The Endless Knot (36 page)

“Even with a blaze the hearth would be cold,” added Emyr.

“Still, I would welcome a fire now,” Garanaw said. “The darkness here is dark indeed.”

Six steps down, we came onto a wide landing, and then six more to another landing, and a final six to the floor, which was covered with six-sided glazed black tiles. The tiles glistened with moisture and made a slick surface for our feet as we moved slowly to the center of the hall where the firepit would be.

“Your hopes for a welcome fire are in vain, Garanaw,” remarked Tegid. “There is no hearth.”

No hearthstone, no fire-ring, nor even a brazier such as we had seen in the tower. The room, as far as we could tell, was devoid of any furniture whatsoever. Instead, where the hearth would have been, there was a mosaic picked out in small red, white and black tesserae depicting the same winged serpent emblem we had seen in the tower. The serpent here, however, was less stylized and somewhat more lifelike: sinuous red coils shimmering in the torchlight, red eyes glaring, reptilian wings spread behind its flat head. And there was a word spelled out in red tiles beneath it, which I took to be the creature's name.

I looked at the image traced upon the floor and my silver hand sent a warning tingle up my arm.

My eyes were better adjusted to the dark now, and I saw that the great room was oval-shaped, its many-peaked roof supported by rows of tapering columns whose tops were lost to the blackness above. Directly opposite the entrance door across the expanse of floor, a second round doorway, nearly as large as the first, opened into the smooth rock face of the bank.

We all proceeded warily across the dark room to this second doorway, which proved to be the opening of a deep cave—elaborately dressed with fine finished stone without, but nothing more than a ragged rock tunnel inside. It came to me that the whole palace was but a façade built to conceal or, more likely, to enshrine this single cave entrance.

“Well,” said Cynan, eyeing the tunnel doubtfully, “we have come this far. Will we turn back without seeing what lies beyond?”

Up spoke Tegid. “Do you yet wonder what lies beyond?”

“Enlighten us, bard,” Cynan said. “I cannot guess.”

“Can you not? Very well then, I will tell you. It is the creature whose image we have seen since coming to the Foul Land.”

“The beast set in the floor back there?” wondered Cynan, gesturing to the empty hall behind us.

“The same,” said Tegid. “It is in my mind that this hole leads to the lair of the beast.
Yr Gyrem Rua
is its name.”

“The Red Serpent?” murmured Cynan. The warriors glanced around warily. “Do you know this beast?”

“Unless I am much mistaken,” the bard replied, “the creature within is that which the Learned call the Red Serpent of Oeth.” He hesitated. “Some call it Wyrm.”

“Wyrm . . .” Bran muttered, glancing over his shoulder.

Sick dread broke like a wave over me; I understood now why the palace consisted of just one room, and why the bronze men of the high tower revered the image of the serpent: it was their god; they sacrificed to it. And this was Yr Gyrem Rua's shrine and sanctuary.

“Let us leave this place while we may,” urged Bran.

With that, we turned from the door, retreating back across the floor by three paces, when the cry sounded again—the thin, tremulous whimper of a forlorn and miserable infant.

“The child has wandered in there,” gasped Cynan, hurrying back to the cave entrance. Peering inside, he called to the child, waited, and when he received no reply, started into the tunnel.

I snatched him by the cloak and pulled him back. “You cannot go in there alone.”

“Then come with me, brother.”

I turned back to the others. “Stay here,” I said. “We will take a quick look inside.”

Trembling in every limb, Cynan and I started down the tunnel, the light of our torches flickering on the damp red stone. We moved cautiously on, but encountered little more than a strong smell: musty and somewhat sweet, but with a ripe gamey taint, like rancid oil or fat.

Fifty paces more and I saw a glistening mass lying on the floor of the passage. My metal hand went suddenly cold, and I stopped in my tracks.

“What is that?” breathed Cynan, gesturing with his torch.

I stepped closer and held my torch nearer. My stomach tightened and my mouth filled with bile. I gagged and choked.

Lying in a pool of vomitus on the floor before us was the undigested head of one of our missing scouts. The flesh was badly corrupted, the face horribly marred; even so, I recognized the man.

Cynan made to brush past me, but I swung toward him and put my hand in the center of his chest. “Brother, no . . . It is Gweir.”

He strained forward, anger, sorrow, and disbelief battling across his features. He glanced over my shoulder. “
Saeth du!”
he cursed and turned away.

There was nothing to be done for Gweir, so we moved on, the odor growing more potent with every step. In a little while the passage turned and widened out somewhat, forming a low grotto. The stench hit me full force as I stepped into this inner chamber; it rocked me back on my heels, but I choked back the bile and staggered ahead. Cynan entered quickly after me.

In the center of the grotto was a hole in the rock floor. The rough edges of the hole were smoothed to an almost polished luster. It was not difficult to guess how the rough stone had gained its glassy sheen.

Scattered on the floor of this hateful chamber were various body parts of our missing warriors and their mounts: a foot still in its buskin, a mangled horse's head and several hooves, jawbones, human and animal teeth, the stripped rib cage and spine of a horse. There were other, older bones too, skulls and broken shanks scoured clean and brown with age—sacrificial victims of a distant age.

I could not bear the sight and turned away. The eerie childlike whine sounded again, rising from the depths below, and I realized that it was the Wyrm itself, not a child, that made the cry. Tightening my grip on the torch, I stepped toward the hole. A blade of ice stabbed up into my arm. Cynan caught me by the shoulder. “Stay back,” he barked in a sharp whisper, pulling me roughly away. “We can do nothing here.”

We retraced our steps to the great hall. Tegid saw the grim set of our faces and asked, “Well? Did you find the child?”

Cynan shook his head, “There was no child,” he answered, his voice a low growl in his throat. “But we have found the serpent . . . and our missing scouts as well.”

Tegid swallowed hard and bowed his head as we described what we had seen. “The evil which has slept untold ages has awakened,” the bard said when we had finished. “We must leave this place at once.”

The sky outside had lost all color and light. Bran wasted no time moving the men along. We hurried toward the road beyond the palace. The first warriors reached the far end of the terrace, and paused to allow the rest of the party to assemble before moving on. It was then that the Wyrm struck.

The attack came so swiftly and silently that the first we knew of it was the choked-off scream of the man it seized and carried away. Hearing the man's dying shriek, I spun around in time to see a sinuous shape gliding into the dusky shadows.

A heartbeat later, we were all racing back across the terrace to where the others had halted. “Did you see?” they shouted. “The Wyrm! It took Selyf!”

I shouted above the clamor. “Did anyone see where it went?”

The Wyrm had attacked and vanished once more into the shadows without a trace. “We cannot go that way,” Bran concluded, staring in the direction of the road. “We will have to go around.”

I peered around doubtfully. On one hand, the river, itself as silent and deadly as a serpent; on the other, the red palace and its evil occupant. Behind loomed the forest, rising like a massive, impenetrable curtain. Turning toward the forest with great reluctance, I said, “This way; we will try to find another path.”

“What about Selyf ?” Cynan demanded. “We cannot leave him behind.”

“He is gone,” Bran said. “There is nothing to be done for him.”

Cynan refused to move. “He was a good man.”

“And will it help Selyf if we all join him in the pit?” Bran asked. “How many more good men must we lose to the Wyrm?”

My sympathies lay with Cynan, but Bran was right—fleeing made the best sense. “Listen to him, brother,” I said. “What benefit to Tángwen if you are not there to rescue her? The serpent could return at any moment. Let us go from here while we have the chance.”

Leaving the terrace, we entered the forest, pausing only long enough to light torches before moving on. Bran led, with myself and Cynan behind, keeping the river to our backs. We worked our way into the undergrowth in an effort to skirt the palace. The further we moved from the river, the more tangled and close grown the wood became. We slashed and hacked with our swords, and forced our way, step-by-step, until we reached a rock wall rising sheer from the forest floor.

“It is the same bank from which the palace is carved,” said Bran, scratching away the moss with his blade to reveal red stone beneath.

Raising our torches, we tried to gauge the height of the bank, but the top was lost in the darkness, and we could not see it. “Even if we could climb it,” Cynan pointed out, “the horses could not.”

Keeping the rock bank to our right, we continued on, moving away, always away, from the palace. When one torch burned out, we snatched up another brand from the snarl of branches all around us. Time and again, we stopped to examine the bank and, finding neither breach nor foothold, we moved on. A late-rising moon eventually appeared and poured a dismal glow over us. Now and then, I glimpsed its pale face flickering in the wickerwork of branches overhead.

“I see a clearing ahead,” called Bran from a few paces on.

“At last!” It seemed as if we had walked half the night and had yet to discover any way we might cross the stone bank. I signaled for the rest of the men to stop while Bran and I went ahead to investigate the clearing. Shoulder to shoulder, we crept slowly forward, pressing ourselves against the rock bank. We entered the clearing to see the red palace directly before us and, a little distance to the right, the darkly glimmering river.

“We have come full circle,” I remarked. Indeed, we were standing just a few paces from where we had started.

“How is it possible?” wondered Bran.

“We must have become confused in the dark. We will go the other way.”

Retracing our steps, we informed the others of the mistake, and struck off once more. Again, we kept the rock bank hard at the right hand so that we would not go astray. The moon reached the peak of its arc and began descending. We pressed relentlessly on, arriving after another long march at yet another clearing. Bran and I stepped together from the shielding edge of the wood into the open: the palace stood directly before us, and off to the right, the dark river.

I took one look and called for Tegid. “See this, bard,” I said, flinging out my hand, “it makes no difference which way we go, we return to this place in the end. What are we to do?”

Tegid cocked an eye to the night sky and said, “Dawn is not far off. Let us rest now, and try again when it is light.”

We gathered at the edge of the clearing near the river and set about making a rough camp. We lit fires, established a watch, and settled down to wait for sunrise. Cynan wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down. I had just spread a saddle fleece on the ground and sat down crosslegged, a spear across my knees, when Tegid leapt to his feet.

He froze. Listening.

A faint, rippling sound reached me. It sounded like a boat moving against the riverflow. “It is coming from the water,” I whispered. “But what—”

“Shh!” Tegid hissed. “Listen!”

Faintly, as in the far-off distance, I heard the nervous whicker of a horse; it was quickly joined by another. Cynan rolled to his feet, shouting, “The horses!”

We flew through the camp toward the horse picket. I felt a sharp icy stab of pain in my silver hand and in the same instant saw, outlined against the shimmering water, a monstrous serpent, its upper body raised high off the ground and great angular head weaving slowly from side to side. The enormous body glistened in the faint moonlight; the head, armored with horned plates, swung above three tremendous coils, each coil the full girth of a horse, and a stiff, forked tail protruded from between the first and second coil. Two long, thick, back-swept ridges ran down along either side of its body from just below the ghastly swaying head.

A trail of water led up from the river. Obviously, the creature had more than one entrance to its den. It had come up from the river, close to the horses, no doubt intent on gorging its fearsome appetite on horseflesh. The horses, terrified, bucked and reared, jerking on their picket lines and tethers. Several had broken free, and men were trying to catch them.

The Wyrm seemed keenly fascinated by the commotion, its plated head swerving in the air, eyes gleaming in the firelight. I saw the plunging horses and the campfires . . .

“Help me, Cynan!” I shouted. Dashing forward, I speared one of the lichen bales with which we fed the horses and ran with it to the nearest fire. I thrust the bale into the flames and lofted the spear. Then, with the courage of fear and rage, I ran to the serpent and heaved the flaming spear into its face.

The missile struck the bony plate below the monster's eye. The Wyrm flinched, jerking away from the fire.

I whirled away, shouting to those nearby. “Light more bales!” I cried. “Hurry! We can drive it away.”

Cynan and two other warriors bolted to the stack of fodder, skewered three bales and set them ablaze. Cynan lunged to meet the Wyrm, raising a battle cry as he ran.

“
Bás Draig!
” he bellowed. The two warriors at his side took up the cry. “
Bás Draig!
”