The Wolf and the Crown (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "This is Morgeu's." Somberly, Lot recognized the Celtic signatures of protection carved into the wheel rims and spokes. "We've buried her in her shrine. I know it now. However, there is one here who may tell us more of her fate." He opened the tent flap and revealed the bed of loam. "Keep your bishop and priests away, sire."

  What Arthor beheld next, he would remember all the remaining nights of his life. Lot climbed into the wagon, thrust his blade into the loam, dug down, and extracted from the clotted earth a human head, its severed neck bloodless, its throat pipes pulsing, mouth snarling, spitting out crumbs of dirt.

  Its eyes glared wide. "Morgeu the Fey is in hell!" the hacked-off head screamed before Lot exposed it to the horizontal rays of sunlight. "Morgeu lives in hell!"

  The vampyre shrieked as its face slithered away under the scarlet light, running waxen from its skull in a sticky spill of melted flesh and syrups.

  This Earthly Star

  Skuld led Rex Mundi down from the rusted Seat of the Slain, across the mesa of ferric rock and scattered bones, and over albino ridges of sand that encircled the high throne. The tall, bestial man held the wizard's cap filled nearly to overflowing with gems, while the child gripped the hem of his robe and pulled him along.

  Why ith that plathe called the Theat of the Thlain?

  "From there, All-Father can see into all worlds," the young girl blithely replied, stepping lightly through the white, ashen sand. "He sees beyond the lives of people and gods to the time when all has passed away. This gives him peace to know that all is temporary. What is victory, what is defeat when all that lives is slain?"

  "You see!" Azael shouted, taking command of Rex Mundi's throat. "All is futile! I've been telling you that from the first! The Fire Lords are crazy to try to make anything of this mess. It's going nowhere. Give up your light. Stop burning. Accept the dark and the cold. That is what is real."

  "Shh!" Skuld held a finger to her lips. "If any of the Asa or Vana see you, your plan to escape won't work. Be quiet!"

  "Be realistic, I'm saying," Azael went on in a softer but no less irate nagging tone. "All life is doomed. The stars will burn out, the galaxies blear away. All that persists is darkness and cold. Get used to it. Stop this senseless running after light and warmth. It cannot last. If we wanted light and warmth we should have stayed in heaven where we belong."

  Give me back our voice, Merlin demanded. I must speak with Skuld.

  "You have something more important to say, Lailoken?" Azael pointed Rex Mundi's arm to the steep, scrabbly rock ledge they approached and the black abyss beyond, in which floated the azure crescent of Earth. "This earthly star will not long endure. That is what Skuld has been telling us. Look at God. She is the one we followed out here. What is She doing? Dancing with microbes! She's crazy! We should never have followed Her in the first place."

  Dog ashes! Merlin thought with all his might, and the demon went silent. The wizard forced his will to speak, "Skuld, you said you wanted to thank me for this gift from the Dragon's hoard. You can thank me by showing me where my body is. Will you do that?"

  The child took the heavy hat of gems, and her shoulders sagged with their weight. "I will scatter the gems on the other side of Raven's Branch, as we agreed." She smiled up at Rex Mundi's round, simian eyes. "When I'm done, I will drop your hat so that it falls to where your own body is. Use the magic in your robe to find your hat—and you will find your own flesh. Now go."

  But how? There ith no thtairway down! And no woc to cawy uth!

  "The way down is easier than the way up—just jump!" She turned and pushed her back against Rex Mundi, striking him with surprising force.

  Into the starflung abyss, he fell, robes snapping, arms outstretched, mouth and eyes wide with fright.

  The Wizard's Hat

  Cei and the priest sat on the curb of a hilltop street overlooking the field of miracles, where metal ships lofted and landed and horseless wagons darted about, conveying cargo.

  Backs leaning against an iron stanchion, basking in a gutterful of streetlight, they craned their necks to stare at the lamp overhead. The priest laboriously began to explain electricity.

  "Say no more, father." Cei shook his brutish head, confounded. "I understand not at all the smithy's secrets, the mason's trade, the carpenter's skills of my own world—what hope I can grasp hell's machinery?"

  "You're not in hell, son." The priest smiled, bloodshot eyes wincing with the pulsebeat of a headache, and he wished he had brought his silver flask with him. "This is your Britain—of a future time. You are from my past."

  Cei mulled this over.

  "How came you here?" the priest inquired, rubbing his brow.

  "Morgeu the Fey cast me into the pit." He shuddered to remember, and his eyes looked to the gutter and a pierced sewer lid. "The gatekeepers took from me the talismans Lot vouchsafed me. For that—for that alone—I should be damned."

  "Talismans?" The priest pinched the numb flesh above his nose. "Gatekeepers? I don't understand."

  "The sentinels at the gates of hell, father." Cei stared hard at the glazed rosette of lamplight on the macadam. "I begged from them a way out of the pit. To urge them speak, I gave them the talismans that Lot gave me—" His voice cracked, and when he looked to the priest, his blue eyes brimmed with tears and inconsolable sorrow. "They are talismans woven from the shorn hair of his sons—Gawain and Gareth—strong, good lads, innocent boys who should not have to die—but for my craven act."

  "You believe they have to die because you gave their hair to the gatekeepers of hell?" The priest frowned with incomprehension.

  "I am a Christian warrior," Cei spoke through gnashed teeth. "I know naught of magic. But I know enough not to give hell's denizens hair of the living. I've doomed those boys. I know that."

  A shadow interrupted the amber glow of the streetlamp, and a soft object fell with a muffled thump onto the street. Cei picked it up and held the crumpled thing to the light, exposing a dark blue fabric embroidered with symbols of fine, crimson stitchwork.

  "What is it?" the priest asked, pulling himself upright.

  Cei unfolded it to a wide-brimmed, conical hat. "Why—it's Merlin's hat!" From within the folds, a bright object rolled into the warrior's hand—a cut diamond big as his thumb.

  King Arthor in Londinium

  Through Bishopsgate with Bedevere to one side, a bishop to the other, and a small retinue of mounted archers behind him, King Arthor rode a stallion into Londinium. Lot had advised him not to go. Better to send a legate to review the terms offered by King Wesc, the Celt had advised. But Arthor felt stung by what Eufrasia had told him weeks before. He needed to demonstrate to himself that he was the same bold leader who had bravely saved her from Guthlac.

  Multitudes jammed the streets to see the boy-king who had successfully repelled Wolf Warriors and the Riders of the North Wind and who had cleared the hinterlands of storm raiders and brigands. Bedevere drew the mounted archers forward into a riding wedge to clear the crowds, while he vigorously scanned for assassins.

  Instead of meeting the young monarch at the gate, as befitted Arthor's royal status, the magister militum asserted his local authority by awaiting his guest at the governor's palace.

  The long ride to the riverside palace amazed Arthor, for he had never before been received so boisterously. In the strenuous throng of cheering faces, some throwing the first purple crocus blossoms of March, others with their children on their shoulders, he sensed for the first time the legend of his deeds.

  Hearing the roaring horde, Severus Syrax regretted not meeting the boy outside the city and bustling him quickly to the palace. He decided to avoid any public glimpse of their meeting and installed himself in the throne room with Bors Bona and Count Platorius.

  The archbishop and his flock of priests scurried to intercept Arthor's bishop and to permit a less formal encounter. When the king entered, he came accompanied only by his steward, a one-armed man with an aristocrat's hauteur.

  Co
unt Platorius had not attended the Camelot festival and had not seen Arthor before. Though he had heard that the pretender to the throne was young, he gaped with open surprise at the beardless boy who approached the governor's marble throne.

  Big and long of shoulder as a farmer's son, the tall youth had the easy, long stride of one accustomed to armor and a sword at his side. But his milk-smooth complexion, rose-tinged cheeks, and ingenuous amber eyes that opened wider to take in the sights of the palace lent him the aspect of an amazed altar boy.

  "Arthor, welcome to Londinium." The magister militum presented his onyx thumb ring, symbol of his authority and waited for Arthor to acknowledge it by touching it to his brow or at least nodding.

  The steward stopped Arthor from responding with a stern glance and stepped forward to speak for his king. "The high king of Britain has presented himself to review the terms for peace offered by King Wesc of the Foederatus. You will show us to our quarters, where we will freshen ourselves from our journey. On the morrow, you will present the foresaid terms to us for our consideration. Also—" Bedevere moved his haughty stare to Count Platorius and Bors Bona, "your king has come in person to receive your pledges."

  The Unnamable Thing of Beauty

  Gorlois saw through the darkness to the vaulted heights of the asylum for the wicked dead. The damned pressed together against iron bars, reaching for the rays that shone from his eyes. Beyond them, he glimpsed hell's floor, crowded with muttersome gangs of shadowshapes.

  "Not that way, father." Morgeu turned him by his shoulders and pointed his strong gaze away from the tiered grottoes and fuming crevices. He found again the glistening trail, like a snail's path, through the tenebrous distances. Soon, they passed beneath an old steel bridge, past the rich odors of a lumber-yard and an abattoir, along the metal tracks of a switching yard. "Do you see him yet? We must find him soon. My sons' lives are at stake!"

  A freight train hurtled out of a tunnel and slashed through their empty shapes, its racket shaking trestles and gravel beds but not slowing the progress of the enchantress and her guide. Looking ahead for the shining trace that would lead to Cei, Gorlois turned his head against the hoving blur of the train and gazed beyond their quarry, farther into time, to where a glare radiant as the sun silhouetted a city of towers and spires.

  For one white instant, the very fabric of the Furor's vision ripped apart, and Gorlois witnessed a loveliness of immaculate void that filled him with joy. He sat down on the rail with the soot-colored freight cars slashing through him. Then, the indescribable moment passed.

  Angels spiraled in the expanding rush of light as the glass faces of the silhouetted towers erupted and their skeletal girders melted. A columnar upswelling of fireclouds and clotted plasma pulled long cords of lightning out of the ground into a burning cloud that swelled like a behemoth tree of fire.

  "What am I seeing?" Gorlois groaned. "Oh, daughter—"

  "Steady yourself." Morgeu pulled Gorlois to his feet. "You peered too far ahead, into apocalypse."

  "Apocalypse?" Gorlois reeled. "It is true?"

  "What is true of yet to be?" With a toss of her head, Morgeu lifted the red curls that had fallen across her small black eyes.

  "I saw angels dancing in a light hotter than the sun!" Gorlois clutched at his daughter. "And I saw—I saw something so lovely—for one instant, so lovely—in the white light—"

  "The Unnamable Thing of Beauty." Morgeu placed a comforting arm about her father's shoulders. "I am sorry you had to see That."

  "What? What was it that I saw?" His silver eyes brimmed.

  "I don't know. The angels worship It. It comes and goes as It will." Morgeu strolled with Gorlois toward a skyline of chimneys unraveling black smoke. "I've seen it in trance now and then. It is elusive. Ignore It. You will be happier."

  Selwa

  She had the physical appearance of a minor Roman deity, a nymph who served the gods at the last station of night, for her swarthy beauty projected aspects of forthcoming night: her eyes, oblique and jet, shone with dark clarity, an astute intelligence more sly than shy. Her flawless skin possessed the dusky tones of rare spice, brown as nutmeg, glowing from within as if pure copper shone through from underneath. Her long sable curls gleamed like shadows of a moonless heaven. And her lithe, long body, robed in the sheerest Ethiopian silks, moved and posed with a benighted pagan sensuousness as though the Son's light had never risen.

  Born in Alexandria to a cousin of the magister militum, a shipping magnate of the extensive and wealthy Syrax family, Selwa had been educated in all the arts and sciences, rational and esoteric, by the finest Greek tutors. Multilingual, she had served her venerable family at numerous houses of her family's far-flung dynasty, from Aleppo to Zaqaziq. She went wherever her father and his brothers dispatched her and always for the same purpose, to protect her family's holdings with her wiles, sometimes using her beguiling beauty to glean information from rivals, othertimes to get close enough to terminate rivalries permanently.

  Severus Syrax had sent for her to remove the chief obstacle to his lucrative trade agreement with the Foederatus: a fiercely idealistic boy-king, who cherished the ludicrous dream of uniting the rustic Britons and Celts. The dither that this child monarch had provoked from her Uncle Severus had made her laugh, an uncommon pleasure among her usually grim and dangerous assignments. The sight of her uncle squirming with indignation and shrilly shouting, "The insolence! The insolence of that child!" had made the cold, storm-tossed sea voyage from Bordeaux worth the misery. "The insolence! Behaving as if he were my king!"

  Severus Syrax sent Selwa to the boy's suite to ensure that the insolence ended once and for all. To accomplish this simple deed, she wore a sturdy bezoar ring spring-loaded with a fine gold needle sticky with poison.

  At the young king's door, she presented herself without guile as the niece of the magister militum. She had toured the Holy Land recently and wished to share her observations with the new sovereign.

  Once past the archers in their black leather corselets, she found him sitting on the terrace, dressed as brutishly as his archers but with a gold chaplet of laurel leaves atop his brown hair, hair swept straight back and cropped short above his ears like a farmer. He had propped his boots on the balustrade and with sleep-lidded gaze overlooked the tile roofs of the river city. Large of frame, he was yet a boy, as uncle had said.

  Before she could go to him, a one-armed soldier blocked her way. Dressed simply and immaculately in crisp blue tunic, a short sword at his hip, he inspected her with a genial smile on his thin lips and a hint of disdain in his arched nostrils and flexed eyebrows.

  "A bezoar ring!" With a swift, deft swipe of his fingers, he slipped the ring from her and held it up to his discerning eye. "This particular bezoar stone has been regurgitated from a camel. A legendary but alas ineffective antidote to poison. Ah, but my lady, I assure you on my life, there are no poisons to infect you here. Please, do come in. The king is most eager to hear of your travels in the Holy Land."

  Reckoning

  Night shone feverishly with the luminosity from blazing chimneys and sweeping rays of silver light crisscrossing off the field of miracles. In the salmon-orange glow of the streetlamp on the cobbled road between derelict buildings, Cei inspected the wizard's hat. It smelled of wild thyme, a rhyme with the pastoral world that he had lost when Morgeu delivered him to these burning mills. "How came Merlin's hat here?"

  "I need a drink," the priest moaned in his own language.

  Cei held the large diamond to the lamplight and saw within its facets Merlin's bareheaded visage, sharp-boned, eyes gleaming deep in their skull sockets. And behind him—Morgeu the Fey, her round moon face set with the black, pearl-bead eyes of a snake. He dropped the diamond with a shout, and it bounced off a cobble and spun toward the sewer grating.

  The priest reflexively bent and scooped up the gem with both hands. Unlike the ghost, this object had solidity. In his palms, it felt warm, like a bird's heat. Immediately, the ha
mmered pain of his headache lifted away—and the craving went with it, the thirst for more drink, the dismantling of his will, the fear of love, the flight of hope—all gone. He grinned at Cei. "I am whole again! Merlin's magic has healed me!"

  The large warrior squatted before him, hat in hand, amazed to behold the priest's face transfigured, the blood-wires untangled from his eyes, all puffiness deflated from his jowls. "What wonder is this? I am confounded by all that has happened."

  "Cei!" Morgeu's voice shouted from the dark of the lane beside a corrugated warehouse. "Cei! Do not run from me or it will go worse with you!"

  "Worse?" Cei stood, vibrant with rage and confusion. "Worse than hell, Morgeu? Come, witch! I want my reckoning with you!"

  Onto the rent pavement, Morgeu strode—and, behind her, Merlin, his forked beard and silver hair glowing in the slim light of the nightheld street. "What is that in your hand?"

  Cei flapped the wizard's hat and shook his fist. "Come, witch! Come along, wizard, and take back your hat."

  Morgeu ran across the street, her scarlet robes fluttering, her frazzled red hair bouncing, and snatched the hat from his hand. "Where did this come from?"

  "You know not?" Cei's wrathful face squeezed even tighter with incredulity. "From him!" He pointed at Merlin, who leaned sideways against a lamp stanchion, looking disordered and mad.

  "You are coming with me, Cei." Morgeu tugged at his big arm. "We will retrieve the talismans of hair you gave the messengers. Do you understand me? My sons will not die for your fear."

  Cei trembled, fist upraised. "I've a mind to box your ears!"

  Morgeu snarled at him—then noticed the priest with the shining diamond in his hands. She turned from Cei and asked the strange priest holding the Dragon's gem, "Who are you?"