Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (3 page)

Gruffudd nodded, his hold loosening on the
scapular. His hand fell back to the paillasse. “I was strong once,
the strongest of the Boar of Balor’s men, and ’twas I who helped
the leech get through the rock slides barrin’ the way into the
caves, but I swear I didn’t know what he was lookin’ for. ’Twas
gold most likely, I said to myself, or silver, or gemstone, but up
until the demon warriors with the blue blades came and took us so
deep, we found naught but a bubblin’ pool o’ water in the middle of
a great cavern. Helebore liked the pool well enough, but I thought
to myself that he’d have to do better than that to keep his promise
of riches to the Boar.”

“So the master of Balor thought to get rich
on Helebore’s secrets,” Nennius murmured, hiding a smile. Once he
too had lusted after the wealth inherent in precious metals and
gems.

Beads of sweat had begun to show on
Gruffudd’s cheeks, and Nennius carefully wiped them away.

“Rich beyond his dreams, all our dreams, that
was what the leech promised, and all he gave us was death and
horrors.” A trembling took him, and Gruffudd turned his face aside,
into the rough wool blanket covering the straw. “Ye’ve never seen
such things, Father, such creatures as I have seen in the dark.
Huge, rolling beasts wet with their own slime. S-s-s-serpents,” he
stuttered. “S-serpents of monstrous size, sliding and prowling
through the deepest, darkest places in the earth. If they be not
creatures of the Devil hisself, I know not what they’d be.”

Nennius knew. His hand tightened on the damp
cloth, squeezing so hard that droplets of moisture ran into the
corner of the guardsman’s mouth.

Pryf.
The lunatic had proven to have
worth beyond measure. The rolling beasts, the serpents the man
spoke of, could only be
pryf
, dragon larvae.

In unconscious reflex, Gruffudd’s tongue
licked the wetness away. Nennius watched the small bit of liquid
disappear, then glanced toward the other door in the cell, the one
leading into the hill and down to the labyrinth below the island’s
surface. His years of searching that dark and dank maze had yielded
very little other than proof that the giant worms—Gruffudd’s
serpents, Nennius’s
pryf
—had once existed in this place,
very near to this time. There was a shaft marked with the word
pryf
, but a word carved into rock was impossible to date
with the tools he had at hand. He had gleaned better proof from
striations in the rock where the creatures had bored their passages
and left bits of dried slime on the walls, a sweet, earthy greenish
black resin when solid, but easily returned to its natural state by
soaking in seawater, unless ’twas too ancient. The slime he’d found
had reconstituted into a lovely mess, much to his encouragement.
Most telling had been the piles of fibrous material he’d found
tangled and matted in a cavern nearly impossible to reach, an apse
at the end of a narrow and low-ceilinged tunnel. He’d pulled the
threads of one knotted bundle apart and felt their tensile
strength, and he’d known what he held in his hands—the larval silk
of
pryf
, spun within the last millennium by the color of it,
silver but yet with a sheen of green.

For all he’d found, though, the nest beneath
Ynys Enlli was an abandoned one, useless for anyone’s attempt to
claim immortality. Still it seemed Nennius had not been denied. Not
yet. The wheels of time and life had turned and delivered upon his
doorstep a bit of flotsam from the sea of humanity, dear Gruffudd,
who had not only seen the mighty worms, but the scrying pool of the
mists and the damson cliffs with their amethystine hues reflecting
off the waves of Mor Sarff, the Serpent Sea.

’Twas there, beneath Merioneth, not Ynys
Enlli, that all the pieces to man’s most beguiling puzzle could be
found. If the worms had made a hole, salvation was within his
grasp.

Nennius shifted his gaze to the stacks of
books on the table. The volumes were steeped to an unintelligible
brew with arcana; ’twas both the beauty and the beastliness of
them. Only long hours and diligence had led him through their
strangely ciphered musings, maps, and mystic aphorisms. Only
quicksilver brilliance had enabled him to piece their secrets
together into the whole of man’s most eternal yearning, the search
for life everlasting, God’s promise to the faithful.

The boundaries of time, the books had finally
revealed, could be transcended through a passage that had been
worked into a feverish pitch of energy by the worms. Ipso facto,
the wormholes were tunnels through time. Being able to control the
placement of one’s self in time was the first step on the endless
journey of immortality, for those so inclined. Nennius’s desire was
far less profane, or profound, though ’til now it had seemed no
less unattainable. There were other steps to be taken in turn, and
multitudes of missteps to destroy the heedless.

Helebore had never understood the last. The
monk had been far too eager to make the transition. No doubt ’twas
how he’d gotten himself killed—and Gruffudd had seen it all, had
seen living worms in their caverns. Helebore had sworn the same,
beneath Ynys Enlli no less, but that one had always lusted after
glory with lies, claiming also to have seen the Archangel Michael
and to have had a personal visitation from St. Jerome. Gruffudd, on
the other hand, while possibly delusional, was far too terrified to
lie.

“There is no reason for fear, my son,” he
said, returning his attention to the guardsman. “All creatures were
put upon the earth by our Lord, and they are in His power. Did He
not make Leviathan and yet tell the day of the serpent’s
destruction in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah?” At Gruffudd’s
hesitant nod, he quoted, “
‘In that day the Lord with his sore
and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing
serpent, that twisting sea serpent, and he shall slay the monster
that is in the deep.’
Verily, your serpents do not lie outside
the reach of the Lord’s judgment, and you have naught to fear from
Helebore’s sins, for they are his alone.”

“Aye, Father, I believe ye. But—but I am not
so pure as to be without my own sins.” Doubt lent a quaver to
Gruffudd’s words.

“No man is,” Nennius reassured him. “But how
else did you survive when so many perished, if not for the hand of
God reaching out to help you in your hour of need?”

Gruffudd gave him a blank look. “I hid,” he
said. “Hared up the beach and slipped into one o’ the headland
caves, ’cept it weren’t no cave a’tall, but more of a tunnel,
smooth and shimmerin’ with a thick layer of abalone mother o’pearl,
all purplish and green.”

“A tunnel?” Nennius’s interest sharpened. “To
where?”

“To wherever the light was comin’ from, big,
bright flashes of it and thunder too. ’Twas at the far end of it
that I saw Helebore meet his death, his screams echoing up and down
and rollin’ over me, ’til I can’t hardly hear anything else even
now. Ye must help me, Father. Ye must.”

A flush of rare exultation quickened in
Nennius’s veins.
Mellt a tharanau
—thunder and lightning.
There was no more auspicious portent of a live wormhole, of a time
weir.

“You will have sanctuary here for as long as
you live. I swear this before God,” he vowed, wiping Gruffudd’s
brow again. “But I must know more about this place that you fear.
With knowledge I can protect you from it and the beasts that reside
there.”

And so Gruffudd told of paths and twists and
turns, of the leech’s chambers below the great hall of Balor, of
caves that opened onto the cliff face above the Irish Sea, and of
those deeper caverns where no man was safe. All the while he spoke,
Nennius ministered to him with the damp cloth and soothing
words.

“ ’Twas a fortnight, mayhaps more, that I
was’t lost afore I stumbled out onto a hill that had the sun above
it. ’Tweren’t too far from Balor, and I thoughts to make my way
back, but— Do ye have some wine, Father?” Gruffudd asked in an
abrupt aside. “Me throat’s awful dry, and I feel like a fever’s
takin’ hold of me.”

Indeed, the man was warm...
and bound to
grow warmer,
Nennius thought, getting to his feet. As he passed
the table, he reached out and trailed his fingers over one of the
books, his prize, stolen from this very monastery. ’Twas bound in
age-darkened blue leather affixed to oak boards. The leather was
covered with runes worked in gold leaf, naming it as the
Prydion
Cal Le
. Its final pages were a veritable farrago of heresy and
alchemy penned by a man who called himself simply a bard from
Brittany, but who in truth was far more than a mere bard. Nemeton
was his name, and his pages in the latter section of the Blue Book
of the Magi (Nemeton’s translation of the title) told of Druids and
wild folk, and of stars far beyond this time. All fascinating
enough, especially the astral references, but the true wealth of
the tome lay in its earlier sections where Nemeton had translated
the much older runic script into Latin, and in places, also into
Welsh. ’Twas in those older leaves that Nennius had come closest to
discovering the origins and the dwelling place of the
pryf
.
One passage in particular had held him at Ynys Enlli for two long
years, speaking as it did of an abyss that lay at the heart of a
rocky isle in a northern sea—for such was the island on which he’d
found the book. The passage had gone on to tell of “strange and
wondrous occurrences of a terrifying nature” taking place in the
abyss, thus giving the only firsthand description he’d found of a
wormhole.

And Gruffudd, dear, doomed Gruffudd, had just
given him the same description with the addition of shimmering
tunnels.

Nennius opened the book and watched the
pages fall into their familiar, worn place. His fingers trailed
down the lines of script, caressing the words written by a
long-dead mage in a long-forgotten time:

Seven years past, the dragon spawn
breached the mere and descended into its depths. Our
fears
that the swirling activities of the larvae—for such has been their
wont in the mere—would disturb the crystal seals set in the earth
against the scourge of the Dark Age have proven true. Yet this is
not the terror, both wondrous and fell, that has brought me to
these pages. Four times a Prydion Mage has descended into the abyss
with the power of the ages at hand to bring the larvae out of the
mere and thus secure our safety. Four times the mage has failed in
the clash of battle and been lost, never to be seen again.

Today one of the lost magi returned,
Nemeton. More dead than alive, he crawled forth from the rocky edge
of the abyss amidst a cataclysm of thunder and lightning. He lies
now in the Dragon’s Mouth and tells a tale of a path trod through
the stars to the far reaches of the cosmos, verily to the home of
darkness itself. Thus Nemeton is the first of the Prydion Magi to
transcend time and heaven and mayhaps the one to bring us to our
final doom, for however we may rejoice at the miraculous deed, we
must also know that the way has been opened and a path marked.

More than marked, Nennius knew. The path had
been cut into the cosmos, a sucking, whip-tailed groove snaking
through the endless darkness, waiting to snare any unwary
traveler.

A grimace crossed his face, and he turned
away from the book with a soft curse. Kneeling by the table, he
dipped a cup of water out of a bucket and returned to Gruffudd’s
side. He knew nothing of dragons or Dark Age scourges and couldn’t
have cared less, sounding as they did of metaphorical social
hysteria for the inevitable calamities of life. But he did know of
time and paths through the stars, the damned unstable things. And
he’d learned of worms.

Gruffudd greedily gulped the water down,
spilling it into his beard and onto the paillasse.

“How did you survive underground for a
fortnight, my son, without food or drink?” Nennius asked, forcing
his voice to a monotonous calm and his attention back to the
man.

“Oh, there was drink, Father—water.” The
guardsman wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Water everywhere.
Tricklin’ out o’ the rocks in some places and gushin’ out in
others, the sweetest water a man could ever hope to find. ’Tweren’t
drink that I was lacking, but food. There was’t not much beyond a
few mean bites of things skitterin’ through the dark. Some of them
put up a bit o’ a fight, but once’t ole Gruffudd got ’is chompers
in ’em, they was done for.”

Nennius refrained from asking what kinds of
things Gruffudd had eaten. It sufficed that there was fresh water
in the caves.

“Is there more that I should know?” he
asked.

The guardsman shook his head. “I’ve told ye
everything I remember and some I thought I’d forgotten. Now I’d
have another cup o’ water, if you please, or ale if ye hast
any?”

“Ale it shall be.” Nennius gave him a
benevolent smile and wiped the corners of the man’s mouth, his
fingers closing around the cloth and squeezing, squeezing, until
another drop of moisture fell on Gruffudd’s lips. The guardsman
licked, and Nennius slowly rose to his feet. “Rest, my son. It will
not take me long to fetch your ale from the kitchen.”

“Bless ye, Father.” Gruffudd reached out and
let his fingers graze the hem of Nennius’s robe. “Yer a saint, just
as I thought ye must be for Helebore to hate ye so. Sometimes he
called ye names, not just the blasphemous ones, but strange names
like
Corvus
. Told me ’twas Latin for raven, which I thought
demned odd for a priest, but now’s I’s seen ye, I know where’s he
got it. It’s yer hair, isn’t it, all black like that, exceptin’ for
the one stripe o’ white, and sproutin’ like a couple o’ wings off
the side of yer tonsure. Aye, it’s raven black a’right.” The
guardsman gave a distracted chuckle. “Blacker’n a new moon night or
a whore’s—” His mouth snapped shut, and he cast a wary gaze
upward.