by Tara Janzen
And truly, he’d asked himself, what harm could there be in a few judicious drams?
Enough and then some had been his answer, for the price of Morgan’s ease had become unbearable since Sonnpur-Dzon. The other times Morgan had escaped to the strange and enchanting world from whence he’d come, Aja had gone with him, reading him through his own taste of wine and a delicate touch, reliving the laughter of Owain and Rhys, Drew and Rhodri and Dafydd. Over the years, Aja had ridden the length and breadth of the land called Wales with Morgan’s band of men, taking surefooted horses through the snowcapped peaks of Eryri and fording the quicksands of the Neath. They’d swum naked in cool, clean rivers and hunted deer in the king’s forests—lush, wild greenwoods unlike anything left on Earth. Some of the wild boys told tales of a lost forest in the Waste, but Aja had been born and bred in the desert and never seen more than a scrub of grass growing anywhere.
Yet he liked to dream about forests, and think such a place might exist, somewhere, rising out of the sand.
He released the ties on the dagger sheaths in his boots, readying the knives for a quick throw. Aye, he knew Morgan well, for the thief he was and for the prince he had once been. But not even he could follow his lord through such dark corridors of memory as Morgan now chose to tread.
Aja touched the larger sheath on his belt, checking its position, and his fingers absently brushed across the yellow wallet always secured at his side. The short sword inside the sheath was rimed in bia sap, a sure death for any who felt the blade, though the storm brewing above Racht might do as much to save them as any of his weapons, if it broke soon enough. A fierce electrical charge was building in the clouds. He could feel the energy skittering across his skin, heralding deadly bolts of lightning. The Old Dominion had once been powered by such bolts, the lightning captured and channeled by a grid of spiraling towers that reached thousands of meters into the atmosphere, but no more. Most of the towers had been shattered in the wars. Huge pieces of the open-metalwork structures lay scattered throughout the quarters. One good cracking blast close to the square would shake up the skraelings for sure, and mayhaps even throw the Lyran off her scent. The Third Guard was less easily startled, but any delay worked to his and Morgan’s advantage. York he counted on to take care of himself, if things took an inescapable turn for the worst.
Bones, what an end after all their glory.
He’d oft thought he should get Morgan a greenwood tree, a reminder of his home, but he’d left it too late. They were rare things, trees, hard to come by, but available to a man with enough gold. The dragon statue would buy a tree, but he dared not touch it. Morgan’s bane he called it under his breath. Since the night in the monastery, the golden beast had not left his lord’s side—and neither had flask after flask of Carillion wine.
Morgan was killing himself. The truth could be no plainer—and Aja had handed him the death weapon.
He checked the crowd and saw that York was nearly halfway to them, running when he could, muscling his way through the milling throng when he had to, but he wasn’t going to reach them in time. The skraelpack was closer, and the Warmonger’s guard not far behind. For himself, Aja could have disappeared, eluding even the Lyran, but he needed York to get Morgan out.
He pulled his lasgun free of its holster and knelt by his prince’s side, working quickly to untie the leather bag holding the gold statue. He’d seen the trader’s body, or what had been left of it, and the friggin’ skraelings weren’t going to take him or Morgan alive. If they wanted the dragon, he was going to give it to them right down their mange-infested throats. If they wanted Morgan, they were going to have to blast their way through him first.
Aye, by the bones he held so dearly, he’d rather be dead when they ate him.
~ ~ ~
Three hundred miles to the south, where the last outposts of the Old Dominion gave way to the Deseillign Waste, a lone messenger hurried along a dark corridor in Magh Dun, the Warmonger’s stronghold. The smoothly rounded fortress squatted amidst the dunes and rocks, a windowless iron keep streaked with soot from the fires kept burning in its oily moat.
“Doomed,” the nameless minion muttered, looking down every hall he passed in hopes of finding someone else to deliver the encrypted message crumpled in his fist. “I’m doomed.”
Any dispatch from the captain of the Third Guard was bound to have consequences. Good news meant a possible promotion for the messenger. Bad news inevitably meant death.
A bad death. Swift and sure and agonizing, and unbearably strange.
Sweat broke out on the minion’s brow. Better to be eaten by skraelings than to suffer at the left hand of the Warmonger, or even worse, to be given to the witch Vishab for her dreadful experiments. How in the world, after so many years of unremarked existence, had he allowed himself to be passing Magh Dun’s command center at the exact moment when a message had come through from the Third Guard?
He reached the last corridor before the entrance of the Hall of Tombs, an arched vault of black glass in the heart of the fortress. His eyes darted one way then the other. No one. There was no one to save him.
He looked down again at the missive. Mayhaps he could avoid the hazards of delivery by placing the message in his helmet and sliding it across the floor while running madly in the other direction.
Yes. That was it. Relief flooded through him—until the unmistakable voice of the Warmonger reached out of the darkness and ensnared him with a single word.
“Enter.”
It was the voice of doom.
From where he sat on his great stone throne, Corvus Gei, Lord of Magh Dun and Warmonger of the Waste, saw the man hesitate and thereby prove himself more intelligent than the average slave, but no one in the realm would dare disobey a direct order from the Warmonger. There was no future in such an action. Not so much as an instant.
His left hand twitched, and Corvus looked down at the blackened thing that lay on the arm of the throne.
Smoke and darkness, he thought, gazing upon his strange limb. In certain light, his fingers seemed to disappear altogether. Sometimes his whole arm. Sometimes his mind.
And there was the rub.
He’d gone mad.
“He delays, my lord,” a raspy voice said to him from beside the throne. “Shall I draw him near?”
Corvus glanced at the ancient crone standing to his right. Her long gray hair wisped about her heavily lined face and stooped shoulders in a nimbus of sparse strands. Her body was no more than a small bag of bones contained within a thin, leathery casing of skin, ninety pounds of usable terror covered in shabby dark robes—but he did not need her to control the messenger.
“Stay yourself, Vishab. If the news is bad, you’ll have him quick enough.”
Twice he’d breached the wormhole. Twice he’d slipped into the maelstrom of the time weir. Twice, it seemed, was once too much—yet he would go again. Thousands of years in the past, he had still been whole, and undoubtedly the most brilliant mind of the age. He alone had deciphered the secrets of the great worms and found his way back to the time of the Old Dominion. He alone had followed in the footsteps of the Druid savant, Nemeton, compiling a library to make even the most erudite of scholars weep with envy.
Knowledge. He had drenched himself in it, devoted himself to it, murdered for it, yet he’d still not had enough to save himself. Something had gone wrong in the wormhole, a minute change in a regrettably acquired substance that he could not have foreseen.
He willed his black hand to move toward his chest, demanded that the smoke-like fingers grasp the pendant he wore as an added reminder of the cost of ignorance.
Nemeton. The name whispered through his mind. Nemeton had known. Perhaps he’d even set the trap through his daughter. For it had been she who had burned the earth next to the River Bredd, leaving the traces of chrystaalt that had opened the way for him into Merioneth and the wormhole. The bait had been irresistible. Chrystaalt was a vital ingredient for traveling through time. Any time-r
ider would have scooped up the rare crystals from the scorched dirt and secreted them in a pocket.
But he’d scooped up a bit more than chrystaalt, hadn’t he.
He opened his fingers, cradling the pendant in his palm. A small piece of parchment lay frozen within the brilliantly faceted crystal, a few grains of chrystaalt embedded in its surface, its edges blackened by the eldritch rot that had shifted its domicile to his arm.
Strange stuff, he brooded. When he’d been spat out on the desert ten years ago, he’d taken a careful inventory of his belongings. One of the two ancient books he’d brought from the past had still been with him, and with it he’d found his ally, Vishab. He’d also still had three small packages of twisted parchment he’d placed in a pouch on his belt. Two of the packages had been pure chrystaalt and worth enough to supply his needs and begin the process of reclaiming his lost empire. The third had changed the course of all his plans. One touch, and the strange rot he’d tried to scrape off had begun blackening his fingertips. The pestilence had claimed his left arm over the years, and it would not stop there. The fresh marks on his chest were proof of the danger.
Time, he thought. Time was working against him in this. If he found no way to stop it, his whole body would become nothing but a blackened shadow with an awesome power he would not be able to control.
His fingers twitched again, but he held them in check with a surfeit of will—for now.
He needed to go back. He needed to find the damned witch who had sent him into the future, and the even more damned witch who had trapped him with the chrystaalt. Naas and Madron were their names. They had cursed him. They could heal him. No death-witch he’d ever captured in his own time had been able to stem the tide of his destruction. He’d bled priestesses dry, literally, to no avail. He’d called on them to wield their power against the rot, and every White Lady had failed. They ruled the time weir from their northern temple of Claerwen, but they did not rule the scourge of the Dark Age he’d read about in a book on Ynys Enlli, a scourge that he feared was the same all-devouring Dharkkum spoken of in the book he’d brought through the weir, the Yellow Book of Chandra. It was an everlasting night, like the strange and frightening substance that now comprised his arm. Only dragons could destroy it, according to the books.
Dragons, and maybe Vishab. No White Lady she, but a very dark woman, a desert sept outcast who a century past had set herself against the Priestesses of the Bones. He had bought her loyalty with the Yellow Book, a farrago of ancient history and priestess bloodspells she spent her time combing through, searching for her enemy’s weaknesses and his salvation.
Witches, he thought with a grimace. Women had always brought him to ruin, especially the White Ladies, Claerwen’s Priestesses of the Bones. They’d been the ones to stake him out for the worms on a pile of chrystaalt the first time he’d traveled through the weir. They had destroyed him to protect one of their own, a royal bit of baggage he had once loved. Now the favor was his, and he was eager to return it in full measure.
Love, he silently scoffed. His one experience with the emotion had been his downfall. No act of murdering vengeance or criminal intent had ever done him as much damage as love.
A soft noise brought his head up. The messenger had finally minced his way across the hall to the throne.
Corvus held out his right hand and accepted the hesitantly offered dispatch. The captain of the Third Guard’s mark was on the digitally encoded seal. His eyes narrowed. He’d set the Guard to finding the most daring fool in the Old Dominion, the one who had dared to steal from him. The man was a tech-trash thief contracted by a trader in religious artifacts to retrieve a statue Vishab believed might prove of value as a cure for his grave malady.
“Worms,” he muttered, breaking the seal on the dispatch. The great time worms that had brought him to this pass were the dragon larvae of the past. Vishab had traced a dragon cult to a Middle Kingdom monastery called Sonnpur-Dzon. The trader had double-crossed him with the statue and paid with his life. The thief would be next.
He skimmed the brief message and felt a surge of satisfaction. The Third Guard had found the tech-trash sot in Racht Square. The Lyran mark-tracker he’d paid so dearly for had proven to be worth the price. The thief and the golden dragon would soon be his.
Chapter 3
The Old Dominion
The Sha-shakrieg Night Watchers moved with swift assurance along the edge of Racht’s balcony. While the boy below made ready to sacrifice himself, and the mercenary was proving too slow to be of help, Avallyn and Dray acted to save the drunken thief, covering the distance to a place above Morgan in seconds.
“Take the skraeling captain en chrysalii dea,” Dray ordered, reaching under his sleeve for one of the thin coils of thread adhered to his arm. The coil came free, and with a flick of his wrist, Dray sent the thread sailing out into the gloom of Racht Square. Slickly wet and glinting with bits of reflected light, the purplish-brown thread snaked through the air to find its mark. Dozens more of the puce filaments followed, all thrown with the same unerring accuracy by his guards.
“Night Watchers!”
The cry went up even as the skraeling captain grunted with pain at the first touch of the thread. Within a minute, the beastman was down, his body wrapped in a tangled skein of bia-steeped pryf silk. The stench of burning hair and flesh drifted up to the balcony amidst the captain’s death squeals.
“Drop a web and come with me,” Avallyn said to the Night Watchers closest to her, peeling a silver thread from the inside of her forearm.
The skraelings fell on their downed leader in a feeding frenzy, their advance halted by the insatiable hunger of their breed. The Third Guard was yet twenty meters away from the prince, their passage blocked by the uproar caused more by the manner of the skraeling’s death than the death itself. None in Racht Square—or in truth, in the whole of the Old Dominion—relished the company of the Sha-shakrieg.
A half-dozen threads uncoiled in quick succession from the skilled hands of the Sha-shakrieg guards, crisscrossing to the main floor. Avallyn secured her length of silk and swung over the balcony rail with three of the guards close behind.
She knew what they looked like, four death-shadows dropping out of the darkness, harbingers of doom for hapless souls—and so it would be for the sake of the wretched man below. A cry went up from the Third Guard, a cry for the death of the desert wraiths, and Avallyn speeded her descent.
~ ~ ~
The death squeals woke Morgan from his stupor, the trilling terror in the high, elongated notes cutting through the fog of wine and exhaustion and sparking him back to life. Once he was conscious, the blood-scent accompanying the swinish screams hit him like a wave, clearing his brain as nothing else could.
“Christe,” he swore, staggering to his feet, sword in hand. Racht had erupted into chaos. ’Twas a skraeling beast screaming and snorting in pain. People were shouting and running in every direction. The wind was strengthening, lifting debris off the floor and sending it flying into the air. The square’s few hanging lamps were swaying on their cords, casting long arcs of light through the gloom.
He barely had time to register the slathering pile of skraelings feeding on the floor, before the crush of the crowd took them from view. Someone bumped into him, and he swore again, the words as slurred as his brain. Skraelings. He tightened his grip on the sword. They weren’t ones to savor a meal. Time was short.
“Aja,” he called, turning his head—and paying the price for the deed. Pain rocketed around his skull, but not enough to blind him to his captain’s folly. The boy was at his side, readying to throw the Sonnpur-Dzon statue into the battling throng. Morgan watched in dismay as the dragon left Aja’s hand and arced into the air, all gold and glittering and moving inexorably toward the phalanx of hairy fists reaching up to grab it... over his dead body. The bloody dragon was his.
With a roar, he leaped for the statue, and in brief triumph, his fingers closed around solid metal.
; “Milord!” Aja yelled—too late.
Morgan was hit in the side and knocked facedown on the floor. His breath left him in a pained gasp. His ears rang with the force of the blow. In a trice, his attacker was on him, a growling creature with arms and legs like iron, every limb wrapping around him and squeezing. The gold dragon was beneath him, digging into his ribs. He tried to twist his body free and failed, outmatched by the beast on his back.
The fierce hands threatening to break him were merciless in their grip, the fingers gouging into his muscles in search of bone to crack. He gasped for a breath and then groaned in agony as the creature wrenched his shoulder as if to pull his arm from its socket. When the limb didn’t give way, his attacker let out a roar of its own and slammed him against the floor. His sword was still in his hand, but he was too stunned to use it. The beast closed its jaws around his neck and a great orange mane of hair fell over his face, forming an all-too-clear picture in his mind.
Merde, he swore, in the tongue of his old Norman enemies. Double rows of teeth, two sets each for the top and bottom jaws, with radical canines pressing into his skin and a cloud of sickly sweet breath billowing up around him—a smell too unique to ever forget—confirmed the rotting truth. ’Twas a sodding exotic Lyran on his back, and she had him by the throat.
Groaning, he tried to angle his blade upward for a cutting strike and couldn’t. Her teeth pressed harder, and she gave him a shake, playing with her food. Switching tactics, he went for the lasgun on his hip and found himself blocked by a quick, upward move of her knee, her huge, knobby, hip-crushing knee.
There was only one chance, and fighting every instinct he had, he forced his body to go limp within her grasp. Lyrans liked live prey, the livelier the better, especially for the female mark-trackers, who were known never to eat anything they hadn’t fought to the death.
The pressure of her jaws lightened faintly. Then the thing let out a screeching howl, releasing him. The smell of burning flesh assaulted his nostrils, hot and rank. The Lyran bounded off him, and he rolled to his feet, the freed lasgun in one hand and Scyld in the other, swinging out to cut the beast.