Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Read online

  For all he’d found, though, the nest beneath Ynys Enlli was an abandoned one, useless for anyone’s attempt to claim immortality. Still it seemed Nennius had not been denied. Not yet. The wheels of time and life had turned and delivered upon his doorstep a bit of flotsam from the sea of humanity, dear Gruffudd, who had not only seen the mighty worms, but the scrying pool of the mists and the damson cliffs with their amethystine hues reflecting off the waves of Mor Sarff, the Serpent Sea.

  ’Twas there, beneath Merioneth, not Ynys Enlli, that all the pieces to man’s most beguiling puzzle could be found. If the worms had made a hole, salvation was within his grasp.

  Nennius shifted his gaze to the stacks of books on the table. The volumes were steeped to an unintelligible brew with arcana; ’twas both the beauty and the beastliness of them. Only long hours and diligence had led him through their strangely ciphered musings, maps, and mystic aphorisms. Only quicksilver brilliance had enabled him to piece their secrets together into the whole of man’s most eternal yearning, the search for life everlasting, God’s promise to the faithful.

  The boundaries of time, the books had finally revealed, could be transcended through a passage that had been worked into a feverish pitch of energy by the worms. Ipso facto, the wormholes were tunnels through time. Being able to control the placement of one’s self in time was the first step on the endless journey of immortality, for those so inclined. Nennius’s desire was far less profane, or profound, though ’til now it had seemed no less unattainable. There were other steps to be taken in turn, and multitudes of missteps to destroy the heedless.

  Helebore had never understood the last. The monk had been far too eager to make the transition. No doubt ’twas how he’d gotten himself killed—and Gruffudd had seen it all, had seen living worms in their caverns. Helebore had sworn the same, beneath Ynys Enlli no less, but that one had always lusted after glory with lies, claiming also to have seen the Archangel Michael and to have had a personal visitation from St. Jerome. Gruffudd, on the other hand, while possibly delusional, was far too terrified to lie.

  “There is no reason for fear, my son,” he said, returning his attention to the guardsman. “All creatures were put upon the earth by our Lord, and they are in His power. Did He not make Leviathan and yet tell the day of the serpent’s destruction in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah?” At Gruffudd’s hesitant nod, he quoted, “‘In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, that twisting sea serpent, and he shall slay the monster that is in the deep.’ Verily, your serpents do not lie outside the reach of the Lord’s judgment, and you have naught to fear from Helebore’s sins, for they are his alone.”

  “Aye, Father, I believe ye. But—but I am not so pure as to be without my own sins.” Doubt lent a quaver to Gruffudd’s words.

  “No man is,” Nennius reassured him. “But how else did you survive when so many perished, if not for the hand of God reaching out to help you in your hour of need?”

  Gruffudd gave him a blank look. “I hid,” he said. “Hared up the beach and slipped into one o’ the headland caves, ’cept it weren’t no cave a’tall, but more of a tunnel, smooth and shimmerin’ with a thick layer of abalone mother o’pearl, all purplish and green.”

  “A tunnel?” Nennius’s interest sharpened. “To where?”

  “To wherever the light was comin’ from, big, bright flashes of it and thunder too. ’Twas at the far end of it that I saw Helebore meet his death, his screams echoing up and down and rollin’ over me, ’til I can’t hardly hear anything else even now. Ye must help me, Father. Ye must.”

  A flush of rare exultation quickened in Nennius’s veins. Mellt a tharanau—thunder and lightning. There was no more auspicious portent of a live wormhole, of a time weir.

  “You will have sanctuary here for as long as you live. I swear this before God,” he vowed, wiping Gruffudd’s brow again. “But I must know more about this place that you fear. With knowledge I can protect you from it and the beasts that reside there.”

  And so Gruffudd told of paths and twists and turns, of the leech’s chambers below the great hall of Balor, of caves that opened onto the cliff face above the Irish Sea, and of those deeper caverns where no man was safe. All the while he spoke, Nennius ministered to him with the damp cloth and soothing words.

  “ ’Twas a fortnight, mayhaps more, that I was’t lost afore I stumbled out onto a hill that had the sun above it. ’Tweren’t too far from Balor, and I thoughts to make my way back, but— Do ye have some wine, Father?” Gruffudd asked in an abrupt aside. “Me throat’s awful dry, and I feel like a fever’s takin’ hold of me.”

  Indeed, the man was warm... and bound to grow warmer, Nennius thought, getting to his feet. As he passed the table, he reached out and trailed his fingers over one of the books, his prize, stolen from this very monastery. ’Twas bound in age-darkened blue leather affixed to oak boards. The leather was covered with runes worked in gold leaf, naming it as the Prydion Cal Le. Its final pages were a veritable farrago of heresy and alchemy penned by a man who called himself simply a bard from Brittany, but who in truth was far more than a mere bard. Nemeton was his name, and his pages in the latter section of the Blue Book of the Magi (Nemeton’s translation of the title) told of Druids and wild folk, and of stars far beyond this time. All fascinating enough, especially the astral references, but the true wealth of the tome lay in its earlier sections where Nemeton had translated the much older runic script into Latin, and in places, also into Welsh. ’Twas in those older leaves that Nennius had come closest to discovering the origins and the dwelling place of the pryf. One passage in particular had held him at Ynys Enlli for two long years, speaking as it did of an abyss that lay at the heart of a rocky isle in a northern sea—for such was the island on which he’d found the book. The passage had gone on to tell of “strange and wondrous occurrences of a terrifying nature” taking place in the abyss, thus giving the only firsthand description he’d found of a wormhole.

  And Gruffudd, dear, doomed Gruffudd, had just given him the same description with the addition of shimmering tunnels.

  Nennius opened the book and watched the pages fall into their familiar, worn place. His fingers trailed down the lines of script, caressing the words written by a long-dead mage in a long-forgotten time:

  Seven years past, the dragon spawn breached the mere and descended into its depths. Our fears that the swirling activities of the larvae—for such has been their wont in the mere—would disturb the crystal seals set in the earth against the scourge of the Dark Age have proven true. Yet this is not the terror, both wondrous and fell, that has brought me to these pages. Four times a Prydion Mage has descended into the abyss with the power of the ages at hand to bring the larvae out of the mere and thus secure our safety. Four times the mage has failed in the clash of battle and been lost, never to be seen again.

  Today one of the lost magi returned, Nemeton. More dead than alive, he crawled forth from the rocky edge of the abyss amidst a cataclysm of thunder and lightning. He lies now in the Dragon’s Mouth and tells a tale of a path trod through the stars to the far reaches of the cosmos, verily to the home of darkness itself. Thus Nemeton is the first of the Prydion Magi to transcend time and heaven and mayhaps the one to bring us to our final doom, for however we may rejoice at the miraculous deed, we must also know that the way has been opened and a path marked.

  More than marked, Nennius knew. The path had been cut into the cosmos, a sucking, whip-tailed groove snaking through the endless darkness, waiting to snare any unwary traveler.

  A grimace crossed his face, and he turned away from the book with a soft curse. Kneeling by the table, he dipped a cup of water out of a bucket and returned to Gruffudd’s side. He knew nothing of dragons or Dark Age scourges and couldn’t have cared less, sounding as they did of metaphorical social hysteria for the inevitable calamities of life. But he did know of time and paths through the stars, the damned unstable things. And he�
�d learned of worms.

  Gruffudd greedily gulped the water down, spilling it into his beard and onto the paillasse.

  “How did you survive underground for a fortnight, my son, without food or drink?” Nennius asked, forcing his voice to a monotonous calm and his attention back to the man.

  “Oh, there was drink, Father—water.” The guardsman wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Water everywhere. Tricklin’ out o’ the rocks in some places and gushin’ out in others, the sweetest water a man could ever hope to find. ’Tweren’t drink that I was lacking, but food. There was’t not much beyond a few mean bites of things skitterin’ through the dark. Some of them put up a bit o’ a fight, but once’t ole Gruffudd got ’is chompers in ’em, they was done for.”

  Nennius refrained from asking what kinds of things Gruffudd had eaten. It sufficed that there was fresh water in the caves.

  “Is there more that I should know?” he asked.

  The guardsman shook his head. “I’ve told ye everything I remember and some I thought I’d forgotten. Now I’d have another cup o’ water, if you please, or ale if ye hast any?”

  “Ale it shall be.” Nennius gave him a benevolent smile and wiped the corners of the man’s mouth, his fingers closing around the cloth and squeezing, squeezing, until another drop of moisture fell on Gruffudd’s lips. The guardsman licked, and Nennius slowly rose to his feet. “Rest, my son. It will not take me long to fetch your ale from the kitchen.”

  “Bless ye, Father.” Gruffudd reached out and let his fingers graze the hem of Nennius’s robe. “Yer a saint, just as I thought ye must be for Helebore to hate ye so. Sometimes he called ye names, not just the blasphemous ones, but strange names like Corvus. Told me ’twas Latin for raven, which I thought demned odd for a priest, but now’s I’s seen ye, I know where’s he got it. It’s yer hair, isn’t it, all black like that, exceptin’ for the one stripe o’ white, and sproutin’ like a couple o’ wings off the side of yer tonsure. Aye, it’s raven black a’right.” The guardsman gave a distracted chuckle. “Blacker’n a new moon night or a whore’s—” His mouth snapped shut, and he cast a wary gaze upward.

  Nennius only smiled and made a blessing sign over the man before leaving the cell. Latin, indeed. Outside, he lifted his face to the sun. The scent of heather was on the wind, and the sound of ocean waves breaking on the island’s eastern shore. He stood for a moment, silent and waiting. When the first cry came, a gasped breath of agony, he began making his way toward a small hollow of land no more than a stone’s throw from the cell door. Gruffudd’s cries would get louder, much louder, before they ceased for all eternity, and Nennius would as soon not have his ears overly taxed by the guardsman’s death throes. There had been no help for the man’s demise. Nennius could not afford to have a lunatic running around speaking of serpents and demons and Helebore, and to have his name linked to all of it. The Culdees had been strangely skittish of late—with good reason it seemed, what with worms moving in the deep—and throwing suspected heretics off cliffs was the quickest way to ease a bit of ecclesiastical skittishness.

  The afternoon was growing late, a crispness in the air heralding the cool night to come. The summer just passing had been peculiarly long and warm with a fair balance between sunshine and rain, a fecund combination, as if the earth had drawn the sun’s rays to it more fully than in other summers, as if the land had called only the perfect measure of moisture from out of the clouds. Now he understood why. The books had told him pryf were a blessing to Earth’s gardens.

  He smiled. Worms.

  The harvest had been bountiful on Ynys Enlli and no doubt throughout Wales. ’Twould be a good year to travel, even in battle-ravaged lands. When men’s bellies were full, they were far less suspicious and far more generous, whether the request was for food, or shelter, or information.

  Purple heather and saffron gorse brushed against his robes as he walked the narrow path that led to a well-worn bench tucked into the hollow. A kelp-strewn beach stretched out below the windswept bower, welcoming the incoming tide, while across the sea the Lleyn Peninsula rose above the horizon. Nennius sat on the bench and let his gaze follow the dark rise of land to the south until it disappeared. A thousand emotions flooded through him, making him feel more alive than he had in years, as if he were pulling free from a long and arduous half sleep where the line between memories and dreams had grown dangerously thin, where the nightmares were of forgetfulness, not death.

  He’d been so close all this time. His books had not led him astray as he’d oft feared, but had held true. A land called Merioneth was there, just beyond where he could see, nearly due east according to Gruffudd, and beneath the castle keep once called Balor lay the long-sought end of his exile, the wormhole, the tunnel through time—his chance to go home.

  Enchantments

  One treasure only the fair maid took from the dragon’s trove—the double-edged favor of the beast’s untempered love.

  Chapter 1

  October 1198

  Carn Merioneth

  Merioneth, Wales

  Wolves howled in the darkness. From his vantage point on Carn Merioneth’s east wall, Rhuddlan of the Quicken-tree watched the fleet forms weave their paths through the moonlit forest. Swift and deadly, the shadows were hunting, coming down out of the mountains of Eryri to claim the land from the river to the sea. Wolves alone were naught to fear—but the wolves were not alone. Here and there, Rhuddlan caught sight of a more upright shape running with the animals. The man beside him nocked an arrow into his longbow.

  “Hold, Trig,” Rhuddlan commanded softly. He was tall and slender and wore no badge other than his bearing to proclaim his rank as king. Gray marked the pale blond of his hair and was woven into the five-strand plait on the left side of his head. A long green cloak was thrown over his shoulders.

  “Ye know what they are.” His captain’s voice held an edge of impatience. Trig was as tall as his sovereign, but broader in girth, with a squarish face bearing the scars of a long-ago war. He, too, wore a fif braid streaked through with gray.

  “Aye.” They both knew. Men were running with the wolves. The question was, Why?

  When Rhuddlan said nothing else, Trig snorted and lowered his bow. “It’ll be our heads on pikes, or worse.”

  “ ’Tis too soon to be worrying about pikes. Find your bed, if you wish. I’ll wait with Naas.”

  Trig grumbled again. “She’s been at it all night and seen naught. More ’an like, she’s gone full blind on ye.”

  Rhuddlan let him leave with his complaint unanswered. Dawn was not far off, and if Naas was to see for him, it had best be soon, or they would have to wait the month out in hopes of another clear night with a full moon.

  Behind him on the wall-walk, the old woman tended a fire of hot burning coals. She was small, a bundle of greenish gray cloak and dark gown huddled next to the flames. The brazier holding the fire had been forged of a rich alloy, giving the bronze a fey, purplish cast. The shallow rim of the pan was circled ’round with dragons in relief, all of them spouting ruby flames into billows of smoky quartz. Magic was to be done in the night. Rhuddlan but waited for the old one to pull it down out of the sky and into her cauldron.

  The last wolf disappeared into the northern woods, and Rhuddlan turned toward the upper bailey of the castle. Light from the full moon slanted long, dark shadows across the grass and the scarred remains of what had once been Balor Keep. Since taking the demesne in May, he’d had his people destroying the structures built by the previous ruler, Caradoc, the Boar of Balor, and by the Boar’s father, Gwrnach, except for the stone wall. That great defense he would leave for time and the old white-eyed woman by the fire to dismantle. He had need of it for now.

  “Naas.” He spoke her name, and the woman lifted her strange gaze. Pale irises discernible only as rims of milky luminosity were barely visible across the rising smoke. The bones beneath her age-lined skin were delicate and finely fashioned, giving her a fragile appearance. Pure deception, t
hat was, for few had Naas’s strength—and none had her singular skill with fire.

  She whispered something unintelligible, then turned and added another stick to the flames. Sparks rose with the wind and cascaded by him, a thousand brilliant stars slipping through the merlons and falling to their death on the sward.

  Trig was wrong. Naas was not blind, only too replete with the past to see beyond the memories of her race. Those memories ran through her veins and filled her eyes with visions of life from a long-ago world, a world she brought forth through burning heat and the light of the moon. Rhuddlan needed such knowledge if he was to keep the wolves from the wall. He needed to know what darkness threatened Merioneth, for the heralds of darkness were there, creeping into his woods and lapping at the shores of the River Bredd with black rot.

  Yet ’twas not the rot in his woods or the strangely mixed wolfpack they’d seen that night that stole his sleep and put Trig on edge. Dangerous though they were, the men were yet true Men; they had not been turned. Of the danger he did fear, there had been no sightings. He’d sent scouts as far north as Finn’s Road and as far south as the white horse, and none had seen sign of skraelings, the fierce and dirty beast men that were all that remained of the fell legions conjured by the Dockalfar, an ancient enemy that had once ruled the caverns below. Nor had there been any reports of disturbances in the troll fields of Inishwrath.