by Terry Madden
“Stars and stones,” Dish whispered, and ran his fingers over the chiseled figure of the water horse. Dirt fell away, and the runes became clear.
“How do we get behind it?” he asked, hoping the salamander would have the answer.
But his question was met by a chorus of frogs which had grown so loud, it nearly drowned out his voice. He thought he could smell the forests of the Felgarths, could hear the sound of the surf on the shoreline of the island of Ys. He could wait no longer to cross the threshold, to finish what he’d started a thousand years before.
The frogs converged, crawling over him, throwing themselves at the stone. But the salamander woman strode through them as they cleared a path for her. She pointed through the trees to the east to where the stars of the constellation equuleus were just appearing in the near darkness. And there, between two pale white stars, rose a star of sea green, just like the one on the salamander’s forehead.
She raised her tiny arms and beckoned the pale light.
Dish watched with the others as the light drifted like a beam of green pollen from the star to alight on the stone, to fill the grooves of the design with green light.
“Fuck,” Iris said, and began to back away.
The stone dissolved into light which pushed into the cairn’s inner chamber like a verdant dawn, like the shaft of the midwinter sun in the great tombs of the ancients. As it did, frogs from every part of the wood streamed past Dish, all entering the cavern that had opened before them.
“Come,” the salamander said to him, her copper eyes like a cat’s in the dim entrance to the cairn.
Bronwyn gripped Dish’s shoulders. “Don’t go, Hugh. Please.”
“I must, Wyn.”
“But what will I do when the police come?”
“You called them?”
“Just now. I figured you’d be gone before they arrived. We can hold Celeste off for a bit, but not forever.”
“Stop right there!” It was Iris. She clutched the pistol in both fists and held it out before her.
Dish looked up to see Celeste and her Order of the Green. They stood on top of the cairn, looking down on them.
Iris called, “Come no closer.”
“Or what? You’ll blow my brains out? Just like Hollywood?” Celeste started down the slope of the cairn toward them, saying, “Then it will only take me a bit longer to cross. The well is open. The way is clear, and all of us who have been exiled will either cross here or through the door of death. So shoot.”
Iris looked to Dish as if for guidance.
He said to Celeste, “You’ll stay back until all of the Old Blood have passed.”
“Oh, will I?”
Iris fired. The shot echoed through the twilight and Iris stumbled from the recoil. She’d fired into the sky.
“You will,” Dish told Celeste, “or Iris will make you take the long road back the Five Quarters. You’ll be far too late then to enter the fray, born as a babe. Far too late to lead the rebellion of the Sunless.”
Dish glanced at Bronwyn, hoping she truly had called the police.
With quaking hands, Iris pointed the gun at Celeste.
“You’d best get moving,” Peavey said to Dish. He stepped beside Iris and eased the gun from her trembling hands. “I’ll watch them.”
He dragged his dead legs behind him into the opening of the cairn, then turned to look over his shoulder. “Come on, Iris.”
“Come? You mean cross?”
“That’s what I mean. If you want to.” To Elowen he said in Ildana, “It’s time. Let’s be gone.”
The stream of frogs had begun to thin, and Dish knew his only chance of living on the other side would be to reach it with them before the Sunless followed. He started to crawl in. The passage was narrow and slick with mud and reminded him of the way into the underground cavern he and Lyleth had followed through the Felgarth mountains. Once inside, his eyes adjusted to the dim green phosphorescence that lit the circular chamber with a barely palpable light.
Upright stones carved with spirals and chevrons circled a flat stone upon which lay something that he discerned as bones only when he drew closer.
At his back, cold air disturbed the dust, and as he glanced back down the corridor, he saw Iris and Elowen appear in the chamber.
“Where’s the well?” Iris asked.
Dish felt panic rising in his gut.
He looked around the chamber for the salamander, but could not see her.
He crawled to the bones, looking for water, anywhere.
Two battleaxes had fallen from the skeletal hands. He knew those axes. They had once belonged to warriors of Emlyn, two men Nechtan had slain in a tavern on the banks of the River Rampant. As he picked them up, everything became clear. Nechtan’s axes. Nechtan’s bones. All covered in frogs.
He looked into the center of the chamber to find the salamander. The tiny woman danced a circle, like ring around the rosie, singing in the most exquisite voice, an impossible melody. As she danced, the dry dust beneath Dish grew damp. Water began to drip steadily from the stones over their heads, dripping into a stone bowl beside Nechtan’s bones.
“It’s happening,” Elowen cried. “It’s opening.”
“Holy shit,” Iris said.
Within moments, they were floating in a bottomless pool lit by green starlight. His dead legs and the weight of the axes bore him down. The water was thick as honey, and he drew a deep lungful.
He felt the salamander-woman swim past him, her tiny hand touching his skin so lightly, beckoning him downward. As he sank deeper, another light suffused through the water, coming from below. In that light, he saw a thousand frogs swimming past him, downward. But there, a figure was swimming upward, toward them. It was another salamander. As the two met, they embraced, their bodies spiraling around one another until they burst into a whirlpool of light.
The water began to churn, to spiral downward.
He let go of the two axes, so he could take Elowen’s hand. Iris was beside him. She reached for him and took his arm. There was panic in her eyes.
Like an anchor, he dragged them deeper, through darting frogs, toward a light on the other side that sang of home.
Chapter 30
“Hurry,” Lyleth urged Connor. “Change me! Draw your runes on me! Turn me into one of your blood beasts!”
Angharad had vanished.
Lyleth had nothing left here, nothing but pure rage and the will to pursue the Crooked One into the bowels of the earth. Her own tears enraged her further. But Connor was shaking his head. He was a weakened pile of bloodless flesh lying beside a wide pool of primordial water. The third well of the sea. The well between the worlds. It was real, and it was now.
“I have nothing to shape,” Connor whined, “no green flow to use in this hole. There’s so little left in me, I wouldn’t even be able to give you fangs, Lyl.”
“I found a way up,” Dylan called from the southern tunnel. “Stairs.”
Far above, the sound of steel on steel meant the battle had begun afresh. Fiach was still alive, or he was, just before the island fell into this cavern. I was impossible to say which army gained the advantage.
Lyleth turned back to Connor. A rivulet of his blood ran into the well, polluting it with a spreading stain of red. He didn’t have long. And he was the only one who could hope to unmake that beast.
“I won’t let him get away,” Lyleth vowed. “If you can’t help me, I’ll go after him alone.”
“Even at half his strength,” Connor said, “you can do nothing.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She pulled on her tunic and buckled her sword belt.
She’d follow Tiernmas into the caverns alone if she had to.
“Lyleth.” Connor took her hand weakly. “I know what you’ve lost to him, what we both lost. I loved her, too. But what we’ve lost cannot be recovered.”
Her fingers slipped around his throat. “If you loved Merryn, you’d never have let that bastard
touch her!”
She drew close to those copper eyes, looked as deeply as she could into the black chasm that was his soul and said, “Merryn would be safer in the Otherworld, but because of you, she will return soon. And as soon as Tiernmas knows this, he will be looking for her.”
She watched a callow hope spark in Connor’s eyes.
“He will never touch Merryn again,” Lyleth vowed, “and neither will you!”
Dylan had returned from his scouting of the stairs. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“Let’s go, Dylan!” Lyleth ordered, and started toward the tunnel that had swallowed the Crooked One.
Then she saw the first frogs at the surface of the well. They were swimming up from below, surfacing and paddling to the edges. They piled on top of one another, trying to climb the slick stones that edged the pool.
Lyleth bent down and put out her hand. Three frogs climbed into her palm, and before she could set them down, the transformation began. In moments, three men stood before her, naked and radiant. Their warriors’ bodies were battle-scarred and hardened and yet weaponless. They showed her their palms and spoke in the tongue of the Old Blood, “We are in your debt, sister.”
The three men proceeded to help the others from the water, and soon the cavern was teaming with people, young and old, men and women, children and crying babes. Dylan led a troop of warriors up the stairs with the intent to fight their way to the weapons and armor of the fallen. Lyleth’s only hope was that it would take six or more Ildana to take down a warrior of the Old Blood, even naked and weaponless. Once armed, half of them would return to the well and prepare to fight the Sunless, for they said they followed closed behind.
It was then Lyleth saw him. He washed up on the rocks with two girls, one of them was Elowen.
The girls climbed out and proceeded to pull him out behind them.
It was not the face she knew, but the face of the teacher from the land of the dead. His legs were withered, lifeless stalks. But his body was as strong as he’d ever been in this world.
“Nechtan,” Lyleth heard herself say.
“Dish!” Connor called weakly.
It would be so easy to give up the fight now. To welcome him back, to retake his throne with him, to prepare for the battle that would sunder this land. To love him. But Lyleth knew that the Crooked One would never be more vulnerable than he was right now. From deep in these caverns, in the halls of the Sunless, he would continue to drink down the green flow. He would drink down entire forests from the roots, drain villages and herds of red deer. He would grow stronger. And he would surface again to command the Sunless. But if that flow were severed. If he were imprisoned again… it would have to be now.
She shouldered her bow and two quivers and started for the tunnel that had swallowed Tiernmas.
“Lyleth!” Nechtan called after her.
She longed to take him with her, to fight beside him again. But she refused to turn around, and stepped into the blinding dark with nothing and no one but the little horse Brixia at her side.
Chapter 31
With the remaining energy Connor possessed, he began to crawl toward Dish. Iris was with him, looking helpless at how to move a man. But there was someone else. The girl Connor had pulled from the water. Elowen. She had not taken her eyes from him since she’d climbed from the well dressed in Connor’s Metallica tee shirt. It looked like a wet dress on her.
“They’re coming,” Dish called to Connor.
“Who?”
“The Sunless. They’ll be right behind me.” Dish pulled himself closer with a guerilla crawl and gripped Connor in a strong embrace. Then he looked down at the blood streaming from Connor’s arm and said, “Stars and stones.”
“She’s gone after him,” Connor tried to explain. “The Crooked One has fled into the caverns, and Lyl has—”
“We have to be ready to fight,” Dish said. He crawled toward two axes that had lodged in the rocks. He handed one to Iris, and the hopelessness of what would come next overtook Connor. They would all be slaughtered.
“Elowen,” Connor called to her. Using her name made her eyes brighten. “You’ll find stairs in the passageway.” Connor pointed. “Dylan is there. Call the warriors back down here.”
She started away, but he caught her arm. “Be safe.”
She gave him a smile saying, “I got this far, didn’t I?”
“Move these people into another tunnel,” Dish said. “At least we can hide them.”
Connor translated Dish’s orders into the tongue of the Old Blood, and the people began to move silently into the darkness of the tunnel. Dish gave Connor a quizzical look.
He’s wondering how I know the language of the Old Blood, Connor thought.
Dish hadn’t figured anything out yet. None of it. But he would. And Connor hoped he wouldn’t be alive to try to explain his part in this.
Three men surfaced, armed with staves.
Dish hooked one around the ankle with the horn of his axe and dropped him. Unable to swing it, he pushed the blade into the man’s throat.
Iris was doing her best, but the stave caught her in the cheek, and she fell into a pile of boulders.
Dylan emerged from the tunnel with half a dozen bloody men with him. Naked but for their shields and spears, they met the next of the Sunless who climbed from the well and cut them down quickly. Then they stopped coming.
“Where are they?” Connor asked.
Dish laughed. “She did it!”
“Who?” Dylan asked.
“You must go back.” It was a woman’s voice. Elowen. She knelt beside Connor. “You’ll die here.”
It was the last thing Connor heard. His vision narrowed then vanished. He dreamed he was afloat. Dreamed Brixia carried him in a whirl of silver fish. He was aware of nothing but the weightlessness of his soul. His arms drifted over his head like sails and what was left of his blood streamed away in bright red ribbons like the ones tied in Brixia’s mane.
She carried him down into the deep, back to the dead where he belonged. Not Brixia, no. She’d gone with Lyl. What carried him?
He closed his eyes and waited for death and forgetfulness.
A hand touched his chest, dragged over him and down his arm. He forced his eyes to open in time to see her float past. But she gripped his hand, clung to him. The woman of stone. Dylan’s Elowen.
Her other hand was on his arm. She pulled him to her, wrapped herself around him in an embrace, and drifted downward with him, toward the dead.
As the water above them dimmed, so the water below them brightened. The figure of a serpent writhed below, spiraling toward them until it had wrapped them both in a maelstrom.
They surfaced at last. And the great eel bared its teeth at them before it submerged.
“Ned?”
They were in another cavern.
“Come,” Elowen said. She dragged him to the edge of the water and fought to pull him out. “They’ve healers here in your world. We’ll find them.”
He rolled out of the water and into the mud just as a blinding white light shone through a corridor into Connor’s eyes. He heard a voice coming over a radio. Other voices. Speaking English.
He leaned against the wall of the circular chamber and soon the place was full of police. Men in uniforms and walkie talkies.
“He’s here,” he heard Elowen say. In English.
Once they got him outside, he saw he had been in the cairn at the bottom of Merryn’s farm. A paramedic was tying off his wounded arm with a tourniquet. There were more cops here, and two of them were handcuffing a tall blonde woman who glanced at Connor and gave him a big smile as the officer led her away.
And there was Bronwyn, talking fast as another officer took notes.
“Thank god we had a gun to protect ourselves,” she was saying. “And now my brother is… gone.”
She wasn’t a very good actor.
The ambulance arrived as Connor felt his soul hovering just above this vessel tha
t had carried him. He was strapped to a gurney and loaded into the waiting vehicle. The medicine of the dead would call him back, force him to live. Blood. He could feel it coursing through his veins from the I.V. They would force him to bear the memories he’d found in the soothblade. To take action because no one else could.
“You’ll grow strong again,” Elowen was saying. She must be riding in the ambulance with him. “I’ll see to it.”
He wanted to argue, to send her back to Dylan. But he didn’t have the strength.
Epilogue
With one hand knotted in Brixia’s mane, Lyleth followed the little horse into the darkness. Here and there a patch of phosphorescence provided enough green light to see a few steps in front and behind. But she could hear the Crooked One breathing; hear his laughter roar and echo through the labyrinth. The smell of crushed insects led her on.
Deeper and deeper, they crept through passages so narrow Brixia barely fit. The way was tangled with roots from the world above, and Lyleth slashed at them with her soothblade, to make a way through.
The little horse came to a sudden halt. A dislodged stone fell into the empty blackness before them. Far at the bottom, a torch burned before a door of blazing copper.
“The Halls of the Sunless,” Lyleth whispered.
“You can go no farther,” a voice said.
Brandishing her knife, Lyleth turned toward it. A shadow moved in the tunnel from which they’d come, and stepped beside Lyleth on the ledge above the chasm. Just visible in the powdered light that drifted up from the torch, the figure took shape and turned a smiling, familiar face to Lyleth. The young woman placed a cold palm on Lyleth’s cheek. She smelled of soil and the green sap of a tree. Her eyes were laughing, and the sorrow she had once known was replaced with resolve, and love.
Lyleth felt tears well. “Merryn.”
“I’m here, sister.”
The latch on the copper door opened with a resounding echo, and it swung wide. The Crooked one turned and gazed up at the two women huddled at the edge of the chasm above. He laughed, then stepped through the open door.