The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (33 page)

Alan nodded. “Just tell me who—or what he is?”

“A warlock from the realms of chaos. Do you imagine that he alone would have had power enough to usurp me? None other than the Tyrant himself could have cast me down! I was forced to be the amanuensis and slave to that hypocrite and liar, while his shadow grew and spread. But enough of explanations! Hurry now! With every moment, the danger increases.”

He led Alan and Mo through the labyrinth of shadows, to where Kemtuk appeared out of the shade of a doorway, his face racked with contrition.

“Mage Lord, I followed through the most difficult of tracks to this point, when an ague came over my mind. I awoke only minutes ago, convinced that we had lost you.”

Alan grabbed the shaman’s hand and squeezed it. “No time for apologies! We’ve rescued Mo. All thanks to the real Mage of Dreams.”

The dwarf mage waved them away. “You have sprung the warlock’s trap. But still another trap ensnares you.”

“The Death Legion!”

Qwenqwo took a renewed grip on Alan’s arm. His breath was hot on Alan’s face. “You people are its target. Save yourselves! There is nothing left for me here. I shall join you in escape.”

“But we have vulnerable people to protect.”

“Then take them with you. Any who are left will be hunted down.”

Alan turned to Kemtuk. “Can you find your way back to the warehouse?”

“Yes.”

“We must call Ainé. Get help.”

Qwenqwo squeezed Alan’s arm even tighter. “There is no more time for talk.”

Kemtuk still shook his head. “But how can we possibly escape? The boats of the Olhyiu are confiscated and guarded.”

The dwarf mage twisted his neck a moment, as if he had heard a distant growl on the night air, his twisted back hunched and gnarled as an old tree root.

Kemtuk decided. “The Temple Ship is our only hope. All other boats will have to be sacrificed. We must flee downriver to the Vale of Tazan. The Legion will follow but we may yet elude them. I know that for all their boasting, they have not yet defeated the ancient power that still inhabits the Forest of the Undying. If only we can pass through that haunted valley, sanctuary awaits us in Carfon.”

From his pocket Qwenqwo picked out the runestone and fondled its engraved surface a moment before
pressing it into Alan’s hands. “Keep it safe—for I must return to the chamber for some unfinished business.”

Alan’s eyes met those of the dwarf mage. “Be careful!”

“You also—hurry now! May the Powers grant you wings!”

The Flight from Isscan

There was barely time for the people gathered in the rickety warehouse to welcome Mo back—this strange new Mo, who had lost her stammer—before the whole company made ready to flee. It seemed an impossible task to move an entire village of men, women and children out of a town in the first light of morning and not attract attention. But these were people skilled in the art of moving silently. And fear gave urgency to their feet. Now, with their bundles of possessions carried on their heads or strapped to their backs, the Olhyiu followed the meaner streets, cutting through the yards of closed and derelict buildings where locked gates were no barrier for desperate people. The sun had half crested the horizon, its rapidly growing light obscured by the haze of smoke from
wood-burning fires in a city of open hearths. Then, on the upper wharf-side, and no more than half a mile from their destination, a company of black-armored soldiers sprang from the shadows to confront them.

The platoon of Death Legion, though more than matched in numbers by the fisher people, was made up of lightly armored soldiers, each of them better trained and much better armed than the Olhyiu. The officer-at-arms struck a woman in the face with his mailed fist, causing her to drop the infant she was clutching to her breast. Her husband pressed himself in front of his dazed wife, his only weapon a wooden staff. A heavy-set man with the face of a bully, the officer pretended to quake with fear, his arm trembling as he pulled his black-bladed sword from its scabbard. Several soldiers laughed in anticipation of the coming sport.

“What have we here—a dawn plague of rats?”

With a play of bravado he whirled the blade in a feint and parry before pressing its tip against the throat of the husband.

“Squeak now, vermin! But what is that you say? I can’t hear you!”

Alan tugged Kate back so she was hidden behind him, then brandished the Spear of Lug, getting ready to throw it. But before he could carry out his intention a gleaming blade flashed through the air and parted the officer’s head from his shoulders. The dwarf mage, Qwenqwo Cuatzel, barely recognizable under a heavy helmet of embossed bronze, clinking shoulder plates and chainmail to his
midcalves, caught the returning blade and stepped out to confront the platoon of soldiers. His green eyes blazed as he twirled a double-headed bronze battle-axe above his head in one gnarled hand. Runes identical to those on the blade that Padraig had shown them—the Fir Bolg battle-axe that had killed the warrior prince, Feimhin—glittered over the cutting edges.

“Which ten of you cowards will desist from tormenting women and engage in battle a single Fir Bolg warrior!”

None of the soldiers moved to attack him but no more did they pull back. And additional heavily armed soldiers were arriving by the second, blocking all progress down into the harbor.

Alan closed his eyes and focused his exhausted senses into the oraculum. He called out Ainé’s name. But Siam’s hand on his shoulder pulled him back to reality. “The helper, Layheas, has already summoned the Shee. Meanwhile, we must look to ourselves!”

The Olhyiu chief was already organizing a simple defensive circle around the vulnerable. Fish-gutting knives and staves were all that armed the Olhyiu, but they intended to fight for their lives. The soldiers closed around them, their armor rattling as they took up positions to attack.

“Mage Lord, give me the blood-rage,” Siam demanded of Alan.

Alan probed the chief’s spirit, found the embryonic form there, a lot stronger and more ready to emerge
than before. He poured energy into it, saw the change complete in mere moments. The grizzly bear rushed forward and battered through the near ranks of soldiers before retreating to guard the knot of his people. Its battle roar echoed far and wide through the streets and walls of Isscan.

Although eyes widened among the soldiers, they still held their ground. A new officer-at-arms appeared among them. His sword arm rose, preparing for the attack. Suddenly a new chanting could be heard on the air. Such a strange medley of voices and throats that goosebumps rose on Alan’s skin. He remembered it from the skirmish by the river. It was the battle hymn of the Shee. The outer circle of Death Legion spun around to face attack from this new quarter while the inner circle continued to surround the Olhyiu. The officer, with his sword still aloft, rallied his men. “Is the Death Legion to be routed by shee-cats a midget and a bear?”

The soldiers laughed and cheered.

But even as the officer’s sword arm fell, an explosion of white fire closed about his throat, and the head of a tigress tore itself free from his falling body, its eyes red pits and its body an incandescent furnace of lightning and flame.

Ainé!

It was the Kyra, but in a form Alan had never witnessed before. It was as if she had turned the force of her oraculum inward, melding its terrible power with her flesh and blood.

The dwarf mage shook Alan’s shoulder. “Make ready to run!”

The soldiers were falling back, step by step, fear etched into their faces. And through the oraculum, Alan detected the looming approach of fighting Shee, a terrifying vision of snarling jaws and extending talons. Suddenly the tigress lifted her huge head and bared her maw. Rivulets of lightning flickered over the ground and a crackling white fire flared outward through the air, reflected by a wall of approaching Shee blades. With this, a coordinated attack descended on the soldiers and the noise of battle echoed far and wide through the streets and boulevards.

“To the harbor!” shouted Alan.

The Olhyiu hurried onward, with the giant bear tearing a way through the panicked soldiers, and soon there was the renewed pattering of many feet into the awakening morning.

At the harbor, Alan and Kate found themselves wreathed in a heavy mist that was rising out of the confluence of the two rivers. They heard their names spoken in an urgent whisper. They might have walked by a high white wall, faintly luminescent in the pearly light, had they not heard the urgent summons.

“Alan . . . Kate!”

Glancing upward, they saw Mo’s face peering down at them over a white wall that must have been the hull of the Temple Ship.

Through gaps in the mist they glimpsed a towering superstructure, aglow with a strange lambency, dressed
in a wraithlike maze of rope ladders and rigging that ascended into the murky air. The Temple Ship appeared ghostly, as if illuminated by a diffuse, pale light that flickered and danced in the timbers and rigging. What had happened to the black oak, fissured and worn with time and weather? A new transformation was changing the superstructure, extending and swelling into this spectral monolith. It was as if the ship was responding to their needs.

Tall shapes were materializing out of the harbor mists. Alan and Kate glimpsed the flash of warded green blades.

Kate clutched at his arm.

“It’s okay—they’re Shee!” He hugged her to him with his free left arm. “They wear camouflage cloaks. It makes it difficult to see them clearly.”

Many more Shee were arriving. Alan assumed that Muîrne would no longer be with them. He knew that the plan had been that she escort Valéra’s baby back to the safety of their homeland in the Guhttan Mountains. Now the swirling camouflage of the warriors’ capes made it difficult for him to count the numbers of arriving Shee, though there were a lot more of them than he had left at the edge of the trees, perhaps as many as a hundred. He caught a glimpse of Milish, followed by two Aides carrying her ornate trunk.

“No time to wonder!” Qwenqwo hissed at both their elbows. “We must flee while the mist still cloaks our passage!”

As they scrambled up the gangway, the ship appeared to shudder and move. Alan and Kate headed aft, where they found Mo waiting for them with Mark at the great wheel, his feet widely planted on the aft deck.

Mo tugged at Alan’s arm. “His eyes!” she whispered.

Alan and Kate peered into the face of their friend, whose eyes appeared to be glazed, as if registering nothing of the hustle and bustle on the deck around him.

But then Kate took up Mo’s alarm. “Oh, Alan—look more closely!”

When Alan did so he saw that the whites and irises of Mark’s eyes had disappeared, replaced by darkness, black as obsidian, in which motes of a silvery light flickered and changed.

In a tremulous voice, Mo pressed him, “What’s happening to him?”

“I don’t know, but the pattern is the same as his crystal.”

“But he broke the crystal!”

Alan shrugged. “I’m not sure what it means, Mo.”

Mo said, “I think it’s something to do with his closeness to the ship.”

Kate turned to look at Mo, her eyes wide as if still only coming to terms with a great many different surprises. “What do you mean?”

“Do you remember how we all felt that terrible sadness when the Olhyiu were going to burn the ship, back at the frozen lake? Mark was just standing there on his own. He sensed it before anyone else. He knew the
feeling was coming from the ship. Then he just took the wheel as if . . . as if the ship had summoned him. And look at him now. He has that same look on his face.”

Alan studied Mark again. He hardly seemed to register any of their presences. It was if he and the ship were in some intense, intimate communication.

Suddenly the matrix in Mark’s eyes began to pulsate rhythmically and powerfully, as if with his heartbeat. Everybody jumped with fright as a crackling force shook the massive timbers. All three of them spun around, marveling at the changes that continued to pervade the creaking and groaning superstructure. Moment by moment the ship glowed brighter, a light that seemed hardly to reflect the dawn but to exude from every surface and line of the vessel, as if the ship itself had become the cradle of light. Ainé, restored to human form, had come on board without Alan noticing, and now she stared about her with an expression of wary incredulity. She reached out to touch a glowing rail and withdrew her hand sharply, as if it had given her an electric shock.

Siam, also restored, stood and stared, his eyes wide with astonishment, interrupted in the order to raise the gangway. Regaining his senses, he shouted orders to his sailors. But without their help the great sails were already rising. Ainé called out to the Shee, ordering them to take up defensive positions on the port side, where they faced the battlemented city walls. Alan, now probing with his oraculum, sensed the immense and mysterious charge of energy that surrounded them.

“The chains!” Siam roared, his alarm too urgent for whispers.

Running sternward in Ainé’s wake, Alan found the Kyra with legs astride a massive anchor chain. Each individual link was a foot in diameter and cast of the same dull black metal as the armor of the Storm Wolves. The chains manacled the ship to the huge iron capstans of the dock. With jaws clenched in warlike incantation, Ainé raised her sword to its extremity and crashed its glittering blade against a single link, causing an explosion of brilliant sparks but barely making a dent on its surface. Milish placed a cautionary hand on the upper arm of the Shee. The Kyra’s blade was not indestructible, and they might have need of it in days to come.

With an oath, Ainé sheathed her sword and glared with rage at this shackling of their escape.

Alan was equally appalled by the massive girth of the chains. Powerful and strange as the Temple Ship had become, there would be no escape without first breaking through these bonds.

A shout from above caused the Olhyiu to crouch down on the deck, already rolling and shuddering as the power of the unfurled sails battered against the obstruction. The Death Legion was proliferating on the walls above the dockside. They had the advantage of the harbor side of the great plaza, which brought them high above the level of the groaning deck. Some among them were swinging cannons into position so they could direct them at the Temple Ship. Alan shouted at Kate and Mo
to go below. It was pointless risking their lives here on deck when they were unarmed and couldn’t contribute to the fighting.

“We’re here to tend the wounded!” Kate insisted.

“That will keep for when the fighting is over.”

He saw them reluctantly head for the stairs. He glanced over at Mark, who appeared to have become one with the wheel. He heard the first thunder of cannon fire, followed by flame and smoke. The discharge struck the superstructure about the mainmast, and a conflagration of sparks exploded in the rigging. He recoiled, gagging, from the foul green fire, noticing how an answering counter-force rose out of the deck, smothering the flames, causing them to splutter and die.

The Shee were hurling javelins with deadly accuracy at the Death Legion on the harbor walls. Bodies were tumbling down onto the quay. But there was no shortage of reinforcements.

Confronting the chains, Alan focused on them through the power of the oraculum. The red glow from his brow caused the people to shrink away from him. From above, two more cannons were being pulled into position, their muzzles trained directly onto the crowded decks. Ainé’s voice of command sounded out like a clarion call, exhorting the Shee to greater battle. A fierce flare from Alan’s oraculum caught a single link in the chain, and within moments it glowed red. Sparks of hot metal began to crackle from its incandescent surface. But its massive strength resisted the force of his
attack. Several more detonations of green fire descended on them from above; the burning conflagration and foul stench of one struck no more than yards from Alan.

Suddenly Qwenqwo was by his side. A glare of determination contorted his features as he lifted his arms into the air, as if invoking the assistance of the elements. Alan felt a gale of wind rise around him and catch in the heaving rigging.

A roar of triumph came from above as a gigantic cannon was dragged into place. The legionaries rammed the huge barrel through the fabric of the masonry, toppling a shower of stones into the water, meanwhile enabling them to direct it downward. And now they were wheeling it back again to load it, before training it onto the central mast of the ship.

Alan stood still, his legs parted on either side of the chain, his brow cast down, furrowed with the intensity of his concentration. Desperation consumed him. There was an almighty flare from his brow and the link blazed white-hot. A cataract of sparks erupted into the air from the blazing link.