Chalice 2 - Dream Stone
Page 45
“Nay, ’tis not hurt I feel, but a strange loss. The ache in my chest is gone, taken from me.”
He knew the implication of that even before she spoke it aloud.
“Aye,” she whispered, a beatific smile gracing her lips. “I’m free. Morgan is no longer falling through the wormhole. He has landed.”
Mychael gathered her close, his relief matching hers. He looked to the stars wheeling over their heads in the vast, dark ocean of the sky and sent up a prayer of thanks.
The Thief of Cardiff had finally washed ashore... in time.
Glossary
aes sídhe—fairies of the hills
aetheling—descendant of the Starlight-born
Beltaine—Celtic festival falling on May Eve and May 1
bia—poisonous distillation of sap from the bia, a desert tree
chrystaalt—universal salt
Cymry—Welsh name for themselves
Dangoes—ice cave in the deep dark
Ddrei Goch, Ddrei Glas—the dragons of Carn Merioneth
Deseillign—desert city of the Sha-shakrieg
Dharkkum—a malevolent darkness sealed in the earth by the Prydion Magi
Dockalfar—Dark-elves
druaight—an enchanted thing
gwaed draig—dragon’s blood
gwin draig—dragon wine
hadyn draig—dragon seed
Lanbarrdein—ancient seat of the Dockalfar
Liosalfar—Light-elves
Mor Sarff—Serpent Sea
Prydion Magi—those of the Starlight-born who created the arts of enchantment
pryf—dragon larvae, worm
rasca—Quicken-tree medicinal ointment
Rastaban—Eye of the Dragon; ancient seat of the Troll King
Sha-shakrieg—desert dwellers
sín—a rising storm
skraeling—beast man
thullein—metal used for the weapons of the Sha-shakrieg
tua—blind lizards that live in the deep dark
Tuan—dead king of the Dockalfar
tylwyth teg—Welsh fairies
uffern—hellish
Yr Is-ddwfn—sanctuary of the Prydion Magi
Clans of the tylwyth teg:
Daur
Ebiurrane
Kings Wood
Quicken-tree
Red-leaf
Wydden
Yr Is-ddwfn
Seven Books of Lore:
Sjarn Va Le—Violet Book of Stars
Elhion Bhaas Le—Indigo Book of Elfin Lore
Prydion Cal Le—Blue Book of the Magi
Treo Veill Le—Green Book of Trees
Chandra Yeull Le—Yellow Book of Chandra
Gratte Bron Le—Orange Book of Stone
Fata Ranc Le—Red Book of Doom
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Thank you for reading Dream Stone. Please visit my website, www.tarajanzen.com, and follow me on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @TaraJanzen https://twitter.com/TaraJanzen for information on all of my print and e-books.
And read on for an excerpt of Prince of Time, Book 3 in the Chalice Trilogy and Morgan ab Kynan’s adventures through the wormhole!
Prince of Time
The Chalice Trilogy – Book 3
Prologue
In the failing light of a mid-winter’s eve, high in the mountains of the Dhaun Himal, the monks of Sonnpur-Dzon trudged across a frozen courtyard filled with ice and snow. A fierce wind howling down from the mountain peaks whipped at the hems of their robes and made the nightly devotional a prize to be won. Behind the monks, a half dozen novitiates cloaked in gray wool plodded through the worsening storm, following their masters to the assembly hall. A black-cowled mendicant brought up the rear.
Looking up from beneath the hood draped low over his face, he squinted into the wind. Dark clouds raced across the horizon, leading the night into the west across a barren, sharp-edged landscape of gray rock and steep slopes. Drawing his gaze closer, he scanned the castellated wall connecting the monastery buildings one to the other. Torch bearers walked the ramparts of the wall, heading toward the braziers flanking Sonnpur-Dzon’s only gate. On either side of the gate, stone towers rose up from the braziers, each one crowned with a fearsomely carved dragon head.
Every night of the two weeks since he’d come to the monastery, the fires had been lit at sunset, sending flames shooting out of the dragons’ mouths. Smoke would then curl from the beasts’ nostrils and the nightwatch would sound the Dragon Hearts. The resonant vibrations from the great bronze gongs would echo the length of the valley below, calling anyone within hearing distance to prayer—a rare occurrence from what he’d seen. There was hardly anyone within a hundred kilometers of the place, let alone within hearing distance.
He shifted his gaze to the west again, noting the last sinking rays of the sun. The men outside the monastery that night were unlikely to drop to their knees when the gongs were struck, for the men were his, and the sounding of the Dragon Hearts was their signal to breach the wall. He’d used his time between prayer assemblies and meditations to search for Sonnpur-Dzon’s weakest point, and he’d finally found it in the grates of the hypocaust. The last two nights had been spent unsealing the grates, working his way from one level of monks cells to the next until he’d reached the last round of bars set into the north wall. With the breaking of the final seal, he’d opened a path from the outside world into the heart of Sonnpur-Dzon.
The monastery’s remoteness had been its first line of defense against him. Even though he’d been assured of its existence, it had taken him over three months to narrow down its possible location and another six weeks of hard travel to reach the area. Situated in the highest mountain range on Earth, Sonnpur-Dzon clung to the sheer sides and craggy peaks of the Dhaun Himal. No pilgrim came there except through hardship and design. The nearest outpost was nine hundred kilometers to the southeast, on the coast.
Despite the initial difficulties in finding the place, it was the kind of job he liked—straightforward and paid in advance. The seals had been cheap and messy Carillion knock-offs and the bars had been surprisingly tough alloy digitals. He’d been prepared for worse. There would be some softwork in the courtyard shrine, but softwork was his captain’s specialty.
Poverty had been the monastery’s second protection. Sonnpur-Dzon’s only treasure had been the bliss achieved through devotion, until seven months past when the monks had come into possession of a small gold statue highly prized and eagerly sought by a trader in the west.
On the basis of a whispered rumor, the trader had come to him for help, and he, in turn, had come to Sonnpur-Dzon for a considerable amount of money, more than he’d believed any small gold statue could be worth, except possibly in the western markets of the Old Dominion, the greatest den of vice and iniquity in the Orion arm of the galaxy.
Ahead of him, the saffron-robed monks and the novitiates came to a halt and turned to face the dragon towers. Snow began falling from the sky, mixing with the glacier driven flurries. The torch bearers on the wall touched their flames to the braziers and fire roiled up across the pans. Against the night sky, the dragons breathed smoke and flames. The heart gongs were struck, and as one the monks and novitiates prostrated themselves on the ice-riven stones, intoning praise for the gods and divine defenders.
He prostrated with them, the picture of piety, his voice joined with theirs in the chant, utterly guiltless though he would steal their statue this very night. Whether the gold figure was a sacred relic or not, the dragon gods of Sonnpur-Dzon were not his gods. He’d lost his God in the past.
The reminder elicited a softly spoken curse, the words of praise disappearing from his mouth. He’d lost his God, aright, but not his skills. He was still light of finger if not of heart, still quick of mind, assets that served him well in the strange and dangerous time he’d been thrown into by the friggin’ weirworms. He was still a leader of men, though none knew his lineage, still a prince, though his country no longer existed.
The last echo of the Dragon Hearts was swept away on the wind, and the votaries rose. As the line neared the main assembly hall, Morgan slowed his steps, falling behind and slipping into the shadows of a grain storehouse. The novitiates’ dormitory, empty at this hour, was to his left, the doors low and covered with heavy, striped curtains. A ladder leading up from the storehouse to the kitchen rested against the wall to his right.
Other monks were converging on the hall, coming across the central courtyard from where they’d prostrated themselves for the nightly devotional.
He waited, out of sight, his back against the dormitory stone wall until the monks passed. When they’d all entered the hall, he made his way up the ladder. At the top, he skirted a wooden porch and posted himself on the south side of the nearest building. The smell of roasted barley coming from a hide-covered window confirmed his position by the kitchen. He’d marked every turn in the hypocaust, laying a trail for his captain, Aja, to follow. The boy had the burrowing instincts of a rat dog and would not lead the rest of the men astray. With Aja pushing them, even the clumsiest of the lot should make the kitchen in ten minutes. The monks would be well into their prayers by then.
He checked his watch, then cut his gaze to the shrine in the center of the courtyard. A curtain flapped in the doorway of the temple supporting the monument. Fierce demons were carved on the lintel above the door. The statue was inside the temple room, a dragon wrought in reddish gold, sleeping on a bed of snakes, about fifteen centimeters in length, no gem stones. He and Aja would make the snatch together. Even a place as remote and backward as Sonnpur-Dzon had rigged up a field-style security system to protect its new treasure. From what Morgan had seen of it, Aja shouldn’t have any trouble neutralizing the power field. The trick would be dismantling the alarm.
Snake beds and dragons, firegods and demons... The future had proven to be a place rife with religions and idolatry. A pervasive trade in divine artifacts kept a good portion of the populace, including the religious houses, in and out of each other’s pockets with rightful ownership proved more by possession than provenance; a lucrative climate for a thief. When the politics and benefactions of patronage were added in, few in the Old Dominion were left uninvolved. As for the vast backwater of the Middle Kingdom, he hadn’t seen a living soul whose life didn’t revolve around one religion or another, with the dragon sect of Sonnpur-Dzon being one of the more obscure. Other than the couple of hundred monks in the monastery and the Dominion trader, few people had ever heard of the place. Luckily, he’d found those few.
Dragon gods. Christe. He shook his head.
In his world there had been only one God, the God he’d fought for, the God he’d nearly died for, the God who had ultimately abandoned him in the shifting lair of the worms that had taken him far, far from his home.
Waiting in the frigid darkness, the temperature dropping toward zero, he resisted the temptation of his memories. Richly colored in his mind’s eye and ever beckoning, they were a siren’s call into the past, into the life that had been his until a fateful battle had sent him falling into the time weir.
Wales... his mind whispered. Land of the Cymry, of wild, clearwater rivers and woodland idylls a thousand shades of green, land of mountain sunrises streaking gold across the horizon, land of harps, song, and war.
Always war.
He swore again and pulled his cloak tighter about himself. There was no salvation to be had in memories. Naught but pain and longing awaited him there. He checked his watch again. Five more minutes. With luck, he and his men would be back in the hypocaust before any of the monks knew their treasure was missing. If not, and a warning was sounded, it was over the wall with all of them. Jiang and Robbi would be carrying grappling hooks, ropes, and zip lines. York and Wils were bringing in the diversionary firepower, a few blastpaks guaranteed to throw enough smoke and sparks into the air to cover their escape. Morgan had ordered all lasguns and carbines trigger-locked. He didn’t mind thievery. It was what had kept him alive in the beginning, when he’d first come through the weir. Ten years later, it was still what kept him alive, but he drew the line at massacre, and the monks were unarmed. A fortnight in the place had given him plenty of time to find any weapons hidden in the monastery, and there were none—except for the longsword concealed beneath his cloak, a cool length of steel resting in the scabbard laid along his spine, its rune-engraved cross-guard shadowing the curve of his shoulders, the one piece of his past he was never without. Ivory gripped, its hilt chased in gold and silver, its blade engraved with a rune spell, the sword was named for an ancient king of a land that like his no longer existed—Scyld, King of the Danes.
A faint flicker of light drew his gaze to the kitchen window in time for him to see Wils slip through the opening. Aja was already out, no more than a shadow sliding along the wall, closing in on him through the wind-driven snow.
Morgan smiled. The boy was a cat.
Robbi came next, followed by Jiang and York.
Wils was literally a one-armed bandit, having lost his left arm in an Old Dominion bar one night. Morgan had taken the man on despite his handicap, partially because Wils was faster with a lasgun with one arm than most people were with two, and partially because the first time they’d met, Wils had nearly conned him with a scam so skillfully contrived, Morgan had decided he’d rather have the man working with him than against him. Robbi, Wils’s younger brother and a fair thief in his own right, went wherever his older brother chose to go.
The third member of the group, Jiang, was a self-professed wastrel, sometimes in Morgan’s band and sometimes not, depending on whose bed he was in or who was buying the drinks, and invariably, how big a prize Morgan was going after. Too small, and Jiang wasn’t interested. Too big, and he figured the risks were too high. Their current job had been the exception. Easy in, easy out, and easy money had been Jiang’s cheerful summation of the undertaking. Despite the weather, so far he hadn’t been too far off the mark.
The last man came through the window and started down the wall. Huge and hulking, York was a brigand to the core, hard faced and harder hearted. He was marked for death in half the solar system with a bounty on his head posted by Van the Wretched, a lunar warlord of vile reputation—enough reason for Morgan to take York on. He’d had a few run-ins with Van’s skraelpacks, troops of beastmen as brutish as they were fierce, and he’d figured anybody who had dared to cross the wretched Van could be nothing less than an asset in his own line of work.
Morgan looked over his assembled band. To a man they were as loyal to him as they could be, which oft-times wasn’t much, except for Aja. If Morgan had sired the boy himself, he could be no more stalwart a companion. A shock of red hair, usually standing somewhat on end, framed an impish face kept from innocence by a wickedly mischievous grin and a pair of green eyes that saw far more than they missed. There was little of a child about Aja except for his damnable curiosity and mayhaps his seventeen years. A refugee from the earth’s great deserts, he had lived on the streets of the Old Dominion before attaching himself to Morgan.
The boy materialized next to him from out of the shadows, a slender form dressed in black, his face camouflaged with broad, dark stripes of paint. “Bitchin’ weather, milord,” he said, and blew on his hands.
“Aye,” Morgan agreed, watching his captain size up the courtyard, the shrine, and the great wall, his eyes flicking from one potential location to the next. Aja was the only one who ever called him milord, a title the boy could only have gotten out of him on a night when he’d been deep in his cups.
Some nights he awoke in a cold sweat, once more falling through the weir, freezing to death with terror clenching hi
s gut—worm nights, he called them. ’Twas then he would drink, looking for oblivion and a remnant of home. Aja could have gotten anything out of him, if he’d asked on a worm night.
“Robbi over there on the wall with the ropes,” the boy said, pointing to a crenellation south of the dragons. “Wils by the temple door. Jiang standing guard with Wils. York stays here to cover us.”
“Agreed,” Morgan said.
“What have they got inside the shrine?”
“Some ancient Lectron tripwires, field security on a board—”
“Good,” the boy interrupted, a quick smile curving his mouth. “And the alarm?”
“A series of color-synchronized lights on the column holding the statue.”
A moment’s silence met that answer, then Aja asked, “Like what we saw on Mercury Island?”
“Aye, much the same,” Morgan said, the tone of his voice noncommittal. He thought he heard a soft curse, or mayhaps it was only the wind.
They’d pulled off the Mercury Island job four months ago, and despite Aja’s nimble fingers and quick mind, the alarm had gone off and damn near gotten them caught. It was the closest call they’d ever had, with him and Aja both sustaining minor injuries.
“The seals in the hypocaust were Carillion knockoffs. The alarm might be too,” the boy suggested, his tone equally noncommittal.
“Maybe,” Morgan conceded.
“Well, I don’t want another friggin’ Mercury Island catastrophe,” York said, shoving himself forward from the rear and giving them each a tech-jaw to bite down on. Morgan put the marble-size piece of soft plastic on his back teeth and closed his mouth for a count of four.
“Friggin’ catastrophes are your stock in trade, York,” Aja countered before biting down on his own tech-jaw. With his teeth closed, he flashed York one of his trademark grins, thoroughly unperturbed by the older man’s complaint. York always expected the worse, and Aja never did. Morgan figured the two made a good pair.
“Are we going to do this thing or not?” Jiang asked, and Morgan heard him half through the storm and half through the tech-jaw.