High in the turret of the keep, with the shutters tight closed and no tallow torch or even a candle to light the room, Mandrake was awake, and trembling.
He heard the sound of ponderous footfalls on flagstones, slow and deliberate, getting nearer with every heavy tread. It louder and louder until the walls began to shake.
He knew what was coming next.
Doom …Doom … the thick oak door shivered. Dust puffed out and dry splinters of rust and old wood tumbled at the hinges.
Stay away. Stay away…he tried to speak.
The door creaked. It had been locked with a massive iron hasp, but still, it opened, shuddering. A grey mist oozed through the portal.
Then came the smell. Foetid, cloy and clogging in the air, dank on his sweating skin.
Out of the mist his older brother came, the reek of death on him. Lugan Redthorn's feet scraped the stone flags. His skin sloughed off a skeletal face and in the pits of his eye sockets, red pinpoints glared.
"A curse on you brother." Lugan's voice was the crackle of dead-winter leaves underfoot.
"Forever cursed."
Mandrake cringed, trying to back away from the apparition, but there was no escape. Lugan's face was black with the poison of the mandrake root and the wolfbane that had slowly killed him.
Now Lugan stood before him, rotting and rotted, a ghastly spectre. Mandrake cringed.
Another shape came behind, taller than the first, broader, hair in thick red braids, every inch a man, but for the dreadful gash that cut from forehead across his eye and nose, down to his chin.
Young Ceruin Redthorn stood beside his father, dead men both, but alive with an anger that they carried with them from the other side.
Ceruin leant forward. Around his head, a crown of five stars sparkled. Like his father, he raised a hand and pointed it at Mandrake's heart.
"The sword. You stole the sword."
Mandrake tried to breathe, tried to cry out, but no sound would come, no breath.
Ceruin had blood in his eyes. His hand dripped red down into darkness.
The Red Hand . An omen. The red hand and the circlet of stars.
Drenched in a cold sweat mandrake wondered if the Bards had turned the tables and put a curse on him.
But inside him, somewhere deep down where his most bitter thoughts lurked, he knew it was not this. He could feel the corrosion eating him, worse than acid.
There was always a price to pay.
* * *
Mandrake had learned the forgotten legends of the Morrigan when Men fought the Fomorians and he knew their power had come from her darkness.
He knew all of it, the great geas laid on the Morrigan's stone prison whose location had been forgotten down the generations.
And it was in the study of the dark arts that he had, after years of searching, finally come to understand how they had trapped the ancient Morrigan.
But equally important to him was the final knowledge of where it had been done, and even more so, how to bring her back to this world.
When the time was ripe, he used his knowledge to gather what he needed and he had watched Lugan Redthorn slowly die.
Then he had stolen the Redthorn Sword, the sword of Cullian, the fire-blade that had trapped the destroyer in a prison of stone, and as Lugan lay dying, he had taken it with him when he fled the Redthorn Keep and set out on his journey.
Even in her long, long sleep, she called to him. She whispered promises of wealth and power beyond his dreams.
Lordship of Temair and all lands would be his. And more. She promised him the Lordship of worlds.
He had gone on the hard journey, alone, at first on horseback until the horse had died under him, then on foot, with nothing but his hunger and anger and need to keep him going.
He walked through swamp and marsh, climbed treeless slopes where nothing moved under a sun that scorched by day, and a frozen moon by night, until he came to the high Salt Barrens.
Delirious with thirst and blinded by mile after mile of dry salt dunes, his lips were blackened and cracked, but he stumbled and staggered on, weighed down by the sword, eating lizards and scorpions and things that lived under the rime of salt.
The closer he came to the Black Barrow, the more devastated the land became, the more he felt the awesome gravity of her presence. Rambling and half mad, he listened as he stumbled on. Her voice had told him where to dig and after that, when he had almost killed himself in prying a massive stone loose from where it had sat these thousands of years, he was inside, out of the burning light, into the darkness where foul water puddled at his feet.
It seemed he wandered in dark tunnels for days, under the weight of the stones, images in his head, images of her pale face and long braided hair and lips the colour of new blood. He sensed her presence, felt it in every pore of his body, his nerves tingling with anticipation.
When he saw the great stone slab, he knew he had found her.
And when he rested the sword upon the stone, he felt her power surge through him as she woke. He prostrated himself on the slab, saw her swim up towards him, her beauty impossible, eyes as black as caves, her arms reaching for him.
Mandrake lay there a long time, bathing in her terrible power, filled with the urgency to break the last geas and bring her back into the world.
Together we will rule, she sang in his mind.
Together we will rule worlds.
She promised herself to him, to have forever, her terrible beauty and her might.
He raised the Redthorn Sword and plunged it deep into the stone.
In a shattering instant she came awake and her power, as it surged through him was vast. It threw him, shivering to the ground where he lay in a stupor, overwhelmed by the force of her will.
He was never sure how long he had been in the darkness, but when he came out again into the Salt Barrens, into the sunlight that hurt his eyes, great flocks of roaks and ravens wheeled about him.
He could see what they saw and he could use their eyes to go where she had shown him the cave half way to the Scree mountains. Long ago treasures had been hidden there, and with the Roaks as companions, he found wealth beyond his wildest dreams, wealth that would enable him to return to the Redthorn Keep with an army.
Now he had wealth and power, the sight of the Roaks and knowledge beyond even his own twisted ambition.
The melding with her mind had changed him. Sunlight hurt his eyes and blistered his skin, so he kept to the shadows and wakened in the night when she would come to him, invade his mind to whisper her plans.
Now the whole of Temair lay under his hand while the people who had looked to Lugan Redthorn for leadership worked under his command, slaving on the great project that would finally free her from the fireglass prison.
* * *
Up in the high tower, the visions faded.
He would let neither the ghosts of Redthorns, nor the Bards stop him now.
In the room where he had raised dark magic, he mixed his own vision, and flying with the roaks in the early morning mist, he saw through their eyes.
He saw a boat emerging from the mist, oarless and rudderless, moving with an uncanny power.
As the Roaks spiralled to the water, he saw the three of them , saw her red hair clearly against the grey of the cold water.
Mandrake laughed.
She stepped off as soon as the boat touched the bank, Corriwen Redthorn and the two boys and the mist closed in over the water as they began to walk down a forest trail. The Roak-eyes followed them into open country where fires had blackened the fields and smoke rose in grey shrouds.
He summoned his guard. They came warily, for a night summons to Mandrake's tower was always fraught with danger.
"Bring the Scree hunters," Mandrake croaked. "We will not miss them this time."
"Go and find her and bring her alive," he snarled. "I'll roast her and feed for a week."
Mandrake turned: "And those boys. They have something I want."
He reached the window, threw open the shutters, and stared into dismal dawn. As his retainer watched, his expression changed yet again until he was no longer recognisable as Mandrake at all.
Whatever Mandrake had become, raised bony arms to the sky, as if it could pull down the moon and tear it apart.
Then it began to laugh.