Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3)

by S L Farrell

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” But he wished he weren’t. He wished Padraic weren’t. He had been having more than second thoughts about this, as the burning in his stomach reminded him. Past the Rí’s shoulder, he saw Padraic, walking near the road. His son waved once at him, then continued walking. The banked coals in Doyle’s stomach glowed brighter.

  “Aye, you’re here,” Rí Mallaghan answered. “And I’d remind you that it’s because you are with us that your wife is allowed to be as . . . uncooperative as she has been. This is the time when all of us Riocha must stand together. But you still look unconvinced, my friend.”

  Once, Doyle had thought that Torin Mallaghan meant the word “friend” when he said it. No longer. “I remember having a conversation with you twenty cycles ago, back when Edana’s da died. You told me then that ‘the prize was worth the risk.’ Back then, I agreed with you.”

  “But you don’t now. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Doyle was saved from having to answer. A garda came running up to them from the village, the rings on his leather mail clanking. “My Rí, Tiarna, they’re approaching.” The embers inside Doyle went to flame.

  “Ah, good.” Rí Mallaghan took a deep breath in through his thin nose, his nostrils flaring. He brought his Cloch Mór out from under the clóca and took it in his hand for a moment. “We begin, then. Come, Doyle.” He began walking away without waiting for Doyle to respond.

  The garda was staring at him, waiting for him to move. Doyle shivered in the cold breeze. He looked back at the lake. It was still and silent. There was nothing there.

  “I’ll be there, my Rí,” he said. “Give me a few moments.” He gestured to the garda. “I need to see Tiarna O Blaca,” he said. “Tell him it’s vital. Hurry!” The garda nodded and ran off. Doyle glanced once more back at the lake—no, there were no seals there now—and began walking slowly toward the hovels of the village and the road. Shay O Blaca met him halfway there. “What is it, Doyle?” the man asked. “Make it quick—Rí Mallaghan wants me to talk to the green-robes before Kayne gets here.”

  “Shay . . .” Now that it came to it, Doyle wasn’t sure how to proceed, and the sour fire in his throat made him swallow hard. Shay’s head cocked sideways and lowered storm cloud-gray eyebrows. “We’ve been friends for as long as I can remember, and I’ve asked you too many times for favors. But I have one more to ask: the last one, I promise . . .”

  In the morning, she slept long, and when she awoke, only Issine was still there. The Créneach stood motionless a few strides from her, looking more like a knee-high pile of rocks than a living thing. The round head turned on its stony torso with a sound like scuffed gravel as Sevei stood up, shivering a bit.

  Bhralhg had evidently brought fish while she’d been sleeping. They lay gleaming at Sevei’s feet. “Did he expect me to eat these raw?” she asked.

  Issine made a sound halfway between a cough and a hammer blow on granite. “They would taste good enough to you if you were in Saimhóir form,” he told her. “Or you can build a fire and scorch them if you’d like. I’m sure Lámh Shábhála’s capable of that.”

  His tone made her feel like a child again, being scolded by an amused parent. She stuck her tongue out at Issine impulsively and he made a chuckling sound again. Sevei glanced down again at the fish. “What do Créneach eat?” she asked.

  “Flesh eats flesh, stone eats stone,” he answered. “I particularly like the taste of ocean sand. The salts, you know.”

  “I suppose,” she said, looking around the cove. “Where are the others?”

  “Gone,” he said. “Bhralhg, Beryn, and Kekeri left during the night. They’d said what they wanted to say, and heard what they wanted to hear.”

  “And were they satisfied?”

  If a pile of rocks could shrug, Issine did so. “Who can say?” he answered. “Bhralhg, perhaps, is—after all, he made his choice when he gave you Lámh Shábhála, and Kekeri and Beryn lent their help to you also. So . . .”

  “Were you satisfied? I notice you’re still here and the others aren’t.”

  “This is where I live. The sand and the salts, you know . . .” She waited, and he made the birdlike warbling sound that she’d heard the first time she’d seen him. “But no, I’m not yet satisfied.”

  “What will you do about it?”

  “Nothing,” the Créneach answered. “Nothing at all.”

  “How can you do noth—” The world tumbled and changed around Sevei in that instant. She no longer saw the cold ledge jutting out over the green tidal swell. Instead, she saw trees and tumbledown houses and people. Even as she blinked and wondered at the sight, she realized whose eyes she was seeing through.

  “Kayne!” A feeling of dread and apprehension filled Sevei, and she gasped as the vision swept her under. The people surrounding her were Riocha, and she recognized the faces: Rí Mallaghan, Rí Mac Baoill, Doyle Mac Ard, and Padraic. Their Clochs Mór were open and raging all around her, and then the pain came, an awful and unrelenting wave. Sevei groaned with the torture, wanting to hunch over and collapse into a fetal ball. She forced herself to remain upright, grimacing.

  “Kayne . . .” Sevei grasped for Lámh Shábhála, willing herself to go to him but though the energy flared around her, she could not find him in her mage-sight, only feel his distress. She didn’t know where he was, didn’t recognize the landscape in which she found herself, and there were no mage-lights to give her the connection to his cloch she needed to follow.

  Already, the vision was starting to fade, as if unable to bear the touch of sunlight.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him,” Issine said. She turned around, and the last wisps of her connection to Kayne vanished. She blinked at his sudden absence.

  “Go after them . . .”

  “The only safe enemy is a dead enemy . . .”

  “It’s that bastard Doyle . . .”

  The voices hammered at her from within Lámh Shábhála, her gram’s chief among them. “I have to go to Kayne,” she said. Tears had started in her eyes: from the pain, from her fear, from the sense of loss. “I have to try to help him.”

  “You can’t,” Issine answered. “What can be done is being done.” The Créneach warbled again, high and shrill. It waddled away from the sea, looking like a child’s statue, and stopped near a cleft in the rocks. “Come walk with me,” he said.

  “I have to help Kayne, Issine,” she began, frantic. “How can I go with you when he’s in trouble, hurt, maybe . . .” She couldn’t say the word. Dying. Dead . . . She was afraid to give voice to her thoughts, afraid that if she spoke the bare syllables they would come true. The Créneach warbled again, clapping its hand together percussively.

  “You can do nothing now. You can only wait. Come walk with me,” he repeated.

  Sevei stood there with Lámh Shábhála open and impotent inside her. She heard Carrohkai Treemaster’s voice, faint and deep within her. “. . . walk with the Eldest . . . go with him . . .” After a moment, she released the cloch and went to where Issine waited patiently. “What can you do here?” Issine asked again. “When the mage-lights come again, if Kayne feeds his cloch, you can find him. In the meantime, we should walk together.”

  The cold sea spray from the wind touched her flesh and she hissed at the sting of the contact against her scarred and delicate skin. She turned her back to the sea and went toward Issine. Together, they walked up the slope toward rocks and scrub.

  49

  Bunús Wall

  ENNIS DIDN’T NEED Cima’s translations to know that the Arruk utterly detested their trek through the mountains. The High Road wound disconcertingly up and down the spines of the high peaks, as if it had been laid out by following the path of wandering sheep. As they moved through the mountains into the Finger itself, the advancing army began to be harried by a constant series of ambushes. There would be a sudden flight of arrows from one side or another, but when the nearest Arruk soldiers rushed to confront their attackers, their a
ttackers would vanish into the hills and brush and dense forests of the valleys, never allowing a direct confrontation. The ambushes became more frequent and more deadly as they moved into the Finger, especially where the High Road was but a channel between two clifflike slopes. But there was no other way to go: to abandon the High Road would have led them into the maze of trackless hills and valleys where their advance might have been blocked by sheer walls and drops.

  They went forward, leaving a bloody, steady trail of their dead behind. The Arruk grumbled and the Mairki complained, but Kurhv Kralj was adamant: they would follow the High Road, as Ennis Svarti had told them. Kurhv Kralj, Ennis realized, was as locked into his pattern as Ennis.

  It was at midday on an overcast and drizzly day that they came upon the Bunús Wall.

  Kurhv Kralj, and thus Ennis, traveled on their litters near the front of the army, with only a thin buffer of troops between them and whatever lay ahead—Ennis knew that was different from the way the Daoine armies were arranged, where the Riocha often rode to the rear and a commander might not draw his sword at all. They were ascending along the spine of a ridge to a plateau where the army could spill off the confines of the High Road, trampling the heather and grasses well to either side. There seemed to be a black cliff ahead of them; as they drew nearer, the first troops to approach came hurrying back to Kurhv Kralj’s litter. “What are they saying?” Ennis asked Cima, who was leaning from the litter as the Arruk chattered.

  “There are stone monsters ahead, as well as several bluntclaw soldiers,” Cima answered. “Kurhv Kralj has ordered the army to hold, but we’re going forward to look.”

  The litters were borne through the ranks to the very front and set down. Kurhv Kralj dismounted the litter, as did Ennis and Cima. Ahead of them, a few hundred strides up the road, a stone wall loomed, as high as three Arruk and following the line of the ridge to the north and south as far as they could see. Ahead, the High Road widened, the lane leading to a massive gate in the wall. And the wall . . .

  The faces of hideous creatures and fabled monsters, carved in stone and painted, glared out at the Arruk army as if defying them to move forward. There were terrible dragons coiling around the snarling mouths of dire wolves; Black Haunts with howling mouths; doglike creatures walking upright with scarlet mouths and hands like Ennis’ own that could only be mythical blood wolves; the frilled, reptilian back and cavernous, tooth-lined mouth of the knifefang; a dozen other nameless gargoyles and beasts. They writhed in unmoving stone on the eastern face of the wall. Kurhv Kralj stared most, though, at the gate. The metal-sheathed wood of the gate was the mouth of a gigantic creature, the wall around it was its body: a winged feline with a dragon’s barbed tail; the head and eyes nearly human except for the sharp incisors crowding its snouted mouth, clawed forepaws extending outward from the gate to form an entrance into the gaping mouth . . .

  “Cudak . . .” The word was a whisper that leaped from Kurhv Kralj’s mouth to the others. “That is Cudak . . .”

  “It’s the Bunús Wall,” Ennis told Cima. “I heard about it. Mam told me. She said the Bunús Muintir built it with their magic . . .”

  “What’s beyond the wall?” Kralj Kurhv asked.

  “The Tuatha,” Ennis answered. He could not raise his voice above a croak. Home . . . Home is beyond the wall. “The land Mam used to rule.”

  “Who guards the wall? How many?” They could all clearly see men moving along the wall, and hear their faint shouts as they pointed at the Arruk force before them. A few of the gardai, Ennis thought, seemed to be wearing the gray clóca of Dún Laoghaire. He wondered at that—why would they be here?

  Ennis shrugged. “I don’t know.” The blue ghosts were rampant here, as if this place were full of possible futures. He could barely find the one he needed among the crowd, and even that one seemed pale and weak. “I never knew there was anyone here at all. Kayne . . . he told me it was mostly ruined, that the gates hung open . . .” He stared at the wall. “They’re not open now,” he said, a disappointed child stating the obvious.

  Kurhv Kralj laughed. “They will be soon enough,” he answered. “You—” he pointed to one of the Arruk. “Bring the Mairki here. Cudak waits for us, and we will come to Him.”

  The sound was the first thing they heard: the low, insistent thudding of thousands of feet punctuated by the clashing of wood and metal and shouts in a strange language. When the first of the creatures appeared down the long slope where the High Road entered a cleft pass in the mountains, the gardai along the Bunús Wall gasped as one, even though they’d seen this vision before. “Arruk!” someone shouted. “It’s the Arruk!”

  The year the gardai had spent in Céile Mhór could never be forgotten, nor the friends they’d known and lost there, and they shuddered at the memories.

  The creatures kept coming, boiling out of the cleft like ants from a disturbed nest and arraying themselves before the wall just out of arrow range. Garvan O Floinn, in charge of the gardai in the absence of either Tiarna Kayne Geraghty or Hand Harik, shook his head as he stared outward at the massed force. For the last several days, they’d received increasingly urgent reports from the Fingerlanders who lived beyond the wall that the Arruk were coming. The clan-lairds of the Outside Clans had done what they could with ambushes and quick forays, but none of them had the resources to attack the Arruk directly. The other clan-lairds had sent men and women to the wall to bolster the small force already there, but Garvan could already see that they were too few. Too few by half or more. “By the Mother, the reports were right. They’ve brought the entire army—look, that’s the Kralj’s litter out there, and the Kralj doesn’t move without Mairki and Svarti.”

  “We can’t hold the Wall,” a garda next to him muttered. “Not with the people we have. Not against a force even a quarter that size.”

  “We’ll do what we’ve been asked to do,” Garvan answered sharply, “for as long as we can. If we can give the others time . . . well, that’s what we’ll do.”

  He forced his gaze away from the Arruk. He could hear the shrieking of the Arruk Svarti with their spell-sticks, already beginning to chant their magics, and he saw the fluttering banners of the Mairki. All four of them . . . We saw that only once the entire time . . .

  “Archers to the wall!” he called out to the encampment of gardai and Fingerlanders below. “Lock and bar the gates. I need two Fingerlander riders: one to go to Laird O’Blathmhaic and tell him to send as many men as he can; the other to ride to Ceangail for reinforcements. Move! Go!”

  He turned back to the Arruk. He could see two cloth-draped litters moving toward the front, the flags on the poles telling him that it was the Kralj and his Svarti. Instinctively, Garvan checked to make sure his sword was loose in its scabbard: it wouldn’t be long now. Too few soldiers, even with the Fingerlanders, and no clochs na thintrí at all . . .

  He didn’t wonder if he would die today. He wondered how.

  A Daoine army might have waited before the gates, preparing siege engines, battering rams, and catapults. That was what Kayne had said armies often did when confronted by obstacles. But not the Arruk.

  Kurhv Kralj’s orders were simple, direct, and brutal. The only concession to time was to send troops into the nearest stand of trees to cut scaling ladders for the walls. In a few stripes, the ladders had been made. Two Mairki, along with their Svarti and troops were sent to assault the wall to either side of the gate. The huge gate itself, Cudak’s Gate, they were calling it already, would be stormed by Kurhv Kralj and the remaining two Mairki.

  Kurhv Kralj had his litter sent to the rear. He took a step out from the gathered troops. The war drums had already begun their insistent unison rhythm. Ennis could feel the battle lust throbbing in the Arruk as they waited, pressed together, their jaka held high, the Svarti chanting their opening spells, the foot soldiers slapping spear shafts to chests in time to the throbbing, slow rhythm of the drums. The pulse made Ennis’ heartbeat sound fast and frightened. Ennis was once
again on Cima’s shoulders lest he be lost and crushed in the press of Arruk, his spell-stick clutched firmly in his left hand (and lashed there by Cima with a strip of leather), his right hand still bound to his chest, but with Treoraí’s Heart out from under his léine and firmly clutched in his hand.

  Kurhv Kralj lifted his hands and the drums stopped. In the eerie, stunned silence of the landscape, the Kralj opened his mouth and roared a challenge to the wall and its defenders. He gestured. “Hajde! Idemo!” he cried: Come on! Forward!

  With that, a roar erupted from the thousands of Arruk throats, the drums began a quick, urgent cadence, and the army surged forward, a savage wave across the land that trampled heather and grass underfoot. Ennis and Cima ran with them: they had no choice.

  As they advanced, the Daoine on the walls loosed flight after flight of arrows, some of them breaking harmlessly against the thick Arruk scales, others finding the softer flesh between the scales. With a shriek and a howl, the Arruk on either side of Cima and Ennis went down, but more rushed in to fill the gap. Then they were no longer running but were rushing between the legs of Cudak and pressing around the base of the wall. Close up, Ennis could see the eroded, carved faces with their coats of fresh paint, now scarred by Arruk claws.

  The scaling ladders were raised, with Arruk standing on them to strike as soon as the ladder reached the summit of the wall. Most were immediately cut down by the Daoine and the ladders pushed back into the crush of Arruk. There were a few skirmishes along the wall but none of the Arruk managed to secure a breach along the wall where others could surge up the ladders to gain a hold. The Arruk army milled at the base of wall, stymied for the moment.