The Snowmelt River

by Frank P. Ryan

  ‘What have we here – a dawn plague of rats?’

  With a play of bravado he whirled the blade in a feint and parry before pressing its tip against the throat of the husband.

  ‘Squeak now, vermin! But what is that you say? I can’t hear you!’

  Alan tugged Kate back so she was hidden behind him, then brandished the Spear of Lug, getting ready to throw it. But before he could carry out his intention a gleaming blade flashed through the air and parted the officer’s head from his shoulders. The dwarf mage, Qwenqwo Cuatzel, barely recognisable under a heavy helmet of embossed bronze, clinking shoulder plates and chainmail to his mid-calves, caught the returning blade and stepped out to confront the platoon of soldiers. His green eyes blazed as he twirled a double-headed bronze battle-axe above his head in one gnarled hand. Runes identical to those on the blade that Padraig had shown them – the Fir Bolg battle-axe that had killed the warrior prince, Feimhin – glittered over the cutting edges.

  ‘Which ten of you cowards will desist from tormenting women and engage in battle a single Fir Bolg warrior!’

  None of the soldiers moved to attack him but no more did they pull back. And additional heavily armed soldiers were arriving by the second, blocking all progress down into the harbour.

  Alan closed his eyes and focused his exhausted senses into the oraculum. He called out Ainé’s name. But Siam’s hand on his shoulder pulled him back to reality. ‘The helper, Layheas, has already summoned the Shee. Meanwhile, we must look to ourselves!’

  The Olhyiu chief was already organising a simple defensive circle around the vulnerable. Fish-gutting knives and staves were all that armed the Olhyiu, but they intended to fight for their lives. The soldiers closed around them, their armour rattling as they took up positions to attack.

  ‘Mage Lord, give me the blood-rage,’ Siam demanded of Alan.

  Alan probed the chief’s spirit, found the embryonic form there, a lot stronger and more ready to emerge than before. He poured energy into it, saw the change complete in mere moments. The grizzly bear rushed forward and battered through the near ranks of soldiers before retreating to guard the knot of his people. Its battle roar echoed far and wide through the streets and walls of Isscan.

  Although eyes widened among the soldiers, they still held their ground. A new officer-at-arms appeared among them. His sword arm rose, preparing for the attack. Suddenly a new chanting could be heard on the air. Such a strange medley of voices and throats that the hackles rose on Alan’s skin. He remembered it from the skirmish by the river. It was the battle hymn of the Shee. The outer circle of Death Legion spun round to face attack from this new quarter while the inner circle continued to surround the Olhyiu. The officer, with his sword still aloft, rallied his men. ‘Is the Death Legion to be routed by women, a midget and a bear?’

  The soldiers laughed and cheered.

  But even as the officer’s sword arm fell, an explosion of white fire closed about his throat, and the head of a tigress tore itself free from his falling body, its eyes red pits and its body an incandescent furnace of lightning and flame.

  Ainé!

  It was the Kyra, but in a form Alan had never witnessed before. It was as if she had turned the force of her oraculum inwards, melding its terrible power with her flesh and blood.

  The dwarf mage shook Alan’s shoulder. ‘Make ready to run!’

  The soldiers were falling back, step by step, fear etched into their faces. And through the oraculum, Alan detected the looming approach of fighting Shee, a terrifying vision of snarling jaws and extending talons. Suddenly the tigress lifted her huge head and bared her maw. Rivulets of lightning flickered over the ground and a crackling white fire flared outwards through the air, reflecting by a wall of approaching Shee blades. With this, a coordinated attack descended on the soldiers and the noise of battle echoed far and wide through the streets and boulevards.

  ‘To the harbour!’ shouted Alan.

  The Olhyiu hurried onward, with the giant bear tearing a way through the panicked soldiers, and soon there was the renewed pattering of many feet into the awakening morning.

  At the harbour, Alan and Kate found themselves wreathed in a heavy mist that was rising out of the confluence of the two rivers. They heard their names spoken in an urgent whisper. They might have walked by a high white wall, faintly luminescent in the pearly light, had they not heard the urgent summons.

  ‘Alan … Kate!’

  Glancing upwards, they saw Mo’s face peering down at them over a white wall that must be the hull of the Temple Ship.

  Through gaps in the mist they glimpsed a towering superstructure, aglow with a strange lambency, dressed in a wraithlike maze of rope ladders and rigging that ascended into the murky air. The Temple Ship appeared ghostly, as if illuminated by a diffuse, pale light that flickered and danced in the timbers and rigging. What had happened to the black oak, fissured and worn with time and weather? A new metamorphosis was changing the superstructure, extending and swelling into this spectral monolith. It was as if the ship was responding to their needs.

  Tall shapes were materialising out of the harbour mists. Alan and Kate glimpsed the flash of warded green blades.

  Kate clutched at his arm.

  ‘It’s okay – they’re Shee!’ He hugged her to him with his free left arm. ‘They wear camouflage cloaks. It makes it difficult to see them clearly.’

  Many more Shee were arriving. Alan assumed that Muîrne would no longer be with them. He knew that the plan had been that she escort Valéra’s baby back to the safety of their homeland in the Guhttan Mountains. Now the swirling camouflage of the warriors’ capes made it difficult for him to count the numbers of arriving Shee, though there were a lot more of them than he had left at the edge of the trees, perhaps as many as a hundred. He caught a glimpse of Milish, followed by two Aides carrying her ornate trunk.

  ‘No time to wonder!’ Qwenqwo hissed at both their elbows. ‘We must flee while the mist still cloaks our passage!’

  As they scrambled up the gangway, the ship appeared to judder and move. Alan and Kate headed aft, where they found Mo waiting for them with Mark at the great wheel, his feet widely planted on the aft deck.

  Mo tugged at Alan’s arm. ‘His eyes!’ she whispered.

  Alan and Kate peered into the face of their friend, whose eyes appeared to be glazed, as if registering nothing of the hustle and bustle on the deck around him.

  But then Kate took up Mo’s alarm. ‘Oh, Alan – look more closely!’

  When Alan did so he saw that the whites and irises of Mark’s eyes had disappeared, replaced by darkness, black as obsidian, in which motes of a silvery light flickered and changed.

  In a tremulous voice, Mo pressed him, ‘What’s happening to him?’

  ‘I don’t know, but the pattern is the same as his crystal.’

  ‘But he broke the crystal!’

  Alan shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what it means, Mo.’

  Mo said, ‘I think it’s something to do with his closeness to the ship.’

  Kate turned to look at Mo, her eyes wide as if still only coming to terms with a great many different surprises. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you remember how we all felt that terrible sadness when the Olhyiu were going to burn the ship, back at the frozen lake? Mark was just standing there on his own. He sensed it before anyone else. He knew the feeling was coming from the ship. Then he just took the wheel as if . . . as if the ship had summoned him. And look at him now. He has that same look on his face.’

  Alan studied Mark again. He hardly seemed to register any of their presences. It was if he and the ship were in some intense, intimate communication.

  Suddenly the matrix in Mark’s eyes began to pulsate rhythmically and powerfully, as if with his heartbeat. Everybody jumped with fright as a crackling force shook the massive timbers. All three of them spun around, marvelling at the changes that continued to pervade the creaking and groaning superstructure. Moment by moment the ship
glowed brighter, a light that seemed hardly to reflect the dawn but to exude from every surface and line of the vessel, as if the ship itself had become the cradle of light. Ainé, restored to human form, had come on board without Alan noticing, and now she stared about her with an expression of wary incredulity. She reached out to touch a glowing rail and withdrew her hand sharply, as if it had given her an electric shock.

  Siam, also restored, stood and stared, his eyes wide with astonishment, interrupted in the order to raise the gangway. Regaining his senses, he shouted orders to his sailors. But without their help the great sails were already rising. Ainé called out to the Shee, ordering them to take up defensive positions on the port side, where they faced the battlemented walls. Alan, now probing with his oraculum, sensed the immense and mysterious charge of energy that surrounded them.

  ‘The chains!’ Siam roared, his alarm too urgent for whispers.

  Running sternwards in Ainé’s wake, Alan found the Kyra with legs astride a massive anchor chain. Each individual link was a foot in diameter and cast of the same matt-black metal as the armour of the Storm Wolves. The chains manacled the ship to the huge iron capstans of the dock. With jaws clenched in warlike incantation, Ainé raised her sword to its extremity and crashed its glittering blade against a single link, causing an explosion of brilliant sparks but barely making a dent on its surface. Milish placed a cautionary hand on the upper arm of the Shee. The Kyra’s blade was not indestructible, and they might have need of it in days to come.

  With an oath, Ainé sheathed her sword and glared with rage at this shackling of their escape.

  Alan was equally appalled by the massive girth of the chains. Powerful and strange as the Temple Ship had become, there would be no escape without first breaking through these bonds.

  A shout from above caused the Olhyiu to crouch down on the deck, already rolling and shuddering as the power of the unfurled sails battered against the obstruction. The Death Legion was proliferating on the walls above the dockside. They had the advantage of the harbour side of the great plaza, which brought them high above the level of the groaning deck. Others among them were swinging cannons into position so they could direct them at the Temple Ship. Alan shouted at Kate and Mo to go below. It was pointless risking their lives here on deck when they were unarmed and couldn’t contribute to the fighting.

  ‘We’re here to tend the wounded!’ Kate insisted.

  ‘That will keep for when the fighting is over.’

  He saw them reluctantly head for the stairs. He glanced over at Mark, who appeared to have become one with the wheel. He heard the first thunder of cannon fire, followed by flame and smoke. The discharge struck the superstructure about the mainmast, and a conflagration of sparks exploded in the rigging. He recoiled, gagging, from the foul green fire, noticing how an answering counter-force rose out of the deck, smothering the flames, causing them to splutter and die.

  The Shee were hurling javelins with deadly accuracy at the Death Legion on the harbour walls. Bodies were tumbling down onto the quayside. But there was no shortage of reinforcements.

  Confronting the chains, Alan focused on them through the power of the oraculum. The red glow from his brow caused the people to shrink away from him. From above, two more cannons were being pulled into position, their muzzles trained directly onto the crowded decks. Ainé’s voice of command sounded out like a clarion call, exhorting the Shee to greater battle. A fierce flare from Alan’s oraculum caught a single link in the chain, and within moments it glowed red. Sparks of hot metal began to crackle from its incandescent surface. But its massive strength resisted the force of his attack. Several more detonations of green fire descended on them from above; the burning conflagration and foul stench of one struck no more than yards from Alan.

  Suddenly Qwenqwo was by his side. A glare of determination contorted his features as he lifted his arms into the air, as if invoking the assistance of the elements. Alan felt a gale of wind rise about him and catch in the heaving rigging.

  A roar of triumph came from above as a gigantic cannon was dragged into place. The legionaries rammed the huge barrel through the fabric of the masonry, toppling a shower of stones into the water, meanwhile enabling them to direct it downward. And now they were wheeling it back again to load it, before training it onto the central mast of the ship.

  Alan stood still, his legs parted on either side of the chain, his brow cast down, furrowed with the intensity of his concentration. Desperation consumed him. There was an almighty flare from his brow and the link blazed white-hot. A cataract of sparks erupted into the air from the blazing link.

  The passionate voice of Ainé was ringing out, concentrating a deadly fire onto those commanding the great cannon. Qwenqwo was howling at the wind. Suddenly there was a cry from Mark at the wheel.

  ‘C’mon, old girl! Time to show us what you’re made of!’

  Alan whirled to look at his friend, who was embracing the wheel with his entire body. Was it Alan’s imagination that from his friend’s outstretched body, flickering lines of force connected him to the decks, the masts, the rigging, as if the matrix within him was one with the ship?

  With all of his remaining strength Alan focused even more desperately on the link that tethered them to this deadly harbour. There was a massive lurch, as if the ship itself was coming to his assistance. A great new force of energy pressed against the restraining chain as the sails cracked taut in the gathering wind. There was a shuddering jerk that almost threw Alan down onto the deck as the ship surged against its restraints, and then, with an almighty crack, the weakened chain sundered. Alan watched, blinking furiously, as the splintered edges tore apart, streaming sparks. He watched them still as the fractured links slipped out from between his stiffened legs, tumbling over the decks, hissing deep into the storm-whipped water. From above, and rapidly receding, rage-filled faces howled as they watched the great ship pull away from its moorings with sails billowing on its towering masts, the tallest complete with a crow’s nest in which Turkeya was shouting his triumph.

  In a blinding conflagration of force and light the Temple Ship forced its passage through the hindering maze of other vessels in the harbour, battering a path through into clear water, and throwing up a mountainous wave of spray across its bow as it approached the pincers of the harbour mouth.

  ‘Danger! Up ahead!’ screamed Turkeya from high above. His hand was pointing to the river.

  Peering out over the prow, Alan saw massive iron teeth looming out of the depths, about fifty yards downstream. A trap for the unwary, the boom spanned the entire harbour mouth.

  Alan ran to the stern rail, the oraculum bursting into a brilliant red flare even before he got there. He leaned forward against the broad rail, his fists raised, his eyes glazed. He heard the screams and shouts from all around him as they approached to within twenty-five yards of the trap. Then he brought his fists down, invoking all of his power, directing the First Power deep into the turbulent water. In moments a great sea-spout whirled into the sky, raising an enormous wave that lifted the great ship high on its crest, carrying it, bucking and heaving, over the danger.

  Once clear, the ship drummed in its depths and sang in its rigging, so that Kate and Mo, and every man, woman and child that had been cowering below decks, came up into the salt-drenched air to join them, sharing in their hearts the pure, sweet joy of the freed leviathan as it struck a majestic course southwards, towards the Forest of the Undying in the haunted Vale of Tazan.

  PART III

  Ossierel

  Mysteries and Silences

  The thrust of wind in the sails was so perfectly balanced with the direction and purpose of the ship that the waters appeared to surge by with scarcely any resistance, so that, although the thunder of cannons still cracked and boomed behind them, they were soon out of range of the batteries on the walls. Mark still took the helm, but his posture was more relaxed now. His eyes had cleared and the lines of force had slowly melted away from his body. A
lan and the other two friends had watched it happen. None of them knew if Mark simply did not remember what had happened or if he just didn’t want to talk about it, so maybe he was genuinely unaware of the changes that had taken place in him. Either that or he was deliberately avoiding having to discuss it, even with Mo. The truth, as they acknowledged discreetly to each other, was that there appeared to be two different Marks at war with each other within the same body, and the upshot was that their friend was growing increasingly distant from them.

  Within an hour or so of sailing, the mist had blown away, and no boats had been speedy enough to give chase from the harbour. No more could they see signs of organised pursuit on either bank.

  But Alan was not so naïve as to imagine that they had won. He couldn’t help but recall the horror of what he had witnessed in the false Mage’s chamber. The memory so shocked and bewildered him that even now, aboard the escaping ship, a lingering fear lurked below the surface, so that he wondered how anyone, let alone himself and his friends, could possibly challenge that terrible malice. And so it was that, as all around him the happiness of liberation thrilled and excited the people crowding the deck, the lingering awareness of unseen menace still oppressed Alan from all sides as they sailed in full majesty through a hinterland of devastated nature.

  Kemtuk arrived to stand by him, as if sensing his mood. ‘When an Olhyiu fells a cedar to construct his boat, he keeps vigil for a night and a day to ask forgiveness of the spirit of the forest. Yet here you see no evidence of respect, let alone repentance, only a greed that might cause an entire forest to fall. The hearts of the people of Isscan have become as stone under the brutal overlordship of the Tyrant.’