Prince of Time

by Tara Janzen

  Prince of Time

  The Chalice Trilogy – Book 3

  Tara Janzen

  First published by Bantam Dell, 2000

  Copyright © Glenna McReynolds, 2000

  EBook Copyright © Tara Janzen, 2012

  EBook Published by Tara Janzen at Smashwords, 2012

  Cover Design by Hot Damn Designs, 2012

  EBook Design by A Thirsty Mind, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Titles

  Map of Wales

  Map of the Deeper Caverns

  Map of The Old Dominion

  Cast of Characters

  Prince of Time

  Prologue

  The Talisman

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Dragonfire

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Flight Into Darkness

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Titles

  The Chalice Trilogy

  The Chalice and the Blade – Book One

  Dream Stone – Book Two

  Prince of Time – Book Three

  River of Eden — “One of THE most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years! [Tara Janzen] has created an instant adventure classic.” RT Book Reviews

  Steele Street Series — “Hang on to your seat for the ride of your life... thrilling... sexy. Tara Janzen has outdone herself.” Fresh Fiction

  For more information about Tara Janzen, her writing and her books please visit her on her website www.tarajanzen.com; on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @TaraJanzen https://twitter.com/TaraJanzen

  To Katie and Chase

  Of all the millions of words to be put into place,

  my thanks go to you for giving me the very best one—Mom.

  You fill my life with love.

  Cast of Characters

  The Old Dominion

  Morgan ab Kynan—a thief

  His band of men:

  Aja—the captain

  York

  Wils

  Robbi

  Jiang

  Ferrar

  Jons

  Corvus Gei—the Warmonger

  Vishab—a witch

  Claerwen, Temple of the White Ladies of Death

  Avallyn Le Severn—Priestess of the Bones

  Palinor—Priestess of the Bones

  High Priestess of Claerwen

  Dray—captain of the Sha-shakrieg Night Watchers

  The White Palace

  Au Cade—Queen of Deseillign and the Sha-shakrieg

  Tamisk—an Ilmarryn mage

  From the Past

  Ceridwen ab Arawn

  Dain Lavrans

  Mychael ab Arawn

  Llynya—a Liosalfar

  Madron—a Druid priestess

  Naas

  Moira

  Trig

  Nia

  Math

  Shay

  The Lost Five

  Ailfinn Mapp—Prydion Mage

  Rhuddlan—King of the Quicken-tree

  Owain—a Welshman

  Wei—a Liosalfar

  Varga—a Sha-shakrieg

  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

  Prince of Time

  Prologue

  Sonnpur-Dzon Monastery

  Mountains of the Middle Kingdom

  In the failing light of a midwinter’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.

  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. Torchbearers 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 above the braziers, each one crowned with a fearsome dragon head chiseled from stone.

  Every night of the two weeks that he’d been at 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 night watch 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—though from what he’d seen, it was a rare occurrence for anyone to be within a hundred miles 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 this night were unlikely to drop to their knees when the gongs were struck, for they were his, and the sounding of the Dragon Hearts was their signal to breach the wall. He’d used his time between the daily prayer assemblies and meditations to search for Sonnpur-Dzon’s weakest point, and he’d finally found it in the grates of an ancient, unused hypocaust. He’d spent the last two nights unsealing those 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, defeating the monastery’s last defense.

  Sonnpur-Dzon’s remoteness had been its first line of defense against him. Even after being assured of its existence, it had taken him over three months to narrow down its possible location, and then another six weeks of hard travel to reach the area. In the highest mountain range on Earth, he’d finally found Sonnpur-Dzon clinging to the sheer sides and craggy peaks of the Dhaun Himal. No pilgrim came there except through hardship and design. The nearest outpost was five hundred miles to the southeast, on the coast.

  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. 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.

  Despite the initial difficulties in finding the place, it was the kind of job he liked—straightforward and paid in advance—even if the seals on the hypocaust had been cheap and messy Carillion knockoffs 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.

  Ahead of him, the saffron-robed monks and the novitiates halted and turned to face the dragon towers. Snow began falling, mixing with the flurries the wind swept off the snowcap. The torchbearers on the wall touched their flames to the braziers and fire roiled 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 that night. Whether the gold statue 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, interrupting the words of praise. He’d lost his God, but not his skills. He was still light of finger if not of heart, and still quick of mind, assets that had served him well in the past, and that had saved his life 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.

  He’d lost his family and his friends, the mountain streams and valleys of his youth, every woman he’d ever loved, and nearly his mind, but he’d not lost his name. He was still Morgan ab Kynan, and he was still the Thief of Cardiff. Before the next rising of the sun, the monks of Sonnpur-Dzon would know he had been among them.

  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, its doors 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, crossing the central courtyard from wherever they’d prostrated themselves for the nightly devotional.

  He waited, out of sight, his back against the dormitory’s stone wall, until the monks passed. When they’d all entered the hall, he climbed 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 comwatch, 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 gemstones. He and Aja would make the snatch together. Even a place as remote and backward as Sonnpur-Dzon had a security system rigged up to protect their 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 being proved more by possession than provenance, ’twas lucrative climate for a thief. When politics and the 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 who’d hired him, 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 from his home—far from his time.

  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, clear-water 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 in his memories. Naught but pain and longing awaited him there. He checked his comwatch 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 runic spell, the sword was named for an ancient king of a land that, like his, no longer existed—Scyld, King of the Danes.

  A flicker of light drew his gaze to the kitchen window in time 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 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. A hefty price had been agreed upon and half paid before they’d left Old Dominio
n for the mountains of the Middle Kingdom, and Sonnpur-Dzon was no fortress. 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 him 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 Van would be 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 ofttimes 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 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 his seventeen years. He was more than a boy, for certs, but far from fully grown. A refugee from Earth’s great deserts, he’d been with Morgan the day he’d arrived in Pan-shei.

  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, the boy’s eyes flicking from one potential location to the next. Aja was the only one who ever called him milord, a title the boy could have gotten out of him only on a night when he’d been deep in his cups. For the most part, Morgan tried to forget the past. He didn’t allow himself to dwell on it, for therein was the definition of hopelessness. He couldn’t go back. He didn’t talk about the past, ever, to anyone.