by Terry Madden
It took to wing, circled, and headed back along the battlement wall the way they had come. Lyleth had the feeling it was returning to its lord, to Tiernmas, with news of their passing.
She stood and followed to see where it led.
The sprite found an open stairwell and disappeared inside. Maybe this led to the inner ward, whose expanse appeared as a sea of darkness from this height.
“Merryn! I think I found a way down!”
But as Lyleth drew closer, she saw that the sprite had vanished, leaving nothing but darkness behind. Sliding her foot along the edge of stone, she found the first step. But the second might be not step at all, but a drop into emptiness.
With one arm thrust in front of her, she felt for anything that might protrude from the wall. Finding nothing, a sense of endless freefall consumed her, a recent memory of the collapse of the island above to the caverns below.
She’d forgotten to breathe, and sucked in a deep, urgent breath. Dipping her foot into darkness, it met the next step.
“I don’t know how far it will go,” she called back to Merryn. Half trying to convince herself, she added, “I think I should go.”
A distant dripping of water echoed through the stairwell. She felt for the next step. With one hand on the wet stone wall and the other out before her, she met with something directly in front of her, something that wasn’t stone. The unmistakable cold ripple of mail. In the absolute blackness, something pale appeared.
Lyleth backed away through the dark, tripping over the top step and falling.
The thing stepped from the darkness of the stairwell, and into the light of the sprite swarm. It was a man. Or it had been. It took a slow step toward her, the eyes showing a hint of the same phosphorescence as the sprites. They stayed eerily still, never seeking her out, never blinking. The flesh was lichen green, where flesh showed beneath his armor. Its musculature was built of vines and roots that had grown over the skin. He was a fallen warrior of Ys, by his surcoat, but his body was a mold upon which the creature had grown like ivy on a tree.
Its hand went to the weapon at its belt. By the light of the sprites, the nature of that weapon was immediately clear to Lyleth. She had been there when Black Brac had swung it to take Tiernmas’s head, and again when the High Brehon had taken Talan’s. The dead man pulled the silver axe from his belt. Carved with runes of inlaid gold that glinted weakly in the dull light, there was no mistaking it. The labrys of the Moon.
It must have fallen into the pit with everything else, and this creature had found it.
He swung it, mechanically. Lyleth dodged, her shoulder slamming into a wall. She maneuvered to get behind him. She had speed on her side.
“Run, Merryn!”
Lyleth pulled the rusty flail from her belt.
Merryn’s retreat was marked by the waning of the swarm. The sprites went with her, taking their light.
The labrys flashed feebly—the only indication the creature was swinging it. The stroke was like a farmer clearing a clutch of vines from his garden.
Blindly, Lyleth danced aside. The axe stirred the air beside her, but missed. She backed away until her back struck the battlement wall. The force drove the wind from her lungs, but she lashed out with the flail at the darkness. Recovering the ability to breathe, the air stung going in. Frantically, she swept the flail back and forth catching the wall on either side, missing its mark. She lunged one step and lashed out again.
Something tangled the chain before it could make contact. The axe haft. The creature yanked the flail out of her hand, pulling her toward him. As Lyleth tried to run, it grabbed hold of her hair.
She smelled it then. The stench of earthy decay, mulch in a garden, blood congealing to make sausage.
The thing turned and, dragging her like a sack of chickens, it headed in the direction of the stairwell.
Lyleth beat on him, struggling and twisting. It felt like her scalp would tear away from her skull. His fist was an iron vice.
“Merryn!” she cried.
If Merryn had done as Lyleth told her, she’d be long gone, lost in the corridors inside the halls; free to seek out Tiernmas. If Lyleth was getting out of this, she had to do it herself.
She kicked out, landing a knee to the creature’s groin, but he didn’t flinch.
Finding the soothblade in her belt, she drew it and stabbed at his face. She felt the blade strike the bony parts of his skull, and then the softness of his eye. His grip never loosened as they moved inexorably toward the stairwell.
At last, she started sawing at her own hair until she was free, and the beast was left holding her braid.
She ran in the direction she and Merryn had come, tripping on fallen stones, and glancing off the walls, but the creature pursued.
By the light of the glowworms high above, she could see that part of the battlements had given way ahead of her. The wall was open to the darkness below.
She positioned herself before the collapsed wall, hoping the drop beyond was a long one. As the beast came at her, she locked her hands on his surcoat and swung him like a sack of barley. His mail rattled as it struck the wall.
The vine-like clutch of his hands had closed on one of Lyleth’s arms. His weight pulled her with him.
Frantically, she wedged one shoulder and leg against the edge of the broken wall. He hung from her arm, threatening to pull it from the socket with the weight.
Her cries of pain echoed around the dome of the rocky sky.
Then the wall began to give, and she was going over, too.
Her grip on the wall began to fail, the rocks dislodged from the mortar in her hand. An arm closed around her. She heard a quarterstaff being jammed repeatedly into the beast’s face. At last, it let go of her arm, and the risen creature fell, still holding the labrys of Black Brac.
Lyleth and her rescuer tumbled to the battlement walk.
Even in the darkness, she tried to imprint this place on her mind. She’d come back for the labrys. It had taken Tiernmas’s head once, it could do so again.
Several beats of her heart later, she heard the beast strike the bottom. And with it, the labrys.
“Merryn!” she cried, but her voice only echoed in the vastness of this place.
By the dim light, she saw that her rescuer was not Merryn at all. But a man. In his hand he had Merryn’s stave, the one she’d taken from the armory. His pale hair reflected the dim light of the glowworms like a halo.
For a heartbeat, she thought it was Tiernmas himself.
Then he spoke in broken Ildana. “Come. We go.”
“You know the way out?”
“Maybe so,” the man said. “Ve go past gate. Find tunnel.”
He struck a rushlight with a flint. The yellow flame seemed as bright as the sun to Lyleth’s eyes.
His name was Ragnhast, an ice-born slave of Talan’s, and his story unfolded as they walked.
“Talan sail to my village. He puts us in chains. But only ones what can works. ‘You fight,’ he say to me. ‘You cook,’ he say to my wife. ‘You tend the swines,’ he say to my son. Then he take my little daughter, a babe, and swing her by feets so her head striken stone.”
The rushlight revealed his tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, because there was nothing else to be said. Then, indicating the stave Merryn had been carrying, she said. “Where did you get that?”
“Stick? I find. On wall. Where you fight.”
If he was telling the truth, then Merryn had fled and left it behind. This could only mean she feared nothing in the halls, that she’d been lying to Lyleth from the start.
“How did you get into…” Lyleth motioned to the darkness around them, “…this?”
“I fights for Talan. But chief, Fiach, try to kill Talan. Many want that, too. We tries to run.” If Lyleth understood this correctly, Ragnhast had lost his enthusiasm for killing.
“Most were—” Here he made a sound like dying. “Then all is dark and me…down here with the deads.”
By the light of the rush, they had found their way down the staircase, and into what once had been the castle’s outer ward, now a stinking swamp of rotting bodies and tree roots.
With light, Lyleth found the place where the creature had fallen. He had not landed inside the ward, but outside in the moat beyond the wall. The labrys was lost, at least for now.
When they reached the main gate, they found the chains of the portcullis rusted, so raising the gate was not possible. Together, they hammered at the rusted grating with stones to make a hole large through which to crawl. Lyleth feared the noise would bring more like the one who had assaulted her on the wall. But none came.
Beyond the gate, they found an ancient road paved in rutted flagstones that wound into a tunnel. But through a crack in the stone walls, water trickled, feeding the stinking lake of the outer ward. They decided to follow the water and hope it led out.
They followed the trickle of the subterranean stream. Ragnhast liked to talk, though often she had to puzzle out what he was trying to say. He described Talan’s descent into madness, his refusal to eat, and the ministrations of Angharad, his solás.
“She try,” he said. “But the kink could not be welled.”
Lyleth wrung every bit of broken description she could from Ragnhast, every look on Angharad’s face that might give her some indication of duress. But he had seen no such struggle in the child. She had cared for Talan with a daughterly tenderness; that was all Lyleth could determine from Ragnhast’s story. It wrung her heart.
After what seemed like leagues of crawling, they reached light. A narrow cleft in the rock allowed entry to a small crystal mountain stream from the outside world. Ragnhast used the stave to break open the way out. They crawled out into a bed of fern and moss, and Lyleth took a deep breath of green as she surveyed the dense woodland around them.
They were on the downslope of a spine of jagged mountains. It took her no longer than a moment to recognize the peaks. They were in the Long Vale, at the foot of the Felgarth’s western slope which meant they had traveled at least fifteen leagues from the Red Bog.
“How can that be?” she asked, squinting into the brilliance of day.
“Praise the Hooded One,” Ragnhast whispered and traced a symbol of some kind on his breast. Lyleth didn’t know much about the gods of the ice-born, but the king of their gods went by many epithets. She was sure this was one of them. At this point in their journey, she was willing to praise him, too.
“We’re not far from Caer Ys,” she told him. “And your family.” She wished she could say the same for herself.
Chapter 8
As it turned out, Celeste was a bit slow at running away from Connor. In fact, after he’d attempted to call on her at the law office, she’d gone to the gym, a place called Body Space in the suburbs of Truro. Maybe the name Caradoc had meant nothing to her. Maybe Connor was wrong about her being one of Caradoc’s students. Maybe she was one of those nouveau blood scribes, derived from the bastardization of the old ways, and she’d never even heard of Caradoc.
It was raining.
Connor had parked Merryn’s truck a half mile away and, having found Celeste’s license plate on the DVLA website, the English equivalent of the DMV, he now sat in the backseat of her Beamer. She had expensive taste. Leather seats. Smelled new. It occurred to him that this was an old trick, waiting in the backseat for the driver to return, one that was overused in the movies. He had figured correctly that her car was in far better shape than Merryn’s clunker. After all, they had a long drive ahead of them.
He hoped his gun was serving Iris and Dish well, because he could have used it. Just in case. All he had was the nub of his soothblade.
He recognized Celeste from a photo he’d found in the local paper. She had been detained for questioning with her Order of the Green followers after the “incident.” They’d apparently talked their way out of any responsibility for the violence at Merryn Penhallow’s farm. Dish was gone, after all. No evidence. Bronwyn had lied and said he’d gone back to California.
Connor watched Celeste cross the car park, gym bag over her shoulder and oversized umbrella streaming water. Hardly the picture of someone who made sacrifices to the Crooked One.
The car door opened and she slid inside, shaking out the umbrella.
Conner placed his soothblade to her throat. “We’re going to Wales.”
Her eyes flashed to the rearview mirror. She showed not a glimmer of alarm, not even mildly startled by the man in her backseat who held a knife to her throat. In fact, she was smiling.
“At laaaaasssst,” she started singing, “my looove has come alooong.” She pushed the blade aside with a manicured finger, then turned and looked him in the eye. “Time to find our way back,” she said evenly. “He’s waiting.”
Exactly the response Connor had hoped for. This would make things so much easier. Her voice and her eyes…yes, he knew her. This woman, Celeste, whose name of a thousand years ago had completely vanished from Connor’s memory, had been executed by Black Brac before Connor and Merryn had betrayed her beloved Tiernmas. Nowhere in her salvaged memories could she know about the events that had transpired after her execution. So, Celeste knew Caradoc only as her teacher, the master and devoted servant to a twisted god, not the man who had helped hand Tiernmas over to the invaders.
Oh, lucky day.
He produced a bag of Chinese takeaway. “I brought dinner.”
Connor had accompanied Merryn to her family cottage in Snowdonia the summer after the Malibu accident. She had still been able to get around with assistance then, and she wanted to see Ynys Mon, the holy isle known commonly as Anglesey, one more time before she passed. Snowdonia was not far from it.
Connor had suspected then that the well she ostensibly sought was there. It would make sense. Wasn’t Anglesey the location of the first and greatest druidic school in Britain? Wasn’t it the setting for the last stand of druidism when the Romans sought to wipe the practice from the face of the earth?
It was obvious to even the least schooled that Anglesey was the prime contender for the location of the Old Blood’s emergence into exile. Druidism was said to have originated there in the darkness of prehistory. It made sense that the Old Blood had transformed the local tribes with their culture, and spread throughout the British Isles.
After they’d left Truro, he’d been reflecting on the reasons for the trip he and Merryn had taken, in light of what he now knew about her. She had never been looking for the well, so why had she taken him there?
“Why Wales?” Celeste asked him, as if reading his mind. He’d moved to the passenger seat in the front. Better to hand over eggrolls.
“I’ve been told that Inspector Trewin has been quite interested in you lately,” Connor said, taking a bite of lo mein with the disposable chop sticks. “He knows you have something to do with Dish’s, er Hugh’s, disappearance. I’m surprised you’re not behind bars.”
“Dish?” she laughed. “Is that a pet name for Hugh?”
“From school.”
“He was quite the eyeful. I didn’t know you two were—”
“We weren’t.”
She licked her lips. “Too bad he had no legs, he was positively peng. It was you who crippled him, I’m told.”
Her blue eyes flashed to him. He remembered now. She was a provocateur of some skill. She used to make a game of demoralizing the other acolytes. But her ancient name still escaped him.
He forced a smile. “It was an accident.”
“Didn’t you teach me that nothing is an accident? That every event, whether intended or random, is as inescapable as the sunrise?”
“Yes.”
“So, you’re taking me to Wales to save me from punishment for my crimes at the hands of Inspector Trewin.” She proclaimed it as an obvious truth.
It was better than the real reason…he was kidnapping her.
“Something like that,” he replied.
In the light of oncom
ing headlights, her angelic face and perfect skin looked exactly like the perfection Tiernmas so admired. Beauty. It had always been his addiction. She’d even reapplied her makeup after her workout.
“But tell me,” Connor went on. “How did you find your memories? How did you find your skills?”
“Why, Merryn.” She gave him a suspicious look, as if to say—isn’t that obvious? Isn’t that what she gave you?
Merryn had given Connor the soothblade, and she’d told him how to extract the information from it. So, yes, Merryn had given him these horrible memories back. And she’d done it purposefully. For that, he might never forgive her.
“Of course.” He hoped that in the dark she wouldn’t be able to see the confusion in his eyes.
“And you sent Merryn across, you sent her as root-born,” Celeste demanded. “But I am guessing you have no intention of sending me. Because if you send me, you’re stuck here. So, I’m guessing you intend to coerce me to send you…”
If I wished to serve the embodiment of twistedness and perversion, he thought, then yes, that’s what I would demand of you.
“Yes,” he answered with all the conviction he could muster.
A veil of seriousness dampened her excitement. “How is it you think you can force me to do this?”
“You know as well as I that Tiernmas would have me beside him before you.” He pierced her with a solemn gaze. “I serve him, not you.”
At that moment, he wasn’t sure which of them was the kidnapper and which was the kidnapped. It would work itself out soon, he figured.
They arrived at Merryn’s cottage at close to 3:00 a.m. He’d hoped that at this time of year there would be no renters there; in fact, he had no plan B if there were. Thankfully, the key, though rusted, was still hidden under the loose rock in the gate wall. Celeste used her cell phone light to help him find the door which looked like the entrance to a hobbit hole. He had to duck to enter.
