, uffern trolls, except for a certain fey cast to their faces and their speed. For certes naught but an elf could have caught her.

  But the smell of them!. Murder and mayhem and rot. ’Twas all she could do to keep from retching.

  The two smaller ones slipped coils of rope from across their shoulders, while the bigger one sidled closer, sword in hand. She lashed out at him with her long blade, forcing him back while trying to keep the other two in sight. She darted and dodged, but on her fourth parry with the noseless elf, the other two snaked their ropes around her wrists and dragged her to the ground.

  “Sticks!” She squirmed and cursed and got in a couple of good kicks before they were able to bind her ankles. Her heart was beating so fast ’twas near to bursting. Captured. She’d been captured. She swore again to keep the sob from escaping her throat.

  The noseless one took her dreamstone dagger and pushed her hair up away from her ears. He let out a pleased grunt at what he saw. His gaze locked with hers.

  “Ye should’a stayed in Yr Is-ddwfn, aetheling, with the rest o’ yer pointy-eared kind.” He spat on the ground and rose to his feet, leaving the other two to finish trussing her up after Ratskin had taken her sword. They wrapped a length of dirty cloth over her mouth, and she almost fainted from the explosion of rank and fetid smells.

  “Lacknose,” one called out. “She’s turnin’ blue.”

  The big Dark-elf came back and looked at her. “I’d turn blue too, Ratskin, if ye wrapped yer filthy food sling over me mouth. Frey, get it off her.”

  Like the other two, Frey was blond-haired, but was missing an eye. Ratskin had all his parts with the addition of soft gray hair growing in patches on his face. Some dire happenstance had befallen them that they were all thus disfigured.

  Frey took the sling off her, but immediately replaced it with his own only slightly less rancid one. Ratskin’s he used as an extra binding around her legs. Ropes bound her arms to her torso.

  The horn to the north had grown silent, but Trig’s yet sounded from the south, the calls moving toward the alder copse. He would pass her by, unless the smell of the skraelings alerted him. The skraelpack had caught up with her and the Dockalfar. She could see them gathering ’round Frey and Ratskin, peering over the Dark-elves for a look at their prisoner.

  They were terrifying to a soldier, their teeth barely contained within their overlarge jaws. A few wore mail hauberks. Others had boiled-hide gambesons sporting spiked bosses to protect them. Each was fully armed with spears, daggers, and swords. Two of those leaning over Ratskin had morning stars looped over their belts. A few others, she realized, were female, as equally armed as the men and with no more pity in their gazes.

  Lacknose growled an order in a language she barely recognized as derived from the ancient common tongue. ’Twas harsh in his mouth, a scramble of hard letters and short sounds, but the skraelings responded as one, falling into line and heading toward the river. Frey slung her over his back like a sack, and everyone made way for him to take his place at the front of the pack.

  A new chorus of horns sounded from the west, from Carn Merioneth, answering Trig’s call. Kynor, she fervently hoped.

  “That puts ’em on two sides of us, mayhaps three,” Ratskin grumbled.

  “He’s right, ye know.” Frey looked to Lacknose. “And every scout they ’ad in Riverwood is headin’ in this direction by now.”

  “Aye, but we’ll not be in Riverwood for them to find,” .Lacknose said. “There’s a hole into Lanbarrdein not a quarter league hence. We’ll lose them in the dark.” With a barked command, he doubled their pace.

  Doomed, Llynya thought. She was doomed.

  ~ ~ ~

  Nennius stood over the four dead soldiers, his breath coming hard, his arms throbbing from the force of the blows he’d delivered with killing strength. The sword he’d borrowed dripped blood at his side. He shook his head, trying to clear the last of the pale-haired man’s friggin’ enchantment from his brain. He’d come back to consciousness in his alder prison with naught but two scouts left to guard him, two who were obviously not up to the deed. Behind him, the two wild boys were sprawled in the grass, wounded, but not dead.

  One—Pwyll, he was called—had been shot in the leg with an arrow. Poisoned, by the looks of the wound and the boy’s face. He’d gone white with sweat dampening his dark hair and pouring off his brow. He’d been the first to fall from his perch, and ’twas his sword Nennius had taken. The other one, Lien, was more sorely hurt. He’d fought a brace of the enemy in the trees and jumped to Pwyll’s rescue when two more of the smelly brutes had broken through the alder wall. Thus they’d fought side by side, Nennius and Lien, and killed all four of the soldiers while Pwyll had blown his horn.

  The other wild folk were returning. Their warhorns echoed through the forest, coming closer, but Nennius doubted if they would arrive in time to save Lien. The scout was losing blood from a sword cut on his side, lots of blood. An hour earlier, Nennius would have finished the boy off himself. Now he stood and watched and hoped the scout would live. To his practical advantage and to save his own skin, allies had been made out of enemies. ’Twould be a shame to lose them nearly as quickly as they’d been converted.

  One of the deformed attackers twitched, a death spasm, and Nennius stuck him again for good measure. Then he walked back to the boys, collecting the food they’d brought to him at daybreak.

  Holding first one and then the other, he gave them each a drink of the sweet, fresh-smelling water they had plied him with each day. Pwyll managed to swallow. Lien could not. For himself, Nennius took a swig of brandy off the flask he’d carried from Ynys Enlli. Stiff stuff, it probably would have killed the scouts on the spot, and he wanted them to live.

  Aye, he dearly wanted them to live.

  To that end, he took Pwyll’s crystal dagger and made a swift incision on the boy’s thigh where the arrow protruded. Once he’d located the barbs, he extracted the arrowhead with a minimum of damage. He poured some of the sweet water into the wound—the stuff had a quality about it that made Nennius believe it could do naught but help—and bound the wound with a strip of cloth he cut off Pwyll’s cloak. Suturing would have to wait.

  For the other boy, there was not so much he could do. He cleansed the gash in Lien’s side with the sweet water, bound him with green cloth, and wrapped him in his cloak to keep him warm before sitting down beside him. ’Twas thus Nennius arranged himself to be found by the returning wild folk, with a blooded blade lying across his lap and a dying wild boy cradled in his arms.

  Chapter 18

  Flowstone rolled in smoothly rounded waves down the narrow passageway of Mychael’s descent, a frozen river cresting and eddying in the blue light of his crystal dagger. ’Twas slow going, but shorter than retracing his and Tabor’s path through the Canolbarth. Singing along as the pony-master was, Mychael doubted if Tabor would note his leaving until he reached the Cavern of the Scrying Pool.

  A botch that was, he thought. Since the freeing of the pryf, naught had been seen in the pool. Steam rose and wafted as it always had, but the water was murky, swirled through with muddy currents that even Madron and Moira had not been able to clear. In the spring, Madron had taken him there on occasion to teach him the songs of his mother and the chants of her father: songs to open windows onto faraway places and chants to guide those who sought to reach them. Nemeton had been such a seeker. Madron said he had traveled far and wide before coming to Wales with a Lord D’Arbois. On that journey, happening on the place where the Wye and Llynfi rivers met, he’d called a halt and thereby saved the retinue from a blizz
ard of uncommon fury—or so the tale had always been told. For three days the snows had fallen, rent with lightning and resounding with thunder. The hours before each dawn had been filled with rains of ice, the nights in between lost in banks of fog. When ’twas over, Nemeton had prophesied great victories for whoever ruled the small keep on the bluffs above the rivers. D’Arbois had taken the prophesy to heart, routing the old baron and winning Wydehaw for his own.

  Sín. The making of storms. Madron had tried to teach him the way of it. ’Twas a skill the witch held in a small degree, and apparently he held in none. Mychael had yet to raise a wisp of fog under even the best of circumstances. Just as well, to his way of thinking. Godless witchery was not his goal, though Madron had assured him there was no godlessness in all of nature or witchery.

  Wales, she’d gone on to say, had been her father’s truest home, and Wydehaw his truest place in Wales. He’d built a tower at the castle and studied there for many years before tragedy struck and sent him north. He chose to stay in Merioneth to be close to the last of the Magus Druid Priestesses and the long-forgotten men of Anglesey. And in all her father’s travels, she’d said, he’d laid his traces of magic to mark the wonders he’d found.

  As to his sanctuary, Madron had been the one to show Mychael the mark “Ammon” wound through Ddrei Glas’s and Ddrei Goch’s serpentine scales. It was part of a map Nemeton had been laboring to piece together before his death, the journals of which had been lost when Carn Merioneth had fallen. She’d searched both Anglesey and Wydehaw many times in the past fifteen year’s and come up with naught. Nor had she been able to find anything in Carn Merioneth since their return in the spring, though she and Moira had searched the place clear through, and even Naas had lent a hand.

  Mychael and Lavrans had spoken of Nemeton’s tower, the Hart of Wydehaw Castle, of its Druid Door and the great celestial sphere in its eyrie, and of the walls carved with all manner of words and numbers in receipts and obscure formulae. Mychael greatly desired to search the Hart for himself, being well aware of the inherent sanctuary of castle towers, and mayhaps there would yet come a chance for him to delve the mysteries the bard had unraveled, though how he would convince the current lord to allow him access to Nemeton’s tower remained to be seen. Having gone from a Welsh monastery into the otherworldly realm of the deep dark, he knew little of the English and even less of Marcher lords. Lavrans had given him the secret of the Druid Door, and provided he could actually open the mighty thing, that deed alone could suffice.

  As for his lessons from Madron, with each turn he’d taken toward madness, he’d been less inclined to spend time with the witch. He was Druid, aye, but no priest as she would have him, and no witch of nature’s ways. He knew words of power and the power of a man’s voice raised in chant; he’d felt such power at Strata Florida every evensong, at every spoken prayer. Between the Christians, and the Druids, and the Quicken-tree with all their many songs, he saw no difference in putting a voice to whatever sacred thing they would honor. But for himself, he feared what had chosen him was neither honorable nor sacred, but was only power—raw and unyielding. He was a strange mix, and mayhaps knowing none could claim him as their own, all the gods had abandoned him, left him to the dragons, to fight and die with the beasts.

  The worms were their spawn, the Weir Gate their doing. Since Rhuddlan had sealed the tunnels to the great wormhole, his wildness had only grown. In the past at least he had been able to find a measure of peace in the smaller weirs, which had since disappeared.

  Peace, the promise of gods.

  Nay, he’d not told Llynya all of the wormholes and their dangers, and he’d told her naught of the bliss, of the stars he’d seen; nor of the turnings of the Earth and how the timeless flow moved inside him in the weir; nor how the tides once washed through him, a full cycle, and had shown him the course of the Moon. ’Twas the sense of salvation itself he’d found, to slide into the Earth’s wisdoms and from there into the Heaven’s. He would give much to sink himself into that peace once more. Yet in the end, the dragon’s path always led to war, to war and the river of blood. That truth, too, was in the mighty weir, swirling around the core on smoky tendrils of dragon’s breath.

  Sanctuary might be found there... or battle. For certes battle would be found in the damson shaft if Rhuddlan had broken the Sha-shakrieg web and gone on. Mychael knew he would then be bound to follow and to fight. Thrice cursed he was, with the dragon’s gift of war, the Merioneth priestess blood that had brought him hence, and that he had always been as he was now—alone.

  He rounded a curve into a steeper descent and bore right along a narrow ledge that took him above the flowstone. The smooth expanse of rock wound downward at an ever sharper angle until it joined the gigantic flow of opalescent gemstone that made up the north wall of Lanbarrdein. The ledge skirted the flow and dropped down into a cavern on the other side of the north wall. ’Twas called Dripshank Well for the maze of dripshanks pillaring and arching across its main room, and because of the sinkholes that beaded its surface like a string of pearls. ’Twas through Dripshank that the River Bredd found its way into Lanbarrdein, and he could hear the river running far below him in the dark. Mychael had traversed the cavern’s trails many times, it being a direct link between Riverwood and the deep dark and a quicker way to the surface than going through the Canolbarth.

  From Dripshank he could take a path directly into the pryf nest and from there work his way down to the crystal-cliffed headland of the weir tunnels on the shores of Mor Sarff, or he could continue on through Dripshank to the Magia Wall and backtrack a quarterlan to the headland cliffs. Much of the choice would be based on the pryf. On the last journey up, despite his own distress, he’d noted their frantic, continuous movement and erratic bursts of speed, and he’d wondered if they were trying to make a wormhole in the nest itself. The gods protect him if that was true.

  Too much strife was about, and too many enemies. He had Sha-shakrieg and skraelings to worry him, and rot and wolves, and men turning from their own kind. If the pryf, too, went berserk, he feared ’twould do naught but hasten his end.

  Traversing a short squeeze of a switchback, Mychael came out on a windswept ledge high on Dripshank’s west wall. The smell of salt was in the air. The aboveground entrance to the cavern was set in a cliff face on Riverwood’s eastern edge and ever caught the prevailing ocean breezes. Trig had put a permanent guard on the hole and specifically banned him and Llynya from going anywhere near it. Thus when Mychael saw flickers of light in the darkness below, he quickly sheathed his dreamstone and hoped he’d not been seen. He would not be stopped at this point. Nearly as quickly, he realized that the lights bobbing through the forest of pillars and arches were yellow and red, completely lacking the lucent blueness of dreamstone—except for one, and that one was shining toward the green side of blue with violet at its core.

  Llynya was in Dripshank Well—and with a larger troop than he’d thought left in all of Carn Merioneth, what with Wei being in Tryfan and all the messengers Rhuddlan had sent, and Rhuddlan himself in the deep dark with forty Liosalfar. Those in Dripshank could only be the Kings Wood elves Rhuddlan had hoped would come.

  The sound of running water masked much of the marching of feet, yet he heard the clattering of weapons. Strange, that. He’d never heard tylwyth teg clatter, no matter how well armed, and a fully armed Liosalfar warrior carried no less than three blades, a bow, and a full quiver. Of late, Trig had also issued everyone iron stars, and still they didn’t clatter when they moved.

  The group below sounded like a tinkers’ rendezvous. The Kings Wood elves were going to need shaping up before they would be of much use.

  Curious, and concerned that Llynya would be the one chosen to lead such a rustic band, he strode along the high ledge, following them in hopes of getting a better view. The troop veered north in a short curve before heading south, and Mychael swore softly to himself. They were at the largest sinkhole. Once on its other side, ’twas a straigh
t shot into the deep dark.

  Sticks, he swore again, speeding up his steps. Trig knew better than to let Llynya anywhere near the deep dark.

  He redrew his crystal knife to better light his way and kept on after the troop, or at least the main part of it. The Kings Wood line was ragged, ill-formed by even the laxest standards. Stragglers abounded, small spots of jingling brightness wandering off from the group.

  The tunnel they were heading for connected Dripshank to the Wall and widened into a small cavern about halfway along its length. At a fork in the trail, he took the lower road and broke into a steady running gait, deciding ’twas best if he caught up and saw what they were about. Trig hadn’t mentioned a sortie into the dark, but if Rhuddlan had called for Liosalfar beyond the Wall, Mychael figured he was more likely to be welcomed than reprimanded. He would offer to take Llynya’s place, and she could be sent back to scout in Riverwood where she belonged. If he met with any resistance, he wasn’t above revealing her intention to follow Morgan into the wormhole.

  The closer he got to the cavern floor, though, the less sure he was that Rhuddlan or Trig had anything to do with the raucous, lumbering group he was following. The less sure he became, the faster he ran, until he was racing along the narrow slabs staircasing Dripshank’s south wall. When he cleared the last riser, descending to where the salt tang of the ocean breezes did not reach, sure and sudden dread replaced any uncertainty. He landed on the cave floor and knew immediately it wasn’t Liosalfar he was chasing.

  The smell of black rot hung like a pall in the lower levels of the cavern, weighing down the air and teasing a fine strand of terror to life in his veins. Skraelings.