The Sword and the Song (16 page)

You are not blind. You are not being tortured.

He turned his head away as if he could shut out her voice. What kind of cruelty was this? Did she think she could give him some comfort in his last moments? He had just one more thing to convey. “I love you, Aine. I always have.”

He closed his eyes and drew what would surely be his last breath.

“Conor!” Aine screamed his name aloud and pounded her fists against the stone floor. “Don’t die! Don’t give up! Do you hear me?”

Eoghan gripped her shoulders. “You can get through to him, Aine. You must. If you don’t, he really will die.”

She tried to still the beating of her heart, tried to regain their connection. It had to have been Comdiu’s voice that roused her from a sound sleep, and that meant she could still save him. She found his consciousness again, barely a whisper in the tunnels of Ard Bealach.

Conor, listen to me. You are not dying. You are not being tortured. None of this is real. You’re trapped in a glamour.

Why could he not die? Was it Aine’s fault? Was she the one holding him back from finding peace in the arms of his Maker?

“I love you,” he mumbled. “Let me go.”

Conor, listen to me. You are not dying. You are not being tortured. None of this is real. You’re trapped in a glamour.

The words pierced the fog, even though they didn’t make any sense. “Please, just let me go.”

No. I will not let you go. The sidhe are deceiving you. This is all an illusion. Don’t you remember Cwmmaen? Prince Talfryn?

It seemed familiar somehow, but he couldn’t remember why. Cwmmaen was a Gwynn name. When had he been in Gwydden?

That’s right. You were in Gwydden. The sidhe were keeping you there to prevent you from finishing your mission, just like now. Are you listening to me, Conor? You have to break free. You have to shake this off.

“I can’t.”

You can. You must. Otherwise, you fail. Isn’t that what this is about? You’re afraid that you will fail me? Seare? Now, think. Think about all the things that don’t add up. If you have the shield rune, how are we talking now? It blocks magic.

That was true. It was supposed to block all magic of the mind. But how had Niall known what he was thinking, then? Unless he had spoken his thoughts aloud.

No. It’s all a construct. You have to fight it. If you don’t listen to me now, it’s all for nothing. You’re a failure.

A spark of anger ignited at the words. He was dying. How dare she.

But the pain. Where was the pain? He flexed his fingers and realized his hand was no longer bound.

That’s right. You see? It was an illusion. Where’s your harp?

By the tunnel entrance, wasn’t it? But how could he escape?

Open your eyes now, Conor. Now! Do it! I promise you, you can see.

But he remembered the pain quite clearly. The screaming.

Just like he remembered the opulence of a destroyed Gwynn fortress. The kiss of a beautiful girl who wasn’t a girl. None of it was real, at least not in the way he imagined it.

Aine’s voice sounded tearful now.
Please, Conor, just open your eyes. If you love me, if you love your child, finish this mission and come home to me.

Could it be true? Could she be right? Or was this all a hallucination born of blood loss and pain and madness?

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

A flame, little more than a flicker, guttered from the torch on the tunnel’s gravel floor. His ivory charm
 
—the one he’d counted on to protect him from the sidhe, the one he’d foolishly revealed
 
—lay beside it. Slowly, he took inventory of his body. No blood, no pain except the throb of his neck where Larkin had throttled him. His eyes darted around the tunnel as the strength flooded back into his limbs.

His men lay sprawled out as far as he could see into the dark, lifeless, limp. A few twitched or moaned. Were they undergoing torture as he had, or were they experiencing their own private torment?

Embarrassment flooded him. All his worst fears had been laid out before him. Captivity and torture. Failure. Losing his wife and child
 
—and losing them to Eoghan. All had been used to ensnare him and make him ineffectual. All used to cripple him so he couldn’t do the things Comdiu had sent him to do. Shame
joined embarrassment now. These things onto which he held so tightly he had let consume him until they nearly destroyed him.

Had he admitted the fears and given up and let go, they never would have been able to be used to deceive him. He couldn’t even put it into words, the depth of his shame and sorrow. How many times did he have to learn the same lessons? Today his stubbornness could have cost twelve lives for which he was responsible, including his own.

Aine, I’m here. I’m going back for the harp.

He could feel her relief.
Thank Comdiu. Be careful, Conor. You have no idea how close we were to losing you.

But he did.

Aine let out her held breath before she realized it was the only thing keeping her upright. She would have collapsed had Eoghan not scooped her up beneath her arms and helped her to a chair. He hovered above her while he waited to see if she would stay there on her own.

“I’m fine. I am. I just . . .”

She became aware of the looks exchanged around the room. Somewhere in the minutes or hours that she had been linked with Conor’s mind but unable to break through the illusion, more of the brothers had arrived to stand silent watch with her. Eoghan. Riordan. Dal. Even Fechin. For the first time, she understood the unbreakable strength in the brotherhood, why they had fought so hard to keep it intact. Their support for Conor, who was no longer really one of them, was plain in their support of her.

They remained quiet, leaving Eoghan to ask their question. He reached for her hand, then apparently thought better of it. “Is he free?”

“He’s free.” The words seemed to sap the last of her strength, and her body sagged forward toward the tabletop.

“Come, let’s get you to your bed. Riordan?”

Gently, they slid an arm under each side and helped her to her feet. She would have protested, but she felt too weak to put one foot in front of the other. She’d never been linked so closely to another’s mind, had underestimated the effect on her. She had felt every moment of the torture, so intense that she almost believed it was happening, even knowing it was an illusion. Even worse had been feeling his agony and hearing the thoughts that ran through his head as he tried to escape something that just continued to grow worse. Eoghan had repeatedly pulled her out of the trance, forced her to drink water, made her focus on the reality around her lest she get pulled too deeply into the illusion herself.

She felt a gratitude toward him that was altogether unsettling considering she understood what lay behind his concern.

“Sleep now, my lady. We’ll have one of the women check on you in the morning.”

She couldn’t manage anything but a weak nod as she climbed into her bed and pulled the coverlet to her chin. Only when Eoghan blew out the candle and the room drained of its inhabitants did she let her tears fall.

Great, racking sobs for what Conor had experienced, for what she had experienced through him, and for the one thing she never thought possible, the one thing she wished she had never been able to see through his eyes.

While Conor was in Gwydden, there had been another woman.

Conor retraced his steps
toward the tunnel entrance, praying that the harp was where he had left it. How long had he been trapped in the glamour? How long had he lain there, unconscious and helpless? It was all too possible that the men of the fortress were waiting for them, and if they weren’t, the minute he played the harp, they would be alerted to the Fíréin’s presence.

The trip back took much less time than the approach, his steps picking up speed until he was almost running. His body was finally remembering that it was not dying, he had not been carved up and tormented until he wished for death, even if flashes of false memory still sent his heart racing. Later. He could deal with that later. Right now his men needed him. He still had to finish the mission.

The cold glimmer of moonlight shone through the tunnel’s entrance, illuminating the outline of his harp case. He let out a breath of relief. A quick look outside revealed that the moon had sunk toward the horizon again, an indication that a few hours had passed. Given the time it had taken to traverse the passage, he couldn’t have been unconscious for long. He reached for
the case and then thought better of it and climbed through the opening to where the horse still waited. It tossed its head and huffed impatiently as if to ask where Conor had been.

“I know,” he murmured. “But you’re going to have a long wait.” He retrieved a mallet, chisel, and shovel before climbing back through the tunnel opening and adding the harp to his burden. He hadn’t thought to see if the dead end was part of the glamour or a reality, and he wouldn’t have time to return for the tools if the passage really were blocked.

He reached his men in no time, though he suspected that might have more to do with the residual fogginess than the actual distance to the end of the tunnel. He let the tools fall and set the harp down as gently as he could manage, then held the torch out. No, it had been no illusion. The tunnel was seamless rock, just as the outer entrance had been. Whoever had sealed the tunnel had been taking no chances. That worked in their favor. The men above would never dream that it could be so easily reopened.

For a moment, he debated. If he had been so close to dying, the others might be as well. Playing away the illusion now would free them from the enchantment, but it would also alert the others above. What happened if they followed the sound and figured out they were being attacked?

No, he couldn’t risk it. He picked up the chisel and mallet and began to carve the rune into the surface of the rock wall, just large enough for them to climb through. This time he only scratched the surface, relying on speed rather than thoroughness. The basic shape came together quickly, and Conor used the chisel to deepen the lines and double-check his work. Little bits of granite began to crumble at his feet. It had worked. Two strong thrusts of the shovel, and there was a hole big enough to squeeze his shoulders through.

A light breeze ruffled his hair as he knelt beside the opening.
He had definitely broken through to a chamber of some sort. Carefully, he leaned in and looked around. The soft glow of a torch from somewhere in the recesses of the space gave just enough light to see that it was empty
 
—for the time being.

Comdiu, please let this work
, he prayed. He opened the harp case and drew out the instrument, the same plea circulating through the back of his mind like a litany. He could not fail. This had to work.

He didn’t question the melody that came to him. If he trusted Comdiu to give him this gift, he had to trust Him to bring the right notes to mind as well. The music spread out around him, filling the dark spaces of the tunnel with sound, but the golden light he’d come to expect in his mind’s eye was absent, as if he were blind.
Please, Comdiu
, he prayed again.
Let this work. Let this be successful. Bring them back.

And then he heard the screaming.

It was the sound of men in agony, as if they were being torn limb from limb.

No, worse. It was the sound of souls being rent from their bodies.

Conor’s fingers faltered on the strings, but the screaming continued, and he realized that it was not coming from his own warriors but somewhere in the keep itself. His stomach turned and his throat tightened, but he kept playing. It was only when he stopped, his eyes blurred with unshed tears, that he realized the shrieking had been silenced.

Larkin was the first to push himself to a sitting position, his eyes wild. He scrambled back on his hands and feet until he hit the tunnel wall. “Where am I? What’s happening?”

Conor replaced the harp into the case and moved to his side, but Larkin recoiled. “It’s all right,” Conor said soothingly. “I don’t know what you saw, but none of it was real. It was all an illusion.”

“But you . . . you’re dead. I killed you. I
 
—” Larkin shook off the thought. “That was all an illusion?”

“Aye. Clearly, I’m alive.” He didn’t have the heart to tell Larkin he was remembering his own actions, that he had almost killed Conor. His eye once again caught a glimmer of white on the ground
 
—the charm. The sidhe had used Larkin to remove the charm so Conor would be susceptible to their illusions. He palmed the necklace and surreptitiously slid it into his pouch.

“What happened?” A voice rang out from farther down the tunnel. Everyone seemed to be stirring now, murmurs of fear and confusion filling the cavernous space.

Conor held up his hands for attention and pitched his voice low. Now that the tunnel was open to the catacombs, they had to be especially careful not to be discovered. “I don’t know what you saw or what you just experienced. I know that it was likely different for each one of you. But it was not real. The sidhe are trying to keep us from accomplishing our mission.”

The dazed expressions were fading from their faces, a sign that they were shaking off the glamours’ influence at last. He hoped that meant the others’ experiences had been less dramatic than his. It would be a struggle to force enough strength into his still-trembling hands to hold a sword. As it was, he’d barely been able to make his fingers move on the harp strings.

“What are your orders?” Larkin asked.

Comdiu bless him. These were men who were used to following orders. Clear direction would give them enough structure to shake off the illusion. “Bar the front entrance. No one goes in or out. Secure each room of the keep from the bottom up. Anyone who resists dies. Anyone who surrenders loses his weapons. We don’t have many men to accomplish this, and we don’t know if Daigh’s men even reached the tunnel.”

He should have thought to ask Aine, but his mind was still
working at reduced capacity. He could only trust that Comdiu would be with them.

To his relief, the other eleven men seemed to come back to themselves more quickly than he had, sorting themselves into order and checking weapons. Maybe the harp’s music had helped eradicate the memory of their mental captivity, whereas he’d not had that advantage. Recollections of torture still lurked around the edges of his mind like shadows seen from the corner of his eye.

“You ready?” he asked. “This only works if we’re alert. No mistakes. If you think you haven’t recovered, speak now. You can stay behind. After what you saw, there’s no shame in needing time to pull yourself together.”

They exchanged glances, but no one volunteered. Conor hoped they were showing wisdom and not bravado. “No? Then let’s go.”

Conor climbed through the opening first, sword at the ready, but the center chamber of the catacombs was deserted. As the others climbed through behind him, he stayed alert for the sounds of onrushing footsteps, the shadows from the connected tunnels that would indicate they had been discovered. Yet there was nothing but the sound of their own breathing and the faint scuff of their shoes against the stone floor. A quick inspection revealed a steep flight of stairs leading upward.

He gestured for them to follow and quickly climbed the stairs, pausing at the top before pushing the heavy wooden door open. Had no one heard the harp and been curious about its origin? He had been sure they would already be facing down dozens of men, but the corridor was as still and quiet as the catacombs below. Slowly, he moved into the great hall.

It was empty.

Conor lowered his sword. “I don’t understand.”

“Maybe they’re elsewhere?” Larkin’s expression was equally confused.

“All the corridors lead into the hall. If anyone heard us, they’d be here already. Blair, Ferus, stay here on guard. Bar the front doors. Men, the rest of this level now.”

They spread out down the two corridors, dividing themselves evenly. As Conor passed the doorway to the catacombs again, it creaked open. He pressed himself against the wall, sword at the ready. The soft shuffle of feet on stone heightened every sense as he prepared to strike.

And then he let out his held breath. “You made it.”

The other Fíréin party flooded the corridor, and he automatically counted each man as they entered. He frowned when he came up one short. “Where’s Daigh?”

Ailill, a stocky young man with quick dark eyes, stepped forward. “He didn’t make it. He’s still below in the tunnels.”

“What do you mean he didn’t make it?”

“He didn’t come out of . . . whatever that was . . . at the sound of the harp.” Ailill cleared his throat. “He was already dead.”

Guilt and sorrow crushed down on Conor. He had been too late. He just as swiftly pushed the emotion away. They had no time for sentiment. “My men are checking this floor. Secure the upper level. Those who surrender, take prisoner. Kill the rest.”

“Aye, sir.”

“And be cautious. We haven’t encountered anyone yet, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be making an ambush.”

“Aye, sir.”

Conor gave a nod and they moved toward the stairway that led to the next floor up. Uneasiness washed over him. This was all too easy. They’d been expecting a fight, and instead all they found were empty rooms?

Yet in chamber after chamber, the only things Conor found were the remnants of personal belongings and weapons. “I don’t understand this,” Conor murmured to Larkin, who had accompanied him with two other men. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Ailill’s group met them back in the great hall several minutes later, looking as baffled as Conor felt. “It’s empty,” Ailill said. “There’s no one here.”

“Why set the sidhe on us if there’s nothing to protect?” Larkin asked.

But Conor knew. The sidhe depended on human passions to sustain them and their strength. Starved for pain and fear on which to feed, they’d simply taken the opportunity that Conor and his group presented.

“My bigger question is where are the men? Ailill, Larkin, Seanán, and Tomey with me. The rest of you, secure the entrances. Check every last nook and bolt-hole to make sure we haven’t missed anything. We’re going to check the catacombs.”

Ailill looked doubtful, but he followed Conor down the stairs without question. When they emerged into the heart of the catacombs, he took the torch he’d left burning and lit the others scattered around the space.

Five tunnels branched off from the main space, including the two they had broken through with the runes. That left three unexplored. Conor nodded toward the one from which he’d seen light coming, a sure sign of human presence. The sidhe hardly needed torches. He lifted a finger to his lips and gestured for the men to follow him.

Their footsteps crunched on a scattering of gravel over the hard stone floor as they entered the tunnel. The foul smell grew steadily stronger as they proceeded. It was the stench of living men, not dead. Did that mean that prisoners might still remain?

Just as Morrigan had described, the cells were tiny holes in
the rock, barred by metal grates. He held the torch out to illuminate the interiors, looking for signs of life.

The prisoners might not have been dead before, but they were now.

Dirty hands curled around the bars, faces frozen in terror and agony as if they had died mid-scream. Some of the men had bloody gashes where they had thrown themselves against the bars in an effort to get out. This must have been the source of the screaming he heard when he had played the shield around the fortress. They had been ensorcelled.

Conor pushed aside the knowledge that he was responsible for these gruesome deaths and signaled the men to follow him past the cells. The tunnel widened slightly into an alcove housing a table and two stools
 
—a guard station. The smell of recently burned pitch still hung in the air. He touched the torch set into the bracket in the wall. Still warm. He signaled a warning to keep alert for resistance. And then he stopped short.

Sweat broke out on his forehead as he saw the small room that lay ahead. He nudged the door open with his foot. His fingers trembled around the grip of his sword.

The storeroom where he had been tortured. He’d somehow hoped the sidhe had fabricated their illusion from nothing, but now he saw they had rendered every detail faithfully. Boxes and crates packed the perimeter of the room, leaving just enough space for the trestle table to which he had been tied
 
—or, rather, not tied. Bloodstains darkened the wood and the stones below. It may not have happened to him, but it had happened to someone else.