by Terry Madden
It wouldn’t be long now.
Minutes seemed like hours as the next two days dragged on. Bronwyn was easily convinced to use her credit card to get takeaway from the local pub. For the next two days, they lived on fish and chips, and bangers and mash.
Celeste taught Elowen to play pinochle. Connor watched from a rocking chair at the fireplace as Elowen’s eyes met his often. Sometimes, he thought he saw her will flash like a lightning burst, as if she were trying to regain control of her body, only to fade back into numbness.
Connor had been thinking about the spread of the runes of Arianrhod. Celeste knew how to use blood magic because he had taught her. He’d taught others as well, which meant that any, or all of them, had likely taught others over the centuries. Why had he not considered it before? It was overly clear to him now, that the ice-born woman who had murdered Nechtan by poison was a blood scribe. She even created a blood beast—the red crow Dish had told him about.
The lore must have spread throughout the Five Quarters after his death, propagated like a poisonous wave through the Ildana and possibly beyond.
Over a hand of cards, he said to Celeste, “When you were exiled, you taught the craft. Though it was against our principles, you shared it with the Old Blood here.”
“Not just the Old Blood,” she corrected. “The Ildana. For they would be reborn to the living world and there…there they could spread the message of everlasting life, the promise of Tiernmas, to those with ears to hear.”
“Like the brehons,” he said, watching her reaction. “The brehons of the Wildwood are apparently worshippers of…the immortal one.”
“Did you know there are entire hives devoted to the Runes of Arianrhod?” she asked. “Your teachings?”
He feigned surprise. It looked more like constipated elation, he was sure. Jesus, there were more of them than he had ever considered. He was like the Typhoid Mary of blood magic. Why hadn’t Arianrhod considered this when she’d shown him the runes?
He had naively thought the knowledge would die with him, when he and Merryn had walked into the sea.
His mind snapped back to Angharad astride the little horse Brixia. The vision he’d seen of them was too reminiscent of the experience he’d had so many centuries before. He was being led by the nose by beings who could only be labeled ‘gods.’ What kind of trouble was Angharad leading him into this time?
Celeste had enslaved Bronwyn and Elowen. Connor could enslave entire villages, could turn a forest into a city, which he suspected was happening right now. For he had placed his runes on every wall of Caer Sidi a thousand years ago. His conjuring was in place; it had been lying in wait like a seed waits for rain. And now, the rain had come. The well had opened, and Caer Sidi was certainly rising.
He’d been checking on the salamander on every visit to the loo.
When he opened the toilet tank, the salamander eyed him with expectation. Everything was ready. The Sun merely had to cross the celestial equator, to lift both worlds into the equality of light and dark. What would happen next, only the gods knew.
Connor had used Bronwyn’s phone to do some checking on the possible security in place at King Arthur’s Labyrinth. It was likely very low tech. Some silent alarms and cameras. With any luck, he would be done with what he had to do before anyone actually responded.
Dawn would mark the threshold of day, the door through which the sun traveled the from a landscape of stars.
Connor peered from the small front window of the cottage. Orion was just rising. It was past midnight.
“Get up,” he told Celeste, still snoring in the sofa bed. “It’s time.”
He went to the bathroom, locked the door, and removed the small jar containing the salamander. He whispered as the golden eye met his own, “Llygaish o fewl, llygaish hebac.” Eyes within, eyes without. He slipped the jar into the pocket of his hoodie.
The link was forged.
Celeste roused Bronwyn and Elowen. They all dressed as warmly as possible. On the way out the door, Elowen caught Connor’s arm, a look of terror in her eyes. Jesus, she thought she was going to be sacrificed or something.
Connor took her hands, pulled her close and whispered in her ear. “I would never hurt you.”
Celeste drove.
When dawn came, they would be waiting where Angharad had indicated, in the pool of Excalibur. Deep inside the mine, it would be impossible to tell when the sun breached the horizon. Connor would be ready with plan B if Angharad failed to materialize.
He instructed Celeste to park the car outside the lot.
“King Arthur’s Labyrinth?” She read the colorful sign over the carpark entrance. “Bloody hell, this is a kiddy park, isn’t it?”
“Just go with it, Celeste.”
“You’re the master, love.”
On his scouting hike two days before, he had discovered a way onto the grounds that didn’t involve breaking through the front gate. He led the way up a rocky ridge to the north. From there, it was only a matter of crossing some barbed wire. He’d brought a blanket for that purpose.
Once over the fence, they were basically standing on top of the mine entrance, looking at the back of the carved dragon that marked the opening. With nothing more than a small flashlight from the glove box, they crept down the wooded slope to the entrance. Connor was certain the silent alarms would be triggered by their motion. If they had, the clock had started. He shifted the pack of gear he’d brought to buy them some time.
The grating that covered the entrance was locked, of course, but it succumbed to the tire iron from Celeste’s car without much effort.
“Come,” he said, and the three women followed.
He lit the rocky corridor with the little emergency flashlight he’d found in the glove box of Celeste’s car. A boat waited at the launch site, but it was on a track. No power, no boat.
“We have to wade in,” he explained.
“Wade? Where are we going?” Celeste moaned.
“You want to go back or not?”
“Yes…but here? Why here?” Celeste had taken off her pumps and edged into the water. Bronwyn and Elowen stepped in without hesitation. Their blank eyes focused on the darkness ahead.
“You’ll do as I say, or you’ll not see your beloved king.” He had a hard time making those words sound genuine.
He opened his pack and pulled out five self-inflating swim rings he’d bought at the market. He pulled the tab on the first one and a plastic swan burst open.
Elowen screamed.
“It’s okay, it’s just a toy.”
The air cannister inside the swan made a creepy hissing sound.
Connor launched the swan into the gently moving water, and followed with four more—a duck, a dolphin, a flamingo and a dragon. He hoped it was a fortuitous sign, but he didn’t believe if fortune. He only hoped they’d trip the alarms further along the tour route, and attract security to a different part of the cave.
The smell of chlorine and mold hung like a hot, wet blanket over the place. They waded past the alcoves with the wax figures, which looked even spookier by the light of his pocket flashlight. He turned to the right. The pool of Excalibur was still until his ripples disrupted the surface. The little flashlight cast a pathetic, undulating yellow beam across it. When it reached the plastic dragon, Elowen cried out.
“It’s not real,” he told her in Ildana. Then he took her hand.
She pulled away forcefully. “Stars and stones,” she said. “Dewi’s beast. The wyrm.”
“It’s not real,” he repeated, taking another step away from her.
But she just scowled at him, saying, “Nothing in this world is real.”
“Nothing in either world,” he said. They fiddled away lives in some kind of reality mock-up. Maybe the gods were the only ones who lived in reality—and even then, it might not be so.
As they waded across the pool, Connor’s jeans got hung up on the submerged point of Excalibur. He struggled until he broke free, ripping h
is pants. He’d thought that thing was plastic. When he reached the exact place where he had watched Angharad and Brixia vanish into the stone wall, he halted. A triple spiral was there, faintly pulsing with greenflow. It was almost time.
The dragon was frozen in mid roar, its jaw hanging open. The mechanical truck it rode upon was rusty. The canvas fabric that covered the actuators in the neck had faded to an orange-pink from decades of chlorine. Its large bat wings were folded amorphously at its side and the head sported horns as well as long droopy ears. The eyes were small and unimaginative, and likely lit up when it was animated. The teeth in the long snout were far too white.
It had spent decades coming to life at the flip of a switch, and running a programmed script until the gears ran down. That was the same thing Connor had been doing since he’d been exiled. Living and dying and living again, but never really understanding that he’d been made of plastic all along. Not until he saw his true self in the soothblade. He could never un-see it. He could never go back to running through the script. Who was he fooling? There was only one direction now, and it was not running away.
“Now what?” Celeste said, breaking the momentary silence.
“Now we get you out of here before the cops come.” But if his visitation from Angharad was correct, this was more than a sacrificial pool.
“Let’s get on with it,” she said, and indicated the soothblade he had stuffed into waistband of his jeans.
“Dawn,” he said. “It must be dawn. And you must release these two before I’ll send you.” He indicated Bronwyn and Elowen, who stood before the dragon as if admiring an art installation.
When Celeste failed to answer, he said, “Now would be good.”
She sighed, and planted her hands on her hips, saying, “Right. But you know how to spoil the fun.”
With an absent flick of her own soothblade, she laid down a nick to her left forearm. She dipped her fingers into it and quickly drew the rune of unmaking on Elowen’s forehead. As she moved to do the same on Bronwyn’s, she said, “You’d better be ready for shrieking.”
She was right. Bronwyn immediately wailed in fear, spun in circles, and fell with a splash as she tried to run in the water.
“Bronwyn,” Connor said, taking her arm. “The exit is that way.” He pointed across the water to the blackness of the access tunnel. An illuminated exit sign was just visible, and the ghostly bobbing of the pink flamingo who didn’t make it downstream.
“Like bloody hell it is,” she cried. “Where are we? What have you done?”
“Listen,” he started, but the light that emanated from the triple spiral had grown until the whole chamber was glowing green.
Dawn had come.
“Come now, Caradoc,” Celeste said. “It’s time.”
He drew his soothblade, now bright with its own fire. He had to place the salamander before the doors opened.
Celeste bared her arms for his blade. “Cut me,” she said.
“I’m going to…do this a different way,” he said.
“Different? What do you mean? No, no, you’re not cheating me out of this, you bastard.”
He held his hands up in defense. But as soon as he revealed the salamander, she’d know what he intended to do with it. Own her.
“Police,” he said, and pointed toward the tunnel.
As Celeste followed his finger, he locked one arm around her throat.
She struggled, elbowing him in the belly repeatedly, but he would not let go. It took an unusually long time for the chokehold to work. He was careful not to apply too much pressure, just like he learned in his security class.
Bronwyn was screaming again.
As Celeste started to slump in his arms, he realized that Elowen and Bronwyn had started slogging across the water. But Elowen had stopped, and turned to watch him.
He was cradling Celeste, who would not be out for very long. He eased her onto the platform that held the dragon. Draped across its front talons, she looked like a sacrifice, making everything worse.
He fished the jar out of his pocket, opened the top, and the salamander slipped into his palm. It curled and looked at him attentively, waiting for his instruction. It was a shard of his own soul, after all. How many times can one cleave shards from a stone before there’s nothing left?
He repeated the charm, “Eyes within, eyes without.”
He felt Elowen at his back, but couldn’t look at her. She might strike him over the head herself.
Holding the flashlight between his teeth, he opened Celeste’s mouth, took the salamander by the tail, and dropped it in.
“Give my regards to your beloved king,” he said past the butt of the flashlight.
He heard voices down the corridor. The cops really were coming.
He gathered Celeste in his arms as she began to regain consciousness, and then he released her to the water of the pool. She struggled a little. Biological response to drowning. The way so many of the sacrificed had entered the halls. But she would enter whole, and under Connor’s control.
“Angharad.” The voice was Elowen’s.
At the sound of her name, Connor dropped the flashlight.
He saw Angharad astride the plastic dragon. Brixia waded to his side, and Connor’s hand found her mane as it always did. It was part of his script, his and Brixia’s.
“Do as the green gods command, Caradoc,” Angharad said. But her voice was not that of a child, but of the goddess who had come to him so many centuries before. A voice like rain on forest leaves. She said, “I have given you many gifts and now it is time to pay your debt. Unmake that which you have made, free the Sunless, and return me to my halls in Caer Sidi. For maker and made are one. Ye must rend him, ye must end him.”
With that, she reached a pudgy child’s finger to the forehead of the plastic dragon and drew a rune upon it. The symbol burnt green in the plastic. It was a rune he’d never seen before, and the shape of it seared into his mind as it dimmed.
It was time to write his own script.
The little horse was in the water, dissolving into a million silver fish. He found Elowen’s hand in his and together, they stepped into deepening water.
The last thing Connor saw as the water closed over him was the plastic face of the red dragon, burning like an afterimage in his mind.
Chapter 16
Birth pangs were thrusting the walls of Caer Sidi skyward in intermittent spurts. Tiernmas had led Merryn to the balcony outside his bedchamber. She clung to him as the castle shifted beneath them.
“Just days ago,” he told her, “this overlooked nothing but darkness and the depths of the Earth. Look.” He pointed. “The Felgarths seem to rise with us now.”
The tallest towers now rose above the bog. The distant snow-crowned mountains appeared to float upon the gathering waters. As the fortress rose, the lake that had once surrounded it continued to fill as the streams continued to feed the bog. Caer Sidi would once again be a beacon of light to the Old Blood. The seat of the immortal king.
The once-ornate balustrade which had lain in a crumbled heap on the cracked flagstones reassembled. With every tremor, the stonework floated upward and found its proper place. Cracks in the walls were quickly filled with luminous sap that solidified into opalescent stone.
“Caradoc’s work,” Tiernmas said, indicating the healing masonry. He watched Merryn’s reaction to that name closely. But she refused to meet his eyes, gazing instead at the rising landscape before them.
“He loved you,” she said at last. “As I did.”
“Did?” He laughed. “You’re here. With me. In my bed. Caradoc has fled to hide in the land of the dead, like a coward. How can he fear me?” he asked her. It was an honest question. For maker and made are one, but Caradoc was as distant to Tiernmas as knowing the mind of the mountain.
“Once you were a just man.” The look on her face said she hadn’t meant to say it. Then she went on. “He fears doing your will, for yours and his are no longer the same. He want
s peace.”
“Peace?”
She finally met his eyes, saying, “You can rule this land as both king of the Old Blood and king of the Ildana.” She ran her hands over his naked chest, her own sweet skin pressed to his, still damp with sweat from their lovemaking. The fall of her thick black hair tickled his arms. “You wear the flesh of their king.”
He snatched her hands and held both her wrists in a tight grip.
“You’ve come to counsel me to make peace?”
She struggled to free her wrists, but he wouldn’t allow it. She finally said, “I’ve come to counsel you, my love, as is my place.”
He pushed her away, the warmth of their coupling dissipating with the cool evening air. She had not changed. It was as if no time had passed since the day she and Caradoc had left him.
“The green gods gave us this land,” he demanded.
“They gave us nothing. We took the land from them,” she corrected. “Just as the Ildana took it from us. With blood and steel.”
The tremors had ceased. The unmistakable sound of rustling leaves accompanied the vining of the greenstone masonry as the crumbling sculpture grew its old polish. Tiernmas felt the fortress send its tendrils into him, into this new body he wore. He could do nothing without Merryn. Losing Caradoc would cripple his army, but Merryn…she was the earth to his sky. Sea to his stone. A king without a solás…
“We’ll take this land with blood and steel,” he told her. “Just as we did before. It was the green gods who made me king.”
“No,” she said, drawing herself up regally. “It was Caradoc. I once loved you more than life, Tiernmas. I loved a man who understood that peace is the only weapon that can build a lasting kingdom.”
“I left my misguided ideas with my twisted body. I’ve learned what it means to be king.” But he was more than that now. He was a god. And he lived only to be worshipped by Merryn. He spread his arms wide, willing her to embrace him. “With you,” he said, “I am whole again.”
