Destiny: Child of the Sky

84

The first to feel the change was Grunthor.

Like the sensation that occurred within the ear while climbing a high mountain, the pressure in his head expanded, then popped as the earth beneath his feet turned ill.

Achmed looked to his friend questioningly. There was no mistaking the change that had come over the Sergeant-Major; the amber eyes were wide and growing glassy; his bruise-colored skin was flushing, his enormous nostrils flaring as his heart pumped great volumes of blood. He stared off to the west for a moment, and then his muscles coiled as he vaulted off the rim of the Moot and down toward the tentative gathering below.

“Down from the rise!” he roared to Rhapsody, then bolted down the face of Bowl into the crowd of confused Cymrians, who only a moment before had been in the throes of joyous celebration. “Move! Move!” His voice rumbled through the air and over the bewildered populace, frozen in fright as he charged them; then he was shoving them in any direction away from the sloping rise at the center of the Moot which no one but the giant Bolg had felt shaking.

Rhapsody had broken from Gwydion’s embrace at Grunthor’s shout, and turned to look down into the blank faces of the throng of Cymrians. The crowd was quickly parting in Grunthor’s path, scattering out of his way, though the noise of fear had not come forth yet; everything was eerily silent. Her eyes went back to the pulpit, then widened in horror.

“The horn is gone,” she said to Gwydion, then turned and shouted to Achmed. “The horn is gone!”

Achmed nodded, not turning; he at that moment heard an alarm go up from his lookouts and Tristan’s forces on the western face of the Moot. He spun quickly and shielded his eyes from the bright light of noon.

A rider was galloping across the Krevensfield Plain, spurring his horse mercilessly. Even as far away as he was the Bolg king could hear him shouting hoarsely, sounding an alarm. The Orlandan army, encamped now, began rising unsteadily, cautiously gathering arms and armaments, when another shout went up.

“It’s Anborn! Open the gate!”

Behind him the sky was rolling black, clouds of smoke billowing as though a volcano in the sky had erupted. As Anborn approached, the- black smoke roared closer; it had the breadth of a grass fire of continental proportions driving ahead of a purposeful wind, but as it approached it became clear that there was no flame, but rather the earth itself, ripping violently from the wide plain, dust and grit vaulted skyward by the sheer force that disturbed it.

In the shadow of the darkness came an army. For a moment it appeared to be legions of beasts, as much of it did not walk erect, but rather moved across the land as if being dragged by some unseen force. Rhapsody gasped and clutched Gwydion’s arm, recalling the vision from the observatory tower. “It’s the Cymrian dead, the Fallen, slaughtered in the Great War.” Her words came out in a half-whisper. “Anwyn has summoned them from the Past.”

The sea of walking bodies crested the horizon, staining the rim of the world black with their number. The shell of every corpse that had perished on the plain or in the mountain, any body that had not been immolated or otherwise fully consumed, had been reanimated by the sheer force of memory and had crawled or staggered or slid toward the Moot; now they stood, amid a sea of the dead, of decay and disease and human fragments magnetized to Anwyn’s wrath.

From the peaks of the Teeth came a roar like captured thunder moving through the mountains. Avalanches of rock and soil rolled from the crags, starting at Griwen and then rumbling through Canrif and all of the peaks that rimmed the foothills, until the shale began to rain down on the Moot, a pelting hail of sharp dust. From those hillsides rose more soldiers in Anwyn’s force, animated bodies of Nain and Lirin, human and demi-human, adults and children, all the victims of Anwyn and Gwylliam’s great folly, crawling forth from the vaults of the dead to answer the call of the horn as they once had long ago.

Outside the Moot, the army of Roland, one hundred thousand strong, began massing into legions and columns. Rhapsody shuddered at the sight. Where before they had seemed a numerous force, one that by its sheer number threatened to challenge Achmed’s hold on the mountain, now they were suddenly and overwhelmingly dwarfed, outnumbered perhaps a hundred to one, perhaps more. She didn’t have time to count.

From the belly of the Moot a thundering rumble issued forth. The ground bubbled and broke open an instant later, crushing, overwhelming, swallowing Cymrians from every fleet who had been unable to move out of the way. Amid screams of terror more soldiers of the dead crawled forth, from ancient and forgotten mass graves, swords and rotting spears in their hands wrapped in burial cloths or shroud-rags. Their sightless eyes turned to the scattering masses that fled before them like crows before a storm.

Grunthor and a small band he had conscripted and armed from his personal arsenal had managed to interpose themselves between the crush of fleeing pilgrims and the grisly approach of what seemed thousands of the disinterred. He was simultaneously screaming orders to the ramparts to mobilize the hiding army of the Bolg.

In the panic of the earthen tremors Rhapsody felt a sense of calm settle on her, muting the anger that was burning behind her eyes. Quickly she cast her gaze around the Moot, erupting now beneath the sea of the living, foaming and cresting like an earthen sea, filling it with waves of the dead.

A group of children, mostly human, had been separated in the initial cataclysm, torn from their family groups when the ground sundered. Their cries of panic were only slightly louder than those of the adults struggling to get to them. From her place on the rim above, Rhapsody could see a river of as-yet-undisturbed earth that might serve as a bridge between them.

Gwydion squeezed her hand, then loosed it as they exchanged a nod. “Open the gate!” he shouted to the swirling mass of panicking people nearest the Moot’s great earthen doors. He darted down the side of the Bowl toward the entrance gates while Rhapsody hurried in the opposite direction, to the chasm between the children and adults, where the ground was rumbling in the advent of another schism.

“Here! Here! Follow the unbroken ground!” she called. Her voice, clear with royal timbre and full of a Namer’s authority, rang over the cacophony below, cutting through the noise like a diamond through glass. The children turned immediately and sighted on her. “Come—come to me.” Rhapsody held out her arms, beckoning the panicking children over the rise of earth.

Across the Bowl Gwydion’s eyes had sighted on an answer as well.

“Stephen!” he shouted from one of the Moot’s lower rims. The Duke of Navarne spun amid the maelstrom of Cymrians, living and dead, hearing his friend’s call. “Stephen—open the gates! Clear the Moot!” Gwydion could see understanding take root in his eyes; Stephen nodded that understanding, then passed his screaming daughter to the outstretched arms of a nearby guardsman and broke through the crowd, heading toward the earthen gates.

Gwydion turned to see the masses of panicking people raining down the sides of the Moot into its floor, toppling and smashing into one another in their fright. The rocky causeways and rims of earthen seats shuddered, both from the disturbance below the ground and from the flood of evacuees crawling and tumbling from the higher sides of the Bowl. He grabbed the arm of a half-Lirin woman as she fell, then interposed himself in the stream of evacuees.

“Settle, be calm!” he said authoritatively, the rumble and threat of wyrm-flame barely beneath the surface. “I command you, slow your pace and egress carefully.” The crowd swelled, then stopped. The new Lord Cymrian lifted the supine woman and hauled her easily over the broken mounds of earth, guiding her toward the exit, then turned to the mass behind him. “Slowly,” he commanded. “Be cautious.” He pulled the first man forward and assisted him through the dust from where the earth had been rent, hovering in the air over the newly formed rise, then signaled to the others to follow.

In the center rise of the Moot’s floor, Grunthor was counting troops and victims, grimly revising his estimates moment by moment as more of the disinterred poured forth from the hillsides, broke up from the valleys, and clawed up from the earth. The Cymrians, powerful and long-lived as they might be, were unprepared for any sort of battle. With the exception of Tristan’s army, now preparing to engage the coming tidal wave of the dead, the attendees of the Council had come dressed and equipped for a pilgrimage rather than a campaign. The Sergeant-Major knew that if he was fast, and very, very lucky, he might be able to choose which groups had to be sacrificed, instead of leaving that choice to Anwyn.

“Shoulda torn that bitch’s head from ’er shoulders when Oi ’ad the chance,” he muttered darkly, then shielded his eyes from the blinding brightness of the sun and the hailstorm of gravel and dust mixed with blood, fresh and long-dried.

His stomach roiled as he edged his thin troop of volunteers into an arc to protect those Rhapsody was guiding away. The Earth itself was filling his ears with screams, like the anguished protest of a brutal rapist’s victim, a mother bewailing the slaughter of her children before her eyes. Against his will his mouth opened and roared in answer, a war scream of ferocity and threat that rose above the din for a moment, then was swallowed in the noise of terror and panic around him.

Rhapsody heard the sound, and it turned her blood to ice. She passed the last of the children over the buckling bridge of land beneath her in the center of the Bowl’s floor and crawled over the slab of buckled earth, struggling to make her way to Grunthor, dodging the clutching sea of bony hands emerging from the tomb of memory.

The light of the sun above disappeared into the roiling clouds of blackness swirling like the sea in a tempest. As the darkness of noon fell over the Moot the scattered Cymrian assemblage fell into wary silence. Then a shout went up and rolled in a wave through the shattered Moot, only pieces of words sounding over the din.

“The gates! The gates are open!”

By now the tide of the Disinterred had surged in a monstrous wave, swallowing the earth and those who stood upon it. The shambling army streamed down from the mountain passes like rivers of gore, making the shining waterfalls run red with the red clay of disgorged earth. The ground within the Moot continued to spew them forth, and all the while the horizon continued to darken with their approach as the soldiers of the Past answered Anwyn’s call, filling the air with the scent of the grave.

Ripples of blue light caught Rhapsody’s eye. She turned to see Ashe, Kirsdarke boiling in his hands, swinging the water sword in sweeping arcs, driving back a phalanx of fallen, holding a stand of unbroken high ground. He had rallied a number of ancient warriors to the cause, and with him they beat the corpses back with staves, lanterns, any object that could be employed as a weapon, fighting by the side of the new Lord, the grandson of those who had brought this calamity upon them. The Lord Cymrian remained in the place his grandparents had once reigned, holding back the tide of the dead as best he could.

“Aria!” he shouted over the din. “Lead them out of here!”

She turned again; behind him was a huge cluster of trembling people, Gwadd and human mostly, trapped between the blistering ground and the oncoming tide of the dead. A tiny sliver of unbroken ground was all that remained between them and the great gaping hole that barred the gate, occluded in darkness—the frightened Cymrians either could not see the land bridge, or were too panicked to try to cross the chasm.

Quickly she drew Daystar Clarion. The blade of elemental fire and starlight roared forth from its sheath, ringing its call across the growling roar of the Moot. Those huddled in panic heard the sound, saw the bright flash of light, and shied away, then squinted.

In her mind she could hear the voice of Oelendra, her mentor, instructing her patiently.

Iliachenva’ar; the word means “bringer of light into a dark place.”

Or from one.

Yes.

Rhapsody held the sword aloft, a great burning beacon that cut through the gritty darkness of death that hung heavy in the air.

“Come!” she shouted. Her voice reverberated in the air.

She leapt down from the mound on which she was standing onto the sliver of earth, holding the sword up in front of her, then began to back across the land bridge over the chasm, toward the gate, praying that the army Tristan had brought to threaten Achmed was now holding the ground outside the Moot. The light from the sword splashed over the land bridge; the flames cast a bright, uneven glow, illuminating the path.

-

The masses that had been standing in terror began to follow her slowly. She kept up the pace, occasionally striking at a fleshless hand or head that rose up from the ground beneath her feet, leading the cluster of terrified souls closer and closer to the doors of the collapsing Moot. In the distance she could still see the blazing blue light of Ashe’s sword, driving back the waves of darkness that still emerged from the belly of the Earth.

Then behind her the crowd swelled, and she was carried along on a surge of speed as they passed through the broken gate, torn open by Stephen and his forces, who now were somewhere in the fields surrounding the Moot. The Cymrians, having escaped the certain death of being trapped within the Moot, now faced the oncoming army. All around, from every mountainside, every swale of earth, bodies clashed in combat, some who still lived, some who had lived and died long before, locked in the embrace of mutual destruction.

Outside the Moot, the powerlessness vanished, but desperation was beginning to take hold. Women and men fought with flagpoles, food baskets, bare hands, whatever was available to them, joining the fray from which they had once cowered. The leaders of the provinces, Stephen Navarne, Quentin Baldasarre, and Martin Invenstrand, had rallied large groups of them, setting up a secondary front behind the soldiers of Roland. Stephen turned to Tristan, who had managed to escape the Moot in the last swell.

“Well, cousin,” he panted, drawing his sword, “I don’t know for what purpose you really brought the army to a gathering of peace, but a stroke of luck it was.” Tristan, his garments torn and blackened with the dried blood of his ancestors, only nodded.

“Look well on them one last time,” Baldasarre said, fingering the hilt of his sword. “Trapped with the Teeth behind them, the dead before and all around them, they have no chance—none whatsoever.”

“Gods,” Invenstrand whispered, coming up alongside of them. The approaching army of the Fallen was now within range of the soldiers of Roland. The Orlandan army had employed every ballista, every catapult, flinging burning pitch into the advancing bulwark of the dead, but to no avail. They were vastly outnumbered; it was as if the tide of victims of the heinous battles of the Great War were endless, like the tides of the sea, crashing ever onward in waves, bent only on the destruction Anwyn savored to avenge her humiliation.

From the midst of the fray, Achmed had cleared the Ledge of emerging corpses. He caught the eye of his Sergeant-Major, standing atop a rise in the ruins of the Moot. The giant Bolg nodded, and the Firbolg king nodded in return.

Grunthor threw back his head and roared. The sound carried over the din below; it vibrated in the Earth itself, shaking loose shale from the mountains, rumbling through the rocks. In the heat of battle raging on the fields surrounding the Moot and on the Krevensfield Plain the combatants felt the tremors from the Sergeant’s call; even the disinterred dead, the war-fallen, seemed to pause at the sound.

A moment later great fissures opened in the Teeth; the battlements and guard towers tore open. The mountainsides ran black as the Firbolg army roared forth, swelling down the cliff faces and onto the steppes below.

Grunthor’s war cry was picked up by half a million voices, chanted across the peaks, screamed in the descent to the fields, rattling the very earth. The soldiers of Roland, embroiled in the conflict with the dead, felt them come, much as they had a year before, only this time to engage a common enemy. The swirling maelstrom of battle blackened further as the Bolg spilled forth, joining the men in common warfare, seeking to drive the dead back into their graves.

Martin Ivenstrand clutched at Tristan Steward’s arm as the ocean of Firbolg rolled like a tidal wave down onto the Krevensfield Plain.

“I though you said they had been decimated!” he shouted above the deafening clamor.

“They—they were,” the Lord Roland mumbled. “They—”

The dukes had just enough opportunity to run for cover as a column of Bolg soldiers stampeded through where they had been standing, screaming a war cadence, bent on destruction.

Rhapsody stood at the top of a torn swale on the plain. All around her cacophony reigned. The ground rumbled with the vibration of war, the thundering of horses; it was all she could do to remain upright in the fray. Amid the shrieking and clashing that filled the air she could hear a frighteningly familiar tattoo, a cadence of horrifying crescendo coming ever closer.

She looked up, trembling. In the near distance a swirling storm of dust and black clods of earth blasted skyward into the air beneath a tangle of galloping hooves, moving closer with each passing second. From within that approaching storm the bloodstained warrior of her nightmares was riding down on her, blue eyes gleaming ferociously, beating his straining mount with merciless urgency. The veins in his neck and forehead protruded from a face clenched in grim concentration.

It was Anborn.

He was shouting something, screaming really, but Rhapsody couldn’t hear him over the din. He leaned slightly off the saddle to the right, stretching his arm out to her. Behind him the horizon was black with motion too distant and frenetic to discern. Rhapsody held out her arms, preparing to be swept up and onto the horse before him.

As she did the sky above and around her darkened, the searing heat of battle suddenly purged by a rush of wind that chilled her to the bone. As if time had slowed, she saw the veins in Anborn’s neck stiffen, his teeth bare, as he opened his mouth in a great war scream, drowned out by the noise all around her. His eyes had moved from her face to the sky above her.

She looked up just as the slashing claw of the dragon that blotted out the sun above struck with blinding speed, snatching her from the ground, crushing her in its talons, taking her into the sky in the twinkling of an eye, like the helpless prey of a raptor.