The Great Darkening (Epic of Haven Trilogy) (43 page)

At the moment Cal fixed his attention on the Lady Morana, she passed from beyond the reach of the reflected silver light and into the briefest of shadows in the great, mirrored hall. What Cal saw turned his stomach in instant revolt and woke his mind to an unmistakable sobriety. In the light of the tree, Morana shone as though she was the epitome of every man’s desire, but here in the shadow of the column, the darkness revealed her true nature. Yellow and evil were her once-intoxicating eyes, and the milky smooth complexion of her flawless face was as rotten and worm-eaten as a long-buried corpse. Those slender hands that had bade them all to come and dine in the luxury of her lavish hospitality were but jagged talons of bone and nail and decayed flesh.

“Away from me!” Pyrrhus shouted as he stumbled backwards in retreat. “I will have no part of this!”

Yasen caught the frightened look of Cal’s revelation, and then he noticed the most peculiar thing; a small, blue-winged creature flitted and fluttered about his face with obvious distress.

“Cal!” Yasen called out to him. “Cal, are you alright, brother?”

Pyrrhus fell backwards into a tray of bottles that was held motionless in the arms of one of the shirtless servants. As soon as the silver service piece fell to the floor, the man grabbed the knight with unrelenting strength.

“The lady will have what the lady desires,” the now yellow-eyed man spoke.

“Enough!” Seig shouted, still oblivious to the true nature of the monster that hunted them. “I have waited long enough for those crimson lips of yours, and if my men are too scared, or so ungrateful as Pyrrhus … well then I will make up for their lack of chivalry, my lady!” Seig rose to his feet and began to make his way with virile haste across the marble hall towards the lady of the isle.

“Thank you, Governor,” Morana crooned. “I was hoping that there was at least one man who might give me what I desire!” She batted her eyes at Seig, and in his lust he missed the hungry expression there. She strode forward and met him in the center of the room, Pyrrhus still in the grasp of the shirtless servant.

“I will have my taste now, if it pleases you, my lady,” Seig said with arrogance.

“Oh please, brave Governor, it would indeed,” Morana cooed.

Seig took the flaxen-haired woman in his arms and leaned in to at last relish her crimson lips with his own. Then, without warning the silver light that had bounced and reflected its way in and through the whole of the great, mirrored hall went completely out.

Chapter Forty-Seven

S
houts
and gasps of horror filled the room and echoed off the mirrored chamber, for in this new and unlooked for darkness, the men of the first colony stared at the vile, yellow-eyed monster of a woman that waited greedily to feast upon their governor.

“Seig, no!” Tahd shouted, now waking from his wine-induced enchantment.

The governor had closed his eyes, eager to savor with concentrated feeling the sweetness of this beauty’s red lips, but at the voice of his captain he opened his eyes in annoyance and beheld the nightmare that waited in his arms. The same yellow eyes that the shirtless servants displayed were housed here in the rotting face of the lady of the Isle. Her hair was wispy, like that of a long-dead corpse, and her rotten fangs dripped with salivation for her next meal.

“What in the damnable dark!” Seig screamed, shocked at the transformation of this woman.

“I thought you said you wanted a taste of me, Governor? Am I no longer
desirable
, to you, brave Seig?” she asked with exaggerated enunciation.

Now that the bewitching had fallen away, guardsmen and woodcutters alike began to rub their eyes and rouse their minds out of their lustful stupors.

“Cal!” Deryn shouted to his friend. “Cal, your sword, use your sword,
now
!”

Still groggy, Cal reached down and unsheathed the tarnished, ancient blade of Caedmon in his right hand, not at all confident that it would do much good against this strange evil.

A blood-curdling scream resounded in sulfurous waves of tortured defiance from the mouth of the once-beautiful Morana. “
NO!
Get the blade of that traitor
out of my house
!” With those words she threw the governor halfway across the room in a fit of unnatural fury.

Her no-longer delicate shoulders were hunched in a position that suggested she was about to pounce upon the groomsman like a shadow cat would upon an unsuspecting pony. As she fixed her yellow stare on Cal, a snarl of hatred curled across her worm-eaten lips. “How dare you interrupt my feeding with that wretched piece of steel!” she growled at him.

Cal looked nervously back and forth at his brothers, and as he did his heart sunk with a sickening dismay. The first mate was not the only one sitting still and lifeless at the long table; several others remained frozen in place with the same eyes of dead darkness. It seemed that the Lady Morana had managed to take her taste of more of their company than any had realized. The men who had not been taken stood at the table, drawing their blades and gathering their shaky courage for whatever fight this demon chose to give them.

Morana began to step in unnatural lunge-like paces towards Cal, her bony, clawed fingers spread wide, ready to grasp hold and tear apart whatever unfortunate thing came her way.

“Who are you?” Cal shouted his question at the monster. This was not his first witch, but this was by far the most frightening one that he had encountered.

A deep and sinister laugh came from the fanged mouth of the approaching woman. “Oh, you will find out soon enough! For I will feast on your souls and take your bodies to serve my will!” Morana leapt atop the enormous dining table, her landing sending platters of food and goblets of wine splashing and clanging onto the marbled floor.

Cal mustered his courage and pointed the tarnished blade up towards her monstrous figure.

Yasen shouted in hopes of distracting the witch from her concentrated fury. “You are but one half-dead and rotting woman, and we are many men, with many sharpened blades of steel. How can you hope to overcome us all?” he said in a mocking taunt.

Her snarl morphed into a soul-chilling smile as she spoke. “Do you not guess, North Wolf? For you are not the first mariners that served to satisfy my hunger.” She spread her half-rotted arms wide in a display of great confidence. “Look, even now they are moved by my eternal beauty!” Her voice crescendoed in a maddened swell of evil laughter.

Just then one of the shirtless servant’s eyes woke with the same sickened yellow glow. “Oh beautiful mistress of mine, I will make the whole world bleed to have but one more kiss from your red lips.” His words were detached and puppet-like, devoid of any emotion or conviction; then without even the slightest hint of warning he snapped his mirrored looking glass into two jagged pieces. Blood began to run from his hands from where the splintered shards had opened up his flesh, and without hesitation he sank the mirrored daggers into the neck of the closest guardsman to him.

Morana leapt down from the table and drank deep the soul of the dying man, just as another of her servant drones woke to life. “As will I, my beautiful lady.”

Snap
came the sound of breaking glass, but before he could bury it into the body of one of the men, a sword parted his yellow-eyed head from his shirtless torso. Tahd stood over the shirtless man with his bloodied blade, looking round the room in blatant defiance of the witch and her army.

“Brothers,” the now yellow-eyed first mate spoke in the same monotone as the others, “do not be afraid, for I have tasted her beauty, and so soon will you.”

“Run for the ship!” Seig shouted at the top of his lungs. “Run from this godforsaken hell of a place!”

One at a time the servants of Morana snapped their looking glasses and charged at the men of the first colony as they made their way for the door. Their mirrored daggers were no match for forged steel, but their assault was unrelenting, and several of Seig’s men felt the cold sting of their glassy blades. The white marble floor of the high-columned manse began to run red in the light of the hearth as the blood of the shirtless servants pooled near the door.

Morana’s vile voice echoed out her orders with an intoxicated blood lust. “Get them and kill them and bring them to me! For I have souls that I must dine on this night!” she screamed, her rotten fangs on full display as she commanded her servants.

Yasen was the first to reach the doors of the great, mirrored hall, and he had already cut a path of death through the yellow-eyed men by the time the rest of his brothers caught up with him. “You know what waits for us on the other side of these doors, don’t you, brothers?” Yasen shouted, steeling them for a fight. “Make ready, men, for when we open the doors, hell will rain in upon us all!”

With a nod from the North Wolf, Goran and Pyrrhus opened the doors, but what the men saw on the other side of the columned manse’s walls made their blood run cold with a completely different kind of fear.

“What have you done, witch?” Seig shouted in contempt at the monster Morana. “What kind of devilry is this?”

Cal stole a glance amidst the throng of his angry and frightened brothers, and what he saw broke his heart. The silver light of the great tree had faded once again. Though he could still see the dying tree faintly lit far off on the eastern horizon, it was obvious to all that one of the two remaining branches had been consumed, and the reach of its brilliance had drastically diminished. The world here, on the distant shores of this deadly isle, many leagues from the great tree, was now plunged deeper into shadow. Every man who stood in the open space between monster and darkness knew in his heart that they had little time to succeed, lest the whole of the world go dark forever.

Their saddened reverie was broken by the wails of mourning that came from the lips of the once beautiful Morana. “
No
!!!” The monster pulled and ripped the strings of dead, lifeless hair out from her rotting scalp, her servants standing at the ready with their own blood dripping from their mirrored daggers.

“Curse you, heartless Father! You have robbed me of my beauty forever!” She began to sob in bitter anguish.

There in her tears, with her vile face hidden from the men, the Lady Morana made a pitiful sight. Something akin to compassion came over some of the men, and two of them moved closer to aid this once beautiful woman who now was in great distress.

“No, wait!” Cal said, grabbing their shoulders to stop them from walking any closer to the wailing witch. “Please brothers, do not give your sympathy to such evil, for the only affection she hopes to return is to the stomach she longs to feed.”

Morana looked up at Cal, her distressed pretense displaced by rage at the one who spoke with such truthful clarity and carried the ancient blade of Caedmon.

Yasen spoke next to the men. “Come now, brothers, we must flee right away if we hope to make it off this island with our body and soul still sewn together! Run! Run now and show no sympathy!”

The men began to rush the open doorway, and the light that lit the shell pathway shone as but a faint marker to guide them to their freedom. “Come, come now men!” Yasen shouted. “It appears this witch can only possess one of her servants at a time—if you move together you can hope to make it to the ship. Now!”

Tahd and Seig wasted no time in heeding Yasen’s wisdom, and their men followed closely behind them. The woodcutters hesitated, waiting for their chief.

“After you, sir,” Goran barked.

“No, you go. I will not leave Cal behind.” Yasen’s definitive tone did not leave room for argument. Goran nodded and headed out the door, followed by the rest of the woodcutters.

The entryway erupted with the noise of hurried boots on crushed shells as the men of the
Determination
ran into the shadows towards the hidden dock. As the woodcutters and guardsmen alike brandished blades and moved with haste, Cal realized that the lady of the isle was, in fact, letting the men go. Her attention was now focused on him alone, and this very revelation stopped him cold. He held tightly to Gwarwyn, his blade, as the sad but familiar voice of Morana commanded the shadowy hall.

“I know who you are, Calarmindon, and I know why it
really
is that you are here!” Her face contorted and twisted as she spat her words of hate. “You have come to seek the light.”

Cal held on to his wits, determined not to be thrown by the beguiling efforts of this loathsome creature.

Her voice changed to a sing-song taunt as she looked up from her hair-filled fingers, her yellow, sallow eyes begging him to come closer. “This light that you seek … do you not know that such a light, if found, would ruin all that I have sacrificed to build? And all the souls of those who serve me here on this isle would be lost forever in the wake of your
curiosity
! You wouldn’t waste life, would you? You wouldn’t forfeit the lives of all my servants, counting your cause to be nobler than their helpless existence, would you? You wouldn’t leave half-dead men unburied and unblessed, would you? What would your Poet parents say about such
waste
, Bright Fame? What would the great Father think about treating his creations with such … inhumane disregard?” She spat the last words in disgust.

Cal’s mind went foggy, and as his bearing on the moment was lost in her twisted reasoning, he began to question the truth he knew. In the presence of evil things, even the truth can be wrought into a weapon of lies, and Cal’s doubt began to overwhelm his thoughts like a swiftly moving storm.

Suddenly, out from inside his cloak, the blue-winged Sprite emerged like a bolt of sure-fired lightning. “I know who you are, Morana!” Deryn said with righteous anger. “I know who you once were, and of your great betrayal against your people and your great Father! No twisted words from your lying tongue will find their purchase here tonight!”

Yasen’s eyes went wide with wonder at the small creature that addressed the monster with such fortitude. He could hardly believe what he was witnessing here in the mirrored hall on the Isle
Dušana
.

“For I was there when you betrayed the violet trees in exchange for your humanity and your beauty. I was there the day you sentenced our people to death just to satisfy your lust and appease your jealousy.” Deryn, unafraid and unrelenting, pointed a small finger in the monstrous face of the vile woman. “And I am here now, on the day your beauty fails you for a second and final time!”

Morana glared at the small warrior, but kept a safe distance as she spewed her anger at him. “You should feel what this skin feels like, brother, for I would burn all the violet trees of beauty and forsake my fruited birth a hundred times over to have the full desire and full attention of every breathing man!” Morana’s voice swelled in scorned anger as she deflected the doom that Deryn had spoken over her.

Cal’s mind cleared enough, and he began to grasp hold of the truth that the dark magic had tried to obscure. “I
will
seek the light, and I
will
find it!” Cal shouted to the monster, his words uttered with more bravery and confidence than he felt at the moment. “And evil, all evil …
your
kind of evil will indeed perish when the new light comes.”

“Cal, come on brother, get out of here while you still can!” Yasen yelled from the entrance to the hall, his wonder at the strange sights he beheld overpowered by the knowledge that they were still in imminent danger.

“Look into your mirrored glass, Morana; no man will ever desire you again! This price you have paid has robbed you of your honor and your family, and has now left you bereft of any semblance of beauty. For as the tree of His power is put to sleep, so follows the beauty you sold your soul and murdered your people to keep!” Deryn shouted with vehement disgust, his faint blue glow growing brighter and brighter as he continued his tirade.