Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (42 page)

A wolf dodged in close to nip her ankle and
met the edge of Varga’s blade. Yelping, the beast retreated, but
had no sooner turned than the next set of sharp teeth took its
place. A harsh command from a pasty-faced skraeling set more of the
wolves on them, and in the space of a breath, a snarling pack had
closed in a semicircle around her and the Sha-shakrieg. Gray wolves
and black, sooty brown and even the far northern white breed
snapped and growled in an ever-tightening ring. A large black moved
in closer than the others, and Nia smelled the hunger on him. ’Twas
a desperate thing, full of pain, a victim of the Dockalfar’s
malevolent power. To turn a forest animal into a ravening beast of
war took a conjured twist of nature the likes of which had been
forbidden by the Prydion Magi long before the Wars of Enchantment,
a twist of the body’s hunger into mindless greed, and desires into
insatiable need.

Faced with the fiercely advancing creatures,
Varga ordered her farther up the side of the cairn. As they gave
way, the skraelings bent on retreat passed them by, making only
ineffectual stabs with their weapons before they plunged into the
safety of the Kasr-al portal, leaving the kill for the animals.

On the far side of the causeway, Rhuddlan’s
band was taking the day, with skill and speed proving a good
leveler of numbers. As they moved out onto the causeway, the
Dangoes bones found them as easily as the skraelpack. Rhuddlan set
three Liosalfar to race along the cliff edge, cutting down the
skeletal ice fingers with the heat of dreamstone light and freeing
others for the push forward.

’Twould do her and Varga little good, Nia
feared, slicing at another lunging beast with her sword. Blood
showed on Varga’s thigh where a wolf’s teeth had found purchase.
The animal lay dead on the rocks from the Sha-shakrieg’s blade, but
the scent of death had roused the others into more daring
attacks.

She scrambled higher on the rocks with Varga
beside her, wolves closing in all around, and Rhuddlan yet a
quarterlan away on the causeway. She could have made it to the
Liosalfar line with a quickety-split dash, but the Sha-shakrieg had
no such speed. He’d pitched himself into the battle on Rhuddlan’s
side instead of retreating and saving himself, and for that reason
Nia didn’t desert the cairn. ’Twas a choice she did not expect to
have long to regret, and mayhaps she wouldn’t have, except for an
unlikely savior from the Dangoes.

A low-pitched howl, faint and eerie, wound
its way through the needlelike icicles encrusting the cave’s
ceiling, setting them aquiver. Rescue had never arrived on such a
mournful note. The wolves stilled and fell silent, their ears
pricked.

The howl grew stronger, accompanied by ice
music, and the wolfpack began to whine and yap and jump about,
dancing on the rocks. A few slunk away from the cairn and melted
into the retreating horde of skraelings.

Nia looked to the great cavern and found the
baying hound—Conladrian—still as stone and black as night against
the mighty dripshanks of ice flanking the Dangoes. He raised his
head again, giving full throat to his voice, and half the wolfpack
broke free and streaked back through the Liosalfar line, heading
west off the causeway. The remaining animals milled about in
ever-growing confusion, some answering the hound’s call with howls
of their own, others silent and watchful.

Ice music proved the final bane of the
skraelpack, as it was ever the bane of men. Its sweet, frozen
melody rippled through the air in waves of cresting sound,
promising an endless, sleeping death to all who would come nearer,
ever nearer—and some went, over the edge and into the icy sea. The
Dockalfar tried to herd the skraelings off the causeway before they
were caught in the song’s enchanted grip, but for the weary and the
wounded, the lure was greater than the threat of a Dark-elf
pike.

Varga and she killed four more as they
retreated. Coming up the causeway, the Quicken-tree were laying the
skraelings low on every side. ’Twas only the Dockalfar who escaped
unscathed into the Loop by being too quick for Varga and staying
clear of Nia’s gleaming blade.

The Quicken-tree fought their way closer,
closing the causeway except to those few skraelings who had crossed
the Liosalfar line and were escaping to the west with the wolves.
Varga engaged one last skraeling, fighting him back into the
Kasr-al portal.

“Nia!” Roth, a Liosalfar at the front of the
line, hailed her. Other glad cries of recognition followed, until
Varga came out of the shadow of the Kasr-al portal. Upon sighting
the Sha-shakrieg, voices were suddenly stilled and bloodied swords
relifted.

Varga halted on the track. Dreamstone light
flickered over the woad-painted faces lined up against him, showing
bright aquamarine eyes and the glinting edges of daggers and short
swords held at the ready. For an awful moment Nia feared she might
have to set herself against the Liosalfar to keep him from
harm.

“The Sha-shakrieg is for Rhuddlan,” she
warned, stepping forward and taking a guarding stance.

“Aye. He is mine.” A single voice, clear and
deep, spoke from out of the darkness, and as one, the Quicken-tree
soldiers lowered their swords.

Rhuddlan strode through the parting ranks and
stopped a few yards from Varga, his face a grim reflection of the
carnage on the causeway.

“Leave us,” he commanded, and all of the
Liosalfar moved away.

Nia, too, made a short bow and stepped aside,
back toward the ranks of the Quicken-tree warriors. Should Rhuddlan
choose to cut the Sha-shakrieg down before hearing him out, so be
it. He was her sovereign lord.

The Liosalfar welcomed her, and ’twas with a
sense of relief that she blended into their midst.

Varga watched her disappear, noting the
wanness of her complexion and the unsteadiness of her gait. The
battle had taken the last of her strength. He doubted if she would
see the forests again.

“Mayhaps I’ll compose a song for her in the
desert,” he said, turning his attention to the tall, fair-haired
man in front of him. “A lay for Nia of the Light-elves.”

“If she dies, you’ll not see the desert
again.” The Quicken-tree leader was succinct, his pronouncement no
more than Varga had expected. Rhuddlan had ever been decisive, and
arrogant, and most times too sure of his course. ’Twas his weakness
as well as his strength, and it seemed he’d changed little.

“I was taking her through the Dangoes. ’Tis a
good two days shorter.”

“If you live,” Rhuddlan said harshly. “And
forever longer if you don’t.”

“Aye,” Varga agreed. “Yet I would have risked
my life alongside her. Indeed, I have risked my life to return her
to the Light-elves and to warn you of war as commanded by the Lady
Queen of Deseillign.”

Rhuddlan’s gaze narrowed. “Your life is no
longer at risk, Varga. It is forfeit, and the Lady’s warning comes
too late. War is already upon us.”

Arrogant, aye, Varga thought. A tight smile
curved his lips. He had not fought to hold the Kasr-al Loop for the
privilege of being threatened. He needed Rhuddlan’s help, but so
did the Quicken-tree leader need his.

“This is not yet war,” he said, allowing a
measure of contempt into his voice, “only a few soldiers fighting
in the dark. I have not
forfeited
my life, Rhuddlan, to save
you and your Liosalfar from a skraelpack and the deformed remnants
of the Dockalfar. Look, if you would see the war we fight in
Deseillign, a war that runs through our streets and steals the
breath of our children.” He walked over to the nearest skraeling
and with his foot shoved the dead man over onto his back. Kneeling,
he ripped the pikeman’s sleeve up to his shoulder. “Come, King of
the Light-elves, and look at what lies in wait for Merioneth.”

Rhuddlan lifted his dreamstone high, casting
a pool of light over the gray-skinned corpse at Varga’s feet.
Shadows and a blue luminescence rippled across the skraeling’s limp
form, revealing a rough-hewn tunic and the bit of chain mail that
had failed him, and on his upper arm, a zigzag bolt of lightning
burned into the flesh, a brand to mark him as the minion of a
long-vanquished king—Slott of the Thousand Skulls.

“By the blood of the Stones,” Rhuddlan swore
through gritted teeth. His hand tightened on his dagger and light
burst forth from the crystal hilt, a sharp-edged jacinth flash with
a heart of golden flame.

A second curse lodged in his throat.

In three steps, he was to the next fallen
skraeling. With the tip of his sword, he slashed open the dead
man’s sleeve, revealing another damning brand. The thunderbolt was
unmistakable. Curved like a scythe on one end and edged in flame on
the other, ’twas the finial of Slott’s scepter—which had been
gripped in the Troll King’s hand when the beast and his raiment had
hardened and cracked and metamorphosed into Inishwrath’s granite
tor.

Rhuddlan was no Prydion Mage, but he knew
well enough what it would take to turn enchanted stone back into
flesh and bone—the light-devouring smoke of Dharkkum and a knowing
conjurer to wield it.

“You’ll find the brands are fresh, scabbed
and rimmed with charred flesh,” the Sha-shakrieg said, “and though
you killed a fine number here, there are thousands more like them
in the north with new recruits coming in every day. Have no doubt,
Slott is free and returned to Rastaban, and as the smoke grows, so
does his army.”

Rhuddlan turned on his old enemy, his rage
barely held in check. “Is this the Desert Queen’s doing? Has she
dared her own destruction as well as mine by breaking the crystal
seals to bring Slott back from Inishwrath?”

The shrouded man denied the accusation with a
shake of his head. “The Lady of Deseillign knows naught of freeing
black smoke from crystal prisons or trolls from rock. Nor do the
Desert Magi with all their great powers.”

“The Lady has one of the Seven Books of
Lore,” Rhuddlan retaliated with a sore truth. “I did not take the
Gratte Bron Le
away from her.” He had wanted to. Indeed,
he’d had the great tome in his hands, the Orange Book of Stone, but
Ailfinn had made him leave it, a bond for the ancient pact between
Sha-shakrieg and
tylwyth teg
.

“Aye,” Varga said. “But the
Gratte Bron
Le
is not a book of spells like the
tylwyth teg’s
Indigo
Book. It says nothing of how to circumvent Prydion enchantments. If
it did, Ailfinn Mapp would not have left it in the Lady Queen’s
hands. For certes you and the mage left little else.”

“We left enough that five hundred years later
there are still Sha-shakrieg alive to break their oaths,” Rhuddlan
said with his own measure of contempt.

Turning away in disgust, he stepped to the
next skraeling, and the next. All were branded. All of the brands
were fresh.

“The Lady needs
thullein
to fight,”
Varga said in his queen’s defense, trailing Rhuddlan across the
causeway. “Break the treaty boundaries or lose the Desert
Kingdoms—such was her choice. That she puts her people, and yours,
ahead of her pride is proof of her need, a need greater than even
in those dread days after you destroyed Deseillign’s reservoirs and
poured all of our water into the sands.”

“Half a millennium of defeat is enough to
temper anyone’s pride, even the Desert Queen’s,” Rhuddlan growled,
dismissing the Lady’s well-known pride as he dismissed the rest of
Varga’s reasoning.

Looking about him, he swore again under his
breath. The last Liosalfar he had sent to the island of Inishwrath
before Tages three days earlier had been Pwyll in late August. The
boy had reported the headlands secure, but it seemed he’d escaped
by the skin of his teeth. Slott’s awakening could not have been
long after and must have nigh torn Inishwrath asunder. With luck,
Tages would find only the remains of destruction and not others of
Slott’s hoary brood rousing from their centuries-long sleep.

The slight bit of smoke issuing from the
damson shaft where Varga had left his war gate had not been enough
to raise the Troll King and his scepter. That had taken a
prodigious amount of the wretched stuff. But from where?

Gesturing for a Liosalfar to follow, he made
his way farther along the causeway. In all the fighting, they must
have killed or wounded one of the Dockalfar. Even a dead Dark-elf
would tell him something.

A live one would tell him everything.

Dockalfar.
Shadana
. Slott arisen and
Sha-shakrieg. Someone was stirring up an ancient brew of
catastrophic dimensions, and Rhuddlan would know who.

“Strip the weapons from this group and toss
their bodies into the sea,” he said to the Quicken-tree warrior who
stepped forward. “If any find a Dockalfar, call for me.”

His orders given, Rhuddlan turned and fixed
his gaze on Varga, the Lord of the Iron Dunes. No young warrior
come to test his mettle, but the Desert Queen’s most trusted
adviser during the Wars of Enchantment. Other than the Lady
herself, he was the last of the spider people Rhuddlan would have
expected to willingly put himself in Quicken-tree hands. The
decision could well be his final undoing.

“When last I was in the Sha-shakrieg’s
southern basin, there was
thullein
enough to supply the
desert forges for an age,” Rhuddlan told him. “The Lady at her most
voracious could not have depleted those stores since the Wars, so
tell me not of the Sha-shakrieg needing that small bit of metal
that lies within my borders. I will have the truth, Varga, or I
will have your life. The choice is yours.”

Dark eyes stared out at him from between the
gray cloth wrapping the Sha-shakrieg’s face, giving away nothing.
Then, to Rhuddlan’s satisfaction, Varga bowed and pulled a thin
leather packet out of his tunic.