Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (62 page)

Deseillign—desert city of the
Sha-shakrieg

Dharkkum—a malevolent darkness sealed in the
earth by the Prydion Magi

Dockalfar—Dark-elves

druaight
—an enchanted thing

gwaed draig
—dragon’s blood

gwin draig
—dragon wine

hadyn draig
—dragon seed

Lanbarrdein—ancient seat of the
Dockalfar

Liosalfar—Light-elves

Mor Sarff—Serpent Sea

Prydion Magi—those of the Starlight-born who
created the arts of enchantment

pryf
—dragon larvae, worm

rasca
—Quicken-tree medicinal
ointment

Rastaban—Eye of the Dragon; ancient seat of
the Troll King

Sha-shakrieg—desert dwellers

sín
—a rising storm

skraeling—beast man

thullein
—metal used for the weapons
of the Sha-shakrieg

tua—blind lizards that live in the deep
dark

Tuan—dead king of the Dockalfar

tylwyth teg
—Welsh fairies

uffern
—hellish

Yr Is-ddwfn—sanctuary of the Prydion
Magi

Clans of the tylwyth teg:

Daur

Ebiurrane

Kings Wood

Quicken-tree

Red-leaf

Wydden

Yr Is-ddwfn

Seven Books of Lore:

Sjarn Va Le
—Violet Book of Stars

Elhion Bhaas Le
—Indigo Book of Elfin
Lore

Prydion Cal Le
—Blue Book of the
Magi

Treo Veill Le
—Green Book of Trees

Chandra Yeull Le
—Yellow Book of
Chandra

Gratte Bron Le
—Orange Book of
Stone

Fata Ranc Le
—Red Book of Doom

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thank you for reading
Dream Stone
.
Please visit my website,
www.tarajanzen.com
, and follow me on Facebook
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And read on for an excerpt of
Prince of
Time
, Book 3 in the Chalice Trilogy and Morgan ab
Kynan’s adventures through the wormhole!

The Chalice Trilogy – Book 3

In the failing light of a mid-winter’s eve,
high in the mountains of the Dhaun Himal, the monks of Sonnpur-Dzon
trudged across a frozen courtyard filled with ice and snow. A
fierce wind howling down from the mountain peaks whipped at the
hems of their robes and made the nightly devotional a prize to be
won. Behind the monks, a half dozen novitiates cloaked in gray wool
plodded through the worsening storm, following their masters to the
assembly hall. A black-cowled mendicant brought up the rear.

Looking up from beneath the hood draped low
over his face, he squinted into the wind. Dark clouds raced across
the horizon, leading the night into the west across a barren,
sharp-edged landscape of gray rock and steep slopes. Drawing his
gaze closer, he scanned the castellated wall connecting the
monastery buildings one to the other. Torch bearers walked the
ramparts of the wall, heading toward the braziers flanking
Sonnpur-Dzon’s only gate. On either side of the gate, stone towers
rose up from the braziers, each one crowned with a fearsomely
carved dragon head.

Every night of the two weeks since he’d come
to the monastery, the fires had been lit at sunset, sending flames
shooting out of the dragons’ mouths. Smoke would then curl from the
beasts’ nostrils and the nightwatch would sound the Dragon Hearts.
The resonant vibrations from the great bronze gongs would echo the
length of the valley below, calling anyone within hearing distance
to prayer—a rare occurrence from what he’d seen. There was hardly
anyone within a hundred kilometers of the place, let alone within
hearing distance.

He shifted his gaze to the west again, noting
the last sinking rays of the sun. The men outside the monastery
that night were unlikely to drop to their knees when the gongs were
struck, for the men were his, and the sounding of the Dragon Hearts
was their signal to breach the wall. He’d used his time between
prayer assemblies and meditations to search for Sonnpur-Dzon’s
weakest point, and he’d finally found it in the grates of the
hypocaust. The last two nights had been spent unsealing the grates,
working his way from one level of monks cells to the next until
he’d reached the last round of bars set into the north wall. With
the breaking of the final seal, he’d opened a path from the outside
world into the heart of Sonnpur-Dzon.

The monastery’s remoteness had been its first
line of defense against him. Even though he’d been assured of its
existence, it had taken him over three months to narrow down its
possible location and another six weeks of hard travel to reach the
area. Situated in the highest mountain range on Earth, Sonnpur-Dzon
clung to the sheer sides and craggy peaks of the Dhaun Himal. No
pilgrim came there except through hardship and design. The nearest
outpost was nine hundred kilometers to the southeast, on the
coast.

Despite the initial difficulties in finding
the place, it was the kind of job he liked—straightforward and paid
in advance. The seals had been cheap and messy Carillion knock-offs
and the bars had been surprisingly tough alloy digitals. He’d been
prepared for worse. There would be some softwork in the courtyard
shrine, but softwork was his captain’s specialty.

Poverty had been the monastery’s second
protection. Sonnpur-Dzon’s only treasure had been the bliss
achieved through devotion, until seven months past when the monks
had come into possession of a small gold statue highly prized and
eagerly sought by a trader in the west.

On the basis of a whispered rumor, the trader
had come to him for help, and he, in turn, had come to Sonnpur-Dzon
for a considerable amount of money, more than he’d believed any
small gold statue could be worth, except possibly in the western
markets of the Old Dominion, the greatest den of vice and iniquity
in the Orion arm of the galaxy.

Ahead of him, the saffron-robed monks and the
novitiates came to a halt and turned to face the dragon towers.
Snow began falling from the sky, mixing with the glacier driven
flurries. The torch bearers on the wall touched their flames to the
braziers and fire roiled up across the pans. Against the night sky,
the dragons breathed smoke and flames. The heart gongs were struck,
and as one the monks and novitiates prostrated themselves on the
ice-riven stones, intoning praise for the gods and divine
defenders.

He prostrated with them, the picture of
piety, his voice joined with theirs in the chant, utterly guiltless
though he would steal their statue this very night. Whether the
gold figure was a sacred relic or not, the dragon gods of
Sonnpur-Dzon were not his gods. He’d lost his God in the past.

The reminder elicited a softly spoken curse,
the words of praise disappearing from his mouth. He’d lost his God,
aright, but not his skills. He was still light of finger if not of
heart, still quick of mind, assets that served him well in the
strange and dangerous time he’d been thrown into by the friggin’
weirworms. He was still a leader of men, though none knew his
lineage, still a prince, though his country no longer existed.

He’d lost his family and his friends, the
mountain streams and valleys of his youth, every woman he’d ever
loved, and nearly his mind, but he’d not lost his name. He was
still Morgan ab Kynan, and he was still the Thief of Cardiff.
Before the next rising of the sun, the monks of Sonnpur-Dzon would
know he had been among them.

The last echo of the Dragon Hearts was swept
away on the wind, and the votaries rose. As the line neared the
main assembly hall, Morgan slowed his steps, falling behind and
slipping into the shadows of a grain storehouse. The novitiates’
dormitory, empty at this hour, was to his left, the doors low and
covered with heavy, striped curtains. A ladder leading up from the
storehouse to the kitchen rested against the wall to his right.

Other monks were converging on the hall,
coming across the central courtyard from where they’d prostrated
themselves for the nightly devotional.

He waited, out of sight, his back against the
dormitory stone wall until the monks passed. When they’d all
entered the hall, he made his way up the ladder. At the top, he
skirted a wooden porch and posted himself on the south side of the
nearest building. The smell of roasted barley coming from a
hide-covered window confirmed his position by the kitchen. He’d
marked every turn in the hypocaust, laying a trail for his captain,
Aja, to follow. The boy had the burrowing instincts of a rat dog
and would not lead the rest of the men astray. With Aja pushing
them, even the clumsiest of the lot should make the kitchen in ten
minutes. The monks would be well into their prayers by then.

He checked his watch, then cut his gaze to
the shrine in the center of the courtyard. A curtain flapped in the
doorway of the temple supporting the monument. Fierce demons were
carved on the lintel above the door. The statue was inside the
temple room, a dragon wrought in reddish gold, sleeping on a bed of
snakes, about fifteen centimeters in length, no gem stones. He and
Aja would make the snatch together. Even a place as remote and
backward as Sonnpur-Dzon had rigged up a field-style security
system to protect its new treasure. From what Morgan had seen of
it, Aja shouldn’t have any trouble neutralizing the power field.
The trick would be dismantling the alarm.

Snake beds and dragons, firegods and
demons... The future had proven to be a place rife with religions
and idolatry. A pervasive trade in divine artifacts kept a good
portion of the populace, including the religious houses, in and out
of each other’s pockets with rightful ownership proved more by
possession than provenance; a lucrative climate for a thief. When
the politics and benefactions of patronage were added in, few in
the Old Dominion were left uninvolved. As for the vast backwater of
the Middle Kingdom, he hadn’t seen a living soul whose life didn’t
revolve around one religion or another, with the dragon sect of
Sonnpur-Dzon being one of the more obscure. Other than the couple
of hundred monks in the monastery and the Dominion trader, few
people had ever heard of the place. Luckily, he’d found those
few.

Dragon gods.
Christe
. He shook his
head.

In his world there had been only one God, the
God he’d fought for, the God he’d nearly died for, the God who had
ultimately abandoned him in the shifting lair of the worms that had
taken him far, far from his home.

Waiting in the frigid darkness, the
temperature dropping toward zero, he resisted the temptation of his
memories. Richly colored in his mind’s eye and ever beckoning, they
were a siren’s call into the past, into the life that had been his
until a fateful battle had sent him falling into the time weir.

Wales
... his mind whispered.
Land
of the Cymry, of wild, clearwater rivers and woodland idylls a
thousand shades of green, land of mountain sunrises streaking gold
across the horizon, land of harps, song, and war.

Always war.

He swore again and pulled his cloak tighter
about himself. There was no salvation to be had in memories. Naught
but pain and longing awaited him there. He checked his watch again.
Five more minutes. With luck, he and his men would be back in the
hypocaust before any of the monks knew their treasure was missing.
If not, and a warning was sounded, it was over the wall with all of
them. Jiang and Robbi would be carrying grappling hooks, ropes, and
zip lines. York and Wils were bringing in the diversionary
firepower, a few blastpaks guaranteed to throw enough smoke and
sparks into the air to cover their escape. Morgan had ordered all
lasguns and carbines trigger-locked. He didn’t mind thievery. It
was what had kept him alive in the beginning, when he’d first come
through the weir. Ten years later, it was still what kept him
alive, but he drew the line at massacre, and the monks were
unarmed. A fortnight in the place had given him plenty of time to
find any weapons hidden in the monastery, and there were
none—except for the longsword concealed beneath his cloak, a cool
length of steel resting in the scabbard laid along his spine, its
rune-engraved cross-guard shadowing the curve of his shoulders, the
one piece of his past he was never without. Ivory gripped, its hilt
chased in gold and silver, its blade engraved with a rune spell,
the sword was named for an ancient king of a land that like his no
longer existed—Scyld, King of the Danes.