Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (43 page)

Rhuddlan took the offered dispatch. ’Twas
sealed with a round of orange wax impressed with the Desert Queen’s
mark. The last of its like he’d seen had held the Lady’s surrender.
Now they were to war again.

He ran his fingers over the seal, feeling for
signs of tampering and finding two—a smooth rise of remelted wax
and a hairline fracture where it had been broken. He glanced at
Varga, who answered his unspoken question with a shrug of bland
acceptance. The court at Deseillign was a viper’s pit of
intrigue.

Rhuddlan rebroke the seal and withdrew the
parchment from within. A quick scan confirmed Varga as the Lady’s
emissary. Rhuddlan would not mistake her bold hand. The document
was dated only a day past and told of skraeling strike troops
massing on the border walls of Deseillign and ranging as far as the
eastern deserts. It told also of a mining catastrophe in the
southern basin in midsummer, of a hundred Sha-shakrieg swallowed up
by a sudden rent in Kryscaven Crater that continued to belch flames
and rancid smoke and fill the southern caverns with a strange,
ravaging pestilence.
Thullein
could no longer be mined at
the site, and without a supply of the metal-rich ore for
swordblades and arrow points, the war had taken a turn for the
worse. As for the great fissure that had broken the Crater, signs
of enchantment had been found all along its length, signs the
Desert Magi had determined to be of Prydion making.

The dispatch ended with an imperial decree:
for the
Tylwyth Teg
to surrender the Prydion Mage, Ailfinn
Mapp, and to forever renounce such mage; for the Quicken-tree to
surrender the Aetheling seen in Crai Force as a token of good faith
against further Prydion treacheries; for a chadron’s weight of
Dream Stone to be delivered to Deseillign in recompense for the
damages sustained thus far and for those to come; and for the King
of the Light-elves to surrender to the Lady Queen the most powerful
warrior in all his ranks—a blade-master of dread renown to wield a
druaight sword.

As he read, Rhuddlan’s hand grew tighter and
tighter around his dagger, until a fierce flash of light burst from
the crystal hilt with a cracking whine and struck a skraeling on
the track. Wisps of smoke instantly curled up from the dead man’s
bloody tunic and pale skin. Steam rose from the water pooled around
him.

“Is she fully mad?” he demanded of Varga, the
dreamstone still crackling and flickering in his hand.

“Nay,” the Sha-shakrieg said. He’d taken a
step backward and was watching the dagger with a wary eye. “Only
ill-advised by her Council of Lords.”

“Then you read this idiocy and still dared to
give it to me?” Rhuddlan lifted the parchment.

“I dared not give it to you.” Varga shifted
his gaze to Rhuddlan’s face. “You asked for the truth, not wisdom,
and in truth Deseillign nears its end. The smoke from Kryscaven
pours out of fissures in the Rift and spreads like a cloud of night
across the desert. The skraelpacks have doubled in a fortnight with
destruction as their only goal. No captain has come forth to offer
terms, no demands have been made, and the air fair reeks with their
cries of ‘Death to the Betrayers.’ The Lady fears not only for her
life, but for the lives of all the desert peoples. She would have
the Magia Blade reforged.”

Rhuddlan bit back an oath. He could not save
Mychael from this. Not now. Not with the great seals on Kryscaven
broken and the fell fumes of Dharkkum once more loose on the land.
For certes the Lady had already commanded her desert smiths to
begin their work. Swordblades she had aplenty to fight even ten
thousand skraelings, but not the swordblade meant to fit a
dreamstone hilt. For the Magia Blade she needed the raw
thullein
Varga had stolen from the western basin.

“ ’Tis a sword of ruin to be used for a
ruinous end,” he said.

“You have the aetheling to temper its
deeds.”

“No.” On that point there could be no
compromise. Llynya had not the strength nor the heart to wield such
a dire blade.

“Then there is another,” Varga said, his
voice tight with conviction. “There has to be. Let the aetheling
temper him. Leash your mage, Rhuddlan, and release the dread
warrior. Call the dragons forth and let him put them to their task.
It is the only thing that can save us.”

Aye. ’Twas true. The Magia Blade could save
them all—except for the one who dared to take it up.

He looked to the far edge of the causeway
where the Liosalfar were throwing the last of the skraelings into
the sea.

“Roth!” he called, and his captain for the
sortie looked up and shook his head. No Dockalfar had been
found.

He looked next to the Dangoes. Conladrian was
gone. The black hound’s journey had but begun if he would see his
sister, Rhayne, come out of the ice. The white hound had fallen in
the battle for Balor and been dragged by her brother into the
frozen world beyond the ice cave’s forbidding maw, beyond the reach
of time in hopes of new life. The Balor battle seemed as naught
compared to what they now faced. In all the Dangoes there was not a
place for the ghosts of the legions that would fall if Dharkkum was
not stopped. The smoke was but the beginning with its choking fumes
and ravaging pestilences. The true danger would come after the
smoke cleared, making way for the all-devouring darkness of
Dharkkum itself, a night so pure no light could cut through it, not
even dreamstone light.

Wind touched his check, a cold vapor of
warning, and from out of the Kasr-al came the high, calling howls
of a wolfpack re-forming.

“We dare not tarry here,” he said to Varga.
“Nor anywhere this side of the Magia Wall. If you would have an
alliance, it will be set at the gates of time and on my terms. Can
you speak for the Lady?”

“Do you have the dread warrior the Lady
seeks?”

Rhuddlan weighed his answer one last time,
knowing he cast Mychael’s doom.

“Aye,” he finally said. “I have him. He and
the aetheling await us in Merioneth.”

M
ychael stood over
the dead skraeling and wiped blood from his dreamstone dagger.
Naas’s blade had a killing edge, razor sharp. In less than a
quarterlan it had five skraelings to its tally. No less than
fifteen of the enemy soldiers were behind him in Dripshank Well,
wanderers who had failed to keep up with the skraelpack and were
quickly becoming lost. He’d let them go, killing only those who
stood between him and his goal—Llynya.

Noise from the main troop drifted back to him
from up ahead in the tunnel. The pack was close, no more than a
turn or two away. He’d finished off the last of the stragglers at
the end of their line. The tunnel would widen into a small cavern
in another quarterlan before taking a steep drop into its final
stretch, and ’twas there in the cavern that he would have his best
chance for freeing Llynya—or to die in the trying.

He looked down at the skraeling beneath him.
He’d never killed with a knife before, yet he’d suffered no
hesitation, no uncertainty, not even with the first soldier he’d
come upon. He’d gone for the throat, swift and sure as he’d been
taught by Trig, and killed them each with a single cut.

’Twas far different from a bow. He’d smelled
the blood of each one, been close enough to know the instant when
life had left—that strange slackening in the air about their bodies
when breath was no longer drawn. Whatever horror he felt at killing
them was far outdistanced by the fear that he would not kill enough
of them, that his hand would falter in a death strike, that he
would be wounded or killed and Llynya would be lost.

Stepping away from the fallen skraeling, he
loosened the iron stars in his arm guard, readying them for rapid
release. Every second would count in the coming battle.

When he was but halfway down the guard, a
tremor of heat rippled to life beneath his skin—a flutter, no
more—but it did not pass unnoticed. His hand stilled. He waited,
breath held, and soon enough a second tremor crested in a gentle
wave on the left side of his torso and flowed down the length of
his body, following the path of his scars.

A bitter oath fell from his lips. His hand
tightened into a fist. Time had run out. The dragonfire was coming
upon him.

He swore again, damning his cursed blood. He
had Madron’s phial, aye, but he could not lie down and take his
ease, wandering through a fey land of cooling dreams while Llynya
was dragged beyond the Wall. In truth, when he most needed it, the
price of the witch’s brew had proven too steep.

With a quick hand, he finished releasing the
securing loops on the iron stars. If the madness would come and
take him, let it take the skraelings as well. The rage he’d done
his best to temper with Trig on Mor Sarff would be given full rein.
He would fight until the delirium claimed him. If he could do
naught but free Llynya from her bonds and put a blade in her hand,
the Light-elf might fashion her escape despite his fate. She was
lightning quick.

Touching his fingers to the cut she’d left on
his cheek, he wished her Godspeed, then drew his sword and took off
at a run. The skraelings would soon know their doom was among them.
If there was to be a river of blood, it would start in the tunnel
’tween Dripshank Well and the Wall.

~ ~ ~

Llynya smelled the slight freshening of the
air that told her the tunnel was emptying out into a larger space,
a cavern, or mayhaps the Magia Wall itself. Their trail thus far
had wound through caverns she knew, but hanging upside down over a
Dockalfar’s shoulder she’d become disoriented in the twists and
turns and offshoots of the tunnel leading out of Dripshank, and was
no longer sure if they were in the main passage or not. Skraelings
were all about her, shoving and jostling, stinking and clattering
and reaching out to grab at her whenever they dared.

“Aetheling,” they grunted, and their big,
clawed fingers would come down on her tunic or leg to pinch and
squeeze. Frey, the Dockalfar carrying her, tried to hold them at
bay with snarls and slashes of his knife, but still they took their
chances.

’Twas the Dockalfar’s own fault. To keep the
skraelings from sniffing and snuffling around her like she was the
day’s ration of meat, he’d told them she was enchanted, worth her
weight in gemstones, that the flowers woven into her clothes were
carved from dreamstone and tourmaline—and now every man jack of
them was trying to get rich before they reached Rastaban by picking
a star of meadow-sweet or a rose.

Rastaban.

A shudder went through her. Ancient lair of
the
uffern
trolls, the Eye of the Dragon might see her final
end.

“Slott,” the skraelings muttered and mumbled
as they marched. “Slott. Slott. Slott.
Har!
”

The mere sound of the Troll King’s name
struck terror in her heart, not just for herself, but for all the
tylwyth teg
. She feared Rhuddlan had walked into a trap of
his enemies’ making, Sha-shakrieg and Dockalfar working together to
lure the King of the Light-elves into the deep dark, using Nia as
bait.

“
Shadana
,” she prayed, squeezing her
eyes shut.

Unlike with Nia, she did not think Trig would
dare divide his troops again and send someone after her. Warhorns
had been sounding all over Riverwood by the time the skraelpack had
reached the cliffside hole that led down toward Dripshank Well. Two
Liosalfar had been killed as the skraelings had fought their way
into the cavern entrance, and she realized that battle might yet
rage across Merioneth. Few enough Quicken-tree remained in the carn
without Trig trying to rescue her—and trussed like a rabbit for the
pot, she was near helpless to rescue herself. The Dockalfar had
taken no chances with her bindings, knowing well all the Light-elf
tricks. Her only hope lay in the scarcity of their numbers. For all
the skraelings, there were only three Dark-elves, only three of her
captors wily enough to hold an Yr Is-ddwfn aetheling.