Prince of Time
Page 27
She, too, had found clothes in Tamisk’s trunk, an all-green tunic and leggings, with a dark blue undershirt embroidered with gold stars. He’d kissed her a hundred times while they’d shared their tea, and still every time he looked at her he wanted to kiss her again, to lay his mouth on her anywhere and breathe her in just to feel the softness of her skin.
“So we are to leave this place?” Aja asked.
Morgan detected relief in the question—and well the boy should be relieved. For in the end, Aja was right. If Morgan survived the fearsome journey through the weir, and the cataclysmic breaking of the seals on Kryscaven Crater, and if by some great conjunction of skill, luck, chance, and magic he actually got back to the Hart Tower with the Indigo Book in hand, well, he duly expected that all hell would break loose before Dharkkum let itself be destroyed—and he, of course, would be smack dab in the middle of it, probably not too far from where he stood now.
’Twas a disconcerting thought.
“Aye, captain. We are away,” he said.
But not for long, he thought, looking around the tower. When he returned with the book, the Hart wouldn’t be an elfin glade holding a lovers’ bower. Nay, the tower would be a hell pit—and, more than likely, his grave.
~ ~ ~
Time, Corvus brooded, is at a crux. Forcessssss are coming to bear.
He felt them all around, forces of darkness in infinite shades of black—black like Vishab’s incessant howling. From where he hovered in the steel struts of his warship’s great hold, he could see the black foulness of her cries. She spouted black pain every time she opened her mouth, black pain and black rage for the loss of her Yellow Book. His prisoners, the woman Ferrar and her giant, were drenched in black fear of a complete other shade, cowering in the corner where he had them chained. His captain had fainted dead away. Or perhaps she’d died a black death. Either way, she hadn’t moved since his unfortunate outburst. She lay like a stone, her new epaulets grimed with black soot. The messenger from the command center had definitely died, squeezed to infinitesimal thinness by Corvus’s left hand. He was no more than a wet spot on the floor, the black floor. All was black, everywhere, like the veil of shadows covering Corvus’s one good eye.
It was Vishab’s fault, and the fault of a fool named Tamisk who had dared to breach Magh Dun and ravage her tower.
Tamisssssk. He rolled the name over in his dark mind, loathing the feel of it, loathing the being who claimed it, and loathing Vishab for keeping such a person hidden from him all these years.
Tamisssssk could have saved him, Tamisssssk and his dragons who lived in a tepid pool beneath a lost forest in a white palace by the Sand Sea.
He had enough jaw left to clench, but he dared not. Clenched jaws fed anger, and he had no more room for mistakes of any kind.
Dragonsssss, the foul witch. How could she have kept dragons from him for ten years?
Claerwen held all the power in the Waste, Vishab had told him since the day she’d found him in the sand, and his memories of his previous life had confirmed such truth. The Priestesses of the Bones ruled in Deseillign. ’Twas the White Ladies of Death, she’d sworn, that must be destroyed if he was to save himself, and he was only too glad to believe. They and they alone held the means to his salvation, the time weir he’d come through and the knowledge of Dharkkum. They were the ones deserving of his revenge, for it had been the foul desert mothers who had sent him through the time weir the first time.
He’d never thought to look for another.
Never thought.
Now Vishab’s book, his book, had been stolen from Magh Dun, a breach of security for which many would pay, and suddenly the little dark death-witch had an enemy named Tamisk she’d never bothered to mention before. Tamisssssk with the power to invade Magh Dun and break her cauldron spells. Tamisssssk, a Magia Lord of the Books of Lore.
“Booksss,” Corvus spat. He’d known books. He’d had his fill of books in the past, and they had not saved him. Tamisk could have all the damned books he could steal. Corvus wanted the blasted dragons. Or, rather, he had wanted them. It was too late for dragons now. They would eat him alive. Dragons and Dharkkum had been mortal enemies from the most ancient of ages. He’d read as much in the Yellow Book—and looking down at himself, he knew he dared not get within their reach.
No, he had to go to Claerwen, back to the worms.
Ten thousand years ago he’d known Merioneth as a land of pryf and the time weir. He’d searched the future for it, scoured the Waste and the Sand Sea in hopes of finding its remains and an alternative weir to the cosmic whip that lighted at Claerwen—friggin’ impregnable Claerwen with its friggin’ impregnable priestesses. But all his searching had been for nothing. War and sand had wiped the earth clean of anything that resembled the lands he’d lived in when he’d been in the past. Rumors arose now and again of a lost forest, but what would the people of a wasteland dream about, if not a forest?
Mirage, Vishab had confessed in her despair. The White Palace was concealed by mirage and a mountain of stones, a mirage conjured by Tamisssssk.
Hidden well, indeed, for even in his life before he’d been banished to the past, when he’d been lord of a half-dozen planets and twice again as many moons, when Earth had been a minor refueling base on a second-class trade route outside the boundaries of his empire, even then Corvus had not known of a White Palace. If he had, he wouldn’t have cared. His life then had been lived on a scale outside the imagination of any backwater Earthling. Now his life hung by a thread in the selfsame backwater. Corvus Gei, Emperor, had been reduced to Corvus Gei, Warmonger—and all because of a backwater-born princess who had caught his eye, stolen his heart, and sent him to his doom.
“Love.” He spat another word into the darkness. In his other life, kings and potentates across the Milky Way had been only too glad to give him gifts, be they riches or princesses. The priestesses of Claerwen had felt otherwise, hoarding their precious chit for a nameless prince to claim. A goddamn prince, when she could have had an emperor.
He’d spent years wooing her, coming back to the planet time and time again, setting up trade with the priestesses and going so far as to destroy the Warmonger of that time to free them from their enemy. He’d backed them in their treaty negotiations with the Old Dominion, helping them secure the borders of the Waste, and for all his trouble and billions of marks spent on their behalf, they had still denied him the one thing he wanted, Avallyn Le Severn.
She’d been so pure, he remembered, and so purely arrogant, so sure of herself, and he’d wanted to conquer her as he’d conquered worlds.
She’d been beautiful, too, wildly beautiful. Imperfect, yes, unlike the genetically altered wonders that came from the Psilord’s vaults, and in her imperfections he’d found a grace of form unlike any he’d ever seen, a fairness he’d wanted all to himself.
She’d been ageless, nearly a hundred years old when he’d first seen her and as fresh as a rosebud pearled with morning dew. She had smelled like green grass and immortality, and he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life being close to her, loving her and being loved by her.
And now—his black, smoky fingers twitched—now he discovered that she had a father named Tamisssssk, a mage of boundless powers, who somehow had not overly interested Vishab, whose sole goal, it seemed, was not the salvation of her master, but the meeting of her own ends, the destruction of Claerwen.
The wretched, disavowed priestess-turned-witch had underestimated the importance of a man, and for this she had paid dearly. Her book was gone, taken, she was oh-so-certain, to the White Palace where Tamisk dwelled on the shores of the Sand Sea with his dragons.
The bitch. The vile, vile bitch.
It was too late for her book, and too late for him to go to the White Palace, and too late for him to have Avallyn. She had been among the riders in Rabin-19, along with the friggin’ tech-trash thief from Pan-shei. A skraelpack had tracked them to a camp in the Medain where their trail had run cold.
“Dragonssss,” he hissed, the shadowy remnants of his body beginning a slow spiral with the flow of his anger. Dragonssss.
He’d been deceived. Cheated. Destroyed.
Vishab wailed, drawing his unfortunate attention. He could put her out of her misery. The price would not be so high.
He glanced at his prisoners, his spiral picking up speed, undulating in the cavernous understructure of the hold, and he saw their fear turn to terror. He could take them as well, except... except the giant would require effort, too much effort. Vishab was no more than a wisp’s worth of destruction. The giant would take a full measure of smoke, and the time-rider, for all her slightness, had a clarity of will that would take great exertion to subsume.
No. He dipped down from the ceiling, reaching for Vishab on the floor. He would claim only the dark witch for now. Then he’d turn his warship toward the great bone walls of Claerwen and the priestesses who would finally pay for the destruction they had wrought on his life.
He would show the White Ladies death as they had never imagined it could be.
Chapter 20
The bone walls of Claerwen rose out of the sand, soaring hundreds of feet into the air, like the prow on a ship of death, a great, buttressed mass of mortar and the skeletal remains of the millions upon millions who had died in the wars of the Trelawney Rebellion. As they approached, Morgan could see the infamous skull towers, round edifices encrusted with sun-bleached skulls, empty eye sockets facing outward to the Waste, looking across the gaping canyon at Claerwen’s base, silent witnesses to what had been.
The Sept Seill riders had taken Morgan, Avallyn, and Aja to their sept on masutes, where Tamisk’s rover had been waiting. From there, they’d headed north, a two-day journey made hazardous by the battles raging the length of Deseillign.
“There were so many dead after the Wars,” Avallyn murmured by Morgan’s side.
Aye, he could see how many had died. ’Twas unbelievable. The walls looked to be made up of a whole world’s population—and in truth, they very nearly were. The Old Dominion was all that remained of the once great cities of Earth, with only pockets of civilization scattered elsewhere on the planet.
“At the time of the rebellion,” Avallyn said, “eleven hundred years ago, Claerwen was no more than a small abbey, well out of the main fighting. Afterward, when the Trelawneys had won, the priestesses took it upon themselves to sanctify the dead. The task proved overwhelming. There was no burial ground big enough even for just the thousands of their own district, so they started aboveground burials, packing the bones in mortar to keep the Rift dogs from dragging them away. Word got out about the holy women and the bones, and soon whole towns were bringing their dead to Claerwen. The survivors of a family or tribe would gather the bones of their loved ones and bring them. City-states sent their bones in by land barge. Whole districts brought bones in by caravan. For a hundred years, it was the holiest of pilgrimages, to take the bones of the dead to Claerwen and have them blessed and laid to rest by the priestesses, the Priestesses of the Bones, the White Ladies of Death.”
Another misconception of his laid to rest, Morgan thought. To him, and to many in the Old Dominion and Pan-shei, the priestesses were scavengers, scouring the dunes looking for bones, especially the bones of men, even if they had to speed death along to get what they wanted.
But no one who had ever seen the walls could have been so misled. The bones of Claerwen had been made by weapons of mass destruction on a grand scale, not by women riding the Waste on masutes, looking for carrion.
The rover banked to the left, following the western rim of the canyon, heading toward the temple complex, an expanse of buildings numbering in the hundreds. On the eastern rim, the Warmonger’s army was spread out like a black plague, the battle well engaged. The priestesses had been forewarned of Avallyn’s arrival, and directions had been given for the rover to dock in one of the ports carved out of the canyon’s walls.
As the port came into view, Morgan saw a huge stone platform just beyond it, a white disk jutting out of the canyon’s face. A series of small buildings were clustered along its cliff side. The half hanging out over the abyss was clear of everything save two stone towers crowned with dragon heads. A trickle of cold dread rolled down his spine, and Morgan knew that, like Sonnpur-Dzon, Claerwen was indeed a place of time worms.
~ ~ ~
From a window in the west wing of the cloisters, Avallyn saw Morgan, Aja, and the Sept Seill riders enter the courtyard below. The men had been quarantined upon their arrival, but she had insisted that Morgan be brought to her quarters after the briefest possible detention, reminding the attending priestesses that he was the Prince of Time and should be treated accordingly, as should his escort.
He was so beautiful—her hand clenched into a fist at her side—and he was hers. She had waited as the Red Book had decreed. She’d not given herself to any other, but she’d given herself to him, and she would not be denied.
“A cripple,” the woman beside her said with disapproval, watching Morgan’s limping stride as he crossed the walkways leading to Severn Hall. “Just as Dray reported.”
Fighting back a retort, Avallyn glanced at her mother and was caught like a snared rabbit by the older woman’s sharply discerning gaze.
“A wine junkie as well?” Palinor demanded.
“Nay,” Avallyn told her. “Tamisk’s potion freed him from the Carillion addiction.”
“And the price?”
There was always a price.
“Steep enough. He saw his fate.”
Palinor said naught, dismissing Morgan’s grim future with the ease of years of practice. She glanced back out the window, an expression of resigned disgust drawing her features tight.
“Even with Dray’s warning, I had somehow expected more in a prince. Yet I fear the thief proved to be man enough for you.”
Avallyn’s fist tightened even more. Her fingernails dug into her palm.
She hadn’t tried to hide anything from her mother, knowing the uselessness of such an attempt, but neither had she said or done anything to reveal what had happened in the Hart. Still, her mother knew. Morgan had marked her as his, and no priestess of Palinor’s skill would have missed the signs.
“Tamisk set you up,” her mother continued, “and you fell into his trap. Though what he hopes to gain by your debauchery, I don’t know, unless it’s humiliation for me.”
“I have not been debauched,” Avallyn said.
Her mother looked to her and named her a fool with a dismissive glance. Behind them, a melodic tone chimed at the far end of the hall, announcing the sept riders’ arrival.
“Call it what you will, you have ruined yourself and ruined my plans for you.”
“Plans?” A frisson of unease skittered down Avallyn’s spine. “What plans?”
“You didn’t have to stay in the past. You could have returned.” Palinor swept away from the window and signaled for one of her acolytes to answer the call. “Fata Ranc Le or nay, the priestesses have chosen not to make covenant with the mad thief. If he is meant to be sacrificed to Dharkkum, so be it. We have not accepted him as your consort. You could have returned through the weir and taken your rightful place as a High Priestess in Claerwen.”
Return to the future without Morgan? A chill ran through her. To be separated from him by ten thousand years of cold and empty space?
“Tamisk says the weir will be destabilized if we are successful. There is no coming back.”
“Tamisk is no weir master,” Palinor said, rejecting the idea out of hand. “In this, you would be wiser to trust the High Priestess.”
Avallyn blanched, worried that she could be brought back against her will. Her mother was not without power. She didn’t have Tamisk’s magic,
but she had the High Priestesses behind her, and they ruled through casting the fates of people’s lives. They didn’t change what was so much as they changed what would be, going so far—she’d once heard—as to use their most arcane powers to write desired fates in the Red Book. People’s lives were the priestesses’ work, and ten thousand years wasn’t far enough away to keep them from meddling.
“And what would the High Priestess have of me now?” she asked.
“Now?” Palinor let out a grieved sigh. “Now you have ruined yourself with a tech-trash prince from Pan-shei. You could still return, but it would not be as a ruling priestess. Worse, though—”
The scraping open of the doors at the end of the hall captured Avallyn’s attention, and she heard no more of what her mother said, her gaze riveted by the entrance of the men.
The riders still wore their desert robes, and Aja his Pan-shei garb. The Prince of Time had been dressed in white. He stopped in front of her and went down on bended knee.
“Milady,” he said, his head bowed, the fall of his dark hair with its white blaze hiding his face from her. As one, the Sept riders knelt behind him, a courtesy they’d not bothered to perform during their dash across the Waste.
Behind her, she heard her mother tsk. A quick glance proved Palinor drawing herself up taller and tightening her cloak around herself, and suddenly Avallyn understood the source of much of her mother’s disapproval. ’Twas far more basic than Morgan being a crippled tech-trash thief from Pan-shei. He was a man, and her daughter, the most prized priestess in the purely female stronghold of Claerwen, had allied herself with him, with the opposition. After one hundred and twenty-five years of obedience, her child had broken free of her bonds—though only to be bound to another: Morgan.
“Dread lord.” She called him by his most rightful title, extending her hand. Beneath his clothes, he’d been marked with the runes of the dragon-maker’s firespell. Beneath his skin beat a heart of valor. He was cunning, and fast, and skilled at keeping himself alive, a fact proven with every breath he took. Ten years of thievery in the far-flung quarters of the Old Dominion were nine and a half longer than all but the very best survived.