by Cindy Dees
* * *
Thanon threw his men at the nullstone construct for a third time, following Tarses’s order to at least slow the thing down if it could not be stopped. Tarses’s Klangon steel sword damaged the creatures, but at the moment, the general was off dealing with the winged construct, which left Thanon and his men to cope with the finned one, who had just waded into their midst.
If he could just get the thing pointed at one of the other dangerous and hostile creatures on the field … and then get the rider to order the construct to attack it instead of his men …
He fought a desperate delaying action, risking his life over and over to protect his men as they tried fruitlessly to damage the nullstone beast.
He caught sight of a bright white tabard flashing near the black door, and then he saw Will Cobb join Raina. The gypsy healer and the paxan who ran with Will came into sight as well, gathering at the door. Had they managed to get the thing open, after all?
His attention was drawn back to the battle for several seconds, and he dragged one of his men out of the path of a great nullstone fist smashing through his unit. “Fall back!” he shouted.
Into the gap his men left, one of the black trolls and several nulvari slid forward.
The rider atop the nullstone construct turned his beast toward them and clearly gave it a command to attack them.
“Now!” Thanon ordered his archers urgently. “Take out the lizardman rider!”
A hail of arrows let loose, a half dozen of them piercing the natural armor of the green lizardman. One lucky shot passed through the rider’s throat, and he toppled off his construct, falling to the ground with a thud. Thanon leaped forward himself, swinging frantically, nearly severing the unlucky lizardman’s head from his body. One of his other men administered a killing blow to the lizardman’s chest.
The nullstone construct lumbered onward, leaving behind his dead rider, chasing the now retreating night troll across the battlefield. Praise the Lady.
Thanon raced over to Tarses’s side to report that taking out the rider did, indeed, seem to freeze the nullstone constructs on a single command. He also pointed out that the White Heart emissary and her companions had opened the black door and seemed to be preparing to pass through it.
Tarses nodded tersely and ordered all his forces to fall back and form an arc around the approach to the door. And then he ordered, “Stand your ground or die trying, my friends. No one shall pass through that way but that we let them.”
Thanon and his men hacked and slashed their way toward the door, but unfortunately, it seemed that everyone else chose that exact moment to do the exact same thing. The entire battle collapsed in on itself, converging on the black door in a writhing, battling, screaming, bleeding mass of flesh and bone.
“Go in, Raina!” Thanon shouted at the top of his lungs.
She turned, looked in his direction, and made eye contact with him over the mêlée. He waved at her to indicate that she should press forward. She nodded back and gestured for him to join her.
He shook his head and called back, “Go. Tarses and I will hold the line for you until you return!”
* * *
Return? Raina did not think that was in the cards for her this day. She would move forward and maybe even wake Gawaine, but there would be no going back for her. The separation between the voices and her sanity was paper thin, and with every healing spell she cast, her grip on life slipped a little bit further. She did her best to meter out her magic in the tiniest possible doses and to rest between castings, but this battle was unbelievable. Even if she had been at full strength, her healing would not have been enough to keep even a portion of the combatants from dying.
“Are we all here?” Will asked urgently.
Raina looked around. Sha’Li, Rosana, Will, Cicero, Rynn. Lakanos had left her side momentarily to beat back someone who’d tried to sneak up behind her, but he would return soon. “Where’s Eben?”
Rynn responded, “I see him over there. I’ll go get him.”
The paxan darted away from their little group.
In his absence, Sha’Li explained, “The door is unlocked. On the other side, there may be traps, so I’ll go first. The rest of you stand back at a safe distance. Once I make it through and call back that it’s safe to enter, join me, then we will close the door and try to lock it or blockade it from the other side. Yes?”
Everyone nodded in understanding.
A familiar voice said from behind Raina, “Fancy meeting all of you out here. Nice day for a walk, isn’t it?”
She whirled, staring at Aurelius and Selea. “What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are, I imagine. You didn’t think we old men were going to let you younglings have all the fun, did you?”
She smiled in gratitude. “You are most welcome here. As you can see, things did not go exactly as we expected. That sandstorm allowed everyone who was following us to catch up.”
“Plus a few more players we didn’t know about,” Selea commented.
“Well, they’re all here now,” Aurelius retorted. “Where are we on the door?”
“It’s open. Rynn is fetching Eben, and then we go inside.”
Aurelius shook his head. She thought he might have murmured, “Remarkable,” but she wasn’t sure.
Rynn and Eben materialized, along with a cloaked and hooded figure. “My sister, Marikeen,” Eben explained briefly.
Will nodded. “Welcome, Marikeen. Okay. Let’s go.”
Sha’Li leaned her shoulder into the door and gave it a good push. Ponderously, the great stone slab gave way a few inches. Rynn, Eben, and Will jumped to help her, and the door opened perhaps the length of Raina’s arm.
“That’s enough. I can pass through,” Sha’Li grunted. She slipped into the darkness beyond and disappeared as the fellows fell back cautiously beside Raina and the others.
Someone bumped into Raina from behind, nearly knocking her off her feet, and she turned around with alacrity to discover that a white tiger rakasha mercenary had slammed into her.
“Sorry, White Heart,” he growled. “Healing?”
Frustrated at her requirement to heal everyone, she dribbled a tiny bit of healing magic into one of what had to be Anton’s men. But doing even that small amount of magic made the clearing spin. She wavered and had barely managed to right herself when one of Thanon’s paxan warriors leaped in front of her and cut down the rakasha she’d just healed. She swore under her breath. It was bad enough to have to heal, but it was worse to waste it for naught.
“Come in!” Sha’Li’s muffled voice came out of the crack. “And bring lights.”
Aurelius moved forward. “Allow me. I can magically light the space and leave your hands free for whatever comes.”
Right. Like more angry guardians determined to kill them all rather than let them wake Gawaine. Her friends passed through the narrow, one-person-wide opening. She paused as she realized Lakanos was engaged in battle with a pair of nulvari.
“Go on!” he shouted. “I’ll join you in a minute!”
She turned and slipped inside the chamber. A matching set of symbols decorated the interior side of the door. Excellent. It could be locked from the inside, then.
The chamber itself was huge. It must encompass most of the island. Aurelius’s light spell had created soft light throughout what would otherwise have been a black cave. Or series of caves. As she and her friends moved forward, massive tree roots appeared to have grown down through the chamber over the centuries, and dirt clung to the smaller hair roots growing off of the big ones, creating a maze of walls and openings.
“The ring,” she blurted. “It feels him. Gawaine’s in that direction.” She pointed off to their left a bit.
Sha’Li suggested, “You go on. I’ll catch up after I close the door and check to make sure it’s locked. Otherwise, someone outside will find a way inside.” Sha’Li put her shoulder into the door and started to slide it shut inch by ponderous inch. Unable t
o contain her impatience, Raina moved off, following the lead of Gawaine’s ring with the others just behind her. They were only minutes away from finding Gawaine now.
Soon. Very soon, she would meet him in person.
* * *
One spied a group of people passing through an opening in the black door and yelled for Two and Three to follow him as he raced toward it frantically. His compulsion to get inside that chamber was almost too much to bear.
Where he came from, One didn’t know, but all of a sudden, a large warrior of a man wearing old-fashioned gages upon his forearms appeared at the door and slipped through just behind the jann girl.
One heard a scuffle on the other side of the door, but he jumped through anyway with Two and Three close behind him. A jann girl was just casting some sort of spell upon a jann boy that seemed to command him, and she ran away from the opening with him stumbling along docilely behind her.
A few feet beyond the doorway, a black lizardman girl was fighting the Gaged Man and giving him a hard time of it, too.
Two ordered in a high, childish voice, “Split up. Find the Sleeping King’s body, and then come get me immediately. You, too,” she ordered the Gaged Man. “And hurry!”
Startled, One complied with the order, which resonated with power deep in his gut. As he started to turn toward the maze of tree roots, he saw a white Royal Order of the Sun tabard with the gold trim of a knight fill the doorway.
He turned back to confront this threat, but an alchemy globe exploded against the knight’s armor, and the fellow went down to the ground. Another figure, a man, leaped over the fallen knight and slipped inside.
Old memory, not quite fully suppressed, supplied a name to him. Anton Constantine. That same part of his mind supplied disdain. Hatred, even. But the order from Two overrode every other consideration.
As Anton disappeared into the shadows and the Gaged Man darted away into the chambers, the black lizardman girl slammed the door shut. One turned and headed into the dimly lit cave. Somewhere in here was the ultimate prize. And he must be the one to find it.
* * *
Raina moved forward confidently, the ring on her middle finger pulsing with energy. It took them perhaps ten minutes to wind through the maze of smaller roots to a single, massive root perhaps thirty feet across that plunged straight down into the earth.
“The taproot,” Will murmured. “This is the heart of the wake tree.”
Gawaine’s physical body had to be close now. They passed around to the far side of the taproot, and that was when Raina saw the bower. In it was a platform of some kind about waist high. And a man lay resting upon it, hands crossed over his chest. The body was covered in a white shroud made of some silken fabric so sheer and light as to look more like air than solid cloth.
And beneath it, that face … so familiar … so pale … so still …
Her heart stopped beating for an instant, and her breath skipped and caught. A cold chill and a hot flash raced through her simultaneously.
Gasps sounded behind her. And then everyone exclaimed all at once, asking if that was the Sleeping King.
“That’s Gawaine,” she said reverently, moving slowly toward him.
Other small details registered. A throne-like chair sat at the far side of the bower, placed ideally for someone to sit beside Gawaine’s body, contemplating it. Did Hemlocke come to visit her brother, then? Of course, based on Gawaine’s description of their relationship, she was as likely to come here to gloat as she was to grieve.
Gawaine’s clothing, readily visible through the gossamer shroud, had aged, his tabard turned black, the unicorn rampant upon it a dull, tarnished bronze color. A great diagonal slash marred the cloth from shoulder to hip, but the pieces had been lain together carefully over his torso so the cut was barely noticeable. In his dreaming grove, Gawaine’s tabard was emerald green and his unicorn heraldry stitched in thread of gold.
Gawaine’s body itself was pristine and looked as if he had not aged a day since being laid here. Raina reverently laid her palm upon his chest, but jerked her hand back.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked quickly.
“He’s cold. And he has no heartbeat.”
“Well, of course not,” Rosana said practically. “There’s no life in his body. No spirit.”
“Let us change that,” Aurelius declared.
Rynn spoke up. “The first order of business will be to open Gawaine’s prison on the dream plane. There should be some link to his grove here.” He looked around the inner chamber they stood in. “Something that’s replicated in his grove.”
Will said, “The wake tree. There’s one just like it, but in miniature, in the grove. Right, Raina?”
She tried to remember the individual trees in the grove, but the only impressions she could call to mind were of Gawaine himself. When she was in his presence, she noticed little else. “If you say so, I’m sure you’re right.”
Rynn nodded. “If the tree is the link, then it’s also the key to the prison. It must be destroyed to release Gawaine’s spirit.”
Eben eyed the massive trunk doubtfully. “How are we supposed to destroy that? It would take us days or weeks to hack through all of that.”
Will laid his hands on the taproot. After a moment, he replied, “If we cut away a band of the bark all the way around the root, the flow of life from the earth into the tree will be broken. That should kill it. Mind you, it won’t turn brown and fall over instantly because trees store energy in their leaves. But if it’s a link we’re looking to break, that should do it.”
Eben pulled out his long sword and drew a line across the rough, hard surface of the root. A thin cut formed, and then healed almost immediately. “Um, how are we supposed to kill a tree that heals itself instantly?”
Kendrick spoke up. “What about Kerryl’s dagger? It broke the link between dryads and their trees. Maybe it will break the link between this tree and its equivalent on the dream plane.”
Aurelius nodded. “An excellent thought.”
Kendrick pulled out the cold iron dagger and drew it across the tree trunk. An upwelling of clear sap ran down the root just like blood would flow from a human wound. Even Raina, who had no great affinity for plants, felt the wake tree’s pain.
Kendrick groaned, and the dagger fell from his fingers.
Rosana picked up the weapon and stepped forward, laying the blade against the tree. She murmured in wonder, “I feel its link to the spirit realm. That is where it truly lives. We can kill this manifestation of the wake tree here, and it will not be fully destroyed.” With energy and resolve, she commenced slicing a line around the taproot.
It took her several minutes to work her way around the great taproot, but at last, she returned to where she had begun, joining the two ends of her cut into a continuous circle. She finished by stabbing the blade deeply into the root at the spot where the cut began and ended. A great heaving of spirit energy passed through Raina, all but knocking her off her feet. Ayli also staggered, and Rosana did fall to her knees.
The ring on Raina’s hand grew warm, and a faint green glow emanated from her pouch all of a sudden. Certainty poured through her. “He comes!” she cried. “Gawaine’s spirit is free!”
And that was when all hell broke loose.
* * *
Four figures rushed the group, attacking in a flurry of damaging magic, alchemy globes, and blades. Will raised his staff and started to summon magic, but then stopped, so shocked he forgot what he’d been in the process of doing.
“Mother?” he mumbled. Then louder, “Father? Adrick?”
It could not be. They were dead. And yet, here they surely were. Exultation roared through him. They were alive. Two years of grief and pain and loneliness fell away like dead leaves shed before the budding of new flowers in spring.
His father leaped at him with a flurry of blows from the white-bladed long sword Will had only ever seen his father wield once. But he knew it to be Ty’s sword, Dragon’s Tooth
. Was this some sort of bizarre way for Ty to show love for his son?
Will had no more time to think, however, because his father was on him. Cripes. He’d forgotten how fast Ty was. Even with the intervening two years’ worth of training at the hands of the finest weapon masters in Dupree, Will still was extremely hard pressed to defend himself, let alone launch any kind of attack against his father.
“Where have you been?” he tried.
No answer.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
Still no answer. In fact, he saw no signs of recognition at all in his father’s blank, glassy eyes.
“It’s me, Will!” he cried, parrying frantically. “Why are you attacking me? You set me on this quest!”
His father’s face remained grim and set, his expression implacable.
“He does not know you!” Aurelius called from behind Will.
“What’s wrong with him?” Will called back as he turned and ran, dodging and weaving between the tree roots, using his youth and dexterity to stay a hair’s breadth ahead of his father’s deadly blade.
“I don’t know. Come back to me, and I will backpack you,” Aurelius responded. “Between the two of us, mayhap we can slow him down a bit.”
Will veered toward the sound of Aurelius’s voice. As he raced toward his grandfather, Will heard Selea say urgently, “Kendrick, with me. Adrick is an accomplished fighter in addition to being an outstanding woodsman. I’ll need your help to find him and subdue him.”
Just as Will careened around a wall of roots, Aurelius pointed off to one side. “Serica went that way. Someone go after her, and look out for her alchemy. She has a fair arm.”
“I’m on it!” Cicero called.
“Will, do you need my healing?” Rosana called to him.
“I’ve got Aurelius. Go help Cicero.”
She tore out of the clearing after the kindari.
Will heard metal clanging musically off crystal. Those were Rynn’s gauntlets blocking sword blows. The fourth assailant, the Gaged Man, must be attacking him. A female voice Will didn’t know shouted an incant for ice damage, and Eben cheered as it hit. That must be Marikeen casting at the Gaged Man.