Heir of Stone (The Cloudmages #3)

by S L Farrell

  Arrows hissed down on them. Lightnings flashed from spell-sticks as the Svarti unleashed their spells on the wall and the gate. Though the stones chipped and shattered, the thick wall held fast, and the carved creatures sparked and glowed when the lightnings struck them, the very stones seeming to rebuff them as if the warding spells the ancient Bunús had cast on them still retained some vestige of their power. The battle was loud with the shrieking of the Arruk, the chanting of the Svarti, and the shouting of the Daoine above. Ennis could see their faces now, and aye, some were clad in Dún Laoghaire gray. Some of them saw him as well, for he heard one shout: “A boy! They have a Daoine boy with them!” Heads peered down at him, then vanished, but Ennis had little time to wonder about them.

  He was locked together with the blue ghost and it took all his concentration to remain with it, buffeted by so many possibilities. He saw an image of himself, an arrow through his throat, falling from Cima’s shoulders. He saw himself torn apart by the Arruk. He saw the Arruk pouring through a gap in the wall, but leaving his broken body behind.

  Keep your mind on the pattern, Isibéal’s voice whispered, or was it Gyl Svarti, or perhaps his mam? He could no longer tell. Perhaps it was none of them at all. The arrows were a sharp and deadly rain all around him and the wall seemed to actively defy them. The Arruk clawed at the wall, trying to clamber up and over it without the help of the ladders, but they were cut down before they could reach the summit. They pushed and scrabbled and tore at the wooden doors of Cudak’s Gate, but though the wood shivered and trembled, it did not give.

  He knew what he had to do. He knew what he must do. The blue ghost told him.

  “To the gate, Cima,” he shouted down to his bearer, and Cima obediently began pushing toward the gigantic image of Cudak, pushing aside the Arruk in front of him, his jaka swinging. Seeing Ennis, the Arruk gave way willingly, and he heard the shouts in guttural Arruk: “Ennis Svarti goes to the gate! Make way!”

  The Arruk, with Kurhv Kralj urging them on, were shoving at the barred doors without success. Ennis wanted to tell them to move aside, but the blue ghost was silent and Kurhv Kralj was far enough back from the gate that he seemed to be safe, and Ennis was afraid that the pattern was so faint that he might lose it entirely if he broke away from it. So he also remained silent, standing close to the Kralj several strides back from the gate and lifting his spell-stick. Arrows fell all around Ennis, but none touched him—the archers on the wall seemed to be deliberately aiming away from him; afraid, perhaps, that he was an unwilling captive of the Arruk, a hostage. As he lifted the spell-stick, Ennis also opened Treoraí’s Heart and once more let the power within it flow out into the staff. He groaned as the energy rushed outward from him, his wounded arm aching as if the healing skin were being ripped apart once more. But the blue ghost didn’t cry, and so Ennis couldn’t either. Instead he brought the staff up and spoke the release words for the spell, adding the energy within Treoraí’s Heart to the magic.

  With the last word, the spell-stick shivered in his hand, a fierce, unrelenting white light gathering at the knobbed top of the staff. The radiance washed out the cloud-filtered sun, sent sharp black shadows racing across the battlefield and over the wall, caused the Daoine staring out from the wall to cover their eyes.

  “Go!” the blue ghost and Ennis shouted as one, unable to hold back the gathered fury. The knob of the spell-stick shattered in Ennis’ hand, but as the splinters raked across his face like tiny knives, a pair of thick, fuming lightnings arced from him to the gate. The first struck the image of Cudak and the winged beast moved, the Daoine-like eyes gleaming green, the legs stirring, the wings beating and sending stone falling. Cudak stirred and yawned, and the gate fell open in its mouth as the second lightning smashed into it, shattering stone and beast and wood, Arruk and Daoine. The arch of Cudak’s mouth above the gate crashed down on the ruins and part of the wall itself tumbled inward with the sound of a falling mountain, the tumult drowning out the screams and howls of the dying and wounded. Kurhv Kralj gave a startled glance back at Ennis, but then turned quickly to the smoking gap in the wall. He pointed his weapon to the smoking ruins of the gate. “Hajde!” he cried again, and the Arruk all around them took up the chant, rushing forward in an unstoppable, remorseless mass.

  Ennis was borne along with them.

  “There’s a boy with them!” the gardai said to Garvan, cupping his mouth and shouting to be heard over the noise of the battle. “Look!” He pointed over the wall to the seething horde of Arruk below. Garvan could see the strange sight: a Daoine child in a tattered, bloody, and filthy léine, being held on the shoulders of one of the horrible creatures and holding what looked to be one of the Arruck spell-sticks in his hand. Directly below, the child raised his face to look up at them, close enough that Garvan could see his features, and Garvan reeled backward in shock and with an oath. “It can’t be! That’s Ennis Geraghty, the Healer Ard’s son.”

  “That’s not possible, Garvan. You’re mistaken.” The gardai looked down again, shaking his head.

  “I know the face, man. Tiarna Owaine introduced me to his son back in Dún Laoghaire. ‘My youngest,’ he told me. ‘One day he’ll ride with us . . .’ ” Garvan felt cold fingers stroke his spine. “I know it’s him. But how . . .”

  “He’s moving, sir,” the gardai told him, “toward the gate . . .”

  Garvan leaned over the wall. Aye, the Arruk was bearing Ennis away to the north, moving rapidly. Garvan followed along the ramparts of the wall, running past the beleaguered archers and the gardai struggling with the siege ladders and storming Arruk, around the bodies of Daoine and Arruk both.

  He was still strides away from the gate when he saw Ennis lift the spell-stick he grasped, when he saw the impossible and for a moment glimpsed the stone-wrought creature writhing as if it were alive; when the horrible, glaring mage-dawn came; when the gate exploded inward and the Bunús Wall itself shuddered along its entire length; when Garvan was thrown off his feet and battered with flying rocks and boulders. The deadly rain continued for three breaths or more, and he finally forced himself to rise, clutching a forearm through which a shattered bone gleamed white. He had to blink away blood from his eyes, and he couldn’t bend his right knee. Garvan could see the Arruk beginning to rush through the opening. “To the gate!” he screamed to the gardai, to the Fingerlanders. “Everyone to the gate!”

  Even as he shouted, even as he limped and crawled and stumbled from the wall—trying not to scream with the pain of the broken, useless arm or his damaged knee, even as he tried to direct the defense—he knew it was hopeless. There were too many of them, and the breach in the wall was too large.

  With his good arm, he grabbed the arm of one of the younger gardai rushing to the gate. “Hold!” he told the wide-eyed young man, with the barest hint of beard on his chin. “Find me the scribe and our message birds,” he ordered the youth. “I have to get word back to the Tuatha. It’s vital—Go! Hurry!”

  The garda nodded and ran off. Garvan could hear the clashing of swords and the din of the skirmish at the broken gate, but it was all he could do to stagger backward. Blood poured down the fingers of his hand, and the world was turning dark around him.

  He hoped the darkness would not last forever.

  50

  Traitors and Allies

  HARIK CAME RIDING back to Séarlait and Kayne as they approached the village of Cloughford. Just ahead of them, they could see Rí Parin Mac Baoill and his retinue waiting at a crossroads in front of a few tumbledown cottages on the shore of the lough. The gardai on foot were plodding up to the crossroads and sitting down gratefully in the grass there as the supply train came straggling and clanking up the road behind. The sky was gray and forbidding, occasionally spitting rain at the clócas draped around their shoulders.

  “One-Eyed Parin said to tell you that we’ll stop here for a bit,” Harik told them.

  Kayne lifted his eyebrows, his nose crinkling. “Here? We’d be better going on p
ast to get through the stench.”

  “I’d agree, Tiarna,” Harik answered. His horse was next to Séarlait’s and slightly behind. “But the Rí . . .” Harik stopped, and Kayne saw the Hand’s gaze flick nervously to their right. He followed the direction of Harik’s glance; there were men emerging from between the houses of the village, from the cover of trees across the road: men dressed in fine clócas, men with Clochs Mór around their necks. Riocha. Mac Baoill, at the crossroads, sat easily on his horse, smiling.

  Kayne felt the breath leave him as if he’d been kicked in his stomach. He reached for Blaze, ready to rip the cloch open and attack, knowing that they’d been betrayed and lied to and that their hope was faint. That he, Séarlait, and Harik were three against more . . .

  “Don’t do it, Tiarna,” Harik said warningly, and as Kayne looked to Harik, his hand dropped away from the stone. Harik had reached over to Séarlait. One hand clutched the dark fall of her hair, pulling her head back harshly, and his other hand held a glittering knife edge to the side of her neck. Séarlait’s eyes were wide with mingled fright and fury, and her throat pulsed with the effort of breathing. Winter gleamed on her chest, but even as she started to reach for it, Harik pressed his knife against her neck, hard enough that blood drooled from under the blade. “If either of you touch your cloch, she dies.”

  “Harik—” The full realization and scope of the betrayal hit Kayne then. “All those years Da trusted you . . .”

  “He trusted me, aye, as well he should have. Tiarna Geraghty would never have made the choices you’ve made, Kayne Traitor,” Harik answered. “He would never have cast his lot with the filthy Fingerlanders against his own people.”

  “Then for all your time with him, you never knew him at all,” Kayne spat back. He kept his hands at his sides. He glanced at the others, recognizing faces: Rí Mallaghan; Shay O Blaca; his cousin and childhood friend Padraic Mac Ard, looking uncomfortable and uncertain as he stared at Kayne; and . . . “Uncle Doyle,” he grunted. “I should have known. What’s the matter, Uncle? Wasn’t it enough that you killed Mam and Gram?”

  Kayne felt small satisfaction in seeing Doyle’s face color with the accusation, as if Kayne had slapped him across the cheek. The man didn’t answer; instead, he glanced at Rí Mallaghan. Kayne chuckled grimly. “Ah, so Uncle Doyle’s just a lackey here, and you’re the one in charge, Rí. My sister’s going to be terribly disappointed in all of you.” He looked at each of them. “So many clochs in one place . . . Certainly far more than you need for the two of us. Do you think it will be enough to hold her? Do you think you’ll manage to stay alive when the Bán Cailleach comes looking for you? You won’t.”

  The bluff was all he had, but if Rí Mallaghan was worried by the threat, it didn’t show in his face. “We have enough clochs and more,” he answered. “We’ll have two more now than we had when we came here, in fact.”

  “No!” The shout brought Kayne’s head back around. He saw Séarlait let herself fall sideways from her horse, surprising Harik. It nearly worked. Harik started to fall with her, almost wrenched from the back of his steed. But he caught himself and kept his grip on Séarlait’s hair, the muscles in his arm cording as he held her body upright by her braided tresses, even as the horses bucked and shuffled nervously at the commotion. Séarlait twisted, trying to pull away from him. He reached over her horse, slicing at her with his knife hand.

  Kayne saw blood flow. Too much blood . . .

  Kayne’s fingers found Blaze and tightened around the sharp facets. He let the Cloch Mór bloom open like a poisonous flower. His sight went as red as the gem he held, as red as the blood spilling over the front of Séarlait’s clóca, and his anger struck Harik full force. The man was ripped bodily from his horse, dead even before his corpse hit the ground, his chest and head a ruin of bone and flesh. Séarlait stumbled away, one hand on the wound that gaped from neck to shoulder, and the other on Winter. Her cloch opened cold and bright.

  It was not alone.

  In his cloch-sight, Kayne saw the other Clochs Mór open as well: more than he wanted to count. He threw up a wall even as Rí Mallaghan opened his cloch, as a glowing yellow dragon appeared around Doyle Mac Ard . . .

  . . . as Padraic, hesitating, started to reach for his cloch and then, strangely, vanished with a small thunderclap of air.

  Kayne had no time to wonder about that. He ran to Séarlait, one arm pressing her to him even as she placed a barrier of cold ice around them. He could see the line of the terrible cut from Harik’s blade along her neck, very near where she’d once borne the scars of old wounds. The blood was pulsing as it ran from her, staining his own clothes. Her eyes were strangely distant, focused somewhere beyond him. “I’m sorry, Séarlait,” Kayne whispered to her. “We’re going to die here.”

  “Dying doesn’t matter, my love,” Séarlait told him, her voice gurgling with blood. She coughed, spattering red over both of them. “It’s only how we die that matters.”

  “Then we’ll die well,” he answered.

  In mage-sight, Kayne saw shapes and lights rushing toward them, and the walls they had thrown up around them shuddered and cracked under the assault of a dozen clochs. The battering of the mage-stones were the blows of unyielding cudgels against Kayne’s body. He gasped, feeling each strike against the wall; Séarlait moaned alongside him. She was deadweight in his arm now, and he could no longer hold her. He let her slump to the ground alongside him. As if through a dark and smoky glass, he could see the Clochs Mór gathering, crows around dying animals. They surrounded them, though there were but a few on the forest side of the road.

  It was still too many. Kayne could not even distinguish the attributes of the clochs that besieged their defenses: he could hear the scrabbling of wolfish claws, feel the whip-strikes of energy, hear the gibbering of skeletal warriors and sense the blows of an angry demon and the smashing of immense fists. Already Blaze’s fiery wall was fading and growing thin, and there were terrible black cracks in Winter’s shield, and Séarlait’s hands were loosening around the cloch. Her breath rattled loudly in his ears.

  There was no opportunity for them to retaliate. It was all they could do to keep the attacks from overwhelming them. Their defensive walls shrank around them, pushing back, until they were surrounded tightly by fire and smoke and light. A bolt of pure energy lanced through their mingled defenses and Kayne tried to shift his wall nearly too late: the bolt, deflected, struck earth just before Séarlait. Winter’s wall vanished for a moment as her hand released her cloch—Kayne looking down at her in panic and concern, seeing the sallow whiteness of her skin and her closed eyes—then the wall returned as she groped for Winter again. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Go,” she told him. “Run.”

  “Not without you.”

  “You’re already without me,” she said. She coughed again, and blood spurted thick from her mouth. “Let me give you this gift, my love. Run to the woods . . .” She looked at the two figures that stood, radiant in mage-sight, between them and the trees. The attack thundered around them. Her fingers tightened around the stone, and in his mage-sight, he saw white light blossom around her: the full power that was left in Winter, all gathered up. She threw it at the mages between them and the forest.

  The two green-robes went down. Séarlait collapsed. Winter fell dead and empty from her hand. “Séarlait!”

  There was no answer. Kayne gathered the rapidly-waning energy within his cloch, the power burning him as if he were trying to handle fire. He pulled the chain of Blaze from around his neck, holding the stone in his hand and gathering its power to himself. He reached down and picked up Séarlait’s limp, unresisting body. The Holders around them sensed the movement, and Kayne felt their hunger. He felt the mind-storm gathering, the red lightning.

  He started to half run, half stagger toward the woods, toward the bodies of the mages Séarlait had rendered unconscious or dead. The other clochs erupted, their images ready to smash him.

  At the same mom
ent, he saw the golden dragon—Uncle Doyle’s cloch—leap from where it hovered above the village and soar toward Kayne, with fire vomiting from its mouth and eyes as red and angry as the sun, its great wings beating and its clawed feet extended for a strike.

  Kayne knew they were irrevocably lost.

  Somewhere close by, a wolf bayed, its howl sounding like wailing words.

  “Uncle Doyle,” Kayne said, and Doyle could hear the disgust in the young man’s voice. Despite his desperate position, there seemed to be no fear in him. He was, Doyle realized, very much his parents’ child. Doyle felt hollow and disconnected, as if the guilt he’d borne for so long had gnawed away all of his insides and left him only a shell. He felt nothing else. “I should have known. What’s the matter, Uncle? Wasn’t it enough that you killed Mam and Gram?”

  It wasn’t me, Doyle wanted to shout to the boy. It was Rí Mallaghan; I was just his pawn. I did what I was told I had to do to keep my own family alive and safe, and that’s my shame and I’ll answer to the Mother-Creator for it. None of your family should ever have died, especially your mam, but the blame is not all on me. Please say it’s not all on me . . .

  But Doyle already knew there would be no absolution. He glanced at the grinning, smug Rí Mallaghan; Kayne followed his gaze. “Ah, so Uncle Doyle’s just a lackey here, and you’re the one in charge, Rí. My sister’s going to be terribly disappointed in all of you . . .”

  Kayne was still talking but he heard none of it. Doyle glanced at Padraic, at the paleness of his son’s face. The two of them used to play together, running across the keep grounds waving mock swords or holding up stones in their hands as if they were clochs and fighting imaginary enemies together. Friends should not be forced to kill friends . . . Doyle looked pleadingly at Shay, nodding with his head toward Padraic. O Blaca nodded slightly, shifting so that he stood directly behind the young man.