The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (46 page)

Mark’s teeth were chattering from the poisons coursing through his bloodstream, yet he refused to shift his gaze from those all-black eyes now beholding him from their wrinkled brow. He summoned up every last fiber of his reserve. “They’re my friends. Can you remember what it was like to have friends?”

A shudder moved through the figure.
Pity? Is that what you expect of me?
A groan, like the susurration of a dried-up ocean, buffeted Mark’s spirit.
Would that I could feel pity!

His throat was dry. His tongue felt so swollen it was hard to speak. “I remember how lovely you looked . . . when we met in the dream.”

He sensed a pause for reflection in the figure of stone.
Great anger at injustice was my undoing. Pride
became my blood, and it hardened my heart to stone. Wrath has become my fate, and I must endure it until the end of time.
But then her voice softened, so it sounded more human.
Yet to communicate with a caring heart, though brief unto a single moment, is such sweetness.

His heart was misfiring in his chest, his body sliding down the parapet until he was slumped against the low wall,
Vengeance
a discomfort against his spine. Through a mist of confusion he thought of the real Nantosueta—the dark-haired girl laughing as she pirouetted among the slender trunks, as free as one could only wish to be. He tried to lick his lips with a useless tongue. “We held hands. I . . . I know you’re no older than I am. I know what it feels like to be that lonely.”

The voice fell to a whisper.
Who are you?

“Mark . . . Mark Grimstone is my name . . .”

You could not love me, such as I have become?

His limbs shuddered. His body trembled so it took all of his strength just to lift his face up to look at her.

“I do—I do love you. I’ve loved you since that moment . . . in the dream, when you held my hand.”

A sigh fell from the figure, like the patter of spring rain entering a forest that had known only drought. A girl’s soft voice spoke to him then, gentle and lovely as he remembered her:
In two thousand years, yours has been the only heart brave enough to love me.
She sighed again, but this sigh had the sibilance of joy.
How could I not love you in return!

Mark’s heart lifted with what felt like an impossible mixture of joy and hope. “Then prove it by saving them. . . . Save my friends!”

So let it be! Yet avert your senses lest dread rather than desire is the memory you would keep of me.

Mark found himself falling into darkness, melding into consummation with Nantosueta, mind for mind and heart for heart. He refused to avert his senses, gladly sharing her gaze as her right arm drew its awful force down out of the heavens, and that single white-marbled left arm extended with the fingers splayed to a spider-shape of bleached ivory. Suddenly, those fingers exploded in blue-black lightning. Her accompanying words were a summons that swept far and wide over mountain and river and through the forests . . .

Guardians of Tazan—awaken!

Resurrection

Qwenqwo Cuatzel felt the power descend over the plateau as if a sudden static charge of electricity had crackled over his skin, lifting his hair so it felt as if his helmet had risen half an inch higher on his head. After Mark had left him, the dwarf mage had gone down into the cellar to discover the shaman, Kemtuk Lapeep, dying from a wound inflicted by the Gargs that had taken Kate. There were children here too, many sick from a poison cast into the air of the chamber. The council woman, Milish, had arrived to join him in tending the children. Now she too lifted her head, startled: “What is it?”

“Salvation—by the merciful gods!”

The dwarf mage hugged the tall statuesque woman, and then ran for the steps. He came lumbering up out
of the cellar, passing several Aides on the blood-soaked paving stones, then burst out into the alley with his eyes thrown wide open, singing a battle hymn he had thought forgotten. In his right hand he held aloft the runestone, which pulsated and glimmered with power.

“What’s happening?”

He didn’t have time to hug the spiritual guardian, Bétaald. He ran toward the central plaza, where he heard the unmistakable roar of a grizzly in blood-rage. Other sounds he heard over the din of battle: the roars of the enemy and a muted cheer from Olhyiu throats. With the oraculum cradled in his injured left arm, and the Fir Bolg axe twirling in his right, he made his way past Kehloke, who stood wounded and exhausted among a small circle of Olhyiu that fought alongside the giant grizzly bear against hundreds of legionaries and swooping Gargs. Qwenqwo Cuatzel ignored them all. He forced his way through soldiers and Gargs, until he reached the defensive wall and turned his face up to view the Rath of Nantosueta. Then he turned to peer down into the Vale of Tazan.

With tears filling his eyes, he murmured, “Ah, bravely done young Ironheart! For so long have I endured to witness this!”

Gigantic cataracts of blue-black lightning arced through the air, provoking luminescent rainbows throughout the valley, even as dazzling flares of light expanded and fused in the statue of the Dark Queen high overhead, transforming her figure into a furnace
of dark power. The avalanche of lightning separated into myriad feelers and rivulets as it struck the slopes, where the thunderous reverberations seemed to go on and on. Vast and wide, a terrible constellation of stars, dark as gunmetal against the light, began to glow in the war-ravaged valley. Tears made tracks down the cheeks of the dwarf mage as he saw the lightning bolts strike one stone head after another. On the forest floor a reluctant movement began. Here and there, sheathed in crackling spiderwebs of power, the horned heads of the Fir Bolg war beasts ripped a passage out of their snow-covered graves.

Armored with their thick hides, on their backs they carried the heavily muscled drum masters, bronze-armored and helmeted. Straddling their pommels, in a semicircle of diminishing size, were the six great kettle drums. The eyes of the drum masters were all pupil, black and bulging like beetles. From the broad flat feet of the war beasts, claws extended to take firm purchase on the slopes. Steadily, purposefully, the drums began to call out . . .

Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . .

The drumming of the masters set up a coordinated signal throughout the valley, discovering everywhere a second wave of response. The war beasts held their ground, standing eight feet tall, their tiny gray eyes of malice looking for bodies to toss with their triple horns, huge jaws open to snap and tear. The black-eyed
drummers continued to beat out their rhythm, awakening into every nook and cranny, so that not a single warrior, other than the few heads destroyed by the Legun, would fail to heed the call. Death Legion and Garg alike hesitated as the drumming expanded, patiently, remorselessly, until it became an omnipresent thunder sweeping through the valley. And soon the first among an army of fifty thousand broke free of the grave, with a rattle of stones and a scattering of insects and worms, their eyes beetle-black, their shoulders weighted with heavy armor, struggling out of their entranced slumber to answer the call of the drums.

The emerging Fir Bolg warriors were giants among the race of dwarfs, the tallest no more than five feet, yet they were shouldered like oxen, with arms and legs muscled like roots of oak. They bore a great variety of weapons, swords, spiked ball-and-chain, and double-headed battle-axes with hafts bent and twisted for sigmoid patterns of flight and their blades embossed and silvered with runes of power. These terrible weapons were now rediscovering the bonds of weapon and master, turning, swirling, glinting ominously in the blue-black lightning that ran and hunted for the great stone heads close to the ground. In a continuously flowing machine of war, the arriving warriors were aligning to columns on either side of the war beasts. All in that same flow, the drum masters began to press forward, hammering out a new rhythm, some leading their columns down into the valley heading for the river, others
wheeling their war beasts upslope, the clawed feet, sharp and strong as steel, biting deep into the slippery ground.

Immediately the slaughter began.

A Garg in midflight was bisected by a twirling battle-axe that curved in its flight to return to the hand that cast it. A Preceptor leading a platoon of Death Legion reached a Fir Bolg warrior, only half-emerged from a muddy stream, and sank his twist-bladed dagger straight into the warrior’s throat. The legionaries cheered and chanted the sacrificial hymn to their master. But as the blade emerged from the cold, pale flesh the wound self-healed. At the same time those all-black eyes opened on the Preceptor and an armored fist reached out and crushed his throat.

Above the third defense, surrounded by a renewed intensity of battle, Qwenqwo Cuatzel, Arch Mage of the resurrected Fir Bolg, held the runestone aloft and whispered a message through the oraculum to Alan:

“Bear it a little while longer!”

Alan received the message, but couldn’t reply. He stood, with the incandescent Spear of Lug extended, his teeth clenched and his feet splayed. Mo lay unconscious by his side. Ainé’s remains lay nearby, her body cremated by the fury of her own attack on the Legun. Her ashes were mixed with those of the Legun’s charger, which had been immolated in the same attack.
Even the immortal Legun had been weakened and maimed, and was leaking foul green slime from the terrible wound inflicted by the Kyra. Yet still it confronted Alan, battering down his last reserves of strength and spiritual energy. Suddenly, as if detecting his exhaustion and anticipating victory, it roared out a call to all of its forces. Legionaries turned, urged on by their Preceptors. Gargs wheeled about in midflight, heading for the single focus of the Legun amid the wreckage of bodies and broken masonry on the great Plaza of Ossierel.

Glancing backward, Alan saw that he and the small company of Shee that still fought around him were surrounded by legionaries and were the focus of an approaching swarm of Gargs. The Legun reached out an enormous fire-scarred hand and, with a venomous claw, rapidly closed on Alan’s brow, determined to quench the blazing oraculum.

From nearby, Alan felt a small whisper of support enter his being. Qwenqwo was fighting his way closer. The runestone! Alan sensed the message of the runestone, the Mage of the Fir Bolg calling for help.

Taking a new comfort from the closeness of his friend, Alan poured his last reserve of resistance into the spear. He plunged it yet again into the flesh of his monstrous adversary. But the approaching hand hardly faltered, redoubling its purpose, forcing its talon closer. Belatedly, Alan realized the implications of the Shee having lost their leader. He sent a call to every Shee still living, directing them to fight their
way here, to where the oraculum-bearer was losing his battle with the Legun.

At several breaches in the wall, great cats appeared from the flame and smoke of the nearby slopes, leaping out of the shadows to tear out the throats of the legionaries attempting to hold their ground.

But the Shee were fighting overwhelming odds. The legionaries were armed with steel-mesh nets and long-bladed battle forks, and the numbers of tigresses were dwindling, the survivors tiring. Suddenly, through the same breaches, the war beasts now clambered, their drum masters swaying in the saddles, all the while implacably calling on the warriors to rise and follow, the drum beat never faltering.

Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . .

The rhythm of the drums rolled out over the plateau, sending a wave of alarm through the enemy. Gargs fell on the emerging Fir Bolg, to be met with a rain of heavy arrows, javelins and battle-axes. A big centurion dropped from an upper window, his sword held aloft in two hands, intent on bisecting a marauding tigress with a single stroke. But a whirring black battle-axe clove deep into his chest before he reached the Shee, skimming the ground before rising up to find the armored fist of its master.

As if sensing the changing tide of battle, the Legun hesitated, but then, drawing deep on the malice of its master, it lunged at Alan a final time, accepting a wound the full depth of the spearhead, yet still
pressing through every wave of his resistance. As if in slow motion, Alan could only stare at the approach of the venom-dripping talon, resisting with all of his might the imminent moment of his death. The talon was only an inch or two from his face when he heard a sound in the distance, like a humming from thousands of low-pitched throats at once. A whirling entity was approaching, directed at the intersection of his oraculum and the talon.

A sudden roar of pain filled his ears—but it wasn’t Alan’s. It came from the Legun, whose taloned hand had been severed by the glowing battle-axe of the Mage of the Fir Bolg, who had placed all of the power of the runestone into the stroke.

Boom-boom tan-tan . . . Boom-boom tan-tan . . .

The drumming now filled the air, approaching Alan and the Legun from three separate directions, as the Fir Bolg adopted a triple-pronged attack formation, each prong led by the trapezoidal spearhead. At the tip of each spearhead fifteen war beasts formed a cutting wedge, the drum masters beating out a new tactic, the warriors swaggering from foot to foot. Their shoulders swayed in their ponderous ballet of combat, bodies twisting and rotating, their positions never still, so as to deflect any arrow or spear, their armor so dense and heavy that not even the fiercest thrust of blade could penetrate it.

At an unspoken command, a hail of battle-axes fell on the encircling legionaries, while another tore
into the descending cloud of Gargs. Flying clusters and ground formations disintegrated as the bodies fell, with heads detached or wings disintegrated, and all the while the drumming continued, as the three-pronged formation closed around the central focus of the Legun, the runed blades whirling and returning, to be cast again and again and again.

Alan, his spear arm shaking with exhaustion, watched in disbelief as a flurry of battle-axes struck the Legun. The glittering blades tore deep into the malignant flesh and then, strangely, horribly, continued to spiral deeper, burying themselves entirely within the monster. A second wave struck, a third—and then it became a hailstorm, thudding into the vast malignant being, until a deluge of green gore covered the surrounding plaza. It altered focus, pouring its malice into the nearing columns. But the warriors who fell, consumed with livid green fire, simply rose again. No power, no matter how dreadful, could kill those who were already dead. With an explosion of rage that shook the ground and echoed in the ruined walls, the Legun deserted the battlefield.

Alan’s ears were deafened by the drums as Qwenqwo appeared by his side. Then Milish arrived, kneeling by the unconscious body of Mo, her regal face awash with tears. “What are we to do?”

Alan blinked, unable to speak.

Qwenqwo spoke softly, reassuringly. “It’s over. Everywhere it is as you see in these streets. The
guardians of the Vale of Tazan are at large in its ancient forests. They will continue to hunt until not a single enemy remains.”

In the hours that followed, the surviving Gargs took to the air, a great cloud dispersing into the gloom of the Eastern sky. The survivors of the Legion fled to their ships in the river below. Yet even here there was little respite from the Dark Queen’s vengeance. A great commotion, too far away for Alan to see it clearly, thrashed the water, smashing one of the ships and tossing the survivors into the moiling river. The soldiers clinging to the wreckage screamed as a gargantuan shape rose out of the water—even from such a distance he imagined it might resemble the gaping jaws of a titanic serpent. Its hunger appeared to match its size, for it rose and snapped again and again, as if filling its belly for a hundred years.