Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (47 page)

His answer to that was a question of his own.
“What possible difference can that make to you, my dear medieval
gaoler?”

She rose to leave, and he let out another
short laugh before acquiescing with an answer. “A time far from
this one, lady.”

“The future or the past?”

“Am I so rustic?”

“The future,” she conceded, settling herself
back down. “How many years?”

“I don’t know. No,” he said quickly when she
started to rise again. “It’s true that I don’t know. This is the
year 1198 anno Domini, and I come from 627 T.R., the six hundredth
and twenty-seventh year after the Trelawny Rebellion. What the
difference is between those two times, I truly don’t know, except
that it must be great. I have visited planets in less time than it
would take you to reach the continent.”

“You have traveled to the wandering stars?”
Despite herself, she was startled.

“And farther.”

For an instant, Madron felt a measure of
fear. He was from much longer away than she had imagined. With
effort, she refrained from looking up to the sky, where the evening
star would rise in a few hours. Had he been there? she
wondered.

“Why did you come?” she asked instead. “What
is your purpose?” Danger always had a purpose, and he was
undeniably dangerous.

“The choice to come here was not mine,” he
told her with a wry intonation, “and my only purpose is to
return.”

“Someone sent you here, against your will?”
The possibility had not occurred to her. Yet had not Morgan ab
Kynan entered the weir against his will? Or had he had any will
left by the time the lightning had snaked out to snare him? By all
accounts his wounds had been mortal.

“Time makes a very effective prison, lady, a
chance for eternal penance.”

“You are a felon.” ’Twas a statement, not a
question.

“Of the highest order,” he freely admitted.
“In my time, I’m a wanted man in two solar systems, and a demigod
in half a dozen more.”

She gave him a highly skeptical look, and he
laughed again, dismissing her skepticism with a chain-rattling wave
of his hand. “Think what you will.”

“I am aware of the solar system. This one at
least.” She made her own broad gesture. “My father was a
well-traveled man, as you must have noted from his book. ’Tis your
claim of divinity I find doubtful.”

His interest, never mild, peaked with the
lift of his finely arched brows. “You are Nemeton’s daughter?”

“Aye.”

“The chrystaalt, then, ’twas you.” He leaned
forward again, his expression fiercely intent. “You have more?”

“Aye, but before you have so much as a taste,
I will have your knowledge of the weir.”

“So you know it is to be eaten and not just
burned?”

She nodded. “What I do not know is how much
is eaten and how long before the journey the traveler should eat
it, and whether there are other necessary preparations.”

His expression hardened, and he looked away,
but not before she saw a flicker of pain cross his face.

“ ’Tis not an idle question,” she
prompted.

“And it is not a journey I would advise,” he
said roughly, turning back to her. “I can assure you, lady, there
is nothing in the future for you. It is a dark and dreary
place.”

“Yet you want to return.”

“It is my time. And I want what is mine.”

“Are you so sure you can return from whence
you left?”

“Yes.”

At her inquiring look, he deigned to
elaborate.

“However much the wormhole may deviate on its
course, the connection it makes in time is the same. If I return to
my time, sixteen years will have passed from when I left. That I
know. Whether I will be dead, alive, or mad when I get there cannot
be known, so take heed.”

“I can assure you that I have no intention of
throwing myself into the Weir Gate. ’Tis knowledge only I would
have.” With her father’s untimely death, she’d been poorly prepared
should a traveler come and need her help. She did know the value of
the salts, if not their method of use, but there was far more to
traveling through the gates of time. There were calculations to be
made that increased a traveler’s chance of coming out of the
wormhole, of landing in a solid place. There were astrological
considerations that could determine the most auspicious time for
the journey. There were even ways of manipulating the wormhole. All
that knowledge and more was written in the stone of the mother rock
somewhere in the farthest reaches of the deep dark, but Madron
could not foresee a time when she would be so desperate that she
would undertake such a perilous and possibly fruitless journey. Far
better, to her way of thinking, to glean what she could from the
books and the unexpected traveler. Convicted felon or nay, he had
been through the wormhole.

“Most of what you want to know is in the
books,” he told her. “Everything except the truth about the journey
itself, and that, lady, is a journey through hell, complete with
fire and brimstone.”

“The universal salts are supposed to
ameliorate the physical crisis of passage. Did they not give you
any?”

“The chrystaalt? They buried me in it,” he
said with a harsh laugh. “Be careful how much of the stuff you keep
in one place. I think the worms can smell it at half a parsec, like
a shark smells bait. It brings them screaming across space to
devour the cache—and any incidental attached to the pile.”

“And that’s what you were, an
incidental?”

“No,” he said, his eyes darkening with the
memory. “I was the raison d’être for gathering the salts, the sum
supply of two worlds to ensure that I was taken, swallowed—”

“By the wormstorm, eh?” ’Twas Naas, coming up
the knoll. “Took the long ride down the gullet, did ye?”

“Naas,” Madron warned, scrambling to her feet
when the old woman passed her by and kept on toward Corvus Gei.

“Pish.” Naas dismissed her with a flick of
her wrist and walked right up to the man. The old woman was not so
far above him even with him sitting and her standing. “Ye’ll not
hurt me, now, will ye, boy?”

Madron was not so sure. Naas was no more than
a jumbled bundle of rags and wispy hair. In what was surely the
foolhardiest of actions, she took hold of Corvus’s chin, her bony
fingers biting into his beard-stubbled skin.

“Did ye know what it was that got ye? Did ye
know about the worms, boy? Did the priestesses breach that trust as
well?”

To Madron’s surprise, Corvus made no move
against the old woman, other than to lift his head to more squarely
meet her gaze.

“I knew nothing of worms and time, until I
reached here. Your secrets are as well hidden in the future,
grandmother, as they are in this time, the domain solely of
religious fanatics.”

“Fanatics.” Naas chuckled. “Yer a smart one
then, smart enough to have survived, smart enough to find the way
home. They won’t expect that now, will they?”

Corvus smiled truly then, and a more
predatory expression Madron had never seen. “They staked me out to
die on that mound of chrystaalt, to die or to be eaten by the worm
and tossed out of time, and for that they will die.” The pleasure
he took in the thought was beyond doubt. It suffused his face like
a light from within. Murder, at least, was part of his
business.

Naas chuckled again and released his chin.
“Ye’ll find they die no more easily than I, but they made a mistake
to send their dregs to me. Ye must have been the last one through
before Rhuddlan sealed the weir, and it’s back to them I’m sending
ye. The quicker the better. Come, Madron. The time of Calan Gaef is
nigh enough for our purpose. Get yer salts. I’ll bring the
boy.”

Madron could do naught but stand and stare,
dumbstruck, as the old woman checked his chains. “We’ll need the
smithy for these,” she muttered, giving them a good rattle.

“Naas. No,” Madron finally managed to
protest. “He is Trig’s prisoner, not ours. You can’t have his irons
struck off.”

The old woman shook her head. “Nay. Trig’s
got naught to do with travelers. That’s yer bailiwick, sweetling,
and mine. Meet me in the boar pit, quickety-split, and we’ll take a
route none will follow.”

When she still didn’t move, Naas leveled her
white-eyed gaze on Madron and looked at her hard, until Madron felt
a tremor of fear similar to the one induced by Corvus earlier.

“Obey, Madron,” the old woman commanded. “
’Tis not a request I make.”

Madron had always considered herself apart
from the Quicken-tree, not subject to them, any of them. She
suddenly realized how wrong she’d been. She thwarted Rhuddlan’s
kingship whenever the need arose. Such was not an option with Naas,
not in this instance, and Madron wondered if it ever had been. With
a bow of her head, she left to gather what they would need for a
journey to the Weir Gate.

Naas returned her attention to the man she
would drop though the gates of time. “Ye must have been a frightful
bad one for the White Ladies to send ye here. I could kill ye for
them, but like them I try to keep my conscience clear before the
gods. And I guess ye know as well as me that putting ye twice
through the wormhole will probably do it for us.”

His dark eyes never wavered. “Yes, I
know.”

“
Auch
.” Naas suddenly turned her head.
“Did ye hear that?”

“No.”

Naas grinned. She’d heard it, loud and clear,
the snap of a twig. The will-o’-the-wisp was hers.

W
orse and worse,
Llynya thought, looking down from her hiding place, a scooped-out
hollow of rock on a ledge overlooking the Wall. Skraelings were
still filing into the cavern below, some marching up and down the
trail, some starting cooking fires. She and Mychael had veered off
the main passage into a labyrinth of narrow corridors to escape the
last skraelpack they’d come upon, but it seemed there was to be no
end to the skraelings. The Wall had been the main road into
Rastaban before the Wars, when Rastaban had been a resting place
between Riverwood and Tryfan. Whoever now ruled in the Eye of the
Dragon had taken the Wall for his own.

There were no Dockalfar below, though, and
mayhaps there was hope in that.

No fire lizard either, and there was definite
hope in that.

She scooted back and signaled Mychael forward
to take her place on the ledge, to take the watch. ’Twas the first
chance they’d had to rest, and she’d used the time to make them an
infusion of lavender. The two of them had huddled over the
dreamstone blades to heat a cup of water, then shared the warm tea
and a seedcake in the reflected glow of the skraelings’ torchlight.
She’d made sure he drank most of the tea, but even her few sips had
done much to restore her. From her baldric pouches, she had shared
acorns from the mother oak in Deri to give him strength, and had
burned feathers for protection.

When needed, they were only using Ratskin’s
blade in the corridors, keeping Ara sheathed. The yellow dreamstone
was hard to distinguish from the yellow light given off by the
torches, and any skraeling who did happen to see it would think it
belonged to one of their Dockalfar masters. For certes the
skraeling who could think beyond that simple reasoning had yet to
be conjured.

Mychael crawled out onto the ledge and knelt
beside her. Light from Ratskin’s blade glinted off the silver rings
she’d woven into his
fif
braid, rings of protection plaited
into his hair to keep him safe. She didn’t doubt their power, only
whether or not there was enough in the finely incised runes to do
the job at hand.
Ammon, Bes, Ceiul
... one rune for each
ring, the runes of refuge. She’d chosen them with care after
talking with Naas.

She handed him one of the honey-sticks she’d
been looking for in her pack, and he sucked on the end.

“We can’t stay here,” he said, handing the
sweet back. “If we can’t find a way to the surface soon, we have to
take our chances on the other side of the Wall.”

“Aye,” she said with a shrug, praying they
would find a way up into Riverwood. The other side of the Wall was
sure death, with so many skraelings about. There was another way
for them to go, but ’twas so terrible, it hardly bore thinking
about. She finished off the honey and packed the empty horsetail
stem into one of her pouches.

A commotion down on the floor of the cavern
silenced them both. Shoulder to shoulder, they watched a raucous
changing of the guard a hundred feet below, the only ritual of
which seemed to be the passing back and forth of leather jacks and
ale gourds.

“They haven’t seen us,” Mychael said, his
voice a low whisper not meant to carry beyond the ledge.

“Nay, I don’t think so either.” She, too,
whispered. “If they get drunk enough, we might be able to get by
them without raising any alarm.”

“Aye.”

They continued watching in silence. A
cookfire was spitting and crackling with the fat dripping off a
couple dozen roasting rodents. There was much jostling around the
fire, the trick being to snag a rat’s tail when it was finally
crisp enough to snap off, but before it fell into the fire. Legs
were the next delicacy, and half a dozen smoking drumsticks were
making the rounds at any given moment. Every charred carcass taken
off its spit was replaced with another squealing animal lifted out
of the rat cage.

Skraelings were murderous and brutish, and
given half a chance, Llynya knew her fate would have been no
different from the rats’. An uncontrollable shiver coursed down her
spine.

“Are you cold?”

“Nay,” she said quietly, tightening her hands
into fists to keep them from trembling. How many skraelings could
she take in an open fight without any Dockalfar to hem her in?

Not enough, was the answer. Not nearly
enough.