The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex (34 page)

“Because of the wings.”

“The wings puzzle me.”

“He had started to apply his invention to his daughters.…”

“I wish Merlin was here. He’d have a better understanding.”

“But he’s not here,” said Colcu firmly. He tapped the blade of his sword gently against the glass pithoi. “If that
is
one of the Shaper’s daughters, and this—” He tapped the stone plinth. “—was put here by the Wild Woman, then—?”

“Then this was his place, his arena, and she has possessed it in her own way. Made it hers. Sacrificed his daughter in honey.”

“A honey child.”

“Well put,” said Kymon.

“This is the forecourt of a Shaping Chamber,” Colcu whispered. He looked round at the entrances to deeper caverns. “And those are the ways in.”

“We’ve found what Talienze asked us to find, I think.”

“Talienze is dead. Probably.”

“And we don’t know what it was he wanted us to bring back from the chamber.”

They were silent for a while, trying to see into the darkness of each of the doors in the wall. It was Kymon who articulated the thought that was in each of their minds: that it was into such an opening that Tairon, a labyrinth-runner, had entered as a youth and had not returned. They had heard his story, told on Argo. In the hills of Crete there were mazes beyond comprehension. And all or none of these five gaping invitations to mystery might have been the beginning of such a consuming, eternal journey.

Colcu suddenly started to pluck long grass, whole handfuls. He knotted the dry ends with the moist roots and, strand by strand, he produced a thin and fragile thread. “There’s a story about this,” he said as he worked. “Can’t remember much about it. Traveller’s tale. It probably happened here on this island, though. It was all about mazes. Don’t hold too hard or tug too hard at either end, but this will be a guide back to the light.”

“Which of us is going in?”

“To be decided. Can you knot? We’ll need a long thread of grass.”

*   *   *

It was getting dark. I moved swiftly towards where the
kryptoii
were echoing Ariadne in their exploration of this Shaping Chamber. The dream was hazy, but the vibrancy of their words, the energy in their actions, the pure youthful sense of their own supposed immortality, had struck a profound chord in my mind’s eye as I absorbed their actions through the face of the Moon.

I had forgotten how slow Moondream was in the pursuit. Cunhaval the hound would by now be wrestling with them—affectionately, of course.

I had begun to realise, also, that I was behind in the chase. The screeching woman was ahead of me, song-singing her flock of predators, spreading them out across the hills as she scoured for these stranger-intrusions into her newly conquered land. Queller was determined to eliminate all that she did not comprehend.

She was very close to them now.

Again, I entered the dreamhunt, absorbing the experience that was Kymon’s as he explored the first of the chambers.

This was a place that Shaper had used to draw on the past. It was a place I knew well, at least in its design: a gallery of painted images, some familiar, some obscure. Animals roamed and leapt and curled in upon themselves, as if asleep, or killed; in other parts of the chamber, lines of strange characters, squares and circles, densely painted signs and symbols: all suggesting an attempt at expressing a forbidden knowledge. I knew better.

Kymon was astonished at the beauty of the animals, especially the horses. They seemed almost to move across the wall, some of their heads raised, others lowered, a motionless stampede of movement, vibrant reds and browns in the shaft of light from the entrance. He could hear the sound of their wild ride in his head; no doubt the ground below him shook with the gallop as his eyes engaged with this gorgeous panorama.

The symbols, the circles and the lines of strange marks almost made his head swim. They seemed to draw him in, freeze him in his tracks. He was strong enough to pull away from this embracing charm.

Deeper in the chamber, there was no light, just the moan of a distant wind, and he didn’t venture there.

What Colcu had discovered I couldn’t tell. I was dreaming Kymon.

In the fading light he had explored a chamber where, as in Jason’s memory, there was a workshop of moving parts, subtly moulded from metals, carved crisply from the hardest woods, cedar mostly, and whole sheets and cylinders of crystal. They were scattered everywhere. The walls where once designs had been depicted were savaged, scratched through. Only one thing remained intact, beyond ruin, to the boy’s hungry eyes. To look up, to look to the roof, was to see the night sky. It was still day outside, but here he could see the stars; and even as he watched, so a star shot across the night. There was a milky veil up there, a stretch of floating gossamer that drew him towards it as much as the older signs in the first chamber.

He picked up discs of bronze, and thin lengths of silver, gathering them into his arms, adding several shards of crystal that appeared to be engraved, heaping up the ruins until his arms could hold no more weight. Then he followed the grass thread back from the deepest gloom he could manage to have entered, back to the dying day, and Colcu.

“That’s a good haul,” Colcu said with a half smile.

Kymon let it all drop to the ground. “A good haul of nonsense. Talienze had something in mind for us to fetch. He should have told us what it was.”

“Perhaps he didn’t know what it was,” Colcu observed quietly.

Kymon sifted the spoils, picking up a small disc, no wider than his hand, turning it in the light, peering at the spiral of drawings on each face. “This means nothing to me.”

“Why should it?”

In frustration Kymon hurled the disc across the grass and sleeping statues of the arena. Flung from the wrist, the disc curved through the air and clattered from the rock wall, close to the entrance. “A good weapon, perhaps,” the boy observed.

Colcu was amused. “I don’t think that was his intention. But if you and I have to fight in single combat again, I’ll be sure to have three or four of them in my belt.”

He stood and walked through the grass, picking up the battered disc of bronze. Something caught his eye. “We’ve forgotten to cover the pig,” he called. “There are flies everywhere. Can we still eat it, I wonder?”

“There’s a lot of that pig that the flies won’t have reached,” Kymon called back, still searching through the artefacts.

He became aware of Colcu’s silence. The taller boy was standing over the dead animal, staring down. “What
is
this?” Kymon heard him say aloud.

Suddenly alarmed, Kymon swept an angry hand through the trinkets from the chamber and walked over to where the carcase lay stretched out.

Open-bellied, its hindquarters hacked to supply the earlier feeding, the young boar was a gruesome sight, stiffening and distorting as heat and time tugged at its dignity. Colcu had thrown it down so that its head was against the rock, as if slouched against the wall.

A child’s face, etched in white, watched them now from the tusk-drawn skull. A child!

“Urskumug,” Kymon breathed. He started to shake. The pallid features of the human face seemed to leer at him. “Urskumug.”

Colcu just stared at him, understanding nothing except that Kymon was in a rage of intuition, and was frightened.

“We’re in danger,” Kymon said. Colcu stayed silent. And it was through that silence that the singing of the Wild Woman and the baying of her hybrid pack reached their hearing. It was still very distant. “We should leave this place and take our chances in the woods. It’ll be dark soon. We’re not safe here.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” was Colcu’s retort, but he ran with Kymon to where the artefacts lay scattered. They gathered as many as they could carry in one crooked arm, then ran back to the cleft.

Too late. The howling and wailing song were much closer.

“We’re going to need a god’s help now,” said Colcu.

“Not a god,” Kymon whispered, his eyes suddenly bright. “We need to make a sanctuary to Urskumug.”

“Urskumug again. You say the name like a boy in a fever.”

“We have to make his sanctuary! It’s just a chance.” He listened nervously to the first sounds of approach through the rock.

“You have the stink of madness about you,” whispered Colcu.

“Then you have a keen nose. This
is
madness. But what have we to lose? Give me the tusks. The boar’s tusks. And those spines from its neck!”

Reluctantly Colcu unwound them from his belt. Kymon grabbed the trophies and ran to the honey child, dropping to his knees and fingering one of the faces of the stone plinth on which she stood. “No. Not here,” he said urgently. “This is Queller’s stone.”

As if responding to the sound of the mistress’s name, Queller’s cat-hounds came pouring through the gap in the rock, howling, fangs bared, large eyes luminous with blood-lust. At the same time a torch was flung into the arena, and the grass began to burn fiercely.

Colcu and Kymon reacted as if in combat, instinctively and furiously. They ran at their attackers, drawing their swords as they did so. Colcu seemed almost to fly as he somersaulted over two of the creatures, sword-blade flashing in the moonlight and firelight as he struck one down. He leaped back up at once and turned in the air, blade extended, doing fierce damage.

Kymon was also adept at the feat of the five leaps. The earth might have been a blanket, throwing him up into the air. He was sprayed with blood twice, dropping to a crouch after the fifth leap, waiting for the pack to pounce.

They had circled him, feral and furious. The stench in the arena was foul.

Four of them attacked him all at once, and two catlike heads flew through the air. Then Colcu appeared out of nowhere, and Kymon found himself below two pumping, foul-smelling carcases.

The fires were fanned by a wind. The two youths stood back to back, breathing hard, preparing for the next assault.

It didn’t come. Kymon looked round, looked up. Rising there against the night sky, on top of the rock wall, came the sinister figure of Wild Creature Lady herself. Peering down, pale and silver, hard-eyed and dispassionate, Queller sat on her mount, arms outstretched, fingers spread. The strange, subduing tune ceased. Her gaze never left Kymon’s.

Then she sang briefly.

Her hunting creatures spread out widely, a steady encirclement, some sidling through the smouldering grass where the torch still burned.

The moon emerged from behind a cloud, and the arena was alive with the gloss and glow of watching, waiting eyes.

Kymon took his chance. He darted forward and grasped the burning torch where it lay. He smoothed the flames from the handle, then raced to the first cave, calling to Colcu, who needed no second urging.

They made the entrance as the pack clawed at their heels, plunged into the darkness, waited for the assault. But the glowing eyes stayed outside. This place still had Shaper’s power within it.

It was the chamber of paintings. The images seemed to writhe, shadow movements from the dying flame of the torch.

“Thank you for that leap,” Colcu said. “I owe you one leap.”

“I’ll be claiming it, be sure of that,” the younger boy said breathlessly, and with a smile. Colcu looked back into the depths of the chamber.

“I’m not going down there. Life is too short to risk an eternal walk. A Tairon walk.”

“I agree,” said Kymon as he started to search the chamber’s walls.

When he had been here before he had seen the way each of the niches had been dedicated to a different animal. He was certain he had seen drawings of a boar.

“Be quick,” Colcu said. “Whatever you have in mind, do it quickly. Our friendly fire is guttering its last.”

Kymon held the torch very still. It was a crude affair, and the flame was small, the light a tiny relief from the blackness. He moved around the chamber with caution, gaze intent on the images. Bulls, horses, cats, hounds … at last he found the boar, three of them, overlapping and ferocious in their illustration.

He fumbled at his belt and produced the souvenirs cut from their last meal, tusks and spine, and placed them in the niche.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Colcu asked.

“Of course not. But what makes a sanctuary? Something dedicated by priests with ritual and secret knowledge? Or something needed by the heart? Urskumug told me I could summon him if needed.”

“We need
something.
”

Kymon called for Urskumug. He knelt before the three boars and reminded Urskumug of his promise, during the Moon Hunt. At the entrance to the chamber the pack howled. A few feral faces started to peer inside, cautious, nervous, testing the threshold. They became bolder.

“Urskumug!” Kymon finally cried in desperation and anger. The torch was flickering. Even as Kymon’s anguished shout died away into the silence of the tomb, the fire flared briefly and died.

But at that moment, the chamber shook. There was the sound of laboured breathing from the deep recesses. A snorting sound, a grunt: a boar-sound.

As the beast emerged from the tunnel, its flanks threw Colcu against one wall and Kymon against the other. Its spiny hide was as sharp as a sword blade, and both youths were grazed badly. The massive animal stalked past them on all fours, ignoring them, head lowered.

The pack fled before it. It rose onto its hind legs as it reached the arena and stared hard at Queller. Beast and Beast Woman exchanged a long, impassive gaze. Then, astonishingly, Lady of the Wild Creatures backed away across the rock, eyes alive with anger and frustration. With a flailing shake of her head, she had suddenly gone, and her creatures slunk back through the passage, to the land beyond.

As Kymon emerged cautiously from the cave, Urskumug turned briefly to glance down at him. The human face, chalk-white and angry, gave no sign of recognising the young Cornovidian.

“Thank you,” Kymon said. “I’m astonished you heard my call. But thank you.”

Still no response. Urskumug looked away, stared at the small dead boar by the entrance. Kymon felt his heart race, uncertain about Urskumug’s response to its slaughtered kin. But the great beast dropped back to all fours and bounded across the smouldering grass to leap up the rock wall, landing with a single jump on the very spot where Queller had watched proceedings. It turned its snout up and sniffed the air, then looked into the distance.