Aoife and Scathach, Shadow Twins Page 4

  “The hook-handed man will know. He will tell me,” she said with enough confidence that Nels began to wonder if she was indeed the real Aoife.

  “Can I ask why you want to return it to her?”

  “She saved my life; I am in her debt.”

  “But I thought you were on opposite sides.”

  “We were.”

  “Ah, a debt of honor,” Bes said. “I understand that. If we are without honor, we have nothing. Complete your quest in the forest and I will gift you with the suit of silver armor. But I will not be paying your fee,” he added quickly.

  “Then it is not a gift,” Aoife reminded him.

  “Well, perhaps there might be room for negotiation,” Bes said finally. “I am wondering if what you glimpsed in the forest earlier might be related to these earthquakes and upheavals.” The Dwarf’s voice had grown thick and sleepy. “I’ve traveled this road most of my adult life, and I’ve never heard of anything silver in the forest. There are beasts aplenty; they are all hair and hide, fangs and horns. None of them are silver, as far as I know.”

  “This was silver,” Aoife said confidently. “Metallic or crystal.”

  Nels heard something change in the young woman’s voice even as she was speaking, a hint of what might have been excitement. “My grandmother sent me to this place in search of ancient artifacts.”

  “When I traveled the worlds with your grandmother, she collected all the ancient remnants of the old world,” Bes said. “Perhaps she wants to add this to her collection.”

  Aoife’s laugh echoed off the stone walls, turning bitter and harsh. “The Witch will destroy it. She is determined that all the knowledge of the old world be wiped away.”

  “There is much we can learn from the past,” Bes murmured.

  “And not all of it good.”

  The Dwarf’s only response was a gentle snore.

  7

  Aoife blackened her face and hands with wet soot before she crept from the camp. She had elected to go on foot; riding across unfamiliar ground at any time was dangerous, but riding through a forest at night almost guaranteed a broken leg for the horse or rider, or both.

  She waited until the smaller moon had disappeared below the horizon and the three Ugly Children rose in the east to chase after their mother, the Silver Lady. They cast confusing shadows through the trees and onto the irregular ground.

  Her route was relatively easy. Twice she stopped: once when something that smelled suspiciously like a Torc Allta—but sounded bigger than any boar she’d ever encountered—lumbered through the undergrowth to her left and again when a huge, faintly luminescent nightsnake as thick as her body slithered lazily across the path. It raised its flattened head to stare at her with yellow eyes before curling away, allowing Aoife to see the distinct outline of a tree fox lodged in its throat. The warrior slid her knife into its sheath and pressed on.

  It was close to midnight when she spotted the first glitter of light through the trees directly ahead.

  Aoife stepped into the shadow of a long-dead stump and dropped to her haunches to stare in the direction of the milk-white light. It did not pulse or ripple like moonlight on water, nor did it flicker like firelight. Turning to look back into the trees, she shifted her head slightly, so that she was seeing the image almost from the corner of her eyes. It was an old hunter’s trick used for revealing details often hidden by looking at something straight on. She began to get a shape of the item: tall, slender, and, she was convinced, crystalline. She guessed that it was in a hollow, so she was only seeing the topmost portion. Aoife loosened the short sword and whip on her belt and checked the knives strapped to her forearms, then moved silently toward the light. She tested each step before pressing down; she did not want to risk snapping a fallen twig or crunching through leaves. Although her vision was exceptional in the dark, like all great warriors, she knew the value of her other senses—especially her sense of smell, which had always been acute. She breathed deeply, identifying the beasts and birds that had moved through this place. She smelled Torc Allta—wereboar—spoor first, the odor rank and cloying. A few steps farther on, she caught the unmistakable stench of a Torc Arzh Gell, a werebear—and then the bittersweet perfume of a female centaur.

  Aoife shivered, and not from the chill night air. Something was wrong here. Boar, bear, and centaur were never found together.

  Mixed among the scents of the living, there were other, less familiar odors: the foul scent of headless Dullahans and the once-smelled-never-forgotten stench of the rotting fear ghorta. What had drawn the walking dead from their graves, she wondered.

  She stopped, crouched and ran her hand across the shadowed ground; it was pocked with prints from hooves, paws, and feet . . and all of them were heading in one direction, toward the light. None returned.

  This close to the ground, she suddenly felt the electric trickle of ancient power trembling just beneath the forest floor. She was suddenly aware that her heart was thundering, her stomach cramping, and it felt as if ants were crawling through her hair and spiders cocooning her flesh with silk. It took Aoife a moment to recognize the emotion she was experiencing. This was fear: the deep, primal terror etched into the consciousness of every living being, the recognition that they were in the presence of something alien to all life.

  Aoife couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt an emotion so strongly, and it had been a long time since she’d experienced anything even approaching fear. Closing her eyes, she threw back her head and breathed deeply. She was vampyre: emotions were her sustenance. If all the other creatures drawn toward the light had experienced the same terrors that were shivering through her skin, she should have been able to feast off that raw emotion.

  But there was nothing on the air.

  No rich soup of sensations, not even the raw stink of fear.

  Wiping damp palms on the legs of her trousers, she moved forward, slipping from shadow to shadow, almost completely invisible.

  The light was clearer now, brighter than the Lady and the three smaller moons in the sky. The source had dipped below a black-edged rise directly ahead. Aoife watched as steam curled out of the hollow ahead, tendrils of yellow-white light snaking through the trees, coiling through the roots like a nest of serpents.

  It was bright enough to see clearly now, and Aoife crouched to examine the earth again. Impressed into the muddy mass were tracks from beasts alien not only to the forest, but to this part of the Northlands, and from some that she’d never encountered on this Shadowrealm before.

  Loosening her metal whip, she dropped to the ground and crawled through the icy mud toward the edge of the rise and the light.

  8

  Tracking the woman was relatively easy.

  On the few occasions he lost the trail, Nels simply continued in the general direction of the point of light, crossing and recrossing the path until he picked up the woman’s tracks again. Like most drovers, Nels could identify animals and beasts by their tracks; the depth and crispness of the edges allowed him to estimate how much time had passed since the tracks had been made. Aoife wore distinctive square-heeled riding boots, which left a clear impression in the earth.

  Nels stopped when he encountered other prints. Animals, beasts, and were-creatures had all traveled down this narrow path. Most of the prints were days old, though some of the Torc Allta tracks were fresher, certainly made within the last day. Nels straightened and raised a studded club as he slowly examined the tracks. He didn’t want to meet with any of the creatures that had preceded him here. Individually they were dangerous; together they were deadly. He had survived because he’d always been cautious—some would have said cowardly, but those who’d said that were all dead. Aoife’s tracks overlaid the beasts’ marks, so she was following them. He straightened and took a step back. Maybe it would be better to let the beasts in the forest feast off the woman. He could retu
rn in the morning, take her weapons and boots…

  He was turning away when he caught a brilliant flash of white light. Before it faded it turned yellow, like polished gold.

  Nels hesitated for a single heartbeat…and then greed drew him on.

  9

  Keeping close to the ground, Aoife crept closer to the light blazing out of the hollow. As she drew nearer to the ancient artifact, she realized that despite the number of animal tracks on the ground, she could hear nothing: no panting, snorting, stamping, or even rustling. They were probably sitting and standing silently before the light, entranced by its power. Though why could she not smell them?

  She popped her head over the lip of the hollow, only to discover there were no beasts, not even a bone or a shred of fur or feather. Where had they gone? There was, however, a stone.

  It was as tall as Aoife, as thick around as her torso and capped with a golden pyramid, a white crystal stone jutted from the earth in the middle of a circular clearing. Mud ran in long streaks along the length of the crystal. The ground around the artifact was cracked and broken, the earth shattered and split, and the tip of the stone was crusted with earth. It had obviously been pushed from the ground by the recent earthquakes and upheavals.

  The crystal was the color of chalk, shot through with tendrils of green and gold, silver, black, and red. It throbbed and pulsed with a soft white heartbeat of light, and occasionally a shimmering strand of brighter light washed through it, curling from the golden cap to flow down the length of the column. The fluid light was mesmerizing as it drifted downward—yellow-white, the shimmer of gold, then ice-white, the color of pearls—before it finally flowed off the crystal and washed over the ground, melding with the mist, until it seemed as if the light itself was rolling along the forest floor.

  From top to bottom, the stone was etched with symbols and twisting lines reminiscent of the ancient Ogham texts Aoife had seen on the oldest Shadowrealms. When she tried to focus on the marks, they shifted and spiraled beneath her gaze, forming new patterns and words. A dozen languages curled into existence, then faded to form a dozen more. Some she recognized; others were completely alien.

  The warrior felt the power radiating from the stone flow across her skin like marching insects. It sizzled through her short hair, making it stand up straight, while sparks crackled from her belt buckle, buzzed across the metal whip she carried coiled on her shoulder, and fizzed around the steel toe caps of her boots. Then the sparks danced blue-white along her flesh to reveal, in stark shadow, the bones beneath.

  She had seen stones like this before, but they had always been finger-length shards of clear crystal and, occasionally, larger, head-sized globes carved into the infamous crystal skulls. She had never encountered anything so large.

  This was a remnant from the Time Before Time, an artifact from the age of the Earthlords.

  The tiny pieces she had encountered previously had been imbued with incredible power and dangerous knowledge. She’d handled a crystal ring once worn by an Archon and was instantly conscious of the slither of bizarre thoughts and the hum of discordant music in her head. She’d lifted a crystal pendant from an Earthlord mummy, and the instant it brushed her skin, she’d felt such a crushing fear that it had forced her to her knees. She went blind and deaf momentarily, and when her sight and hearing returned, she’d found herself speaking in a language that had not been used for millennia. In the days that followed, her red hair turned snow white before falling away, leaving her bald, and her green eyes turned an unnatural black. It took a decade before her hair grew back and her eyes returned to their original color.

  Once, she’d held a crystal skull and felt the knowledge of ages past flow into her, threatening to swamp her consciousness. In the instant it had taken for the cool crystal to become flesh-warm, she’d known everything: the past, present, and myriad futures were laid out in a fractal kaleidoscope. It was overwhelming. She’d felt the walls of her sanity begin to crumble beneath the overload, and right at the very edge of her perception, she had realized that a sentience lurked within the skull, something indescribably alien. Luckily, Scathach had been there and had knocked the skull from her hands with her nunchacku—breaking two of Aoife’s fingers in the process. Aoife thought she’d escaped lightly; if she’d held that skull a moment longer, she knew that her own awareness would have been wiped clean, allowing the creature in the skull to take control. For months afterward she’d spoken with a curious accent and her dreams had been bizarre beyond belief.

  And iIf those small slivers of crystal were that dangerous, then what could this enormous shard do? What wealth of arcane and forbidden knowledge did it contain?

  Eons ago, her grandmother Zephaniah had discovered the dangerous knowledge encoded in the crystals.

  She had sent both Aoife and her sister, Scathach, across the Shadowrealms in search of the crystal artifacts. “Destroy them,” the Witch had said. “Destroy them, before they destroy us all.”

  But Marethyu’s demands had been contradictory: he wanted the crystals and skulls whole and intact. Aoife knew he’d sent her sister on incredibly risky missions in search of the ancient treasures. No one knew what he did with them, but on one occasion he suggested that the ancient knowledge they contained was essential for the survival of the human race.

  Aoife knew why Zephaniah had sent her to this place: she’d want the crystal column destroyed. But what about Marethyu? The hook-handed man would want this treasure. Sometimes she agreed with her grandmother—there were some things best left dead and buried. She’d lived long enough to realize that knowledge itself was neutral. It could be used for good or ill. Yet at the back of her mind were the bitter memories of the few times she’d touched ancient crystal pieces. Something lived within them, and it was most certainly not neutral.

  Slowly, carefully, Aoife uncoiled the metal whip and rose to her feet. Shivering tendrils of ashen sparks ran along the length of the whip. Here was power, indescribable, incredible power. She could feel the raw energies buffeting her like a strong wind, pulsing out like a solid heartbeat. With artifacts like these, the Archons and Earthlords had created the Shadowrealms. But even they had only had tiny fragments of crystals, usually worked into rings, bracelets, or necklaces or set into the tips of wands. A huge crystal like this could create…She stopped. She had no idea what it was capable of.

  Almost unwillingly, Aoife took a step forward.

  She knew what to do with the smaller shards and even the crystal skulls. Years ago Zephaniah had given her and Scathach a dozen tubes filled with a coarse black power that melted crystal, making it run like melted wax. She wondered if she had enough to destroy this.

  The stone suddenly pulsed green and the mist flowing off it turned emerald, the same color as her eyes. It rolled out in a long, sinuous wave and washed over her feet, splashing up against her thighs. Instantly she felt the dull muscle aches and the tightness from old wounds fade. Even the sting from the blisters on her heels disappeared.

  Aoife took a step forward, the whip now hanging limp by her side, trailing on the ground, sparking and fizzing like a firecracker.

  The stone throbbed blue, and now soothing sapphire mist washed over her feet and legs. It was like stepping into warm bathwater. Pins and needles crawled up her body, setting her legs tingling and cramping. The whip slipped from nerveless fingers, and she dropped to all fours in the blue mist. Dipping her hands into the shifting cloud, she brought her damp fingers up to rub her face, bathing in it. The scarred skin on her left cheek burned and itched, but when she touched it again, the flesh was smooth and the deep grooves were gone. And when she looked at her hands, she discovered that her chewed fingernails were strong and unbroken.

  Then, on hands and knees, she crawled toward the stone.

  Aoife blinked tears from her eyes; they rolled down her cheeks and fell onto the churned earth before her like tiny globular sapphire
s. When she looked toward the stone again, she discovered that the night had become even clearer, the stone assuming shape and definition, each wriggling pictogram and shivering line of text now sharp and precise.

  She knew what was happening: the stone was healing her, soothing old aches and wounds, wiping away scars. The ache in her lower back was gone, the ingrown toenail no longer pinched, and she could actually feel a new tooth pushing through her gum to replace the one a domovoi had knocked out.

  She felt amazing. Alive. Young. Whole. But somewhere at the back of her mind a tiny voice was crying out in warning: there was something wrong here…something terribly wrong…

  The stone pulsed cool silver light and the air was suffused with the scent of salt and the scent of the sea. Aoife continued to crawl toward the stone.

  And then a studded club took her between the shoulders, snapping bones, cracking her skull as it drove her face-first into the mud.

  Grinning hugely, Nels stepped over the woman’s body.

  10

  The Lia Fáil.

  Nels recognized it immediately: the Stone of Destiny. At the heart of every legend was a grain of truth, and Nels had just discovered the truth about Tir Tairngaire.

  Every child in Tir Tairngaire learned how Cernunnos had stood with his hand upon this crystal and created the world. It was one of those stories told and retold around the camps, but Nels had always dismissed it, relegating it to tales of lost cities, vanished islands, and mysterious otherworlds where the skies were filled with silver discs. Yet if the Lia Fáil was real, that meant that every other legend—the gods and monsters, the lost worlds, and magical gateways—must also have some truth to it.

  The Lia Fáil pulsed crimson and black, and a thick bloodred smoke curled across the ground toward him.

  Nels stepped into the mist, sending it coiling around him. The drover could feel the ancient power flow across his skin, easing the ache of knotted muscles and wrenched shoulders. His skull itched abominably. Running his hand over it, he felt the rasping fuzz of hair he had lost in his youth. Stepping closer to the stone, he could feel the flesh on his face tightening, muscles rippling beneath the skin, and when he touched his forehead and cheeks, the deep wrinkles and grooves around his eyes and mouth were missing. He spat out a rotten tooth and discovered that the space was already filled with a new one. His hands cramped as missing fingernails appeared, and the deep scars across his palms, caused by decades of gripping leather reins, were turning pink with new flesh.