The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (45 page)

A bit of gravy was pooled in the bottom of the bowl, and he sopped the meat around to soak it up. The meat was old—he could tell by the smell—and the gravy was sure to help. Old meat was nothing new, and if his supper was a little rancid and bitter, well, ’twas still supper.

He stretched his legs out in front of him and took a good-sized bite. Pretty damn bitter. He chewed thoughtfully despite the taste, eking out his enjoyment where he could. ’Twasn’t long before he felt his lips and tongue tingle, then burn. Too much pepper, he thought, taking another big bite. By the time he’d swallowed his second mouthful, his lips were numb, and he couldn’t see quite straight. He turned his head this way and that, squinting his eyes and trying to focus on something, anything. Of course, the damned headache that suddenly came upon him didn’t help. ’Twas as if someone was trying to chisel his head open with a pike. In the next moment his throat grew tight, then tighter. He dropped the bowl and lurched to his feet, panicked, gasping and wheezing, trying to pull in a breath, but could not. Confusion flooded his mind. He stumbled forward and fell down prone on the hearth.

Scorching heat licked at his face. Sweet God A’mighty, the eternal fires of damnation were upon him. He could see Satan beckoning to him from the heart of the flames.

Christ, Christ, Christ
, he prayed and swore, trying with all his heart and mind to move away, to escape the Dark One, to run, but the only movement he managed was involuntary, a twitching that grew and grew until the final death convulsions seized him.

~ ~ ~

Dain strode up the length of the siege tunnel. Ceri had not been waiting for him, which meant the tower was open. Good. The gold would make their journey easier, and he needed his sword. Damned blade, it made the Damascene look like a butter knife, and he had hoped never to wield it again.

The door to the alchemy chamber was ajar, as he would have expected, but all was not right. Too much scent was in the air, of powders and sulfurs and distillations he kept in tightly closed containers. He continued forward toward the dim light, drawing Ayas in one hand and the Damascene in the other. Ceri could have knocked a jar or two over when moving the door, but he feared ’twas not the case. He stopped a few steps away from the opening and listened. All was quiet. Had Rhuddlan sent someone after them who had followed Ceri up the tunnel and kidnapped her?

Without making a sound, he slipped into the shadows of the alchemy chamber. A sense of dread washed through him. The place had been torn apart as if there had been a fight. He quickly searched the room, keeping his dread at bay with cold, calculated fury. Blood would be shed if Ceridwen was hurt.

When he found nothing, he headed for the stairs, holding the knives tightly in his hands, though no sound came from the upper chambers. Even the mice seemed to have deserted the place. At the top of the stairs, he scanned his bedchamber, and his fury turned to something far worse—fear. The Druid Door was open.

“She’s gone,” a voice said from behind him.

He whirled and stared into the shadows at the far wall. Rhuddlan stepped into the light, and all around the tower, the Liosalfar revealed themselves.

“What do you know of this?” he demanded of the Quicken-tree leader.

“Only that we are too late. We arrived just ahead of you, Dain. I fear the evil one has her.”

Helebore
. Dain needed no more explanation. The open Druid Door was enough. He should have killed the man when he’d first laid eyes upon him.

“And Caradoc?”

“He is with them.” Rhuddlan gestured, and the Liosalfar continued their search of the chambers. “She is too important to both of them to be killed,” he said to Dain. “The danger to her will not come until they reach Balor.”

“There is danger besides death.” Danger and degradation and despair. His hand tightened reflexively around the Damascene. He would not have her harmed, so help him God, and his actions had put her at great risk, at the mercy of Caradoc’s rage.

“Ride with us, if you would have her back.”

“Aye,” Dain agreed, willing to put her under Rhuddlan’s control if it freed her from Caradoc.

“Rhuddlan,” one of the men, Bedwyr, called from over by the hearth.

Dain turned and saw what he had found, a dead body behind the table, and beside the body, a loaded crossbow.

“I don’t think you were meant to live through the day,” Rhuddlan said, walking over and releasing the bolt from the bow. He passed the arrowhead beneath his nose and raised his eyebrows. “Poison.”

“And the man?” Dain asked.

Rhuddlan pushed the archer over with the tip of his boot. “Also poison. It seems he used one of your simples for sop. Monkshood from the smell of it.”

Dain eyed the dead man dispassionately. “Then the world has lost another fool.”

“’Tis him,” Wei said, kneeling by the dead man. “The one who lagged behind the other horsemen to speak with the hairless monk.”

“Helebore wears the habit,” Dain said, “But he is no monk.”

“Given his time with this poor sod, I would guess he is the one who wants you dead.” Rhuddlan offered the opinion in a dry voice.

“With good reason.” Dain looked back at the Druid Door. “I would as soon kill him as not. Mayhaps before the day is finished.” He walked over to the door and began locking it down. He would not leave the tower open to packrats and the castle folk. They would have him stolen blind within a sennight, the length of time he presumed it would take for someone to screw his courage up. And if, perchance, he did not return, he wanted something left for the next “mage” to come along. As for Helebore, he would never have another chance to breech the Hart, not in this lifetime. When the door was secure, Dain strode quickly to the upper chamber to get his gold. He would bargain with the Devil himself to buy her back, if his sword would not suffice.

Rhuddlan watched Dain disappear up the stairs, and his gaze strayed to the cornice over the door, to the letters chiseled there by Nemeton:
Amor... lux... veritas... sic itur ad astra
. Rhuddlan smiled. He hoped his old friend had found such a way.

He turned to Wei and gestured for Shay and Nia. “Take the dead man out into Wroneu. I would not leave him rotting in the Hart. Meet us by the horses.”

Wei and the scouts obeyed, taking loops of Quicken-tree cloth from their belts to wrap around the archer’s wrists and ankles to better carry him. When they touched the cloth to the dead man’s skin, though, wisps of smoke arose, followed by faint sizzling sounds. Shay and Nia both blanched and scrambled back.

Wei quelled their cowardice with a single glance. “Finish the work, if you would be Liosalfar one day.”

Rhuddlan watched carefully to see if either of the scouts faltered. Only one vice made Quicken-tree cloth burn. He could tell by Shay’s and Nia’s faces that they knew what it was, but they finished their work without flinching. Rhuddlan continued looking around the tower room. Dain was far different from Nemeton, filling his chamber with rich tapestries and woodland plants, so many flowers. The Hart had been much starker under the Arch Druid’s reign.

“Trig?” he called to his captain.

Trig crossed the chamber from where he and Math had been studying the rushes. “They have not been gone long. Mayhaps they’ve made it as far as Builth. We still have a chance of catching them.”

Rhuddlan nodded and signaled for them all to leave. “Lavrans!” he shouted.

Dain descended the stairs, buckling a heavy belt around his waist. The iron-and-teeth bracelets of the Beltaine ceremony still wrapped his left wrist and forearm. He didn’t waste time speaking to Rhuddlan. He knew the need for haste and strode to the chest chained at the foot of his bed. The lock on the chain was old and rusted and gave way under the force of his swift kick. Inside the trunk was the past he’d hoped to forget, but he did not hesitate in opening the lid and throwing it back to reveal the contents. Yet for all his fortitude, the sight of crimson wool gave him pause. Bloodred it was, desert sun red, the hot red of a branding iron glowing in a brazier of coals; and snaking through the wraps and folds of the crimson surcoat were the snow-white stanchions of a Crusader’s cross—taken in pride and piety, revered as the promised path to God, and saved as a remembrance of hell.

“Come, Dain. We must be off.”

“Aye.” He squeezed his hand into a hard fist to keep it from shaking. Then he reached within the folds of cloth and withdrew that which had made his fame in Palestine. Ivory-gripped, its hilt chased in gold and silver, the sword was named for an ancient king of the Danes, Scyld. Rune staves were engraved upon its pommel and guards, an invocation to Odin flowed down onto the blade, and the steel—the steel had been tempered in the cold waters of Havn and hardened in the blood of the Holy Land.

N
ight was falling as Dain and his companions headed deeper into the mountains. They rode through pouring rain, being two days out from Wydehaw and having seen no sign of Caradoc. Even Quicken-tree could not track in a deluge. The road—to give it an undeserved name—was a quagmire that rivaled the sands of Neath. Visibility was nil.

The rain had found them shortly after they had left Wydehaw, while they were still south of Builth, and it had come from the south and east. The fairer weather ahead had only increased Caradoc’s lead, though by the previous evening, Trig and Wei had conjectured that the Balor troops must have been overtaken by the downpour and their pace slowed. They had hoped to catch Caradoc at a first night’s halt in Rhayader, but when Dain and Rhuddlan had stopped in the village the next morning, they had found not Caradoc, but Morgan and his band journeying south to Wydehaw. Morgan’s men were a welcome addition to the company, all good fighters with knowledge of Balor Keep.

Yet as Dain looked around at his companions, he saw not so much a cadre of warriors as a group of bedraggled travelers beset by mud and rain who would have been frozen if not for their cloaks of Quicken-tree cloth, which Rhuddlan and his Liosalfar had generously shared. They were thirteen to the man, and Nia—not enough to storm a castle, but enough to get them all killed.

If they could have caught Caradoc on the road, ’twould have been different. Trig had sighted seventeen riders with the Boar. One was now dead, poisoned in the Hart, and one was Helebore. ’Twould have been a fair enough fight in the open, but not so in Balor. Battling the Boar in his lair was sure death, and thus Dain had decided to go in alone. Fourteen warriors were naught but an invitation to disaster, whereas one man could be invisible, and none knew the way of it better than he.

He drew the Cypriot up beside Owain, Morgan’s captain, a shrewd fighting man ungiven to exaggeration either of his own deeds or those of others.

“What do we face in Balor?” he asked.

“Nigh onto a hundred and a half men-at-arms and archers as brutish as their master,” Owain answered with a sidelong look. “The keep sits between two baileys. The lower bailey houses the garrison and the gatehouse. There’s a barbican with arrowslits aplenty, a portcullis and murder holes. The curtain wall is stone, but inside the wall is mostly timber and earthworks. The upper bailey sits on the cliffs overlooking the sea, and they say it can’t be breached.”

“They say?”

Owain grinned. “Morgan could get in aright. He scaled the tower at Cardiff with twice as many men guarding it as Caradoc’s got.”

“What of the keep itself?”

“Simple enough above ground with the hall on the first floor and storage chambers and such underneath. It’s what’s below the storage that’s cause for worry.”

Dain did not press him, but waited for the captain to continue.

“I don’t rightly know what it is that lies beneath Balor,” Owain said, squinting thoughtfully, “but the passage that leads to the cellar is guarded by no less than four men night and day. ’Tis said Caradoc keeps wild animals down there in a dark dungeon to drive them mad before he fights them in the pit, and I can say I’ve heard some strange noises comin’ up from below, enough so to curdle yer supper. I’ve seen the pit too, in the southwest tower. Nasty place.”