Dragon Sword Series - Dragon Sword Part 35

They continued on throughout the day, traveling the long gray road that led toward the Circle. From behind came a continuous series of blasts and concussions that were accompanied by the blinding incandescence generated by the conflict of magical forces.

There was time for few rests, and food had to be eaten on the run. Mernyl fretted, his eyes intense, his lips tight, and though he stayed for the most part with the columns, he frequently turned back and sought high ground so as to judge the progress that Corrin was making. In all, he seemed satisfied, but wary: the Tree seemed more hampered by the disruption of the road and fields than by his magic.

That evening, as the army stopped to s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours of rest, he called up his spells again and threw another wall across the road. But detonations and starbursts of light made the night a poor one for sleeping, and the darkness was filled with the murmur of anxious human beings and the cries of frightened horses.

Marrget sat on the ground near a fire, hugging her knees to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and she faced the magical conflict as though wis.h.i.+ng she could add her sword to it. "At least Tarwach's men rest no better than we this night."

"Who gives a d.a.m.n about Tarwach's men?" Alouzon was almost surly. She was inextricably caught between two courses, neither satisfactory. Settlement would lead to the slaughter of her friends; battle raised the possibil- .

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ity that the whole world would be destroyed. And battle, it seemed, was inevitable.

"They will be tired tomorrow also. The odds will be more even." Marrget's smile was mirthless. "Say, perhaps only five to one."

A distant ripping sound, and the earth shook.

"G.o.ds!"

Though there were still some hours left before dawn, a dull, red glow was mounting in the east. Puffs of dark clouds mushroomed out of it, and explosions cracked across the miles.

Mernyl was already on his feet, his staff in hand. "I should have expected it: Tireas is using the Tree to open the road."

Sleep was gone for even the most fatigued now, and men and women staggered to their feet in the crimson light and turned pale faces eastward. The earth continued to quake, and the sudden shock wave that rolled away from the detonations sent one or two soldiers stumbling through the clutter of baggage and blankets as several horses broke loose and bolted away. ' 'Dragonmaster, save us!" someone shouted, and there was fear in his voice.

Alouzon threw up her hands. "What the h.e.l.l am I supposed to do? I'm a warrior, not a f.u.c.king magician." She realized what she had said. "s.h.i.+t."

Mernyl set out for the king, pus.h.i.+ng his way through clumps of gawking men. "Give me leave to ride ahead," he said to Vorya. "I have no fear that there are Corrini-ans ahead of us, and I must make preparations at the Circle."

Vorya scanned Mernyl's face, then looked about at his forces. "I cannot push these men and women any faster."

Mernyl was shouting above the rumbles and the confusion. "I am not asking you to drive them beyond their endurance, my liege. I want leave to ride ahead."

"What about you, Mernyl?" said Alouzon.

"What indeed?" He laughed, and she recalled his look in Vorya's pavilion. He was going to die, and he knew 308.

it. "I must go, my king. With or without your permission."

"With it, then," said Vorya. He pulled a ring from his finger and put it into Mernyl's hand. "Small honor this may give anyone in a few days, but I would you take it in token of my grat.i.tude. I name you Councilor of Gryylth."

Mernyl slid the ring on, gave the king a bow, and sprinted for his horse, his gray robe flapping and his staff a glowing beacon. He seemed to have recovered his strength, but Alouzon recalled what his spells had done to him the day before. "I'm going with him," she said. "And . . ." She caught sight of a flash of amber hair and a questioning face. "And with your permission, I'll take Wykla, too."

Vorya nodded. "I would you stayed with us, Dragon-master. But go. We will come with all speed."

Alouzon turned to find Marrget beside her. "I'm going ahead with Wykla."

"You have done her much good, friend. Take her. We will all meet at the Circle: the order of arrival matters not."

The lurid light from the east painted the scene with the colors of blood and fire. Alouzon gripped Marrget's hands, looking for a farewell. She recalled the captain's words: Unless death intervene . . . Would it? How soon? By what means?

A horse whinnied. "Dragonmaster," called Mernyl. "We must hurry."

"I'm coming." She hugged the captain. "Move your a.s.s tomorrow, b.i.t.c.h," she whispered. "I'm too scared to do it all by myself."

The informality shocked Marrget, but she smiled after a moment, then roared, and her laughter followed after Alouzon as she and Wykla ran to catch up with Mernyl.

CHAPTER 21 *.

They gave their mounts free rein, galloping across a landscape seared by light and shaking as though the very stones would shatter. The army, held back by its foot soldiers, would take at least another half day to reach the Circle. Alouzon, Mernyl, and Wykla covered the distance in an hour.

Just at dawn, they topped a rise that gave them a clear view of their destination, and Alouzon, stunned, pulled up short. She stared with disbelief at the Circle, for she might have been confronted with a ghost.

"Stonehenge!"

There it was: two outer concentric rings of stones, one connected by lintels, the other free standing; two inner horseshoes of individual trilithons and monoliths. But this was not the Stonehenge she had known and studied, its trilithons fallen and weathered with the rains and frosts of millennia, its bluestones scattered like logs after a flood. This was new, fresh, as though its stones had been set in place that morning and the workers had just now put away the scaffolding, leaving the monument gleaming in the sunlight of a new day.

Beautiful as the roots of a planet are beautiful, awesome, ponderous, immovable, the whole construction was wrapped about with a bright radiance of power that brought tears to her eyes. Here, in this world of abrupt change and brutal transformation, was something she could cling to, something that embodied preservation and constancy.

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Slowly, she approached, the road taking her past the Heel Stone and straight along the main axis. The open ends of the interior horseshoes pointed directly at her as she dismounted at the edge of the lawn, as though they were open arms that would take her in and welcome her.

And yet, for all its beauty and strength, this holy place was but a faint echo of the Grail's ineifable presence, a single part of a whole that subsumed everything: Gryylth, Corrin, blood, death, resurrection . . . even the implacable trans.m.u.tations of the Tree. She handed Jia's reins to Wykla and watched Mernyl pace to the center of the rings with his pack, but their figures seemed transparent, ephemeral, for she was seeing beyond the stones to the living manifestation that lay behind them. Beating with life, overflowing with lush waters, the Grail cupped the Circle invisibly, held it within itself, empowered it: the dynamo of a world.

The energies and the Presence were palpable, and she followed Mernyl into the stones with some trepidation, like an orphan child brought into the palace of a queen. She wanted to reach out and touch the smooth surfaces of the great monoliths, to embrace the refuge that had opened itself to her, but even if she had forgotten what Cvinthii had said about the stones-the visions and, yes, the madness that they could impart-to touch seemed an act of profanation.

Stonehenge. It was impossible, but it was real. Buried in the subconscious of Solomon Braithwaite along with all the other knowledge, archetypes, longings, and fears, the incredible structure had appeared in Gryylth as the omphalos of the world.

Feeling as though she had entered a waking dream, she pa.s.sed through the rings and entered the open area within. Memyl was pacing off distances, his staff a bright glow, his initial scintillating out of the wood when he paused and meditated. The interior trilithons and blue-stones rose up on three sides like the columns and vaults of a cathedral: peaceful, silent. Alouzon suddenly realized that the shaking and flashes of light had cut off the moment she had entered the Circle's precincts.

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"a.s.sist me, Dragonmaster," said the sorcerer. He tossed her one end of a long strip of blue cloth and told her to stand at the center of the monument. She acted as a pivot while he traced a circle on the ground. "I intend to begin by defending farther out," he said as he worked, scribing the line with the end of his staff, "but should I be driven back, I will have no time to prepare."

She only half-heard him. The sky was a blue vault over their heads, cloudless, serene, and the rings of standing stones pointed up to the heavens as though she stood in the depths of a chalice of living rock. "This . . . this has always been here?"

"Since the beginning." The sorcerer waved her silent and closed the circ.u.mference carefully, murmuring a soft chant. He straightened, and for a moment he gazed about himself appreciatively, his gaunt face softening. "You seem familiar with it."

"WeVe got one where I come from, too."

"Not a completely benighted world then, eh?" Mernyl 's eyes twinkled as he took the end of the strip from her.

Again, she marveled at his strength. Gryylth, and everything in it, was but ten years old, and Mernyl knew himself to be the spontaneous creation of a despairing mind, but still he could smile and be glad of sunlight and stones. His expression was that of a man with a fatal task ahead of him, who nonetheless intended to do it well, and who would not let its proximity detract from the glory that surrounded him.

Wykla came into view from between the trilithons, stepping carefully as though her mere presence was sacrilege. "I took the horses to the far side of the Circle."

Her slight form appeared all the more fragile compared with the twenty-five-foot trilithons behind her, and the breeze caught her hair and ruffled it into tendrils and curls. By her looks, she might have been a girlfriend from the college years that Suzanne h.e.l.ling had once known, a coed from long ago who had lived, loved, felt the first blush of dawn and sunset's lingering glow . . . and perhaps died in a rain of steel-jacketed bullets.

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MernyPs voice came to Alouzon as though from a distance. "Dragonmaster? Are you well?"

She realized that she was crying, tears running freely and unashamedly down her face. It had been a simple time then, when all questions had answers, when all problems could be solved, when there was hope that, regardless of their depth, all differences could be reconciled in the end. But those beliefs were no more st.u.r.dy than was Gryylth, and the bloodshed had ravaged them away with the impersonal precision of a razor.

She wept, not with the hysteria that had saved Wykla during the first night of her womanhood, nor with the catharsis that had restored Marrget to her humanity, but rather with a sustained, bitter grief that welled up for all the love and the beauty and the innocence that had ever been ignored, trampled, or lost in the eternal transience of people and worlds.

Eyes shut, jaw clenched, she allowed herself only a minute to plumb the aching void within her, and then she turned away from it. "I'm all right," she said at last, her voice catching. "We don't have time for me to go to pieces. You still need help, Mernyl."

He nodded, but before he bent to his pack again, he paused before her. "I saw," he said gently. "I grieve with you."

"What about Gryylth, Mernyl?" she choked. "Kent State is in the past. Gryylth is here and now. What happens to it when all this s.h.i.+t hits the fan?"

"I believe ..." He watched Wykla as she crossed the open center of the monument, seemingly at one with her body, her girlish grace and her warrior's poise now combined into an emblem of newfound strength. "I believe that the G.o.ds, whatever their names, are merciful and loving. I believe that they care about the people of Gryylth and Corrin." He fixed her with a glance. "Just as you care, Alouzon Dragonmaster.''

"I'm not a G.o.d."

He was silent.

"That's all you've got then? Faith?"

"Faith is a paltry thing. I have knowledge."

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"Yeah ... sure .. ."

She started to turn away, but he caught her arm. "And do you then disbelieve in the Grail?"

To disbelieve was impossible. She had seen. "That's ridiculous."

"You do not, then, simply believe. You know."

"Yeah, I know."

He nodded in his strange way. "And that is Gryylth's hope."

Questions again: questions she did not know how to ask. Mernyl bent to his pack, took out a second roll of cloth, and handed it to Wykla. His face was set, his expression hidden. Alouzon had the distinct and unnerving reeling that he had just indicated that his belief and his hope rested on her.

With their help, Memyl constructed a series of interlaced circles and triangles that surrounded and contained the large tracing he had already made. Morning lengthened into afternoon as he worked, and gradually, the lines began to a.s.sume a life of their own, s.h.i.+ning brightly in the clear, laser light that Alouzon had seen before.

But as he was closing the final figure, the earth shook slightly, and, alarmed, he looked up to the northeast. The inner horseshoes opened out in that direction, and, beyond the outer peristyle, far beyond the Heel Stone, the darkness was gusting toward the Circle as if driven by a hurricane. "My defense is no more," he said. "The second wall has been breached."

"I hope everyone got away."

"Fear not: look."

The army of Gryylth was topping the slight rise from which Alouzon had first seen the Circle, its weapons and armor glinting in the afternoon sun. To either side of the footmen were the mounted forces: the King's Guard, Santhe's men, and, their hair streaming behind them, the women of the First Wartroop.

Mernyl came up behind her. "Ride, Alouzon," he said. "Tell them to form within the embankment but to keep the Avenue clear."

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Wykla was already bringing Jia. Alouzon mounted, and the girl tried to smile. "Ride, my liege. For Gryylth."

"For Gryylth, Wykla," she returned. "When your wartroop arrives, rejoin it. Fight well."

"I fight for you, my lady." She clasped Alouzon's hand for a moment before the Dragonmaster turned her horse out along the Avenue and galloped away.

Although the disruption of the road and the surrounding fields had given the Gryylthans time to prepare for the expected onslaught, there was not much for them to do save take up positions and wait, s.n.a.t.c.hing food and rest as they could. The sanct.i.ty of the Circle precincts was such that, even had there been time for defensive earthworks, no one was willing to rnar the ground to make them.

But the Circle itself provided some fortifications, for surrounding the outermost peristyle of stones at a distance of about a hundred feet was a four-foot bank of earth encircled by a ditch-a formidable obstacle for the Corrinian phalanxes. Vorya stationed his warriors and soldiers behind it, but the situation still did not look good: Gryylth had a thousand feet of perimeter to defend with a little over a hundred people.

And, sweeping in from the northeast like a wave, clutching at the stainless blue with hands of jet, the darkness devoured the sky degree by degree, a constant and urgent reminder that the Gryylthans faced more than simple material weapons. From within it came the rumble of thunder, and the shadow it cast turned the day into night.

Vorya watched its progress from the rim of the bank as he ma.s.saged his useless arm. "The one battle to which I would come a whole man, and I am maimed."

Beside him, Alouzon glanced at Marrget and the First Wartroop. The women had taken up positions on the other side of the Avenue, keeping the axis of the Circle clear in accordance with Mernyl's wishes. "Others, I think, feel the same way.''

At first the king did not comprehend, but he followed .

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her eyes. Relys saluted them with an uplifted sword, her dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng in what was left of the sunlight.

Out along the Avenue, nearly a hundred feet beyond the ditch and the bank, Mernyl stood beside the Heel Stone. If he had turned around, he would have been able to look directly into the center of the Circle, where the interior horseshoes of bluestones and trilithons opened out at him. But he did not move, nor did he appear to mind his isolation. Holding his staff level with the horizon, he stood like a monolith himself, small and puny beside the thirty-five-ton stone, barring the way as though his authority alone would suffice to keep the enemy from approaching.

A blot of darkness separated from the main ma.s.s, and, shrouded in a halo of lightning, threw itself forward. It grew rapidly, tunneling itself into a glowing, black bolt, eating away at the distance to the Circle.

Vorya stiffened. He had encountered this before. His hand went to his left arm.

Behind, there was a sudden flash and a continuing glow. The Circle had turned radiant with blue fire. Light shone out through the interstices of the peristyle as though a lantern had been lit within, and Mernyl swung his staff up, holding it above Ms head as though in summons or in challenge.

The distance narrowed, and the bolt made directly for him. Like a striking snake, it lashed out, driving into the upraised staff with a sharp crack. But, its powers awakened, its energies invoked, the Circle flared into life, and a stream of light blasted out along the axis toward the Heel Stone. The blue and the black met at Mernyl's staff, there was a flare ...