Prince of Time

by Tara Janzen

  “What of free will?” he demanded, looking up. “Have I had none?”

  “You’re a thief, aren’t you?” Tamisk replied with undisguised distaste. “The Red Book said nothing of that.”

  “He has the blood of the Starlight-born from Stept Agah’s line,” Avallyn interjected. “Did the Red Book say anything of that?”

  The mage stared hard at Morgan, his interest obviously piqued.

  “Stept Agah? Did you deep-scent him, then?” Tamisk asked his daughter.

  “Aye,” Avallyn said.

  “After the wine was out of his system, I hope.”

  “Twenty-four hours after I gave him your potion.”

  “Good,” the mage said succinctly, and in the next moment, Morgan felt Tamisk’s invasion of his mind. ’Twas no light step like Avallyn’s but a bounding leap that set him staggering. Avallyn grabbed him as he was nearly knocked off his feet. It was all over in a second.

  “So he does,” Tamisk said, not looking at all as though he were going to faint from the effort.

  Left feeling slightly nauseous and thoroughly trammeled, Morgan found his balance and enough wherewithal to glare. “Bastard,” he ground out. “I can trace my family’s lineage back two hundred years to Gruffudd ap Cynan without once coming across anyone named Stept Agah.”

  Tamisk appeared nonplussed. “To get to Stept Agah, you would have to go back to the end of the Dark Age of the Starlight-born, an unlikely journey even for you, time-rider.”

  “So you didn’t know?” Avallyn asked her father.

  “No.” The mage considered Morgan. “Perhaps ’tis of no import. Blood alone does not make the man, as any king with sons can tell you.”

  “And perhaps it is the difference between life and death for all of us,” Avallyn said.

  “Stept Agah had many children, with the last child born from Arianrod’s line after his death.” A frown marred the mage’s smooth brow. “We know that line was carried only by the females until Mychael ab Arawn was born, and the other branches spawned as many cowards as heroes.”

  Morgan had his sword drawn and laid against the mage’s neck before he finished his sentence.

  “Give me back my captain,” he demanded through gritted teeth.

  “You’re fast,” the mage said thoughtfully. “Very fast. Journeying through the time weir has given you speed.”

  “His sword, Scyld, is marked with runes,” Avallyn said, neither of them seeming the least concerned that the blade in question was pressed against Tamisk’s fair skin.

  “So I see,” the mage said.

  ’Twas a slender, elegant neck, and easy enough for Morgan to sever if he so wished—but he didn’t wish, and the mage knew it. Nay, he wasn’t going to cut Avallyn’s father’s throat. Not yet.

  With a muttered curse at his own rashness, he lowered the sword.

  “At last, a sign of wisdom,” Tamisk said drolly. “Mayhaps all is not yet lost. Come, prince, look into the pool, into the past. I swear no harm will come to your captain, and perhaps you will learn something to increase your own odds of survival.”

  The mage was speaking the truth, and Morgan knew it. He had to look, had to know, and anger was a luxury he could no longer afford.

  Neither was fear.

  But when he looked, he discovered he had some fears not so easily put aside. Mychael ab Arawn, Ceridwen’s twin brother, had taken the ring from Caradoc’s hand. The boy looked older than Morgan remembered him, and fiercer, far fiercer, with a wildness in his eyes Morgan had never before seen in a man. His face was grimly stark, his hair a wind-whipped mane cut through with the copper blaze of a time-rider. Flying in behind him, looming up out of the darkness of sea and cave, were dragons—beasts of enormous size and magnificent fury, their visages carved in clean, reptilian lines, their screams echoing out of the past. Scales with the shimmer of abalone covered them from their long, bewhiskered snouts to their serpentine tails, one in crimson limned in shades of blood and flame, the other in pale green underscored with watery blue.

  “Ddrei Goch,” Avallyn whispered by his side. “Ddrei Glas.”

  “The dragons of Merioneth,” Morgan said, fascinated despite the purely primal fear that told him any flying serpent-lizard that big was a monster, far more so than pryf.

  The dragons had teeth, incredible teeth. Fangs the size of ship’s masts bracketed their jaws. Flames roiled out of their gaping mouths, and smoke trailed from their nostrils.

  “They live in the White Palace?” he asked, the truth of what he’d been told almost impossible to believe when faced with the beasts themselves.

  “In Dragonmere,” Avallyn answered, “the last remnant of Mor Sarff, the Serpent Sea that lies beneath the carn. There are always only two, genetic replicas of the first dragons conjured in Ysaia’s cauldron.”

  “ ’Tis a name she chooses to forget, priestess,” Tamisk interjected in a pained voice. “A name the wise refuse to speak. ’Tis better to call her Rhayne, as she has chosen for the incarnations of this Age.”

  “Nothing is forgotten in Claerwen,” Avallyn said. “And so Rhayne knows.”

  “Rhayne?” Morgan asked, a faint memory tugging at his mind. In the pool, the dragons beat their wings against the dark sky, and he swore he felt a gust of wind blow across his face. He nearly retreated. These were the beasts he was supposed to fight with against Dharkkum? Gods, he’d never heard of anything more insane. Yet there was Mychael ab Arawn, the look on his face telling Morgan he knew exactly what was coming down out of the sky behind him.

  “The White Bitch of the Dangoes,” Avallyn explained.

  “And your threat to the Lyran,” he said, remembering how she’d invoked the name Rhayne and the Lyran had backed off.

  “Aye. The Lyrans remember her wrath when they would have destroyed the last of a rival species, and they know where their bones lie in the walls of Claerwen. The White Bitch still strikes fear in their hearts.”

  Morgan barely heard her explanation. The dragons were descending on Mychael, dwarfing him with their size. No Saint George’s beast of a quarter ton, they were sea dragons with dorsal fins rising ten feet off the crowns of their heads and cascading down their backs. Their wings were like thunderclouds, with a single claw at the apex of each scapular arch. The long fangs gracing each side of their upper jaws were curved scythes of pure ivory running green with seawater.

  “Mychael,” he whispered, a warning that was ten thousand years too late. Smoke bellowed out of the beasts’ razor-toothed maws with every breath, smoke shot through with flashes of flame. Mychael had to feel the heat—yet the boy’s attention was firmly fixed somewhere beyond Morgan’s sight.

  The dragons screeched in fury, flying in closer, their wingtips grazing Mychael, but to no effect. Mychael stood like a tower of rock on the beach, resolute, as if receiving only his due—until the dragons roared, a rumbling, all-consuming sound rising from the depths of their wyrmish souls. Mychael responded, opening his mouth and answering the call, lifting his sword into the light of the cliffs guarding the gates of time. Aye, he lifted his sword and roared, a sound no less gut-wrenched than the dragons’, a call to blood, a primal scream of fury that belonged in no man’s mouth. And within that fearsome, chilling roar, Morgan felt his own blood catch fire and race through his veins, urging him on to the fight. A fight to the death.

  His breath came hard. His hand tightened on his sword, and he felt Scyld grow warm and come alive with power—and he feared he would go, that nothing could keep him from the battle awaiting him in the past. No fear of time worms or the weir; even the Warmonger was as nothing compared to the insistent, blood-churning lure of the dragons’ cries. They were his, and he was theirs, their destinies entwined beyond fate.

  Closer and closer the dragons flew, louder and louder they roared, until Morgan could feel nothing beyond the beat of their wings and the scorching heat arising with each ear-shattering screech. Sweat poured down his body, steam rose from his clothes, and still he couldn’t
tear his gaze away from the pool. Within its watery depths Mychael was being consumed, his clothes giving way to tatters in the growing maelstrom, the blaze in his hair seeming to come alive. Smoke and flames swirled around him, fed by the bellows of the dragons’ breath and turning the sand at his feet into glass.

  The blaze of flames streaked up Mychael’s body. Morgan watched, horrified, as the fire pouring out of the beasts and the fire engulfing Mychael became one, a single inferno into which the man vanished—only to be reborn in the red dragon.

  The giant animal tossed and twisted in the flames, its wings flapping, its cry strangled in its throat, until Mychael’s voice became its own, the scream of Mychael’s fury breaking free from the mighty jaws to ring out against the cliffs and shore. The maelstrom of fire ran back into the roiling waves of Mor Sarff, and a wash of gray flooded into the beast’s golden eyes, the beginning of a thousand shifts of shape confirming the frightful transition taking place by the dark sea.

  The man was gone, and so was the dragon, and in their place was a creature far different than either. It looked like a dragon, but the heart beating inside its scaly breast was that of a man, Mychael ab Arawn’s. Morgan felt its rhythm match his own beating heart’s.

  “Fight with me.” Mychael’s voice, edged with a dragonish rasp, spoke out from the pool. “Fight with me so that we may live!”

  ’Twas a call to arms, a call for the death of Dharkkum, for the great devourer to be devoured by Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas. Mychael’s sword had fallen to the shore, and another hand came into view to lift it up. Morgan knew who grasped the blade before the pool showed him Llynya’s face. She’d been wounded. Blood ran from a bandage on her arm and from a fresh cut marking her from elbow to wrist. Sweat dampened her brow. Her hair was a tangled riot of braids and twists stuck through with green leaves. Behind her was chaos, the coming of Dharkkum, a blanket of whirling threads warped in darkness.

  The undulating vortex flattened and flowed through the cavern of the Serpent Sea, and everything it touched was consumed, stretched to an excruciating thinness before being dissolved into Dharkkum’s black core.

  ’Twas Pan-shei again, but worse, far worse. No malfunctioning camera or comstation blacked out the harrowing truth of Dharkkum’s destructive powers. Terror made the elfin maid’s face stark, but she did not cower in the face of such dreadful death. She lifted Mychael’s blade with a cry of Khardeen! and urged the dragons on to their duty.

  Ddrei Glas, the smaller green dragon, dropped out of the air, swooping in behind the sprite. With a leap, Llynya was upon the dragon’s back, the sword still held high to lead the beasts into the fray.

  As if sensing the coming of its foes, the blanketing vortex rippled backward along its length, wiping out half a score of Light-elves on the beach. Farther down around the headland, a strange sight met Morgan’s eyes—skraelings, dozens of them, fighting their way down to the sea and dying in the swart grip of Dharkkum.

  Sweet Jesu! Skraelings in his own time.

  ’Twas a revelation he had little time to dwell upon, for the battle was engaged. Threads spiraled out of the darkness to ensnare warriors and snatch away their lives. The dragons retaliated with fire, flames unlike any Morgan had ever seen—ephemeral washes of color that stained the ether of the beasts’ scorching breath, all of it coalescing into a white-hot core of painfully bright, darkness-eating light.

  With each advance the dragons made, the light grew brighter and hotter, until Morgan felt the heat of it licking at the air around him, more intense than what he’d felt before. Dharkkum flowed forward to meet the beasts, skimming along the face of the damson cliffs, stealing light from the crystalline wall and picking off soldiers, and growing larger with each death.

  Then, in a sudden about-face, Dharkkum retreated, imploding upon itself and drawing back into the deeper reaches of Mor Sarff. Like an arrow, it shot back into the labyrinth of fjords and tunnels fronting the blackened sea. Enraged, the dragons followed, and in the lost land of the deepest caverns, the true storm broke.

  Morgan witnessed the ferocity, the tearing asunder of both the light and the darkness as time sped by in the pool, days falling away in the space of minutes. Clouds of smoke covered the sea and scoured the cliffs; the dragons’ fiery breath flashed like lightning through the banks of endless night. In his mind, Morgan knew the dragons had won in the end, for he was alive and standing on Earth, though ’twas a wasted shell of the green paradise it had been—but in his heart, he feared for Mychael and Llynya. Each glimpse he caught of the sprite showed her weakening, her clothing scorched, her face haggard with exhaustion, the sword she wielded growing too heavy for her to bear. He feared she would soon die.

  For Mychael, his fears were of a different nature. Not that he would die, but that he would forever be trapped in his dragon form, a beast and no longer a man.

  At the dawn of the fifth day, the tide of battle shifted in the dragons’ favor, with Dharkkum retreating ever faster and ever deeper into the earth. As the dragons raced in pursuit, a voice could be heard rising out of the depths.

  “Heln heln criy-darr... ba!”

  A woman’s voice, growing stronger.

  “Ailfinn Mapp,” Avallyn whispered.

  “Aye,” Tamisk confirmed. “Chanting the Doom of Dharkkum.”

  Morgan watched the dragons chase the darkness through tunnels carved from the mother stone of the planet, until a great, broken wall rose up out of an even greater cavern. ’Twas the underground mountain of Kryscaven Crater, with its broken western face made of rock crystal, deep purple rock crystal shattered into thousands of jagged-edged boulders.

  Five people stood on the crater’s silvery floor beyond the broken wall, a rainbow-hued fire blazing at their feet. ’Twas their protection, Morgan knew, because Dharkkum swirled all around them, the black threads twisting and turning, the vortex shuddering as it was pulled into the crater, and yet the five were untouched by the darkness.

  “Luenn luenn criy-darr... ba!” The woman’s voice rose, and an edge of darkness fell in upon itself and disappeared into the crater. It would soon escape, Morgan was sure, unless the old woman could rebuild the crystal wall.

  Ddrei Goch roared out of the tunnel first after Dharkkum and leveled a mighty blast at the shreds of smoke snaking through the shattered crystals on the passage floor. The smoke vanished, consumed by the fire, and the purple stone turned to molten glass in the heat. Ailfinn changed her chant into a soft murmuring, and the fiery purple rivers began running together into pools. The words were unintelligible at a distance, but the effect was immediate, with the pools washing together into a tide-racked lake a hundred yards across. As her chant grew in strength, the tide rose, flowing up onto the wall and cooling into hard rock.

  The dragons breathed again, a fierce expulsion of flame, and more of the crystal boulders melted. Once again Ailfinn drew the molten tide up onto the wall with her chant.

  ’Twas a mighty task she had taken upon herself. With each word, she dragged Dharkkum in deeper and built the wall higher, until it became obvious to Morgan that she was walling herself and the four inside.

  The woman knew. She had to know what she was doing, and what kind of death Dharkkum would deal them. Yet as he watched, the wall grew higher and higher. ’Twas a nightmare fate far exceeding the vision of Caradoc in the pool. How long, he wondered, would the rainbow fire last? And how was such a sacrifice made when hope must die with the last embers of the flames?

  The five were doomed.

  His gaze slid over them, their scorched clothes, their faces hardened by determination, yet weary with despair: the old woman with her cloud of long white hair and rune-marked cloak, a book held open in her hands; a Night Watcher—to his surprise—a Sha-shakrieg recognizable by the whorls of fighting threads on his arms and his desert countenance; a Quicken-tree man he faintly remembered, Wei was his name; and another of the Quicken-tree he remembered all too well—Rhuddlan, King of the Light-elves. ’Twas the last of the fiv
e, though, that caused his breath to catch and his heart to seize up with fear. ’Twas Owain, his own man, a Welshman with no business dying in the midst of magic and horror.

  Owain had been his captain in the past, his responsibility, and Morgan had led him into a world of enchantment when he’d committed his small force to the taking of Balor. The man had been like a father to him, and he’d died a death of terrors—stark, raving terrors by the wild look in Owain’s eyes and the tears streaking down his cheeks. The sheer dread and fear on the man’s face stripped Morgan’s emotions to the bone. There was no defense for leading his men into a situation so far outside their comprehension. Owain would have bravely died by the sword in any battle with the Norman English, the warrior’s death he’d expected, but Morgan’s choices had reduced him to less than a warrior, to less than what Owain would ever have considered a man.

  He’d deserved so much better for his loyalty. He’d deserved better for following his prince.

  A numbing wave of guilt forced Morgan to look away.

  “You can save him and all the Lost Five by going back,” Tamisk murmured, and Morgan suddenly understood why the mage had brought him to the tower.

  “It’s the old woman, the priestess, you want, isn’t it?”

  “And her book, the Elhion Bhaas Le,” Tamisk admitted. “It is of the most importance.”

  “And the others?” Morgan demanded. “Why did she take so many with her?”

  “So many?” Tamisk repeated blandly. “There were only four. Ailfinn’s ordeal in the oubliette at Rastaban had left her weak. She needed the strength of their life force to sustain her, mayhaps for eternity. Believe me, if there had been a hundred at hand, she would have taken them all.”

  Tamping down his anger with himself, Morgan replied, “I was won to the cause with Mychael’s first dragon cry.” But ’twas true that seeing Owain took away even the possibility of doubt, or of hesitation when the time came. He had no choice but to go back through the weir and breach the prison Ailfinn Mapp had made for herself and her companions—and for Dharkkum.