by Tara Janzen
They did not. The lizards were amassing again even as she watched, making ready for another dash, with the only way down.
“Sticks,” she swore under her breath, pacing the edge of the wide hole at their feet. The tua might survive a willy-nilly drop down its throat, but she and Mychael would not.
To him, she said, “I don’t know. The pryf avoid Dripshank Well because of the open water, so they don’t often get into the tunnels north of the nest. And for certes the old worm couldn’t be chasing tua down the narrow track we took out of Dripshank.”
“I don’t smell any worms, pryf or otherwise,” Mychael said. “I smell tua, and the smell is stronger behind us than it is in here where we’re surrounded by them.”
’Twas an odd truth, what he said. The pungent musty scent was more potent where they’d been than where they were, where she couldn’t move a step without a hundred tua skittering away. She cast a wary glance back into the tunnel. Something was back there. The tua knew what, and it frightened them.
Of a sudden, the lizards went from frightened to terrorized and launched themselves down the dark hole in droves, wave after wave, scrambling over one another in their desire to flee. Startled, Llynya grabbed for Mychael, and they held themselves against the rushing tide of white-skinned beasts. In seconds ’twas over, and the two of them were alone, except for the few tua who had not made the desperate leap through the hole in the Magia Wall—mayhaps, like Llynya herself, doubting that the great cavern would give them safety.
“Godsblood,” Mychael swore, staring down the dark passage from whence they’d come.
“Shadana,” she agreed.
They looked at each other, and Mychael shrugged off his pack.
“You first,” he said, snapping out the length of rope hooked to the outside of his pack. With a few quick moves, he secured the rope to a projection of rock, using a modified hitch.
“No, you go first,” she insisted. “You’re hurt.”
He met her gaze with a grim smile curving his mouth. “I’m not hurt. I’m on fire, cariad.”
The endearment, though roughly spoken, was not missed even when tied to his dire revelation. She reached out a hand in comfort, and his smile faded. In a step, he had her pulled into his arms, his mouth coming down on hers. What there was between them could not be sated with a kiss, yet Llynya felt a deep and healing relief to touch him so, to share the heat of his mouth as she would share all of him.
Lost in his embrace, she was nearly a second too late in escaping the danger that snaked out of the tunnel.
Warned by the tail end of a raspy hiss, she yelped and leaped back, pushing Mychael toward the wall with the same action.
He swore and ducked as the long carnelian sliver of a tongue lashed out again from the black depths of the tunnel, its forked tip searching for warmth and a taste of prey. Like a whip, it was, the crack of it softened by sibilant hissing. A fear-frozen tua was its first victim, snapped off the wall with a lightning-quick flick, snared by the sticky tip that recoiled into the tunnel with its flailing supper in tow.
Mychael grabbed her in the reprieve and shoved her into the hole. She slid down the chimney of rock on the rope, barely touching the walls, praying Lacknose wasn’t at the bottom waiting for them. Mychael was coming down behind her, and coming down behind Mychael was the red tongue, searching to and fro with each uncoiling. Of the beast who owned the dread thing, they saw naught.
Llynya came out of the hole and dropped a good ten feet to the rock plain flanking the great Magia Wall. She landed on her feet and looked first to the west. Her own dreamstone blade flickered back at her in the darkness, a small dot of blue light among the torches making their way along the Wall. Her mouth tightened. She wanted her blade back, but it wasn’t to be hers on this day. There were too many of them for her and Mychael to fight—and there was the beast above them.
Unlike where she and Shay had descended from the other cavern, the Wall beyond the southern tunnel was a huge, open passage with a ceiling ten times higher than the walls of Carn Merioneth, with the mighty ridge of the Magia Wall running for miles down its entire length. The rock plain on either side of the ridge was beset with gaping, rough-edged canyons whose sides were littered with boulders fallen from the ceiling. Vitreous rose quartz ran through the walls and across the floor between thick bands of granite, picking up the yellow dreamstone and adding a faint glow to the passage. When Mychael dropped out of the shaft, his blue light joined hers, and the cavern took on a greenish cast.
His first word upon landing was an oath. His second was a command.
“Fireline!”
Aye, she thought. Let Lacknose deal with the tua’s terror.
They ran a short distance and began a line out of reach of the tongue, until the beast itself should emerge from the chimney. The torches coming down the Wall from the west were advancing more quickly, drawn, she guessed, by Ratskin’s blade. The hissing grew in strength as the creature climbing down the shaft labored closer and closer. Mychael had the only fireline makings, Llynya having been banned from the caves. She took his gourd of hadyn draig and shook the seed out onto the floor. ’Twas no sense trying to incise a groove in quartz and granite, so the dragon seed fell where it would with Mychael doing his best to cover it with roc tan.
When time was to be had, a fireline was layered to add depth and longevity to the flames, steps four and five of Trig’s teachings. Step six was the addition of color to name the maker of the line. Llynya started the step four layer against Mychael’s protest.
“We stop it here, or run our hearts out mayhaps all the way to Tryfan,” she told him, keeping an eye on the opening of the shaft and on Lacknose’s progress. “I don’t know what lies ahead. Shay and I never explored this part of the Wa—”
A snout appeared out of the chimney, a long, scaly snout. Mychael went utterly still at the sight.
“Nay,” she murmured, fighting the urge to drop the gourd and run. “ ’Tis no dragon with that tongue. Quickly now.”
They finished as the head came into view, white-throated and pale on the underside with row after row of knobby golden brown scales along the top. ’Twas a tua of monstrous proportions. The front legs followed, and the she-beast used them to claw and scrabble her overripe body out of the shaft.
Aye, ’twas female, from the glint of ivory off her razor-sharp teeth to the black slash marks where her eyes should have been; from the white star-shaped spikes jutting in a line down her spine to the soft scales of her pregnant belly.
The tua’s golden-sheened tail slid out of the shaft with a heavy slap on the floor, and for a moment the blind lizard—which stood as tall as a man and nearly twice as long—did naught but sniff the air with her tongue. Then she attacked.
Llynya felt herself being hauled back as Mychael dropped a burning sulfur twig on the line. Flames shot up, making a wall of fire eight feet high. Its heat was scorching even at a distance. They turned and ran, but got no farther than a quarterlan before they caught up with the herd of tua. The tiny reptiles were ankle-deep on the trail, all clustered together, and to a lizard they were facing due west, noses lifted toward the raging fire.
She turned, afraid the monster was upon them. It wasn’t, but what she did see was nearly as frightful.
“Mychael,” she gasped, pointing for him to look.
He glanced over his shoulder, then turned full on his heel, his mouth agape.
The fireline had stopped the giant tua, but stopped her with pleasure, not pain. The golden brown beast had wrapped herself in the flames. They tickled along her scales and claws and wreathed her with lambent fire. The star spikes down her back glowed red.
“Salamander,” Mychael whispered, crossing himself with the Christian warding.
“Fire lizard,” Llynya breathed, and made her own sign of protection.
The two of them watched, mesmerized, as the great tua bathed herself in the roc tan’s incandescence, in the combustion of the hadyn draig. She neither burned
nor smoked, only luxuriated in the inferno. The light sparked off her scales, making her glitter. The darkness all around made her a living flame in the midst of the heat.
Llynya looked down at the lizards at their feet. They, too, were mesmerized. A cry came from the salamander, a shrill screech that echoed up and down the Wall and made Llynya’s blood run cold. The tiny tua started forward at the beckoning, taking a few steps before stopping. Another screeching cry had them skittering forward again for several more steps.
“How long do you think we have?” Mychael asked.
“Longer than these wee beasts,” she said, an opinion that was verified with the salamander’s next cry. The little ones could not resist its command except in delay. They moved forward again, a great, pale wave of trembling dainties.
“The fire will hold for six hours, mayhaps longer.”
“It won’t matter,” Llynya said. “She won’t move for days after gorging herself.”
“She?”
“Aye. She’s their mother, and she’s going to eat them every one.” A shudder ran through her.
Mychael slid his arm across her shoulders, gathering her close. “Aye, well, it’s a sight you’ll not have to see. We must leave. The group on the Wall has seen us for certes, though I doubt they’ll trouble us again.”
He was right. They had to leave. The way back was denied them, so ’twas forward they must go—into the unknown.
The fiery beast would be Lacknose’s bane.
~ ~ ~
Naas finished setting her trap in one of the tunnels of Balor’s old boar pit. ’Twas the one place in Merioneth Rhuddlan had not yet reclaimed. The Druid boy had reclaimed a bit of a hidey-hole for his book, and safe enough it was there. Bones and blood, death and fear, murder and mayhem—’twas all the same to her, but the rest of the Quicken-tree could get a bit squeamish about such. Trees were their touchstone, the guardians of the earth and all green growing things. They mightily loved their leaves and cones and flowers.
“Garland weavers,” she snorted. “Bramblers.”
Oh, they were not averse to a good fight, like the one racing down upon them, but the brutality, the senseless violence of the boar pit, was beyond their capacity to absorb—or forgive.
Not so for the will-o’-the-wisp. Like Naas, that one did not make forgiving his business. He’d been living carefree in the pit since May, but his time had run out as it was running out for all the tylwyth teg. She was going to catch him, she was, and set him to a task,
“A bit of the cloth,” she murmured, baiting her trap with a Quicken-tree cloak. A tunic and boots would follow, after she caught him. No need to overdo. Next to the cloak, she laid a pile of seedcakes, a large pile. Goodness only knew what the boy had been eating all these years—all these many, many years.
Aye, she knew him for who he was, had known since he’d first been sighted by the children. He was the Wydden child lost in the last great traverse into Yr Is-ddwfn, lost the same year Llynya and Ailfinn had come out of the weir into Merioneth. The trail was damned tricky, as any who had trod it could tell, and he had slipped, much to his mother’s lament. Lost forever to time, they’d all thought—incorrectly.
Well, she would catch him soon enough. Been watching for him, she had. Seen him a couple of times. He had hurt himself somewhere in the passing of years, probably in his fall. One of his shoulders was higher than the other, a twist of his spine.
’Twould pain him, but she would find something in her bags and boxes to ease his hurt.
She finished the trap with a length of riband and a twig, the hunter’s contraption being her last resort. Skraelings and Dockalfar in Riverwood, and Llynya taken. ’Twas time to act. She’d lain in wait for the will-o’-the-wisp three times in the pit, luring him with sweetmeats and songs, but he was too quick, and she too old to catch him in a foot race.
Satisfied with the look of the thing, she left the pit and made her way up into the bailey. Plenty of trouble up there for anyone who cared to get into the middle of it.
Madron was one who did, and—Naas admitted—she was another, especially the trouble Trig had brought out of Riverwood, the man named Corvus Gei.
~ ~ ~
Madron eyed the man chained to the curtain wall. She was just out of his reach, sitting on a grassy knoll in the lower bailey where Trig had chosen to hold him.
Corvus Gei was the name he’d given Llynya. Nennius was the name Madron had found in one of his books, along with an inscription from Balor’s dead leech, Helebore. Nennius was a name familiar to her, though the man she knew by such was long dead. He’d written a book, the dead man had, a history book. This Nennius had stolen a book, her father’s book, from the monastery on Ynys Enlli, Helebore’s island.
She should have thought to search the Isle of Saints. Nemeton had ever been wont to secrete books in Christian houses, letting the new God protect the old. The chances that the Culdees would have granted her access to their island, though, were naught. To the monks, women were as the Adversary.
No matter. The book had found her.
She lowered her gaze and smoothed her hand across the gold runes and aged blue leather of the Prydion Cal Le, the Blue Book of the Magi, one of the Seven Books of Lore. Her father had shown it to her once, after they had been reunited in Merioneth, after her long stay at Usk Abbey, but he’d been taken from her before he’d had a chance to teach her its contents. Precious, precious book. With the finding of it, she now had two of the seven books at hand... and the wheel turns.
Of the other books, only the whereabouts of two more were known. The Sjarn Va Le, the Violet Book of Stars, was sealed in stone with the trolls on Inishwrath. Or it had been. Tages had returned from his journey there with a tale of destruction. The great headland of the island was gone, leaving a ragged scar down the cliff face.
Trig had grown unutterably grim at the tidings, and when Tages had finished telling of all he’d seen, the captain had said only one word: “Slott.”
A good many Quicken-tree had blanched at that, and the fears for Llynya had risen. That she’d been taken by skraelings was a fate worthy of despair. That some of the Dockalfar had survived, and that Slott walked the land, cast them all in the same fate. There was not a Quicken-tree alive who did not have an ancestor woven into the Troll King’s braids.
The Gratte Bron Le, the Orange Book of Stone, was in Deseillign. Rhuddlan himself had left it there in the Desert Queen’s hands.
The other three books were lost. The Elhion Bhaas Le, the Indigo Book of Elfin Lore, had disappeared at the end of the Wars of Enchantment. ’Twas the book Ailfinn sought in all her travels, though knowing now that some Dockalfar lived gave Madron a good idea of where the mage’s search had led, and mayhaps why she had not answered Rhuddlan’s summons. Desperate tidings, indeed.
Lanbarrdein had been the great hold of the Dockalfar. When Rhuddlan had taken it in the Wars, Tuan had moved his court to Rastaban, the underground demesne of his ally, Slott. ’Twas in Rastaban that all the Dockalfar had supposedly died. That Dockalfar and skraelings were making strikes on Riverwood meant Rastaban had been reopened. The book would be there with whoever had twisted an army of skraelings out of the dregs of men, and mayhaps Ailfinn was there as well.
The Treo Veill Le, the Green Book of Trees, had been lost through treachery, taken by she-whose-name-could-not-be-spoken, the greatest of all the Prydion Magi, and thrown into the weir in the Third Age. ’Twas she who had conjured the dragons in her cauldron, she who had forged the Magia Blade. Then the treachery—unforgiven through all the passage of time. The Chandra Yeull Le, the Yellow Book of Chandra, the book of priestesses, had also been lost through treachery, stolen by a thief in the Age of the Douvan Kingdoms, some said by a Douvan king.
But Madron had the two books her father had known. With each pass of her hand, she felt his presence.
Nemeton, the blue tome whispered. Nemeton, bearer of the secrets of time and sanctuary. The map inside was not what Rhiannon’s son would h
ave hoped, but there was hope for him in the magi’s writings—and hope for her.
And mayhaps a little hope for the man who called himself Corvus, who despite his robes and tonsure was no monk. He was a traveler, a man out of time, though no traveler the Druids had sent, which made him a mystery and a danger. Trig had told her of Llynya’s discoveries before the skraelings had attacked, but Madron would have known regardless. Who besides a traveler would have searched for her path? Who besides a traveler, indeed, would have scraped up the remnants of her conjuring fire and bothered to wrap a few crystals of universal salts into a package?
Chrystaalt, he’d called it, and asked if she knew where more could be found, as if she were a kitchen maid. Thus had he revealed his desire to her.
“I can speed you on your journey,” she said, looking up. “Or I can hold you here until your natural death.”
His attention had not wavered from her since she’d sat down, and she found him still watching her. His interest, as in their previous encounters, was not purely baleful, but being long accustomed to men’s varied interests, Madron held his gaze unperturbed.
“It would be safer for you if you sent me on my way,” he said, his words as dispassionate as her gaze, belying the keenness of his own. She did not make a move that he did not mark with his eyes.
“A threat?” she asked with a lift of her eyebrows. “You are in chains. Would it not be better to bargain?”
A surprising smile broke across his face, accompanied by a short laugh. “You do yourself a disservice, lady, if you would bargain with me.”
“In what way?” she asked. He was a handsome man, his features cleanly formed with no imperfections, his teeth unusually white and straight, his eyes clear. The hair beginning to grow on his head clearly showed the weir stripe, a flash of white amidst the dark.
His smile hardened into a baring of those straight white teeth, and he leaned forward as far as his chains allowed. “I am a man with no honor. None. Whatever bargain we make will only last as long as it has advantage to me.”