As Sion took one of the numerous sheep trails, the first dragon to appear—a giant, reddish-brown creature with rippling muscles and dirt-encrusted talons—fell from its folds in the sky to plummet toward the escaping group. Its hide was thick, comprised of tiny, mottled scales. Spikes encrusted its head and along its sinuous tail, like a war machine built for gruesome death. With its dagger-filled maw open and talons extended, the dragon would rip them to shreds.
Dendreth saw the impending doom and sang, his voice rich and resonant with knowledge and power, calling on the aid of the All Father. The prayer slipped the bounds of the world, its lyrics alive and in unison with the notes and cadences of his voice to form a cohesive plea. The supplication was the one bane to the dragon he could think of. A wind, harsh and crisp from the ocean answered his call and lashed out at the flying beast, twisting it in the air before it had time to strike. The dragon, not expecting the assault, tumbled in the air briefly in an attempt to right itself before winging against the gale with its might. The other two dragons appeared, both dark brown, overriding the wind the Pontifex sent at them. With the power thrumming from his chest and throat and his youth returned to him, Dendreth saw he was slowly putting space between their group and the beasts.
Sion continued to lead, the young girl pointing out the correct paths to take and the Pontifex bringing up the rear guard. The group came around a sharp growth of jagged rock and brown grass to view the panoramic vista of the ocean. Again, the reddish dragon came at Dendreth, and again the Pontifex pushed the beast back with his soncrist. The hard riding, the old man’s age, and the expenditure of focused power were catching up to him, and his strength was flagging. Every time he tossed the dragons away from the group, Dendreth knew he was slowly being drained. Each gust grew weaker; each time the dragons righted themselves faster. The dragons grew angrier and angrier with every failed attempt to reach the company, their teeth becoming a very real threat. The red dragon rained fire onto them, and the Pontifex brushed it away. Soon he would have nothing left with which to save them.
The ocean sparkled darkly on the western side of the island, and the crashing of waves far below reached Dendreth. They had come to the end of their flight; a precipice greeted them with yawning expectations. There was nowhere else to flee. They were trapped.
As the Feyr pulled up on his horse’s reigns, the girl vaulted from the saddle, ran to the edge of the cliffs, and jumped into thin air. Sion quickly followed and the Wards did the same, leaving their horses to mill around fearfully.
There was nowhere for their steeds to go.
“What about the horses?” Tiril shouted into the melee of the roaring dragons and the angry sea below them.
“Go!” Dendreth shouted, ignoring the Ward leader, bringing his soncrist back into being.
The reddish dragon landed, shaking the ground with its massive weight, and another burst of flame erupted from its maw. The fire tumbled toward the Pontifex, and after brushing it aside, he realized he could not stop the dragon now that it had landed. It too realized this and moved toward the group, its talons digging into the soil and rock of the island and its baleful, yellow eyes watching its prey as the horses scattered. Another gout of flame chased the Pontifex, but it disintegrated against the power of the old man’s soncrist once more. The other dragons had landed and attacked the horses as they attempted to flee, one pouncing on a lone mare and rending its flesh with sharp, knife-like teeth.
When all of the men had followed Sion, Dendreth slowly crept over the edge onto a thin ledge that steeply snaked down against the cliff face. Cool mist rose from the ocean below and coated the rock with beaded perspiration. The Pontifex hesitated, unwilling to slip and fall to his end. The Feyr and one of the Wards helped him down the pathway before Dendreth realized there were caves cut deeply into the shelf of the island. The girl had done well. The dragons would not be able to follow them here; they would be safe for the moment.
With his aged heart racing, Dendreth let the power of the soncrist die upon his lips and vertigo attempted to claim him. Hands reached out to steady his weakness, and he slowly entered a cave as tall as he was. Rather than being consumed by darkness, the cave greeted him with warm, yellow torchlight amongst the dirtied faces of dozens of the island’s people.
Even though the rock separated them and the ocean slammed against the island below, the terrified squeals of the company’s horses could be heard above and the snapping of bones and guttural ferocity of the beasts’ hunger followed. There was nothing the old Pontifex could do for the animals; they were as dead as the town they had visited.
“We are the people of Arklinn,” one ponderous fat man said in the thick accent of the isle. “You are lucky Janniva found you and brought you here.”
The Pontifex nodded. They were lucky to be alive. But he would not leave the island. Not until he learned exactly what it was the dragons were doing. In the meantime, before attempting another foray into the Highlands, he would sleep and regain his strength.
And the terrified screaming of his horse would follow him into his dreams.
Chapter 34
With his arms wrapped about his chest and his legs drawn up as close to his body as possible, Sorin Westfall shivered in his cell, the hewn rock of the mountain leeching his body’s heat. The air was stagnant, possessing a mineral quality like the air of the forge, but unlike the fire pit, the world had become chilled; puffs of steam emanated from him with every exhalation he made. He sat in moldy straw and took what comfort he could from it. His muscles ached and his head throbbed. He had lost all sense of time. Iron manacles circled his ankles like bands of ice, their thick chains connected to bolts driven deep into the rough stone of Keslich ’Ur to prevent his escape.
He had no hope for that. Not now. No one knew they were even here.
The cell was large and rectangular, with one thick wooden door highlighting a barred window that admitted faint, flickering torchlight from the hallway. Darkness surrounded him, a constant observer of his woe. The rest of the room was composed of black granite walls. The floor had been sanded smooth when the dungeon was built, but centuries of use had been unable to wear the living rock at the young man’s back down to a wall more comfortable to lean against. Other sets of manacles hung from the wall, all but three unused.
Across the cell, Thomas lay on his side, the wound at his temple still bleeding in the dim light. The torture had begun first with the former First Warden. The old knight had shown the most defiance to the Woman King, and she in turn had decided to reward him for his efforts. A day after being taken into the depths of Keslich ’Ur and its labyrinthine dungeons, the guards had dragged the old man into a torture cavern and beaten him. Tem was next. Relnyn and Sorin had not left their cell. He believed Lin and his guards worried that if the Giant was angered to the point of the power he had shown at the Morliun Tower, he might gain his freedom forcibly. Near Sorin, a long-haired blonde man hung limply in his chains, barely alive. Eventually Sorin would be taken to the cavern and forced through the same damage the other men had experienced.
Now, after what had seemed weeks but could have easily been days, Tem sat near Thomas after his return, unable to reach him. Relnyn meditated between Tem and Sorin, improvised manacles chaining him likewise to the wall.
Thomas took a deep breath and opened his eyes, fluttering back from unconsciousness, and stared at the floor for long moments before moving.
“Thomas, are you okay?” Sorin asked, knowing the answer already.
“I’m still here,” he whispered into the grungy straw his head laid in, and Sorin could not tell if it was an answer or a question.
“You are,” Sorin replied, his chains rustling. “Did they ask you anything?”
The old man moved his shackled hands to his head and then slowly pushed himself up to sit slumped against the wall. He tenderly touched the cuts on his face and head as his left eye swelled and bruised purple. “No, they still haven’t even asked me a question. That time
will come. They are softening us first before they begin the real torture. I suspect the Woman King and her witch and warlock will use witchcraeft to gain from us what they believe we know.”
“What do you mean?” Tem asked.
“When they feel our spirit is close to breaking from the beatings, they will use their pagan ways and infiltrate our minds. Godwyn Keep has the power as well but they have all but banned it due to its danger. The man hanging over there, he has had it happen to him.” Thomas spit blood into the straw to clear his mouth. “To be within another person’s mind while they die leads to death for the invader. They do not fear such things here in the Reach. The Woman King rules by dread and for a witch or warlock to refuse her command would mean instant death anyway.”
Thomas focused his eyes on Sorin. “If that should happen to you, Sorin, you might have the power to deny their prying. Oryn and Pontifex Charl believe you to be more than what you even believe right now. I’ve seen the ability you have; you saw it too at A’lum. If you are like Aerom, you have nothing to fear. Do not show weakness to the Woman King or her puppets.”
Sorin shook his head. “I’m not special, Thomas.”
“That’s what Aerom believed, before he saved the world.”
They grew silent. Thomas closed his eyes. Sorin watched his friend’s breathing ease. The Codex, the Magna Kell, and prophecy of any nature could not convince him he was the hope of the All Father. He had no special talents and no amazing powers. The link he had with Artiq was the only thing to make him second-guess himself. Even now, sitting and shivering in the dank cell, a part of Sorin deep down in his soul yearned to feel that connection it had with the horse. If Artiq was special and the horse seemed drawn to him, perhaps Sorin was a man with a destiny.
Looking at the empty blonde stranger, Sorin hoped he would have the chance to find out.
After an uncertain amount of time had passed, angry voices from the hallway followed by the forced rustling of the lock brought Sorin back from his reverie. The door was cast aside, and the Woman King stormed into the cell, the torchlight behind her accentuating her flaming hair.
“Subterfuge!” she spat at them. “Where is it? Who has it?”
Lin, the wolf rider, had entered the room along with more guards, the latter holding torches in an attempt to chase away the darkness of the cell. Sorin reflexively got to his feet, his chains clanking as he did so. Relnyn came out of his trance and stood, slouching beneath the low-hanging ceiling of the cell, while Thomas struggled weakly to rise, his white hair blood-encrusted and his face a dappled arrangement of colorful bruising. The stranger did not react, his jaw slack and drooling.
“Where is what?” Thomas croaked, swallowing hard and gravely looking at his keeper with malignant interest.
The Woman King’s cheeks were ruddy in the glow of the torchlight and her fury. “Do not play with me, old man. You know of what I mean. The Hammer. Where is it?”
“We know nothing,” Tem said, his own beatings evident in the illumination. “We have told you everything we know!”
Thomas whispered with a snort. “You lost it. We are doomed.”
She kicked him in the face with her boot heel and crimson welled from a new cut to his jaw. He was dazed and his limbs went flaccid.
“You were a decoy,” she hissed. “The true thieves used you to gain it.”
“If that were true,” Thomas gasped. “Would we not be happy?”
She kicked Thomas again, this time in the chest. Sorin self-consciously recoiled from the blow. Relnyn strained against his iron bonds, his teeth clenched at her treatment of the old man.
Cwen Errich snapped her fingers at the guards, and they moved toward Thomas like hawks sweeping in for the kill. Instead of ending his life, they lifted him free of the dingy cell.
“This is pointless,” the Woman King said through gritted teeth, grabbing Thomas around the throat. “I know your faith keeps you strong, and that same faith gives you strength of mind.” She pointed at the blonde man. “He was an assassin, sent by criminals in Aris Shae. He broke, untrained by your pitiful faith, revealing his secrets. I know I will never find out what I need from you, Godwyn dog.” She turned her flashing green eyes on Sorin. “But I think I can arrange another avenue to go by, someone not old enough to be trained.”
Lin looked gratified by the violence, his hands on the sabers he carried at either hip. The redheaded man bared white teeth in the mockery of a grin and stared at Sorin with viper’s eyes.
“Move the young one to the Chamber,” she said, her eyes sweeping the room. “Tie the rest to my husband’s barge and set it ablaze. Let them die on the very boat they killed my husband upon.”
More guards undid the manacles imprisoning Sorin’s friends. Even Relnyn had so many men about him he could hardly move.
Cwen Errich smiled without humor.
“And send them back to their home over the Falls.”
* * * * *
With the last words of the Woman King still reverberating inside his head, Sorin hung in darkness blacker than any he had ever been within and prayed for a flicker of light to ensure the loosening tenets of his mind he was still alive.
After his companions had been pulled from their cell and disappeared in a flurry of activity, grunts, and struggle, guards had taken Sorin through a menagerie of twisting corridors cut deeper into the rock of the mountain. Every turn had revealed a part of the castle not wholly finished; the granite floors were wet and jagged as though the artisans and engineers who had built the underground labyrinth had no time to finish it, and thick icicles of stone clung to the ceiling in effigy of the icy winters of his home. Cells lacking doors or chains appeared in the torchlight, unfilled and unneeded, while subterranean moss and lichen grew on the walls. The odor of old decay and minerals accosted him. Sorin was being led deeper into the rocky world, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
At the end of his forced journey where no more tunnels branched, the guards placed him in a circular chamber. The cell door, an iron panel rusted red and bumpy with rivets, was windowless and squealed painfully as it opened. The guards threw him into the cell, and the last vision he saw before the door closed was Lin’s white grin. The light around the doorway had faded as the guards left with their torches, and Sorin was soon encased in the cloying darkness.
He moved about the cell, his hands numb as they tried to discern any information about his new environment and its icy granite wall. There was none to be had; the stones of the chamber had been sealed with a smooth mortar. No chains were driven into the rock; no straw was placed on the ground. It was a cell devoid of anything. The door, ridged on its outside, was as smooth as the granite on the inside and it offered no grip to leverage it open. Assured there was no escape and feeling the weight of the blackness around him, Sorin curled up much as he had in the other cell and waited.
The voices began soon after he lost all sense of time.
They rose from the cold touch of the rock and the silence around him, whispering in his ear of evil tidings from the darkness. He swiped at the air, and they disappeared like smoke but gathered anew, testing him with their slick tongues and wicked intentions, sensing he was more helpless than a newborn baby. His breathing grew erratic and his eyes darted in his skull until a throbbing overtook his temples, the claustrophobia of his situation falling on him like a boulder. The voices caressed his gooseflesh and probed his recesses, spiders weaving gossamer threads over his body in preparation for a feast. Ghosts faded in and out of his body, stealing his heat as well as his mind. It lasted forever, a relentless barrage, until he heard an audible snap deep inside and he was no more.
When thin, fiery lines in the shape of a rectangle burned through his eyes and threatened to destroy him, he cowered in fear. The voices had long since left him, having taken what they had come for, and left him to deafening silence. Shivering, he turned away, fearful for what was to come, pushing himself deeper into the cold to flee from the flickering. A shat
tering scream pulled the fabric of the darkness asunder and the fiery lines became a box filled with light and movement. The brightness sent daggers into the recesses of his eyes. He tried to lift his head from its place on the rock floor and couldn’t. Docilely he lay, awaiting the final strike of what new devilry the voices had brought to end him.
Sorin shook from the vision before enough sanity returned for him to recognize the figure of Cwen Errich standing before him.
The Woman King entered the cell, alone, and knelt next to him. She moved the hair away from his face like a mother would and then touched his forehead. Something warm stirred there on his skin but was gone as quickly as it had come.
“You know, I have a son,” she said quietly, odd compassion in her eyes. “He is but an infant, but one day he will become King of the Reach. I took great pains in securing his throne. The leaders of the other clans of the Reach wanted to deny a female ruler from governing the decade it would take him to grow and become strong. But I love my son very much, and I ended any dispute with all means at my disposal.”
She continued to stroke Sorin’s hair as if to lull him to sleep.
“What I did not know was how soon another strike against our lives would happen. I had no sooner ended all debate about my crown when the attempt on my life happened while I was with my son.”
Song of the Fell Hammer Page 48
