Read Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Online
Authors: Tara Janzen
Tags: #chalice trilogy, #medieval, #tara janzen, #dragons, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Historical, #Epic
The nadir of their trek had been crossing a
tide-pulled sea via a narrow causeway of stone. Far below the path,
waves had crashed into one side of the cliff face. Salt spray from
the wind-whipped water had lain in pools along the track, making
every step a treachery. On the other side of the causeway, a huge
ice cavern had loomed up out of the darkness. Glistening blue-white
dripshanks the girth of a hundred men hung like grim sentinels at
the cavern’s entrance. By the light of the Sha-shakrieg’s torches,
she’d seen frozen waterfalls gushing out of the cave’s inner walls,
floes of blue-green ice roiling up from the floor, and a ceiling
encrusted with slender white icicles.
“The Dangoes,” the man in front of her had
said in the common tongue. Varga was his name, and he was the
leader, the one who held the rope binding her wrists. Naught else
had been done to hurt her, though ’twas not for lack of enmity.
Strange, frightening beings, the spider people were bound from head
to toe in layers of brown cloth with gray gauze wrapped around
their faces. They seemed of elfin or human shape—descended from a
common ancient race, mayhaps—but only their dark eyes could be
seen, watching her every move with hostility and a wariness she
didn’t understand. What did they think she could do against so
many?
They’d thrown an extra cloak over her before
they’d gotten to the causeway, yet ’twould have taken more than a
cloak to keep the cold horror of the place from seeping into her
bones. The vast, frigid cave smelled of death, of cold beyond the
grave reaching out to hold life hostage in an icy grip. Passing the
mouth of the cavern, she felt the caress of unseen wintry fingers,
one across her cheek, another curling around her ankle. Light gusts
of wind, she thought, until whatever spirit ruled the cave
tightened its grasp—the better to pull her off the track and down
into its gaping maw. Her cry brought Varga to her side with his
torch. He swept the fire between her and the cave, and in the arc
of sparks and flames she saw wisps of icy vapor twined and gnarled
like old bones. Varga’s quick action freed her, but fear had gotten
a hold with that arctic touch and would not release her.
A true wind came up behind them as they
followed the long, sinuous track over water and ice. Its frigid
draft set the icicles in the cavern to singing, an eerie resonance
of the earth’s breath blowing through frozen strings. “Ice music,”
someone close to her muttered while making a warding sign. Varga
walked on, pulling her behind, seemingly unaffected, but others of
the spider people tightened their wraps over their ears for
protection against the otherworldly strain.
The song floated out over the track to the
sea, wordlessly melodic, its notes rippling through the raw air and
running like ice water down her spine. Madness lurked in the song,
the promise of a sweet, sleeping death to lure the weak or unwary,
or those too tired to go on, whether their weariness was from the
march or life itself. She was not so far gone as that and set her
mind to other things, trying to block the eldritch tones. They were
halfway across the causeway when a new melody came into play, and
the fine hairs on her nape rose like hoarfrost. She stopped,
unwillingly, her attention drawn and held by the glacial
cavern.
The fey, mournful howl of the new song grew
in strength, echoing off the giant pillars of ice and drowning out
the sound of the sea crashing into the rocks below. She stared into
the black reaches of the cave, frozen in fear with a prayer on her
lips, until a hand grasped her arm.
With a start, she looked up and found Varga
near. She could see naught of his wrapped and shrouded face except
for his black eyes peering at her. His hand on her arm was like
enough to hers, including being chafed red with the cold, but she
saw what lay beyond the loose cuff of his sleeve, and she flinched.
He immediately loosed her arm.
“ ’Tis naught but your hound loose in the
dark,” he told her in his muffled voice, nodding toward the cave
where the unearthly cry still rose from its depths.
“I have no hound,” she said, her breath
making vaporous puffs in the air. Then she knew and gasped a name.
“Conladrian.”
Varga shrugged and motioned up the trail. Nia
followed, but cast a look behind. Conladrian, last seen in the
mists pouring out of the Weir Gate. ’Twas Rayne he must be
mourning, his littermate, younger sister laid low on the shores of
Mor Sarff by Caradoc. How was it he lived in this faraway place
girt with ice and darkness?
The Dangoes
. She repeated the name
silently, and a shiver set her to trembling. She would not
forget.
That had been two days past, and now ’twas
heat she felt building ahead of them and pressing against the chill
of the caves. Bedwyr had been killed in Crai Force, but the others
had survived. She’d seen them in the damson shaft and heard their
plans. Their leaving had been hard to bear, but she was Liosalfar
and knew Trig had spoken with wisdom. They had been outnumbered
twenty to one, and Trig would have sensed the greater force.
Rhuddlan would mount a rescue, but by her best reckoning, she put
him just beyond the Magia Wall. She was on her own and had gleaned
little information to help either herself or the Quicken-tree.
The Sha-shakrieg had argued in the damson
shaft after the Liosalfar had left. Blades had been drawn and the
company near split a dozen ways. One faction had cleaved to the
dead boy they’d carried out of Crai Force. Others had made to
follow the Liosalfar, but Varga had held them back, and
miraculously held them all together. Rhuddlan’s name had come up
many times. In the end, Varga had prevailed, and they’d begun their
trek toward Deseillign, carrying the body and their leather packs
filled with
thullein
.
The sound of rushing water came to her on the
next turn in the track, a great fall of it, and around the next
turn came the light—bright and unbearable after the darkness of the
caves, cast in shades of yellow and orange. The colors, she soon
realized, were not of the light itself, but from the surrounding
rock. Varga slipped a protective layer of gauze over her eyes
before leading her on. She noticed all the Sha-shakrieg doing the
same, pulling their gauze bandages up to dull the light. The
landscape changed quickly from mostly horizontal to toweringly
vertical, from the grays and browns of the deep earth to a thousand
shades of orange and umber, to yellow, gold, and ochre, and to red
in all its hues. Sheer-sided slick-rock canyon walls rose ever
higher on either side of the gorge they followed, with a pale
ribbon of blue-lighted sky showing in the opening above. In places,
water ran down with the light, rivulets of color wetting the stone
and illuminating the richness of the striated colors. Ahead of
them, she could hear the thundering of the falls growing
closer.
Pools of crystal-clear water marked one side
of the path. Small and intermittent at first, they soon grew larger
and closer together, until they began running into one another in a
trickling cascade. Green plants sprouted up at the edges of the
pools, and moss showed around the banks. Yet for all the beginnings
of vegetation and the stream, ’twas the smell of the desert she
sensed most keenly, dry and fine and slightly bitter. The sand,
when it came, was at first no more than a few wind-driven grains
littering the floor. By the time they began switchbacking into
another descent, it had become a thick layer drifting into the
canyon’s nooks and crannies.
The falls gradually came into view, a line of
silver rimming the edge of a canyon wall and growing wider as they
rounded the curve, until finally the sheeted veil of water was
before them. A heavy mist billowed into the gorge, dimming the
light. The desert scent was drowned by the smell of water. Looking
about her, Nia could see the trail had come out on a great rift
that stretched for miles in either direction. The falls dropped
from a promontory hundreds of feet above the trail and plummeted
back into the earth through a mighty chasm hundreds of feet below
them. In width, the chasm was half the length of Carn Merioneth’s
eastern wall, with rivers joining it at different heights. Canals
stretched out in four directions from the lake formed by its
rushing waters, and far in the distance, across a barren landscape
of endless sand, she saw towers floating on the horizon.
“Deseillign?” she asked, pointing to the
east. She would know her doom.
Varga shook his head. “No. Wadi Bishr-dira.
The towers you see are pillars of rock shaped by the wind. Their
heavy capstones keep them from being completely worn away.
Deseillign is twice as far as can be seen from here.”
Wadi Bishr-dira
. The name echoed
softly inside her. Varga used the common tongue when speaking with
her, the language of all lands, but his voice had warmed when he
used his own language to speak the name of a place he knew. She
looked back out over the empty plain. Like the canyon walls around
her, the desert was shaded in many colors. Clouds scudding across
the sky threw shadows on the rise and fall of dunes and the rare
scattered outcropping of rock. There was naught of what she knew,
no trees, no mountains, no forests. It was the land of her enemies,
yet the land itself was part of Earth, and she sensed the same
power moving through it as moved through Riverwood or Wroneu. What
stories did the night winds tell across the desert? she wondered.
Of what did the sands whisper beneath the burning sun?
A group of black-cloaked guards waited
nearby, while the rest of the Sha-shakrieg troop continued on down
the trail, silent except for the creak of their leather ore packs.
Varga called one of the men over and spoke to him in a low voice,
then pulled a parchment from a pouch on his belt and handed it to
the soldier. When the soldier started back down the trail at a run,
Varga turned to her and pulled the gauze away from her face. Then
he lowered his own, though only from his eyes.
“You should eat,” he said, handing her a
tough strip of the mashed and dried leaves that had been their
rations on the journey.
She accepted the food, her hand out, and
noticed an odd shimmering blue cast on her skin. Curious, she
looked up, past the clouds, and her breath caught in her
throat.
“The vault of heaven,” Varga said. “The light
of the Star still burns above Deseillign.”
Nia knew what it was, but she’d never
expected to see it. Far above the clouds, looking truly like the
sky, was the roof of rock that encased the underground realm of the
Sha-shakrieg, a cavern so vast as to deny that description, a
country stretching from the Rift to the wasteland, a full thirty
days’ march wide.
The light flooding the subterranean desert
came from the masses of crystal lodged in the rock, remnants of a
star that had fallen to earth. Spread across the dome in a clear,
mineral venation, the crystal burned with the fires of heaven,
unquenched for a span of time beyond even the memories of trees.
Only the rock itself had lived as long.
She moved her hand through the chroma,
watching the starshine play upon her skin. That it could sustain a
Light-elf, she had no doubt, if just barely. For all its bright
beauty, ’twas not as potent as the daystar. Locked in the earth for
millions of years, its life force was waning. She wondered if the
Sha-shakrieg knew their time was running out—as would hers, if she
could not escape.
She turned to Varga. “How many days’ march to
the city?”
He considered her carefully through the slit
he’d made in his bandages. His eyes were not so dark as she’d
thought, but closer to brown, very thickly lashed and deeply lined
at the corners. “For them”—he gestured at the troop winding its way
down to the desert floor—“two days by caravan. With the Lady’s
leave, you and I will go back.”
“Back?” she repeated, startled.
“To Merioneth, to Rhuddlan’s court that I may
speak my piece.”
Hope rose in a rush. He was taking her back.
Alone. Whether ’twas brave or foolish, she cared not, though from
what little she knew of him she thought that foolishness was not
his wont. Yet with only him to guard her, she had a high chance of
escape—even if her chances of survival were not nearly so good.
She’d been underground for nine days without the sun’s light to
lift the weight of the darkness, and had only five more before the
toll would tell. Beyond that was the unknown. No Liosalfar had
stayed below more than a fortnight since the Wars of
Enchantment.
She looked out to the crystal-streaked sky
above the sand valley of the Rift. The starlight would help, but
mayhaps not enough. Five days to get to the Dragon’s Mouth. Alone,
she could do it, if she was not injured in the escape.
Near as quickly as she allowed her hope to
rise, ’twas dashed. Varga carried only her pack, but signaled for
another of the black-cloaked guards to bring him one of his. Unlike
the ore packs, the guard’s pack jingled and clanged.
Inauspiciously, she thought. Her foreboding proved justified when
Varga reached into the pack and pulled out a wild tangle of chains.
Rusted and barbed with a line of hooks, they had the wicked look of
fetters.
“What are those?” she asked in a voice edged
with anger begat of fear.
“Running shackles. Your odds of escape will
not improve for being left alone with me.” The clinking of iron
underlay his curt explanation.
“I’ll not run with those on my legs.”
“You’ll run,” he said, calmly assured,
untangling the looped metal links one from the other. “And over the
middle stretch, you’ll wish you could fly.”
Bastard. She cared not what he said. If he
bound her with chains and irons, the journey back through the caves
would take longer than she could survive.
Something must have shown in her face, for
his next words offered encouragement. “I know how the deep dark
weighs on the Quicken-tree, and that you’ve been at least nine days
down. With it eight days back to the light, you’ll be dead, or
desperately failing three days before we get to the Dragon’s Mouth.
So we’ll not go back the way we came. There are shortcuts through
the great caves, none swifter than the ones we’ll take, and few
more hazardous, but we’ll cut the three days we need off our
time.”