Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (5 page)

Steam swirled across the water, and Naas
stirred, each curved arc and loop of her stick marking the pool
with another word of ancient script, clearing a path for the
moonlight. Years peeled away within the reflection of the celestial
orb, the centuries slipping through her cauldron more quickly than
lightning strikes.

Ah, we’ve reached a little deep we
have
, she thought, feeling heat press into her skin from the
wand and flow up into her arm. Sweat ran off her face and down
between her breasts. The past was a thing of heat, always heat, and
more often than not brought a little gut-churning nausea with it.
Though her gaze remained steady on the water, the rest of her
trembled like a wind-beaten leaf. She inhaled a fire-warmed breath,
fighting the sickness, and in time the priestess lifted her arms up
through the years and revealed her name.
Arianrod. Arianrod
Agah
.

Aye, deep. A thousand thousand years into the
past. Beyond the beginnings of the current age to the death of the
last. Deep enough to burn.

Fingers singed, Naas continued stirring her
chant—loop, curve, stroke; loop, curve, stroke—and felt herself
sink ever deeper into the glimmering, beckoning pool of the
cauldron. Welcoming water. She kept her breathing soft and deep,
until Arianrod’s cry welled in her throat and broke through the
final barrier, near choking her with a rush of pain:

I have drunk the dragon’s blood, reduced to
desperation and despair. The darkling shadow has been sealed again,
but at such a cost! Stept Agah is dead, his life given that we may
live.

I have drunk the dragon’s blood, letting
it fill my mouth and descend into my body. The darkness feeds on
the fire in the earth, conjuring itself in myriad deathly ways that
the Prydion Magi had not foreseen.
Uffern
trolls arose with
the smoke, and ravening wolves, and fear shadows in many forms. All
were smote down by the Magia Blade wielded with the force of Stept
Agah’s hand, the last of the true Starlight-born.

I have drunk the dragon’s blood and eaten
of his flesh, and Ddrei Goch yet writhes on the shores of Mor Sarff
with the pain of my taking. Half-aethelings only are left and they
will not have the power to prevail over the Dark when next it
comes, nor the power to wield the blade. They will need another
whose beginnings even now I feel running into my veins—
Savage
brew searing a course beneath my skin!
My blood shall be as one
with the Red Dragon’s, steeped to a potent mix in my womb and sent
forward through my children and my children’s children until in
time the fierce creature of my conjuring will be brought forth to
battle in the coming age. Pray then that a half-aetheling still
resides on Earth to stand by his side. Pray now that I have not
damned myself for all eternity by delving into the forbidden arts
of the Prydion bloodspell
. Shadana... shadana...

“
Shadana
...” Naas gasped and clutched
her hand to her breast, letting the rowan wand fall. The priestess
faded into the pool, her golden hair becoming a river of silver
water, her eyes losing their despair and becoming the deep blue
calm of the ocean, a water woman.

Naas pulled a hard breath into her lungs.
So, pretty one, you thought to drink dragon’s blood and send a
rare creature down to me—and for this ye died before yer
time.

The story was an old one and Naas knew it
well, but she’d never seen it before this night, never seen
gwaed draig
, dragon’s blood. Iridescent it was,
rainbow-hued, seven colors played together in one potent
elixir.

A weak smile curved her mouth. ’Twas good to
know there were still surprises to be had at her age. Rainbow
blood. She should have guessed as much, for the beasts had been
born in a star-wrought cauldron—so the oldest stories told. She
doubted them not; Naas’s life was filled with old stories. They ran
through her days in endless abundance, enriching some, destroying
others. Arianrod’s story had cost her dear. The fire was gone from
beneath the brazier, the cauldron cooling in the bed of dead
coals.

Aethelings, half-aethelings
. She
snorted. The Priestesses of Merioneth had always made much of blood
and its purity, to their eventual demise. Yet ’twas the same
preoccupation with blood that had led Arianrod to drink her bit
from Ddrei Goch’s flesh. The old beast could not have liked
that.

The last remnant of the vision took flight,
and thus released, Naas slumped against the parapet. A pair of
strong hands caught her. An extra cloak was wrapped around her
shoulders. She needed rest, only a moment’s rest, then must add one
more deed to the day’s toll.

“Naas?”

’Twas Rhuddlan. She recognized his voice. He
must be told, all of it. She just needed to catch her breath. Then
she had to find the boy, that wild boy who prowled through Carn
Merioneth both above and below, ramparts and caverns alike, Mychael
ab Arawn. She had to find him and give him a knife.

’Twas time to call the dragons home.

~ ~ ~

A fair autumn’s dawning rose along the
eastern borders of Merioneth, reaching gilded tendrils across the
mountains and trailing them down the hills to the cliffs standing
guard over the Irish Sea. To the west the light played on the
waves, limning the peaks and washing through the swells of an ebb
tide, chasing the shadows of night beyond the far horizon. Yet not
all the dark things that had fallen ’tween sunset and sunrise were
so easily routed.

By the light of a small torch, Mychael ab
Arawn made his way beneath Carn Merioneth, down narrow flights of
stairs and through the black tunnels leading to the Dragon’s Mouth,
a cliffside cave overlooking the ocean. Time was running out. He
felt it with each slip of the sun to the south, with each frosted
morn. The land was changing, beginning its turn toward winter, and
still he had naught to show for his months of searching.

A sudden pain doubled him over, taking him
unawares, but not by surprise. Quick and clean, the flash of heat
tore down the length of his left side, following the path of his
scars—his ever-present reward for daring to breach the wormholes.
He wrapped his arm around his middle and halted for the space of a
breath, then ’twas gone. He gritted his teeth, keeping on. Such was
the price of his failure, a price growing ever higher.

He made a last turn toward the west,
following a well-worn track up and out to the Mouth. Light from his
torch flickered along the tunnel walls that grew ever farther
apart. The air was cool and damp about him, a welcome relief from
the heat he’d suffered in the night. The smell of salt was
strong.

He stopped where the tunnel opened onto a
rock-girt shelf above the waves and held the torch high. Dragons
came to light beneath the yellow flame, dragons twisting and
turning in an ageless push to the sea, two mighty creatures etched
into the stone. The only dragons he had yet found, and these had
never been hidden from the sight of man, but indeed had been carved
there as a reminder to all who would come to Carn Merioneth.

Long ago, his mother had woven her music into
the ocean mists from this place, calling to the sea dragons in the
deep beyond with the magic of her melodies. Long ago, he and his
twin, his
gefell
, had played in the Mouth and traced the
stone beasts with their small fingers—but he was a child no more,
and the two women he’d loved had been lost to him. His mother,
Rhiannon, was long since dead. His sister, Ceridwen, had been
called to Merioneth in the spring, at the time of the Battle of
Balor, to take their mother’s place at the gates of time. She had
done so, but only to do one deed as Rhuddlan asked. Then she had
left, five months ago now, on a journey to the far north, leaving
naught but a green charm and a red book for him to remember her
by.

’Twas not enough.

Rhuddlan had needed Ceridwen to break the
seal he’d put on the weir gate fifteen years earlier, when Carn
Merioneth had first fallen to Gwrnach and his cursed son, Caradoc,
the Boar of Balor. The deed had been perilous, but Ceri had broken
the emerald door that had imprisoned the
pryf
in the
wormhole.

Reaching out, Mychael smoothed his hand over
the graven wall of the Dragon’s Mouth, his fingers following the
first flush of daybreak across the curves of the beasts. Rhiannon’s
fair songs had long since wafted away on the wind, but the remnants
of another’s enchantment remained in the rock to entice and
confuse. Mychael had foresworn the delving of its secrets not a
month past, having grown weary of laboring in vain and having
realized that each breach of the wall lessened the strength of what
remained. Yet here he stood again, disavowed by weakness and need,
hoping against hope that this time he would find some solace in the
Dragon’s Mouth.

“
Quo Ammon ah ethruill
,” he whispered,
speaking the words of an ancient tongue that wound over and over
again in near indecipherably small print through the dragon’s
scales—
Here lies the mark called “Ammon.”

He passed his hand over fanned wings and
scalloped fins, nearing the long whiskers sprouting from the larger
beast’s snout. At the place where scaly lips drew back in a snarl,
the stone dragon warmed to his touch as it had many times before, a
spontaneous blossoming of heat coming from deep in the rock and all
the stronger for having been let lie. He slowed his movement,
spreading his fingers wide across the incised grooves of the
dragon’s teeth. For a moment he felt the promise of something more
flickering on the edge of his fingertips, and his hope rose.
Mayhaps at last he would see his way clear before him. In the next
moment, failure crashed a resounding knell. All the warmth sank
back into the stone, leaving it naught but rock, cold and lifeless
to the touch.

He pulled away with a curse, girding himself
against despair. ’Twas the swiving magic of the Brittany bard,
Nemeton, left on the wall to mark a path; so he’d been told and
learned to believe. The damn stuff lay everywhere, traces of it
cropping up the length and breadth of Merioneth. But there was
never enough. Never enough to tell him what he needed to know or
where he should search. The bard’s name promised sanctuary, but the
path he’d left was impossible to follow. No mark beyond
Ammon
had shown itself, let alone whether to go forward or
back.

“
Christe.
” Mychael tightened his arm
around himself. He needed sanctuary and the bard’s pagan magic, if
not this day, then on one too quickly coming, for the truth could
no longer be denied. Between the pain and the dreams that would
grant him no peace, he was going mad.

He’d burned in the night, the vision that had
come to him months earlier in Strata Florida Abbey returning with
new and terrible force, and he’d felt with dread certainty some
fiendish thing drawing near. Verily, in the worst of his delirium,
it had flowed over him, silencing his screams and consuming him
once more. Remembrance of the heated dream lingered still, faint
images of a white light sundered by a dark flame, the scorching rip
and tear of it through sinew and bone, and of the light flaring
ever higher to rejoin above the swart blaze—and of a fearsome
shadow advancing. Only the coming dawn had saved him.

Christe, eleison
. Christ have mercy...
the scorching rip and tear of it through sinew and bone
...
His sinew, his bone, all of it following the path of scars that had
been blazed down his left side during his first wormhole descent,
freshening them anew. The great wormhole, the Weir Gate, had been
sealed when he’d returned to Merioneth a year past, but there had
been smaller ones swirling in hidden places in the deep dark. They
were all gone now. The renegade
pryf
who had made them, and
the force of Time that had compelled them, had all been pulled back
into the Weir Gate when the seal was broken. Shortly thereafter,
he’d breached the rim of that great hole, and if the lesser
wormholes had the power to scar, the Weir Gate had the power of
death.

Yet ’twas a lure, the flux of time, a
damnable lure. The pain in the night had forced him to his knees,
humbling him when humility would not suffice. If not sanctuary, he
needed strength. If he would rule this land and be the master of
what strove to master him, it would not be with humility as his
blade.

On the headlands above, Rhuddlan of the
Quicken-tree clan waited for him in the keep overlooking the sea,
waited as he had the summer long for Mychael to take a vassal’s
place at his side. Rhuddlan waited for naught. Merioneth was
Mychael’s by right through his mother’s line. He would be no pawn
for the Elf King, who would take his heritage and hide it forever
from the world of Men, from Mychael’s world. Nor would he play the
Druid priest for the Quicken-tree as Madron, fey witch-daughter of
Nemeton, wished. He had been raised to be a monk, a Cistercian
brother, and he well knew the ways of priests, well enough to
realize he had been rendered unfit for holiness in any form by the
changes wrought in him against his will. Transformation, sought by
some to save their souls, would be the death of him, he feared.

’Twas what Madron feared too, but he dared
not put himself in her hands, Nemeton’s daughter or nay. For as
Rhuddlan sought to turn him into a vassal, Madron thought to turn
him into a priest to suit her own needs, the both of them wanting
to clip the ab Arawn wings while they still could—or still thought
they could. Poor sops. ’Twas far too late to stop what had begun,
if there had ever been a time when it could have been stopped. He
had become wild in his madness, no different than any feral
creature put upon the earth by God, a being no longer subject to
the laws of man, but to surges of instinct. The monks at Strata
Florida would say ’twas ever thus, that wildness had always been
his true nature, but they had never seen him like this. His needs
had become hungers, desirous, gnawing hungers stripping away
fifteen years of cloistered life and monastic rule and the layers
of his sanity, denuding him down to a soul that was no pious
thing.