Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (59 page)

Mychael watched the two giants crash on the
rocks of Mor Sarff and be washed into the sea. The
pryf’s
sacrifice had saved him, had bought him time, but it would not be
enough. He looked up through the rain and saw the small form yet on
the trail, a small form stirring to life. His first sense of relief
in days flooded through him, and he took off at a run. She was
drenched and shivering when he reached her, the bandage on her arm
in bloody tatters, her face drawn and pale, but she was all of life
in his arms.

He kissed her cheeks, her brow, her mouth—and
lingered, drawing her closer and losing himself in the relief of
touching her. She clung to him, her lips coolly sweet, the taste of
lavender only faintly detectable. Not so the scent of Dharkkum. A
trailing wisp of smoke passed by them, startling him out of the
kiss and back into bleak reality.

“Come,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “We
must be away. The smoke reaches even the
pryf
nest now.”

“Mychael?” She looked at him through slightly
dazed eyes and lifted a long golden swath of his hair for him to
see. ’Twas cut through with the auburn blaze, his
fif
braid
bright and plaited down its center. His skin, too, had regained a
healthy color.

“ ’Twas the storm, I think,” he said in
answer to her unspoken question.

She smiled weakly, a stark reminder of what
they had endured. “I knew you were
sín
. Druids call storms.
Did you call this one?”

“Nay,
cariad
. This one has called me.”
He looked to Mor Sarff, knowing he spoke the truth. The storm had
called him. It was still calling to him, though not with yearning
any longer, nor with the fury of battle, but with something more
elemental—blood. He felt it coursing through his body in a manner
he’d thought he had lost, a wild heat grown strong with the
pounding of his dragonheart.

Far out on the sea, he saw a shifting flash
of color, first red, then green, and the blood quickened with a
frightening intensity in his veins.

Thule, he’d been about to tell her. They
could go to Thule, to Ceridwen. With luck, ’twould be years before
the death of Dharkkum breached the northern wastelands. But their
luck, what little they had, had run out. She felt it too, her hand
suddenly reaching for his.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Get back. Back against the wall.” He pulled
her behind him and looked up and down the trail for an opening.
They needed cover, and they needed cover fast.

The widening of her eyes and the slackening
of her jaw told him ’twas too late. He whirled around to face the
sea and saw dragons rising up out of the deep, mighty creatures
whose churning pulled the tides, whose blood had called him
home.

Ddrei Goch.

Ddrei Glas.

Golden eyes glowed like dreamstones, casting
light down their twisting, scaly hides. One dread serpent was ruby
red, the other pale green. Both of them huge beyond belief. No
painting etched into cave walls, no drawing in the book of fates,
but Behemoth and Leviathan incarnate. Fangs and claws and leathery
fins, long trailing whiskers and ribbed wings sprouting from their
backs like caps of thunderclouds. They swam toward the shore, and
every ship left on Mor Sarff was subsumed in their wake.

The Daur who had yet been moored at
Lanbarrdein scrambled up the cliffs, their silvery drakars and blue
painted kharrs crashing against the rocks beneath them. In deeper
water the skraeling halvskips and their crews were tossed and
broken by the dragon-made swells.

Panic broke out on the beach, with soldiers
of both armies racing for cover into the
pryf
nest or around
the other side of the damson cliffs. Watching the dragons, Mychael
feared the whole headland would be torn asunder, but the serpents
turned before reaching the sand, sending up a wave that dragged
half a pack of skraelings back into the surf to drown. Only one
person stood unmoving on the beach. Naas.

“The sword, Llynya. Where’s the sword?” He
turned to her. He had to stop the dragons before they destroyed
everything.

“The Magia Blade? ’Twas to be made here, for
you. Trig said Varga had sent for the Edge of Sorrow, but
Deseillign has fallen and the blade never arrived. There is no
sword, Mychael.”

He looked to the sword in his hand. It had
failed him in the Dangoes and would do the same here. It had not
been steeped in the
magia mysterium
. It had no ancient,
glorious past, no magic. Wei had forged the blade just last summer.
Mychael had made the grip himself out of leather-wrapped wood. The
only sorrow it had seen had been since he’d left Tabor above
Lanbarrdein.

And even if it had been beholden of some
unknown power, he’d yet to learn the ways of magic. Yet ’twas the
only sword he had, and if the dragons were to be ruled by a sword,
it would be his.

The dragons made their turn in the channel
currents and started back toward the damson cliffs. An opening into
the inner maze of the nest was not too far down the trail. Mychael
took Llynya to the tunnel entrance and kissed her once.

“Go deep into the nest,” he told her, but got
no farther before the look in her eyes registered. Wind whipped her
hair and the rain drove against them, each drop stinging when it
hit, but the elements of the storm were no more fierce than her
gaze.

“We’re better off together,” she said, and
when he started to protest, she held up her hand. “Nay, ’tis not
sentiment, Mychael, nor even love, but the truth. I
am
the
Aetheling, Starlight-born, and if you would be a Dragonlord, you
are best served with me at your side.”

He hesitated no more than a second before
agreeing, partly because there was no time to argue, and partly
because he knew she was right. Whatever bound them had begun long
ago, long before he’d first set eyes on an elf-maid wrapped in
river mist.

On the shore, Naas had made her way through
the dead soldiers and the increasing haze of smoke to Caradoc’s
body, and was staring at the strange, dazzling sword sticking out
of the Boar of Balor. ’Twas to her they went. Trig and a few others
of the Liosalfar were doing the same, hurrying down from the
pryf
trails to intercept them on the beach.

The old woman looked up as he and Llynya drew
near, and her gaze narrowed. Silvery strands of hair floated out
around her head, given life by the wind. Her cloak was sodden with
the rain, her brown gown clinging to her bony frame.

“Give me yer sword, quickety-split now, boy.”
She stretched her hand out to Mychael, and he placed the grip of
his weapon in her palm.

Trig reached them then, giving him a quick
once-over even as his attention turned to Naas.

“By the gods, woman, can he set the beasts to
their task? Or will we all be choked before this day is done?”

“He’ll have to,” she said simply, lifting the
sword into the dreamstone light coming off the cliffs and peering
down its edge. “Hmmph.”

Mychael glanced toward the sea. The dragons
were cresting again. Ddrei Goch rose up beneath a halvskip and sent
it flying through the air like a piece of driftwood. Ddrei Glas
slashed at another one with her snout and it crashed into one of
the Daur’s drakars. Indiscriminate destruction marked their path,
and their path led straight toward the beach.

“Am I to have Caradoc’s sword then?” he asked
curtly. He could think of no other reason for Naas to be by the
Boar’s body. The thought repulsed him, that he would come to his
duty by Caradoc’s sword, despite the weapon’s brilliant
dreamstone-studded grip and its ability to cut through mail.

“Nay.” Naas shook her head. “ ’Tis a
Deseillign blade on it aright, mayhaps the one that was intended
for the Magia Blade, but ’tis an abomination now, cobbled together
by a dark mage for a fell purpose.”

“A mage? It has magic then?” Given a choice
between a half-magic blade blessed with sorcery, fell or otherwise,
and his own plain weapon, Mychael could put his scruples aside.

“
Auch
, and men always like to think
they’ve got a little magic in their blades.” She made a dismissive
gesture and knelt down to scour his leather-gripped sword in the
sand. “Don’t speak to me of magic blades, Druid boy. ’Tis never the
sword that gives victory, but the arm that wields it.”

She swirled the sword around, working it
clean.

“I couldn’t cut the smoke threads in the
Dangoes, not with that sword,” he voiced his failing and his
fear.

“Ye had no dragons with ye in the Dangoes,
boy, and when I’m done with ye, yer arm will not be so weak. Aye,
magic blades, magic blades,” she muttered. “I’ll give ye a magic
blade.”

With that, she rose to her feet, wiped his
sword on her skirts and in one neat swipe, cut him from shoulder to
elbow. The shock of the deed froze him to the spot. What ran out of
the thin, neat line she’d made on his skin set his hair on end.
’Twas blood, but like no blood he’d ever seen. It ran down his arm
in a narrow stream of shimmering iridescence. Rainbow blood...
dragon’s blood.

His sword sizzled with it.

“Aye, he’ll do,” the white-eyed woman said,
then nodded to the elf-maid. “They’ll need your blood as well to
heed the call, child. Let them taste the starlight.”

Llynya did not hesitate, but drew her
dreamstone knife down her arm, loosing her blood into the tide
lapping at their feet. The cut was not so deep as Naas had made on
him, but ’twas deep enough for Llynya’s blade to crackle and
smoke.

And so they came, sea dragons from the deep
beyond, guardians of the gates of time, called by the blood of the
Starlight-born to the very shores of Mor Sarff.

Trig, Naas, and the other Liosalfar held
their ground on the beach, until the sea wave created by the
dragons’ approach began to rise like a wall before them. Mychael
didn’t see the Quicken-tree leave, but he sensed when he and Llynya
were alone, two against the serpent beasts.

Their monstrous heads rose from the swell,
Ddrei Glas’s eyes piercingly bright, her long, bewhiskered snout
cutting across the surface. Ddrei Goch had eyes like the harvest
moon, a deep, multi-hued amber, and the force of the creature’s
gaze locking on to his was fierce and powerful, intoxicating with
the promise of bloodlust and war.

~ ~ ~

Llynya felt Ddrei Glas’s power surge into
her. Blood of her blood, they were both born of the starlight.
Dragons from the star-wrought cauldron. Her race from the celestial
fire set in the nether sea. They were both born to fight
Dharkkum.

She lifted her sword with a battle cry.
Mychael matched her, and the dragons rose out of Mor Sarff, their
wings unfurling from the white-capped foam and beating against the
billowing clouds of smoke, bringing them to flight.

Ddrei Goch roared his rage, his screams
echoing from the vault to the waves in the lightning-rent cavern of
the Serpent Sea. Ddrei Glas lifted her voice into the wind and the
rain, and from out of the south, the dark pestilence sealed so long
in the crystal chasms came forth to answer their call, a void of
night whose touch was cold, whose shape was an ever-shifting vortex
without end, and whose single purpose had always and forever been
to devour.

Like a blanket made of dancing, whirling
threads, Dharkkum flattened and flowed across the surface of Mor
Sarff, picking up speed before washing itself against the Wall.
Where the smoke had ravaged, Dharkkum simply consumed, scouring the
trail clean of every living and dead thing and taking part of the
Wall, sucking everything into its core.

The soldiers on the headland broke and ran,
skraelings and
tylwyth teg
alike, but their efforts were as
naught. One by one, threads spiraled out and pulled them into the
warp of darkness, each beast and elf chosen for a death of terrors.
Mychael watched in horror as their bodies were stretched to an
excruciating thinness and began to dissolve into the black vortex’s
core. Their cries tore through the cavern, keening to the same
bloodcurdling thinness before their final silence, and still the
void advanced.

And it grew, a pulsing expansion along its
edge for each lost soul it engulfed.

A fresh infusion of fear tightened Mychael’s
hand on his sword grip, and he took a step back up the beach. Sweat
broke out on his brow. The foe bearing down on him was too great.
There was no way to fight it, not even with dragons, no way to
raise arms against such an empty terror. He saw a thread reach out
and snare Treilo. The Wydden lord was dragged fighting into the
undulating vortex, lashing out with his sword, his bright hair a
spot of color fading into naught. Mychael retreated another step,
and then another. His teeth were gritted, his muscles rigid with
strain. All was lost. The black matter would be victorious.

He backed into something lying on the beach
and looked down to find himself standing next to Caradoc. The
rising tide washed over the Boar’s body. The fell sword still
jutted out of his chest, its dreamstone hilt casting yellowing
shadows across his mailed shirt. Mychael’s gaze followed one of
Caradoc’s outflung arms to his hand. Rhiannon’s ring was still on
her murderer’s finger, a gold band engraved with four lines and a
circle inset with a square and a triangle of carnelian. ’Twas a
sign he’d seen in the tunnels of the weir, the only sanctuary he’d
ever found, and that one too costly to bear. Mychael knelt and took
the ring from the Boar’s finger and slipped it on his own. If he
should die, he would at least reclaim a small part of what Caradoc
had taken from his mother. The ring had been the slightest loss,
but ’twas all that was left for him. Above him the dragons
screeched, and flames burst forth from their mouths. He looked up
to see clouds of smoke roiling out of their nostrils.