The Crown of Stones: Magic-Scars

by C. L. Schneider

  At least it should have been.

  As the pieces of him bore deeper, dug in, and settled inside me, my perception changed. I began to grasp a small measure of what the eldring truly were. And with that awareness, their existence, their very conception, was so frightening and impossibly familiar, that all I could do was scream.

  TWENTY NINE

  “Troy? Troy? Did you hear me?”

  Of course I did. Krillos was sitting right next to me on the cave floor. There were just too many thoughts in my head, too much noise.

  “Troy!” he said again, louder this time.

  I forced the words out. “I heard you.”

  “Then why aren’t you moving?”

  “Moving where?”

  Moaning, Krillos ran his hand over his face. “I said we’re ready to go.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I told you not to wait for me.”

  “Well,” he grunted. “That was never going to happen.”

  “You should be on your way out of Langor by now. Jarryd,” I said, my jaw grinding, “should already be free.”

  “That wasn’t going to happen either. Pulling off a rescue like this is hopeless on a good day. But you’re crazier than I thought if you believe the kid and I could do it without you.” I didn’t answer, and he worked at not being angry. “We can’t stay here anymore. You were deep into your connection to that eldring brat for three and a half days. It’s been another two since he woke up and you came out of it. As far as I can tell, he’s okay.” Krillos’ eyes roamed cautiously over me. “I’m not so sure about you.”

  I looked past him to where Liel sat against the cave wall. Hunched inside a fur, legs pulled up, arms wrapped around them, I got the impression he was trying to be invisible. It wasn’t working. I saw the apprehension on the boy’s face just fine.

  My gaze swung back to Krillos. “What did I do in those three and a half days?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Do you realize how fucking sick I am of people asking me that question? No, I don’t remember. If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  He released a long sigh. “You weren’t yourself. Leave it at that.” Shifting position, Krillos shifted subjects as well. “We need to figure out what we’re doing.”

  I knew exactly what we were doing, but I kept losing our conversation in the clamor. It had been exploding off and on in my head since I woke up. A discordant symphony (a mix of yelps and howls, snippets of blended memories too vast and ancient to be true), it was the overlapping, nonstop chatter of all the eldring minds working together as one. I could still hear them. Not just the one I healed. Not only those in the cave—all of them. Every eldring that was currently alive. I was eavesdropping on the whole damn race. They were all connected, all of the time, in some kind of communal mind. I didn’t understand how they could exist like that. How they could think with so much swift-moving clutter in their heads.

  It has to be the way I perceive it, I thought. The way my brain handles their shared consciousness. Though, according to Jillyan, with the increased mental abilities of my line, the experience would be worse if I wasn’t an erudite. Being linked to Jarryd likely helped some as well since, at its core, the eldring’s uncanny connection wasn’t that different from the one I shared with him. Except theirs was on a more grand and dizzying scale. Aside from fresh experiences being constantly exchanged, they each had a wealth of inherited memories to add to the already crowded pool. Passed down from parent to child at the moment of death, the eldring my father resurrected possessed the knowledge of all eldring that had ever lived, including the first. Now, at least temporarily, so did I.

  Some of their experiences and sensations were base and easy to grasp. A great many were just the opposite. All were powerful and intense as hell.

  I hadn’t absorbed a single one of my patient’s memories. They had absorbed me.

  My consciousness hadn’t been near strong enough to stand up to the onslaught of all those eldring minds. They’d taken me over without a fight. The only sensation from the experience that was positively my own was an incessant, raw pain in my throat that suggested I must have screamed for days. I must have clawed at something, too. My nails were broken and my fingers scraped. My muscles ached from some kind of physical exertion, and there was tender evidence on my wrists and ankles that someone, probably Krillos, had restrained me.

  For my own protection, I wondered, or theirs? Part of me thought I was better off not knowing. Soon the eldring would leave my head and I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. Yet it had already been days. What if they never left?

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought. I didn’t want to be stuck hearing their racket forever. I could be though; at least on some level we were compatible. There were emotions and motives I recognized in their animal minds. Perceptions that weren’t so different from a man’s. They were capable of being driven by more than simple instinctive or physical urges. They just didn’t bother most of the time. It was easier to be the beast. It was less painful to pretend they weren’t once something more.

  But they were.

  A long time ago the eldring were something else, something I couldn’t quite grasp. They weren’t natural creatures. They were made. I knew, because like all eldring, I owned the memories of the first one. I saw his abnormal birth. I experienced it. I lived the moment as one of them would upon receipt of a dead parent’s cache of memories. I endured his pain, his hunger. His confusion and discomfort as the cauldrons of fire blinded his sensitive eyes. The screams of the ‘white-hairs’ in the pit with him rang in my ears. The smell of their fear burned hot in my nostrils.

  I heard their hearts: thump…thump…thump.

  Somewhere close, there was blood. The scent was on the air, and it affected me.

  Not me—him, I told myself firmly. But it touched him in a way I could identify with: it filled his body with need. It made him want to rip the frail forms of the white-hairs apart, chew on their soft flesh and suck the precious liquid from their veins.

  It would be such an easy kill, I thought, almost without challenge.

  They aren’t built to withstand such power. They can’t fight me.

  Except…

  My orange eyes turned upward. The ones above were different. The way they peered down into the hole at me, unafraid. Proud even, as they stood between the tall, shiny, dark pillars.

  They held a thing in their hands. Glowing and round, it pulsed and hummed. The power coming out of it was mesmerizing. Calming. Tempting. It called out with whispers and promises, like a mother would to her child.

  It called to me like it had so many times before.

  The Crown of Stones.

  Shaken, I fell out of his mind. But I didn’t like the thoughts in my own any better.

  They used it on them. My people used the crown to create the eldring, to form them. But form them from what? What were they?

  The answer was in a memory that came before. A flash of life the first eldring had prior to living. It was the key to explaining so many things. But it was buried under the brutal cascade of all those new sensations, and the beast had been unable to hold onto it.

  He couldn’t remember. And so, neither could I.

  I understood though, why he let go of it. Why he wouldn’t care to cling to the past when in the present—

  I could smell everything.

  I could distinguish a single drop of water from all other noise in the room. Separate the breathing of the white-hairs in the pit. Sense their slightest movements. Gauge the heat fluctuations in their bodies when their emotions flared.

  Swiftly, their blood pumped in anticipation. Salty sweat dripped from their skin.

  They climbed over each other, struggling to scale the rock, to get away from me.

  I couldn’t let them. I was too hungry. A deep thirst scratched at my throat. My teeth—my entire mouth—ached for that first, sweet moment of penetration.

  But there was something else, something before.
/>
  A place. A city...

  Krillos broke into my thoughts. “You need to make a decision.”

  There were people laughing. I inhaled the stink of their cooked food.

  “We’re overdue at the camp,” he said. “We either to do this now or we go home.”

  Armed, they surrounded me. I cringed as the net was thrown over my body, flinched from the pain of the spiked sticks in their hands.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Krillos was nearly shouting now, as if he’d been asking me the same question for a while. “The ship? Or the keep?”

  The images faded. I looked at Krillos. “You act like there’s a choice.”

  “Okay,” he nodded. “You’re sure you know how to get there?”

  “I can see the tunnels in my mind. Better even than if I’d traveled them myself.”

  “But you didn’t travel them,” he said with force. “It was the eldring. The one you were linked to. He knows the tunnels to the keep. He was there.”

  “It wasn’t him. These eldring escaped from a holding pen north of here. Soldiers were sent after them. They ran into the forest to hide, stumbled onto these caves, and have been here ever since. It’s been months, years. I can’t tell. Their sense of time isn’t the same as ours.”

  “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

  “And I don’t have time to explain it to you. Just believe me that I can get us there the same way I can tell you the position of the ones that aren’t here, the rest of the pack—the males and the childless females. I can tell you where all the packs are, Krillos, all the eldring, across all the realms.”

  “That’s unnerving. But it could be useful.”

  “Why? So you can kill them?”

  “I was going to say avoid them.” His eyebrows pinched tighter. “You do remember they work for the enemy, right?”

  “The eldring don’t work for anyone. They’re forced. Coerced.”

  “Coerced?” His laugh had worry in it. “Come on...”

  “Mates are separated. Children are taken from their parents. The eldring are starved and tortured if they don’t comply. Maybe in Langor those are considered normal incentives for labor, but it sure as hell sounds like coercion to me.”

  He’d stopped laughing. “Ian, they’re just animals.”

  I shot to my feet, shouting, “They are not just animals!”

  The echo of my proclamation faded into the darkness, and the entire cave went still. Krillos and Liel exchanged glances. The eldring sniffed at the air, sensing my anxiety and the abrupt change in my body temperature. They knew something was wrong, but they couldn’t reason the source. Or, they didn’t care to. Whatever part of me the eldring youth and his kin received in the exchange must have been minimal. Otherwise, I would have seen some alternation in their behavior. As it was, their focus remained, as always, on survival. Their attention limited, by all appearances, to basic necessities only.

  Krillos is right. They are animals.

  Animals my people went to great lengths to create with the Crown of Stones.

  My anger gone, I sat back down. I was working on an apology to Krillos when my recently recovered patient loped over and crawled up onto my lap. The lack of an invitation didn’t concern him. The eldring child made himself at home, resting his small, furry, oblong-shaped head on my shoulder. Curling into my chest, he started making soft, gurgling sounds. There was something peaceful about the noises. They were rhythmic and flowing, with at least three distinct levels of pitch, and groupings of similar, repeating sounds

  Krillos leaned closer. “Is that…?” He listened a moment more. Unease etched into his marred face. “Gods, Troy, is he singing to you?”

  I didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if Krillos’ dismay was inspired by shock or disgust. Either way, I didn’t share it.

  Slow and tender, so as not to spook the child, I put my arm around him. He nuzzled into me as he sang, and I rocked him. It was a natural response to his gesture of affection. That didn’t mean I’d lost sight of the strangeness of it, or that I’d been fooled by the innocence of the act. I was keenly aware of the unpredictable ferocity the little beast was capable of. Despite his claws, teeth, tusks, and muscles being nowhere near fully developed, there was incredible strength in him. And a penchant for violence that far surpassed his age.

  “I need a drink,” Krillos said.

  I patted the eldring child on the leg. It sat up and blinked its red-orange eyes at me. I smiled at him. “Thank you.”

  He stuttered out a low growl, slid off my lap, and went back to his mother.

  Krillos was staring at me. I didn’t want to hear it, so I got up and went to see Liel. Still hunched under his fur, his young face was long. His gaze was distant as he studied the eldring mothers and their offspring, all crouched together, awaiting their portion of whatever the bloody meat-of-the-day was. Divvying it up, as the ‘server’ plopped dinner down in front of her pack, she helped herself to a generous bite of each juicy portion. No one chastised her. It was her kill so she had the right to tax each share.

  Gods…I shouldn’t know that.

  I slid down the wall beside Liel. “Interesting, aren’t they?”

  I didn’t get an answer. I didn’t get a glance, either.

  I tried again. “Was I that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn. You could have at least pretended to think it over.”

  “I know you couldn’t help it,” he relented. “When Captain Krillos found me in the woods, he said joining with the eldring would likely steal your wits. But when we got here…it was worse than that. You were like a…a…”

  I said it for him. “Animal?”

  After a couple of silent nods, he snapped at me. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “I thought I could handle it.”

  “That’s not true. The captain said you knew it would be bad. That’s why you told him to leave you behind.”

  “I told Krillos to leave me behind, because every moment we spend in Langorian territory is a risk to us all. I didn’t want you two sitting around waiting for me to come out of it. I didn’t want Jarryd in that prison any longer than he had to be. And yes, I knew forming a temporary bond with an eldring wouldn’t be pretty. But I had no fucking idea I’d be sharing consciousness with the whole damn species.” My temper was up, and his attitude wasn’t helping. “Whatever happened, whatever I did, I didn’t mean to scare you. There were just too many memories and sensations, too many voices.”

  “Voices?” Liel looked at me sideways. “Are you saying they can talk?”

  “Not like us, no. But the fluctuations and nuances in the sounds they make are distinct. More so to me right now, because I can still access some of their memories.”

  “Still? I thought it was temporary.”

  “There are no hard rules to a spell like this, Liel. The details of the exchange and the length of it are always different. I absorbed a hell of a lot from the eldring. It may take a while before it fades.”

  “Guess that explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “The Kayn’l is gone. Your memories are back. You look all right, but…” Liel chewed on his lip a moment. “Something’s off. Something’s changed.”

  “A lot of things have changed. I’m running on half a soul. And…I’m a Reth. Things are different now.”

  “You can still be Rella’s Champion.”

  “Not anymore.” I’m Kael’s Destroyer, I thought. “I got mad at Krillos the other day because he was right. I brought down a castle full of people. And I’d do it again if I had the chance.”

  “The erudite spells are new to you. All you need is training.”

  “I do, yes. But this future Malaq’s chasing, this vision of peace he’s striving to bring about, he’s pinning too much of it on me. The way I’m going, with these scars, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in a position to do him any good.”

  “Because you think…” Liel swallowe
d. He didn’t want to say it.

  “I think, whatever the crown’s magic did to my father, it’s doing it to me. And these scars are just the beginning.”

  “What about Queen Jillyan’s collection? You didn’t find anything to help?”

  “Not yet. There were some passages on the crown, but most of what we’ve found doesn’t go back far enough.” An idea popped into my head. “But I can.”

  Barely visible beneath his hair, Liel’s brow wrinkled. “You can what?”

  “Go back.” The notion picked up steam the more I thought about it. “I can use an oracle spell to send me into the body of one of my ancestors. If I can find out how my family is tied to the crown and what it means, maybe I can make sense of some of this.”

  “Can you do that, without a specific person in mind?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “But I thought you needed an anchor. Like when you make a door?”

  I was getting the impression Liel didn’t like my plan. “I read about door making in one of Jillyan’s books, and the spell is significantly more accurate if the anchor is a person. But it doesn’t have to be. It can be a place, or an event.”

  “Is that how you ended up in my straw pile in Kabri?”

  “It’s possible. I’ve been in a few straw piles before,” I said, getting him to grin. “But I don’t remember making that door, so who knows. The point is, if I do it right, if I concentrate on one place or one event, the oracle spell will work the same way. It should, anyway. And I can only visit the past of someone I share blood with. So if one of my ancestors wasn’t there…I can’t be either.”

  “Where will you go? What place do you know that well, from so long ago, that you could latch onto?”

  “Only one. That cave you found in Kael.”

  He tilted his head and scratched it. “But you weren’t there, Ian. I was.”