Tapestry of Dark Souls
Page 25
“Someday,” Sondra replied. But before her blade could strike, the air around them shimmered. Something lifted the knife from her hands and threw her away from her aunt. An intense, sudden cold flowed through Sondra’s body until she was certain it would freeze her heart.
“Morgoth!” Sondra said in a whisper. His body formed before her. His robe was white, loose and flowing. The front was open, showing his chest, the black iron amulet he wore. It was shaped like a thin skull, and the yellow gems in its sockets seemed to stare at her. Morgoth’s silver hair and pale skin glowed with their own cold light and his eyes glittered with the flame of the torch. The resemblance between him and Jonathan was strong. As he smiled and called her name, Sondra longed to go to him. Instead, she skittered away toward the stairs.
“Morgoth.” Dirca echoed her niece’s cry. She screamed as his arms circled her waist, lifting her from the floor with brutal force.
“You disobeyed me.”
“Let Sondra go, Morgoth. The girl is useless to you.”
“Silence! She is the betrothed of my son!”
“You can have another son. You said as much. You promised me your child.”
A hand crushed Dirca’s spine, and her legs danced in agony. She opened her mouth to scream, but he cut off the sound with his lips. Though he kissed Dirca as he had before, this time he inhaled her life with slow, deliberate cruelty. When she lay limp in his arms, he let her fall and straddled her, his hands moving over her body, drawing every spark of heat from it.
Morgoth lifted his head and looked at Sondra. His expression seemed happy, his need sated. “Daughter,” he said and held out a hand. “Come with me.”
Sondra shook her head and tried to call for help, but a muttered word and wave of his hand silenced her voice. Morgoth’s eyes, bright like his son’s, narrowed. “I have been kind for his sake. Now come.” As he reached for her, she kicked the side of his face and heard him grunt. The sound told her that he was real, and he could feel pain. Heartened, she kicked and clawed as he pulled her toward him. With one swift fist he knocked her unconscious.
She didn’t feel him drag her, transformed, over the sharp granite of the path through Ivar’s cavern, through the low passage to his milky-white home where the glowing lights danced. When she opened her eyes again, Morgoth sat on a ledge beside the lake, and she lay on her back over his knees. He was bathing her wounded leg and arms with the water, dabbing at the blood with strips he had torn from her now-ragged cloak.
He saw that she was awake and buried his hand in her dark hair, holding her head tightly, forcing her to look at him. “You were going to the Guardians, weren’t you? Did you think those tired old men would do anything to free my son?”
She said nothing. She didn’t know.
“When the time comes, I will be the one to rescue him. Until then, you will stay with me. As my son told me, you are beautiful, and you carry the future within your body. Your son will have great power.”
“Your grandson?” she managed to ask.
He didn’t answer, only looked at her with his pale, metallic eyes. She thought of Jon’s mother and how he had been conceived, and she felt suddenly cold.
He guessed her thoughts. His smile held no reassurance.
The day after Jonathan was captured, the guards were doubled around the barn. He sensed renewed fear in their faces, doubt in the hushed way they spoke to one another, pity in their eyes.
Morgoth, his father, had struck again.
One of his guards spoke of a dark force that Jon could call on to rescue him. The other two said the disappearances meant that two more lives had been taken by the monster—possibly even the creature Jon had described.
“Who is gone?” he asked.
“Sondra and Dirca, both vanished from the inn.”
Jon turned his face to the ground to hide the grief he didn’t dare reveal. “I’m responsible,” he mumbled.
Someone reached a hand through the bars, grabbing his hair, forcing him to look at them. “See his tears,” the man said gruffly. “You know he loved her. That thing is still out there just like he said, I tell you, out there and waiting to claim another of us.”
“Even if the boy is the killer, burning him won’t end it. Evil lives on,” someone else commented.
“Not after it’s reduced to ashes,” a third man said. “Don’t look so sorry for him. I’ve seen tears like this before. Tears of guilt, they are.”
“Maeve’s the only witness. I don’t trust her.”
“What of Kezi’s girl? She spoke of silver fur, a silver mist. Look at his eyes and tell me it wasn’t him.”
The debate continued among the guards. But their doubts wouldn’t stop the ceremony—not when someone else would have to be sacrificed in his place.
Through the long final day before the celebration, the guards left the outer doors open so Jon could watch the preparations—the tables arranged for the supper, the wood and dung chips laid for the cooking fire, a stack of carefully seasoned split logs waiting for the climactic final burn. Jonathan dug his fingers through the open bars beneath him, burying them deep in the soft straw and earth of the barn and prayed that his father wouldn’t come for him tonight. If he did, surely everyone was doomed, himself most of all.
As the sun began to set, a hushed expectation filled the valley, a mood more suited to a sultry summer afternoon than the frozen air of winter. By dark, it reached such intensity that Jon became convinced the entire town must have already been ensorceled. They gave no indication that they sensed it, that they were already trapped in the eye of a deadly storm.
As he lay in his cage listening to the sounds of music and revelry, he thought of the autumn festival and Sondra. How full of hope he had been; how invincible. Now, whether he lived or died made little difference to those he loved. Sondra was undoubtedly dead, destroyed by his father. Ivar and the remaining Guardians would die soon. For all their fates, he was indeed responsible.
The guards were relieved by others midway through the night so that all would have a chance to attend the festival. As soon as the new ones took their place, he heard a girl laughing outside, saw her silhouette move between the door and the torches, kissing each guard in turn before slipping inside.
The girl stepped sideways out of the light and pulled the hood off her face. Jon saw that she was Willa, one of Sondra’s friends—a girl to be married tonight. She stood anxiously for a moment, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, Willa called his name, apologizing if she had awakened him. She spoke quickly, hardly pausing to breathe. “We … some of the other girls and I … we remember how you saved Sondra from the beasties. We know you wouldn’t hurt her. We don’t think you killed anyone. We wanted you to have this.” She drew a wineskin from beneath her cape and held it up. “The wine is from the festival. We mixed a potion in it. Drink a little and you won’t feel the pain. Drink it all and you’ll die now.”
When he didn’t answer, she placed the skin inside the bars, in a place where he could reach it with his mouth. “You can decide later,” she said. “We wanted you to know some of us don’t agree with the elders.”
Willa looked away from him in the direction of the light. He was surprised by the bitterness in her tone, the tears in her eyes. For the first time, he saw a tragedy that he could prevent. “Don’t stay and watch the burning,” he said. “Leave before the ceremony. Take anyone that’s willing to go.” He paused to give a silent apology to Ivar for breaking their pact, and told the girl of the secret passage, the spiral staircase, the cavern beneath the inn. It was hardly a safe place, joined to Morgoth’s lair, but he could think of no other. “Go to the base of the stairs and hide until morning. The destruction that’s coming may not find you there.”
The festival music had stopped, replaced by the insistent pounding of a drum. “They’re calling the couples for the betrothal ceremony. I must go before someone sees me.” Willa started for the door.
“Wait! You must believe me!”
The elder shouted out the words to the marriage ceremony so all could hear. As Jon watched the couples step forward for the formal bonding, he thought of Sondra. Could his father have let her live? The thought held more horror than her death. He prayed for the passage of her soul to a happier place and the mercy of the fates that he might join her.
The wineskin had begun to leak on his arm. The cloying scent of the wine mixed with the sharper odor of the poison. A painless death tempted him. He shifted his weight as quickly as he could and watched the wineskin fall well out of reach. His time wasn’t over, not yet. When it was, he should die by fire.
The ceremony ended and the singing began once more, but the crowd didn’t join in with the same exuberance as at the harvest festival. Terror gnawed at their strength, and the night’s killing unnerved them.
In spite of the agony in his back, Jon forced himself into an even tighter ball and twisted his head sideways. In that position, he could see the path that led to the inn, count the ones who were leaving; twelve, hardly enough to atone for his wrongs. He strained, hoping to see more, but the huge drums began their steady booming and the men came for him.
They carried the cage out as Maeve chanted and the villagers offered their guilty response. “To the spirit of our land, we give this sacrifice. May his pain and blood make the winter short, make the spring rain plentiful, make the new seed sprout.”
Tonight Maeve didn’t wear the ceremonial skirts with their bright ribbon trim. Instead she kept her legs covered with flowing pantaloons, tucked into high leather boots. The tiny cymbals on her fingers were muted by the leather of her gloves, making a sound as uneasy as the whispered chant of the crowd. The mask she wore now covered her entire face. Crystals lay like tears in the corners of the eye holes, and the lips curved upward in a perpetual knowing smile. Feathers had been attached to the top and sides, and what hair still fell over her shoulders was thin—drab gray rather than violet-black. Her voice, though beautiful, was strained.
The fire was no larger than the one they had used to burn the goblin. They wouldn’t admit their doubt by showing mercy, a point that became all too clear to Jonathan as they lifted the cage well above the hungry flames, then slowly began to lower it.
He wouldn’t struggle, wouldn’t give them or the land the satisfaction of his screams. But, as the flames brushed his side, the agony flowed through him, a steady searing pain that throbbed in time to the pounding of his heart. For the moment he could endure it in silence. But the moment, like his resolve, would pass. As he raised his head, seeking one final breath of clear air, he saw the silver mist swirling above him. It coalesced for a moment into the face of Sondra, her expression frozen in fear and awe.
“She lives,” Jon whispered through clenched teeth.
“She lives,” his father replied.
Jonathan beat his body against the bars of his cage and screamed her name.
The mist folded in upon itself, fell into the space between Maeve and the cage, and reshaped into the form of Morgoth. He was dressed in white flowing robes, his skin as smooth as well-worked metal. His thin hair framed a face whose features were given form to meet each person’s desires. Some saw Morgoth as male, others as female, but each saw a different face. As the people stopped their chanting, as Maeve began to turn to see what had distracted them, Morgoth said a single, damning word in a loud voice.
“Vixen.”
A shudder passed through Maeve. She cried out in rage, in pain. An instant later, she ripped the mask from her face and the gloves from her hands, revealing the hideousness of her curse. The crowd recoiled from her thickened, yellow skin, her oozing sores, her swollen slash of a mouth, her bony, twisted fingers. Morgoth’s word overpowered her. The change began.
The skin on her face smoothed, and for a moment all her perfect beauty returned. An instant later, her nose and mouth began to lengthen, her teeth and claws to grow. As she pulled the clothes from her body, fine silver hair sprouted on it, rippling in silver waves as it grew and covered her.
From her place near the front of the crowd, Kezi’s daughter screamed and pointed at Maeve. Kezi pushed the girl behind him. He ripped Ivar’s amulet from his neck and lunged forward, intending to tear the vixen apart. Other men followed his lead, and Maeve, betrayed and outnumbered, bounded from the circle and disappeared into the black night. As the others stood, stunned by the sudden revelation, Kezi tore at his clothes and began his own lycanthropic transformation. He fell to all fours and pursued.
As soon as Maeve had begun to change, the men holding Jon’s cage tried to move it from the fire, but all their strength couldn’t budge it. They released the hot bars, but it didn’t fall. They took branches to scatter the fire from beneath it, but some force, felt rather than seen, surrounded the pit and repelled their jabs. Panicked, they bolted from the open circle to the dubious protection of the crowd.
With only himself and Jon left in the ceremonial circle, Morgoth turned toward his son, hanging in agony above the flames. “You may choose to die if you wish, but then I will take your beloved and use her as I did your mother. I will create another son.”
Though waves of heat washed over him, though his body was in agony, Jon didn’t reply.
“Your death will prevent nothing. I will annihilate this town, the cloth, the old men who raised you. With or without you, my legions will be freed.”
The flames rose higher around him. Jonathan had never imagined such pain. Yet his flesh blistered no further, his hair didn’t ignite. His father was begging him to live, to serve him willingly. If Jon didn’t, some shell of what he had once been would continue on—drained of will and sanity, possessing only hollow power and slavish obedience.
“I do what I must,” Morgoth told him. “You do what you must. If you choose to be my ally, show me you are still my son. Use your power. free yourself.”
With his words, the flames rose, circling Jon’s wrists. The chains melted. His hands were free. He felt the spells return to his mind, felt the power coursing through him, bringing with it the old hunger.
“Show me!”
Ivar and Andor were with the Guardians. Sondra was trapped. Would Morgoth’s legions share his terrible desires? Would they drain the town for sustenance? Jon looked through the rising flames directly into his father’s eyes. He recited the incantation that diminished the flames, another spell that concentrated the heat on melting the lock. Morgoth released his hold on the cage and lowered it to the ground. Jon pushed it open and stretched his body on the frozen earth. Never had cold felt so magnificently soothing before.
“Vengeance,” Morgoth whispered.
Jon looked up. In spite of his display of power, the townsfolk had retained the ceremonial circle, their expressions joyous, expectant. Morgoth moved to the edge of the crowd. A mother smiled and held out her infant as if Morgoth were a priest who might bless it.
He touched the babe’s forehead. The child shuddered and died without a whimper, laying frozen in its mother’s arms. The woman looked from her dead child to Morgoth. He kissed her forehead, and she died as quickly as her child had, hitting the ground so hard that Jon heard her frozen flesh crack. Though they had watched the death, the townsfolk didn’t move.
After the first death, Morgoth killed quickly, claiming one enraptured victim after another. Jon wished to scream his defiance, to try some spell to end the silent slaughter. But Morgoth held him in a mental bond so potent that escape was impossible. As his father moved from one person to the next, the bond between him and Jonathan strengthened. Jon sensed energy flowing from his father into him, each life adding to it. When the killing was over, they would both be omnipotent. Jon doubted that even the hags could control them then.
The power tempted Jon. He saw himself as a ruler, Sondra dressed in satins and gold
on a throne beside him, the beauty of the land they could create.
As the tenth victim died, Morgoth returned his hand to the victim’s forehead. The cold flesh thawed, the limbs twitched, and the body stood, its glazed eyes following Morgoth as he moved to the next in line. No breath from the body clouded the frigid air. The man was his father’s slave now.
Morgoth would do this with all of them, Jon realized, then lead the animated corpses to the fortress. “No!” Jon cried, “The village must be destroyed, all trace ended. I claim the right to my revenge!”
Morgoth turned to face his son. The Silverlord’s eyes glowed red from the life force coursing in him. He said nothing, but released his son to destroy the village.
Jon pointed his fingers toward the embers in the fire pit. The dying fire roared and rolled inward. He spread his fingers and angled them toward the crowd. A single word and the flames shot outward, the bodies flaring in their heat. As Morgoth turned to him, Jon hid his disgust behind a howl of triumph.
He felt his father’s wrath and expected to die for the servants he had immolated. Instead Morgoth reined in his anger and looked from the devastation around him to Jonathan. His face showed satisfaction. Jon felt the first glimmer of hope—the realization that, though his emotions were plain to Morgoth, his motives were veiled. He knew his father was beginning another, more powerful, incantation, but he didn’t have the endurance to see its result. The use of his power had exhausted him, and he fell mercifully unconscious.
The ceremony had just begun when Willa led the thirty people who had joined her through the deserted inn to the hidden passage and staircase Jon had described. Aran, her husband, carried their single lamp, holding it high to light their way. At the bottom of the stairs, they discovered Dirca, her body as frozen as the others had been. “We were right about Jonathan,” Willa said. “And look!” She took the lamp and held it close to the passage, where thin lines of blood marked the trail to the narrow passage beyond.