Illengond Read online

  “Then why is the battle still going?” Hrevia asked.

  “I do not know,” Thimeon replied. “I do not know. We are in the battle that defines our times, I think, and I do not know who will win. Even if we win, I don’t know if we will survive. Probably not. Even a victory may claim our lives. I am afraid. But I believe the All-Maker is real and powerful, and will one day defeat his enemy. I don’t know when and I don’t know how.”

  “Well I would place greater hope in an army from the Northland,” Banthros said. “If we could reach my people and convince them of the evil now present in Citadel, they would rise to our side. Once before, many generations ago, a Northland army drove south and conquered this realm. It could happen again.”

  Thimeon shook his head. “I doubt we could reach your people. But even if we could, what hope would we have? We might resist Citadel for months or even years with a rebel army. But not the Daegmon. We have already seen that. They cannot be destroyed by mortal means. Even if temporarily defeated in battle, they return.”

  “But if what you say is true, how do we find help here?” asked Elynna. Though she still stood beside Thimeon in the front of the group, she was speaking for the first time in several minutes. “I have heard you praying to this Mountain from the first day of our quest. And yet no help has come. No one has answered your prayers. Now we are in what has always been said to be the seat of his power, and still no help has come. We are trapped without food and with little water. More than one army waits outside to destroy us. When does the help come? What can Illengond do for us?”

  Thimeon’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I will not try to deceive you with false hope. Maybe it all has been futile. I admit that much of the help I had hoped for was from Cane. I thought that with the sword and stone both…” he left the rest of his thought unspoken. “Borodruin told me that the blade was forged long ago to be wielded against the might of the Daegmon by one with the gift of flame. It seemed clear to me at the time that he spoke of Cane. And now his gift is gone, and there is no telling how many generations of men will come before it returns. So we have lost our greatest strength.”

  “And with him went the Stone too,” Aram said glumly.

  Thimeon nodded. “The Henetos it was called. Borodruin spoke of it. Theo told me that it had been lost in battle, but he spoke only in brief. Tell me what happened. Are you sure it is destroyed?”

  “It was destroyed,” Cathros answered. “Cane was wearing it in battle when he fell. I was watching. A great clap of thunder shook the air and in the same instant he died and the stone split in two.”

  “Is it possible,” Tienna asked, “that when the sword went cold it was in response to the destruction of the stone and not to Cane’s death?”

  “It is possible,” Thimeon answered. “There were two swords, Borodruin said: one for flame and one for strength. But the later sword had long been missing, and was believed lost at sea.”

  “So the stone and sword are both lost,” Elynna said. “What of the book? Where did it come from and what is its power?”

  Thimeon looked down at the ancient tome. “This, too, was given me by Borodruin. It is all that remains of the great archives. All the wealth of knowledge that may have aided us in our battle is gone. Destroyed by Koranth. All but this.”

  “Yet Borodruin said this was the greatest treasure,” Dhan reminded Thimeon. “He was also unsure that this sword was truly the one meant for your late friend Cane. This may be the other.”

  “That is true,” Thimeon agreed. “But we saw the sword glowing with power when Cane was fighting, and we felt that power go out when he was killed.”

  “What of the book?” the prince asked. “Where does it come from? I mean, where did it originally come from.”

  “From the All-Maker,” Thimeon replied.

  “What does that mean?” several people asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, but a moment later he added, “yet I believe it is true, somehow. I have seen already both that it speaks truth and that it has power.”

  “Was it the death of Cane or the destruction of the stone that silenced the blade?” Tienna asked again.

  Thimeon pondered this. “It could have been the stone,” he said. The possibility brought some hope back. He looked again at the book. “Even after the loss of the stone this book still held power. It struck the Daegmons. It protected us from them. I could feel that, and I think all who were with me could. Without Cane or Cathros, we won a battle against two Daegmons.”

  “But there are five, now,” said Bandor. “And one of the other creatures is here also—one like Koranth. It wields great power.”

  “And even against only two,” Armas added, “aided by the power of this book, the victory was not easy. It could have gone against us.”

  Thimeon was still looking at the book in his hand. Filled up the mountain’s bowl, spilled to make the broken whole. The words popped unbidden into his head. They were words he had read just a short time ago. He lifted his eyes and looked around the cavern, and for the first time he paid attention to its shape. The floor of the cavern was a giant bowl, like an old underground lake but far too symmetric. When he’d read the song at first, he’d assumed the bowl referred to the center of the mountain’s triune peak. Maybe it did. But what if…?

  He opened the pages of the book, and began flipping through the pages looking for the poem. His hands shook with a sudden eagerness to read the words of that poem again. Voices of his companions murmured around him, but he blocked them out. Would he have to read the whole book again to find that one poem? He remembered the illustrations on the page: the peak of Illengond on the top of the left page, and the small tree with three leaves in the middle of the right page. He scanned the pages more quickly looking for the drawings, flipping forward to the end, and then backward again toward the beginning.

  On the second time through he found them, right near the middle of the book. He read the words again, eagerly. The poem on the left side was a creation tale, of the making of Gondisle and the All-Maker’s children—what Thimeon took to be the human race. Nothing about a bowl, or the gifts. He turned to the right side. Above the illustration of the tree he read again the short poem. Just four lines. Death, the great divide, shall make All-Maker bleed, it began. What that meant, Thimeon did not know. Still nothing about gifts or bowls.

  He dropped his eyes to the final poem on the page, just below the drawing of the tree. He grabbed a torch, held it closer, and began to read. The water is the mountain’s blood / To bleed into the stone and wood, it began. Stone and wood? Thimeon thought of Breanga and Gaelim. Where rebellion makes too great a rift / That blood spilled shall be His gift / Filling up the mountain’s bowl, / Spilled to make the broken whole. He looked at the illustration on the left side of the page of the bowl of clouds at the summit of the peak. Then he looked at the bowl in the center of the cavern in front of him. He thought of the stone that had been broken, the Henetos. Could it be made whole? In Illengond’s hidden roots / From the rock grows the shoot, / By the gifts merged and forged / To join the gifts in one accord.

  Before Thimeon even realized what he was doing, he started walking forward, down the slope away from the wall and toward the center of the cavern. “Gaelim,” he called. “Breanga. Follow me.”

  The murmurs rose. Questioning voices. Footsteps on rock. Thimeon continued to block it out and kept walking, down toward the center of the cavern, the deepest point of the bowl. Memories of holding the Henetos drifted through his thoughts. He could almost feel the power surging through him. He could see the shape in his thoughts as clearly as if he were holding it. The gem had not been mined, he realized as he walked. It had been shaped. That was why not even the Northlanders recognized it. The purpose of the Henetos was to bring together the people of Gondisle, to join the gifts in one accord. But the gifted were not to wield it. That’s what Bor
odruin had said. It would enhance the powers of the gifted, but also of the ungifted. Thimeon had felt that in himself. For there is strength in all of us—in all who oppose the Daegmon-Lord.

  He felt a hand on his arm. He turned to see Tienna walking beside him. Her eyes glowed with the same excitement and anticipation that Thimeon felt. “What is it?” she whispered.

  Thimeon did not answer. He had come near to the center of the cavern, the bottom of the bowl. His sudden wild hope would be disappointed or fulfilled here. He slowed his pace, raised the torch over his head, and began looking around by his feet, scanning ahead, to one side, then to the other. Tienna fell back a step. His other companions crowded around behind him.

  Then he saw something, the flicker of a shadow, an irregularity in the smooth rock floor. He stepped toward it. Slowly he dropped to his knees on the hard floor and lowered his torch almost to the ground. “May the All-Maker be praised,” he said softly.

  36

  THE BLOOD OF ILLENGOND

  Tienna remained a step behind Thimeon. She yearned to know what thought had so filled him with excitement or trepidation, but she held her questions in. She knew him well enough, and she trusted him. He would share his thoughts when the time was ready. So she followed in silence until they came to the center of the cavern, the bottom of the bowl that she now realized was ten to twelve feet below the rim.

  Thimeon stopped and dropped to his knees, lowering his torch to examine something. Tienna stepped forward and knelt beside him, following his gaze. What she saw took her by surprise. Out of the rock in front of them grew a tiny tree, no more than two feet tall with a trunk about the thickness of her thumb. It had three small branches, each with a single delicate leaf. The bark was as black as the rock, but the leaves glowed reddish gold in the torchlight. Though most of the rock floor was smooth, a dozen or so small black pebbles lay scattered around the trunk of the tree.

  This was impossible, Tienna thought. How could a tree live here with no light? How could it grow out of rock? She probed outward with her health sense. Instantly she had the sensation—terrifying and simultaneously strangely compelling—of sinking into a deep well. She gasped for breath and kicked hard toward the surface. She was once again sitting next to Thimeon looking down at the tree.

  “It’s so strange,” Tienna whispered, when she had recovered. “It’s alive. I can feel it. But it’s not like—” She paused. “It is certainly a tree, yet somehow not a tree. Its roots are massive. I can feel them all around us, reaching into the heart of the mountain. It’s almost as though the whole mountain were the roots. I thought it was going to swallow me.”

  Thimeon nodded. “Rock and wood and the mountains’ blood,” he said.

  Tienna didn’t know what Thimeon was talking about, but she knew that the tree and this place where it grew were powerful and mysterious and sacred. “The mountain’s blood?” she asked.

  “Water,” Thimeon replied. “But I don’t see any.”

  His answer was just as mysterious, but Tienna held her questions. A sense of holiness pervaded this place and made speaking feel irreverent. Or was it sorrow she sensed? Others gathered around them in a tight circle, gazing at the mysterious tree with murmurs of astonishment. “Is it alive?” Beth asked.

  “It must be,” Noab answered. “Look at the leaves.”

  Regon said something to Breanga in the Undeani tongue.

  “How can it live here?” Cathros asked. “There’s no light.”

  “Hush,” Thimeon said, and the others fell silent. Tienna knew something important would happen—needed to happen—but she didn’t know what. She looked at Thimeon. He gazed around the group until his eyes came to rest somewhere behind her. “Gaelim,” he said. “Breanga. Come here.”

  The Ceadani stone-shaper and the Undeani wood-shaper both came forward. Their expressions were solemn as they knelt by Thimeon and peered at the tree. For several minutes all of them just sat in silence gazing at the strange sight.

  Then, very slowly, Thimeon reached forward to touch the tree. No, Tienna wanted to warn him. Don’t touch it. She had a feeling that he wasn’t meant to hold it—that something bad would happen if he did. But her warning proved unnecessary. As soon as Thimeon’s hands drew close to the tree, the trunk and all the branches bent away from him as a tall tree might do before a gale. Tienna felt like the entire cavern had suddenly tilted. Several of her companions gasped in surprise.

  Thimeon withdraw his hands and the tree straightened up again. He looked at Tienna, then he looked at the tree. Again he reached out to touch it, and again it bent away from its touch. Again Tienna had the sensation that the cavern was tilting and that she was falling back into that deep well.

  Thimeon withdrew his hand again. “Breanga,” he asked, without looking up. “Do you understand me?” He said something else in the Undeani tongue.

  “I understand some of your tongue,” Breanga answered. “You may speak.”

  “Reach out your hand and try to touch the tree?” Thimeon said.

  A long moment passed and Breanga did not move. Then, very tentatively, he reached out toward the tree. The effect was just the opposite. The tree bent toward Breanga’s hand. He pulled back and looked at Thimeon. “What is it?” he asked, with awe in his voice.

  “Break off a branch,” Thimeon ordered.

  Breanga’s jaw dropped. “Will it hurt the tree?”

  “Yes,” Thimeon replied. “But it must be done.”

  Breanga nodded. He reached out again and gently closed his fingers around the bottom branch. He caressed it for a moment between his thumb and forefinger, then bent it back. The branch broke off easily in his fingers, but the instant it snapped, a low rumble shook the ground. Tienna fell backward as if struck. She felt a sudden overwhelming sensation of pain—not her own pain, but an awareness of another’s pain.

  The rumbling lasted several seconds. Only when it ceased was Tienna able to sit up again. She looked around. Breanga’s face had turned white. So had Thimeon’s. The others looked nervously around them.

  Thimeon turned to Cathros, who stood beside him and seemed to have just regained his balance. “Pick up one of the stones on the ground beside the tree.”

  Cathros bent down. He closed his fingers around one, about the size of the last joint of his smallest finger. But when he straightened to pick it up, his fingers slipped off and he almost fell backwards. The stone did not appear to be attached to the rock below it, yet it would not budge. He tried twice more to no avail. The stone had not moved even a hair’s width.

  Thimeon turned to Gaelim. “Pick up a stone if you can. Pick up the same one that Cathros tried to lift.”

  Gaelim leaned forward. His face was set in a grimace as he prepared for some heavy chore. Tienna sat tense with anticipation as he pinched the stone between his thumb and three largest fingers. It came up easily in his hands.

  Again Tienna felt the ground shift, though this time she had no awareness of pain. She gazed at the small stone in Gaelim’s hand until another movement or change in the shadows below her drew her attention. Where Gaelim had removed the stone, a hole—just smaller than the stone itself—opened up in the rock floor. Water bubbled up through the hole and began spreading outward into a small pool.

  Thimeon held the torch over the water. His voice was hushed and full of awe and wonder. “The mountain’s blood? But what else could it be?”

  “Where does it come from?” several voices asked. “What do we do?”

  For several seconds, Thimeon just stared as the pool spread and grow. Tienna had thought he had understood all this—that he had expected it and even had a plan—but he appeared to be just as much at a loss as she was.

  Suddenly, Thimeon turned to Breanga and Gaelim who knelt holding the tree branch and the stone. “Move quickly. I don’t know how long we’ll have.”

  “Have for what?” Gaelim asked. />
  “Hold the stone and branch together. Hold them in the water. You must use your gifts of shaping. Work together and fashion a single device out of the stone and the wood.”

  “How?” Gaelim asked.

  “I don’t know,” Thimeon replied. He sounded suddenly anxious. “Do something. I don’t think we have much time.” The water now formed a pool about two feet in diameter. It lapped against the root of the tree. “You must work together. Let your mind choose the shape, but you must work together, and it must be in the blood of the mountain.”

  Gaelim nodded. He exchanged glances with Breanga. Slowly they lowered their hands into the water. Breanga recoiled. Tienna understood why. When his hand went below the surface of the water, it disappeared. Though the floor of the cave was visible below the surface, as were the branch and small stone, their flesh was not. Breanga stared in horror at Thimeon, but Thimeon said nothing. So Breanga took a deep breath and returned to his work. Now the two of them—one with the small branch and the other with the stone—held their hands together, invisible beneath the surface of the pool. Both of them closed their eyes. Breanga hummed, but Gaelim was silent.

  The water continued to rise. The companions had to step away to keep their feet from getting wet. Only Gaelim and Breanga still knelt, wrapped in concentration, in a few inches of water. Soon the water was half way up the little tree. It came up faster, now. Tienna could see bubbling on the surface above the hole, like in a small woodland spring. Thimeon stood, his toes on the edge of the water, holding the torch. The portion of the bodies of Gaelim and Breanga below the water were invisible to Tienna. Still, with eyes closed, they stuck to their work.

  The ground began to rumble again. Tienna felt the overpowering need to flee. It came to her through her health sense. It came from the water itself. Something in this water and this place was too healthy for any of them. She looked up at Elynna. “We need to get out. Get the others ready to depart. Hurry.” Elynna didn’t move. “Now!” Tienna almost shouted.