Chalice 2 - Dream Stone

by Tara Janzen

  The shrouded man denied the accusation with a shake of his head. “The Lady of Deseillign knows naught of freeing black smoke from crystal prisons or trolls from rock. Nor do the Desert Magi with all their great powers.”

  “The Lady has one of the Seven Books of Lore,” Rhuddlan retaliated with a sore truth. “I did not take the Gratte Bron Le away from her.” He had wanted to. Indeed, he’d had the great tome in his hands, the Orange Book of Stone, but Ailfinn had made him leave it, a bond for the ancient pact between Sha-shakrieg and tylwyth teg.

  “Aye,” Varga said. “But the Gratte Bron Le is not a book of spells like the tylwyth teg’s Indigo Book. It says nothing of how to circumvent Prydion enchantments. If it did, Ailfinn Mapp would not have left it in the Lady Queen’s hands. For certes you and the mage left little else.”

  “We left enough that five hundred years later there are still Sha-shakrieg alive to break their oaths,” Rhuddlan said with his own measure of contempt.

  Turning away in disgust, he stepped to the next skraeling, and the next. All were branded. All of the brands were fresh.

  “The Lady needs thullein to fight,” Varga said in his queen’s defense, trailing Rhuddlan across the causeway. “Break the treaty boundaries or lose the Desert Kingdoms—such was her choice. That she puts her people, and yours, ahead of her pride is proof of her need, a need greater than even in those dread days after you destroyed Deseillign’s reservoirs and poured all of our water into the sands.”

  “Half a millennium of defeat is enough to temper anyone’s pride, even the Desert Queen’s,” Rhuddlan growled, dismissing the Lady’s well-known pride as he dismissed the rest of Varga’s reasoning.

  Looking about him, he swore again under his breath. The last Liosalfar he had sent to the island of Inishwrath before Tages three days earlier had been Pwyll in late August. The boy had reported the headlands secure, but it seemed he’d escaped by the skin of his teeth. Slott’s awakening could not have been long after and must have nigh torn Inishwrath asunder. With luck, Tages would find only the remains of destruction and not others of Slott’s hoary brood rousing from their centuries-long sleep.

  The slight bit of smoke issuing from the damson shaft where Varga had left his war gate had not been enough to raise the Troll King and his scepter. That had taken a prodigious amount of the wretched stuff. But from where?

  Gesturing for a Liosalfar to follow, he made his way farther along the causeway. In all the fighting, they must have killed or wounded one of the Dockalfar. Even a dead Dark-elf would tell him something.

  A live one would tell him everything.

  Dockalfar. Shadana. Slott arisen and Sha-shakrieg. Someone was stirring up an ancient brew of catastrophic dimensions, and Rhuddlan would know who.

  “Strip the weapons from this group and toss their bodies into the sea,” he said to the Quicken-tree warrior who stepped forward. “If any find a Dockalfar, call for me.”

  His orders given, Rhuddlan turned and fixed his gaze on Varga, the Lord of the Iron Dunes. No young warrior come to test his mettle, but the Desert Queen’s most trusted adviser during the Wars of Enchantment. Other than the Lady herself, he was the last of the spider people Rhuddlan would have expected to willingly put himself in Quicken-tree hands. The decision could well be his final undoing.

  “When last I was in the Sha-shakrieg’s southern basin, there was thullein enough to supply the desert forges for an age,” Rhuddlan told him. “The Lady at her most voracious could not have depleted those stores since the Wars, so tell me not of the Sha-shakrieg needing that small bit of metal that lies within my borders. I will have the truth, Varga, or I will have your life. The choice is yours.”

  Dark eyes stared out at him from between the gray cloth wrapping the Sha-shakrieg’s face, giving away nothing. Then, to Rhuddlan’s satisfaction, Varga bowed and pulled a thin leather packet out of his tunic.

  Rhuddlan took the offered dispatch. ’Twas sealed with a round of orange wax impressed with the Desert Queen’s mark. The last of its like he’d seen had held the Lady’s surrender. Now they were to war again.

  He ran his fingers over the seal, feeling for signs of tampering and finding two—a smooth rise of remelted wax and a hairline fracture where it had been broken. He glanced at Varga, who answered his unspoken question with a shrug of bland acceptance. The court at Deseillign was a viper’s pit of intrigue.

  Rhuddlan rebroke the seal and withdrew the parchment from within. A quick scan confirmed Varga as the Lady’s emissary. Rhuddlan would not mistake her bold hand. The document was dated only a day past and told of skraeling strike troops massing on the border walls of Deseillign and ranging as far as the eastern deserts. It told also of a mining catastrophe in the southern basin in midsummer, of a hundred Sha-shakrieg swallowed up by a sudden rent in Kryscaven Crater that continued to belch flames and rancid smoke and fill the southern caverns with a strange, ravaging pestilence. Thullein could no longer be mined at the site, and without a supply of the metal-rich ore for swordblades and arrow points, the war had taken a turn for the worse. As for the great fissure that had broken the Crater, signs of enchantment had been found all along its length, signs the Desert Magi had determined to be of Prydion making.

  The dispatch ended with an imperial decree: for the Tylwyth Teg to surrender the Prydion Mage, Ailfinn Mapp, and to forever renounce such mage; for the Quicken-tree to surrender the Aetheling seen in Crai Force as a token of good faith against further Prydion treacheries; for a chadron’s weight of Dream Stone to be delivered to Deseillign in recompense for the damages sustained thus far and for those to come; and for the King of the Light-elves to surrender to the Lady Queen the most powerful warrior in all his ranks—a blade-master of dread renown to wield a druaight sword.

  As he read, Rhuddlan’s hand grew tighter and tighter around his dagger, until a fierce flash of light burst from the crystal hilt with a cracking whine and struck a skraeling on the track. Wisps of smoke instantly curled up from the dead man’s bloody tunic and pale skin. Steam rose from the water pooled around him.

  “Is she fully mad?” he demanded of Varga, the dreamstone still crackling and flickering in his hand.

  “Nay,” the Sha-shakrieg said. He’d taken a step backward and was watching the dagger with a wary eye. “Only ill-advised by her Council of Lords.”

  “Then you read this idiocy and still dared to give it to me?” Rhuddlan lifted the parchment.

  “I dared not give it to you.” Varga shifted his gaze to Rhuddlan’s face. “You asked for the truth, not wisdom, and in truth Deseillign nears its end. The smoke from Kryscaven pours out of fissures in the Rift and spreads like a cloud of night across the desert. The skraelpacks have doubled in a fortnight with destruction as their only goal. No captain has come forth to offer terms, no demands have been made, and the air fair reeks with their cries of ‘Death to the Betrayers.’ The Lady fears not only for her life, but for the lives of all the desert peoples. She would have the Magia Blade reforged.”

  Rhuddlan bit back an oath. He could not save Mychael from this. Not now. Not with the great seals on Kryscaven broken and the fell fumes of Dharkkum once more loose on the land. For certes the Lady had already commanded her desert smiths to begin their work. Swordblades she had aplenty to fight even ten thousand skraelings, but not the swordblade meant to fit a dreamstone hilt. For the Magia Blade she needed the raw thullein Varga had stolen from the western basin.

  “ ’Tis a sword of ruin to be used for a ruinous end,” he said.

  “You have the aetheling to temper its deeds.”

  “No.” On that point there could be no compromise. Llynya had not the strength nor the heart to wield such a dire blade.

  “Then there is another,” Varga said, his voice tight with conviction. “There has to be. Let the aetheling temper him. Leash your mage, Rhuddlan, and release the dread warrior. Call the dragons forth and let him put them to their task. It is the only thing that can save us.”

  Aye. �
�Twas true. The Magia Blade could save them all—except for the one who dared to take it up.

  He looked to the far edge of the causeway where the Liosalfar were throwing the last of the skraelings into the sea.

  “Roth!” he called, and his captain for the sortie looked up and shook his head. No Dockalfar had been found.

  He looked next to the Dangoes. Conladrian was gone. The black hound’s journey had but begun if he would see his sister, Rhayne, come out of the ice. The white hound had fallen in the battle for Balor and been dragged by her brother into the frozen world beyond the ice cave’s forbidding maw, beyond the reach of time in hopes of new life. The Balor battle seemed as naught compared to what they now faced. In all the Dangoes there was not a place for the ghosts of the legions that would fall if Dharkkum was not stopped. The smoke was but the beginning with its choking fumes and ravaging pestilences. The true danger would come after the smoke cleared, making way for the all-devouring darkness of Dharkkum itself, a night so pure no light could cut through it, not even dreamstone light.

  Wind touched his check, a cold vapor of warning, and from out of the Kasr-al came the high, calling howls of a wolfpack re-forming.

  “We dare not tarry here,” he said to Varga. “Nor anywhere this side of the Magia Wall. If you would have an alliance, it will be set at the gates of time and on my terms. Can you speak for the Lady?”

  “Do you have the dread warrior the Lady seeks?”

  Rhuddlan weighed his answer one last time, knowing he cast Mychael’s doom.

  “Aye,” he finally said. “I have him. He and the aetheling await us in Merioneth.”

  Descent from Mercy

  Chapter 20

  Mychael stood over the dead skraeling and wiped blood from his dreamstone dagger. Naas’s blade had a killing edge, razor sharp. In less than a quarterlan it had five skraelings to its tally. No less than fifteen of the enemy soldiers were behind him in Dripshank Well, wanderers who had failed to keep up with the skraelpack and were quickly becoming lost. He’d let them go, killing only those who stood between him and his goal—Llynya.

  Noise from the main troop drifted back to him from up ahead in the tunnel. The pack was close, no more than a turn or two away. He’d finished off the last of the stragglers at the end of their line. The tunnel would widen into a small cavern in another quarterlan before taking a steep drop into its final stretch, and ’twas there in the cavern that he would have his best chance for freeing Llynya—or to die in the trying.

  He looked down at the skraeling beneath him. He’d never killed with a knife before, yet he’d suffered no hesitation, no uncertainty, not even with the first soldier he’d come upon. He’d gone for the throat, swift and sure as he’d been taught by Trig, and killed them each with a single cut.

  ’Twas far different from a bow. He’d smelled the blood of each one, been close enough to know the instant when life had left—that strange slackening in the air about their bodies when breath was no longer drawn. Whatever horror he felt at killing them was far outdistanced by the fear that he would not kill enough of them, that his hand would falter in a death strike, that he would be wounded or killed and Llynya would be lost.

  Stepping away from the fallen skraeling, he loosened the iron stars in his arm guard, readying them for rapid release. Every second would count in the coming battle.

  When he was but halfway down the guard, a tremor of heat rippled to life beneath his skin—a flutter, no more—but it did not pass unnoticed. His hand stilled. He waited, breath held, and soon enough a second tremor crested in a gentle wave on the left side of his torso and flowed down the length of his body, following the path of his scars.

  A bitter oath fell from his lips. His hand tightened into a fist. Time had run out. The dragonfire was coming upon him.

  He swore again, damning his cursed blood. He had Madron’s phial, aye, but he could not lie down and take his ease, wandering through a fey land of cooling dreams while Llynya was dragged beyond the Wall. In truth, when he most needed it, the price of the witch’s brew had proven too steep.

  With a quick hand, he finished releasing the securing loops on the iron stars. If the madness would come and take him, let it take the skraelings as well. The rage he’d done his best to temper with Trig on Mor Sarff would be given full rein. He would fight until the delirium claimed him. If he could do naught but free Llynya from her bonds and put a blade in her hand, the Light-elf might fashion her escape despite his fate. She was lightning quick.

  Touching his fingers to the cut she’d left on his cheek, he wished her Godspeed, then drew his sword and took off at a run. The skraelings would soon know their doom was among them. If there was to be a river of blood, it would start in the tunnel ’tween Dripshank Well and the Wall.

  ~ ~ ~

  Llynya smelled the slight freshening of the air that told her the tunnel was emptying out into a larger space, a cavern, or mayhaps the Magia Wall itself. Their trail thus far had wound through caverns she knew, but hanging upside down over a Dockalfar’s shoulder she’d become disoriented in the twists and turns and offshoots of the tunnel leading out of Dripshank, and was no longer sure if they were in the main passage or not. Skraelings were all about her, shoving and jostling, stinking and clattering and reaching out to grab at her whenever they dared.

  “Aetheling,” they grunted, and their big, clawed fingers would come down on her tunic or leg to pinch and squeeze. Frey, the Dockalfar carrying her, tried to hold them at bay with snarls and slashes of his knife, but still they took their chances.

  ’Twas the Dockalfar’s own fault. To keep the skraelings from sniffing and snuffling around her like she was the day’s ration of meat, he’d told them she was enchanted, worth her weight in gemstones, that the flowers woven into her clothes were carved from dreamstone and tourmaline—and now every man jack of them was trying to get rich before they reached Rastaban by picking a star of meadow-sweet or a rose.

  Rastaban.

  A shudder went through her. Ancient lair of the uffern trolls, the Eye of the Dragon might see her final end.

  “Slott,” the skraelings muttered and mumbled as they marched. “Slott. Slott. Slott. Har!”

  The mere sound of the Troll King’s name struck terror in her heart, not just for herself, but for all the tylwyth teg. She feared Rhuddlan had walked into a trap of his enemies’ making, Sha-shakrieg and Dockalfar working together to lure the King of the Light-elves into the deep dark, using Nia as bait.

  “Shadana,” she prayed, squeezing her eyes shut.

  Unlike with Nia, she did not think Trig would dare divide his troops again and send someone after her. Warhorns had been sounding all over Riverwood by the time the skraelpack had reached the cliffside hole that led down toward Dripshank Well. Two Liosalfar had been killed as the skraelings had fought their way into the cavern entrance, and she realized that battle might yet rage across Merioneth. Few enough Quicken-tree remained in the carn without Trig trying to rescue her—and trussed like a rabbit for the pot, she was near helpless to rescue herself. The Dockalfar had taken no chances with her bindings, knowing well all the Light-elf tricks. Her only hope lay in the scarcity of their numbers. For all the skraelings, there were only three Dark-elves, only three of her captors wily enough to hold an Yr Is-ddwfn aetheling.

  Trolls were another worry altogether. The enmity ’tween trolls and elves went back to the Douvan Age, an ancient, bitter feud. When the Dockalfar had allied themselves with Slott to turn the tide of battle in the Wars of Enchantment, they forever set the rest of the tylwyth teg against them. Trolls picked their teeth with elfin bones. Slott braided their skulls into his beard, with one dread plait made up solely of the royal line of Yr Is-ddwfn. When Ailfinn Mapp had turned the trolls to stone on Inishwrath, it had been a corps of Yr Is-ddwfn aethelings that had brought the wretched giants to heel for her on the rocky shore.

  Trolls were a curse, a fearful, frightful curse, and knowing Slott again walked the earth was to know evil had
been resurrected.

  She had to escape before they reached Rastaban. She still had her pack and could easily find her way home. The gods save her, she would not have her head hanging from the Troll King’s wiry locks.

  Another skraeling reached for her flowers, and Frey cut him with his knife. “Back off, ye beast.”

  They were all beasts—stupid, beastly men to have given themselves over to the Dockalfar for a promise of plunder. What had they thought, she wondered, when the Dark-elf potions had begun to work their monstrous changes on them?

  For certes they thought little enough now. They were cunning, aye, but only when it came to feeding the hungers that had been contorted inside them to an insatiable degree—greed and gluttony. The Dockalfar had stripped them of all other desires and ruled them with that cardinal pair. A skraeling ran on avarice and the keenness of his appetite and naught else.

  Not so the Dockalfar. If she had a blade, Ratskin would be dead a hundred times over for all his touching of her. Netherworld dweller or nay, he knew flowers for what they were and the difference between such and gemstones. He touched her for his own pleasure, foolishly ignoring the murderous gleam in her eye. Unless Slott ate her whole, still bound and gagged, she would have at least one moment of freedom before she died. Since Ratskin’s last lewd caress, she planned to use that moment to slit his gullet. She had the knife for the deed all picked out. ’Twas the pearl-handled dagger hanging over Frey’s right hip. He and Ratskin both had a half-dozen blades sheathed in their belts, some hilted with wych-elm roots bound in silver, others with carnelian hilts, still others with runic oak. Ritual knives, though she dared not guess what rituals Dark-elves practiced.

  The freshening breeze came to her again, winding its way through the reek of skraelings. The barest scent of the greenwood lingered on it, telling her they were still above the Wall and that other tunnels lay ahead. No forest smells came up from the deep dark. She closed her eyes and breathed in the faint wind, using it to ease the pains of being bound. Her hands and feet were numb, her jaw achingly sore from the dirty rag stuffed in her mouth.