Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Read online

  Nay, ’twas not wildmen and wolves he feared, but things unseen yet still felt. In the sky the tension had played itself out in thunder and lightning, mellt a tharanau, a summer of storms. Nearer to earth, the air held a certain heaviness, the ground a certain softness, as if the Earth herself was giving way to some greater force. Verily, one part of the Earth had given way. In spring, after the battle to reclaim Merioneth, Mychael ab Arawn had reported the breaking of a damson shaft in the caverns. The damson shafts were pure veins of crystal set into the matrix of the Earth by the mages of old. That one would crack was a grim portent, but how grim, Rhuddlan could not judge. The crystal shafts harkened back to a time long, long before his, but not beyond the reach of Naas’s vision. To this end, he’d set the old woman to her fire. Five months past, he’d looked to another for answers. He had sent runners to the four directions in search of Ailfinn Mapp, last of the Prydion Magi. The wandering mage was e’er difficult to find, but that he’d had no word in nearly half a year of looking, and that not even the old men of Anglesey had seen her since the winter solstice, was another cause for worry.

  Naas added another stick to the fire, and Rhuddlan looked to the sky. Dawn still lay beyond the mountains, but not for much longer. The morning stars were rising.

  “Nothing lost, nothing gained. All is change. All is change,” Naas muttered, drawing his attention. She reached out with a rowan branch to stir the cauldron nestled in the coals.

  Rhuddlan followed the meandering path she drew in the boiling water. Steaming ribbons of vapor curled around her gnarly wand and drifted upward into the stars, streaming through smoke and sparking flames. Of a sudden the old woman cackled, a dry laugh bespeaking grim satisfaction rather than delight, and a chill went through him.

  “There ye are, my pretty one. There ye are,” she crooned, gently stirring, stirring, stirring.

  Rhuddlan saw no change in the water, only in Naas, and moved to her side. Sweat had broken out on her age-spotted brow; her eyes were wide and staring, reflecting the dance of flames in the brazier. She’d started her fire at dusk, building it piece by flaming piece to reveal the path he’d asked her to tread, and finally, at dawn’s edge, it seemed she’d taken a step.

  “What do you sec?”

  “A woman,” she said, her voice thinning to a raspy whisper. “She’s weeping, she is, with blood running out of her mouth.”

  Blood.

  Rhuddlan cursed to himself. He’d seen enough blood in his life.

  So had Naas, rivers of it from out of the past, but she’d not seen blood like this. ’Twas shimmering, with a pale iridescence about it, yet she knew ’twas blood that stained the woman’s yellow gown and dripped from the chunk of red, scaly flesh in her one hand. In her other hand, the woman held a knife, a steel-edged dagger from a lost age.

  Rhuddlan asked her another question, but she waved him off, paying him no mind. Bothersome man. He’d asked for a vision, and by the grace of the gods she’d conjured one in her cauldron. Touch and go, it had been, touch and go the whole night long, but she’d done it, and now he could wait until it was finished.

  “Aye, a vision they ask, but does they ask the price?” she grumbled under her breath, all the while stirring the small, twisted branch through the bubbling brew of water and whatnot. Days were the price, a day off her life for every minute she would look, and she knew well the passing of a minute. She counted them in heartbeats and breaths—such was the cost of looking into the past.

  She knew the woman as well, not by sight, but by her presence. Naas had seen High Priestesses before in her cauldron. In truth, within the borders of Merioneth, it was a rare stew that did not have a High Priestess floating in it. This was their place, and though there were none left in the carn, they had not let it go.

  “Tears and blood. Tears and blood,” she murmured in a singsong cadence. ’Twas the way of the cauldron to show moments when the world had hung in the balance and lives had hung by a thread. Rarely, Naas was given a mundane glimpse into the past, but there was nothing mundane about a bloody, sobbing priestess. “What’s happening here, then, hmm?”

  Steam swirled across the water, and Naas stirred, each curved arc and loop of her stick marking the pool with another word of ancient script, clearing a path for the moonlight. Years peeled away within the reflection of the celestial orb, the centuries slipping through her cauldron more quickly than lightning strikes.

  Ah, we’ve reached a little deep we have, she thought, feeling heat press into her skin from the wand and flow up into her arm. Sweat ran off her face and down between her breasts. The past was a thing of heat, always heat, and more often than not brought a little gut-churning nausea with it. Though her gaze remained steady on the water, the rest of her trembled like a wind-beaten leaf. She inhaled a fire-warmed breath, fighting the sickness, and in time the priestess lifted her arms up through the years and revealed her name. Arianrod. Arianrod Agah.

  Aye, deep. A thousand thousand years into the past. Beyond the beginnings of the current age to the death of the last. Deep enough to burn.

  Fingers singed, Naas continued stirring her chant—loop, curve, stroke; loop, curve, stroke—and felt herself sink ever deeper into the glimmering, beckoning pool of the cauldron. Welcoming water. She kept her breathing soft and deep, until Arianrod’s cry welled in her throat and broke through the final barrier, near choking her with a rush of pain:

  I have drunk the dragon’s blood, reduced to desperation and despair. The darkling shadow has been sealed again, but at such a cost! Stept Agah is dead, his life given that we may live.

  I have drunk the dragon’s blood, letting it fill my mouth and descend into my body. The darkness feeds on the fire in the earth, conjuring itself in myriad deathly ways that the Prydion Magi had not foreseen. Uffern trolls arose with the smoke, and ravening wolves, and fear shadows in many forms. All were smote down by the Magia Blade wielded with the force of Stept Agah’s hand, the last of the true Starlight-born.

  I have drunk the dragon’s blood and eaten of his flesh, and Ddrei Goch yet writhes on the shores of Mor Sarff with the pain of my taking. Half-aethelings only are left and they will not have the power to prevail over the Dark when next it comes, nor the power to wield the blade. They will need another whose beginnings even now I feel running into my veins— Savage brew searing a course beneath my skin! My blood shall be as one with the Red Dragon’s, steeped to a potent mix in my womb and sent forward through my children and my children’s children until in time the fierce creature of my conjuring will be brought forth to battle in the coming age. Pray then that a half-aetheling still resides on Earth to stand by his side. Pray now that I have not damned myself for all eternity by delving into the forbidden arts of the Prydion bloodspell. Shadana... shadana...

  “Shadana...” Naas gasped and clutched her hand to her breast, letting the rowan wand fall. The priestess faded into the pool, her golden hair becoming a river of silver water, her eyes losing their despair and becoming the deep blue calm of the ocean, a water woman.

  Naas pulled a hard breath into her lungs. So, pretty one, you thought to drink dragon’s blood and send a rare creature down to me—and for this ye died before yer time.

  The story was an old one and Naas knew it well, but she’d never seen it before this night, never seen gwaed draig, dragon’s blood. Iridescent it was, rainbow-hued, seven colors played together in one potent elixir.

  A weak smile curved her mouth. ’Twas good to know there were still surprises to be had at her age. Rainbow blood. She should have guessed as much, for the beasts had been born in a star-wrought cauldron—so the oldest stories told. She doubted them not; Naas’s life was filled with old stories. They ran through her days in endless abundance, enriching some, destroying others. Arianrod’s story had cost her dear. The fire was gone from beneath the brazier, the cauldron cooling in the bed of dead coals.

  Aethelings, half-aethelings. She snorted. The Priestesses of Merioneth had always made much of blood and
its purity, to their eventual demise. Yet ’twas the same preoccupation with blood that had led Arianrod to drink her bit from Ddrei Goch’s flesh. The old beast could not have liked that.

  The last remnant of the vision took flight, and thus released, Naas slumped against the parapet. A pair of strong hands caught her. An extra cloak was wrapped around her shoulders. She needed rest, only a moment’s rest, then must add one more deed to the day’s toll.

  “Naas?”

  ’Twas Rhuddlan. She recognized his voice. He must be told, all of it. She just needed to catch her breath. Then she had to find the boy, that wild boy who prowled through Carn Merioneth both above and below, ramparts and caverns alike, Mychael ab Arawn. She had to find him and give him a knife.

  ’Twas time to call the dragons home.

  ~ ~ ~

  A fair autumn’s dawning rose along the eastern borders of Merioneth, reaching gilded tendrils across the mountains and trailing them down the hills to the cliffs standing guard over the Irish Sea. To the west the light played on the waves, limning the peaks and washing through the swells of an ebb tide, chasing the shadows of night beyond the far horizon. Yet not all the dark things that had fallen ’tween sunset and sunrise were so easily routed.

  By the light of a small torch, Mychael ab Arawn made his way beneath Carn Merioneth, down narrow flights of stairs and through the black tunnels leading to the Dragon’s Mouth, a cliffside cave overlooking the ocean. Time was running out. He felt it with each slip of the sun to the south, with each frosted morn. The land was changing, beginning its turn toward winter, and still he had naught to show for his months of searching.

  A sudden pain doubled him over, taking him unawares, but not by surprise. Quick and clean, the flash of heat tore down the length of his left side, following the path of his scars—his ever-present reward for daring to breach the wormholes. He wrapped his arm around his middle and halted for the space of a breath, then ’twas gone. He gritted his teeth, keeping on. Such was the price of his failure, a price growing ever higher.

  He made a last turn toward the west, following a well-worn track up and out to the Mouth. Light from his torch flickered along the tunnel walls that grew ever farther apart. The air was cool and damp about him, a welcome relief from the heat he’d suffered in the night. The smell of salt was strong.

  He stopped where the tunnel opened onto a rock-girt shelf above the waves and held the torch high. Dragons came to light beneath the yellow flame, dragons twisting and turning in an ageless push to the sea, two mighty creatures etched into the stone. The only dragons he had yet found, and these had never been hidden from the sight of man, but indeed had been carved there as a reminder to all who would come to Carn Merioneth.

  Long ago, his mother had woven her music into the ocean mists from this place, calling to the sea dragons in the deep beyond with the magic of her melodies. Long ago, he and his twin, his gefell, had played in the Mouth and traced the stone beasts with their small fingers—but he was a child no more, and the two women he’d loved had been lost to him. His mother, Rhiannon, was long since dead. His sister, Ceridwen, had been called to Merioneth in the spring, at the time of the Battle of Balor, to take their mother’s place at the gates of time. She had done so, but only to do one deed as Rhuddlan asked. Then she had left, five months ago now, on a journey to the far north, leaving naught but a green charm and a red book for him to remember her by.

  ’Twas not enough.

  Rhuddlan had needed Ceridwen to break the seal he’d put on the weir gate fifteen years earlier, when Carn Merioneth had first fallen to Gwrnach and his cursed son, Caradoc, the Boar of Balor. The deed had been perilous, but Ceri had broken the emerald door that had imprisoned the pryf in the wormhole.

  Reaching out, Mychael smoothed his hand over the graven wall of the Dragon’s Mouth, his fingers following the first flush of daybreak across the curves of the beasts. Rhiannon’s fair songs had long since wafted away on the wind, but the remnants of another’s enchantment remained in the rock to entice and confuse. Mychael had foresworn the delving of its secrets not a month past, having grown weary of laboring in vain and having realized that each breach of the wall lessened the strength of what remained. Yet here he stood again, disavowed by weakness and need, hoping against hope that this time he would find some solace in the Dragon’s Mouth.

  “Quo Ammon ah ethruill,” he whispered, speaking the words of an ancient tongue that wound over and over again in near indecipherably small print through the dragon’s scales— Here lies the mark called “Ammon.”

  He passed his hand over fanned wings and scalloped fins, nearing the long whiskers sprouting from the larger beast’s snout. At the place where scaly lips drew back in a snarl, the stone dragon warmed to his touch as it had many times before, a spontaneous blossoming of heat coming from deep in the rock and all the stronger for having been let lie. He slowed his movement, spreading his fingers wide across the incised grooves of the dragon’s teeth. For a moment he felt the promise of something more flickering on the edge of his fingertips, and his hope rose. Mayhaps at last he would see his way clear before him. In the next moment, failure crashed a resounding knell. All the warmth sank back into the stone, leaving it naught but rock, cold and lifeless to the touch.

  He pulled away with a curse, girding himself against despair. ’Twas the swiving magic of the Brittany bard, Nemeton, left on the wall to mark a path; so he’d been told and learned to believe. The damn stuff lay everywhere, traces of it cropping up the length and breadth of Merioneth. But there was never enough. Never enough to tell him what he needed to know or where he should search. The bard’s name promised sanctuary, but the path he’d left was impossible to follow. No mark beyond Ammon had shown itself, let alone whether to go forward or back.

  “Christe.” Mychael tightened his arm around himself. He needed sanctuary and the bard’s pagan magic, if not this day, then on one too quickly coming, for the truth could no longer be denied. Between the pain and the dreams that would grant him no peace, he was going mad.

  He’d burned in the night, the vision that had come to him months earlier in Strata Florida Abbey returning with new and terrible force, and he’d felt with dread certainty some fiendish thing drawing near. Verily, in the worst of his delirium, it had flowed over him, silencing his screams and consuming him once more. Remembrance of the heated dream lingered still, faint images of a white light sundered by a dark flame, the scorching rip and tear of it through sinew and bone, and of the light flaring ever higher to rejoin above the swart blaze—and of a fearsome shadow advancing. Only the coming dawn had saved him.

  Christe, eleison. Christ have mercy... the scorching rip and tear of it through sinew and bone... His sinew, his bone, all of it following the path of scars that had been blazed down his left side during his first wormhole descent, freshening them anew. The great wormhole, the Weir Gate, had been sealed when he’d returned to Merioneth a year past, but there had been smaller ones swirling in hidden places in the deep dark. They were all gone now. The renegade pryf who had made them, and the force of Time that had compelled them, had all been pulled back into the Weir Gate when the seal was broken. Shortly thereafter, he’d breached the rim of that great hole, and if the lesser wormholes had the power to scar, the Weir Gate had the power of death.

  Yet ’twas a lure, the flux of time, a damnable lure. The pain in the night had forced him to his knees, humbling him when humility would not suffice. If not sanctuary, he needed strength. If he would rule this land and be the master of what strove to master him, it would not be with humility as his blade.

  On the headlands above, Rhuddlan of the Quicken-tree clan waited for him in the keep overlooking the sea, waited as he had the summer long for Mychael to take a vassal’s place at his side. Rhuddlan waited for naught. Merioneth was Mychael’s by right through his mother’s line. He would be no pawn for the Elf King, who would take his heritage and hide it forever from the world of Men, from Mychael’s world. Nor would he play
the Druid priest for the Quicken-tree as Madron, fey witch-daughter of Nemeton, wished. He had been raised to be a monk, a Cistercian brother, and he well knew the ways of priests, well enough to realize he had been rendered unfit for holiness in any form by the changes wrought in him against his will. Transformation, sought by some to save their souls, would be the death of him, he feared.

  ’Twas what Madron feared too, but he dared not put himself in her hands, Nemeton’s daughter or nay. For as Rhuddlan sought to turn him into a vassal, Madron thought to turn him into a priest to suit her own needs, the both of them wanting to clip the ab Arawn wings while they still could—or still thought they could. Poor sops. ’Twas far too late to stop what had begun, if there had ever been a time when it could have been stopped. He had become wild in his madness, no different than any feral creature put upon the earth by God, a being no longer subject to the laws of man, but to surges of instinct. The monks at Strata Florida would say ’twas ever thus, that wildness had always been his true nature, but they had never seen him like this. His needs had become hungers, desirous, gnawing hungers stripping away fifteen years of cloistered life and monastic rule and the layers of his sanity, denuding him down to a soul that was no pious thing.

  Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas, the red dragon and the green, conjured the wildness in his breast that slipped ever more often into delirium. Their siren call had lured him home, crying out to him from within the maelstrom of his dire vision and the long-forgotten dreams of his childhood; home to where ancient legend said the dragons had been born of the very earth of Merioneth, yet they had not returned to be by his side. To the depths of his thrice-cursed heart he knew naught but the dragons could save him.