by Tara Janzen
“Dain Lavrans, a friend and soldier, and last I knew, a sorcerer as well.”
She nodded. “Aye, it has the feel of enchantment, faint but there. And these? What do they say?” she asked, running her fingers over the runes on the blade.
“They’re Norse, an invocation to a long-dead god.”
“All gods have ever been the eternal One. What was this god’s name?”
“Odin, a god of war.”
“And also of magic and wisdom. Aye,” she said at his questioning glance. “I have heard of Odin the one-eyed god. His Valkyries brought heroes slain in battle to Valhalla, where they awaited the coming of Ragnarok, the cataclysmic end of the world and the doom of the gods.”
“We seem to have apocalypse as a recurring theme,” he said, smiling wryly.
“Aye.” Her gaze returned to the sword. “Ragnarok and Dharkkum seem much alike.” She leaned closer to inspect the rune staves, her braids and twists sliding over her shoulders. “Odin was ever one to carve magic runes on his weapons in hopes of fending off the fateful moment of his death. Mayhaps a bit of his magic has rubbed off on this god-blessed blade.”
“Mayhaps,” Morgan agreed, his voice roughened by a surge of desire—inevitable when she was practically in his lap. Whatever the dangers, he had to kiss her, his need far outweighing self-preservation.
With his sword between them, he lifted her chin and lowered his mouth, and with only the slightest hesitation, she allowed herself to be captured.
Sweet Jesu, no lips had ever been so soft, no mouth so made to match his, no flick of tongue so erotic as she pressed herself closer and kissed him back. Her hand came to rest on his chest, and he wished his skin was bare to feel her touch.
“Morgan,” she breathed, her lips sliding away from his to press a silken trail of kisses across his check, caressing him with a tenderness he was sure was undeserved—as she would undoubtedly find out when she deep-scented him.
And she would, he knew. Distraction or nay, the fey woman had been single-minded in her purpose from the moment they’d met.
Better to enjoy her kisses now, he thought, when they were still so easily to be had. In Rabin-19, he had pulled away, but no more. ’Twas time to stop and indulge himself, while the scents of lavender and oranges filled the air and her lithe body was his to be had on the soft rugs in her private bower.
He angled his head to kiss her throat, but his lips no sooner touched her skin than he sensed the first soft tread of her deep-scent invasion.
He stilled, one hand on her waist, the other tunneled into her hair, and he waited, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop her, fearing there was no place left for him to hide.
’Twas a strange sensation, wondrously strange, having her search him from the inside out. He felt her presence move through him, lingering here and there, especially near his heart, where Llynya’s rowan leaf graced his skin. For long, silent minutes, she wandered at will before focusing on his mind, and with each minute that she looked, his unease increased, the novelty quickly wearing off and leaving him uncomfortably aware of what she was finding—a truth about himself that perhaps he didn’t even know.
“Avallyn.” Her name was a whisper on his lips, half contrived as a plea. She was getting close to something, and though he hated to think there was danger for her inside himself, he felt she was heading somewhere she should not go.
He knew instantly when she took the one fateful step too far. A gasp was torn from her throat. She clutched at him even as his hands tightened on her. Then she fainted into a heap in his arms.
“Avallyn!”
Avallyn heard the cry of her name echo across the timeless abyss, but she could not answer. She was falling, falling into the fathomless canyon that snaked across the inner landscape of Morgan’s mind.
She’d deep-scented a time-rider once before and had known what to expect: the faint scent of knowledge twined into a wavelike ribbon; the growing storm of wind; then the fall into the canyon, the weightless traverse of space and years. Such was the trail into the prince’s deep past.
There had been love in his other life, an abundance of it, and a surpassing amount of innocence for a thief, and all the passages of a life well lived.
But there was something else as well, an elusive thread running through the ribbon that was pulling her deeper than she’d meant to go. Deeper than she’d thought ’twas possible to go, past his cell walls into their nuclei and into the threadlike bodies of his chromosomes.
’Twas there she found the unexpected, a gene sequence that marked him as the warrior they had long awaited, more surely than any time-rider blaze or rowan leaf. Morgan ab Kynan had been bred to the sword, to one special sword, the Magia Blade. With it in his hand, he would fight to the death and beyond—like his ancient forefather, Stept Agah.
She saw the place of Stept Agah’s birth in a deep cavern, and she saw his long-ago battle with Dharkkum, how the Magia Blade had molded itself to his hand and fought on even after he’d died—and she feared the same fate for Morgan, that he would die and still fight.
“Avallyn. Avallyn.”
She roused to the sound of her name, coming back from the abyss to find herself cradled in Morgan’s arms. Looking up at him, she was washed through with fear. Stept Agah had defeated the darkness in his own time, and a son of his had been sent to save the world in her time, but the price was too high.
Dread lord, indeed, and dread warrior with a star-crossed blade.
“Morgan, you are—” She started to tell him what she’d seen, but was interrupted by a commotion in the outer tent.
They both turned toward the noise, rising to their feet in one graceful movement, the sheer fluidity of the action making her wonder if they were still somehow connected on a cellular level. The look he gave her showed the same intrigued awareness.
“Commander.” One of her Night Watcher guards rushed through the tent flap, his black-and-gray robes whipped up by a gust of wind following in his wake. The flames in the brazier danced and flickered, casting wild shadows on the tent walls.
“Petr. Who is here?” She no sooner addressed him than the telling scent reached her nose.
“Sha-shakrieg, a corps of Night Watchers from Tamisk.”
Aye, she thought, detecting the fine, bitter smell of the spider people. A corps’ worth at least, if not more.
But this other, what she’d learned of Morgan, it set her reeling. The blood of Stept Agah ran in his veins—for the good of the world and his own doom.
Shadana. Palinor must have known.
“He commands your presence at the tower in the dunes, and the presence of the time-rider. The corps is to be your escort.”
Other shadows from the outer chamber danced on the walls, too many for her to count. She was being invaded by her father’s troops just when she needed time to think. If Palinor had known about Morgan and deliberately kept the information from her, there must have been a reason.
The first one that came to Avallyn’s mind hardly bore contemplation, yet it had a disturbing ring of truth about it. He would not save the world as Stept Agah had. The whole world, including the two of them, would be destroyed no matter what they did.
So why suffer the agonies of the weir? And why would Palinor sacrifice her only daughter when fate had already doomed them out of hand?
The answer to that was a bit more complex, but easy enough for Avallyn to surmise. Perhaps the world would survive through their efforts, but only with sacrifice. She and Morgan would perish, with him fighting like his forefather before him, wielding his blade even beyond death to secure the destruction of Dharkkum.
’Twas a grim conclusion, but not too difficult to fathom. Palinor had ever been a priestess before she was a mother, and Tamisk had been even less of a father. Easy enough to understand how their duty had overcome any maternal or paternal instincts. Avallyn had been born of their union, but not of their love—and in all her years love had not grown between them nor for her.
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Her mouth tightened. Mayhaps Morgan had known the right of it, after all. Mayhaps she did count her life too lightly, a trait well learned at her mother’s knee. ’Twas an old and worthless hurt, and one she’d long outgrown.
Or so she’d thought.
What else was her mother keeping from her? she wondered.
“Commander.” Petr interrupted her thoughts. “We must leave now.”
Aye, ’twas true. Time was running out.
Within the voluminous drape of her robes, she made a sign of protection.
~ ~ ~
“Dragonsss,” Corvus hissed, drawing out the word on a sibilant exhalation even as he drew himself in as best he could.
A wisp of his left leg escaped him, and he swore viciously. How could he survive if parts of him were ever drifting away?
It was a question with an obvious answer: He wasn’t going to survive.
“Vissshhhab.” He snarled the witch’s name, staring at her across the dark expanse of her workroom in his warship’s hold, willing her to look at him, to look at what little was left of him.
The crone lifted her gaze from her cauldron of boiling blood, the light from the fire reflecting red in her eyes, the nimbus of her hair looking like the fires of hell.
“Lord?” she inquired, almost sweetly, if he was any judge. No doubt she was reveling in a misconception of her own power now that he was so disturbingly discarnate. Parts of him were still corporeal, though, mostly on his right side. He still had an arm, a hip and thigh, nearly half his face, and a bit more.
The ancient bitch would go too far someday, and then he’d have her, by God, and take her with him to their doom. Only the thought of spending eternity attached to the ragged woman stopped him from shredding her into the cosmos—that and the hope that she could contrive some foul conjuration to hold him together.
“Dragonssss,” he hissed again, reminding her of what he needed, staring harder with his one good eye to get his point across. Of course, he wasn’t even sure if dragons could save him now. He’d been willing to sacrifice an arm, if being free of the black smoke would keep him from destruction. But more than his arm had been consumed by his deeds in Pan-shei, so very much more than his arm.
“Aye, the beasts are cauldron-born, milord. The book is very clear about it, and I’m stirring, I am.” She cackled, a harsh, maleficent sound, and his patchy skin crawled. “Oh, aye. I’m a-stirring.”
“Cryssstal.” She’d promised him crystal to seal in the darkness and the smoke, enough to see him through until they reached Claerwen, the only place on Earth where he knew a time weir existed. It was filled with sand, as was everything on the goddamn planet except the Old Dominion and the Middle Kingdom, but it still was a time weir, still a place where the time worms came.
And he needed worms, golden worms—and dragons, and crystal, and whatever else it would take to keep him from his self-inflicted doom.
Chained in a corner of the workroom were the two prisoners he’d taken in Pan-shei, the woman time-rider and her giant. Grim-faced, they were, but not beaten, not yet. Corvus was saving them, his instincts telling him they had value beyond fodder for his dark, smoky power. Perhaps he could bargain their souls for Avallyn’s.
“Avallynnnn,” he moaned at the reminder of his demon-witch. As much as he needed worms, dragons, and crystal, he wanted her, now more than ever. It was a fiery desire incinerating the last shreds of his reason. Nothing could be sweeter than to take her with him into a hellish eternity.
Ah, yes, that place by his side was reserved only for Avallyn Le Severn, the damned bitch he loathed... and loved. A pain stabbed through him where his heart had once been, a vicious, tearing pain that would have put him on his knees, if he’d had any. As it was, he writhed with the pain, a shadowy twisting, and his loathing doubled over and increased. Such were the rewards of love.
He cut his gaze to the rigid form of his First Guard captain.
“Find herrr,” he commanded.
“W-we will, m-master,” the captain stammered. “W-we have over a h-hundred search v-vessels combing the W-waste, and five hundred ss-sseeker d-droids.”
It would be enough. It had to be enough.
Avallyn had brought him to this horrifyingly nebulous existence, and it was only just that she share his fate. To that end he would search her out wherever she’d gone to ground, search her out and devour her.
Chapter 15
Morgan felt the Night Watchers’ rover slow, but he saw nothing in the vast expanse of the Waste to tell him why. They’d traveled most of the night, with dawn just beginning to break behind them to the east.
Twelve rovers had been sent to the Medain—two to pick up Avallyn and him and bring them here to the middle of nowhere, the other ten to reinforce the troop of wild boys from Sept Rhymer. All the desert Septs had been summoned for battle. The Second Guard was to be fully engaged on Craig Tagen. The First Guard was to be harassed and kept north of Rabin-19, but not engaged, not after what had happened in Pan-shei.
The dragons were rousing, Morgan had heard one of the Sha-shakrieg captains tell Avallyn. Dragons. It scarce made sense, but Avallyn had assured him that they were real, the dragons of Merioneth, fighting dragons meant to fight with him and her.
He knew Merioneth, and he remembered a cavern by the Irish Sea known as the Dragon’s Mouth, but he’d never dreamed the name referred to actual dragons. Even when he’d been in the deeper caverns, there had been only pryf, strange enough for any man of twelfth-century Wales to comprehend, less strange to a man who’d fought with skraelings and Lyrans and other manifestations of galaxy offal.
A man revered as Saint George had killed a dragon once, in a long-ago and faraway land. Morgan had seen a drawing of their battle in Dolwyddelan Castle. Saint George had been mounted on a horse, and the dragon had been writhing about the destrier’s feet, a serpentine beast looking to be twelve feet in length and weighing nearly a quarter of a ton. In the future, he’d seen all manner of dragonish beasts: crocodiles, Komodo dragons, lizards as big as Saint George’s nemesis; the giant tuataras and snakes from the Friina Group—none of which he would particularly care to have by his side in a battle, and for certes none of which he wanted to fall through ten thousand years with in the weir.
The rover came to a complete stop, and still there was nothing to see but the rolling crests of dunes.
Nothing to see, but Morgan felt something, an odd familiarity. His brow furrowed.
“What, milord?” Aja asked, standing next to him on the forward deck. York had chosen to stay and fight on Craig Tagen, but nothing could have kept Aja from Morgan’s side. For himself, Morgan was glad to have the boy with him. If there was to be a parting, he’d as soon it was later.
“I’ve been here more than once in my dreams, but it did not look like this,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the boy. “Have you ever followed me to such a place through the wine?”
Aja looked out the starboard window and shrugged. “We came out of the desert, milord, and from any direction ’tis all very similar, but I like not the feel of this particular pile of sand.”
“ ’Tis true there is more here than meets the eye,” Avallyn said, coming up behind them.
“Is the White Palace buried beneath the dunes?” Morgan asked.
“Not yet, thanks to the sweepers. It lies farther to the west, on the edge of the Sand Sea. Captain.” She turned to the nearest Night Watcher. “Tamisk undoubtedly knows we’re here. What’s the delay?”
“No delay, Commander.” The Sha-shakrieg lifted a large, callused hand and pointed to the nearest dune.
Before Morgan’s eyes, the sand began to flow like water, illusory sheets of it sloughing off to reveal a jutting protrusion of stone—but no mere protrusion. The stone had shape and, Morgan realized, purpose. ’Twas a tower, one he feared he recognized.
“How?” he whispered, taking a step toward the window, his hand rising to touch the glass.
Second by second, the
ancient tower was stripped of its protection until it stood like a beacon in the Waste, a beacon of the past. The rest of Wydehaw Castle was little more than rubble, but the Hart Tower stood tall, Dain’s tower of magic and alchemy. Any doubts Morgan had harbored about the priestess-princess and her Book of Doom evaporated in the face of reality. Even without the weir, she’d brought him to a place in his past he’d never thought to see again, a place he’d thought long destroyed. That it still existed, even in a ruined state, attested to the power of the Hart. Naught but the abiding grace of magic could have saved it from the destruction of the wars that had ravaged Earth and made the Deseillign Waste.
“You know this place, then?” Avallyn asked.
He slowly nodded. “Aye, ’twas a castle in Wales, where Ceridwen was healed by Dain Lavrans before they opened the time weir beneath Merioneth, and where my sword was kept in the years between our Holy Crusade and the Battle of Balor. Why have we come here?” he asked, wondering if he would have been better served to stay and fight on Craig Tagen with York. Not that he’d been given a choice. That he was caught in the inexorable pull of destiny was a truth he could no longer deny.
“Tamisk.” Avallyn’s answer to his question was succinct and exactly what he’d expected.
“The Magia Lord awaits,” the Night Watcher captain said, gesturing for them to descend the rover’s ramp.
Aja started forward with them, but the Sha-shakrieg man stopped him with an outstretched arm covered with whorls of fighting threads.
“Only two have been granted leave to enter the tower.”
“Then let his admittance be on my head,” Avallyn said.
“So be it.” The captain stepped back and allowed them all to pass.
The desert dawn was a frigid thing. Though warmly dressed, Morgan was grateful when they had covered the stretch of open dune between the rover and the tower. At an arched doorway banked into the sand, he stopped and turned, surprised to hear the rover engines winding up.