Lord of Shadows (39 page)

“You kill her and you’ve lost your only bargaining chip,” Douglas brazened. “Besides, I’m no fool. Either way, you’ll not leave anyone alive who can raise the warning against you.”

“Always so clever, young Douglas,” Máelodor sneered. “Then I shall amend my words. I can kill her quickly or I can kill her slowly. That becomes your choice.”

Daigh risked his first glance at the woman whose fate hung by a thread. She hunched as far back against the wall as she could, hands clutching her stomach, face eerily expressionless.

For an instant, their eyes locked, hers shiny with tears. But it was he who looked away first, unable to offer her anything but a clean death.

“You’re not his slave,” she whispered.

Daigh kept his gaze fixed upon the battle of wills between Douglas and Máelodor.

“Don’t let him win.” Her voice came soft as a last breath.

His blood moved sluggish and frozen in his veins, his mind carrying naught but a soldier of Domnu’s cold-blooded indifference. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Could only listen to her futile pleading.

“You’re not Lazarus. You’re Daigh.” One final entreaty, this one ending on a sob that would have torn at his heart had he one left. But that, like his memories, had been taken from him, leaving naught but the presence in its place.

“Kill her,” Máelodor commanded. “Prove your allegiance.”

Hate. Terror. Evil. Violence. Murder. The emotions took physical and horrifying form. A scarlet and golden river of flame and smoke. The open maw of the serpent widening as Daigh teetered on the edge. He scrambled for
a hold against the gaping emptiness. Anything to stop his final tumble into hell.

“Do as I say!” Máelodor screamed.

Daigh drew forth the billhook. Stepped forward, his body no longer his to command.

“No!” Brendan lunged between them, mage energy crackling the air. The spell on his tongue bursting forth with the speed and strength of a final stand.

Daigh faltered, his head exploding as it had been cleaved in two. His weapon fell from a hand gone suddenly numb as he dropped to his knees.

“Sabrina! Now!” Douglas shouted. “Stop him. Use the memories. Find him and—”

Douglas’s instructions ended in a grunt of pain as St. John backhanded him to the floor. Stood above him, murder in his gaze.

Daigh looked to Sabrina. The blue of her eyes sweeping him under like a cresting wave. Her hair floating about her shoulders as if caught in the flow of an ocean current.

Letting go of his last handhold, he sank deep, letting her carry him away.

She didn’t know what she did. How she did it.

Dropping through the fragmented, scattered layers of Daigh’s memories, she took up the gossamer threads of his past, winding herself into them. Becoming a piece of that lost life. Entering as if stepping through a doorway.

If Brendan was correct and the veriest scrap of memory was enough to loosen the mage’s hold upon Daigh’s soul, what would a deluge of memories beget? And would she be strong enough to hold herself in this time and place long enough to create them?

There was no way but to try. Failure meant death.

The air thickened and condensed with rain and cloud. Fog muffled her footsteps, creating ghostly specters of the wooded Welsh glen. But he was just as she knew he would be. Eyes sparkling soft and as gray-green as the fog, untouched by shadows, body bearing none of the jagged edges of his present blighted existence. He reached a hand for her. Wide. Callused. Warm. It enfolded her fingers. Drew her in.

“I know you,” he whispered.
“Cariad.”

She smiled, stepping into his embrace.

Daigh’s mind fractured like a fist through a mirror. A million shards. A million crystalline memories. Pristine. Without flaw or fault. And sharp enough to sever the strongest prisoner chains.

Energy flooded limbs suddenly free of the taint of Máelodor’s dark magics. The oppressive presence no longer coiled at the base of his brain. He struggled to his knees, shaking his head as if to clear it, but the memories clung like burrs to cloth. Throbbing the very air. Filling him like an empty wineskin with moments and impressions as clear as the scene before him. He knew who he was. What he was. The being known as Lazarus shed like a discarded cloak.

“St. John. Kill her!” Máelodor screamed, spittle flecking his mouth, his eyes wild and unfocused.

Douglas lay bloody and dazed upon the floor, Máelodor’s cane pressed to his windpipe, the master mage crouched above him like a vulture.

St. John advanced upon Sabrina, who lay still as death upon the pallet. “What say you, Douglas? Shall we carve a few scars into your pretty sister’s face?”

All eyes upon St. John, none noticed Daigh reach for the discarded billhook. Close his hand around it. Roll up and forward in one fluid thrust aimed at St. John’s back.

Not until the last possible second. Then Máelodor shouted a warning as St. John swung about, the sharpened tool ripping a long gash through the fabric of his coat. “You!”

His retaliatory spell hit Daigh like a wall of crushing stone.

Darkness closed in as his lungs worked frantically for air, his tongue thickening, his throat closing. No gentle suffocation, but a pressing sense of panic. His struggles availed him nothing. No mage energy answered his summons. He was powerless.

“Play fair.” Reaching out with his ruined hand, lips moving in a soundless whisper, Douglas shattered the room with a thunderous tremor of answering magic. Walls bowed, the floor heaved, and dust and thatch drifted in the fetid air.

St. John fell, his spell dissolving while Máelodor stumbled to his knees, his face contorted with pain and an insane fury.

But no sooner had the master mage hit the floor than his body wavered and shifted. Shadows overlapping shadows. More than human, less than snake. Eyes round and red and lidless. Mouth unhinged in a gaping fork-tongued grimace. A great hood spreading above a scaled head while his body lengthened and contorted with the striking speed of a snake.

“He’s a Heller!” Douglas gasped.

“Gelweth a sargh dyest. Pádraic eskask.”
The words slithered ominous and black from Máelodor’s mouth.
“Dreheveth hesh distruot.”

From the center of the room, an enormous serpent took shape. A rippling, reptilian monster.

Fangs bared, it lunged for its closest prey. Daigh.

The fog smothered her in its damp, cloying folds. The trees and the holding and the path and the weeping left behind. Word had come. The men were dead. Word had come of the death of a prince and the slaughter of his companions.

Keening filled the air. Rose like the thick, black smoke of the cook fires. Sabrina had stayed as long as she dared. But word had come, and there was no more reason to hold fast to this time and this world.

Her life here had been full, the memories precious. But her lover was dead, and she was released to return to her home and her time while he slept the passing centuries in a grave, awaiting the odious spell that would summon him to a new existence among the living.

The fog thinned to silver strands, the enormous, sheltering woods contracting to the dingy walls of a cottage, the prickle of a straw mattress beneath her cheek. Years for her shrinking down to mere minutes for them.

He stood with his back to her. Sword-straight. Shoulders braced for battle.

She reached with her mind, touching the heat and love and strength of a man she’d parted with in tears and pleading long months previous. But nothing else.

She had beaten Máelodor. Saved Daigh.

Word had come. And though she had lost him in one life, she had gained him in another.

The great snake undulated from side to side as if assessing the easiest target. Winded and heart pounding, Daigh backed against the edge of the pallet. Weakness buckled his legs while sweat poured between his shoulder blades. Streamed into his face. He wiped it with the back of a sleeve.

The snake took that moment to strike.

Its tail whipped St. John’s legs from under him as it lunged at Douglas, still lying prone upon the floor.

Daigh shoved the man out of the way, taking the fangs deep into his own arm.

With his free hand, he slammed the billhook down and down again until the snake released him. Blood poured green from its wounds, burning Daigh where it spattered his bare flesh.

The snake struck again, but this time St. John used the moment to launch his own attack.

Daigh parried the snake, but was too slow to thwart St. John’s thrusting knife, which caught him a raking slash across the collarbone.

The
Amhas-draoi
sought to follow up one success with another, his dagger flashing against the growing darkness, his gaze alive with a diamond’s icy fire, full lips parted in a ruthless grimace.

Daigh’s stomach tightened with nausea, acid eating its way up his throat, but he evaded St. John’s assault by a hair-breadth, though he knew it would only be a matter of time.

“Dreheveth hesh distruot,”
Máelodor’s voice rasped low and venomous.
“Ladhesh esh’a peuth. Kummyaa nagonaa byest.”

“He’s escaping,” Brendan cried.

Daigh dared take his eyes from St. John for long enough to see Máelodor duck out into the passage. He tore after him, but St. John stepped in his path, dagger at the ready.

“He leaves you to die,” Daigh uttered from a jaw clenched tight against the pain in his arm. Already his fingers tingled and his vision sparkled with bursts of white light.

St. John drew himself up. “I’m Lancelot. The battle hand of Arthur himself. Máelodor knows my worth.”

The curse he unleashed cut into Daigh like hot knives, every breath a new horror. Then just as suddenly, the spell dissolved as the snake struck at St. John. And again.

His focus interrupted, the
Amhas-draoi
bellowed, “Máelodor! Your beast. Call it off!”

Daigh raced for the stairs, but the snake threw its coils beneath his feet. He stumbled, throwing an arm out to catch himself. Something snapped in his wrist, agony shooting to his shoulder until he almost passed out from the pain.

The worn grip of the billhook met his throbbing fingers. “Daigh.” A whispered voice. Rejuvenating as a plunge in a snowy mountain-fed stream.

He forced his fingers to close around the handle. Adjusting his grip, he took difficult aim. Waited for an opening though every nerve screamed for vengeance and his arm grew heavier with each passing second.

St. John’s golden features bloodied and streaked with gore, his breathing fast, his body quivering, he bellowed curses at Máelodor while dodging the snake’s frenzied attacks. Swinging under the snake’s guard, he stunned it with a brutal crack to the skull, thrusting up into the snake’s
throat, blood pouring over his arm in a blistering, green, noxious wave.

It was Daigh’s only chance.

Even as St. John screamed his victory, Daigh released the billhook with a whiplike snap. Sent it thudding hilt-deep into the
Amhas-draoi
’s chest.

The man toppled to one side, eyes glazing in death, mouth twisted in a cruel rictus.

Without pausing for breath, Daigh threw himself at the door. Máelodor couldn’t be far ahead. He could still catch him. Still retrieve the tapestry.

“Brendan!” Sabrina cried.

Daigh spun around in time to see the snake once more lunging for Douglas, who scrambled to escape. Thrusting himself between predator and prey, Daigh felt the pierce of the snake’s fangs in his chest and back like a fiery double punch. As he was pulled from his feet, feeling flowed from his body with his blood.

But this time and this death there was light rather than darkness filling his vision. It spread over him. Burned through him. He knew his name. Knew his life. Heard his comrades’ fond welcome.

He was finally going home.

“Dehwelana dhil’a islongh. Pádraic eskask.”

Arrayed like
bandraoi
of old in gowns of ceremonial white, gold torques encircling their throats, heavy gold cuffs upon their wrists, the carved lines of their faces frightening in their solemnity, Ard-siúr and Sister Brigh stood in the doorway, voices lifted in challenge.

“Boesesh nesh fellesh.”
The chant seemed to reverberate in the air like a rumble of summer thunder.
“Dehwelana dhil’a
islongh. Pádraic eskask.”
Louder. Stronger. Each syllable storm-edged and hurricane fierce.

The serpent froze, its glittering, maddened gaze focused upon the two women approaching it with slow, even steps. Yet it made no move, as if they’d charmed it into submission.

“Boesesh nesh fellesh!”
The words splitting the air with lightning ferocity.

The great snake dropped Daigh to the floor on a shuddering, writhing, hissing scream. Its tail lashing furiously from side to side. Smoke billowing from its mouth, flesh melting from its bones until naught remained but ash drifting upon an oily breeze.

Sabrina wasted not a second, ripping free Daigh’s shirt, laying bare long twin gashes slicing through muscle and bone. Blood bubbled with every panting breath, his skin a sickly pale green. “It’s not working. He’s not . . . why isn’t he healing? What’s wrong?”