Morigu: Book 02 - The Dead Page 7

  Finally, the elf looked up. His face shone with a light like a bright star, but his eyes burned nearly red.

  "It is the shame not just of my family, but of the whole elven race, for he was corrupted." Cormac turned to Niall, and to the human it was like looking in the face of some old god of fury and storms. "Cucullin will find Apkieran, and the Undead Lord will fall. But Lord Kiernan's soul is gone for all time and my father's rots in some unnamed hell." Cormac took a deep breath and his gaze turned to the mountains in the south.

  "If I or my people seem to be aloof, my lord, we have burdens you could not know." Niall watched the elf but his eyes that had been filled with sympathy turned hard. It was a moment Niall recognized from the songs and ballads he had grown up on, from the great tales of elder days. It was quite enough, he thought.

  "Humans," he said, and he did not care if his voice was rough, "know something of pain." Cormac turned to him. The light was gone from the elf's face, but his eyes still burned.

  "The Caves of Meaglin," the elf answered, "are in a land no human could find. There the cries and tears of the whole elven race are ever fresh. There my people sometimes go, when they have despaired. There they go to die." He looked away from Niall. "There my mother weeps for the fall of Cainhill, Warlord of Cather-na-nog."

  "My mother was captured by goblin raiders, ten years ago," Niall replied. "We never found her. My father does not cry; he is Archduke of the empire, lord of the Clan Ruegal. Nae, my father does not cry, but he sleeps alone and I think his throne is a cold place." Once more the elf turned to Niall. He saw something that surprised him, for the human was covered with a bright aura, an aura that spoke of many things, but mainly of strength. A pulsing light came from Niall's closed right fist, and there was knowledge written in that sight that Cormac knew he could never read.

  "What I'm saying to you, Lord Cormac," Niall said, "is your father is a man to be pitied and a man to be mourned. There's no nobility in a son hating his father, no matter how well deserved."

  "And I thought to teach you something this night, Lord General," the elf answered. "But it is I who have learned." Niall pursed his lips for a moment then he opened his hand to show the ring that lay there. It did not glow; it didn't do anything but lie there. Niall carefully placed the ring in a pouch at his belt. He held his hand out and the elf lord grasped it.

  "Call me Niall," he said.

  "And I am Cormac," came the answer. For a moment the two held the grasp, then let go. Niall looked up at the stars.

  "In a few days we will be in Ruegal Keep, Cormac," he said. "Then I shall put this ring on. I would ask a favor of you. I would ask if you will be there when I do."

  "I will."

  "Aye, and I thank you for it." Niall smiled at the elf. "And what do you say we find a bit of wine? We have a long war ahead of us and I have a dragon to find and that black bugger owes me."

  Fifty miles away from the two generals, Mannon, Archduke of Ruegal, stood alone on a tower of his mighty fortress. The wind was strong from the mountains and it whipped his graying hair about his face. The archduke's face was strong and proud, and his eyes were the eyes of a hunter. But this night his skin was pale and his eyes were red-rimmed.

  "Guenivive," he called to the night. "Guenivive, can you not hear me, lass?" For a moment the only answer to his cries was the howl of wind about the battlements. There were powers in that wind, dark things and creatures of old sadness and lost pains. But the archduke could not see them or hear them and he continued to call.

  "I am here, my lord," a gentle voice answered. Mannon turned around to face the apparition behind him. She was as she had been when they had first met: a young girl of sixteen, full of the promise of her womanhood to come. She stood naked to the wind, but it did not chill her. And if her pale flesh glowed with a light that no mortal ever bore, the man blinded himself to it.

  "Guenivive," he whispered and he held her tight. Her skin was soft, soft as ever he could remember it. There was still baby fat beneath that smooth skin, and her hair was silver blond. He had lost her when she was thirty-eight, but ten years can do many things to a man's memory.

  She was warm, though he always thought on these moonless nights when she came that she should be cold, cold as. . . but that was not a thought he gave room to.

  "Tell me you're all right, my heart," he murmured into her ear. "Tell me they have not hurt you, sweet Guenivive." She held him as tight as he did her, but her eyes watched the stars. And there was no passion to be read there.

  "I am as you see me, my lord," she answered.

  "Tell me, lass, tell me you've come back for good now. Ah, gods, tell me you'll stay."

  "I can tell you that, my lord, but I cannot make it so." And he stood back and held her at arm's length, but she would not meet his searching eyes.

  "Then, lass," he said harshly, "I will make it so. I will free you from this devil game and bring you home."

  "No mortal, my lord, not even you, may break the bonds that hold me." And with that his strength was ripped from him. He fell to his knees and held her about the legs and he began to sob. It was a sight none of his people would believe that the archduke would collapse so. But she who was there turned from his sorrow and looked to the mountains that overshadowed the great city.

  From the highest of the mountains a small red light could be seen and it moved. Three times the light went about the mountain's sharp peak then it disappeared. Once more she saw it; this time it was much lower and it seemed to grow larger as if it moved toward her, then it was extinguished again. And at last she smiled, but there was no happiness in it.

  "I must go, my lord," she said.

  "Nay, lass, nay, do not leave me so."

  "Remember your promises, my lord, and maybe one day I will be freed." And with that she was gone, leaving the man collapsed on the cold stone, his hands grasping feebly in front of him.

  "Guenivive," he moaned, "Guenivive." But there was only the wind to answer him.

  C H A P T E R

  Six

  The army of Aes Lugh moved swiftly and silently through the night. Wrapped in a concealing magic of the elves, no creature was aware of the army's passage. The humans and their mounts were near exhaustion as both valiantly tried to keep up with the furious pace of the elven steeds, and even though the elder magic buoyed and supported horse and rider, the ride was beginning to take its toll.

  The army had fought its first engagement two days out of Tolan deep in the ancient wood of Ettorro. There the elves and their allies had virtually wiped out a small army of goblins that they had caught unawares. Now ten days later, the riders were close to the borders of the Devastation.

  It was essential to the allies' plan that their enemies not know of the army's passage. Donal had left a thousand elves, supported by some hundred monks of the huntress, in the wood of Ettorro. It was this small force's job to convince the enemy that the army was still in the woods preparing for an attack to the south.

  The elves exhausted themselves using all their magic to hide the army, and even Margawt claimed that he would be hard-pressed to follow the trail that was being left. It was hoped by the leaders that in the vast swamps of the Devastation all trace of the allies would be lost, and that the army could come to the north of the Borderlands unheralded.

  Margawt ran ahead of the vanguard, his feet leaving no marks in the ground that he raced over. It was the marvel of the army that the Morigu refused to ride any steed and yet he easily kept up with the bruising pace. He never seemed to get tired.

  To Margawt the long race of the last week and a half had been a time of real freedom. Each step took him farther from the agony in the south and the constant cries of need and pain of the earth things. There were many places of wrongness in the land now, but nothing could match the madness that the south of the empire was enduring. The Dark Ones were killing all life there, except for livestock, and even the animals the enemy fed on were butchered in the most painful ways possible. It was beyo
nd evil, beyond destruction, beyond insanity. And Margawt was the Morigunamachamain and even a thousand miles away he heard every plea for mercy, every cry of pain, every death.

  So it was that the Morigu added his howl to the cacophony that always rang in his ears, for he felt the earth weeping once more. Margawt skidded to a stop and with a moan knelt down, placing his hands to the earth.

  It was not far ahead, the place of pain. There seemed to be no life, just the slow crackle of blood drying on the earth. Margawt extended his senses through the ground; his magic spread outward from him like the ripples of a pond when a stone is cast in its center. The power continued, then lapped upon an obstacle like a hard rock in the water. But it wasn't a rock. It was death. An area of the earth, dead. Rock and soul, root and vine, creatures above and below--all dead. All that was left was the hollow sound of a thousand dying shouts. It brought pain to Margawt, physical pain, as if his hands were immersed in molten lead. The pain stripped him of skin, of muscle, of bone, of thought, of mind, of emotion. It left him only one thing: need.

  Need for the blood of the desecraters.

  Margawt walked beside Donal's horse, and the two entered the town together. Around them, the warriors of the army of Aes Lugh spread out to seek survivors. The town of Cienster had never been an overly prosperous place, not by the standards of the empire of Tolath, but its people had been hardy and brave; this close to the swamps of the Devastation they had to be. Most of the warriors of Cienster had been with the regular army when the attackers came and the small garrison that was left was no match for the enemy. So the people of Cienster had taken up what weapons they had, even if those weapons were only a shovel or a butcher's knife and they fought to the bitter end. They paid the price for their courage.

  The Morigu and the warlord were both speechless at what lay about them". They slowly picked their way through the main street, its cobblestones black with the blood of the people of Cienster. The inhabitants were still there, or at least their corpses were. They hung on great poles where they had been crucified--man, woman, and child. They lay curled in the middle of the street, or pinned to the walls of the two-story homes, or piled in great tangles of naked death.

  The walls were broken in many places, and many of the homes and buildings still sullenly burned. The small castle at the town's edge was nothing more than a gutted shell. Even the fountains had been broken and the water poisoned with rotted corpses. But the worst, worse than the sights or the terrible smell of carrion and charred flesh, the worst to Donal Longsword was the silence.

  His horse's hooves clopped on the cobblestone, the sound echoing weirdly about him. A few crows cawed to the sickly moon, but nothing else. No barks of dogs, or cries for help; no nothing, just a hollow, empty silence.

  Ahead a small grove of trees had been chopped down; about the stumps lay nearly a hundred human corpses and twice that number of goblins. The fighting here had been vicious, neither side giving way. Donal remembered that Bronwen had told him that in Cienster there was a grove of oak trees sacred to the Hunter. The people had fought hard to protect their shrine. The warlord dismounted and walked over to the corpses. There wasn't one, human or otherwise, that didn't show signs of mutilation. Many seemed to have been gnawed on, like a hungry dog chewing on a bone. Donal had seen many horrors during the war, but nothing like this gray, silent town.

  "It is like this in the south of the empire," Margawt said quietly. Donal spun to face the Morigu behind him. The sound of a voice was jarring in this place, but even more startling was the fact that Margawt spoke. The Morigu rarely said anything and when he did talk the warlord was always surprised by the richness of that voice, and the sorrow in it.

  "The whole south is like this," Margawt continued, his black eyes searching the faces of the dead as if he could read something in their blank faces.

  "They kill everything--animal, vegetable--it doesn't matter. They only keep alive just what they need to feed themselves. The rest die. They die by the hundreds, by the thousands, one by one. Always the Dark Ones seek to make each death as painful as possible, to stretch the agony as long as they can." Margawt knelt down, staring into the face of a dead warrior. He touched her long black hair, now stiff with blood, and he nodded as if in answer to a question.

  "Why?" Donal said. Though he was warlord, he asked.

  "Because it makes them happy," Margawt answered, his hands tracing the dead woman's profile gently. "Some it makes stronger. Evil thrives on destruction." He stood up and shrugged. "It isn't really their nature, it is simply the requirements of the path they have chosen. Half is madness, half is necessity for their continuance." The warlord towered over the Morigu and his elven eyes glowed in the dark. They stood, the two of them, knee-deep in corpses, and stared at one another.

  "We will find who did this," Donal said slowly. "We will, make them pay." Margawt just nodded.

  "Many must die for this." And the two said no more but turned to see the rest of the decomposing corpse that was once the town of Cienster.

  It didn't take long for the hunters to find their prey: two thousand goblins led by a minor demon and a great goblin lord. The army of Aes Lugh picked at the fringes of Dark Ones, pushing and prodding the mass of the ravagers of Cienster into an empty plain. There the humans and elves surrounded their prey and at daylight's opening they attacked.

  It wasn't a battle as much as a massacre. The Dark Ones had nothing to match the power of the elves and the heroes that led the army of Aes Lugh. The demon fell to Donal, and the goblin lord to the destroyer. Cucullin was a bright, flame that burned everything in its path, Bronwen a cat among mice, and Dermot's magic tore through the Dark Ones like a black tornado. Fergus and his queen sliced through the enemy; Kevin's sword was stained red as he rode with them. And the Morigu, the Morigu raged through the goblin lines like an ancient god of war and nothing that day could have stood before him and lived.

  The goblins could not hold ranks but tried desperately to break the noose that held them. As always the Dark Ones fought bravely, but they had no chance, none at all.

  It was over in a matter of hours, the plain black with the dead. The army of Aes Lugh lost only a handful, the Dark Ones everything. Donal Longsword stood in the middle of the field carefully wiping his blade. Margawt came up to him and once more the two stood facing one another, standing in a pile of corpses. But this time, Donal thought, the right corpses.

  "They had scouts," Margawt said. He was covered with drying blood. Everywhere it caked him; even his hair was thick with it. Donal thought of the dead warrior that Margawt had so tenderly touched not so long ago, of how her hair had been, as the Morigu's now was: stiff with blood. And the warlord knew that Margawt had made a promise to that poor dead woman.

  "I wonder what her name was," he said aloud.

  "Who?"

  "The woman at the grove in Cienster." Donal looked away from the Morigu. Margawt's face was covered with a layer of dried blood and the half-elven could not meet those black eyes staring from the gruesome mask. "The woman who you touched."

  "Her name was Tael Golan," Margawt answered. "She was twenty-four years old. She saw the goblins tear her three-year-old in half, and her husband died with an arrow in his groin. She killed three goblins before she died among the trees and five before that; she wounded nearly twenty. Tael Colan was the best swordsman in Cienster. She was choking a goblin when the spear severed her spine. There wasn't much physical pain when she died, but her death cry will echo in the town of Cienster for a thousand years." Donal could not believe what he was hearing. He spun around and looked down at Margawt.

  "How could you know?" he said incredulously.

  "I know all the dead," came the quiet answer.

  The warlord had no answer for that. Donal was half-elven and would never die of old age. He had lived for a hundred eighteen years and to him Margawt was little more than a toddler. It was too much to bear, to face Margawt as he truly was, and now Donal understood why the elves avoide
d the Morigu as much as possible.

  "Margawt--" he said, but the Morigu interrupted.

  "They had scouts," he said. For a moment Donal was confused by this shift of direction. Finally, he answered.

  "I know."

  "They must die." Margawt licked a cut on his hand, the blood thick on his tongue. Donal watched a moment in fascination, then he shook his head as if to shoo away an insect.

  "I think there's been enough death today," he answered.

  "NO!" Margawt shouted, and for a moment Donal thought the Morigu might attack him. "There will never be enough! Never!" And with that he spun away from the warlord and ran off. Margawt could no longer take the pity in the gray eyes of the half-elven. No longer take the gentleness there and the memory of horrors that washed over that gaze but never left a stain. He ran drawing his sword, for the earth still cried its outrage and there were scouts out there, and he would hunt, because it was the only thing he could do, and the only way he knew to make it right again.

  So it was that Margawt wasn't there when they brought the woman into the camp of the army of Aes Lugh. They had found her some miles to the south of Cienster wandering along a small stream. She was naked and badly bruised. Her thighs were covered in blood and she held a notched ax head in her hands. It was an elven scout who found her, and she was quiet, entranced by his beauty, but when he brought her back to camp she tried to kill the first human she saw and her screams woke the whole army.

  She would not speak of what had happened to her, so it was Dermot who read the memories the woman could not face. Her name, Dermot learned, was Manwyn O'Shea and she was the daughter of a local farmer. She had escaped the pillage of Cienster through the sewer systems but had been caught deep in the clay sewer lines by three goblins. They raped her repeatedly, pushing her head under the foul water. Two had left and the third amused himself by cutting off the fingers of her left hand. But she killed the goblin with a blow to the head with the ax head she had carried from the fight above. Then she had wandered until the scout had found her. Manwyn O'Shea was two months short of her sixteenth birthday and though once she had been a pretty little girl, her broken nose and knife-scarred face held no hope of beauty anymore.