Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Page 16

  Neither she nor Shay had jumped into Trig and Mychael’s short-lived battle, and not because of a sense of divided loyalties. They’d both been too wide-eyed and dumbstruck to move before it had all been over. If she was to stay in Rhuddlan’s good graces, ’twas probably best to distance herself from the archer. Yet he’d read the walls with his hand. In all her life, she’d seen only Nemeton do such a thing.

  He hadn’t spoken to Trig of her scent-blindness, another point in his favor. Below Mor Sarff, they had all been too intent on reaching the surface, and after Mor Sarff, Mychael and the captain had not spoken a word to each other. Bad blood had been spilled there, for certes. Rhuddlan would want to speak to Mychael, but Rhuddlan was headed back to the deep dark before dawn. Moira had taken Mychael up almost immediately when they’d finally surfaced, and Llynya hadn’t seen him since, neither at the meeting nor the hearthfire. If he slept, he was sleeping through his last chance to expose her. She could only hope it so.

  Strange man, to turn so suddenly fierce. She’d thought him a sapling in Crai Force cavern, but no sapling could have daunted Trig, and no sapling could have made the run from the deep dark to Merioneth in two and a half days with two wounded and one dead. They might have lost Math without that speed. Aye, Mychael could make a powerful ally, but there were definite dangers to weigh.

  Upon reaching the apple grove, she swung herself up into the nearest tree. Immediately, a familiar and comforting lightness suffused her limbs. She was home. The leaves in her hair fluttered ever so slightly, and a smile came to her mouth. Her ears twitched. These trees remembered her from the spring. They had been a haven for her then, awash in blossoms and open to her tears, cradling her in boughs laden with fresh green leaves. Before Aedyth had taken her to Deri, she’d spent her days sheltered in their shadow-dappled branches.

  Her tears were gone now, and the blossoms had yielded fruit, moonlight limned apples, their golden roundness edged with crescents of lunar silver. She picked one and took a bite, her teeth sinking into sweet, crisp flesh. Moira had told her the trees had been planted down through the ages by the Anglesey priestesses. They had refined the juice of the apples to a love potion of unsurpassed potency and used it to bind men to them in times of danger. At least a garrison’s worth of men, so one story went, had been lured to the coast by songs of enchantment set loose upon the wind. After filling the mortals with magic drink, the women had marched off with them to do battle with a monstrous creature. Few of the men had survived the slaying of the beast, according to Moira, but those valorous few had lived the rest of their lives in peace and plenty, blessed by the favor of the priestesses.

  No such potions worked on tylwyth teg, nor did any such poisons, priestess brewed or nay. If it grew upon the earth, it flowed through elfin blood. ’Twas only the damnable desert brew that laid them low. Llynya took another bite of apple and began making her way deeper into the grove, alighting from one bough to the next, heading for the middle of the fruitful copse. In the tallest tree’s topmost branches, she made her bed and settled in to watch the sky and let the moon’s light soak into her pores.

  The first keening moan was no more than the barest whisper on the breeze, an underlying dissonance more than an actual sound. She might have missed it except for a tingling in the tips of her ears.

  She rolled over and brushed aside a veil of leaves, looking to the southern end of the bailey from whence it had come. Or so she thought. When next she heard it, ’twas from over the great wall, clearer, louder, yet faint with distance. Pushing to her feet, she balanced herself between one branch and the next and looked out to the sea. Long breakers were rolling in toward the cliffs, their white froth shining in the moonlight. Farther out, on the edge of the horizon, almost past where the curve of the earth cut its scythe across the sky, a thin streak of green fire edged in red flickered in the night. Then all was gone, both the keening cry and the colored lights, and naught remained to delineate where the blackness of the heavens sank into the last reaches of the ocean.

  A movement on the wall drew her gaze, and she looked to find Naas staring out to sea, her aged fingers making some unknown sign. ’Twas no warding like Llynya had ever seen. On each hand the woman’s third finger was bent into the palm, while her little finger came forward to make a circle with her thumb. Naas was extending her hands out as if in offering—but an offering of what? And to whom?

  ~ ~ ~

  Caradoc and the skraelings had marched for two days, through tunnels and caves that grew ever higher and wider, but no better smelling, despite the stacks of oak planks filling some of the caverns. An odd cache, he’d thought, until farther caverns had revealed their even odder purpose. The skraelings were building ships.

  Other skraelpacks had joined them from out of connecting passageways, some carrying bags of rivets and spikes, or thick skeins of withies for lashing. They’d made their first camp in a cave filled with the skeletal beginnings of half a dozen halvskips, and the troop had grown to a hundred strong.

  And still they came. That morn, a single portal had disgorged enough of the beastly creatures to double their ranks, and they had doubled again at the next cavern. Somewhere along the trail, wolves had joined the horde. Caradoc could see them sliding like shadows through the pack of marching feet, dark wisps of terror with far less beastly-looking men at their sides. He thought he recognized one or two men from Balor, but the crush of the crowd made it impossible for him to get more than a fleeting glimpse of any one face.

  There were more than enough soldiers to squash the Quicken-tree. Yet even more came, pouring out of every hole in the dark, until he began to think there were too many.

  The growing corps bristled with halberds, pikes, and lances. Greenlings favored bows and short swords. Knives and daggers there were aplenty, and staves, iron-spiked caltrops, war flails, axes, and hammers. The clash of metal and thumping of feet created a raucous din, and soon the jostling in the narrower passages turned into shoving matches. One such test of wills ended in a grunt and the collapse of a white-faced skraeling to Caradoc’s right. Without a pause, the man was trampled beneath the hobnailed boots of the marching soldiers, but not before Caradoc saw the foot-long gash in his side and Igorot wiping his bloody blade across the front of his hauberk.

  A quick signal passed between the greenlings, and Lacknose Dock, still in the lead, shouted above the burgeoning roar, “Grazch! Kle, drak, dhon, vange!”

  The count was taken up and down the lines—“Grazch! Kle, drak, dhon, vange! Kle, drak, dhon, vange!”—and order was restored, with feet marching in rhythm and the strident noise of skraeling voices grating on Caradoc’s ears.

  Piles of fresh bones and hollows afloat with rancid offal in Rastaban’s outlying tunnels warned him of even more skraelings to come. His gut churned into an angry knot. He’d been played false. He’d asked for a scant hundred skraelings, a garrison to replace the one he’d lost, and they’d brought a whole friggin` army down on his head.

  The wind picked up as they neared the triple arch entrance to Rastaban, carrying the sound of hundreds—nay, thousands—more voices raised in the skraeling war chant. “Kle, drak, dhon, vange! Har maukte! Har!”

  He tried to slow his pace, every instinct he had telling him to retreat, but Lacknose Dock grabbed him with a viselike grip and hauled him forward into the shadows of the archway’s pillars. Fear overtook him then, and he tried to break free. Lacknose did but tighten his hold, aided by Igorot’s mighty hands. ’Twas thus he entered the Eye of the Dragon, bound on one side by a metal-nosed greenling, and on the other by a burnt and branded grayling.

  The wretched scent of burning flesh assaulted him in the cavern, a redolent wave of carnage so strong it near put him to his knees. Thousands of skraelings filled the vastness of Rastaban, all of them stomping in rhythm to the chant. The ground trembled beneath Caradoc’s feet. The sound crashed into the walls. The air itself shook with the force of the cries—and at the far end of it all, ten times the girth of any skrae
ling in the cavern, sat Slott.

  Slott of the Thousand Skulls—human skulls and animal skulls, each one of the little bone-white things braided into the giant’s hair, hundreds of calcified ribands twining through wiry locks and weighing down his beard.

  Caradoc faltered at the sight. A ring of fiery braziers encircled the dais where the monstrous beast overflowed his huge stone throne. Against Caradoc’s will, and over the harsh sounds of his threats, Lacknose Dock and Igorot half-carried, half-dragged him down a great flight of stairs into the cavern hall. As they crossed to the dais, the chant died down into murmurs, and then silence. The only sound to be heard was the clink and clatter of the thousand skulls as Slott swung his big head down to spy him with a milky black eye.

  The giant was hunched in his chair, his arms reaching past his knees. His knuckles scraped the ground. Hairs the size of bristles stuck out of the backs of his hands. A matted brownish black pelt covered the rest of him, including his long, twitching tail. Slott wore no shirt or tunic or shoes, only a vest made of stretched skins, some furred, some pale and hairless, some gray... some tinged green. Salt crusted his beard and made white streaks on his skin and clothes. Strings of bladdery kelp clung to the skulls twisted into the greasy strands of his hair.

  His face was broad and smashed-looking, his lips overly large and glistening with drool. Warts the size of potatoes clustered along the curve of his nose—and Caradoc realized with a bolt of terror that he had seen the beast before. Aye, he’d seen Slott in the wormhole, where futures were written and pasts collided, where all of time stretched out in an infinite banquet, where the histories of all who had ever been or who would ever be ringed the abyss in a golden swirl. The giant had been there, a fleeting image stretched thin by the speed of the light running through it, but there nonetheless, too large to remain unseen in the chaos of faces, too horrific to forget.

  “Bow to the Troll King,” Lacknose Dock growled, pushing Caradoc to his knees. “Abase yourself and swear fealty to your lord. Now!”

  “My lord,” he gasped, encouraged by the twist Igorot gave his arm. Everything was wrong. Wrong. He was to have no master. None. The power of the wormhole was to be his.

  “Swear by the Stones of Inishwrath,” Lacknose Dock demanded, his nose flashing silver in the torchlight.

  “By the Stones.”

  “By the Stones!” Slott roared in a voice so harsh it near took the skin off Caradoc’s face. He drew back in the wake of the Troll King’s breath, choked by stench and fear.

  The skulls rattled and jangled as Slott turned his head and bore down on him with his keener eye.

  “Caerlon!” the king called, and from the other side of the dais a tall greenling strode forth, fair of face and with no long, sharp teeth, no long, sharp claws.

  “By the Stones, lord,” Caerlon said, dropping down onto one knee, his short brown hair falling across his forehead.

  “Am I not risen from the smoke and the rock?” Slott asked, each word sounding like a sloppy tumble of bricks caught in a backwash.

  “Aye, lord. I took the smoke myself to Inishwrath to break the power that steeped the king’s host in deathlike sleep. To unbind the dire enchanting art of the spell that was cast in the Wars. To set you free, lord.”

  “Why?”

  “When the smoke arises the skraelings shall have a king. Such has it been told since the Wars.”

  “And what would a king have?”

  “Glory, sire.”

  “And what is the greatest glory?” The giant reached out and with two huge fingers pinched the copper stripe running through Caradoc’s hair.

  “Time, milord,” Caerlon said, rising with a short bow and putting on a thick leather glove that had been hanging from his belt.

  Slott handed the greenling his scepter, and upon noting it, Caradoc felt his last shred of hope seep out of his pores. ’Twas a thick shaft of iron with a zig-zag bolt of lightning welded to the pommel. ’Twas the brand, the instrument of carnage.

  Caerlon turned to the nearest brazier, and Slott pushed his face closer to Caradoc’s, each of his stinking breaths like a cold north wind sent to freeze a man’s bones. Even Igorot and Lacknose Dock backed off, though they still held him.

  “Would you steal my glory, skraeling?”

  “I—I am n-no s-skraeling,” Caradoc stammered, feeling a wet warmth run down his leg.

  Slott leaned even closer, and a dark flame came to light in his eyes. “You soon will be,” he promised in his guttural rasp, “and whatever you’ve taken, you will give back to me tenfold.”

  Caerlon turned from the brazier, his gloved hand holding the red-hot scepter. A wan smile crossed his lips.

  Caradoc began to struggle, desperately. Igorot and Lacknose Dock seized him with renewed force, forcing him to the floor, his arm outstretched in homage to his lord.

  The brand was pressed onto his skin, and the stones of Rastaban echoed with his screams. Then he heard nothing.

  “Wyrm-master,” Slott said contemptuously, rolling the ragged, little man over onto his back. He smelled of roasting meat. “I should eat him.”

  “No, milord,” Caerlon advised, kneeling beside the prostrate form. “Not this one. See?” He lifted a swath of hair, and copper strands fell through his fingers along with the gold. “He is as was long ago foretold, Troll’s Bane, born of Merioneth, a golden-haired youth with an auburn blaze marking him as a traveler, a—”

  Slott grunted. “He is not so young.”

  “ ’Tis a relative thing, sire. For the span of his life, nay, he’s not so young, but compared with your great years, he is but a babe.”

  Slott accepted the explanation with another grunt, and Caerlon continued.

  “—with the strength of a thousand men—”

  “He’s lame,” Slott interrupted again.

  Caerlon released the slightest breath of exasperation.

  “Aye, milord. He’s lame, but I had some salve given to him, and by all accounts he’s getting better.”

  Slott waved him on.

  “—and the knowledge of time.” Caerlon shook the copper strands. “Such is the heir to Stept Agah’s sword, the Magia Blade. We have him, milord, and now he’s sworn to you.”

  “Why not just eat him and be done with it?” Slott licked a finger and smudged it around on the man’s cheek before sticking it back in his mouth.

  Caerlon positioned himself more carefully between his king and the unconscious morsel.

  “He has worth, sire, ever so much more worth than supper.” He saw the doubt in Slott’s keen eye, and in the milky one too. “Revenge, milord,” he quickly elaborated. “Is not your lady-wife still frozen in stone on the shores of Inishwrath?”

  “Aye.” Slott’s brow furrowed and lowered into a hairy ridge.

  “With this one, victory will be ours, sire. Whatever knowledge he has taken from the weir, whatever power comes to him through the dragons, can be ours. With the son of Merioneth to mark the way, we can go back, the whole horde, and win the Wars of Enchantment.”

  Understanding dawned in the Troll King’s gaze. “I am only half-awake, Caerlon,” he admitted.

  “I know, sire. But we have returned to Rastaban, and the ways are open into the deep dark. The damson shafts are breaking, and the fell smoke of Dharkkum rises from its ancient prison, the promise of darkness for a dark lord. And is that not you, sire?”

  “Aye,” Slott agreed in a low grumble. “I am the darkest lord.”

  “And dear dark lord, victory shall be yours. Whoever wields the blade rules the dragons, and now you rule the blade-wielder. Have him hold the dragons in check. Let Dharkkum destroy what it will and wipe the earth clean of our enemies. Even now the Sha-shakrieg venture forth, the wretched betrayers, and Light-elves search the deep dark for broken damson crystals. We shall have them all, lord, the spider people and the Quicken-tree, the Ebiurrane, the Daur, the Kings Wood, the Red-leaf, the Wydden, and the wicked Yr Is-ddwfn. All who denied us before shall die in darkness.�
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  “What of us?” the troll interjected, looking doubtful.

  “We won’t be here, milord,” Caerlon said, brightening with a winsome smile. “We’ll be in the past, fighting the Wars, and when this day dawns again, we’ll unleash the dragons on our side, to clear the world for the Troll King’s Dynasty.”

  Slott leveled his gaze on Caerlon. “How long was I asleep on Inishwrath?”

  “Five hundred years, sire.”

  “And you woke me because you saw hope in this?” He poked at the golden-haired man.

  Caerlon hesitated but a moment, then said, “And in the aetheling.”

  Slott’s gaze instantly sharpened. “Aetheling?”

  “Aye. From Yr Is-ddwfn. All the signs are here, milord. And with Dharkkum to come, and the blade to be reforged—”

  “Why would they send an aetheling now?” Slott interrupted.

  “To better battle the darkness, Lord,” Caerlon supposed. “To stand by the bloodling son of the priestess line and call forth the starlight. To fight by the side of the one who wields the blade, or mayhaps to take the blade herself and bring the dragons to heel in the doorways of time. Mayhaps they make a bid for the future, sire, just as we must make our bid for the past.”

  A bid for the past. Caerlon made it sound so simple, Slott thought. Blades and dragons, aethelings and priestesses. Except it wasn’t simple. Slott remembered that well enough, how things had gone awry in the Wars. How the lines had broken and the Quicken-tree had gotten through to Deseillign. How the Lady Queen’s house had been destroyed and the Sha-shakrieg had deserted in droves to save her. How the Dockalfar had all gone mad and left him with nothing but skraelings and his own too few trolls to carry on the fight.

  How the Prydion Magi, aided by their Yr Is-ddwfn aethelings, had turned him and those he loved into stone.