The Chapel Perilous (4 page)

“Right,” I said, pulling out Fragarach. There wasn’t time to analyze the situation with a room full of armed nobles and guards who would shortly be after my head. I made sure the Fisher King lost his first, since he wasn’t using it anyway. It was telling that he hadn’t moved, even though his most trusted counselor had been whacked in the face—twice—in close proximity. I swung
Fragarach through his neck and it tumbled onto the table; there was no blood. The shadowy spells around him dissipated.

Domech jerked as if I’d hit him again and the screaming began. I checked my rear to see if anyone approached from that quarter and found the nobles cowering in a satisfactory manner. The lesser folk and the maids tore at their hair in terror as they fled the hall. There were guards running my way, however, and I was quite clearly the bad guy from their point of view.

“No!” Domech cried, his eyes fixed on the head of the Fisher King. “He was chained to the land!”

No wonder the land had died out so quickly; Domech had bound it to a dead man. With the Fisher King gone, the land would be able to recover on its own—so long as the Pict didn’t do it again.

Domech had more than earned the death sentence according to Druidic law; he’d been draining the life out of an elemental while cloaking his activities beneath a fog. There wasn’t a Druid alive who wouldn’t slay him for what he’d done, and I felt honored to get to him first. Unfortunately, he ducked under the swing of my sword and trapped my arm across my body before I could take a backswing. Magic swirled amongst the silver bars in his face and blood dripped from his ruined nose. His right hand grabbed me between the legs and then he lifted me bodily over his head,
throwing
me over the table into the clear space of the hall.

“Kill him!” he demanded, and pointed at me in case the guards hadn’t figured out I was a public nuisance.

A slim wee man like him shouldn’t have been able to pick me up and toss me. He was using the earth’s energy in the same way a Druid would to boost his strength. Except he’d stolen all that energy, leeching it through the Fisher King.

The minions in leather boots weren’t any trouble. Fishing out the silver cross, I used some of the stored magic in it to bind the leather on the insides of their calves together and they collapsed to the stone floor. Some landed less gracefully than others.

I couldn’t do the same to Domech; he had fashioned some kind of ward against my bindings. He couldn’t affect me directly with his magic either, since necromancers are incapable of affecting the living except through the dead. I used some of the juice to increase my speed and strength instead and charged him.

For all the power he had leeched, Domech was still at a disadvantage and he knew it. He wasn’t armed or armored and there weren’t any dead people in the hall he could use for his own ends. He did, however, have some big fucking chairs he could throw at me. I leapt over the first one but the second knocked me down. He was on top of me before I could regain my feet, his left hand pinning my sword arm to the floor while his right tried to grasp my throat. I prevented that by sweeping my left arm out, dropping the cross, and then I locked onto his neck—a rather skinny one—and began to squeeze with all I had. He could have grabbed me in turn, but instead he clawed at my arm and tried to break my grip. His damned nails ripped at my forearm and he bruised me, but he wasn’t enough of a fighter to know anything about pressure points or how to break bones.

“That black hand of yours got two Druids this way in the chapel,” I said through clenched teeth. “You know the one I mean, Domech? The wheel keeps turning, doesn’t it?”

He couldn’t answer me. I crushed his trachea and his hands fell slack as the strength left him. I rolled him off me and saw that there was still plenty of magic centered on his head. As a necromancer, he might have rigged his own resurrection, so I removed the Pict’s head and tossed it into the hearth to burn. I didn’t need my magical sight anymore, so I dispelled it.

More guards streamed into the hall, including the captain, alerted by the panicked dinner guests. The lads on the floor couldn’t decide whether to plea for help or to urge their friends to get me. It was time to make my exit, so I picked up the silver cross and hurried to the nobles’ table. Dogs had leapt on the tables to chow down since the humans had left all that perfectly good food there to cool. One of them was feeding directly from Dagda’s cauldron and couldn’t believe his good fortune. He snapped at my arm when I tried to take the cauldron but discovered that his teeth didn’t fare well against chain mail.

“Go on, you’re full,” I said, and he allowed me to take the cauldron without any more fuss. I upended it to turn off the infinite refill and then camouflaged it, my kit, and myself with the remainder of the magic stored in my cross. I sheathed Fragarach as the dismayed shouts of the guards echoed in the hall. Carrying the cross in my left hand and the cauldron—or the Grail—in my right, I did my best to hurry past them with a minimum of noise. It’s tough to sneak around in armor, but they were helping me out by loudly asking each other where I went.

Once out in the unpaved courtyard where I had access to the earth, it was a simple matter to maintain my camouflage and slip past the guards at the gate. I retrieved Apple Jack from the stable where I’d left him and set off across the wasteland toward Gloucester. Weather patterns returned to normal and the elemental was showing the first signs of recovery with the necromancer truly dead. You’d never know today that the area around Swansea had been a desert for a few months.

I didn’t see the Chapel Perilous, as it came to be known, on my way back. Most of the lads had cleared out of the Silver Stallion by the time of my second visit and I was able to get a room. There were only three people there, in fact—myself, the innkeeper, and one other—and it was with them that I shared the story of what happened, the quest for the magic
graal
. From there the story was told and retold through the centuries until poets like Chretien de Troyes finally started to write them down.

Ogma was waiting for me on the trail to Gloucester the next morning. I returned Dagda’s cauldron to him and he thanked me. I told him about Domech and what he’d done, the dead Druids at the chapel, and he was grateful that I had dispatched the Pict as well.

“What would you have of me?” Ogma said. “I owe you some favor for what you’ve done.”

“I’d like to stay out of Aenghus Óg’s sight for a while, if you can manage it.”

He gave me a hunk of cold iron and told me to wear it as a talisman. “It won’t completely shield you from divination but it will make it more difficult to pinpoint your location. And I’ve recently linked a new part of the world to Tír na nÓg. Feel like learning a new language?”

I told him I did. After bidding farewell to Apple Jack, Ogma shifted me east of the Elbe River, where the Slavic people were emerging as a distinct culture. And that was how I, as Gawain, came to be immortalized in legend.

Granuaile dropped her eyes to the fire after I finished and said, “Wow.”

Oberon said.

Thanks, buddy.

My apprentice looked up from the fire. “Are necromancers common?”

“Quite rare, actually, outside of video games. Domech was one of the worst, but I was able to surprise him. If he’d had time to run the fight his way, I don’t think I would have made it.”

“That’s where you got the idea for your cold iron amulet,
isn’t it?”

“Yes, that gave me the idea. The silver cross gave me the idea for the charms, and Apple Jack is the reason I have a talking hound today.” I scratched Oberon behind the ears. “Ogma did me quite a favor by sending me on that trip.”

Of course I did.

Meat and potatoes in the most delicious gravy I’ve ever had, Oberon. I still dream about it.

Good night, Oberon.

“That story actually made me a bit hungry,” Granuaile said. “Anybody up for a snack?”

Oberon leapt to his feet, tail wagging. he explained.

I smiled at him.
Understood.