“They are up to something, the puddle-makers,” one of the mercenaries said. “Perhaps they know we are after their treasure. They are trying to drive us back.”
“That is not their way,” said Fionnuala. “They would not use their precious powers to counter the likes of us.”
She added to herself, Besides—’tis likely they have already been and gone. The prospect, however, did not daunt her. Sheer stubbornness had ensured her survival during her childhood in the gutters of Cathair Rua, and it stood her in good stead on this venture.
Such unnatural weather caused eldritch wights to stir. Unusual numbers of them issued from their secret places and ventured abroad. The hair-raising harmonies and discords of their singing, their weeping and sobbing, their low chuckling and sudden shrieks of laughter punctuated the clear but blusterous nights. Attracted to the source of the brí, they drifted toward the shores of Stryksjø. Sometimes Arran and his companions glimpsed curious figures moving through the trees, or felt the pressure of eyes like augers drilling into the backs of their necks.
In High Darioneth the queer winds and disturbances and distant lightnings were sensed by the weathermasters. They knew that some major man-made event was taking place, and that only powerful weathermages could cause such upheaval. Many folk anxiously wondered what was to be done. Were Arran and his party in distress? Should they dispatch a search party straightaway?
“They ought to have taken a cage-full of carrier pigeons with them,” said Nyneve Longiníme. “At least they would have been able to send us an ‘all’s well’ note now and then.”
“They are four grown men!” argued Cacamwri Dommalleo. “How should we treat them so—as if they are merely small boys that cannot be let for an instant from their mother’s sight without sending home notes!”
The councillors of Ellenhall gathered together. They agreed that Rivalen and Arran must surely know what they were about, and decided to wait on further events.
By the evening of 30th Ninember the lake-ice was almost strong enough to bear the weight of a man.
The same twilight that enfolded its gray gauzes around the weathermasters on the shores of Stryksjø was also gathering about Fionnuala and her band of mercenaries, who were making their way through a juniper forest. The day’s riding had been hard. Trails had petered out or doubled back, steep ridges had risen like walls before the riders, sink-holes had opened at their feet, hail-drifts had partially swallowed them, twigs and thorns had torn their garments and flesh, and they were cold to the very marrow of their bones. As the swallow flew, they were now fewer than six miles from Stryksjø.
The afternoon’s cloud-cover had cleared, but the sun had long since vanished and it was getting too dark for the riders to go on. Like a thatched roof, the foliage of the junipers blocked out the weak light of the stars. When at last it became impossible to see where they were going they tethered the horses, made camp, partook of a rudimentary supper, and set one of their number to watch. Except when absolutely necessary, they did not speak to one another.
“Prepare to encounter the weathermasters tomorrow morning,” said Fionnuala before she lay down by the fire to take her rest. “We shall depart at first light.”
Privately, she believed she would arrive at Stryksjø too late. Although she had regularly scanned the skies throughout her journey, she had seen no balloon; this, however, she considered hardly surprising, because a clear view of the heavens could never be obtained from down amongst the trees.
She did not divulge her misgivings to the men. Should they believe they had battled the travails of the journey for naught, they must surely rise in rebellion against her. If the weathermasters were to be found at the lake and taken by surprise, then they would either slay the mercenaries or be slain themselves. Were they not there, she would wait a day or so in case they appeared, and if they failed to do so, she would slip away alone and ride home. The compass was in her possession. The men had no such instrument. Without her guidance they would have little chance of finding their way out of the wilderness of Grïmnørsland. In all likelihood they would perish, and it would not be necessary to pay them for a mission that had proved fruitless.
Her crossbow dug into her ribs. Although it was awkward and bulky she kept it always close to her body, beneath her clothing, so that it would not become frozen. She hugged it to herself like a lover, fiercely protecting this instrument of war. Unlike the human men who had left her desolate through abandonment or death, the crossbow had never failed her.
Closing her eyes, she sank at once into a slumber so deep it was akin to death.
Before sunrise a thick flocculence of cumulonimbus wadded the sky like mattresses. Gradually, it altered in color from slate-gray through pale ash to luminous platinum. The sun had arisen behind the overcast, ushering in a wan day. Everywhere, unmelted hail lay heaped like an overabundance of pearls. At the lakeshore the goat willows stood as stiff and crystallized as trees of glass. Weary were gray-haired Rivalen and young Gahariet as they waited there, yet they continued to make the gestures and say the words of gramarye. Out of the half-shadows came Arran and Bliant, their boots crunching on fallen hail.
“Good morrow,” said Rivalen, timing his greeting between his utterance of vector commands.
“! The ice on Stryksjø has become strong enough to walk on,” said Gahariet.
“Yester-eve Bliant and I reckoned that this dawn would see our purpose fulfilled,” said Arran. “I have come prepared.”
“Go now, Arran,” said Rivalen. “It is time. We can hold the ice for you, but you must make haste. The longer we hold it the weaker we become, and the greater will be the impact on the world’s weather.”
The young Maelstronnar had dressed in protective clothing. In his breast pocket he carried a tiny vial he had brought with him from High Darioneth, for the purpose of collecting the Draught from the Well of Dew. He checked that his sword slid easily in its sheath, and his knife was sharp.
“Farewell, friends,” he said, but he hesitated. In response to his salute his comrades could do no more than nod, because they were occupied with keeping up the weathermastery. Arran’s gaze took in the three of them standing in a row, side by side at the lake’s edge, tall and graceful, in command of stupendous forces, frost caught in their hair and ice riming their beards. He felt a surge of pride and love for them, then stepped onto the ice.
His balance was faultless—he had the poise of a dancer. Besides, the tumbled hailstones lent some grip to the soles of his boots. Lightly he sped, reaching ahead with his weathermage’s senses to predict any thin places in the ice.
It was as if he ran through some dim-lit, preternatural realm. All was ivory and alabaster, and soft tones of cobweb-gray. The lake surface was chiefly flat, buckled in places where the ice had burst upward. It was skittering with diminutive marbles, opaque hailstones that had frozen so quickly that bubbles of air had been trapped inside, each one no bigger than a pinpoint.
Islands shouldered their way up out of the frozen sea. From the nearest, arrows erupted. Eldritch archers were shooting at Arran, but he was covered with chain mail and thick leather, and his friends standing on the distant shore sent gusts of wind that threw the archers off balance so that, unaccustomed to slipperiness, they slid backward over the frozen layers. Rivalen, Bliant, and Gahariet also delivered swirls of hail to confuse the deadly wights. Arran ducked, dodged, and wove, moving rapidly.
Ragnkull Island stood up out of the ice like an elfin castle, pinnacled and turreted, jagged with stony battlements, pitted with natural crevices and clefts for windows. Its tall rock formations and peaked trees were frozen, coated in a lacework of frost. With shadows of glacial blue and highlights of silver it glittered, casting somber reflections of hyacinthine and swift argent on the gleaming lake.
Arran stepped onto the island. Instantly a rabble of small wights assaulted him; he drove them back with cold iron, flourishing his sword in one hand, his knife in the other. As a child, he had mastered
a unique trick of activating an electrical charge on metal blades. Sparks flew from his weapons; he guessed the wights had never encountered such a device before. Some of his attackers he managed to injure. Black ichor gushed from their wounds, and they fled.
Frantically the young man searched for some sign of the Well, ever aware of urgency. He knew that if his companions should falter, if they succumbed to weariness and failed, then the ice would melt and he would be doomed.
Yet what did the Well of Dew look like? Was it merely a hole in the ground? Many depressions, large and small, pitted the surface of Ragnkull Island. Most were choked with hailstones. How could he know which of them was special?
He searched with ever-growing desperation, while dodging knee-high assailants and ducking for shelter from arrows. He was crouching behind the rough-barked bole of an ice-bedecked pine when a small voice piped up close to his ear.
“Look for a dingle.”
Arran leaped sideways, dropped to the ground, and rolled, an instinctive reaction for one who had been trained in self-defense.
“Ooh, man, now I’m dizzy,” moaned the voice, still right next to him.
Arran lay quite motionless in a bank of hailstones. He breathed shallowly. Softly he said, “Where are you?”
“I’m in your packet, man.”
A head, impossibly small, like that of a child’s doll, poked out of the breast pocket where Arran kept the vial. Its eyes were beady, and exhibited a pained expression. “Man, you might’ve broke all me bones,” it said reproachfully.
“You are the boy with the tankard!”
“Ye’ve done us a good turn, man. I came with ye to gie ye a helping hand. Ye’re lookin’ for the Well o’ Tears. I know where.”
“Tell me!”
“We be nigh to a dingle. ’Tis small, no more than seven man-paces across, and not much deeper than the height of a man. ’Tis treeless within, but surrounded by trees that grow right up to the brink.”
Arran peered over the top of the ridge of hailstones. Perceiving no immediate peril, he rose into a partial crouch and cast about, searching for anything that resembled the creature’s description.
“Walk straight ahead now,” the small voice said. “Now turn. No, not that way, t’ither!”
As Arran pushed his way through a wall of foliage, great heaps of ice came sliding from the boughs onto his shoulders. The tiny wight ducked back into the pocket for shelter. Abruptly the ground gave way beneath Arran’s boots and he fell, sliding in a mass of melded hailstones. After sliding a short distance he came to a halt. The world had closed in. He was confined within a shadowy bowl, covered with a web of twilight. The wight popped its head out again and squeaked, “Here be the dingle!”
Ancient alders leaned out over the dell, their branches interlocking to weave a dense roof of living twigs and boughs, a shield against hail. Thick mosses carpeted the floor, which sloped downward toward the far end. As the floor descended, the walls of the hollow climbed steeper and higher until at last they closed in overhead, forming a sunken, low-ceilinged cavern on one side of the dingle.
“Go inside,” the wight’s voice advised. Arran had no doubt the creature could be trusted. Like all wights, it was incapable of lying. It had declared it had accompanied him in order to help him; therefore he knew it was not leading him into some trap.
Within the cavern the inclined floor continued for about fifteen yards until it met a stony wall, the back wall of the cavern, a dead end. About ten yards in from the entrance, the ground had been punctured, as if some fist-sized object had rapidly entered it on a diagonal trajectory. The hole that had been scooped out was not very deep; it was probable that rocks lying close to the surface had stopped the traveling object. This depression was lined with that silvery metal with which Arran was now familiar. It glimmered faintly in the gloom. Neither moss nor fern grew on that coating. No slime sullied the distillate therein, and no water-plants existed in that well. The water was clear, but there was no more than a thimbleful. That it remained in a liquid state and had not succumbed to the freezing conditions was no surprise to the weathermage; this was no ordinary liquor, after all.
At last he had reached the long-sought goal, this brew-vat of heart’s desire and poison.
Kneeling beside the Well of Dew, Arran wept three tears.
“Here’s your water-barrel,” said the tiny wight. With both hands it proffered the vial, which it had discovered in Arran’s pocket.
The young man withdrew the cork, leaned down, and carefully collected all the water. It was similar to the fluid in the Well of Rain and unlike natural water, in that somehow it allowed itself to be taken in a single mass, without leaving wasted dregs, or droplets clinging to the sides. When the silvery receptacle was dry and the vial securely plugged, the thought came to Arran that he had been holding his breath, and he let out a great sigh.
The pocket-wight chuckled merrily.
“Time to go hame,” it said.
“If I put this vial in my pocket with you, will you guard it for me?”
“I’ll guard it for ye, man. But I must be getting back to me mither now.”
“We shall head straight back to the shore, I promise you, after I have completed one task more.”
Arran had intended to destroy the Well of Dew with a dose of etching acid, in the same way Weaponmonger had ruined the Well of Rain, but even as he reached for the acid flask he recalled that in the excitement of preparation he had neglected to bring it from the campsite. For an instant he cursed his forgetfulness; then an idea occurred to him.
He broke a small chunk of material from the cavern’s roof and held it close to his face for examination, noting the mineral and ore content. After letting the specimen drop from his fingers he crawled from the low-roofed cavern into the relative brightness of the shady dell. The exertion of the last six days had taxed him sorely. The channeling of enormous outputs of the brí in order to freeze the lake had drained and weakened him. There remained, however, one final challenge.
With or without the acid, he must destroy the Well of Dew.
Climbing out of the dell, shoving his way through the tight-knit branches of the alders, and brushing off the continual showers of hail that cascaded over him, Arran forced his way into the open. The dangers that surrounded him had not decreased; if anything, his presence had attracted further peril. A couple of small black darts whizzed past his ears. He ducked. His hands spun a shape in the air, while he uttered a swift phrase. A miniature whirlwind jumped up and blasted the unseelie marksmen that had slyly approached. They were bowled away across the ice, turning somersaults and shrieking as they tumbled.
The young weathermage continued to gesticulate and speak, but he had progressed from performing a simple wind-summons to executing a far more complicated and potent formula. Above Ragnkull Island the clouds darkened. As if exploding slowly from their foundations, they commenced piling on top of one another. Inside their gigantic bellies phenomenal amounts of energy were beginning to churn. The building of a thundercloud demanded the participation of violent updraughts, engendered by the heating of air close to the surface. Ramming together infinitesimal particles of water to form ice would release quantities of energy. The young weathermaster must drive the warming of the island’s microclimate using the power of the brí alone—there were no fronts at hand to aid him. Simultaneously, he must fine-tune the conditions by ensuring the atmosphere’s uniform moisture content. Fire, water, and air—all three moved at his command; yet it was against their nature to be tamed. Tremendous forces would lash out instantly, should he not remain vigilant.
Within the rising tower of cumulonimbus, ice-crystals and water droplets were circulating at high speeds, being smashed apart and thrown together with a brutality that unmade their neutrality. Sundered from one another, the positively charged particles accumulated near the crown of the thunder-head while those that were negatively charged gathered at the base.
From inside Arran’s pocket, a voice
screeched, “I mislike this! Let’s go, man!” The wight’s head appeared. Its hat had fallen off and its hair radiated in a frizz, like the bristles of a bottle-brush, framing the small, alarmed face.
“Fear not,” said Arran. The thundercloud demanded all his attention; he was unable to bestow any more reassurance. He had directed the built-up charges in the base of the cloud, shifting them sideways until they hovered above a specific point. That point was the top of a tall alder rooted directly above the Well of Dew. The opposite electrical charges were straining to reach one another—negative at the base of the cloud, positive in the ground. Only a layer of air insulated them from each other.
The young man turned away from the alders concealing the dell. He ran across the island, then leaped off the gelid land, back onto the slippery surface of the frozen water. No eldritch archers harassed him. Indeed, suddenly there was no sign of any living thing on Stryksjø.
“Ooh, man, there’s a terrible power a-breeding!” wailed the little thing in Arran’s pocket. “ ’Twill explode any moment now! Run, man!”
On the banks of the lake Arran’s companions waited, obscured by the brumous murk. When Arran had reached a point midway between Ragnkull Island and the shore, he halted.
“Don’t stop!” yelped the tiny wight. Only the tasseled tip of its skinny tail was visible, sticking out from the top of Arran’s pocket.
A second time, Arran turned. This time he faced the island. He raised his right hand.
Deep in the ground the positive charge was waiting, beckoning, reaching a crescendo. A jagged leader-charge came zigzagging out of the thundercloud and smote the tip of the alder. An explosion of blue-white light lit up the entire region, so intensely brilliant that it seemed to Arran his eyes had vaporized in their very sockets. Instantly, that electric touch was answered.
Stryksjø blazed.
A second flare had followed, even more dazzling than the first. Cloven by searing energies, the air roared. A wall of compression lifted Arran off his feet and hurled him backward. Thunderclaps crashed so loudly that they splintered the lake ice with their percussions. Ragnkull Island vomited its heart, and a blazing tree crashed down, split in two pieces.
The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 50