Elegy for a Lost Star

27

The outer ring of the city was a maze of white and gray marble buildings set into the foothills of the mountains that eventually became the guardian hills of Sorbold to the south. Those buildings—houses, meeting halls, and museums—shone in the light of morning from a great distance, making the entire city seem to glow from the radiance.

If that were not enough to lend a holy, almost magical patina to the landscape, in the center of the city stood an enormous structure known as the Spire, the pinnacle of Lianta’ar, the great basilica of the Star, the most sacred of all the elemental basilicas. A feat of almost magical engineering, the base of the structure spanned the width of a city block, tapering upward a thousand feet in the air to the pinnacle, which was crowned with a glowing silver star. The shining summit was rumored to contain a piece of ether from the star Melita, the entity known in Cymrian lore as the Sleeping Child, which had fallen to Earth in the First Age of history. Its impact swamped the Island, leaving it half its previous size. Thereafter, the burning star had lain beneath the waves for four millennia, boiling the ocean above it, until at last it had risen and claimed the rest of the Island. But a piece of it had traveled with the Cymrian exodus, or so the legends insisted, and now lighted the top of the Spire, which gleamed day and night, visible from a hundred leagues away.

Lasarys and the two acolytes who had escaped the purge in the square of Jierna Tal had followed that light like a beacon. Knowing that if they were recognized on their way out of Sorbold they would have been returned to Talquist, who believed them dead and would make certain of that belief if he knew otherwise, they had traveled slowly and circumspectly, joining a foot caravan of pilgrims on their way to the holy city. The pilgrims had embraced them, having similarly anonymous travelers in their midst, and allowed them to remain in their company until the Spire came into view. Then the former priests set out on their own, looking to find the Blesser of Sorbold, their nation’s benison, Nielash Mousa, and tell him all that they had seen.

Now they stood at the city gates, the towering Spire casting a deep shadow over them. The priests, swathed in the robes of pilgrims, stood in silence, allowing the majesty of their holy city and its Spire to wash over them along with the crystals of ice that danced on the wind. The Spire was seen as the Patriarch’s direct link with the Creator, and so looking upon it was a bit like looking at the threshold of the Afterlife.

Lester was the first to gain his voice.

“How do we find the Blesser, Father?” he asked Lasarys nervously, watching the river of human traffic, most of it composed of acolytes and priests of the Patrician religion, streaming into the city gates along with merchants and tradesmen and beggars seeking alms. “None of us has ever been here before; in asking the way, we will doubtless be recognized, as the others here all seem to be of Orlandan blood.”

The elderly sexton shook his head. “Keep your eyes to the ground, my sons, and pray to the All-God to sustain us.”

Dominicus tucked his hands nervously into the sleeves of his robe and fell into place behind Lasarys with Lester. Together the three men approached the city gate.

“What’s your business here?” demanded the guard rotely.

Lasarys bowed deferentially. “Linen makers from Sorbold, sir,” he said meekly. “Here to clean His Holiness’s robes and scutch the flax for his new set.”

The guard snorted, then stepped aside, his eyes glassy with boredom.

Quickly the three priests hurried through the crowded streets, making their way to the manse where the Patriarch lived. It was not difficult to locate; the rectory was a beautiful marble building with immense doors bound in brass, attached to the basilica itself, at the opposite end of the city from the Spire, but still directly beneath the light of the star at its summit. It was guarded by two soldiers with spears.

“What do you want?” the first guard demanded as the three men approached the doors.

“We’re priests of Sorbold, here to see Nielash Mousa,” said Lasarys in a low voice, again averting his eyes modestly. “We beg his immediate audience; it’s very important.”

The first soldier regarded him with narrowed eyes, then muttered a few words to his companion, who nodded. The guard opened one of the huge brass-bound doors and disappeared into the manse. Many long moments later he returned, looking smug.

“The benison is no longer here,” he said. “He’s returned to Sorbold, alas. Be on your way.”

The three priests stared at each other in dismay, then quickly turned away, not wishing to further rouse the ire or the interest of the guards.

“Now what?” asked Lester desperately.

“Perhaps we could speak to the Patriarch,” Dominicus suggested.

Lasarys choked back a sour laugh.

“The Patriarch doesn’t receive the likes of us, nor should he,” he said, stepping past an icy drain where street water had clogged, leaving a patch of ice that reached into the cobbled road like frozen fingers. “When he is not consulting with heads of state or the high priests and benisons, he is receiving our prayers to the All-God and offering them up.” The two acolytes nodded; every adherent to the Patrician faith understood the tenet that prayer was offered by the people to their local priest, who in turn offered it to the area’s high priest, whose entreaties were made to the benison, and ultimately to the Patriarch, who offered them, in a great convocation of praise, directly to the All-God. The Patriarch alone had a straight means of communication with the Creator; all others went through channels.

“Then what are we to do?” Lester persisted.

Lasarys sighed dispiritedly.

“Let us visit Lianta’ar, and offer our prayers there,” he said. “If nothing else, the presence of the holy ether above us in the Spire may cleanse our minds a little of the horror we have witnessed. Perhaps wisdom will come to us then.”

The priests circled the enormous building, seeking the entrance doors. They found them at the eastern side of the temple, facing the rising sun. The doors were fashioned of gleaming brass inset with silver in the pattern of an eight-pointed star, framing the huge basilica whose towering walls of polished marble and overarching dome were taller than any in the known world.

For the sexton and acolytes, who had spent a good deal of their respective lives serving the faithful of the Patrician faith but who had never until this day been to Sepulvarta, and never until this moment had been to Lianta’ar, entering the basilica through those doors was a little bit like stepping directly into the Afterlife. The basilica’s architecture was unsurpassed in breadth, depth, and beauty, with countless colors and patterns of mosaics gracing the floors and ceiling, exquisite giltwork on the frescoed walls and the windows fashioned in colored glass. The men stopped, unable to take it all in and continue moving, just as the hundreds of other members of the faithful who had entered the doors moments before them were standing still in awe.

Finally, after more than a few moments of rapture, the sexton shook off his reverie and plucked at Lester’s sleeve. Quickly they made their way through the assembled faithful staring openmouthed at the ceiling, past the lector’s circle, where sacred texts were read aloud, and into one of the rows of seats and kneelers that surrounded the central altar on all sides.

The altar itself was elevated atop a cylindrical rise of stairs. It was fashioned in plain stone but edged in platinum, and could be seen from anywhere in the basilica. To this altar each week were brought special intentions, special prayers, and requests for wisdom or healing that had been compiled by the five benisons of the faith, and sent to the Patriarch for presentation to the All-God. Lasarys stared at the altar now, silently placing his petition at the feet of the Creator through the hands of the Patriarch, even though he was not in the position to do so.

O holy one, Father of the Universe, Lord of Life, hear my prayer, for I am in fear for your world.

He bowed his head, struggling to remain calm.

The silence of the basilica, broken by the occasional echoing of footsteps and whispering, settled on his shoulders, but no words came to his mind. Finally, after almost an hour in reflection, Lasarys lifted his head and looked at the two acolytes.

Dominicus was still bent in prayer, his hands folded before his eyes. Lester was staring without focus at the altar, a look of quiet panic on his face.

“Anything?” he asked them softly.

The two priests-in-training shook their heads.

Lasarys sighed. He rose stiffly, the joints of his elderly frame sore with age.

“Very well, my sons. Let us quit this place and look around the city; perhaps there are others of our order here we can find sustenance with. But be certain you do not share your name with them, lest it get back to Talquist.”

The acolytes nodded again, and followed the sexton out of the basilica.

As they stepped into the blinding winter sunshine, another, brighter flash assaulted their eyes.

It was the blade of a spear that had stopped a hairsbreadth from Lasarys’s face.

“Are you the sexton of Terreanfor?” the guard demanded. “And did you enter this city on false grounds?”

Lasarys, always a shy, bookish man, looked the man in the eye and nodded slightly.

“Come with me,” the guard said gruffly.

As four other guards closed around them, the priests’ eyes glittered, but they said nothing; they bowed their heads beneath the hoods of their cloaks and followed the lead guard away from the basilica.

With the hardening of the earth at winter’s approach came a similar hardening of Faron’s will.

Each passing day drove him deeper into the frost-blanched fields, through the undisturbed snowpack of the inner continent. His primitive mind had comprehended the necessity to hide, to be unseen in populated areas, but now, as he scoured the lands southeast of Navarne, where there was little but open field, endless road, and forest, his fear and need to remain unseen was dissipating, leaving him emboldened, almost rash.

The coldness of the earth was displeasing to him; he felt like a child pushed from its mother’s lap. He could still feel the heartbeat of it, still sense the warmth beneath the deep blanket of snow, but the sense of comfort that he had drawn from the ground beneath his stone feet in the heat of the desert sand was gone, replaced by a growing sense of anger, of agitation.

Of hate.

He had no need of sleep or of sustenance; the earth was sustaining him through the Living Stone that formed his body. All the while, the dark fire within him, his demonic father’s legacy, was baking the core of his being, withering that stone, making it hard, too, like the earth.

Like his will.

Beneath the crust of that same cold earth, the dragon heard the echo of her name change.

Aaaaaaaannnnnnnnwyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnn!

The beast’s eyes widened in the darkness. The sound that she had followed for so long, had tracked within the strata of the Earth, rang clear and high above her, signaling that she was directly beneath the place where it had been spoken.

It vibrated in waves, as if she were hearing it through water; the beast concentrated and decided after a moment that she was, in fact, hearing a watery echo from a spring-fed lake that she sensed, cool and dark, above her. Despite its distortion there was a clarity to it that could not be denied; her heart began to race with excitement darkened by the cruelty of revenge.

With all the force that her titanic muscles could muster, the beast bore up through the layers of rocks, crawling with every ounce of her coiled strength, gaining speed, gaining fury, toward the surface.

Toward sweet destruction.

28

The royal caravan slowed to a halt at the call of the lead driver.

Gwydion Navarne waited until his carriage had rolled to a stop, then carefully pulled aside the heavy shade and glanced outside. Salt spray blew into the carriage, carrying with it crystals of ice that stung as they made contact with his skin. He dropped the shade and looked questioningly at the Lord Marshal, who was sitting uncomfortably on the velvet bench across from him.

The visit of state to Tyrian, the Lirin forest realm over which Rhapsody was titular queen, had gone reasonably well. Anborn had remained, for the most part, out of sight, as the Lirin tended to still harbor an old grudge from the era of the Cymrian War only recently put aside at the Lady’s insistence. As a result, Gwydion’s first official state visit was experienced almost entirely on his own, under the guidance of Rial, Rhapsody’s viceroy. He had been fascinated to walk the forest streets of Tyrian City, the capital hidden deep within the greenwood, with its ingenious defenses and elevated walkways suspended in the forest canopy between the trees. He felt a sense of wonder that he had long ago forgotten as he watched the passage of the foot traffic, where the people and forest animals traveled the same roads in harmony. His father had always been fond of the Lirin and had maintained friendly relations with them; it warmed Gwydion to see that affection returned in the greetings of the populace of Tyrian, the slender, dark-eyed people of the forest who opened their longhouses and battlements, their palace and winter gardens to him.

It had been difficult to leave, but once his official duties had been discharged, and his tour was complete, Gwydion had bidden Rial and the Lirin dignitaries farewell, indicating that his next stops were the harbor towns of Minsyth and Evermere in the unclaimed region known commonly as the Nonaligned States, as Anborn had instructed him to do. He had received their gifts of state with eagerness, reciprocating with the excellent Canderian brandy and the crystal from his own province that Rhapsody suggested he bring, then met up with the Lord Marshal, who was impatiently awaiting their departure for what he considered the real destinations of their journey. Twelve days of travel followed, much of it spent in silence as Anborn watched out the carriage window, contemplating whatever he was seeing through azure eyes that had beheld much of the region’s bloody history. Gwydion maintained that silence respectfully.

“Are we in Evermere now, then?” he asked uncertainly now.

Anborn nodded shortly.

Gwydion pulled the curtain back again, more cautiously this time.

In the distance the sea was rolling to a windswept shore, crashing in icy breakers beneath ragged floating docks. He could make out perhaps a dozen ships of varying sizes, many of them sea-worn and old, docked at a pier that was similarly old and dark of timber. From the docks a walkway dotted with holes led to a small port town, its wooden and brick shops and houses having clearly seen better days.

After an awkward length of silence, Gwydion coughed politely.

“Er—Lord Marshal, why are we here? I thought you wished to concentrate on Sorbold.”

Anborn leveled his piercing blue gaze at Gwydion.

“We are here because Evermere is well known for its whorehouses,” he said. “An important part of any young man’s education.”

Beads of sweat emerged from Gwydion’s brow.

“I—I had not realized that this was your intention,” he stammered nervously. “Besides, are there not such things in Roland?”

“Indeed,” Anborn said idly, glancing out the window again. “By the time I’m done with your mentoring, you will know each and every one from here to the middle continent.” He caught a glimpse of the young duke’s paling face and blinked in astonishment. “Not to frequent as a client, you young fool, although there is certainly nothing wrong with that when you are older. Brothels are an excellent source of information and refuge. I’ve hidden out in more whorehouses than bunkers in my life.”

“So why are we here now, then? Are you seeking information on Sorbold in the brothels of Evermere?”

Anborn scowled and pulled the shade back, then shouted to the captain of the mounted honor guard accompanying the carriage.

“Roust! Bring two riderless horses round. The young duke and I wish to set out on our own—and once we’re gone, you may visit the port in shifts as well.” The captain’s eyes shot up into his hairline, then a smile crept over his face.

“Yes, m’lord.”

Anborn’s face molded into a forced smile. “Don’t dip your wicks into any suspicious lamp oil,” he said heartily. “Every legend you’ve heard about the brothels of Evermere is true—so it’s best to rosin yourself off afterward, or you’ll be sharing lice with every sailor who plies the wide central sea. Understood?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. We’ll be back in a sennight.”

Anborn let the curtain fall back over the window. He reached under his seat and pulled out a bundle of clothes, which he tossed at Gwydion.

“Wouldn’t want to be too conspicuous among the finer citizens of Evermere,” he said, pointing to the crest on Gwydion’s chest. “Imagine the scandal.” He reached around his useless legs and pulled out another bundle, and began to change as well.

Within moments a pair of mounts were saddled and outfitted. Gwydion watched the guards assist the Lord Marshal onto one of them, then climbed uncertainly onto the other. Anborn dragged on the reins and rode off for the port town; Gwydion set off after him, having no idea what to expect once they dismounted.

Once they were over the hill toward Evermere, Anborn glanced back over his shoulder, then turned east and rode off along a cargo path, with Gwydion struggling to keep up.

“We—we’re not going to—Evermere—then?” he gasped, spurring his mount in the futile attempt to catch up.

“Sorry to disappoint your loins if I misled them, but no, we are heading to Ghant now,” Anborn called back. “If they think we are whoring, they will be discreet as to our disappearance.”

“Ah,” Gwydion said; his tone signaled disappointment, but his relief was immediate. The concept of lessons in a seaside whoring town had turned his stomach to porridge, especially given Anborn’s reputation for wenching and some of his proclivities.

They rode in silence eastward along the windy coastline, through frost-bleached highgrass and over rocky roadways that had been all but overgrown in autumn from decades of disuse. Most of the sea traffic of the Nonaligned States came into port in the western port of Minsyth, which found Tyrian to be a more comfortable neighbor than Evermere found Sorbold to be.

Anborn’s handicap limited the length of each leg of their travels, though Gwydion was grateful each time the Cymrian hero called a halt to their ride; he found himself sore from the saddle as he helped the Lord Marshal down from his horse. A few hours of rest by a hastily built fire, another hour of instruction in the use of Tysterisk, and they would mount again, riding with the intent of crossing the border unseen.

Each time Gwydion drew the all-but-invisible blade from its sheath, he felt the wind around him die down, as if the very air awaited his command. Anborn seemed to be aware of his discomfort but ignored it. He had blindfolded the young duke from the outset of his training so that he was able to feel the heft of the weapon, rather than be deceived by the seeming absence of a blade. Day by day, Gwydion felt his anxiety diminish. Achmed’s words rang in his head as Anborn’s rang in his ears.

Just remember that you wield it; do not let the weapon wield you.

Sorbold was a nation of massive breadth, its borders long and sporadically guarded, though Anborn commented more than once that the number of troops and outposts had greatly increased since the death of the Dowager Empress. Once they finally arrived at the border it took the better part of a day to find a point of entry where two horsemen might cross, unnoticed.

That night, when Anborn had ascertained that they were safely out of sight of any patrolling troops, they made camp in the lee of an old tavern that had once been a way station along the trans-Sorbold thoroughfare. Anborn deemed a fire unwise, so the two men blanketed the horses and then settled down with what blankets remained shared between them to maximize body warmth.

In the moonlit darkness Gwydion pulled his gloves more tightly against his fingers, watching the man he admired more than almost any other save his godfather. Anborn was generally much merrier in his presence; this evening he seemed melancholy as he smoothed the rough horse blanket beneath which they were both huddled.

“This was Shrike’s,” the Lord Marshal muttered as he ran his callused hand over it.

Gwydion held his silence. Shrike had been one of Anborn’s most trusted men-at-arms, probably his closest friend. Unlike the Lord Marshal he was a First Generation Cymrian and ancient, a surly, gnarled old man that Gwydion had found hard to understand. He waited, knowing that if the General wanted to impart more than the words he had already shared, he would do so only if he was not encouraged to do it. His patience was rewarded a moment later.

Anborn stared out the broken ceiling of the way station, his eyes scanning the clear, cold sky for stars.

“Eternal life is nothing without some semblance of eternal youth,” he said finally. “When Shrike left the Island he was already a fairly old man; whatever cursed entity granted the Cymrians an extended life span must have had a perverse sense of humor to condemn so many to lengthy old age.”

Gwydion nodded, remaining silent. The General had not spoken of Shrike since his death some months back; he had died in the ambush in which Rhapsody had been kidnapped.

Anborn’s eyes gleamed in the dark. “I always allowed him to make a fire, because he was so often cold. Sailors—” He snorted gruffly, with an undertone of amusement. “Scrawny, wiry sea rats that can stand in a gale that whips the skin from your bones, out in blasts that make this cold place seem like a tropical paradise, as long as they are on their bloody water. But bring them to land, and they shiver like children.”

Gwydion chuckled quietly. “Your brother Llauron was a sailor for a while, wasn’t he? And yet he seemed quite at home on land, even in the cold.” He tried to blank the memory that rose up at his own words, the image of the Invoker at the bloody winter carnival, standing in the midst of the winter wind in the onslaught, commanding wolves to rise from the snow and tear at the invaders’ mounts.

Anborn’s eyes narrowed. “Llauron has always been more dragon than Edwyn or me. His multiplicity of elemental lores suits him, even as it damages those around him, chiefly my useless nephew, your godfather. It is just as well that he chose to forsake his human form and go commune with those selfsame elements in dragon form. Good riddance to him. May he remain in the ether, content.”

Gwydion continued to listen, but Anborn said nothing more. Finally the young duke dropped off to sleep in the warmth of the shared blankets against the chill of the winter wind.

In the gray light of morning they rose and continued on their way.

29

A tall man with a thin body and a thinner fringe of white hair wearing sexton’s robes was waiting for the three priests of Sorbold at the door of the Patriarch’s manse, to which the guards had led them. In obvious displeasure he motioned them inside the marble building, dismissed the guards, and shut the heavy doors behind him. Lasarys recognized him as Gregory, the sexton of Lianta’ar; among Lasarys’s order, the tenders of the elemental temples, he was the highest ordained priest. Lasarys had received training from him in the deep stillness of Terreanfor upon his investiture as sexton there; Gregory had made the journey willingly, pleased to share the secrets of tending so sacred a temple with another of the five men who devoted their lives to doing so, but had been visibly agitated from the moment he arrived, eager to return to the sanctuary of his own beloved basilica.

Lasarys understood exactly how the man had felt.

Gregory’s small eyes were gleaming with fury.

“You misbegotten idiot,” he hissed at Lasarys, the spittle of rage raining from his mouth. “How dare you disrupt the Chain of Prayer? And if you were going to be so bold as to defy the order of supplication, and pray directly to the Creator yourself, how did you have the temerity to do it in the Patriarch’s own basilica? Did it not occur to you that he would feel it, and that your interruption might be disrupting the daily offering of intentions?”

“I—I am sorry, Father,” Lasarys whispered, the gravity of his crime beginning to dawn upon him. “I—was—in despair and not thinking clearly.”

“A sexton of an elemental basilica has no room for such a faltering of wisdom,” Gregory retorted angrily. “The impact of your foolishness on the entire Patrician faith cannot even be imagined. And what are you doing here in the first place? A sexton of an elemental cathedral has no business leaving it.” He leaned closer for the verbal equivalent of a killing blow. “I hope whatever your self-indulgence gained you was worth the sacrifice of your post. I’m sure your new regent emperor will be displeased to be training a new sexton before his investiture. I hope you have your affairs in order.”

Lasarys swallowed as the two acolytes went pale.

“I am being relieved of my guardianship?” he asked shakily. His voice came out in little more than a whisper.

“Please, Father, we cannot go back,” Lester blurted; his protestations were silenced by the elevation of Gregory’s hand.

“His Grace has commanded that you be detained until he has finished righting whatever he can of your egregious mistake,” the sexton of Lianta’ar said haughtily. “Follow me; you are to wait in the hospice, where you can do no more harm with your renegade prayers.”

The three priests dispiritedly followed the sexton down the dark, windowless corridors in the marble manse, past tapestried walls and heavy brass braziers of incense, burning in thin wisps of scented smoke. They were led deep into the manse, through endless corridors and past numerous identical doorways, until finally the sexton stopped before a heavy mahogany door and opened it contemptuously.

Beyond the door lay a small chapel, with a plain altar and severe, backless benches. Above the altar hung a sculpture of the silver star of the Patriarchy; other than that, there was no other ornamentation.

“Wait in here,” Gregory commanded. He waited until the priests had entered the room, then closed the door resoundingly behind them.

For what seemed an eternity, the Sorbolds waited on the hard wooden benches, silently contemplating their future. The windowless room kept them from watching the morning pass into afternoon, and yet they could feel the movement of the sun in the changing glow radiating from the silver star above the altar. Finally the door opened again, and Gregory returned, looking grim.

A heartbeat behind him, another man came through the door. He was taller than the sexton of Lianta’ar by almost a head, was dressed in silver robes emblazoned with the same star that hung over the altar, and on his hand was a simple platinum ring in which a clear oval stone had been set.

His hair was streaked gray and silver with age, though there was still enough white-blond hue to it to hint of what it must have looked like in his youth. His beard was long, curled slightly at the ends, and his eyes were clear and blue as the cloudless summer sky. Immediately the three priests threw themselves on the ground at his feet.

The Patriarch signaled for Gregory to close the door, then gestured somewhat impatiently at the prone holy men.

“Do get up,” he said in a gruff, commanding voice. “It displeases me greatly to see my ordinates groveling on the floor.”

The two acolytes helped Lasarys rise. The elderly sexton was shaking, his face white with fear. Long ago he had had the privilege of watching the then Patriarch, who was almost never seen by anyone, celebrate the investiture of Nielash Mousa, the man who now served as the Blesser of Sorbold. The Patriarch at the time had been a frail man with the same thin fringe of hair that now decorated Gregory’s almost bald pate, whose aged frame seemed bowed by the weight of his own robes.

This new Patriarch, Constantin, who had been invested only a few years ago, was vastly different from that man. While he had obviously lived many years, he carried himself the way an old man who had been an athlete or soldier would. His shoulders were broad and unbowed, and there was a regal aspect to his bearing, almost an arrogance, though there was no trace of any such haughtiness in his face.

In his role as sexton Lasarys had assisted his benison, Nielash Mousa, on the two occasions that the Patriarch had made a state visit to Sorbold. The first was his own investiture, where he had stepped forth, anonymous, out of the crowd in the square of Jierna’sid and presented himself, when all other contenders had been rejected by the Scales, as a candidate for the office he now held. He had been confirmed; the Scales had held him high against the brilliant blue of the dome of the sky. It was a sight Lasarys knew he would never forget. And just before those same Scales had confirmed Talquist as the new emperor, the Patriarch had come to Jierna’sid again, to bury the Dowager Empress and her son, the Crown Prince Vyshla, who had died moments apart on the same night.

The Patriarch raised his hand in blessing, and the priests bowed respectfully, making the appropriate countersign. Then the Patriarch motioned to the benches, and hesitantly the priests went back to them and sat down again.

“I am somewhat surprised to see you alive, I must admit; word came from Sorbold a few days ago that all the acolytes and the sexton of Terreanfor had perished in a terrible fire at the manse outside of Night Mountain. The Blesser of Sorbold left our meetings and returned home at once, so since in fact you survived the conflagration, I wonder why you are not back in Jierna’sid, helping to arrange for the burial rites. Tell me, Lasarys, why you chose to come here, and pray as you did.”

Slowly the sexton rose and walked over to the Patriarch, then knelt at his feet.

“May the Creator smite me into ash if my tongue proclaims anything but the truth,” he said haltingly. “Your Grace, these two men will bear witness to what I am about to tell you. Talquist, regent emperor of Sorbold, is purposefully despoiling and defiling the holiest places of our homeland, especially the holy basilica of Terreanfor.”

The Patriarch’s eyes narrowed, and his brow blackened visibly.

“Despoiling how?” he demanded.

“At his command,” said Lasarys, the flush of shame reddening his wrinkled cheeks. “And with my unwilling assistance.”

The Patriarch inhaled deeply, his blue eyes blazing with cold fire, but said nothing, waiting for the sexton to continue.

“Many years ago, Talquist was an acolyte in my stewardship,” Lasarys continued, his back straight but his voice trembling. “He was a fickle young man, serving in training to become a priest, not because he had heard a calling from the All-God, but because he needed information about a puzzle that was bedeviling him ceaselessly. He had found an item buried in the sands of the Skeleton Coast, a shell or scale of a sort, tattered around the edges and violet in color. It had the engraving of a throne on its surface, along with runes that I could never read. He was studying with me in the hope that somewhere in the depths of our holy scripture, somewhere in the practices of the faith, he would find clues about this object. When he discovered there was nothing about it to be found in his study, he left the temple and did not return until decades later, when he was looking to be confirmed as emperor.”

The Patriarch’s aspect grew more intense.

“It was my understanding that Talquist had become emperor reluctantly, that the Scales themselves had weighed in favor of the mercantile over the army and the nobility, and selected Talquist before a large coterie of witnesses, visiting heads of state and Sorbolds alike.”

The sexton swallowed hard.

“It was made to appear that way, Your Grace,” he said nervously, “because that was how Talquist wanted it. He had returned to Terreanfor just a few days before the death of the Dowager Empress and the Crown Prince, seeking a small piece of Living Stone from the basilica.” He winced at the horror on the Patriarch’s face. “He told me that if I did not harvest such a piece of stone, he would take the basilica and use it without regard to its needs. He had studied the basilica intensely when he was training with me, and so knew that there was a secret entrance to Terreanfor. If he were to occupy the basilica, his guards could effectively hold the army at bay until he had virtually destroyed it.” Lasarys’s mouth was suddenly dry, an indictment of his silence and at the guilt in his own heart for the darker reasons he was leaving out of the explanation.

“So I agreed, though it broke my heart. I found a place where there was stone that did not take on the form of a plant or animal, and, after praying for forgiveness, harvested the stone and gave it to Talquist.”

“And what did he do with it?” the Patriarch asked, his voice going suddenly soft.

“He used it to rig the Weighing, I presume; I was not there when he did it,” Lasarys said sadly. “But that is not the greatest heresy, Your Grace.”

The Patriarch’s eyes opened wider, but he remained silent.

Lasarys glanced over his shoulder at the faces of the two young acolytes; the men were pale as milk, their aspects grim.

“Once he was vested as regent emperor, he gave me the command that the acolytes were to harvest one of the titanic stone statues of the warriors from the basilica.”

“From the ceremonial archway?”

“Yes. He insisted that the entire statue be taken, sliced from its base and brought to the Place of Weight at Jierna Tal. The sacrifice badly injured the spirit of the basilica; I could feel it suffering each moment that the statue was being—” Overcome, the elderly priest broke down, weeping.

“Tell me the rest,” the Patriarch commanded.

“The statue, which was chosen because of the sheer volume of its elemental earth, was placed on one of the weighing plates of the scales. Some sort of pathetic creature, which looked like it was composed partly of human flesh, partly of pale jellyfish, was placed in the other. Through manipulation of the violet artifact, there was a terrible flash of light, and the creature disintegrated. Then the statue of living earth stood erect. Truly that was the most terrifying sight I have ever witnessed.”

“Where is it now?” Constantin asked. His voice was calm, but the hand on which he wore his ring was trembling now.

Lasarys shook his head. “I know not, Your Grace. The statue—it was capable of a crude form of ambulation. It stumbled off into the desert, destroying anything in its path. It tore the sword from its hand that had been part of the original statue, and that sword crumbled into dry dust, as the statue may have done as well. We saw no sign of it when we ventured into the desert on our way to see you.

“Talquist had his troops murder the acolytes who had witnessed his treachery—the fire you heard tell of was deliberately set. Then he had all the soldiers who assisted in this horrific undertaking killed as well, except for his trusted captain of the guard. Had we not remained in hiding, doubtless we would be dead ourselves.

“We came to you as soon as we could, seeking our benison, and his wisdom, but your guards tell us he has returned already to Sorbold.”

The Patriarch nodded. “Indeed; upon receiving the news from Talquist’s messenger, he offered his prayers, then left immediately to return to Jierna’sid. He should arrive today, or on the morrow at the latest.”

Despair came into Lasarys’s eyes. “He is walking into a trap, then. There is no time to interdict him, and now that he is back inside the borders of Sorbold, any message that is sent to him would be intercepted by Talquist.” His forehead ran with sweat. “I fear he is a dead man.”

Constantin shook his head. “Not as of this morning,” he said, turning away from the priests and staring at the altar, over which hung the silver star. “I could sense the offering of prayers that he submitted on behalf of his congregation; Sorbold is a vast nation with many faithful, and if he had not been able to attend to his duties in the Chain of Prayer, it would have been immediately noticeable.”

“It is only a matter of time, Your Grace,” said the sexton sadly. “Talquist is obsessed, but calculating. The power of the artifact he found on the Skeleton Coast gives him a sense not only of power but invulnerability. He has plans, vast and sinister plans that exceed my understanding, and for all that he assumed the façade of the reluctant merchant summoned by the Scales to leadership, I swear to you that his intent, and his ability to realize that intent, have been in place for many years.”

The Patriarch did not turn to meet Lasarys’s eye.

“You are right about that,” he said in a voice that seemed far away. He stood in silent contemplation, his gaze fixed on the silver star above the altar. Finally he turned to the sexton of Lianta’ar.

“Gregory, take these men into your care,” he said. “I grant them sanctuary here. Find places for them in the priory, but take care not to reveal their names to anyone. We will have a renaming ceremony tomorrow, so that they cannot be hunted.” His searing blue eyes fixed on the priests of Sorbold.

“Whatever roads you have traveled in your lives until now, whatever footprints you have left in the sand between this place and the place from whence you have come, must now be erased. Talquist is a monster; I have known this for more than a lifetime. It is not for your safety alone that I command this. Your lives are secondary. If he discovers that you are here, the holy city itself is in jeopardy from his wrath.”

Lasarys began to shake, as did Gregory.

“Surely he will not attack Sepulvarta?” the sexton of Lianta’ar said; his harsh voice had lost its knife’s edge, and had taken on the tone of a frightened child. Such a violation was unimaginable.

The Patriarch’s voice hardened, taking on a menacing, almost silky edge.

“I assure you, Gregory, not only will he, but he is planning to. It is not the presence of these men that will bring it about, we are on the doorstep between Sorbold and Roland. He will barely pause to wipe his feet on the mat of Sepulvarta on his way to the inner continent.”

“But—” gasped Gregory, “Your Grace, that is—that is unimaginable. To attack, to destroy a holy city—”

“In order to hold anything holy, one has to have a fear for one’s soul,” said the Patriarch. “Talquist is utterly without one. Before he is done, the world itself will be torn asunder. And we will be among the first to be crushed under his heel. It is already far too late to stop him.”

The priests stood, unable to move, as the door opened and the Patriarch left the chapel, taking whatever warmth had been in the room as he went.

Constantin waited, unseen, until the last of the doors of the basilica of Lianta’ar had been locked and bolted for the night, before he emerged from the sacristy and slowly made his way up the circular rise of stairs that led to the altar.

The light of the star shone down through the windows in the ceiling of the basilica, bathing the altar and most of the inner sanctuary in a silver light. As he ascended the stairs in that light, Constantin had the dreamy sensation of following a shaft of moonlight into the heavens.

This holy place, this citadel of a dead star that had fallen in another time, was one of the few places in the world he had ever felt peace. Something in the ethereal glow reminded him of another place, a realm between worlds, life and death, where his old life had ended and his new one began.

Born of an unknown Cymrian mother whose face he still remembered, even though they had shared life for only the space of one breath, fathered by a demon, his early existence had been one of cherished violence and artful bloodshed. Constantin had been, a few short years before in the counted time of the material world, a gladiator in the arenas of Sorbold, a merciless killing machine himself, until he had been rescued and taken to the realm that he was now recalling, a place of dreams known as the domain of the Lord and Lady Rowan, a place beyond the Veil of Hoen, the Old Cymrian word for joy. Those entities, the manifestation of healing dreams and peaceful death, had taught him much; time in their world passed in the blink of an eye as it was counted in the material world. Gone from sight only a few short months, he had aged a lifetime, had studied, been steeped in wisdom, and come to realize that the ignominy of his birth was not a stain but a badge of honor. He had set about being worthy of it when the Scales chose him and elevated him to the Patriarchy.

The sickening irony of his life’s story twisted his viscera now. He thought back to the words he had spoken to the Lord Cymrian and the king of the Firbolg upon hearing of Talquist’s elevation to Emperor.

You could not have brought me worse news.

Why? the king of the Bolg had demanded. Tell us why.

His answer echoed in the darkest recesses of his mind.

Talquist is a merchant in only the kindest usage of the word. He is a slave trader of the most brutal order, the secret scion of a fleet of pirate ships, which trade in human booty, selling the able-bodied into the mines, or worse, the arenas, using the rest as raw materials for other goods, like candles rendered from the flesh of the old, bone meal from the very young. Thousands have met their deaths in the arenas of Sorbold; I cannot even fathom how many more have found it in the mines, or the salt beds, or at the bottom of the sea. He is a monster with a gentleman’s smile and a common touch, but a monster all the same.

And yet the Scales confirmed him, the Lord Cymrian insisted. I witnessed it myself.

As he reached the top step, Constantin thought about the incredulous expression in the eyes of the Bolg king, a man whose previous life had no doubt held much of the same sort of experiences as his own. Why did you not say something before you left? King Achmed had demanded. If you knew this was a potential outcome of the selection process, why did you not intervene?

The bands of platinum that edged the altar were gleaming brilliantly. His own reply reverberated in his head, nauseating him.

Because it is not for me to decry the Scales. They are what confirmed me to my position in the first place. How could I decree their wisdom to be faulty without invoking a paradox? Besides, to acknowledge my past in the arena would be to open the realm of the Rowans to scrutiny that would not be welcome there. And finally, he was not the only man with blood on his hands who was in the running. If I were to decry everyone I thought unfit to be Emperor, Sorbold would be a leaderless state.

And because I am a coward, he thought now. I did not want to imagine what I knew would happen.

He bowed before the stone table, then knelt on the floor in front of it. The simplicity of the stone, the purity of the platinum, was designed to allow the prayers that were presented to him through this altar to flow freely into his mind through the Spire and onto the feet of the Creator. That simplicity, that purity, made his thoughts resonate in his head now.

In the silence, he remembered the last words he had spoken to the Bolg king.

I pray that, as I have undergone a change of heart in my time behind the Veil of Hoen, Talquist too will experience such a transformation. Perhaps the fact that he did not immediately demand coronation as Emperor is a sign of that.

Achmed’s eyes had met his, full of common understanding.

I doubt it. In my experience, men who had a thirst for blood and power only grow thirstier the more they are fed it. You may be the only exception I have ever met.

Constantin’s hands trembled as they touched the altar.

He struggled to keep from cursing himself, pushing back the thoughts that crowded into his mind. They refused to be banished, swelling forward into his consciousness relentlessly.

You fool. If only you had stepped forward then, had recognized that the Scales had been tampered with, perhaps you could have averted the death of half the world that will come now. Now that blood joins the rest that is on your hands.

He thought of Terreanfor, one of the last repositories of Living Stone in the known world, and the vast power that was extant there. Of all the elements, earth alone had the attributes to sustain such a power; the others were too fleeting, too evanescent to hold on to it in great concentrations. The winds were too transitory, the seas too churning, starlight too distant, fire too unpredictable and destructive. But the earth remained steadfast, unchanging, passing through its cycles in patient, almost reverent, consistency, which was why so much of the world’s power resided in earth, in land. And as he thought of the cool, dark cathedral hidden deep within Night Mountain, where the light would never touch it, he thought of the tale the priests had told him of the felling of the statue of the soldier of Living Stone.

And of all the other such statues, man and beast, trees and the Living Stone altar itself, waiting to be harvested.

And the power that was about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Concentrate, he willed himself.

Softly he began to chant the rites by which he received the daily prayers of the faithful of the Patrician religion. His body began to vibrate gently as he did, the power of the ethereal light above him reverberating through him, allowing him to be the channel of those petitions directly to the Creator. It was always a humbling sensation, knowing that the prayers and dreams, fears and joy of millions of souls were passing through him, making his body shine, for a brief moment, with the same ethereal glow as the star on the minaret a thousand feet above him.

From the corners of the continent, the southwestern realm of the Nonaligned States, from Bethe Corbair in the east, Navarne and Avonderre to the west, Canderre and Yarim in the north, and Bethany, the central province of Roland, and finally Sorbold in the south, one by one each of his benisons was transmitting the prayers of the faithful through the stone altar. The receipt of the praise rang like chimes, different tones in his head; he had no idea what was being asked or offered, or how many different people were entrusting him with their prayers, he only knew that together they made up one glorious symphony of praise and entreaty that gave glory and honor to the All-God while supplicating for his grace.

He never knew how long the transfer of prayers would take; time lost its hold in the presence of great elemental power. When at last the tones from each of the benisons’ prayers began to fade, he caught hold of the last one, sustaining it with his own chant.

The remaining four songs of praise came to an end; the benisons had completed their evening requirements of offering to the Chain of Prayer, unaware that the Patriarch was still listening. When only the single chant of the benison of Sorbold was present in the echoing basilica, the Patriarch spoke.

Nielash Mousa, he whispered. Tarry.

It was something he had never done before, had never gone backward down the Chain of Prayer to a supplicant on a lower level, but he was desperate. The altar beneath his hands reverberated. He waited for a long moment, then heard a very surprised voice resound throughout Lianta’ar.

I hear you, Your Grace.

A sickening sensation swelled through him, the glorious vibration of praise and supplication changing into the racheting discomfort of discord. Constantin gripped the altar, struggling not to collapse.

It seemed as if the weight of the material world was now on his shoulders, dragging the breath from his lungs. All the lightness of being that he enjoyed in his daily offerings was reversed; now he struggled for air, struggled to bear up under the crushing pressure.

Time expanded all around him. As his daily prayers seemed to take no time at all, now each heartbeat, each breath was labored, extended, drawn out to the ends of the earth.

Concentrate, he thought again, sweat pouring from his brow.

He opened his mouth to speak, but doing so caused him agony. The joint of his jaw popped loudly under the strain; all the water disappeared from his lips, leaving them cracked as he tried to form words. Constantin’s hands trembled; he closed his eyes and whispered two words, an undertaking of more pain than he ever remembered. Knowing the importance of the message he was delivering, he put the very last grain of his strength into it.

Safeguard—Terreanfor.

The words had just passed his lips when the world went dark. He was vaguely aware of hitting the altar, unconscious before his blood stained the floor of the basilica. Constantin lay, prone, in the silver light of the star atop the Spire of Sepulvarta, too far into the gray haze between waking and sleep to hear the benison’s reply.

I understand.

30

While not as massive as Avonderre’s Port Fallon, the largest harbor on the western seacoast, the inner harbor at Ghant was still one of the biggest in the world, the terminus for the daily off-loading of tons of goods. Hundreds of merchant ships sailed into the inner harbor with the rising of each tide, past the naval fleet of Sorbold moored in the outer harbor. Each vessel was inspected, each manifest checked by the naval harbormaster, and either turned away or allowed to pass into the smooth water of the immense lagoon that formed the inner harbor.

In his day Anborn had seen both harbors many times. Ghant was one of the first places he had annexed in the Cymrian War a thousand years before, a place from which his ground forces had been able to sustain and defend a land supply route, and from which his warships set sail for attacks on the Lirin port of Tallono to the northwest. Tallono was a sheltered harbor that had been built by the Gorllewinolo Lirin with the help of his grandmother, the dragon Elynsynos, but by the time Anborn had come to Ghant, there was no room in his heart for sentimentality, only murder and vengeance. With precision he had burned Tallono almost to the ground, much the same way he had sacked the smaller ports of Minsyth and Evermere, and had secured the seacoast all the way north to Port Fallon when the war finally ended. A millennium had not been long enough to blot out the memories that haunted him still, torturing his waking moments and plaguing his dreams.

Now the ghosts of those battles were no longer hovering over the land, as they had been each time Anborn had returned to Ghant since then. The port was busier than he had ever seen it; he could tell even at a great distance as he and Gwydion Navarne came over the rocky hills above it, looking down at the inner harbor from the trans-Sorbold passage, the main thoroughfare over which the goods were carted to places north and east in Sorbold. He grimaced as he reined his mount to a halt, remembering that his own soldiers had once built this road.

Gwydion Navarne, whose thoughts were not haunted by a history he knew little about, stared out at the harbor in amazement.

“They’re doing a fair business, aren’t they?” he mused, watching the scores of ships that lined the piers of the inner harbor being systematically offloaded by tiny shapes that more resembled ants than longshoremen.

The Lord Marshal nodded, his face grim.

“But in what?” he asked. He looked farther out to sea, past the inner harbor’s sluice to the outer harbor, and took in a ragged breath.

From one end of the outer harbor to the other docks had been constructed, each housing a score of warships. Anborn counted a dozen of those docks, with more beyond the rim of the point.

“Dear All-God,” he muttered.

Gwydion Navarne turned in his saddle. He had been enjoying the taste of the distant sea air, the bustle of the port below, after so many days’ ride in the wastelands of the southern steppes, and therefore was taken aback at the sight of the Cymrian hero’s face, which was now as hard as he had ever seen it.

“What is wrong, Lord Marshal?” he asked, feeling a new chill in the wind coming off the sea.

Anborn dragged the reins to his right, positioning himself for a better view. He stared down at the harbor, crawling with activity, for a long moment, then looked around him at the hillsides from which they had come.

“At the time of the Cymrian War, this was a major military center, the central port of my sea forces’ offensive,” he said finally. “We had a fleet that, in its time, was responsible for the destruction of much of western Tyrian, and the decimation of the coastal areas of Avonderre north to Gwynwood. I led my father’s armies against my mother’s forces with great success on land because of the sheer advantage of numbers and superior weaponry; that is not surprising. But until Llauron abandoned Anwyn and fled to sea, he was a formidable naval foe that would have been insurmountable; he would have destroyed my fleet if it had not been for our control of Ghant, and the size of our armada stationed here.” The Lord Marshal shielded his eyes, stinging now from the glare of the sun.

“And in those days, there were far fewer warships than stand in port now.”

Gwydion swallowed, but said nothing. The taste of the desert air had gone suddenly drier, clogging in his throat and burning like fiery sand.

Anborn shifted awkwardly in his saddle, straining to see behind him.

“There was a sheltered point up a ways, if I recall,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at a convoy of horse-drawn wagons accompanied by soldiers in the articulated leather armor of the mountain columns, units of the Sorbold army that defended the mountain passes hundreds of miles away near the capital of Jierna’sid. The caravan was making its way up the incline toward them on the ancient thoroughfare. “I think we should take cover there now, lest we be seen. My guess is that our presence is unwelcome here.”

The two spurred their horses into a loping trot over the rocky outcropping, climbing into the rough lands perched above the harbor, and took shelter behind the guardian rocks. When the horses were out of sight, Anborn gestured impatiently to Gwydion.

“Help me from this bloody saddle,” he grunted, unstrapping the bindings.

Gwydion dismounted quickly, then hurried to the General’s side, assisting him down from the horse. Once down, Anborn shoved him away, and lowered his body, with the strength of his arms and chest, onto the ground, then crawled to the edge of the outcropping. He signaled to Gwydion, who crouched down and lay on his belly beside him on the sandswept cliff.

Silently they watched, heedless of the time that passed, transfixed by the sight below them.

In a little less than an hour’s time they noted more than two dozen ships approaching the outer harbor, merchant vessels bound for the inner docks, running the gauntlet of warships. Those ships were boarded, checked, and sent onward with military precision; once in the harbor, their cargo was immediately off-loaded and packed into wagons, unlike the harbor at Port Fallon, in Avonderre, where goods were separated into merchant orders, then debarked by longshoremen from the individual merchants who had come to claim the cargo.

“What does that tell you?” the Lord Marshal asked softly, in the tone of voice he used when instructing the young duke in matters of import.

Gwydion stared down at the barrels and crates being systematically moved into a line of standing wagons.

“All the cargo is either going to the same place, or owned by the same entity?” he guessed.

Anborn nodded. “Undoubtedly the Crown. And to some extent that is not terribly surprising; the new regent emperor, Talquist, was the hierarch of the guilds that controlled these western shipping lanes prior to his ascension to the Sun Throne. But it’s not the destination of the cargo that concerns me.”

“Then what does?”

Anborn pointed down the road beyond the rocky outcroppings.

“The cargo itself. Look.”

Gwydion followed Anborn’s finger away from the starboard hold of the closest ship on the jetty, where the barrels and crates were being off-loaded into wagons, to the port side of the same ship. He could see two lines of people, so distant as to be almost indistinguishable from the mass of others working the docks, disembarking from the vessel. The first line emerged from a higher gangplank; they were few in number, and ambulated at their leisure off the ship, where they dispersed into the crowds lining the docks. Gwydion presumed these were passengers.

The second line emerged from a lower gangplank, directly from the ship’s hold. At first he assumed it was the crew, but on closer examination saw that the line was herded forward to a column of wagons, much like the cargo wagons, into which the human figures were then loaded. Gwydion counted more than one hundred from a single ship, stumbling and shading their eyes from the brightness of the morning sun. He shook his head as if to clear it, or escape a buzzing hornet, as a terrible realization took an insistent hold. When he could not escape it, the word fell out of his mouth.

“Slaves,” he murmured. “He’s trafficking in slaves.”

Anborn nodded. He pointed slowly and deliberately to each of the two dozen ships that had docked within the time they had been watching, each of which was unloading human cargo from its starboard hold, packing the hostages into wagons, which were then disbursed in different directions along the trans-Sorbold passage.

“Slavery is not new to Sorbold,” he said in a low voice. “Leitha was empress for three-quarters of a century, an impressive longevity for someone not of Cymrian blood. In her time it was practiced quietly, with criminals and debtors, or war prisoners, mostly in the gladiatorial arenas. It was generational; a slave family remained captive until a male member of it could purchase freedom for his progeny, usually through prowess as a gladiator. But it was considered an ugly, if not particularly well disguised, secret. The number of arenas was fewer than one per city-state; that’s less than two dozen in total.” He cast a quick glance behind him at the horses, then returned his gaze to the port below.

“In the past hour we’ve seen enough human cargo off-loaded to populate that entire gladiatorial structure. There are still a hundred merchants’ ships outside the inner harbor, awaiting passage. And that’s only today.”

“Could arena fighting have increased that much in the months since Talquist took the throne?” Gwydion asked, nauseated.

Anborn’s eyes narrowed, still focused on the sight below.

“Possibly—Talquist has a reputation for fondness of that kind of blood-sport. But I would hazard a guess that only a very small part of this cargo is bound for the arena. These slaves are probably on their way to the salt mines of Nicosi, or the olive groves of Remaldfaer. But the more important question is not to where the poor wretches are bound, but from where did they come? If half of those ships contain as many captives as we’ve seen offloaded, that’s the equivalent of the population of an entire city.”

“Sweet All-God,” Gwydion whispered.

“Indeed,” Anborn assented. “Invoking Him may be the only thing that can help now; if this has been going on all the while that Talquist has been regent, your godfather is going to have a nightmare on his hands.”

“Please elaborate,” Gwydion said, his hands going cold and beginning to shake.

Anborn rolled slightly to his side and motioned the young duke into silence.

From below them a rumble could be heard as another caravan of wagons crested the rocky rise of the passage. The two men watched as they rolled past, guarded by a cohort of Sorbold soldiers both in front and behind them. Gwydion winced at the sight of the captives, a host of ragged men, forlorn women, and thin, silent children packed into the carts like cattle on the way to the slaughtering houses. He counted eleven wagons, estimating that each contained more than two dozen slaves. Gwydion watched, a knot of increasing tightness choking his throat, until the dust of the thoroughfare had settled and the sound had died away. He leaned over the cliff edge slightly and saw similar caravans making their ways in other directions, into the mountains and along the seacoast, bearing similar cargo.

“Tell me more of the implications of this nightmare,” he said finally to Anborn.

The General exhaled, still watching the port below.

“A certain amount of increase in trade is to be expected when a guild hierarch, someone who has excelled in the mercantile all his life, assumes a throne,” he said quietly, not watching Gwydion’s face. “That’s not what we are seeing here. Slaves such as these are not for the amusement of the arena; they are for the production of goods. We are seeing the buildup to war, also not unexpected, though Talquist has been hiding behind a cover of peace and the cultivation of prosperity in his lands.

“What is terrifying is the scale—we came here on an ordinary day, without being seen, and have witnessed, therefore, an ordinary day’s activities. If this is how Talquist operates on an ordinary day—if Ghant has gone back to being a military port, with ships offloading supplies totally possessed by the Crown, then the scale of what he is planning is unimaginable. It dwarfs the buildup to the Cymrian War—and that conflict almost destroyed the entire continent.”

“Is there any other possible explanation?” Gwydion asked, already knowing the answer.

“No,” Anborn said flatly.

“Then the only thing to do is to return to Navarne at once and warn Ashe,” Gwydion said.

“Indeed you must.”

The young duke blinked. “Me? You’re not coming?”

“No. I’m here, so I may as well make use of the journey. I’m going to ride east to Jierna’sid and scout as many of the harbor points, mines, work-fields, and arenas as I can along the way. Once I get to the capital, I will gather as much intelligence as I can, then I will return and aid your godfather in planning the strategy for the war I’ve told him all along was coming.”

Gwydion fought down his panic, which had risen above the knot in his gorge and was threatening to choke him.

“Alone?”

The Cymrian hero reached out had steadied the young man’s shoulder.

“You can do this; do not be afraid. The honor guard is suitable to defend the coach if you are attacked, and the sword you carry will be a decided advantage against any brigands you should engage, or soldiers, if it comes to that, but it won’t, because Talquist will not wish to tip his hand by assaulting a noble in the Cymrian Alliance, at least not yet. If you follow the route back that brought us here, you will be fine, Gwydion. Once you’re out of Sorbold you can stop at any of the way stations of the guarded mail caravan and demand aid. You’re the duke now; they will give you whatever you want, including supplies, a fresh horse, and escort back to Navarne. Just keep all the lessons I’ve taught you in mind.”

“I—I meant you, alone,” Gwydion stammered. “How are you going to make it across the Sorbold desert—”

The Lord Marshal’s brow darkened like a thunderhead. He raised himself up on his elbows and slapped the ground, sending a scattering of sand into Gwydion’s eyes.

“I’d been traveling this continent alone for centuries before your father was an itch in your grandfather’s trousers,” he scowled. Then he dragged himself over the rocks to where the horses waited, and slowly, painfully crawled up his mount’s side, until he was clinging to the stirrup. Gwydion hurried over to him, but the ancient hero slapped him away, pulling himself with great effort into a vertical position, his useless legs limp beneath him. Gwydion could only stand there, suffering silently, as he watched Anborn struggle into the saddle. Finally, when he was atop the horse, he looked down at the young duke with a mixture of triumph and exhaustion in his eyes.

“Mount up,” he said, his voice ringing with the tones of a general. “I will accompany you back to the honor contingent in Evermere, then as far back as Jakar; I want to see what is happening in the gladiatorial arena there. After that you’re on your own, but you will be just over the border of Tyrian. I suggest you ride the forest road; your ‘grandmother’s’ status as Lirin queen will assure your safety there. Tell my nephew that I will be back as soon as I have fully ascertained what is going on in this godforsaken sandbox, but in the meantime, he should be girding the loins of Roland and the entire Cymrian Alliance. It may already be too late.”

The rest of the way home Gwydion’s pulse was thrumming in his ears. The drumbeat grew louder when he parted company with Anborn on the crossroads of Nikkid’saar, the gambling borough in the western city-state of Jakar. From the coach window he watched the ancient hero, his mentor and friend, disappear into the endless lines of foot and mounted traffic that plied the roadways of the city, hoping that this sight of him would not be his last. Then he ordered the contingent to turn west to Tyrian, on his way back to his ancestral lands and the mantle of responsibility that awaited him there.

In his mind he practiced endlessly the words he would use to break the news to his godfather that the war Anborn had so long predicted was finally coming. He pushed the honor guard to ride at double pace, finally leaving the carriage at a way station just inside the border of Roland, riding on mount the rest of the way home. His mind focused on silly things as they flew over the ground, like how far outside his keep he would need to stop and make himself less unkempt before entering, how he would communicate to Gerald Owen the urgency of his need to see Ashe without giving away his terror to the servants, how he would break the news to them without appearing as childish and frightened as he felt.

By the time he reached Haguefort, Ashe was gone.

31

Outside the window of the vast library, the snowflakes drifted down lazily on the warm wind, melting before they touched the earth.

Ashe looked absently out the window, bored with the grain treaty he was rewriting. His dragon sense had been observing the flakes in their descent. Thaw was here; winter would return soon in its fury, making travel more difficult. He chuckled to himself; he was looking for reasons to leave again.

It had been more than a month since he had last visited Elynsynos’s lair, had been able to hold his wife and sing to his child under the approving eye of the wyrm who was caring for them both. For all that he missed her presence with the intensity of a dragon missing its treasure, he had come to believe that her decision to visit with the beast was a wise one. She was much more hale and at ease under Elynsynos’s magical care and fond ministrations.

The door of the library opened silently; had he not been aware, by the nature of his blood, of every minuscule happening within a range of five miles, he would not have heard Portia come in. He had to acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that Tristan had been correct about her worth as well as that of the other servants he had loaned to Ashe and Rhapsody. The two other women were still awaiting their full usefulness, but Portia had quickly become an invaluable member of the household staff. She was quiet and unassuming, entering a room or delivering a message in a way that was never disruptive. Oftentimes she was gone without even leaving a trace of her vibration on the air of the room.

She gave a quiet cough now, a subtle verbal sign Ashe had learned was her way of informing him that his noon-meal repast was warm and would chill unpleasantly, then took hold of the door handle again.

Just as her hand began to turn the handle, the dragon in Ashe’s blood caught the slightest hint of a scent on the wind, a fragment of cinnamon and a drop of vanilla, mixed with the strange and intoxicating aroma of woodland flowers. It reached down into his brain, into memory so deep it did not even need consciousness to be evoked.

Rhapsody’s scent.

He shook his head infinitesimally, and the scent cleared. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a golden flash, like the movement of a fall of hair. He looked up quickly, turning in time to see Portia’s tall, dark form start through the door.

Not a sign of golden hair anywhere.

He ran a hand through his own metallic red-gold hair, then called out to her just as she was closing the door behind her.

“Portia?”

The chambermaid turned, her dark eyes wide with surprise.

“Yes, m’lord?”

Now that she was there, staring at him in confusion, anything Ashe would have asked fled from his brain, and he found himself speechless. He gestured clumsily with his hands, trying to think of a way to phrase a question that didn’t sound utterly insane, but no words would come into his mind.

He wanted her to explain how suddenly her presence, fleeting as it was, had reminded him, in a primitive sensory way, of his wife.

And realized in the same instant that she would think him unbalanced if he told her such a thing.

He smiled awkwardly, then shook his head as he rubbed the back of his neck.

“Sorry,” he said. “I—I don’t remember what I was going to ask you.”

Portia dropped a curtsy.

“Ring for me if you remember, m’lord,” she said pleasantly. “Good evening.”

Over the next few days it happened several times more.

At first Ashe suspected trickery; his upbringing and nature did not allow for an easy application of trust, and so he began to watch Portia carefully, noting her movements, keeping track of her out of the corner of his eye, and when she left the room, with his innate dragonsense.

Each time he felt a twinge of shame afterward.

The human side of his nature had granted him his father’s ability at cool, detached assessment and equanimity, so after a week or so of noting her movements, he began to look elsewhere for an explanation of what he had noticed. The new servant was discreet, modest, and kept to herself. She rose early, kept her quarters straight, worked hard, was prompt when summoned, eschewed after-hours gatherings with others who worked in the keep, and rebuffed the advances made by a young man who had come to deliver foodstuffs to the buttery from Avonderre. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and dark, with deep brown eyes and an olive complexion, a physical opposite of Rhapsody’s slight Lirin frame, rosy skin, blond hair, and green eyes. Her behavior appeared to be above reproach; since Ashe could not read minds or look into people’s hearts, he had little other choice but to assume she was not responsible for his odd inclinations.

Once Portia herself was ruled out he began to muse, almost to the point of melancholy, about why he was seeing aspects of his wife in a serving maid. Certainly he missed her, had always missed her in her absence, and had been driven to the brink of insanity when she was missing the last summer, taken by an old nemesis and hidden in a sea cave where the water, normally an element over which he had power, clashed against the rocks, hiding her from his inner sense. The kidnapping had loosed a wild ugliness in him, a desperation that felt uncomfortably close to the madness of dragon blood that he had seen in some of his other relatives.

I am distracted at best, going insane at worst, he thought glumly, blotting the ink on a new draft of the harbor code he was writing. If she knew, she would come home.

The thought kindled in his second nature an interest that took a while to extinguish. Almost as much as the man craved her company because of his love for her, the dragon sought it as well, but for different reasons. There were gemlike qualities to Rhapsody—her eyes a clear emerald, her hair like golden flax—that had been imbued in her both by nature and by her rather life-changing experience of walking through the fire at the Earth’s core. It was as if all physical flaw had been burned away, and perfection was something that appealed to the avarice in the dragon’s nature.

Blessedly, it was the existence of flaw that the man cherished, the pigheaded stubbornness, the occasional inability to see the forest for the trees, the wild anger that exhibited itself at inexplicable times, all parts of this woman that he enjoyed as well, and so the duality of his nature remained in agreement and in balance, despite taking opposite sides of the debate.

But now, if the physical cues that reminded him of his wife were beginning to manifest themselves for no reason, there could be more beneath the surface. Upon contemplating that possibility, Ashe felt cold.

Because it might be a signal that the dragon side of him was beginning to take over.

His desire to see her return grew stronger. He countered in by chanting under his breath, reminding himself that she was happier in the lair of the dragon than she was in Haguefort, and ultimately safer, but the diversion only worked for a short while. Then he would see Portia pass by, carrying linens or a tray to the kitchen; she would bow or smile slightly at him and hurry away, leaving in her wake a flicker of golden hair, a flash of rosy cheek and the scent of soap and vanilla.

He began to dream about his wife ceaselessly, fevered dreams that caused him to wake, sweating with unmet passion or the shivering chills of fear. Some nights in his dreams she came to him, pulled the covers aside, and settled down into his arms; from those dreams he awoke feeling lost and sick, his head pounding as if it were about to split.

After the worst of those nightmares Portia had come into his rooms, as she often did, delivering a clean basin and fresh, warm water for his morning shave. She bowed and disappeared, leaving such a strong image of Rhapsody in Ashe’s mind that he pulled the covers over his head and groaned loudly enough to frighten the tabby cat in the corner into a frenzy.

Finally the last blow to his peace of mind was struck on an especially cold night.

Ashe was sitting before the fire again, warming himself by its flames and in thoughts of his wife, when the serving maid entered the room, carrying a tray with his supper. She placed it down on the table before him, uncovered the plate, and turned to go; Ashe caught the scent of spice and vanilla, and the faintest hint of summer flowers in the folds of her rustling skirts. But rather than leaving, she came slowly up behind him, the heat of her body far more intense than that of the fire on his back.

With the lightest of touches, she let her hands come to rest on his shoulders, then allowed them to run lightly over his collar as if she were smoothing it. Her hands closed gently on the heavy muscles of his shoulders, her thumbs dug deliciously into the tight bands that encircled his spine as her fingers gently massaged the soreness from his neck.

Just as Rhapsody had always done.

She had magic in her hands, magic that soothed his tension and brought warmth to the deepest places that were tight and sore. Against his will Ashe closed his eyes, surrendering for a moment to the blissful ministrations of her hands.

Then went cold with the horror of what was happening.

Rage began to burn in his belly, anger at the liberties this servant was taking with him, but a deeper fury was building, directed at himself for allowing her to take those liberties.

And enjoying them.

He tried to keep his smoldering anger from igniting too quickly, reminding himself that it was a common practice in other keeps, other castles, for the servants to believe that servicing the master’s needs, physical and sexual, was part of their indenture. When he was an adolescent his own father, a holy man widowed by Ashe’s birth, had had a coterie of whores, each of whom had the countersign to open the secret door into Llauron’s office. So he kept himself as steady as he could, despite his inner desire to fling the girl across the room.

He set his teeth and spoke in as calm a voice as he could.

“Portia,” he said quietly, “you have truly beautiful hands. Soft as milk, and gentle. It would be a shame if I have to cut them off, which I will, if you don’t remove them from me immediately.”

A gasp of shock went up from the doorway. Ashe spun in his chair.

The serving girl was standing in the doorframe, the lid of the serving tray still in her hands. She began to tremble in confusion, tears forming in her large brown eyes.

Ashe looked wildly around him; his meal was still on the table before him, untouched. The nap of the silk carpet showed two sets of her footprints, and his dragon sense could immediately tell from the lack of heat in them that she had made her way directly to the door, rather than lingering.

His stomach clenched.

“Forgive me,” he stammered. “I—I thought—”

The young woman burst into tears.

Ashe pushed the tray aside and rose; Portia froze, her body going rigid with shock.

“I am sorry, again, I apologize,” the Lord Cymrian said awkwardly. “You may go.”

Portia dropped a quick curtsy and skittered through the door, closing it behind her. She waited until she had gotten all the way back to her bedroom, had thrown herself on her bed and pulled the cover over her head, before allowing herself the pleasure of a grin.

By that time, the Lord Cymrian was no longer thinking about her, and was actively ignoring anything his dragon sense might tell him about her. He had bounded up the stairs, two at a time, to gather the provisions he would need for his trip to the silent lake in the forest of Gwynwood.

He did not even wait until morning to leave.

32

The silence of the forest was broken occasionally by the twitter of winterbirds.

Achmed stopped long enough in his trek to point a deadfall out to Krinsel, the Bolg midwife, before stepping over a rotten tree. He waited until the woman had nodded her understanding and had circumvented the natural trap before turning and continuing deeper into the forest.

They had been traveling along a tributary of the Tar’afel River for some time, knowing that the brook would eventually empty into a quiet lake near the dragon’s lair. Achmed was listening intently, paying little attention to the glistening white trees, their branches dripping soft drops of snow in the heat of the morning sun.

He was following a sound that resonated in his ears as well as his blood; the namesong by which Rhapsody had called him. The song vibrated in his soul and resonated in his eardrums, through the sensitive network of veins and nerves that formed his skin-web, to the very tips of his fingers.

Achmed the Snake, come to me.

It was both a welcome sensation, and horrific one, to be summoned thus by a Namer. While the melody being chanted in the distance was perfectly attuned to his brain and the natural vibrations that he emitted in the course of drawing breath, there was still something deeply disturbing to him about his name being on the wind, even if no other living soul could hear it. Achmed had been a solitary and secretive creature his entire life.

Some habits were hard to break, some natural impulses all but impossible to overcome.

Achmed, come to me.

The winter had faded, as it always did in the middle continent during Thaw, for one turn of the moon. The ground at the base of trees was visible, dead or emergent grass in tones of pale green and gold drying in the morning wind. The snowcap, hard and frozen most of the winter, had softened to a thin, watery layer, and the breeze was warm, but did not carry the scent of spring, because the melt was false. In a few short weeks the cold would return with a vengeance, choking back any early shoots that might have come up in response to the cruel invitation the earth issued during Thaw, burying them securely under a resilient blanket of hard white ice until the turning of the season.

Still, he had to admit to himself that it was pleasant to hear Rhapsody’s voice in his ears again. She had been away from Ylorc for so many years now that he had almost grown accustomed to not hearing the morning messages she used to broadcast daily through the natural echo chamber of the ring of rocks that rose above her subterranean home in the grotto of Elysian, an underground lake in his lands.

Even though she liked living alone when she, Grunthor, and he had first come to Ylorc, away from the Firbolg who considered her a source of food and watched her hungrily when she passed by, Rhapsody was good at keeping in touch, and made of point of checking in with him each day. When she first married Ashe and moved to Navarne Achmed found to his shock that he missed her Lirin sunrise aubades and sunset devotions as well, the love songs of her people, sung to the heavens and the stars they had been born beneath, ceremonies she had marked daily all the time that he had known her. She had even continued to sing the prayers when they were traveling within the earth along the Axis Mundi, as far from the stars as it was possible to be, and so they were annoyingly ingrained in his mind, enough so that not hearing them had become even more bothersome than hearing them had been.

So it was, in a way, comforting to hear her voice again, singing his name, in the depths of his consciousness. Almost as comforting as it was disturbing.

He inhaled, allowing the air of the forest to circulate through his sensitive sinuses. Then he grimaced.

There was a taste of salt on the wind; Achmed rolled it around in his mouth, then spat it out on the ground sourly. They were a good way from the sea, and the breeze was blowing from the east, not the west, so that tang could only mean one thing.

Ashe was around here somewhere.

From what he could ascertain the droplets of salty water were a ways off; perhaps he had as much as half a day’s lead on Rhapsody’s husband. Achmed signaled to Krinsel to hurry; he wanted to have a chance to confer with the Lady Cymrian alone before Ashe showed up and distracted her completely, as he had done ever since he interposed himself in their lives four years before.

Achmed.

Achmed flinched and shook his head; the voice was different now, harsher, he thought, though when pondering a moment later he realized that it was not a good characterization of it. Is she growing impatient? he wondered as he quickened his steps, homing in on the aural beacon. Tired of being holed up in a dragon’s cave for an unknown number of months or even years, until her confinement is over and her brat born?

Finally he and Krinsel came to the banks of a placid forest lake nestled against a hillside. Its crystal waters were perfectly calm and reflected the trees that lined it like a mirror; broken chunks of ice floated lazily in the current draining into a small stream. From the descriptions Rhapsody had given him of Elynsynos’s lair, he thought this might be the reflecting pool that was fed from its depths. The grove in which the pool rested was serene, the silence broken only by an occasional chirp of birdsong, which grew lesser with each step closer toward the dragon’s lair.

He motioned to Krinsel to follow him around the quiet lake, the only sound now the trickling of the brook. The song of his name grew louder as he approached; when he got to the far shore he could tell that it was issuing forth from the entrance of a cave that was hidden in the steepest part of the hillside, obscured all but entirely by trees and the grade of the land. From the mouth of the cave a small stream flowed, emptying silently into the glassy waters of the reflecting pool.

Achmed indicated the cave entrance wordlessly, and Krinsel nodded again.

No path was visible to the eye; in fact, it seemed to Achmed that the trees that grew around the lake up to the entrance of the cave had been planted, or perhaps subtly twisted, to obscure the way, to lend yet one more layer of guardian flora to the place. Fortunately, not long after she had given him the ridiculous moniker of Achmed the Snake, Rhapsody had also retitled him with other names—Firbolg, Dhracian, Firstborn, Assassin, Unerring tracker. The Pathfinder. The words, spoken in the pure flames of the fire at the center of the earth, had imparted those traits to him, some of which he had had all his life, others of which were new. The ability to find paths was a useful addition to his skills, and he employed it now; the way through the labyrinth of trees became instantly clear to him.

He had started down the path that led to the entrance when the silence of the forest was suddenly shattered by a voice that rumbled through the forest floor, its pitch at once soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Stop.

Achmed froze involuntarily.

The odd voice sounded both annoyed and amused.

One does not walk, uninvited, into the lair of a dragon, unless one is a great fool. I suggest you knock, or at least announce yourself.

The words echoed up the tunnel beyond the cave entrance. They rippled unpleasantly over his sensitive skin, disrupting the agreeable vibration of his namesong that had been dancing there, irritating it and making his head throb. Beyond that, there was an inherent power to them, elemental in origin, that was unmistakably threatening.

He looked back at the Bolg midwife, whose face was set in the same stoic expression it always held, but whose eyes were glistening with fear.

“You can wait here,” he said; the woman nodded slightly, relief evident, though her expression did not change.

Achmed walked to the mouth of the cave. On the outer wall, obscured by a layer of frost and lichen, he saw some scratched runes; upon closer examination, he recognized them, and exhaled deeply. The words were carved in the ancient language of Universal Ship’s Cant, a compound tongue that was formed from Old Cymrian and the languages of the known world more than two millennia before:

The irony made his skin itch. This was the birthplace of the Cymrian people, the very spot where Merithyn the Explorer had carved the words given to him by his king with which he was to greet anyone he met in the new world.

The dragon that lived in the bottom of this cave had been fascinated with the explorer, then enamored of him; she had invited him to return home and bring his doomed people with him to refuge and safety in her lands. And the imbecile had done so, bringing with him all manner of selfish, spoiled people who had gained a sort of immortality, or at least an immense longevity, in the process. Though Merithyn died at sea on the way back, the Cymrians, as the refugees from Serendair were known, then proceeded to conquer the Wyrmlands and the lands beyond, ruling undisputed, subjugating the indigenous peoples who could not withstand conquerors with such unearthly powers and life spans, only to despoil it all with their great, stupid war.

And this was where it all began.

His teeth hurt thinking about it.

“Rhapsody!” he shouted impatiently into the mouth of the cave.

The namesong abruptly ceased, ripping the pleasant vibration from his skin, leaving it humming with a slight sting.

Silence reigned for a moment. Then the multitoned voice spoke again, displeasure evident in its tone now, replacing the humor that had been there a moment before.

You may enter, Bolg king, but mind your manners.

“Huzzah,” Achmed muttered. He gestured to Krinsel to make camp outside the cave, then started down the tunnel into the dark.

The mouth of the cave began to widen a few feet in, stretching into a vast, dark tunnel that glowed farther below with a pulsing light. At the tunnel’s exterior, a starlike lichen grew on the walls of the cave, spreading out into the light of day, but thinned as the tunnel deepened and eventually disappeared.

The walls of the cave twisted in ever-growing circles as the pathway descended. Achmed could hear the sound of trickling water farther in, could smell the unmistakable odor of the forge, of brimstone burning in the tunnel’s depths. The breath of the dragon, he thought, the acrid scent irritating his sinuses. He squinted in the dark, following the glow.

He was wading now through a shallow stream that deepened the farther he went in. Rhapsody had described the lair to him years before, had told him that the wyrm lived along the banks of an inland sea. Steam rose from the water he walked through.

He lost track of time as he traversed the tunnel, much as he, Grunthor, and Rhapsody had when traveling within the Root. The sensation surprised him; he was amazed that Rhapsody was able to pass any amount of time within this subterranean cave, as it was very reminiscent of that time within the Earth’s belly. Being Lirin, a child of the sky, she had suffered every moment she was away from the open air; the journey along the Axis Mundi had been torture for her. And she had been here for months.

The rancid air blasted around him in a wave of tainted heat again, and ahead of him he could hear the sound of taloned feet scraping against the stone floor of the cave, followed by the splash of water as the beast dragged itself out. Achmed stopped as he rounded a corner and looked up.

Ahead of him the dragon loomed, filling the cave from floor to ceiling, its enormous body ethereal but with surprising mass. The immense wyrm was at least a hundred feet in length, perhaps longer, in her nonsolid state, the copper scales that clad her skin glittering in the warm light from torch-fires that illuminated the bottom of the cave, causing her skin to reflect the light like a million twinkling red stars. Her eyes were prismatic orbs bisected vertically with narrow silver pupils, and gleamed like lanterns in the darkness. And in those eyes was the unmistakable look of irritation.

“Do not upset Pretty,” the beast warned, her multitoned voice echoing through the cave. The multicolored eyes narrowed to emphasize the words that had issued forth from the very air itself.

Achmed nodded curtly. “Where is she?”

The dragon eyed him suspiciously for a moment longer, then moved to one side, allowing him to pass by her translucent body and continue deeper into the cave.

In the midst of all the treasure from the sea Rhapsody sat in a canvas hammock suspended between two walls of the cave, a trident buried into the stone up to the top of its prongs holding one end up. Achmed slowed his steps and came to a halt, watching her intently.

He barely recognized her.

She had changed physically since the festival, but at first Achmed had difficulty trying to isolate in what way she was different. Her features had seemed to sharpen, to have lost some of the softness of angle that her father’s human blood had given her otherwise Lirin face. Now her appearance was colder, more severe; the warmth of the elemental fire that she had absorbed walking through the Earth’s core had diminished, leaving her skin paler, more alabaster, less rosy than it normally was. She seemed detached; she must have heard him come in, but she did not favor him with a glance. There was an almost draconic edge to her, and Achmed swallowed angrily, bile rising in his throat at the sight.

“Are you forming this baby, or is it forming you?” he asked.

Rhapsody turned then and looked at him. Achmed’s throat tightened; her clear green eyes, emerald in the torchlight, were scored with the same vertical pupils that her husband’s eyes, and those of the dragon, had.

“Both,” she said. There was an echo in her voice that was reminiscent of the multiple tones of the wyrm, though less pronounced. “And hello to you, too.”

Achmed measured his breathing, trying to beat down the rising sense of distress that was welling up inside him.

Rhapsody slid out of the hammock then and came to him. She nodded to Elynsynos, who glared at Achmed once more and slipped deeper into the cave through a mountain of gleaming silver coins.

“It’s only to be expected that a blend of such powerful blood would have an impact on both the mother and child,” Rhapsody said calmly, but clearly disturbed by Achmed’s reaction. “It’s temporary.”

“Has Ashe seen you like this?” Achmed demanded.

Rhapsody’s brow furrowed. “Yes. Did you bring Krinsel, as I asked you to?”

“She is outside. Did you finish the translation?”

“I did,” Rhapsody said.

“Where is it?” Achmed asked, his hackles beginning to rise from the static air in the cave and the disturbing change in Rhapsody.

Rhapsody crossed her arms. “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I am not going to give it to you, Achmed.”

The air in the damp cave suddenly seemed to go completely dry. The two friends stared at each other intently. Finally Achmed spoke, and his voice was calm, but with a deadly undertone.

“I must have misheard you.”

“You didn’t,” Rhapsody said flatly. “You cannot have this lore, Achmed—it mustn’t be used. Not now, not ever. For any reason. You must abandon your plans to rebuild the Lightcatcher, and find some other way to keep the Earthchild, and Ylorc, safe. This way will only make things more dangerous.”

The pupils in Achmed’s mismatched eyes contracted, as if drinking in a blinding light. His breath became more measured, shallower, but there were no other outward signs of the towering rage that was building within him. Both of them knew it was coming. Finally he spoke.

“Over the time I have known you, Rhapsody, you have given me many reasons and even more opportunities to kill you. You always do it so blithely that your sheer ignorance saves your life every time, because it would be difficult to summon up the initiative to terminate the existence of someone who is so clearly missing the point.” His eyes narrowed perceptibly. “This time, however, you are so willfully unaware of the thinness of the ice on which you are treading that it is breathtaking.”

Rhapsody exhaled but did not blink. “Do whatever you think you must, Achmed,” she said evenly, but with a deadly undertone of her own. “If my death at your hands is what it takes to keep you from moving forward with this folly, then it will have been worth it.”

Achmed flinched. She was using the Namer’s skill of True Speaking; there was no sarcasm, no jest in her voice.

“Why?” he spat. “Tell me what is so worrisome to you about me having this information that you would jeopardize—no, sacrifice—our friendship, and possibly your own life, to keep it from me, knowing how much I have need of it? Have you lost your mind, or just your commitment to the Earthchild and her safety?”

“Neither.” The pupils in Rhapsody’s emerald eyes expanded in the same way Achmed’s had, mirroring the control he was struggling to exert over his anger. “My commitment to keep her, and the rest of the people for whom I have responsibility, safe has not changed. Not even in the face of having to refuse my dearest friend something he craves beyond reason. Whatever that costs me is a price I’m willing to pay because, unlike you, I understand what is at stake here.”

“I am fully aware of what is at stake,” Achmed said softly, menace dripping from his words. “What is at stake here is the continued existence of life, and the Afterlife. Should the F’dor find the Earthchild, they will tear her rib of Living Stone from her body, and use it to unlock the Vault of the Underworld, in which all their remaining kind are imprisoned. Once loose, the demons will destroy all that lives on the earth, for that is what they crave, but since their existence is not limited to the material world, well fed with the power of that destruction, they will use it to undo even that life which exists beyond this one. Even I, godless man that I am, find that to be a fate that I cannot allow while there is breath in my body. So why is it that you, who see yourself as the savior of the world, not to mention every lost wastrel, child, and cat, cannot see the need to help me in this totally baffles me, Rhapsody.”

She exhaled deeply, then glanced over to the wall of silver behind which the dragon had disappeared.

“For ages you have had Grunthor’s loyalty, loyalty without limits, unto death and beyond. And yet there have been times over the course of your association that he has had to refuse you, has he not?”

“There is a considerable difference between Grunthor and you,” Achmed said, the hint of a sneer in his voice. “I trust his judgment. He is wiser than me in many ways. So when he questions me, I listen, because he and I have the same basic goals in mind, and he never does it just to be cantankerous. You, on the other hand, are like a spinning top. Your ethics, while consistent, are frequently foolish, your loyalties ill placed. Ofttimes you defy me or what I mean to do for reasons that make no sense to anyone ruled by his head rather than by whatever body part rules your decisions.”

He waited for the hurt reaction he knew would result from the cutting words, but saw none. The arrows of his words bounced off her unnoticed; her facial expression did not change.

“And does Grunthor support your decision to rebuild the Lightcatcher?”

The Bolg king’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever doubts he has had have been assuaged both by his knowledge of the instrumentality’s history, and of what is at stake.”

“Liar,” Rhapsody said contemptuously.

The air between them crackled with sudden dryness.

“Grunthor has done whatever he has to support you in the feverish intensity of your plan, which has consumed you,” she continued. “He has expressed his worry to you, I am certain of it. And this is what frightens me more than anything, Achmed. It does not surprise or distress me that you would disregard my concerns, for we both know you do not hold them in any regard. You have defied the pleadings of the Sea Mage, because you despise him and blame him for losses in the past. The king of the Nain, the people who built the very mountain realm that you now rule, and the Lightcatcher itself, sent you an emissary to warn you against building it again, did they not? That was the reason he came to you, though you did not confess that when you told me of his visit during the carnival.” Achmed did not answer. “All these people who are your friends, or at least your allies, have begged you not to do this, and their pleas fall on your deaf ears. I am not surprised.

“But then, your own chief Archon, your supreme military commander, your best friend who has followed you with the unquestioning loyalty of a born soldier throughout more than a millennium of time, not to mention through the very bowels of the Earth itself, tells you he doubts the wisdom of what you are doing, and you still do not heed? You should ask yourself whose judgment is really impaired here, whose soul is possessed of irrational ethics and goals.” She put a hand to her belly and took a deep breath.

“Here is what you truly need to know about this translation, Achmed. I have told you from the beginning that this is ancient lore, the very code of power by which magic is manipulated. The roadmaps to the beginning of time, the musical score of the elements and how their vibrations make up the very fabric of the world itself. Is it even possible for you to understand the import? You have the keys to the world in that manuscript. Any man with even the slightest humility would tremble at the thought of touching it, let alone wielding it, without years of study in how to use it. But your arrogance knows no bounds, and so you are blind to how ferociously dangerous this information could be, even in the hands of someone well-intentioned.” Her eyes gleamed bright in the darkness of the cave.

“So since you will not accept my wisdom in this matter, or that of the Sea Mage, or the Nain king, or even your best friend, perhaps I can put it in terms you might actually fathom. Power does not come from nowhere, Achmed. It is an elemental vibration drawn from something else, a transfer of life essence. Whether it be for healing or hiding, scrying or destruction, the instrumentality you have built, and want to rebuild, needs a source to power it. And since you are using the pure energy of the light spectrum, the colors which, like music, are attuned to the vibrations of the elements, know what it is that you are drawing from.

“These are primordial magics, left over from the birth of the world. Those magics that are purely fire-based pull power from the core of the earth, the very elemental inferno through which you, Grunthor, and I walked to come here. Those that are based in water draw from the Well of the Living Seas, the place where that element was born. Air-based magics come from the Castle of the Knotted Winds, ether from the star Seren and the pieces of others that have fallen to earth and yet remain alive still. But most of the magic of the Lightcatcher, or the Lightforge, as the Nain called it, is drawn from the earth, since it is in earth, being the last element born, that traces of all the elements are contained.”

Rhapsody’s breathing evened out, as she saw her words beginning to register with the Bolg king. Lest the moment be lost, she leaned closer, and whispered her final words like a killing blow.

“The machine you built, and want to rebuild, draws from the earth itself, Achmed, and more—it saps the oldest piece of it, that which has lain within it, dormant, since the world began, its power tainted with fire lore because it has been polluted by the F’dor. This machine, which you see as a bastion of protection for the Earthchild, pulls power from the very wyrm that lies, sleeping now, within the body of the earth—it is part of that body, a large part. You have seen that wyrm with your own eyes.

“And each time you use the Lightcatcher, you are risking waking it.”

33

For a long time the only sound in the cave was the trickling of the water that streamed from the underground lagoon into the quiet lake beyond the confines of the cave. The two ancient friends stared at each other, neither speaking, their breaths measured in unison. Finally Achmed broke the silence.

“Give me the translation.”

Rhapsody’s eyes narrowed. “Have you heard nothing I have said?”

“Every word. Give it to me anyway.”

The Lady Cymrian rested her hand angrily on her swollen belly.

“I want you to leave now, Achmed,” she said.

“With pleasure, as soon as you give me the translation. I have been learning to be patient with reptiles, but don’t push too far.”

Rhapsody turned away angrily. “Or what? You’ll kill me? If that will keep you from finishing and using that device, go ahead. I have already told you that the price would be worth it.”

The Bolg king exhaled. “Who’s being the fool now? First, let me tell you this again: The Lightcatcher will be built, it will be used, translation or no. You cannot stop that. I’m looking for something in the text to avoid having to learn how to use it by trial and error. In that you could have been useful, but instead you remain blind—perhaps it is the shrinkage in your eyes from carrying your husband’s brat.

“Next, when was the last time you knew me to kill someone when it wasn’t in self-defense, or, more likely, in your defense, my dear? I leave my kingdom and travel over the width of a continent to haul your arse out of the sea and the grip of a depraved maniac, and you accuse me of being willing to kill you? Ridiculous, on top of insulting. Just because I know how to kill well or easily doesn’t mean I do it recklessly or without reason. There are plenty of individuals I would like to see dead who still walk the earth—many of them related to you.

“And don’t treat me like a child. Primordial magic? Of course it is primordial magic. We are dealing with forces of evil left over from the First Age. No source of power that has its genesis any later than that will work against those forces.”

Rhapsody turned back; she was pale now. “But you have no business using it,” she said haltingly. “This is not a matter of reading a recipe or building from a design. The great Namers studied for centuries before they were given access to these lores; even I, who have studied these things, am woefully unprepared to understand what is written here fully. I am largely self-taught, Achmed—do not forget that much of my study was done in the absence of my mentor. Despite all the time I have practiced the science of Naming, even I would not dream of manipulating primordial magic.”

Achmed pointed at her belly. “What do you think you have been doing in spawning dragonlings?” he said, unable to disguise his disgust. “If that’s not manipulating primordial magic, I don’t know what is. You don’t even have a pretense of an idea what will happen as a result of this pregnancy. You, a vessel of elemental fire and ether, the wielder of a sword that has no doubt shaped your soul with its own powers, Lirin and human and Cymrian, gods help you, frozen forever in time, ageless—blending your blood with the tainted mishmash that is Ashe’s? Whatever is born could be the end of the world all by itself. And don’t pretend this was entirely your idea. I know enough about wyrms to know that your beloved husband is toying with your life, whether he pretends otherwise or not. All this pretense of concern about the risks of the Lightcatcher—you should be far more worried about the risks of bringing this child into the world, not only to your own life, but to the future.” He saw Rhapsody wince, and felt a twin rush of satisfaction and guilt.

“So now,” he said quickly, “stop lecturing me about the risks of playing with magics one does not understand and give me the translation. I assure you I will be far more responsible with mine than you have been with yours.”

“I—I can’t—”

“Of course you can. Ask yourself this: Knowing that there is an entire library, Gwylliam’s library, at my disposal, in Ylorc, and any number of Bolg to work on it, is it better for you to give me specific directions, or allow me to experiment? Or, of course, you could abandon all this”—he waved contemptuously at the cave filled with sea treasures and lichen—“and come back to Ylorc with me; you can oversee the project, and then at least you will know how the lore is being used.”

“No.”

In fury he reached out and seized her wrist; instinctively she pulled away, but stopped, feeling the strength of his grip.

“You are sacrificing your status as a Namer, you realize this?” Achmed said softly, staring directly into the now-vertical pupils of her eyes. “You promised me in Yarim, when I did a rather major favor for you and the useless duke there, that you would help me with this. If you refuse now, that will be a lie. You will be going back on your word. You will be breaking your oath of truth—your status as a Namer will be forfeit.”

Rhapsody’s face hardened, and she struggled to pull free of his grip again.

“So be it,” she gasped, her attempt to break his lock on her wrist futile. “If I was willing to die to keep you from disturbing the lore, what’s the sacrifice of a profession?”

Achmed released her arm with a violent toss.

“I repeat, you are keeping me from nothing,” he said harshly. “You are only missing the chance to keep the process from being haphazard. Let that be on your head.” He turned and started up the passage to the air again.

Rhapsody’s eyes opened wide with shock, the emerald green irises lightening to the color of spring grass. Achmed caught the change out of the corner of his eye. He recognized that look; it was the expression that came into Rhapsody’s eyes when she was afraid.

He stopped in the tunnel and opened his mouth to ask her what she feared more, his actions, or her inaction.

Then shut it abruptly at the sight of the bloody water gushing forth from her and pooling ominously on the floor of the cave at her feet.

Within a heart’s beat, the whole world seemed to change.

Rhapsody’s hand went to her belly, and her face contorted as she doubled over. She let loose a gasp of pain and shakily put out her hand to brace herself against the wall of the cave.

Achmed felt a sudden chill, an iciness as the heat in the tunnel dropped suddenly and dissipated. His anger melted away, leaving him dizzy; he seized Rhapsody’s arm and discovered that her body was cold, as if the core of elemental fire burning within her had been snuffed.

The air in the tunnel crackled statically; the dragon appeared, sliding over the pile of silver like liquid lightning. Her multitoned voice resonated in the water and walls of the cave.

“Pretty?”

Rhapsody struggled to remain standing, but her legs buckled beneath her, and she slid to the floor. She opened her mouth to form words, but then her face contorted in pain and she gasped again.

“Your husband comes,” the dragon said, her voice solid and resolute as the ages, but Achmed could see consternation glittering in the beast’s prismatic eyes. “I sense him at the stream’s edge, less than a league away.”

Rhapsody’s eyes met the Bolg king’s. “Krinsel,” she whispered. “Please.”

Achmed fought back the acid in his throat. He slid his hand down the length of Rhapsody’s arm into her own and squeezed it; he released it and bent to the floor, dipping the edge of his robe in her blood. Then he ran back up the tunnel.

He found the midwife at the cave’s mouth. The command to run and aid Rhapsody he gave in Bolgish, as it was a terse and guttural tongue that required little effort to speak. As the woman hurried into the glowing darkness, Achmed exhaled sharply, then stepped out of the cave and held the edge of his cloak aloft in the wind.

He waited impatiently, long enough for the scent of the blood to catch the wind, then turned and hurried back into the dark belly of the dragon’s lair.

Two miles away at the edge of the tributary of the Tar’afel, Ashe paused from drawing water and rose. He cast the droplets in his hand to the snowy ground, where they refroze into crystals of ice, and ran the back of his sleeve across his face to clear his nose and eyes.

Within him his dragon sense expanded, rising from its dormancy. The minutiae of the world around him became mammoth; suddenly he was aware of the tiniest of details, the infinitesimal threads of light and sound that made up all the individual things that existed beneath the sun, that stood separate from the wind that blanketed the earth. Every blade of frozen grass in every thawed circle below every leafless tree, every feather on every winter bird that flew above him, every ice-covered branch of every bush was suddenly clear to him, or at least to the ancient beast in his blood.

On the wind he could count the drops of blood he recognized more surely than he knew his own name.

And more—there was blood mixed with hers that echoed his own.

Ashe turned in that instant and surveyed the land between where he stood and the dragon’s cave. Two miles as the raven flies, he thought, forcing down the fear that was rising within him the way his dragonsense had the moment before. At least ten to ford the river at a low enough place and then circumvent the thickest parts of the virgin forest, where no path had ever been blazed, and where snow still lingered.

The woodlands around him appeared for a split second in his mind to be filled with obstacles that separated him from his treasure, snow-covered deadfalls and white hillocks, hummocks and knolls that barricaded the forest with thick frost that had melted to mere frosting at the onset of Thaw.

And then suddenly the obstacles fell into place as his dragon sense took on a new dimension. No longer confined to being just an awareness, his dragon nature took over, and that side of him rose, rampant, struggling within him no more, but rather asserting itself over nature and the earth around him. A path gleamed in his mind like a beacon, an ethereal guide to Elynsynos’s cave.

And as his wyrm nature took over, Ashe felt a loosening of the reins of control that he kept so tightly inside of himself, a calling to the power of the elements all around him.

His body remained human for the moment, even though his conscious mind was now draconic. He began to run, straight into the tree wall before him that kept him separated from what the dragon in his soul considered its treasure.

His wife and unborn child.

Bend to me; let me pass, the multitoned voice within his soul commanded.

And the earth obeyed.

Trees shrugged in the wind, their trunks bending at barely possible angles to clear the path. Mounds of snow-covered brush parted; the muddy ground hardened in places before him, all in response to the lore of the earth from which his ancestors had sprung. The forest, suddenly silent, seemed to hold its breath as the man who raced through it dragged power from the air around him, passing through the greenwood as if it were nothing more than wind.

Leaving it crackling, dry, a moment later, as if his presence had stripped the life right out of it.

As he ran, all of the thought went out of Ashe’s conscious mind, sinking deeper into the primal nature of the dragon in his blood, until the solitary thought—the need to get to Rhapsody—consumed his entire being. That primacy gave him greater speed, and before he knew it he was standing at the mouth of Elynsynos’s lair, panting from exertion and sweating in terror.

At the cave entrance his dragon sense was suddenly, rudely slapped away, forced into sharp submission by the greater lore that was extant in the place. Ashe blinked, then listened. From the depths of the cave he could hear a keening wail, the sobbing of pain and despair in a voice that he knew well. The sound of the agony made his blood turn cold; his skin prickled in sweat and nausea threatened to consume him.

Standing before him in the cave’s mouth was a Bolg woman, a dark and somber-faced midwife he vaguely remembered Rhapsody introducing to him years before. In Bolgish culture the midwives held a special place of power; the Bolg believed that infants were to be given the best of their crude medical care because they represented the future, even while Ylorc’s warriors of great skill and accomplishment might be left to bleed to death of their wounds. The midwives were an iron-fisted lot, a dominant political faction even in Achmed’s new order, a silent, stern-demeanored group of women who were rarely known to show emotion or distress.

So it was even more disconcerting to see the expression of stoic fear in the eyes of the woman standing before him.

Ashe struggled to form the words. “My wife?” he whispered. “My child?”

The Bolg woman let her breath out slowly, then spoke three words in the common tongue of the continent.

“I am sorry,” she said.

34

The days of endless snow passed, one into another.

Faron’s mind, absent of other things to comprehend, honed a harder focus. He had lost all memory save one, had turned away from acclimating to his new body, his new reality, to keep his attention set on but one goal. Mile by mile, he followed winter’s path through unbroken farmland, sighting along the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, the frozen road that bisected the continent. There was very little traffic on that thoroughfare; Thaw had come, and the people of the towns, villages, and cities of Roland were busy making repairs, stocking up peat, wood, and dung for fuel, and settling in, awaiting winter’s return. With the lore of the earth strong within him, Faron had learned to blend into the landscape, so whether it was because of that new ability, or the lack of anyone to see him, he passed unnoticed.

He was following a sound now, a distant call in a vibration he had known all his life, the ancient, primordial song of the scales he had lost. If it had been possible for him to forget the tune, he would have been reminded by the humming of the ones within his possession, their power reverberating through his stone body.

Ofttimes the noise of day served to mute the call, and when it did Faron became angry beyond all measure. The cry of a winter bird, of geese flying overhead in formation, caused him to stop in his snowy tracks, looking up to the firmament of the sky above, muttering silent curses in a long-dead language deep within his brain. He craved the silence of the world, for in that silence, he could hear the call clearly. Once he got a fix on it, he followed it ceaselessly.

Until at last one night he found what he was looking for.

He had come to the top of a rise above a small, low-lying valley, one of the undulating hills of the Orlandan Plateau, on the wide Krevensfield Plain, and there it was below him.

The full moon was shining, bright as day. Its light glazed the snowy fields, making them gleam silvery blue. Even in the dark, the moonlight was so intense that it was easy to see the brightly colored wagons, the crimson and purple flags dressing the carts that by day were pulled by horses. Those beasts were quartered together now, blanketed for the night; they alone noticed the chain in the earth, and nickered in a growing panic.

Within the Monstrosity’s camp torches and barrel fires burned, sending sparks skyward to dance with the blazing moonlight.

Around those barrel fires some of the men who served as guards and laborers sat, drinking foul ale and telling fouler jokes. The hunchback ticket taker had imbibed more than he could handle, and was now being used as a human ball in a grotesque game of Tossabout, to which he seemed to proffer no objection and was, in fact, cackling aloud. The laughter echoed off the empty world of hummocks and rises around them, fading off into the night.

Masking the call of the scales.

Malik held his battered mug to his lips, blowing the dirty foam off, the ale spattering into his beard as he laughed. He had pulled his legs against his chest in the attempt to warm them when out of the corner of his eye he spied movement.

He looked again, peering out into the darkness, but whatever had been moving was gone. Nothing more ’an a snow devil, he decided, taking another draught. Wind’ll be a bitch tonight.

The wagon closest to their barrel fire reared up off the ground, then was slammed down on it again, shattering into pieces.

For a split second, no sound was heard on the wide expanse of the great plain except for the splintering of the wood. Then the screaming began.

The freaks that had survived the initial impact inside the wagon started to scream; their harsh, alien voices rose in a discordant wail that sliced through the winter wind and the crackle of the fire, blending with the frightened whinnying of the horses. Malik and the others around the barrel fire fell back, covering their faces, then scrambled to their feet in shock. The keeper’s mouth flapped, forming two words.

“What the—”

The next nearest wagon suddenly skidded sideways toward them, as if it were being swung from behind. It smashed into the wreckage of the first, doubling the screams and filling the night air with the sounds of gruesome snapping and grinding.

Then it was hoisted up into the darkness, and tossed in much the same manner as they had been tossing the hunchback the moment before, right into their midst.

Through the sheer luck of reflex and favorable positioning Malik dropped on the snow and rolled to his left, bruising himself from face to knee but spared from being crushed, as three of the other men he had been drinking with the moment before were.

As the cacophony swelled around him, and the blood pounded crazily in his ears, Malik’s mind tried to determine what was happening, why a pleasant night’s drinking in the cold had suddenly become a nightmare. All he could imagine was they had been caught in the middle of a terrible winter storm that had whipped up from nowhere, catching the wagons and sending them flying.

He struggled to regain his feet and his gorge, which had risen into his throat and was choking him; just as he did, Malik thought he saw a shadow pass between the destruction and a third wagon, from which freaks and others that traveled with the Monstrosity were streaming, gibbering in confusion and fear. In the tattered light of the remnants of the barrel fire that had been in their midst and now was scattered over the snow the shadow appeared to be human, but elongated into gianthood by the undulating flames.

The roof of the next wagon splintered into pieces as the chorus of confusion grew into screams of terror.

This time Malik looked up over the top of the broken wagon in time to see the silhouette of two enormous arms and upper body slamming down with fury again. The shadow seized the wagon, shaking it violently, causing whatever other creatures had still been inside, crowding their ways to the exit, to be thrown clear onto the snowy ground, where they huddled, their eyes fixed above them, as it brought the wagon down directly on top of them with a resounding slam.

In the fading light of the barrel fire Malik thought he could make out the entire silhouette now. For a brief moment he had believed that one of the freaks was rampaging; such things had happened before, and a number of their exhibits were very strong. But as the titanic shadow lurched away in the snow toward the Ringmaster’s wagon, he could see that whatever was assaulting the monstrosity was no freak, nor was it any man he had ever seen.

And it was making its way to the Ringmaster’s abode.

“Fire at it!” he shouted hoarsely to the men who had been on duty while he and the others were drinking with the hunchback. Those men were leveling their crossbows, shaking; they were in better sight of what they were facing, and whatever it was must have been far worse than Malik could imagine by the sight of their faces, frozen in a rictus of fear. His shout seemed to waken them; in unison they fired, one of the bolts going wide, but the other three finding their marks on a target that was hard to miss, even when moving.

The bolts glanced off or shattered, as if they had been fired into a stone wall.

“Again!” Malik screamed, but two of the crossbowmen had already dropped their weapons and run while the third stood motionless; only one of the guards had the presence of mind to fire again, which he did even as the moving earth in man’s form brought its arms down in a single clenched fist onto the guard who had frozen.

Amid the spattering of blood and crunching bone that followed, a tiny metallic clink could be heard.

The statue reared upright, clutching at the vicinity of its ear, immobile for a moment.

Malik saw the opportunity. “Run!” he screamed to anyone still standing, stunned, in the area. He waved his arms wildly, then glanced about him. “Sally? Sally darlin’! Sally, where are ye?!”

“’Ere, Malik,” answered a small, terrified voice behind him as Duckfoot Sally appeared on the step of one of the wagons, logjammed with the others trying to make their way out.

At the sound of her voice, the enormous man stopped, then turned sightless eyes toward her that in the gleam of the torches of the remaining wagons shone blue and milky.

Then began to stride in her direction, following the sound of her voice.

Malik was between them, and saw the intent in the statue’s stride. “Run, Sally!” he screamed, interposing himself in the statue’s path and grabbing hold of a broken tent pole. “He’s coming fer ye! Run!”

The giant slapped him away like a leaf in the wind, shattering his bones and flinging them into the snow in several discrete sections.

Duckfoot Sally and the freaks crowded around her screamed in unison. The sound seemed to infuriate the approaching titan; its speed increased, along with the menace in its stance. For a second there was jostling on the porch of the wagon; then the freak known as the Human Bear seized Sally from behind and tossed her over the railing into the statue’s path.

She squealed as she tumbled to the ground, then looked up to find two unearthly eyes, eyes whose scleras were stone, but whose irises were blue with filmy cataracts, staring down at her intently.

Choking on her horror and on her own tears, Duckfoot Sally skittered backward a short distance, hampered by the rustling tatters of her many layers of skirts and aprons. Under her breath she began to mutter soft prayers she remembered from childhood, even though their meaning was long lost to her.

The titan continued to observe her, unmoving. It watched her as she began to sob, then slowly knelt in front of her, oblivious of the arrow fire that was glancing off its back and sides.

One of the statue’s enormous hands curled into a fist, eliciting a gasp of horror from Sally and every other freak who had been trapped on the wagon’s porch or by fear.

Silence fell over the devastated ruin of the camp, save for the crackling of the remaining barrel fires and the soft moaning of the dying.

The titan reached out slowly and ran the back of its stone knuckles over the cheek of the terrified woman, brazing it slightly from the roughness of the stone, but wiping away the flood of tears that had cascaded down her face.

Exactly as she had always done for him.

No realization came into the terrified woman’s eyes.

From his wagon across the campsite, the Ringmaster finally emerged, tucking his nightshirt into his striped pants, the double-pursed woman behind him.

“What is going on here?” he shouted, his voice thick with rum, unspent arousal, and annoyance.

The shocked silence broken, the freaks and carnies, Duckfoot Sally among them, began to shriek again.

The statue’s head snapped upright.

For a moment Faron had been feeling a sensation that had not been present since he had been encased in the body of Living Stone. It was the sensation of sadness.

She no remember me, he was thinking.

There was something devastating to him about that; without Sally and her kindness, there would be no one now in the world who had known him as he was.

Had loved him as he was.

He put his free hand up to his ear, where the lucky shot had torn a chink in his flesh; there was no pain, just a sense that the damaged area was drying in a way that the rest of his earthen body was not, as if the stone was no longer alive.

Suddenly he could hear the sound ringing clearer, the song the scales emitted.

His head jerked up at the realization, but as it did, the garbage noise, the interference that deadened the song of the scales, rose to meet it, blocking its sound, hindering him from finding it.

He shook his head, trying to clear it of the noise, but that only made it grow louder.

Loudest of all seemed to be coming from immediately in front of him.

His balled fist opened, his fingers wrapped around Duckfoot Sally’s neck, and squeezed until the noise she was making stopped.

In horror, the remains of the Monstrosity watched the titan rip Duckfoot Sally’s head from her shoulders and drop it idly on the ground to its side, then straighten up and turn slowly in the direction of the Ringmaster.

The Ringmaster stumbled down the steps of his wagon, barefoot in the snow.

“Do something, you misbegotten idiots!” he squealed at the remaining guards, but the carnies were running, fleeing out into the darkness of the Krevensfield Plain along with whatever freaks could still move. The woman he had been attempting to fornicate a few moments prior gaped raggedly and ran back inside the Ringmaster’s wagon, a miscalculation apparent a moment later when the titan grasped the rail of the porch and hurled it over the Ringmaster’s head, blocking his exit as it smashed to the ground.

The Ringmaster froze. He glanced wildly around, looking for any exit he could find, but behind him his path was blocked by his shattered wagon, the bi-pursed woman’s broken body sprawling from what had once been his window.

Before him was a giant angry shadow, formed of stone but moving now as a man.

A man with murderous rage in his eyes.

Quickly the owner of the Monstrosity dug his hands into his pockets, searching blindly for whatever valuables he might find, knowing there was little likelihood that anything so destructive might be bought off with gems or gold, but not knowing anything better to do.

His trembling hand caught hold of something sharp and rough at the edges; it was the tattered blue oval he had removed from the belly of the fish-boy a long while back. He kept it in his pocket for good luck, and because the vibration it emitted had a warm and sensuous effect on his nether region. He seized the scale and tossed it into the darkness at the approaching titan’s feet.

Faron stopped in his tracks on the snowy ground.

The scale gleamed before him, reflecting the fires and the crazy light of the moon. It was the scrying scale, the blue talisman etched with the picture of an eye surrounded by clouds on one side, the convex one, and obscured by them on the other, the concave one. It was the scale in which he had first found this place, had tracked the woman with the long hair over the sea at his father’s insistence, had helped his father keep track of his fleet of pirate ships on the sea. It was possibly his greatest prize, and the loss of it had left him bereft.

Now it was lying, unobstructed, at his feet, singing its clear and bell-like song.

Reverently Faron bent down and scooped up the scale, then held it aloft in triumph to the light of the cloud-draped moon.

Then he turned away, lost in the joy of a treasure recovered.

Behind him, the Ringmaster let out his breath in a ragged sigh of relief.

Faron stopped in midstride.

For a moment he had almost forgotten, in the reverie of the scale’s recovery, the torture that he had endured, the agony of the scale being torn from him, the teasing to force him to perform, the endless abuse and isolation in the darkness of a bumping circus wagon. He did not understand his torment then, nor did he understand it now.

But he remembered it.

He thought back to the image of Duckfoot Sally, swinging her nails like a sword in his defense; the Ringmaster had belted her into unconsciousness with the back of his hand. In his primitive mind Faron did not even remember what he himself had done to Sally, but the rage of the memory returned, along with that of all the other torment he had suffered at the hands of the man in the striped trousers.

He turned and was on the Ringmaster in a heartbeat; the man didn’t even have a chance to open his mouth to scream before Faron backhanded him into the broken wagon. Then, for the first time since gaining this new body of living earth, he attacked for the sheer, sweet pleasure of revenge, pummeling the man’s lifeless body into jelly, then flinging it out into the night where even the carrion did not recognize it the next morning.

The song of the scales swelled in his ears now, drowning out the whine of the wind, the whimpering of the injured, the agonized howls of the dying. It was the only thing he could hear, and it sustained him.

He listened as, in the distance, the last of the tones sounded, calling to the others. Faron turned to follow it, heading south, away from the broken remains of the Monstrosity.

Toward Jierna’sid.

35

In the moments before the assault on the Bolglands began, Grunthor was experiencing a sense of foreboding that was unlike any other he had been granted in all his years of war. It was not the presence of some sort of fear, nor the queasiness in the stomach and dull thudding at the base of the brain that a commander of fighting men feels when something is not right. He certainly had known that sensation enough to recognize it. Rather, it was an artificial absence of any feeling of concern at all, as if some unknown entity had reached directly into his warrior’s soul and ripped out every instinct, every trained alarm, that had been his from birth and developed over a lifetime of soldiering.

In short, he felt nothing.

Suddenly all the unconscious points of reference that a man whose life consists of perennial vigilance marks with each breath were gone, as if in all the world there was nothing to worry about. The sensation did not include a false sense of well-being, just a total numbness to the ever-present need to be on guard, at the ready.

Had he not been shocked by this sudden ripping of his soldier’s wariness, he might have recognized it for what it was. It would have made no difference in the outcome of the events that followed, and perhaps would have only served to frighten him more.

Because what he felt in those moments, that utter sense of nothingness that numbed his senses and left him blank, was the total subversion of his earth lore as the dragon subsumed it.

The elemental heartbeat that rang in his blood, the thudding pounding of the world’s pulse, disappeared. Had his own heart suddenly ceased to beat it would not have been more shocking. His connection to the earth, deep and intrinsic as it was to him, vanished, leaving him frozen, dizzy, for a split second, before he took another breath, and his heartbeat returned to its regular tempo.

By the time his awareness returned, the ground was already beginning to sunder.

Rhapsody had given the underground grotto, with its tiny cottage and gardens in the middle of a dark, subterranean lake, the name Elysian, after the castle of the king who had ruled in her homeland of Serendair. The daughter of a human farmer and his Lirin wife, she had grown up in wide green fields beneath open skies, and had never seen anything so enchanting as the quiet solitude of the dark lake, dotted by tiny shafts of sunlight that shone through holes drilled in the rocky ground above it. She had never seen Elysian Castle either, but its name conjured magical images in her mind as a child, so she thought the name appropriate.

But the place had had other names long before she came. The Firbolg called the ring of rocky crags that towered above the grotto, hiding it from sight and the wind of the upworld, Kraldurge, which in their tongue was translated as the Realm of Ghosts. Whether this was because of the mournful howling of the wind as it whistled around the bowl formed in those towering rocks, or for a deeper reason, was lost to memory. In any case the name was apt, because both the dark underground lake and the grassy meadow above it held unholy secrets, unforgiven sins that could only have been remembered by one living being, the beast who until her awakening at summer’s end had been forgotten as well.

It was to this place of dark secrets that the dragon went first, boring up through the earth quietly, drawing the lore of it into herself. Her innate sense led the way as unerringly as a beacon, guiding her from far away to this place she had once made a lair of a sort, a hiding place of privacy and seclusion within the mountains she had once ruled. Her hated husband had given her this place, had made it for her, in fact, but she did not remember those things, only that it had once been hers, and that she had been betrayed there.

And more—she could hear the echoes of her name in the underground grotto, could sense it whistling in the wind of the guardian rocks above, trapped in endless circles, repeated over and over in an eternal howl of despair.

Aaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnwwwwwyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

Now that she was finally here, in the place where the name had been uttered, she could feel the hatred, the betrayal, and the grim memory of pleasure long ago tasted in revenge. Whatever she had done to inspire that scream had a sweet flavor; it must have been a delicious payback, though she did not recall what it was.

As she waited beneath the grotto, savoring her return to this place, another taste came into her mouth, bitter this time. It was akin to the smell of another woman’s perfume on the bedsheets, or a foreign taste on a lover’s lips. At first the dragon was repulsed, spat in a vain attempt to clear the lore from her mouth, but eventually her compromised understanding recognized it for what it was.

This place above her, the lake and the gardens, the island and the cottage, belonged, in every possible way, to someone else now.

At the precise moment that her mind grasped that concept, it realized another as well: the person who supplanted her in this place, who had torn the lore away from her, knowingly or otherwise, who had taken away her dominion, was the woman whose misty face and green eyes haunted her waking dreams.

As the fury rose, a calming reassurance took hold, staying the response.

Because the dragon knew in that place she could smell the scent of the woman she despised, could drink in her essence, absorb it into her skin, into herself.

And thereby track that woman until she found her.

The wyrm did not feel the need to know the reason for her hatred, had no urge to understand her desire for revenge. She was still barely cognizant of anything, had lost the planes and angles and strata of consciousness, still was not reasoning or making the connections between thought and action. She knew only two things beyond doubt—that she had an endless well of acidic anger within her soul, and that venting it in destruction eased the pain somewhat.

I seek relief, she told herself as she slid along the underground spring that fed the lake, feeling the water recognize her and welcome her to this place again. Surely there can be no reproach for that.

Up from the bedrock at the lake bottom she emerged, swallowing the last of the earth’s lore like a breath to be held beneath the water. Up she spiraled, from the endless darkness of the earth toward the muted light above the lake’s surface, swimming with all the speed her anger could generate.

Past startled fish that dwelt in the depths, skittering away in terrified schools, by whisper-thin formations of crystal stalactites that rose up in great cathedral arches of brilliant color, unseen in the underground grotto, the dragon sped forward, finally bursting forth from the water onto the rocky shore of the tiny island in the center of the dark lake.

She lay for a moment, gathering her breath, then lifted her head and gazed at the place she had heard her name being called.

The long-ago scream actually had its genesis in the world above this place, this deep grotto; she could hear it wailing high up through the rock, dancing angrily on the wind that whipped through the circle rocks of Kraldurge. But there was enough memory latent here, below where it had happened, to warrant her notice.

The dragon crawled away from the bank, pulling the last part of herself from the water; water tended to mask vibrations, especially old ones, or distort them, and she wanted whatever she discovered here to be absolutely clear. How she knew this she was uncertain, but she didn’t care.

Because her sensitive nostrils had already caught the woman’s scent.

The dragon’s piercing blue eyes scanned the dark island.

In the center of it stood a small cottage, surrounded by gardens deep in winter’s sleep that had not been tended for a few years, with a tiny orchard behind it, beneath an opening in the firmament that otherwise covered the grotto. The wyrm’s dragon sense made note of the contents of the cottage—a kitchen with no stores but dried herbs and spices, a bathroom with a tub whose pipes drew water from the lake and drained it into the gardens, a drawing room with a cherrywood cabinet lined in cork and filled with musical instruments. One bedchamber contained a tower with a windowseat, the other a large closet filled with rich court dresses and linen gowns, along with an array of jewels to match them.

Ah, so you are a musician, are you, m’lady? And a pampered collector of clothing as well, the dragon mused, until a moment’s reflection yielded notice of one other item in the closet. It was an infant’s garment, a gown of some sort, ancient and delicately embroidered in every color of the rainbow. I recall this garment, the dragon thought, but the space it occupied in her memory was otherwise blank.

The goodwill in the place was extant in the air; there was an unmistakable happiness in the place, something the dragon found both foreign and appalling, as if someone had taken what had once been her warm, dark lair, beautiful in its starkness, and whitewashed it with cheery paint and pretty, vapid flowers.

And, in doing so, had given it a sheen that had not been present before, had made it a home and a sanctuary, a place of refuge. There was a deeper entity here than that; the dragon could feel it, but did not understand it. Love was something she had never recognized, even when in human form, and even when she had it.

Done with her assessment of the cottage, the wyrm turned to examining the gardens. In the center of the long-dead flower beds, near an arbor of roses given over to growing wild, stood a stone gazebo, hexagonal in shape, with two stone benches entwined as if they were lover’s seats.

In the corner of that gazebo stood a broken birdcage fashioned of pure gold, smashed beyond repair, its door gone.

The dragon’s sense honed in immediately on that cage; within it she sensed not only great power, but also her own fear, old fear, mixed with pain and anger.

The side of her gigantic face tingled; unconsciously she lifted a claw to rest on it, to cool the sting of the memory.

It had been a grievous blow.

And it had happened here, in this place. In this gazebo, near this birdcage.

Why? the beast screamed internally. Why can’t I remember?

The rage returned, flooding through her veins like acid. As the fury built, she struggled to subsume the lore, to take back what had been stolen from her, but the land would not yield its lore to her.

Never one to be denied anything, the dragon struggled again, calling in her blood to the place that she knew had once belonged to her, but nothing answered her call, not the gardens nor the cottage, not the lake nor the crystalline formations in the purple caves beyond and beneath it. Not even the hexagonal gazebo, where her fragmented memory told her she had once been so greatly wronged that the entire world had suffered, would acknowledge her.

She did not know the reason, and would have been even more furious if she had—that the man who had taken the crown of Firbolg king, the warlord who had won rightful dominion over the lands of the Teeth, had given this place, in word and lawful deed, to the woman she considered her life’s enemy.

It did not matter anyway.

Hatred, caustic and corrosive, rose up from the depths of her soulless being, and vented itself in acid fire.

First the gazebo; she blasted her fiery breath through its stone walls until the birdcage had melted into a pool of golden slag. Then she turned her anger around the rest of the place, torching the gardens and the orchard, which vanished quickly in a billowing cloud of orange and black smoke, finally turning to the house. There was a grim satisfaction in its destruction, like the ripping of old love letters from an adulterous liaison; the thatched roof ignited quickly, immolating the lovingly restored bedchamber, the rich gowns, the carefully closeted musical instruments—destroying, with blast after blast of brimstone flame, every trace of the woman who had supplanted her here.

When the entire island was engulfed, the smoke and ash forming a dizzying cloud of black over the dark lake, the dragon surveyed her handiwork.

It’s a beginning, she thought, still unsatisfied. But only a beginning. Now I need to know her name, and where she is. But the dragon knew those things were not to be found in this place; she sensed the woman she sought was a creature of starlight and air, not of earth.

And needed to be sought in the upworld, the world above.

The wyrm reached down into the depths of herself, to the elemental earth, and once again, like a desert drawing in the water from an entire rainstorm and still not being quenched, still remaining deathly dry, she turned away from the burning island and sped across the surface of the dark lake, up into the windy meadow where the sound of her name rang ceaselessly around the mountains, and past the guardian rocks of Kraldurge.

Into the realm of the Firbolg.

36

“What do you mean?” Ashe demanded shakily, the multiple tones of his draconic voice gone, replaced by a very human one that echoed off the walls of the cave mouth.

Without a word, the Bolg midwife turned and descended into the cave.

Numbly Ashe followed Krinsel down into the belly of the dragon’s lair.

The glow emanating from the treasure horde of the lost sea was tinged with the color of blood. He could hear his wife weeping, her voice shuddering as if she were trying to still the lament but failing. The sound caused his feet to gain speed; he shouldered past Krinsel and ran to the bottom of the cave, calling her name. The sight stopped him in his tracks.

The great ethereal beast was cradling his wife in the crook of her arm, gently brushing the sweaty locks of hair from Rhapsody’s face with her claw. That face was contorted in pain, white with fear, but there was more; it was pale as milk and her lips were colorless.

She lay on her side, her eyes open and glassy, a river of blood staining her clothes and pooling on the ground before her, growing larger before his eyes.

“The waters have broken, but the baby is not coming,” Elynsynos said softly. “And it is so tiny.” He heard her voice in his ear, where she had caused it to originate so as not to frighten Rhapsody further.

“Sam,” Rhapsody whispered. Her voice was dry and weak.

He knelt before her and cradled her face in his hands, smiling falsely to encourage her. Then he glanced at the two Bolg. Krinsel’s face was pensive and stoic, as was Achmed’s, but the Bolg king’s normally swarthy skin was dusky with sweat in the reflected light of the cave.

“It’s too soon,” Rhapsody said softly. “Not even three seasons—”

“We don’t know that,” Ashe said soothingly.

“Your mother—carried you—three years—”

“Who can say?” The Lord Cymrian looked into the prismatic eyes of the dragon, which glistened with unspent tears. “How long was it for you, Elynsynos? How long did you carry my grandmother and her sisters?”

The wyrm shook her massive head. “More than a year’s time,” she said.

Desperately Ashe thought back to the words of the Seer. Rhapsody will not die bearing your children, Manwyn had said smugly. He had puzzled endlessly, trying to invent some way in his mind that the words could be twisted, as the Oracle had a way of doing, but had finally determined the statement to be unequivocal.

Then a terrifying thought came to him. Perhaps the Seer did have a cruel way out, a way that would defy the implication of the prophecy while still being accurate.

Perhaps it was meant to end like this, with the child dying inside her, before it was born.

In his head he could hear his father’s voice.

Beware of prophecies, Llauron had said. They are not always as they seem to be. The value of seeing the Future is often not worth the price of the misdirection. Ashe cursed himself silently, having to acknowledge that his father might have been right.

“Help me,” he said to Achmed as he stripped off his cloak and tucked it around her. “You are the Child of Blood, are you not? Can you not stop her bleeding, at least?”

Achmed shook his head. “I don’t know how,” he said sullenly. “I have used my blood lore as a trained killer, not a healer.”

In the darklight of the cave, the beast’s head inclined slightly, causing all random noise to still. “If you have an elemental lore, you should be able to make use of both aspects of it,” the harmonic voice said. “Blood is an element, though not a primordial one. If you know how to let blood, you should be able to save it as well.”

Achmed stood still, but his dusky face grew more ashen. “I do not,” he repeated.

The iridescent eyes of the dragon narrowed in a solemnity that was unmistakable, and the artificial voice in which she spoke, fashioned from twisting the lore of wind, was soft with import.

“Hear me, Bolg king,” Elynsynos said. “Close your eyes, and listen to no sound but that of my words, and I will tell you how to use your lore to bind up the blood of mortal wounds, rather than spilling it.”

For a moment Achmed stood, rigid with indecision, in the quiet of the cave as Rhapsody’s lifeblood pooled at his feet. Then reluctantly he knelt beside her.

“Tell me,” he said tersely.

“All of the universe, Bolg king, is either Life, or it is Void. It is these two opposing forces that are forever at war, not good and evil, as man believes. Something is either creative, or it is destructive. And in each life, there is both creation and destruction.” The wyrm’s words grew warmer, as if the heat of the fire lore to which she was tied, along with that of all the other elements, was rising in her voice. “Those that are born with the gift of Lisele-ut, the color of red, are tied inexorably to blood, the river of life that runs through all creatures. If they invoke it in the name of force of Void, of murder, destruction, they are Blood-Letters, natural assassins, killers, as well as those who bring death respectfully when it is needed.

“But if that blood lore is invoked in the name of creation—with love—then it is a healing force. You and Pretty share the same connection to blood in many ways, but you have chosen to use your gift to spill it, often in the course of protecting what you believe to be right, while she struggles to contain it for the same reason. As a Namer she can heal, but she does not have the gift of Lisele-ut, nor do I; dragons are tied only to the five primordial elements. You alone are blessed, or cursed, with it, the natural tie to blood. It is not skill you need to save her, Bolg king—it is a reason. If you care for her, direct your tie to blood to heal instead of kill. The blood will obey you, as it has done countless times in the past. If your intent is to save, to heal, then that is what will happen.”

“She and I have not exactly been on the best of terms,” Achmed muttered.

“Your arguments, and the state of your friendship, do not matter now. All that matters is that you wish to aid her. If you do, then address the bleeding. If you do not, you should leave now.” A puff of acrid steam issued forth from the beast’s nostrils, a hint of menace in its odor.

Achmed stared at the growing red stain on Rhapsody’s garments, then stiffly removed the glove from one of his hands and let it come to rest on her abdomen near Ashe’s.

His mind wandered back, unbidden, to the tower rooms of the monastery in which he had trained. Achmed shook his head sharply, violently, as if to snap away the memory.

A shame you chose to leave the study of healing behind for another profession, Jal’asee had said. Your mentor had great faith in your abilities. You would have been a credit to Quieth Keep, perhaps one of the best ever to school there.

A hollow sting filled his ears at the recollection of his reply.

Then I would be as dead as the rest of the innocents you lured to that place. You and I do not have the same definition of what constitutes “a shame.”

Warmth crept through him, followed immediately by the chill and the flinching pain of recall, as he thought of a particular one of those innocents.

Beneath the sodden fabric of Rhapsody’s clothing, her belly moved, fluttering, then stretching, then subsiding immediately.

Achmed recoiled, his arm drawing back with a jerk.

The child within her was kicking, its effort listless.

Rhapsody moaned, and her eyelids flickered.

“I—this is not the first time I have attempted such a use of lore,” the Bolg king said haltingly. “The outcome was not good the last time.”

Elynsynos eyed him, the multicolored irises gleaming in the partial light of the cave.

“This time you have incentive, Bolg king,” the dragon said. “This time you are trying to stanch the blood of one of the only people you care for.”

Achmed snorted, but internally the irony was almost more than he could keep from giving voice to.

Now I see where Ashe comes by some of his most irritating traits, he thought as he rolled the sleeves of his shirt back to the elbows, revealing arms scored with surface veins. Dragons. They speak as if they are in sole possession of the world’s wisdom, when in truth they know nothing. Come to think of it, priests and academicians must be part dragon, also.

His irritation cooled upon touching Rhapsody again. The warmth in her body was fading quickly, ebbing with each heartbeat, as if she were expelling her life force with each exhalation of breath. Guilt, a sensation he did not normally experience, clutched at the outer recesses of his mind, then wound quickly through his viscera. It seemed impossible to believe that their argument had caused this, but perhaps it had.

“All right, Rhapsody, enough of this,” he muttered. “The last time you needed healing I had to sing to you, and believe me, nobody wants to repeat that.”

Rhapsody nodded incoherently.

“Nobody,” she whispered faintly in assent.

Achmed smirked in spite of himself. Somewhere inside this draconic woman was a trace of his friend still. He concentrated on the beating of her heart, one of the few rhythms he could still hear from the old world, and found it fluttering weakly within her chest. Achmed’s hand trembled slightly. There was no wound as there had been the last time; the bleeding was coming from within her.

“I don’t have a place to begin,” he said tensely. “There is no external wound.”

“Find the path,” said the dragon. “Blood flows through the body as water travels the pathways through the earth.”

The airy words reached back into the recesses of Achmed’s mind, drawing forth memories he had hidden there. Half a lifetime before he had climbed into the root of Sagia with the only person in the world he trusted—Grunthor—and a struggling hostage who had complicated his escape plans and turned his world on its ear. As unwelcome a companion as she had been at the beginning, over the timeless centuries they had traveled together she had become only the second living person to gain his trust. The three of them had crawled through the very belly of the earth, witnessing horrors that no living man had seen, surviving challenges that seemed insurmountable by remaining together, bonded in their odd triad, while time passed them by in the world above them.

The woman he had dragged along with them as insurance in their escape from his F’dor master had irritated him, crossed him, and, when loathing finally turned to ambivalence and finally to friendship, had sung to him and to Grunthor, sharing the lore of the upworld, the green fields and plains beneath the open sky. It had kept the madness at bay for the most part. And while Grunthor trained her to use a sword, and she taught him in turn to read, perhaps the greatest gift she had given both of them was the purification of their names.

At the center of the world an inferno of elemental fire burned, impassible. While he and Grunthor believed it meant the end of their journey, trapping them forever inside the earth in a grave of wet tunnels and hairlike roots, their hostage companion had chosen to sing them through the fire, wrapping them in a song of their names, or what she presumed to be their names, and endowing them with lore they had lost, or never had before. While the song she sang had tied Grunthor beautifully and inexorably to the Earth, whose heart rhythm now beat in time with his own, she had given Achmed back his tie to blood, and more, by virtue of the name she had bestowed on him in her song.

Achmed the Snake, she had called him, eradicating the name by which he had been called for centuries, the Brother, freeing him from the bonds that had enslaved him through it. Firbolg, Dhracian. Firstborn. Assassin. Those appellations had been true before they had entered the earth, but then she added something more.

Unerring tracker. The Pathfinder.

With that nomenclature had come those powers.

From the moment the namesong had left her lips he had never been lost again. Concentrating on a path he had never seen, his mind’s eye suddenly took on a new perspective, a dimension high above him. An inner sense he had not had before guided him now, showing him the way he wanted to go to anything he sought. That sense had led the three companions along the Axis Mundi, through the countless tunnels, roots, holes, and passageways in the flesh of the world, to this new land, this continent on the other side of the world, and of time. It had served him well since.

The woman who gave it to him now lay before him, her life spilling onto the floor with each breath.

Achmed dipped his finger into the pool of blood on the cave floor.

He closed his eyes and sought the path, hearing her words in his mind again.

Unerring tracker. The Pathfinder.

The blood on his fingertip hummed in the sensitive nerve endings of the digit.

An image of tunnels, now veins and arterial pathways rather than root passageways, filled his mind.

One of them ran with a river of dark blood turning brighter as it fled her heart.

Slowly Achmed expelled his breath, then loosed the path lore he had gained from Rhapsody’s namesong in the center of the Earth. His mind cleared; the dragon, the wyrmkin, the midwife, and the lair faded into mist at the edge of his consciousness and vanished, leaving nothing but the tunnels in his mind, passageways inside the woman who had become the other side of his coin.

A sickening nausea came over him, a chill recalled from other sickbeds. He beat the sensation back and concentrated.

His mind’s eye followed the trickling blood up through dark hallways, internal caverns that made him cringe. He tracked its path as he would the scent of an animal or the heartbeat of human prey; having been born with the gift to track those born in his birthplace by their heartbeats, he was used to hearing them, to feeling them in his own skin, to lock his own life’s rhythm on to theirs.

But nothing he had ever done had prepared him to visually see inside another living person. Especially not one for whom he felt the damnable emotion of love, denied, confused, and forbidden as it was.

The trip along the internal path moved with a lightning speed; in a heart’s beat he was seeing the inside of Rhapsody’s womb, where blood welled from a tear in the wall. He concentrated, willing the wound to close, the blood to cease, and to his amazement, he saw the spongy tissue swell for a moment, then slip back into itself, stanched and red. Then the wound disappeared. The veins in his own skin pulsed, as they did when he was tracking a victim and had successfully locked on to that victim’s heartbeat.

Achmed shuddered. He closed his eyes, preparing to unbind his mind from the path, but hesitated for a second, long enough to see what floated near the former wound.

Wrapped in a translucent membrane, torn down the middle, was an almost human form, a form with eyes closed as if in slumber, the shape of a head with facial features obscured by the broken caul. The membrane was gleaming in the dark, as if it had once been a sack filled with light, striated with streaks of every imaginable color.

The child within it lay motionless, the only movement a weak flickering beneath its breastbone.

With his mind’s eye Achmed stared at Rhapsody’s child, captivated by the sheer beauty of what he was witnessing. Rather than the despised spawn of wyrmkin, the very thought of which gave him to nausea, the infant was tiny, perfect, wrapped in light and color and darkness all at once. Even through the sticky caul golden wisps of hair were visible, and a warmth emanated from it that was compelling to behold, the same warmth that had radiated from its mother before she had come to this dank cave some months ago.

The path now found, his vision faded to darkness again. As it did, Achmed was struck with two thoughts in the same instant.

The child was not the freak he feared it would be. It favored its mother, but had a light about it of its own, and rather than emitting the ancient avarice and twisted lore of a wyrm, it seemed human, tiny, and vulnerable.

And it was dying.

Achmed pulled his hand from the pool of blood as the vision disappeared, leaving him cold and shaking.

“The bleeding is stanched,” he said, his face gray with sweat. “But you have to get the child out now.”

Far away, within the depths of his kingdom, unbeknownst to the Bolg king, another Sleeping Child’s heart was beating more faintly as well.

37

As chance would have it, the guard of the Blasted Heath, to the immediate west of Kraldurge, was changing just as the beast bored up through the dry riverbed that had served as a barrier against human attack for centuries. A consequence of this timing was that twice as many soldiers were on hand to witness the arrival, and twice as many bolts from crossbows were loosed at her a moment after she did, thudding through the air with a dull war tom that served to gain the notice of many who otherwise would have been caught unawares.

It also meant that twice as many died in the single moment that followed.

At first it began with a rumble of earth; the rocks of the crags of the Teeth loosened and began to rain down into the crevasses of the east and onto the steppes to the west with the force of a violent hailstorm. The Eye clans, holding their customary watch over those crags, scrambled down from the summits, trying to find purchase in the rocky terrain shifting beneath their feet, but many were caught in the beginnings of avalanches, and tumbled with those rocks a thousand feet or more into the canyon below.

The Claw clans were guarding the inner and outer passes of the Cauldron, also not far from Kraldurge. Their training had led them to be ever watchful from all directions—the four compass points and the air above—as an attack might come from anywhere. And while they had been schooled to believe that the earth itself might be a point of entry, in reality it was difficult to imagine that the very ground upon which one walked could be monitored as a hazard. So when that ground sundered suddenly, splitting open like the maw of a great stone beast and erupting fire, the Claw soldiers could do little more than roll and run, shielding their heads from the broken earth that rained back down upon them, burying them alive.

The Guts, who by heritage had claimed the lands beyond the canyon to guard, could only stand by, exposed, and watch as a great shadowy beast rose out of the ground, light glittering madly off the copper scales of its hide from the innumerable fires that ignited in bare trees and wintergrass along the Blasted Heath. It was to this group of soldiers that the dragon turned her attention first.

All of the building anger, all of the unspent rage, fostered over the months of travel, listening endlessly to her name cursed aloud in unmistakable loathing; all the betrayal, the loss of these lands that she knew were once hers, all of the confusion and terror at being unable to clearly recall the Past, and, above everything, all of the blame she held for the woman whose face haunted her every waking and dreaming moment, was given vent in the scourge of her first attack. The beast vomited the fire that had been stewing in her belly, inhaled and breathed it again, at every living being she could see or sense in her old lands, tingling with joy as her dragon sense felt them roast alive.

Another round of arrow fire and crossbow bolts were unleashed; they bounced off her ironlike hide, futile. The sensation was little more than a tickle; in fact, it delighted her to the point that the dragon began to laugh, a hideous guttural sound that formed in the very air and echoed harshly off the canyon.

Then, crouching low to the ground, she slithered along it, dragging power from it, devouring the lore of the Bolglands as she devoured the unfortunate soldiers trapped on her side of the canyon, sucking the power into herself, becoming more invulnerable each moment that passed, as she stripped power from the earth.

Able to do so because the king who claimed that power was not there to defend it.

Making her way to the summit of the nearest crag, to taste the wind, searching for any sign she might find of the woman.

Grunthor knew within seconds that the dragon had come, though where it had come from, and who it was, still was unknown to him.

He tossed back his head and roared aloud, a war scream known for its frightening effects on men and horses alike, startling the Archons and tribal leaders with whom he had been meeting.

“Hrekin!” he shouted, slamming his heavy oak chair back from the meeting table and lunging to his feet. “Jump to! We’re under attack!”

Instantly the chairs were cleared of their occupants as the elite of the arch-Archon’s fighting forces readied for the orders they knew would follow.

“Ralbux, take Harran to the tunnels into Grivven post,” Grunthor commanded. “It’s a dragon, by the feel o’ it; nowhere’s safe, so try and stay low, near somethin’ stone.” The education Archon and the Loremistress nodded and headed to the door of the room; both understood the need to keep alive at all costs their training and knowledge. Without the history Harran had studied, the Bolg would return to the demi-human status they had been saddled with before Achmed, or, more accurately, Rhapsody, came to Ylorc, though both had been trained to fight.

Harran stopped at the threshold.

“Reciting,” she announced; Grunthor’s ears perked up. “Dragons are sensitive to an extreme, a quality commonly known as dragon sense. Within a radius of approximately a league and a half, five miles above ground, or twice that within the earth, their ordinary senses are magnified to five hundred times that of Bolg. Taste, sight, odor, hearing, and tactile senses are extended thus, as well as an inner sense of awareness. The firegems within the belly of any dragon whose scales are based in a red or copper-colored metal contain a chemical commonly known as Red Fire, which burns at one and a half times the temperature of true fire. Being an acid, it is also corrosive. Most vulnerable spots include the eyes, behind the ear hole if one is present, and under the wing, also if one is present.”

“Go!” the Sergeant shouted impatiently. Harran and Ralbux disappeared through the doorway. He exhaled angrily; Grunthor had had more than enough experience with dragons to understand how truly outflanked they were.

Within seconds, thudding bootsteps could be heard approaching rapidly in the inner corridor; the Eyes that survived from the parapets were rushing through the underground tunnels of the Cauldron with their report. While he awaited their intelligence, Grunthor turned to his aide de camp.

“Blast muster,” he ordered. “Get me every bloody commander within earshot o’ this place; all Oi got now is tribal leaders.” The aide fled into the passageway. Grunthor turned to the Archons and pointed to the interior and exterior schematics of Ylorc that hung, rendered in minute detail, on the wall of every interior meeting room.

The Eye spies, their normally dark and hirsute faces stained with ash, came into the room, three in all.

“Report,” Grunthor demanded. His skin, normally the color of old bruises, had flushed to an angry leather color, his amber eyes blazing almost gold.

“Dragon; out of ground above Kraldurge,” said the first of the Eyes in the tongue of his tribe. Grunthor smacked the table angrily, and the shaken man quickly switched into the common dialect. “Copper hide. Keeping to the ground, not taking to the air like one at council. Same color.”

The second Eye nodded. “Torn wing,” he said quickly. “May not be able to fly. Perched on Trexlev crag now, not attacking; seems to be watching or listening.”

“Blasted Heath is burning,” reported the last of the Eyes, a woman. “Brushfires on wintergrass; frozen ground will stop the spread at frost line.”

Grunthor nodded. “Back to yer posts,” he said, then turned to the Archons. “Assessments?”

“Traditional weapons will be useless,” said Yen the broadsmith. “Can’t even use the heat of the forges against a dragon; fire will not harm it. Need special arrows, special blades to pierce dragon hide. We have none.”

“Correction,” Grunthor snarled. “We have one, but o’ course it’s not ’ere, as usual. Next?”

“Breastworks, redoubts, defense, irrigation, and sanitation tunnels will all be vulnerable,” Dreekak, the Master of Tunnels, said solemnly. “Beast can use them as we do; can travel wherever they reach. Our own defenses will work against us in this.”

“Good point,” noted Grunthor with a grudging admiration. “ ’Oo else?”

“Many catapults working,” suggested Vrith. “In peacetime have used them to fling hay and seedbags across the Blasted Heath to deeper settlements. Perhaps rocks, if not weapons, can injure it?”

The mining Archon, Greel, the Face of the Mountain, spoke up quickly.

“Much scrap rock outside of Gurgus from tower rebuilding,” he noted. “Much sharp, full of glass shards. Might even make dragon sick.”

Grunthor’s bulbous lips pressed together appreciatively. “Hmmm,” he said.

“One more thought,” added Trug. “If we knew anything about this dragon, we might have a better idea how to attack it.”

Omet, the only non-Bolg Archon, stood up suddenly. He said nothing; his elevation to his feet was more a sign of a sudden realization than an intention to speak. The Sergeant recognized this, and held up his hand to stem any other commentary.

“You were all here three years ago, when the council was assaulted by the dragon Anwyn?” he asked, trying to recall history in which he had not taken part.

“Yeah,” said Grunthor irritably.

Omet spoke even more slowly and deliberately. “And was not the wing of that dragon injured as well? Didn’t Rhapsody drag her blade through it when the beast had her in the air?”

All sound left the room; the Archons ceased to breathe at the expression on the Sergeant’s face.

“Yeah,” Grunthor said again, a deadly dryness in his voice. “But that bitch is dead; Oi saw ’er fall out o’ the sky, and closed the grave on ’er myself. She’s dead.”

Dreekak coughed nervously. “Late summer, a patrol near the breastworks reported some rumblings in the Moot,” he said quietly. “Thought them to be aftershocks of Gurgus explosion.” His last words came out barely above a whisper. “Sent you the report, sir.”

Grunthor’s face flushed an even deeper shade of purple. He threw back his head and roared again; the blast echoed through the corridors of the Cauldron all the way out to the openings above the canyon, and reverberated below.

The Archons waited for the string of hideous profanities that followed, some in Bolgish, others in Bengard, Grunthor’s mother tongue, to subside before exhaling.

“Hrekin,” the Sergeant muttered finally. “Dragons; ya can’t never get rid of the bastards. Guess ya got to kill ’em more than once. Wonderful.”

The door opened, and eight of his military commanders crowded into the rooms. The Sergeant went over to confer with them about troop position and casualties, while the Archons began quietly conferring among themselves.

Finally, when he turned back to them, they were standing, the light of inspiration shining from their faces.

Grunthor eyed them suspiciously.

“All right,” he demanded, “what are ya thinkin’?”

The dragon was too lost in the search for a name, too intent on finding the woman from the grotto, to pay much attention to the movement of the Bolg. She was aware of it, of course, in infinite detail; the minutiae of the inner realm of the Cauldron, everything else within five miles, was apparent to her. But her mind, fractured and limited as it was, obsessed as it was, considered the movements nothing more than the pathetic scramblings of the equivalent of insects. She had destroyed hundreds of them with little more than a breath; she would destroy more before she was done, but whatever meaningless attempts they were making to defend against her wrath were not worth the diversion of her attention from the search for the woman.

She could sense a rush to retrieve the dead, the movements of the old and the young to deeper bunkers, lower ground, an effort that amused her. Moreover, she did not sense the presence of many weapons. The bows and crossbows had proven useless against her, a fact that had sent her already-insane sense of invulnerability even higher.

Had she been more cognizant, more aware of her surroundings, she might have noticed the ruins of an ancient instrumentality that she had loathed in another life almost as much as she loathed the golden-haired woman in this one. When she was in human form, the ruler of a great nation and the champion of a mighty army, her first order in war had been to destroy that artifact; it had taken her soldiers almost five hundred years to accomplish that directive.

But that memory, along with most of the others she had made in her long lifetime, was buried deep in the recesses of the Past, where she could not find it.

Where is she? the dragon demanded of the evanescent winds. Where is the woman I seek? And her name! I want her name!

The wind howled around the mountain crag, saying nothing; very few words were spoken close enough to the summit to linger there, and those that were had blown away, off into the wide world.

Her fury returning, the beast rained fire down again from the mountain summit; no Bolg were above ground by now, so she had to content herself with the destruction of a few outposts and watchtowers, taking little satisfaction in watching them burn.

Perhaps I’m not able to hear because I am hungry, she thought, remembering with pleasure the feast in the Hintervold, not just the satisfying fullness of meat, but the joy of destruction, the orgiastic sensation of utter fear and helplessness in the faces of the hunters. Those few on the Heath were but appetizers. Well, we can rectify that.

Her dragon sense told her that the majority of the population on the western side of the canyon was cowering in bunkers deep within the mountain, but that a substantial cadre had remained behind, large enough to provide a decent meal.

She slithered down the crag, toward the tunnels leading into the Cauldron.

The first shaft she came to was narrow; she did not know it, but it was merely a ventilation duct, used to circulate the heat from the forges into the tunnels to warm them in winter, and the cool wind of the mountain to bring fresh air in all other seasons. She considered squeezing through, but noticed another, wider tunnel nearby, one that led to a central duct system, through which she could chase down anything that she wanted.

Quite a bit of the remaining prey was at the end of it.

She crawled across the lip of its ledge and into the tunnel, her eyes gleaming with blue fire.

Grunthor could sense the change in the earth as soon as the dragon entered the tunnel, stripping the lore from the land as she did.

“Ya bloody ’arpy,” he muttered under his breath. “Thought Oi’d buried ya three years ago. Well, keep comin’, darlin’. Oi’ll kill ya as often as need be.”

He waited until she had come to the first bend before turning to Kubila, who was waiting beside him, ready to deliver his orders.

“Now would be good,” the Sergeant said casually.

The messenger nodded, and sped off like an arrow on the string.

Down the empty corridors and tunnels he ran, his route planned out to the footstep. His destination was almost a quarter mile away, but Kubila could cover that distance in a little over a minute.

He could see the light in the open doorway; the others were awaiting his signal.

“Now!” he shouted, still a few paces outside the central tunnel.

The Archons waiting past the door heard and nodded to each other.

Trug, the Voice, echoed the Sergeant’s order into the central speaking tube, the instrument through which his words would be heard throughout the mountains.

“Now!”

Dreekak, Master of Tunnels and responsible for the network of vents through which the beast was traveling, seized the great valve and turned the wheel with all his might until it opened the floodgates.

All over the Cauldron, his tunnel workers were doing the same.

The dragon felt a shift in the air of the tunnel as the vacuum was released, but too intent on her prey to be distracted, she continued crawling forward until her sensitive nostrils were suddenly, viciously assaulted with the stench of raw sewage.

Which had been released in one enormous flood from the central cistern and all the collection pipes simultaneously.

And was heading, with all the force the ventilation system’s pumps could muster, directly for her.

Shock flooded the dragon’s awareness; she was overwhelmed with nausea, made even more acute by the sensitivity of her dragon sense. What to an ordinary being would have been revolting, vomitorious, was utterly incapacitating to the wyrm. All of her senses, her motor abilities, and her equilibrium were immediately unbalanced by the onslaught of offal and excrement that was rolling in a great, odious wave toward her.

She tried to right herself, to turn in the tunnel and escape, to burrow into the earth, even, but the tunnels built originally by her long-dead, much hated husband had been fashioned from and reinforced with steel, and so did not yield to her. She could only roil helplessly, twisted in a tangle of draconic arms and legs to which she was still not totally accustomed, when the sea of filth blasted around the turn and swelled over her, choking her, threatening to drown her.

In hrekin.

Gasping in horror, swallowing and vomiting simultaneously, the beast was subsumed in the mudslide of Bolgish waste, made even more foul by the vagaries of their diet. She struggled to breathe but her nostrils were filled with feces; she kicked her taloned feet, trying in vain to gain purchase on the tunnel wall, finally being flipped ignominiously onto her head as a great plug of sewage formed around her, obstructing the tunnel completely.

For a moment.

Then the pressure from the ventilation system backed up sufficiently to blast the clog of dragon and a kingdom’s worth of waste out of the tunnel and into the canyon below.

Whereupon the mountain guards, under the direction of Yen the broadsmith, Greel the master of the mines, and Vrith, the lame accountant, unleashed a hail of glass-shard-imbued boulders down on her.

Sickened and bruised, the beast lay at the bottom of the canyon for a moment, trying to return to consciousness. In the distance, her dragon sense noted weakly that the catapults on the ledges above her were training upon her again.

Heedless of direction, with the last of her strength, the beast burrowed hastily into the ground of the canyon floor, following the long-dead riverbed out of the kingdom of the Bolg to the north, where she collapsed in pain and exhaustion.

She was too far away, or perhaps just too spent, to hear the shouts of victory and the songs of jubilation, chanted in harsh bass voices, ringing off the canyon walls and up into the winter night.

Grunthor lifted a glass and toasted the Archons.

“Well, Oi’ve always told you lads to use what ya got, and use what ya know. Oi guess this proves ya all know hrekin.”

38

Ashe ran his hands over his wife’s forehead. The skin beneath his palm was cooler, but papery thin, dry. Her lips were pale, almost the same color as her skin, having lost a good deal of their redness with the loss of so much of her blood.

“Dry,” she whispered. “My throat is so dry.”

Ashe looked at Krinsel. “Is the baby any closer to coming?” he asked the midwife quietly. The Bolg woman shook her head.

The Lord Cymrian glanced from Rhapsody’s face to those of the others standing in the dark cave. Each aspect, each being was utterly different, and yet they all bore the same look of bewilderment, of quiet despair, as if there was nothing to be done in the world save for watching this woman labor and die.

Quickly he took off his cloak of mist and covered his wife with it, hoping the cool vapor would ease the dryness she was feeling. With a shaking hand he drew his weapon, Kirsdarke, the elemental sword of water; the blade came forth from its scabbard, waves of billowing mist running along it like the froth of the sea. He held it in his left hand, allowing his right to rest on her belly, and concentrated, willing the water to seep into her, to sustain her, to bring hydration and healing where the water within her blood was lost.

“How can we get the baby out?” he asked the midwife again.

Krinsel shook her head. “There are roots I have—buckthorn and evening primrose, black lugwort—can open the womb, but it may kill one or the other. You will need to choose which to save.”

“If you are going to resort to such extremes, allow me to help.”

The multiple tones of the draconic voice filled the cave, along with a sudden glow of scattered light that danced over the walls like the evening sun on the moving water of a lake.

Achmed and Ashe turned to see a woman standing behind them, a tall woman, taller than either of them, with skin the color of golden wheat and similarly colored eyes that twinkled with the radiance of the stars. Her hair, silvery white, hung in rippling waves to her knees, and her garment was a filmy gown that seemed woven from fabric more starlight; it cast an ethereal glow around the dark cave.

Achmed looked for the dragon.

She was gone.

Ashe was staring at the woman, a smile lighting his face for the first time since he had entered the cave.

“Thank you, Great-grandmother,” he said.

Rhapsody, half conscious, stirred at the change in the dragon’s voice.

“I thought—you had given up your human—form,” she whispered.

The glowing woman smiled broadly and bent to kiss her on the forehead.

“Shhhh,” she said, resting her ethereal hands on Rhapsody’s belly. “I have. Bolg woman, open the womb.”

Krinsel was staring, her eyes glazed slightly over. She shook off her reverie and reached into her bag, drawing forth the evening primrose oil, into which she dipped a small piece of cheesecloth and held it to Rhapsody’s lips for her to drink.

The two men watched the ministrations of the midwife in silence, uncertain of what they were seeing. From time to time Rhapsody’s forehead wrinkled as if in pain, but she made no sound, nor did she open her eyes, but Ashe was certain that she was at least partially awake.

His eyes went from his wife’s face to that of his great-grandmother, who in all the elegance of her regal beauty wore the plainly excited, childlike expression he had often seen her wear in dragon form. He continued to watch in a mix of fear and awe until he felt Rhapsody’s hand clutch his.

“Sam,” she whispered.

“Yes, Aria?”

She reached up falteringly and rested her hand on his chest.

“I need the light of the star within you. Our child is coming.”

Ashe bent closer to her and rested his hand atop hers.

“Whatever you need,” he said soothingly, though he had no idea what she meant. “How can I give it to you?”

She was struggling for words now, her face contorted in pain.

“Open your heart,” she whispered. “Welcome your child.”

All Ashe could do was nod.

Softly she began to sing the elegy to Seren that Jal’asee had taught her, the baptismal song that she had never had conferred upon her before the Island was lost. As she sang she wept; the midwife and the dragon were moving about her, touching her belly, whispering to one another, but she did not hear them. Rather, she was listening only to the music radiating from within her husband’s chest, the pure, elemental song of the lost star.

Come forth, my child, she sang, her voice strong in the skills of a Namer, quavering in the emotion of a mother. Come into the world, and live.

From within her belly she could feel a warmth radiate, the warmth of elemental fire she had carried within her soul for longer than she could count. Blending with it was the cooling rush of seawater, the water she had been steeped in not long before, and lore that came not from within her but from the child’s father. She closed her eyes and listened now to the whispered words of the midwives, the deep song of the Earth that came from Ashe as well, and the whistle of the wind from which her own race was descended, a symphony of the elements coming to life from within her, baptized in the light of the star that had been all but lost.

She continued to sing until the pains grew too strong; now she groaned in the contractions of labor, her song the story of the pain she accepted, as all mothers accept it, to bring forth life from within her body.

Elynsynos conferred one last time with Krinsel; when the Bolg midwife signaled her readiness, the dragon in Seren form raised her hands in a gesture of supplication, then reached into Rhapsody’s belly from above, her hands passing through as if they were made only of mist and starlight.

Rhapsody moaned aloud, her song faltering, as Krinsel squeezed her hand, but regained it as Elynsynos drew back her hands, and lifted aloft a tiny glowing light, pulling it gently from her body.

“Name him, Pretty, so that he can form,” the glowing woman said, smiling brighter than the sun in the darkness of the cave.

Rhapsody reached for Ashe with her other hand. When his fingers had entwined with hers, she whispered the Naming intonation.

Welcome, Meridion, Child of Time.

For a moment, nothing remained in her hands but the glowing light. Then slowly a shape began to form, a tiny head, smaller hands held aloft, then waved about. A soft coo erupted a moment later into a full-blown wail, and suddenly the cave was filled with the ordinary, human music of a crying infant.

Krinsel set about finishing the delivery as Rhapsody’s head fell back against the cave floor, spent. Elynsysnos glided over to Ashe, who was still staring in wonder at the entire sight, and gently placed the baby in his arms.

He stared down at the screeching child, transcendent joy twinkling in the vertical pupils of his eyes, eyes that matched the tiny blue ones that were staring up at him now. Then he grinned at his great-grandmother.

“Now, as never before, I understand,” he said to her.

Elynsynos cocked her head to one side, as she was wont to do even in dragon form.

“Understand what?”

Ashe looked down at his son again, unable to take his eyes away for more than a moment. He bent and brushed a kiss again on Rhapsody’s brow, then reluctantly turned away again to meet the dragon’s eyes.

“Why Merithyn lost his heart to you upon seeing you,” he said simply. “You are truly beautiful, Great-grandmother.”

The glowing woman smiled broadly, then disappeared, replaced a moment later by the ethereal form of the wyrm once more.

“Thank you,” she said as Krinsel indicated that the delivery was complete.

And while they stood, drinking in the miracle, the cave of the Lost Sea resonated with the elegy to the lost star, the intonation of a new name, and the song of life beginning.

In the only dark corner of that cave, Achmed alone remained silent, watching.

39

In the red clay desert of Yarim, outside the city of Yarim Paar, Manwyn, the Seer of the Future, waited in the bitter winter wind.

While she awaited the arrival of her sister, which she knew was imminent, she passed the time crooning a soft melody to herself, and absently tangling the snaggled tresses of her flaming red hair, tinged with streaks of gray at the temples. In her other hand was a tarnished sextant, a relic from the old world given to her mother by the Cymrians of the First Fleet in memory of her explorer father, who had used it to travel the wide world, but she had no concept of its history, only that it served to help her see into the Future.

From a distance she might have been seen as a handsome, if bedraggled woman; she was tall and slim, with a well-sculpted face and long, slender hands. Additionally, she had a regal bearing, as had all the triplet daughters of Elynsynos. But closer examination would have revealed a single physical characteristic that set her decidedly apart from the ranks of average handsome women. One look into her eyes revealed only the aspect of the person beholding her, for her scleras were silver reflective mirrors, the irises shaped like the tiny hourglass mark a black widow carries on its belly.

Also like her sisters, she was mad. Cursed with the ability to see almost exclusively into the future, she had gained a reputation as a valuable oracle that she did not deserve, because her predictions, while often accurate and always truthful, contained at least a drop of her own madness.

Sometimes more than just a drop.

She had foreseen Anwyn’s arrival but did not remember coming out into the night to meet her; the Past was her sister’s realm, and it did not hold any sway over her. So she continued to wait, confused and disoriented, and more than a little afraid, as she had always been intimidated by her younger sister. Manwyn had been born first, followed by Rhonwyn, and finally Anwyn, but the sisters of the Present and the Future quickly learned that, while they saw into realms that foretold of what was to come or understood the moment as it was unfolding, it was the Past that held the power of history. Since neither of them could hold on to time save from moment to moment, or as a prediction of what was to come, passing from each of their memories a second later, it made the one who could keep Time the dominant one.

The earth split a stone’s throw away, and the dragon appeared, a keen light burning in her searing blue eyes. She was battered, her hide tattered and reeking still, but even a mad oracle knew better than to deny a dragon her due, especially one that had come such a great distance for it.

Well met, sister. The beast’s voice was smooth with an undertone of desperation.

Manwyn shrugged. “You will find her,” she said absently, ignoring the forced pleasantries and jumping to the question she knew was coming. “But you may not want to.”

The beast’s eyes narrowed into glowing azure slits. She slithered forth from the ground, her enormous form dwarfing her sister in the empty desert. Manwyn pulled the thin silk of her tattered green gown closer around her shoulders.

What do you mean by that? The wyrm’s wind-spun voice held more than a hint of menace.

Manwyn blinked; whatever she had uttered was now gone from her memory.

Curls of angry smoke began to issue forth from the dragon’s nostrils.

Tell me where the woman I seek will be in the near Future, the draconic voice in the wind insisted. At a time when I might be able to meet her, not more than one turn of the moon. I wish it to be soon, but I will need time to travel.

The question was phrased in precisely the manner that Manwyn could understand. The clouds in her silver eyes cleared; she raised the ancient sextant and peered through it at the night sky.

“Today, until four days hence this night, she will be in the lair of our mother.”

The dragon’s heart burned at the words, hatred rising without the memory of where it had come from.

And where is the lair?

Manwyn lowered the sextant, pondering the words.

“Deep in the forest of Gwynwood, on the western coast, beyond the Tar’afel River.”

Hot flames shot forth from the dragon’s mouth, and the air roared with her fury.

The sea is more than a thousand miles to the west! I cannot travel through the earth in that time! Do not play with me, Manwyn; sister or no, I will burn you to smoldering cinders—

“You can be in Gwynwood in a heart’s beat if you travel along the roots of the Great White Tree,” the mad Seer whispered, shaking in the wind. “The taproots run throughout the whole of the world, and tie in to the main root of the tree, which is bound to the Axis Mundi, the centerline of the earth. Those of dragon blood can travel along those roots in ethereal form, because the earth is ours. The roots lead directly to the Great White Tree in the center of the forest. From there the lair is only a few days’ travel for man, less for beast.”

The wyrm inhaled slowly, trying to calm her racing heart.

Where will I find a taproot? she asked casually, noting that the Oracle’s skin had gone gray and her eyes were clouding over again. Read the stars for me, sweet sister.

Manwyn looked into the sextant again.

“You will burrow into the desert sand here, following the clay until it turns brown in the north, to the dry bed of the Blood River. It is there that you will find the taproot you seek.”

The dragon’s eyes gleamed with victory.

Thank you, sister, she said distantly, her mind already turning to her path. She slid back into the rip in the clay from whence she had emerged and disappeared into the earth’s crust while the Oracle watched in confusion.

The earth had barely settled into peace in the dragon’s absence when Manwyn spoke again.

“You will kill your own progeny in pursuit of her,” she said vaguely.

Anwyn was already too far away to hear her.

The Seer stared up into the starry night, watching the southern tip of the aurora blazing in abundant color; the pulsing lights caught her fancy, and she watched until the wind became too chill.

Then she drew her filmy silk tatters around her and made her way slowly back to her decaying temple, having forgotten why and how she had come to leave it.

40

When the song of Meridion’s birth had finally faded, when the warmth of the cave had begun to dim, and the afterbirth and blood had been cleared away, Krinsel took the baby from Ashe’s arms, scowling at him as much as she could get away with, and carried him to his mother to be fed. Ashe motioned to Achmed, who had remained in a quiet corner of the cave, and came forth reluctantly. Both men traveled a way up the tunnel to be out of earshot of the women.

“Thank you for your help,” the Lord Cymrian said, offering his hand.

The Firbolg king snorted. “I don’t think observing from the corner counts as ‘help,’ ” he said sourly. “You might wish to consider thanking my midwife, however; she’s the one with the blood on her hands.”

The warmth in Ashe’s eyes dissipated.

“Well, in some way we all have blood on our hands, Achmed,” he said evenly, trying to force the wyrm in his blood from rising in ire. “At least hers comes about for a happy purpose. And I do thank you for saving my wife.”

The Bolg king nodded perfunctorily.

Ashe cleared his throat awkwardly.

“So you will be heading back to Ylorc now?”

“Shortly.”

Ashe nodded. “Then I won’t delay you. I don’t suppose I could prevail upon you to divert your travels to the Circle, or to Navarne, and send back a coach for Rhapsody and the baby?”

“No, you could not,” Achmed said testily. “The Circle and Navarne are both to the south, and quite a distance out of my way. I have already spent far too much time at parties and investitures in your lands, to the detriment of my own kingdom. I’ve done as she asked, and brought her the midwife she trusted to deliver her child. Now that is done, I see no need to stay, nor to delay our return further by running errands for you. Perhaps your position allows you to abandon your post for extended periods of time, but mine does not. Each time I journey west to attend to yet another of Rhapsody’s whims or needs I return to an abominable mess. I can barely wait to see what I am returning to this time.”

“Well, thank you, nonetheless,” Ashe replied, struggling to maintain his happy mood. “I hope you will travel well.”

The Bolg midwife coughed politely from behind the two men.

“Rhapz-dee needs two days of rest and watching, but after that, baby must return home,” she said cautiously. “Thaw is coming to an end; soon it will be too cold for him to travel—will harm his lungs.”

“They can remain with me until spring,” said Elynsynos idly, dangling a shiny necklace of glittering gems from a claw over the baby’s head and chuckling as his tiny vertical pupils contracted in the light that sparkled from it.

The Bolg woman shook her head.

“Rhapz-dee is weak. Has lost much blood. Needs healers, special medicines; must return soon.”

Ashe felt his throat constrict. “Will you stay with her the two days at least?” he asked Achmed, noting the look of concern in Krinsel’s eye. “I will leave for Navarne immediately and get the carriage myself. If you can find it in your heart to wait with Rhapsody here for the two days Krinsel says she needs watching, at least I will be able to leave her, assured she is as safe as she can be.”

“By all means, I will happily divert my plans, then, Ashe, as your peace of mind is paramount to me,” said Achmed unpleasantly. He glanced over his shoulder and met the eye of the midwife, who nodded her agreement wordlessly.

“Thank you,” the Lord Cymrian said, seizing his hand and shaking it vigorously. “If I have to leave them, it will give me comfort to know that they are safe with you. I will leave forthwith—just let me take a moment to say goodbye.”

Achmed waited until the Lord Cymrian had been gone long enough to have crossed the Tar’afel before he approached Rhapsody, who was cuddling the sleeping baby in a corner of the cave, crooning a wordless melody.

He watched her for a moment; her golden hair, normally bound back in a staid black ribbon, cascaded over her shoulders, making her appear younger and more vulnerable than he usually thought of her. She looked up at him, her smile bright, and he felt an unwelcome tug at his heart, much as he had in their earliest days together, during their travels along the Root that bisected the world. Those were lost times, long-ago times that he occasionally found himself longing for, back before the responsibilities of kingdoms and other people had come into their lives, back when the whole world was little more than Rhapsody, Grunthor, himself, and the continuous struggle to survive one more day in a place where no one even thought to search for them.

“He’s asleep?” he asked awkwardly.

“Yes, deeply,” Rhapsody said, her smile broadening. “Would you like to hold him?”

The Bolg king coughed. “No, thanks,” he said hastily. He glanced around the glittering cave. “Where is the translation? Since I am stuck here for the next two days, I may as well make good use of my time and get started on reading it.”

Rhapsody’s face hardened, and her voice lost its gentle tone.

“Did we not go over this already?”

“We did. Give me the translation.”

Silence fell, a silence so deafening that it disturbed the child, and he began to whimper in his sleep, then wail aloud.

Rhapsody shook her head and looked away.

“Unbelievable,” she said angrily, rocking the baby as his crying increased in volume and despair. “After all we’ve just been through, after everything I’ve said, you are still insistent on carrying out this folly?”

Achmed glared at her.

“Carrying out folly is a tradition with us, Rhapsody,” he said, his voice harsher. “You never listen to my concerns, and I reserve the right to disregard yours. You’ve made your position completely clear, as clear as the promise you made to help me in whatever I needed in this matter. Since I believe I have come through for you in your hour of need, again, I would think that you would be willing, if not grateful, to return the favor. Now give me the bloody translation.”

The dragon’s head appeared, misty and ethereal, above a mountainous pile of gold and gems at the water’s edge.

Shall I eat him, Pretty? the beast inquired tartly.

Rhapsody continued to meet Achmed’s stare, matching his intensity, for a moment, then finally exhaled.

“No,” she said firmly. “Give it to him.” She drew the baby closer to herself and watched as the dragon blinked in surprise, then disappeared into the ether. A moment later a bound journal, half the pages empty, appeared on the ground at Achmed’s feet among the coins.

“Take it,” Rhapsody said bitterly. “And then be gone. I do not want to see you again.”

Achmed seized the book.

“Thank you,” he said. He opened the journal quickly and began to peruse the pages, carefully graphed in Rhapsody’s neat handwriting; much of what she had written was in musical script, but each staff had been carefully annotated.

“Go,” Rhapsody demanded. “I mean it, Achmed.”

The words rang through the cave, the Namer’s truth ringing in them.

The Bolg king raised his mismatched eyes and met hers; they were gleaming, green as summer grass.

“I told your husband I would stay two days,” he said shortly, conflicted and hating the feeling of it.

“I relieve you of your promise, even if you were unwilling to relieve me of mine,” Rhapsody said shortly. “Take your bloody translation, and Krinsel, and anything else you have ever given me, including your friendship, and go. What you have demanded has put an end to our association; I cannot save you from yourself, or from your own foolhardiness, but I do not have to watch you as you blunder into lore that you do not understand. You threaten this world, the world my child has just entered, with your actions. I can’t forgive you for that, Achmed. Go away.”

The Bolg king considered for a moment, then nodded. He turned and silently gestured at the midwife, who was watching with concern in her eyes, but she said nothing, stooping to collect her bag and its contents, before following her king up the long, winding tunnel to the light and cold of the forest again.

Rhapsody waited until their footfalls could no longer be heard echoing in the tunnel before she gave in to the tears.

The air of the cave glimmered behind and around her; Elynsynos appeared, cradling her in the crook of her claw.

There, there, Pretty, the dragon intoned softly.

Rhapsody shook her head.

“Do not comfort me, please, Elynsynos,” she said weakly, brushing her fingers over her son’s downy hair as he returned to his sleep. “What he contemplates may assure that there never is a reason for any of us to feel comforted again.”

41

The dry bed of the Blood River was a deep length of sand above a layer of red clay, covered in a thin coating of snow. The dragon found the three strata to be the perfect place to cleanse the stench and remaining offal from herself; she bored up through the clay, spiraling, allowing herself the painful luxury of rolling in the sand until the snow finally coated her, cooling her angry flesh.

Any fury she had known before the assault on Ylorc had only been an irritation, an annoyance, beside what she felt now. Her anger had transmuted from the glowing hot rage of volcanic wrath to a far more frightening state, the cold, emotionless mechanisms of a dragon reviled. It was this same cold state in which she had planned the death of half a continent, had committed some of her most unholy acts, the unpardonable sins which she was grateful to have been born soulless, lest one day she should have to pay for them.

None of that mattered now. She did not remember her actions, her sins; her mind had placed but one goal into play, shutting down all other thoughts, all other desires.

She searched in vain for almost a day before she located the taproot of the Great White Tree her sister said she would find in this arid place. It had dried and withered to little more than an underground branch, but its power was still nascent in its fibrous radix. She did not directly remember the Tree itself, but somewhere in her memory there was a space where she believed those recollections should be, as if it had at one time been important to her.

The dragon steeled her nerve and concentrated, allowing her despised wyrm body to transcend material flesh and become ethereal.

Then she slid into the thin, dry root hairs, crawling along them as they thickened and grew moist, taking on speed, racing along the thicker root now, drawing the power of the tree her mother had tended so lovingly into herself as she passed from one side of the continent to the other in a beat of her three-chambered heart.

Gavin the Invoker had been summoned to Sepulvarta to meet with the Patriarch, the only religious leader on the middle continent of his stature. In his absence, his Filidic followers, nature priests who tended the Tree and the holy forest of Gwynwood, were clearing winter’s deadfall, harvesting the herbs and hardy flowers that had bloomed in the time of Thaw, making ready for the return of snow when the dragon appeared, hovering in the ether at the base of the Tree.

At first the Filids stopped in shock, believing they were witnessing an apparition. Three years before, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, who was wyrmkin, had passed through their forest on his way to wreaking his vengeance on the apostate Invoker, Khaddyr, the thrall of a F’dor demon who had supplanted Gwydion’s father, Llauron. In his wake, much of the forest had been consumed in cleansing fire, though it was mostly the huts and settlements of the traitors that had managed to burn, while the rest had been spared.

One look into the hypnotically terrifying eyes of this beast, and any hope that such evenhandedness was forthcoming vanished.

The beast inhaled, then spewed her breath. It rushed forth in fire that burned black at the edges, glowing blue in the center as it left her maw from the sheer heat that was boiling in her belly.

Then she quickly closed her eyes and concentrated, so that she could enjoy the agony, drink in the pain and fright that was hanging in the smoky air when the fire diminished above the piles of charred bone and ash.

It was a delicious sensation.

The wyrm opened her eyes. Now that her murderous impulse was satisfied, she saw that she was looking out at a grassy meadow surrounding the Tree, whose glistening white branches rose above her for as far as the eye could see, and stretched out over the wide meadow. Beyond the sickening haze reeking of burnt human flesh she could see a settlement of huts, some longhouses, others tiny cabins, fairly newly built, each with a tiny garden or kraal, most decorated with strange hex signs above the doorways. The image was familiar; she looked to the edge of the meadow, trying to remember what was missing, but nothing resonated.

All around her was the song of the Tree; it issued forth in a deep, melodious hum, reverberating the tones of the living earth itself, achingly beautiful. The dragon felt it tug at her heart, or whatever vestige of one she possessed. On some level she knew this place had once been important to her, that if she tried hard enough, she might locate memories that would constitute pieces of her soul here, in this natural cathedral, where one of the five trees that grew at the birthplaces of Time still stood.

The holiness of it was unmistakable, impossible to deny.

The dragon steeled her will.

I choose to be unholy, she thought grimly. It annoyed her to see that the bark of the Tree had sustained no damage from her breath, that not even the leaves had withered or burned while the grass was scorched, the tenders of the Circle reduced to human rubble. It was yet one more defiance of her power which had just been laid low by a mountainful of demi-human Bolg, and served only to drive her smoldering rage into even greater fury.

She cocked her head, looking for signs of the woman, but there was nothing on the wind, nothing but the shouting of the Filidic priests and the foresters as they evacuated the area, fleeing the onslaught they believed was coming.

Deep in the forest of Gwynwood, on the western coast, beyond the Tar’afel River, Manwyn had said.

The dragon closed her eyes again, listening for the sound of the river. It was beyond her sense, but she could tell by the water table, the winding of the stream basin and the patterns of tree growth that the river must lie to the north, so she burrowed back into the ground and followed the sound of the water.

The voice of the Tar’afel was much easier to track than the ancient echoes of her own name. Like a beacon beneath the earth it sounded, rushing endlessly, unhurried, to the sea, in its low phase, carrying with it huge chunks of ice that had broken up and floated downstream with the advent of Thaw.

The winter was returning, causing the current to slow. The dragon could hear it from miles away; as she approached the riverbed, the earth through which she traveled grew ever damper, its silty strata unpleasant to ford.

Finally she could stand it no longer; she bored up through the ground again and traveled through the greenwood in the realm of air now, passing through the uninhabited wood unseen. The forest creatures had long since vacated the place, upon sensing her presence, even beneath the ground.

The river was flowing a league away; she made note of its depth, its speed, and then made her way to its muddy banks, frozen almost to the water’s edge. There was a chill to the air here; she was closer than she had been to her lair since leaving it, though it was still almost a thousand miles away. At the water’s edge she prepared to cross, hoping to return to the ethereal form in which she had traveled to the Circle, but without the power of the Tree, she found herself trapped in material form, her body heavy and stolid, a burdensome prospect in the attempt to cross the river.

The anger burned darker within her, driving her on.

Gingerly the dragon waded into the water. At the place she had chosen to ford it, the river itself was not as wide as she was long, so it was only a matter of bearing up under the current, finding as solid a footing as possible in the rocks along the bottom of the riverbed, avoiding the sinkholes and crosscurrents she could feel upon entering it.

Halfway across she had a sudden flash of memory, or something approximating it.

The woman she sought had forded the river at this very place, or near enough to it to have left a trace of herself in the streambed.

The dragon’s ire burned hotter. Steam rose in rippling waves, hovering over the water in ominous clouds of hatred, palpable in their anger.

She pressed on, her taloned feet leaving great trenches in the cold mud, then pulled herself out of the river and onto the floodplain.

As she began heading north again, the air in front of her shifted, glimmering.

The dragon stopped, as if the breath had suddenly been dragged from her lungs.

The elemental power that hung in the air of the forest, invisible to the eye and unfelt by the vast majority of the living world, thinned out, crackling dryly.

The dragon struggled to breathe.

Directly in front of her a shape began to form; it was as large as she was, and vaguely the same shape, with a great horned head, a long, whiplike tail, and vaporous wings that were extended high in the air. There was the tiniest trace of copper in the scaled hide that was forming on the wind, but for the most part it was gray like the smoke of a brushfire, shimmering with an elemental sheen.

The dragon froze.

In front of her another wyrm finally appeared in solid form. A voice, deep and warm with a pleasing tone, resonated in the icy air around her.

Hello, Mother.

Anger shot through her hide; the beast’s skin dried instantly, giving off a seething glow of steam.

I am delighted, if somewhat surprised, to see that you are alive. The gray wyrm’s voice rang in a light, almost musical timbre, unmistakable in its sincerity.

Who are you? she demanded, but her multitoned voice of air quavered a bit; this being was the first to greet her with respect and fondness since she had awakened, and there was something about that fact that was both enthralling and unnerving, leaving her weak and defensive at the same time.

The blue-gray eyes of the wyrm before her widened for a moment, and it exhaled slowly.

I am your son, Llauron, your secondborn. Do you not remember me, Mother?

I do not, answered the dragon bitterly. I have no memory of you.

Sympathy came into the gray wyrm’s eyes. Ah. Well, perhaps you are just a bit disoriented. Your memories will return, and if they do not, I can help you find them. I made many of them with you, over the course of history. Sadness crept into the sympathetic gaze. Although many of those memories are probably best left unremembered.

I seek but one memory, the dragon said quickly. Help me find the goldenhaired woman.

The sadness turned to surprise. Rhapsody? Why do you seek her?

The dragon’s blood warmed instantly, her heart pounding with excitement. Rhapsody! she shouted in her draconic voice; the word hissed upon hitting the air; it echoed across the river and over the frozen highgrass, rippling with the acid of hatred. Where is she? Take me to her.

Llauron saw his error immediately. She is far from here, last I knew, he said casually, turning subtlely to the east, away from the direction of Elynsynos’s lair. And she is insignificant. Come with me, Mother; I will take you to places where we have spent time, places where we will be undisturbed, and we can chat. If you are seeking to put your memories in order—

NO! the beast bellowed; her voice tore through the winter wind, shattering the elemental vibration of it. The trees and highgrass that had been bending before the stiff breeze in supplication froze and snapped, the water in the river rippled in contrary ways. All of nature in the vicinity shuddered at the tone in the dragon’s voice. Tell me where she is, Llauron. As your mother, I command you.

The gray wyrm folded its solid wings and regarded her seriously.

Let us speak reasonably, please, he said in a sensible tone that carried a barely veiled displeasure in it. We are far from the days when you could command me by virtue of that fact, Mother, though perhaps you do not recall why. I tell you, with every ability to speak the truth that I have ever had, no one who has ever drawn breath on this earth has been more loyal to you than I. I gave up everything I treasured, everything I held dear, to do your bidding once, and it tore a world apart. My love for you should not be in question; whatever else you have forgotten, surely you must remember that.

The dragon shook her head violently. I remember nothing but the need to destroy this woman, she said bitterly. And if you love me, Llauron, you will prove it. Tell me where she is.

I cannot, the wyrm said firmly. I really have no idea. Come, Mother; let us quit this place—

The dragon reared back and inhaled, sucking much of the power from the air as she did.

In a twinkling the gray wyrm vanished into the ether, just in time to avoid the eruption of caustic fire aimed at him that ignited the frozen winter grass and set it blazing.

The beast breathed again, a red-orange flame that crackled black at the curled rims. It spread futilely on the wind where Llauron had stood the moment before, billowing waves of swimming heat that dissipated impotently after a moment.

Now fully enraged, and feeling even more betrayed than she had, the dragon stormed northward, inwardly chanting the woman’s name, tasting the air, hoping for any possible trace of it on the wind.

42

Upon exiting the cave, Achmed spent a moment turning over the firepit that Krinsel had made to warm herself in his absence, and reclaim the campsite. Then he nodded wordlessly to the Bolg midwife, who laced her boots and adjusted her winter gear, then nodded her silent readiness in return.

They had not gone more than a hundred paces from the opening of the cave when the air before them glimmered with a sudden disturbing display of gray light.

In between the gusts of wind an enormous draconic figure appeared, half-ethereal, half-material. Achmed stopped in his tracks, dragging Krinsel instinctively behind him and lowering his cwellan, the one he had shown Gwydion Navarne some months before. His instinctive reactions were instantaneous; his reasoned ones took a split second longer. Just as he prepared to fire, the picture of this particular beast flashed into his mind; he had seen it before at the Cymrian Council, curled up at the feet of Ashe, much to its son’s chagrin.

“Llauron?” he demanded, sighting the weapon.

Achmed, the familiar voice said urgently, Where is my son?

The Bolg king’s eyes narrowed.

“He’s returned to the Circle, or possibly to Navarne, to obtain a carriage to transport Rhapsody and your grandbrat home,” he said nastily.

The gray wyrm’s eyes gleaned.

The child’s been born?

“Yes,” said Achmed. “Now kindly stand aside, and don’t interpose yourself in my path again unless you want to test out my dragon-killer disks.”

No, the wyrm insisted, its anxiety causing the air around the Bolg king and the midwife to grow warm and dry. Tarry; you must help me. Anwyn is coming; she is seeking Rhapsody with a horrific vengeance. She will be here momentarily; you must help me get your friend and my grandchild out of here at once.

“What are you babbling about?” the Bolg king demanded. “Anwyn? Anwyn is dead, as you well know, buried in the Moot these three years.”

So we thought, but we were wrong, Llauron said desperately. There’s no time for analysis and second-guessing; she is coming, and she will kill anyone and everyone in her path in her attempt to find Rhapsody. Is she with Elynsynos?

“Yes,” said Achmed shortly, casting a glance around the woods. The white trees, bare and gleaming in the cold winter air rustled as the wind blew through, seeming to shudder visibly. He looked back at Krinsel, who was trembling violently as well.

Get them out of here, Llauron commanded, his draconic voice ringing with authoritarian insistence. I will try to divert her. He faded into the wind again, leaving nothing behind a moment later but a sense of panic.

Achmed turned on his heel, snagged the midwife, and ran back to the lair of the ancient wyrm, muttering snarled Bolgish obscenities all the way.

Rhapsody had barely ceased weeping when Achmed and Krinsel appeared at the mouth of the tunnel again.

Your friends return, Elynsynos said, puzzled. She cocked her enormous head to one side; her prismatic eyes widened suddenly, sending rainbows of light dancing incandescently around the cave. Oh no, the dragon whispered over the sound of the Bolg’s footfalls. No, it can’t be.

In the warmth of her arms, Meridion began to whimper again, his cries rising to a howl of fear a moment later.

“What’s the matter?” Rhapsody asked nervously, glancing from the wyrm to the child, both of whom were now panicking without any visible reason.

Anwyn comes, the dragon said, rising from the floor of the cave, raising clouds of sandy dust in the process. And she is rampaging; the forest is burning in a wide swath between the river and my lair.

“Anwyn?” Rhapsody asked incredulously, struggling to her feet with the baby in her arms. “What—how can that be?”

Achmed appeared at the bend in the tunnel.

“Come with me if you want to live,” he said sharply. Rhapsody recognized the words; they were the same ones he had spoken to her a lifetime ago in Serendair, words that had begun their association and led them down the long, difficult road to this moment in time.

“Is it Anwyn?” Rhapsody asked, swaddling the baby more tightly and walking with difficulty toward the Bolg king.

“Llauron says so, and I don’t doubt him, even if he was a liar in life. Come on, we have to get out of here.”

“Wait, wait,” Rhapsody said, closing her eyes in pain and rubbing her hand across her forehead. “What good will running do? Besides, I’m safe with Elynsynos. And surely she will not harm Meridion.” She turned to the dragon who was hovering now in the air, ethereal, with a look of quiet despair on her gigantic face. “Did you not say that a dragon values its progeny over all other things in the world?”

Yes, Elynsynos replied quietly. But if she is rampaging, she is not thinking about anything but destruction, probably your destruction, Pretty.

“You are endangering Elynsynos by staying here,” Achmed said harshly, reaching for her arm. “Come.”

Rhapsody handed Meridion to Krinsel and began pulling on her boots, her face white, her arms shaking with the weakness that follows childbirth.

“Anwyn cannot kill her mother, even in a rampage,” she said, lacing quickly. “Isn’t that the Primal Lore, Elynsynos? Dragons cannot kill each other, worlds colliding, and all that?”

The great beast shook her head sadly.

Anwyn is not a wyrm, but wyrmkin, she reminded Rhapsody. She is not bound to the Primal Lore if she doesn’t choose to be. I cannot say what she might do.

Rhapsody’s face took on a harsh determination.

“All right,” she said seriously. “I will go—Achmed, Krinsel, leave this place now, head due west toward the sea, and hide. You need to get as far away from here, and from me, as you can.”

Elynsynos shook her head.

Bolg king, take my friend and yours, she said sadly. Save the child; he is more important than any of you know. Get her to safety; Llauron and I will do what we can to divert Anwyn, but you must go now.

Achmed nodded and seized Rhapsody’s arm. “Go west,” he directed Krinsel, who nodded and hurried up the cave tunnel. “Can you walk?” he asked Rhapsody, who nodded as well, though her face was ashen. “All right, then, come with me. We’ve done this before.”

Together they ran out up the tunnel. Elynsynos watched them leave, then disappeared into the ether.

Through the forest they bolted, Rhapsody following blindly behind Achmed, who was doubling back to the Tar’afel. In his mind he remembered something Llauron had told the Three long ago about Elynsynos and the explorer Merithyn.

If Merithyn had not loved Elynsynos as well, she would have known what befell him. He had given her Crynella’s candle, his distress beacon. It was a small item, but a powerful one, because it contained the blending of two opposing elements, fire and water. Had it been with him when his ship went down, she would have seen him, and perhaps might even had been able to rescue him. But he had left it with her to comfort her, as a sign of his commitment. Alas, such it is with many good intentions.

Perhaps dragon sense is limited by water, he thought, knowing that the element obscured his own ability to track heartbeats. If I can get Rhapsody into the river, we may be able to hide from her inner sight.

Even as his mind planned it, his better sense told him he was fooling himself.

In the distance they could hear the crashing of trees and the ripping of the earth as the two dragons sought to divert their rampaging kinswoman, moving earth, opening chasms, diverting streams, tossing large branches into her path, exercising their elemental power over the earth, each action followed by a bellowing roar of anger and an audible eruption of flame. The ground trembled beneath their feet; Achmed glanced behind him at Rhapsody, whose hand was clutching his gloved one in a death grip, to find her face white and bloodless but set in a grim aspect as she climbed over deadfall and rotting trees, beneath bowers of thorned berries and around forest glades, panting as she ran.

On the breeze that whipped through the forest they could hear the voice of the dragon, screaming, howling, bellowing in rage.

Rhapsody! Rhapsody, you cannot hide from me!

The wind howled around them with the onset of dusk; there was snow on its gusts, icy from the water of the river, and it stung as it pelted their skin and eyes. There was not a sound from the bundle in her arms; Achmed wondered dully if the child was even alive.

Each moment the fire approached ever closer.

Finally, as the heat was beginning to lick his back, he felt Rhapsody’s grip falter, then slip from his.

He turned to find her, pale as he had ever seen her, doubled over, her child clutched against her stomach. With the last of the strength in her arms, she shakily held the bundle out to him.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please—take him—Achmed. Take—him and run. It’s me—she’s after.” Her voice faltered in exhaustion and weakness. “Take him.”

Achmed hesitated, then slung the cwellan at his side, snatched the bundle from her arms, tucking it under his own and grasping her hand again. The baby remained silent, unmoving.

“I’ll carry him, but you must come as well,” he insisted, dragging her over a moldering tree stump, pulling her along as she stumbled. “The brat will die without you anyway; I can’t very well be his wet nurse. Come on.”

Together they struggled, around impenetrable brambles, through half-frozen streams, until the sound of the river could be heard in the distance.

“Not too much farther, come on, Rhapsody,” Achmed urged, feeling the grip of her fingers loosen again.

Under their feet the earth began to sunder in long, thin cracks. The bellowing of the dragon had gone silent; now the only sounds they could hear were the screaming of nature, protesting in reply.

“Leave me,” Rhapsody panted. “The—sword I carry—protects me from—flame—”

“But not from acid, nor from claws,” Achmed muttered, pulling harder on her arm. “Come on.”

They crossed the last field of highgrass, ran along the floodplain, and were in plain sight of the Tar’afel when suddenly the riverbank split with a great tremor into a yawning crevasse, ripping open before their eyes as the dragon reared up, rampant and solid, hatred darker than the fires of the Underworld blazing in her glowering blue eyes. For a moment her face contorted in rage, a hideous anger so palpable that it caused the air around her to stop moving in that instant.

Achmed’s reflexes reacted, bracing for the attack.

Then, without warning, his body lurched as Rhapsody shoved him from behind with all her strength, pushing him and the infant away and falling herself into the dragon’s line of sight.

Shakily she drew Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of fire and ether; the luminous blade trembled for a split second in her hand, then stopped as Rhapsody drew herself up to her full height, her own eyes blazing with fury.

“Direct your wrath at me, Anwyn, you coward,” she said, her voice ringing in a Namer’s commanding tone.

The beast’s nostrils flared, and she rose up, her torn wings spread wide, blotting out the light of the sun. The air crackled and hissed with malevolence.

She inhaled deeply.

Achmed fired.

Three whisper-thin disks, forged of blue-black rysin-steel, sliced into the dragon’s underbelly as she reared back, each driven more deeply in by the force of the one that followed.

The recoil, and the impetuous shove from Rhapsody, left him off balance and he stumbled; he dropped the cwellan, clutching the bundle under his arm.

The dragon screamed in pain and in rage; the heat of her scorching blood was causing the disks to expand rapidly, tearing open the flesh below her throat and into her abdomen. Her first attack of breath went wide, lighting the trees above them and the brambles to an inferno of yellow-orange flame. As the forest caught fire she inhaled again, bleeding profusely, and aimed her acid breath directly at the golden-haired woman whose face had haunted her dreams.

In the fragment of a second before the immolating flames washed over Rhapsody, the air in front of her turned gray and silver with just the tiniest hint of glittering copper. A great translucent figure appeared from the ether before and around her, thin as a breath of the wind, barely visible, surrounding the Bolg king and Lady Cymrian with its body, interposing itself between them and the rampaging dragon.

Just as Anwyn exhaled, loosing fire so acidic that it melted the stones of the ground beneath her, Llauron loosed a lore of his own, letting go of the elemental earth that was within his blood and soul.

Going solid.

Forming a vast, ossified shell around the man, the woman, and the child.

Saving them.

Ending.

43

The flames washed over Llauron’s rocklike form, licking the perimeter, burning the grass beneath it. Rhapsody and Achmed could hear the blast, recognized it by the intensity of its hollow roar, could distantly make out the shrieks of wrath, then the silence.

Inside the shell it was dark; the palest of light remained, glowing ethereally. The Bolg king felt around in the darkness until he found Rhapsody’s hand, and clutched it; she was shaking violently, watching the process of Llauron’s Ending going through its terrible stages.

With the release of the earth lore came the dissipation of the starfire that was also his birthright; the cool light hardened the shell of his body, solidifying it. Her heart beat painfully against her ribs as the water within him evaporated; she felt the tears and the rain both on her face, both drying as the lore vanished into the world from what had once been the soul of a man who had loved the sea. As the water left, the shell hardened further, tempered and cooled. Only the element of wind remained; it took the form of sweet, heavy air hanging in their midst.

For a moment, no sound could be heard inside the dark cavern of Llauron’s body.

Then, quietly, Rhapsody began to weep.

Achmed’s eyes, the night eyes of a Bolg, watched as she walked over to the wall, striated in the pattern of ribs, and reached out her hand to rest it there. She slowly slid down to the floor of the cavern, overwhelmed with grief.

In his arms, the baby began to whimper as well.

Achmed stood for a moment, unmoving, then slowly lifted the swaddled bundle up against his shoulder and rocked it, swaying awkwardly back and forth.

“Shhhhhh,” he said. “Hush now.”

Outside the enormous shell of the dragon that had once been her son, Anwyn stood, frozen in shock.

At first her astonishment came from the immediacy of what had happened; a second before, she had the woman she hated in her sights, vulnerable, was anticipating the relief of her pain that would come with Rhapsody’s death, was looking forward to breathing in the bitter scent of her ashes once her body was immolated.

Then the wyrm calling himself Llauron had intervened, had appeared from the very ether, had surrounded the woman and her child and the monster who was guarding them both, and Ended. Anwyn had forgotten much of the lore of her race, but even in her fragmented awareness, she comprehended the horror, the finality, the sacrifice of what had just come to pass.

And she resented it with every fiber of her tattered, bleeding being.

The rysin-steel blades were expanding in the heat of her body; she could feel them growing larger, compressed by their cold manufacture no longer. Each breath she took tore a little more at her muscle, rent her flesh by inches, as they worked their way toward her three-chambered heart. The wyrm willed her breath to slow, tried to compress her bodily functions as much as she was able, but she could not control the beating of her own heart, the circulating of her blood.

She wanted to scream, wanted to vent her rage in fire and blood, but the disks hovered within her thoracic cavity, threatening her life with every tiny movement.

Finally she decided that she had no choice but to slowly, cautiously make her way back to the frozen north, to her lair of ice and frost. She hoped that the cold would help contain the disks with her, allowing her to pry them from her flesh, but knew that even if that were not possible, she would rather die in her lair than in this alien forest, this place where she should have memories and instead found only emptiness and denied gratification.

This place where a dragon had Ended.

That alone was enough to terrify her. In her mind she heard dark chanting, voices of beings of a different elemental race, cackling as the lore of Earth was diminished by the loss of one of her kind. She no longer could stay; the sight of the massive stone statue, its wings extended forward, wrapped around the people it had died protecting, gave her chills that resonated throughout her body, made her tremble, though later, as she crawled into the Tar’afel and swam against its hardening current, she realized that her shaking was not only from fear, but from her proximity to death herself.

Achmed listened in the darkness to Rhapsody weep. It was a sound he had hated from the first moment he had heard it, a harsh, horrific vibration, unlike the natural music she emitted that he found soothing. It tore across the sensitive nerve endings in his skin, making them vibrate with agony. He set his teeth against the pain and remained silent, allowing her to vent her grief; weak as she was from giving birth and from fleeing the dragon, she had little strength to keep it up for long.

Instead he was watching her child in the darkness. He had laid the little boy down on his back; the floor of the dragon’s stone body was warmer than the ground of the forest would have been. The child seemed to like the position, waving his tiny arms aimlessly, breathing in the cool, sweet air that hung heavily above his head.

Rhapsody leaned back against the cavern wall, spent. She did not have the night vision that Achmed was blessed with, so, to dispel the darkness and cold from the place, drew her sword and rested it on the ground, allowing the cavern to fill with its warmth and light.

“The irony is threatening to choke me,” she said dully, watching her baby entertain the Bolg king.

“How so?”

“All Llauron wanted to do was to come to know this child, and to have the child know him. He made a sacrifice to save him, and us, that is unimaginable—like sacrificing your Afterlife along with your life. And here Meridion is trapped within the shell of his grandfather’s own body, a grandfather he will never know now.”

Achmed sighed dispiritedly.

“Don’t you Lirin Namers have something you are supposed to do when these sorts of things happen?” he asked pointedly. “Like singing a Song of Passage or something, rather than just freeform bemoaning? I find your current lyrics a bit tiresome. Llauron was a complicated man, a draconic man even before he gave up his human body for an elemental state. He never let anything stand in the way of what he wanted or thought was right, not the well-being of his family, or the safety of his allies, or any small consideration such as that. That he was willing to do whatever this was may have been the first truly noble gesture the man ever made. Why don’t you just do whatever you are supposed to do to elegize him, and leave your grief, and the grief you are borrowing for you child, out of it? Meridion may not even miss him.”

Rhapsody exhaled, then pushed herself up a little straighter.

“You’re right about the elegy,” she said shortly. “As a Namer, it’s the least I can do. But I don’t want to sing the Lirin Song of Passage for him; I did that once, when he tricked me into immolating him with the sword, that he might attain his elemental dragon state. I don’t think I could bring myself to do that again.”

“Fine,” said Achmed, shifting to find a more comfortable place in the dark. “Sing a bawdy brothel song, or one of Grunthor’s lewd marching cadences; I’ll bet Llauron would appreciate either of those.”

Rhapsody nodded, unable to smile. “You’re probably right. For all that he had a very proper exterior, he did have a raunchy sense of humor. When I first was studying with him, he used to sing me sea chanteys every night, and some of those would have curled his followers’ hair.” She stood and walked over to Achmed, then crouched down in front of the baby, who turned his tiny eyes in her direction. “Of course, my grandfather sang the very same songs.”

She hummed wordlessly for a moment, smiling down at Meridion, then wordlessly started to croon a song of the sea. After a few moments she added the words, singing one of Llauron’s favorite chanteys, a lonely tale of wandering the wide world, never able to rest, looking for peace in the sea.

Maritime lore held no interest for Achmed, but it had been a long time since he had heard her sing. He sat quietly in the flickering light of Daystar Clarion, whose cool radiance reflected Rhapsody’s somber mood, remembering their journeys together along the Root and overland on this new continent, just the two of them with Grunthor. He missed those times more than he realized.

A strange tone buzzed in his ear; he listened more carefully and realized the baby was cooing along to the chantey with her in harmony. Rhapsody noticed it as well; her voice became softer, and she carried the tune past its ending until the child began to whimper.

“I suppose he does know his grandfather after all,” she said as she lifted him to her shoulder, patting his back. The gesture was to no avail; Meridion continued to fuss, his whimpering turning to a cackling cry.

“Well, I believe he breathed in the last of his essence; that heavy air seemed to hang over him, almost as if Llauron wanted him to absorb it,” Achmed said, his brows drawing together as Rhapsody opened her shirt and positioned the baby on her breast. He turned away hastily, to Rhapsody’s surprise, keeping his back to her while she nursed the baby.

“You don’t have to turn your back,” she said, surprised, as she drew the swaddling blanket over the two of them. “I’m covered now, and I apologize if it bothered you.” She saw him shrug, but he did not turn back to face her. “After all, we lived on the Root for a thousand years or more, and in camping conditions after that. There’s not a shred of modesty left in any of us by now.”

Achmed stared above him at the interior of the dragon cavern, noting the curves of the thoracic cavity and spine. “Had it occurred to you that I might not want to witness you nursing another man’s child?” he asked bitterly.

The silence that answered him was heavier than the air had been.

He continued to examine the intricacies of the shell Llauron had left behind until finally he could hear her patting the child’s back against her chest, humming a wordless lullabye. He turned then, finally, to see her looking above her as well.

“Gods, we’re back on the Root again, in a way,” she murmured. “Trapped in a cavern with no exit, away from anyone who might find us. And it’s dark and close in here.” Unconsciously she wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and drew the baby nearer.

“Yes, but this time we don’t have Grunthor along to make it bearable.”

“No, you’re right, we don’t.” Rhapsody’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “You have changed so much in a few short years, Achmed,” she said sadly, swaying the baby in her arms. “Even in the darkness, I barely recognize you.”

The Bolg king’s breath escaped his mouth in a hiss of sorts as he swallowed a laugh. He stretched out his legs and wrapped his arms behind his head. “Is that so?” he said. “Perhaps it does seem that way to you, Rhapsody, because you never have really understood what mattered to me. You have always assigned me altruistic motives where none exist, because you want to believe that we have the same priorities. At one time I believed we did as well. But who really has changed here?”

The child sighed in his sleep, a high, sweet sound, and she looked more sharply at Achmed.

Achmed leaned nearer, so that his words would carry the weight without the volume. “You risk your life, and the life of a child whose fate you cannot possibly be certain of, and all of the people who follow your vision, for whatever fancy moves you. I don’t remember you ever being careless with those things before. And I, who never felt an obligation to preserve anything other than my own neck, now guard a Child of Earth, and a people who no longer wander the world eating their enemies—oh, and a foolish queen whose husband seems unable to do it alone.

“Who has changed? I suppose we both have.”

The Lady Cymrian stared at him; Achmed noted with interest that her green eyes had now cleared of the draconic pupils. The baby drifted into soft clicking sounds, and then silence. Finally she spoke.

“When first we stepped forth into this new land, Achmed, you and Grunthor were consistently annoyed that I could not let go of the past. You had fled Serendair because there was no longer anything there that mattered to you, only death waiting to find you should you have remained. But I lost everything when you decided to drag me along with you. And then all you did was complain when I mourned. ‘Serendair is gone,’ you said. ‘Your life is here now.’ You were fairly insistent that I come to accept what had happened, put the Past aside and live in the Present.”

“True,” Achmed assented. “And I gave you a project that you seemed to relish—helping to end the atrocities that Roland was committing against the Bolg, and to assist in building them into a kingdom of men, albeit monstrous ones. I gave you a duchy in my kingdom, paid for all the useless trinkets you could possibly desire—there are still two dozen gowns in Elysian, rotting quietly in the grotto.” He sat back heavily against the wall and exhaled. “Perhaps I should commandeer them and pass them out to Bolg women to wear while they are skinning game and rendering tallow.”

“By all means, do,” Rhapsody said, caressing her son’s cheek. “They can wear the skirts around their necks, the way they wore the horns of the unfortunate oxen you brought into the kingdom as codpiece decorations. But don’t avoid your own point—you are happy to see me living in the Present as long as by doing so I am achieving your ends. Should I choose to turn my attentions to other matters which you do not value as readily, such as the Cymrian Alliance or the kingdom of Tyrian, or raising a family, that is not sufficient to assuage you. In your twisted mind, I have ‘changed’ because I am no longer doing what you want of me. Perhaps it is audacious of me to expect it, but I would like to live my life as I see fit, and not by your command.”

The Bolg king snorted. “Neh,” he said. “You’d only bollix it up.”

For the first time since the Ending Rhapsody smiled slightly. “No doubt,” she acceded. “But it is mine to bollix up, Achmed. If anyone has been in support of that belief, it would be you. You have always told me that I have the strength to do things that need doing, to lead when I don’t want to, keep on when I want to give up. But you never share your reasons for anything you do, so I can’t understand them. You support me unfailingly, and feel betrayed when I can’t do the same for you as well.”

“Something like that.”

“So explain it to me,” she insisted. “Tell me why you are so set on building this damnable thing, so willing to risk so much for it. Maybe if you could make me understand your willingness to experiment foolishly with primordial magic, I might be able to help you.”

For a long time Achmed was silent. He continued to look above him, gazing around at the interior of the cavern. Finally he spoke.

“Did I ever tell you what I was running from the day Grunthor and I were unfortunate enough to run into you in Easton on Serendair?”

Rhapsody shook her head. “I know that you were enslaved to a high priest who was the host of a F’dor demon,” she said, rubbing the baby’s back gently. “I thought you were running from him.”

“I was,” the Bolg king said dully. “But do you remember the key I used to open Sagia, to allow us to pass into it in the first place?”

“Yes—it was made of Living Stone, as if it were the rib of a Child of Earth.”

“Did it ever seem strange to you that I had such a key? Did you ever wonder where it came from?”

Rhapsody thought for a moment in the darkness. “Not really. There are so many things about you that are secretive, odd, or difficult to grasp that it never occurred to me to wonder about that. I always supposed that if you wanted to tell me, you would.” She looked above her in the darkness and sighed. “After fourteen hundred years, I’ve learned to live with knowing that you probably wouldn’t.”

Achmed sat quietly, listening to the echoes of sound inside the hollow shell. He saw the expression in Rhapsody’s eyes as they wandered over the ossified corpse of her father-in-law, a man she had loved despite his manipulations and betrayals. The expression on her face was one he had seen before, long ago, on the day they had first emerged from the Root, only to discover how far away from home they had traveled, how lost in time they were.

How long dead everyone she had loved was.

“The demon priest you mentioned gave me that key,” he said finally, in a voice that was dry and soft at once. “He sent me to the northern coast of Serendair, across the straits to the Northern Islands of Balatron, Briala, and Querel, where a failed land bridge once stood. The key was meant open a door in the base of that bridge, so that I could bring back an associate of his from the other side.” He met her eyes in the darkness. “You do understand that Tsoltan was the host of a F’dor?”

“Yes.”

“So do you understand where it is that he sent me, and what I was to do?”

She thought for a moment, her eyes growing wider in the darkness.

“You went to the Vault?”

Achmed nodded.

“The actual Vault? It exists in the material world?”

The Bolg king exhaled deeply. “A gateway to it does. ‘The fabric of the world is worn thin there’; that’s what Tsoltan said when giving my instructions.”

Rhapsody’s eyes were glinting now; Achmed knew she was growing nervous.

“And did you open it?”

He nodded. “I did. I looked into the Vault of the Underworld itself. And what I saw there so defies description that I have never really seen fit to attempt it. But it was enough to abandon everything I had, and everything I was, to risk running, because even a cold-blooded assassin like me, even a reprobate with no use for God or man, and no compunction about administering death as if it were a sacrament, has a limit over which he can be pushed. That experience was the limit.”

“I can believe it,” Rhapsody said.

“Then maybe you can believe that now, as a result, everything I do, every chance I get, is an opportunity to safeguard the world from repeating my mistake. You think I am taking unnecessary risks, Rhapsody, but in truth, I am only taking every opportunity to keep that Vault sealed for all time. It is an endless task; like trying to constantly reinforce a dike of sand against the tide of the sea. There are a limited number of F’dor, it’s true, left over from the dawn of Time, but there are enough of them still out there who escaped the Vault in the first cataclysm, ceaselessly endeavoring to get a key like that one and open it, releasing their fellows. I don’t mean to insult you when I say that even you, a Lirin Namer, cannot fathom what that would be like. I have been the dispenser of death myself, in truly horrific ways sometimes, and even I could not have fathomed it had I not seen it with my own eyes.

“You mentioned when you ripped my skin from me, metaphorically speaking, that the Nain had objected to my building of the instrumentality for which you translated the schematics. There is a reason I didn’t confess all that the Nain said. Do you wish to know how they were aware of our construction? They have already built one of their own.” He took some satisfaction at her intake of breath.

“And I wish you wouldn’t lecture me about primordial magic. I know several things about primordial magic that you don’t. It is not immutable, it is fragile; it can die. The death of Sagia left a huge hole in what was possible for primordial magic. The tools we have now are diminished, the weapons denatured. We lost so much constructive power, so much magic from the world when the Island died. I am trying with all my strength to build up our arsenal in this last, greatest battle of all, in every front.”

“But if your fear is that a F’dor will find the Earthchild, and take her rib to use as a key, and release the F’dor, who will then waken the Wyrm, what good is any of your guardianship if your use of the Lightcatcher bypasses all of this and merely wakes the beast up itself?” Rhapsody asked, holding her baby tighter.

Achmed sat up straighter, shaking a cramp out of his neck. Then he met her eyes.

“On the highest peak of Serendair, guarded at its highest pass in air so thin the winged lions who patrolled it could not fly, could barely whisper, was a Lightcatcher. I saw it, Rhapsody. I saw it used, or at least I saw the results. I spoke with the guardians.

“The reason it was built atop the highest peak was so that the power it drew on was the star, not the earth. Every time Faedryth spies on me he tickles the Wyrm; he roots his movable Lightforge near a vein and rattles the world. The Sea Mages undoubtedly take calculated risks with tremors all the time, which is why the currents near their island run amok.” The intensity in his voice made the cavern walls tremble. “But I know, I know that if you ignore the workings of the earthbound navel examiners like Faedryth and Gwylliam, who only looked to the depths for their power, that I could light a flame with the sun. It wouldn’t draw as quickly, it doesn’t draw on a whim, but it doesn’t reach toward annihilation every time you turn it on, either. I need the information in those scrolls to know what I have to do to make sure my peak is not just a Lightforge, but a Lightcatcher. Taking power not from the Earth, but from beyond it. From a star, from the sun—from before the element of Fire was ever born. I can use that instrumentality to see where I cannot now see, to defend where I am vulnerable, to hold the wall of the world stronger than I can without it, and perhaps, just perhaps, we can keep that Vault sealed if we do not disrupt the earth in which it lies.”

He cast one last glance above him.

“It looks a great deal like this inside, by the way.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Rhapsody said sadly. And while the baby drowsed, she told him the story Elynsynos related of the first Ending, and the building of the Vault of the Underworld.

“I am tormented now, wondering what has become of Elynsynos,” she said softly when she had finished the tale. “I don’t know whether Anwyn killed her, or if she is back in her lair, injured. Otherwise she’d be outside right now, trying to free us.”

Achmed sighed. Comfort was not one of his skills.

“Perhaps she’s alive and is outside, but she merely cannot do anything to free us,” he said awkwardly. “Whatever substance is left when formerly living dragonflesh is fired by the release of elemental powers in Ending, it is impervious to all the magic of the demons in the Vault. I can’t imagine that a dragon has the power to open it. The only thing that might is a key like the one that opened Sagia. And that remains hidden back in Ylorc.”

“Even if she’s alive, I’m sure she is distraught to a level no one but a dragon can fully understand. And I ache for Ashe. Sooner or later he will return to collect the baby and me, and he will come upon his father. And, being wyrmkin, it will devastate him.”

“Unfortunate as that may be, it’s the least of our worries now,” Achmed said. “For when he does come upon our stone prison that once was his father, we will have long since run out of air.”

44

The middle day of the week in Jierna’sid was known as Market Day. On that day, the red stone streets were even more crowded than they usually were with every sort of merchant and waremonger, sellers of salted fish and shoes, leather and cloth, spice and rope, cutlery and salt and any other possible type of good that one might want to buy. As a result, a majority of the citizenry was in the streets as well, taking advantage of the abundance to stock up on their stores for the winter, unlike the populace of the outlying areas, that had to set their stores in before the snow began to fall, as they might not have another chance at procurement until Thaw.

Along with the merchants and the townspeople, others were out in force as well: ratty children ran through the streets, invigorated by the sense of drama in the air; pickpockets plied their trade, under the increased presence of the emperor’s constabulary; beggars and cripples and all kinds of alms seekers lined the dirty alleyways, hoping to benefit from an increase in traffic, if not generosity. As in all of Sorbold’s twenty-seven provinces, there were soldiers everywhere, their numbers and visibility increasing by the day.

Another sort could also be seen in greater numbers during Market Days—thugs. Sometimes wastrels, sometimes former members of the imperial army, there seemed to be an entire class of them scattered throughout Sorbold, a strata of human beings whose only living purpose seemed to be adding to the misery of other human beings. Generally harmless, but always irritating, these louts prowled the streets of Jierna’sid from the Place of Weight to the farthest reaches of the mercantile district, avoiding the constable and soldiers but harassing passersby, jostling well-dressed men, leering at or sometimes groping women, threatening children, all of which seemed to generate gales of laughter that could be heard for city blocks.

On this Market Day one such thug came by chance upon a group of sleeping beggars huddled beneath a few tattered rags in an alleyway avoiding the bright morning sun, their breath shallow and stinking of sour ale.

What ho! the ruffian thought, pleased with his find. He sauntered over to the sleeping grizzled men and prodded the first with his toe. When the man didn’t stir, the brute kicked him savagely.

“Wake up, you stinkin’ sot! Get off the street and out o’ my sight; it pains me to see the likes of you taking up space on the emperor’s thoroughfare. Move on, or it’ll pain you, too.”

The man, now awake and terrified, turned sightless eyes that reflected the morning light and his fear onto his tormentor.

“Please, please, sir,” he muttered in the throes of dementia. “Please don’t take me ta the army; I’ve lost my sight there once. Don’t want ta do it again.”

The thug laughed out loud. He looked more closely at the other two beggars, both lame, one still asleep, the other waking fitfully, and aimed a kick at the waking one’s head.

“I said get up, you beg—”

His word choked off in midsyllable as the hand of the sleeping beggar shot out like a strike of lightning and grabbed him by the ankle, jerking his calf up high and sharply enough to unbalance him. His balance upended, the ruffian fell backward against the stones of the alleyway, slamming his head against them.

Dazed, the young man tried to rise, only to be gripped by a clutching hand that grasped him around the throat in a clenched fist that seemed to be made of iron.

Before he knew what was happening he found himself being dragged forward on his face over the cold, jagged stones of the alleyway, until he was eye to eye with the beggar. The vagabond’s eyes were unlike any he had seen; Sorbold was a nation of swarthy skin and dark features, where almost all eyes were brown as the earth. But these eyes were an azure blue, and they were burning clearer and hotter than the fires of the streetlamps that lit Jierna’sid by night.

The beggar spat in his face, a mouthful of sour spittle rancid with bad drink and coated teeth.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than to bother the downtrodden, you miscreant?” the ragged man said disdainfully. He slammed the young thug’s head against the wall where the men had been leaning, then, with his other hand, seized the remains of the sour ale in the battered bowl from which they had been drinking, and tossed it down the front of the thug’s trousers. Then he pulled the dazed young man’s ear next to his lips.

“Now, here’s the moment in your life where you will decide to either grow up and be a man worth drawing breath, or where you will sign your own death warrant as a pugnacious fool who owes his mother an apology for being born and will, no doubt, come to an embarrassing end every soon. You can leave this place, go home and change your clothing, and cease from here forward to bother old men who have done you no ill, or you can go round up your fellow reprobates to come back for more. Bear two things in mind if you choose the latter option: First, you will need to explain to them why you pissed yourself. And second, you will not find me here—though rest assured I will come to find you. Unless you wish to earn the wrath of the beggar with the blue eyes, I suggest you choose the former.”

He slammed the thug’s head into the wall again for good measure, then dropped him in the street.

“Go,” he ordered in the ringing tone of an army commander.

The thug scrambled woozily to his feet and stumbled out of the alleyway; he was greeted by a chorus of shocked laughter around the corner.

Anborn waited until the noise outside the alley had died down, then reached beneath the tatters of his cloak for his crutches.

“Find another warm street, friends,” he said to the blind beggar and the lame man. He watched until the two had made it to the corner, leaning on one another, then rose creakily to a stand and hobbled along the streetwall to find another place to spy.

It took him several hours to make his way, clinging to the shadows to avoid notice, closer to the palace of Jierna Tal, rising above the Place of Weight where the massive Scales stood, dark against the winter sky. Anborn had seen those Scales many times, but there was something different about them now, something ominous he could not quite put his finger on. Perhaps it was only the way the light was hitting them, casting long shadows into the streets. But it was also possible that the sights he had been witnessing during his time in Sorbold had been enough to stain his view of everything in the nation.

As he feared, there were signs everywhere that Sorbold was preparing for war. The garrisons that previously had been confined to the borderlands and along the thoroughfares had spread; now almost every few blocks within the city an outpost of some kind had been erected. It was all very discreet; perhaps someone who had never been to Jierna’sid or to any of the other Sorbold states would have even noticed. But Anborn’s understanding of the signals of military buildup, and their efficiency, was legion, having been honed in the most terrible of conflicts.

And what he saw was making him tremble.

Finally he found a warm alcove beneath a small tannery across from the palace, where the fumes and stench would keep any patrol from investigating too thoroughly, and took up residence there. From that hiding place he knew he would see the quartermasters bringing in armor for repair, and believed that what he saw would help him determine even more about the army’s movements. He waited until dark when the tannery had closed for the night, then crawled into the tiny alcove beneath it and settled down, as he had in each of the places between Jierna’sid and Ghant, to watch and make note of what he saw.

Nielash Mousa stood in the silence of dawn before the ruins of the monastery and the manse.

Thaw was coming to an end, he knew; even the desert clime of Sorbold had seen a few flakes of snow carried on the cleansing wind that was whipping over the scarred stones, blowing the ashes about in swirling patterns of gray.

Talquist stood behind him, his head bowed respectfully.

“A most terrible tragedy, Your Grace,” he said softly. He gave the benison’s shoulder a supportive squeeze.

“Indeed,” Mousa replied, allowing his dark eyes, red from the ash and the tears, to rest on the irregular metal pool that had once been the manse’s bell; he remembered the clear sound of it, ringing through the rocky mountainside, calling his acolytes and abbot to service in Terreanfor.

He struggled to remain still, to keep his shoulder from shrugging away the regent’s hand, to keep his face set in a mien that was merely sorrowful, not revealing the fury and loathing that was bubbling inside him, eating at his viscera like Pulis, the apocryphal lake of acid in the Vault of the Underworld, where traitors were dipped eternally in endless torment. May the legends of it be true, if only for you, Talquist, he thought bitterly.

As if the regent emperor was reading his thoughts, Talquist squeezed his shoulder again, a little more tightly this time.

“I know this is a terrible blow to you, Your Grace, and so I have made arrangements to assist you in your grief, and in the rebuilding of your monastery and your order.”

Mousa turned then and met the regent’s gaze; behind the sympathetic expression in Talquist’s black eyes he could see a more discerning one, a piercing stare that had sized up the benison’s reaction, and already determined that he had not been misled.

“What sort of arrangements?” he demanded.

Talquist smiled slightly. “All sort, Your Grace,” he replied, his voice warm and respectful but with an icy edge. “You will need a place to live until a new manse can be built, obviously, so I have taken the liberty for finding you lodging within Jierna Tal, where my servants and guards can be at your beck and call.”

“How kind of you,” the benison said dryly.

“And of course we will want to be interviewing new acolytes as soon as possible, I would imagine.”

Nielash Mousa arched an eyebrow. “We? I hadn’t realized you had any interest or expertise in matters of the faith, m’lord.”

The regent emperor opened his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “How awkward; I do apologize. I suppose Lasarys, may the All-God cradle him gently in the Afterlife, did not tell you that I trained with him in Terreanfor as an acolyte myself, many years ago?”

“I see,” said the benison. “Well, what a loss it is that you did not choose to follow the call into the order, my son.”

Talquist threw back his head and laughed merrily, but the piercing glance did not waver.

“Yes, I suppose that would be preferable to being named emperor,” he said humorously.

The benison smiled benignly and made the same conciliatory gesture that Talquist had performed the moment before.

“Well, some of us would think so, m’lord.”

The wind whistled down from the mountain, bringing the sharp sting of fire ash with it, and carrying away the pleasantries of both men.

Talquist broke the silence first.

“So, since these new acolytes will be under my domain, and many of them will serve at my official investiture as emperor in the spring, I would see to it that we have as loyal and capable a crop as possible, and that their training begin immediately. I have taken the liberty of sending a petition to the Patriarch, under your office’s seal, to begin the recruitment as soon as possible.”

“Are there any other liberties you have taken in my name, my son?” asked Mousa, his voice barely steady.

Talquist’s smile hardened.

“Only the ones that would assist you, and Sorbold, in dealing with this terrible loss, Your Grace,” he said evenly. “There will be a good deal of paperwork in the search for your new acolytes, so I have assigned my own personal correspondent to handle all your communications, especially those going to and coming from Sepulvarta. Additionally, because your health and safety are of utmost concern to me, I have made arrangements for my personal retinue of guards to escort you in all of your travels, so that you never need fear any harm coming to you.” He leaned a little closer to the benison. “I can certainly understand how this horrific occurrence might cause you to worry for your well-being, which is a perfectly understandable concern, however unwarranted. Ofttimes when tragedy strikes, men panic, become fearful.” He looked up to the ruins of the old bell tower, then met the benison’s eye again. “Make unwise choices.”

The Blesser of Sorbold nodded silently.

“Good,” said Talquist. “Well, again, let me proffer my deepest sympathies for your loss, Your Grace, and assure you that I stand by to help in all things. Together, we can see to it that Sorbold will be stronger for this loss, that we will rise above it and build a better nation in its wake.”

“I will pray that your words come to pass, my son,” said Nielash Mousa, picking up his walking staff and covering his head with the cowl of his robe. “Thank you for all your efforts on my behalf.”

“It is my pleasure to serve you, Your Grace,” said Talquist smoothly. “After all, you will be officiating at my investiture; I have to keep you safe and well until then.”

The benison smiled. “Of course. And now, if you would be so kind as to have your guards escort me to Terreanfor, I must offer my prayers for the souls of the departed holy men, and for the nation of Sorbold. You may wish to arrange for several watches, as the service will be quite lengthy; I must intone the blessing for each of the lost, and, as you know, a great number of priests were lost. And this is a very large nation.”

“Of course. Consider it done, Your Grace.” Talquist signaled to the captain of the guard. “Escort His Grace to the Earth Basilica, and make certain that he is uninterrupted in his prayers. No one is to enter the basilica without my express permission.” The guard nodded and withdrew.

“Thank you, my son,” said Nielash Mousa as the soldiers took up formation around him. “May your actions be returned to you a hundredfold.”

He bowed slightly and walked away, both men fully understanding the intention in each of their words.

45

The regiment of guards followed the Blesser of Sorbold on the long walk to Night Mountain within which Terreanfor was secreted, through a wide pass in the dry mountains that seemed to go on forever.

Finally at midday they reached the single entrance to the basilica, a lowlying door carved into the mountain, an overhanging ledge assuring that sunlight was not let inside. Beside the opening was a large, flat ceremonial stone; the benison signaled to two of the guards, one of whom had been grudgingly enlisted to carry a golden symbol of the sun atop a long pole, the other of whom was bearing a flask of holy oil. These tasks were traditionally performed by priests of Terreanfor, so the guards had little choice but to undertake them now.

The benison ignored their obvious consternation and ugly expressions, freezing his own aspect into a mask of serenity. He gestured to the first of the soldiers to come forward and place the golden symbol on the stone, which he quickly did, then stepped away, as if he feared proximity would yield divine retribution. The benison then reached for the oil, which he poured onto the golden symbols; he stood back to wait for the sun to kindle the oil into the only kind of fire that would be allowed into the basilica in shielded lanterns of cold light.

While the benison waited, he watched bemusedly from beneath his hood the growing boredom and irritation of the guards. Interesting that you can stand watch in a mountain pass or a field column for days on end without losing focus, but a few moments at the feet of the All-God makes you nervous to the point of dereliction of duty, he mused. Well, we will try not to keep you waiting too long.

When finally the sun overhead sparked a flame, Nielash Mousa transferred the fire reverently into a small ceremonial lantern; he was lighting it for tradition’s sake only. Having been all but raised in Terreanfor, he could find his way around the basilica in the dark with his eyes closed.

Once the wick had kindled, he turned to the guards.

“Thank you for your assistance, my sons,” he said graciously. “Now I will be undertaking my prayers and burial rituals; since that will take much longer than your watch here, I bid you goodbye.”

The soldiers nodded and walked away, taking up their positions at the door of the basilica. The benison ducked below the overhang, uttered the words of opening, and entered the basilica, closing the doors slowly and quietly behind him.

Immediately he could hear the song of the Earth ringing in the depths of the basilica, the slow, melodic timbre of the world’s beating heart. It was a sound that resonated in his soul, and had done so from the first moment he had become aware of it; its timbre was so deep, its tune so subtle, that until he had spent many years in the depths of Terreanfor, he did not even know it existed. Now it was immediately recognizable, like the voice of his mother, calling to him from her heart.

At last, alone in his beloved sanctuary, the benison broke down. He fell to his knees just beyond the doorway and wept, mourning the men who had served tirelessly with the same love of the dark earth, who had prayed beside him and stood vigil over this last enclave of one of the Creator’s Paints, the primordial element from which the world itself was made.

The Earth wept along in unison.

Finally, when he could weep no more, Nielash Mousa rose slowly, with the hesitance of age, and descended the passageway leading to the basilica proper.

Down here in the interior of the Earth cathedral, the dry, stony exterior, dead from contact with the heat of the upworld, quickly gave way to the fresh, cool scent of moist, living earth. The heat of the Sorbold desert dissipated, replaced by colder air, heavy with life. The lamp in the benison’s hand reflected off the smooth walls, trim and clean, gloriously colored in random swirls and stripes of deep, rich brown, gold and vermilion, green and purple, the hues of life that made their way up from the primordial world and bloomed on its surface in the form of flowers and wheat, grass and grapes, and all the outer signs that deep below the crust, the Earth was alive.

The noise of the upworld faded away, leaving nothing but silence and the resonating song of the Earth, growing louder with each step he took deeper into the basilica. He followed the song under the high archway that was the entrance to the Antechamber of the Sisters, which housed altars to three of the other primordial elements. Within that vast circular chamber were alcoves containing a vent to a flamewell from the center of the Earth honoring the element of fire, a bubbling stream to honor Water, and a captured gust of wind that eternally praised the element of Air. The fourth Sister, the element of Ether, could be found deeper within the basilica, where no light of any kind was allowed, in the glowing rocks and organisms that contained its cold light, light left over from the birth of the universe.

The benison doused his lantern, plunging the antechamber into appropriate darkness.

Through the outer sanctum, beneath the gargantuan columns of Living Stone fashioned in the shapes of tall trees filled with earthen birds, past the towering statues of elephants and tirabouri, gazelles and lions, through the archway guarded by titanic soldiers, one of which, to his horror, was missing, the benison made his way quickly to the inner sanctum, the holy altar of elemental earth. He could hear the song of it emanating in the darkness, singing a dirge so painful that it brought him to tears again.

The basilica, his basilica, had been ravaged.

Never again, he thought, shaking his head as he bowed low before the altar. Never again.

In his ears the words of the Patriarch were still ringing.

Nielash Mousa, tarry. Safeguard Terreanfor.

I understand, Your Grace, he whispered again.

His eyes dry, his expression resolute, the benison began to chant, opening his mind and the elemental altar to the petitions the congregation of Sorbold had directed toward it. When the rite of receiving was concluded, he began the rite of sending, directing those petitions along the Chain of Prayer toward Sepulvarta, where the Patriarch would offer them to the All-God.

Once his offering was finished, the benison began the rituals of burial, the rites for the dead. For each of the acolytes that was murdered in the manse he bowed five times over the altar of Living Stone and intoned the blessing.

Finally, when the last of his priestly duties was finished, he walked through the inner sanctum, up the wide, dark stone stairs to the base of the burial tomb of Sorbold’s emperors. Less than a year before he had performed the funerals of the Dowager Empress and her son, Crown Prince Vyshla, who had been taken by death within an hour of one another. It had not occurred to him at the time that they might have been murdered; now the sickening realization of how it may have come to pass added to the nausea of the rest of Talquist’s crimes.

No more, he intoned, hurrying up the stairs. No more.

As light began to filter into the holy darkness, he came into the burial chapel to the base of the Faithful’s Stair, the tight, winding passageway up to the stained glass–filled sepulchers. It was a sealed tomb, but Nielash Mousa knew that the windows presented a possible entrance, a back way into Terreanfor, the only other place where Night Mountain’s hidden cathedral could be broached.

Nielash Mousa knelt at the base of the Faithful’s Stair.

Slowly he began to chant, intoning the words he had learned a lifetime before, words he prayed he would never have to utter. They were the Words of Closing, words of power, of destruction, in a language long dead, that had been taught in secret to each of the benisons who’d had stewardship over Terreanfor since it was built, with the understanding that they were never to be used unless there was no other way of avoiding them, and then only in a time when the basilica itself was under attack, in danger of being destroyed or, worse, its magic misused. That time had never before come to pass, not even in the wake of the war that had torn apart most of the continent, a war in which no weapon of destruction had been deemed too unholy to use.

That time had finally come.

46

The darkness within the cavern of Llauron’s body seemed to close in.

“Is there no opening, no hole—”

Achmed held up his hand gently to silence her. He closed his eyes and loosed his path lore, seeking an egress, any small egress, from within the enormous stone structure. Finally he shook his head.

“None,” he said. “That Progenitor Wyrm knew what he was doing when he encircled the Vault of the Underworld. If there had been any small crack, any hole, those formless spirits would have been able to escape. None ever did, not for thousands of years, until the Sleeping Child hit the Earth and shattered the Vault. It appears that in his attempt to rescue us, Llauron may have condemned the three of us to suffocation.”

“Ashe will return soon with the carriage,” Rhapsody said, her eyes glittering in the dark as the panic within her rose. “He will be able to get us out of here.”

“How? What power does Ashe have over a fired shell of elemental earth, any more than Elynsynos does?”

The bundle within Rhapsody’s arms began to move; the baby’s voice rose in the beginnings of a wail. Achmed watched as Rhapsody’s face changed completely, the sadness now replaced with horror. She crawled weakly to a stand and ran her hand up the ribbed wall of stone, banging on it.

“Elynsynos! Help! Elynsynos!”

She banged again, the sound dull and muted beneath the screams of the baby.

Achmed seized hold of her wrist; as he did, he felt light-headed. The world shifted for a moment, and he remembered suddenly the first time he had taken her by the wrist, dragging her away from her homeland, through the bowels of the world, a lifetime ago.

He loosed his grip slightly so as not to cause her pain, noting the thinness of the skin on her arm, the loss of blood in her face as she turned panicked eyes on him.

“Shhhh,” he said gently, in the same tone he had used to gentle down her child. “Save the air. If she’s alive, she already knows we’re in here. Calling won’t help.”

Rhapsody sank back to the floor of the cavern, clutching the crying child closer, her eyes spilling over with tears of desperation. She caressed the infant for a moment, then looked up suddenly.

“Yes, it will,” she said slowly. “Yes, it will help, if I can reach a Kinsman. Anborn, or Grunthor—if my call can reach them on the wind—”

“What wind, Rhapsody?” Achmed asked quietly.

He could feel the breath go out of her, along with her hope.

“Come over here,” he said, leaning against the wall. “You Lirin are so wasteful of air, because you are used to endless quantities of it. Take it from a cave dweller; it’s best to try and meditate. You will last longer.” He met her gaze as the baby began to whimper more weakly. “Calm is perhaps the last gift you can give your child.” He smiled slightly, trying to take away the sting of the words.

Rhapsody continued to stare at him for a long moment. Then realization came into her eyes. She rose shakily to her knees and crawled over to him, leaning against the stone wall that had once been Llauron’s body. Achmed exhaled shallowly as the baby fell silent, his tiny chest heaving, then put his arm around Rhapsody and drew her head down to his shoulder.

“Meditate,” he whispered with great effort. “Try and—remember—the best of things. There’s not . . . air . . . for anything . . . else.”

“You . . . are . . . one,” she said softly, leaning back against his shoulder, her head heavy now. “Even if . . . we have fought, I—I do love—”

“Shhhh,” he said again. “Don’t . . . be a Waste . . . of Breath.”

Through his very skin, he could feel her heartbeat begin to relax and slow, until he could barely detect it at all.

Nielash Mousa’s head began to hum with a negative static as he chanted; a stabbing pain emerged above his left eye, making his forehead feel as if it were about to sunder. Resolutely he pressed on until the base of the Faithful’s Stair began to shake, then tremble violently, at last collapsing upon itself, sealing off the upper tomb with the sepulchers and stained-glass windows above.

Dizzy, he lowered himself to the ground in the utter darkness. He sat, unmoving, on the floor until he could regain his senses, concentrating on the Earth’s own song, which was beginning to resound in less of a minor key.

Weakly he walked to the enormous pile of rubble that had once been the Faithful’s Stair, and examined it. As soon as he determined that the seal was complete, and the basilica would never be able to be entered through it without the dome of the sepulcher collapsing onto whoever was attempting to enter, he made his way back down the wide staircase, through the inner and outer sanctum, past the Antechamber of the Sisters, until he was standing before the only remaining place in all of Night Mountain through which the basilica could be entered.

The basilica’s front door.

Surreptitiously he peeked out of the dry earthen doorway, past the bored guards, seeking one last look at the sunshine he knew he would never see again. It was there, hazy with flecks of snow; silently the benison bade it goodbye.

Then he turned his back on the light of the upworld and made his way to the altar of Living Stone once more.

Softly he began the chant the Words of Closing again; the irony choked him, because those words were the countersign to the song that had sung the cathedral into being, the holy prayer that had revealed Terreanfor for the first time to man, or at least to men who had been able to record history. He tried not to think about that moment of discovery, when the living earth first was seen in all its dark and sacred beauty, because the loss was incalculable.

Safeguard Terreanfor. The Patriarch had risked his own life and soul reversing the Chain of Prayer to utter the words in a way the Blesser of Sorbold would be certain to hear.

Fighting the nausea, the splitting pain, the blood as it began to pour forth from his nose and eyes, Nielash Mousa continued to chant until the entire opening of the basilica past the Antechamber of the Sisters collapsed upon itself, bringing down a goodly section of Night Mountain with it, burying the guards who were waiting outside in the landslide, trapping himself inside.

Sealing the basilica forever.

Deep within a distant mountain, in a realm that bordered the lands of Sorbold, the last living Child of Earth took in a breath. The fever in which she had been tossing broke; the smoothly polished skin of her forehead glistened with the dew of its leaving.

And once again, she fell into dreaming.

Rhapsody ran trembling fingers over Meridion’s downy hair. Too weak to sing, she started to hum the musical note that was his own, ela, the same as her own, the sixth note of the scale, the New Beginning, hoping it would give him some strength, or at least some ease.

She thought back to the times that singing her note had brought her comfort, had served to remind her of the star beneath which she had been born, and her tie to it that remained, even when she was entombed in the Earth, crawling along the Axis Mundi. As the air of the cave became thinner she felt warm and light-headed; in her mind it was easy to believe she was crawling along the Root again, fighting the vermin that fed off it, struggling to survive, teaching Grunthor to read as he taught her to fight, following Achmed as he guided them all through the endless tunnels of darkness, confident in his unerring path lore.

I gave that to him, she mused as Meridion gasped for air, tears she did not feel falling from her eyes onto his fragile skin. What was the name I called him by, that allowed him to pass through the fire at the Earth’s core, unharmed? The darkness seemed to grow thicker. Oh, yes. Unerring tracker. The Pathfinder. Firbolg, Dhracian, Assassin, Firstborn.

My friend.

She felt too dizzy to turn her head, but she sensed his eyes might be on her in the dark, able to see in the dimness as cave dwellers could. She thought of Grunthor, and how easily he could travel through tunnels and caverns, and of the name she had given him, too, the lore that had allowed for his safe passage through the fire as well.

Child of sand and open sky, son of the caves and lands of darkness. Bengard, Firbolg. The Sergeant-Major. My trainer, my protector. The Lord of Deadly Weapons. The Ultimate Authority, to Be Obeyed at All Costs. Faithful friend, strong and reliable as the Earth itself. It had been the nomenclature that had tied Grunthor to the Earth, had allowed its heartbeat to echo in his own.

In the deepening fuzziness something occurred to her.

No, he was already tied to it, she thought hazily. Elynsynos once said that the race of Firbolg came from a pairing of Children of Earth, the race of the Sleeping Child, and Kith, the Firstborn race born of elemental wind. The name itself, Fir-bolga, meant wind of the earth. So he had that tie from birth, she mused.

With great effort she brought her son’s head to her lips.

Wind of the Earth. The words were louder, as if she was hearing them from somewhere—or someone else.

Suddenly the darkness cleared.

The perimeter of Ylorc secured, Grunthor made his way in the dark down the long earthen tunnel to the Loritorium, trembling with fear at what he might find in the wake of the dragon’s attack.

As he crested the mound of rubble, the last barrier between the upworld and the Child of Earth, his face was brushed by the cool rush of air in the underground chamber, a wind of the earth that carried with it a sense of ease he had not felt in a long time.

He made his way down the moraine as quietly as he was able and approached the sepulcher, relief spreading over his broad face.

The Child slept on, undisturbed, her smooth face of polished stone cold and dry, her eyelids motionless. The sunken circles around the bones of her face had vanished, the withering of her body had ceased. The tides of her breath were gentle, rhythmic, in tune with the beating heart of the Earth he could feel in his soul. Grunthor would not have been able to form words to explain what he was witnessing, but the return of well-being to the subterranean chamber which had seen so much destruction was palpable.

He leaned over carefully and pressed his bulbous lips against her forehead, finding it cool, its tension gone.

“Sweet dreams, darlin’,” he whispered.

Rhapsody struggled to sit up. She carefully lowered Meridion onto Achmed’s lap and, seeing his hands clasp around the child in surprise, turned to the wall that had once been the body of her father-in-law, a kindly, scholarly man whose desire to right the wrongs of his youth and his family had severed him from the family he so dearly wanted to see prosper.

Now was nothing more than a vessel of fired elemental earth.

Her hands trembled as she clutched at the wall.

From her throat came a sound that Achmed had never heard before, a harsh, guttural noise that vibrated against his sensitive eardrums, issued forth from deep within her. At first he didn’t recognize the words, discordant and coarse as the noise was. A moment later he realized what she was chanting . . . in Bolgish.

“By the Star,” Rhapsody chanted from deep within her throat, “I will wait, I will watch, I will call and will be heard.”

She’s calling for a Kinsman, he noted absently, looking down at the tiny baby in his arms. It’s a waste of time, and air. But stopping her could waste even more. Let her cling to worthless hope; it’s not going to matter.

“Grunthor,” she intoned in the same scratchy vibration, almost a moan now, “strong and—reliable as—the Earth—itself.”

Nothing happened.

Achmed’s head throbbed from the sound.

“Stop it, Rhapsody,” he muttered.

She shook her head, still clutching the wall, and continued to intone the call, over and over, from deep within her throat. She continued to sing for what seemed like forever, until stars began to swim in Achmed’s eyes.

Darkness came for him.

47

Anborn could hear the screaming even above the cacophonous noise of the tannery.

Night was falling, and the city of Jierna’sid was beginning to shut down its legitimate operations for the night. It was during such time that the Lord Marshal took the opportunity to sleep, as the later hours were some of his prime time for watchfulness, when many of the more nefarious aspects of the city’s operations were revealed. Thus he was in the throes of a fitful slumber in his cubby beneath the leathermaker’s shop when Faron returned to the city.

The titan had emerged at the far end of the main thoroughfare that bisected Jierna’sid, leading at its terminus to Jierna Tal itself.

The sounds of strife at first were unnoticeable to the townspeople of Jierna’sid, who continued with their nightly preparations; the merchants closed their booths, the soldiers maintained their patrols, the workmen struggled to get a little more of their tasks finished in the fading moments of light. But Anborn’s ears were more sensitive, whether from his centuries of military leadership or the latent dragon blood in his veins, he was aware almost immediately of the sound of panic.

By the time he had dragged himself to the opening of the alcove, the town itself had begun to recognize that something terrible was wrong, and it was coming toward them.

From the western gate of the city a shadow was lumbering, a titanic shadow the color of the desert earth in the fading light of the sun. Anborn could feel its approach in the tremors that resounded through the cobbled streets.

God’s underpants, he thought to himself. In this place of routine horror, what could possibly be so terrifying?

The answer followed a moment later in the twang of bowstrings and the shouted orders of a full cohort of soldiers running forth from the barracks at Jierna Tal toward the western gate.

Screams rent the air as the soldiers who had been stationed at the western gate charged the gigantic man, a soldier of primitive race by his garb and flat facial features, with eyes of a milky sheen that seemed intently fixed on the palace of Jierna Tal. In a great fountain of blood the charge was rebuffed; bodies were hurled left and right, smashed into oxcarts and torn asunder, their limbs tossed aside as easily as chaff in front of the thresher.

From beneath the step of the tannery Anborn watched the shadow pass, saw it pause long enough to seize hold of an abandoned miller’s wagon and heave it, laden with heavy barrels, out of its path and through the window of a boyar’s shop a hundred yards away. But unlike the rest of the populace, which was either frozen in fright by the sides of the roadway or scattering like leaves before a high wind, he recognized in the colors of the lurching man’s flesh something that no one else had seen. The sight of it caused the ancient hero, general of Gwylliam’s army in the Cymrian war, Lord Marshal of the Cymrian Alliance, and a vested warrior in the brotherhood of Kinsmen, first to stare in shock, then to mutter prayers beneath his breath.

Because Anborn could see that it was made of Living Stone.

Having seen more than enough, he waited until the titan had broached the doors of the palace of Jierna Tal, then, in the confusion that was roiling the streets, dragged himself forth from the tannery, stole a horse that had been left riderless, and made his way, in all due haste, back to Haguefort.

Talquist could hear the screams as well.

He was in the midst of a very pleasant dinner when the noise leaked in through the windows on his balcony; it started as a high-pitched chorus in the distance, but quickly rose to the level of cacophony such that he was given to sudden indigestion.

Irate, he rose angrily from his meal, tossed his linen napkin violently onto the floor, and strode to the balcony, slamming the doors open and stepping out into the chilly air.

From the balcony he could see the world below falling into madness.

The height of the upper terrace afforded him a terrifying view of the streets of Jierna’sid, their roadways a grid visible from the air. Down the central street a human shadow lumbered, gigantic given its ability to be discerned from such a distance. Around it tiny human figures the size of ants were scattering, some of them toward it, to be flung away seconds later, others away, some successful in their flight, most not. Talquist lost his water onto the floor of the balcony.

There was no mistaking what was coming.

In a heart’s beat he was screaming orders to the captain of his guard, commanding cohorts and divisions to be activated from the barracks below. He watched in terror as his orders were carried out; an entire column of mounted mountain guard thundered into the streets, firing at the approaching titan, oblivious of townspeople who were fleeing in their path. Talquist could only stare as the immense statue, now more man than stone, waded through the horsemen as if they were surf, pummeling men and beasts with brutal efficiency that led to such a bloody result he could only turn and flee himself.

He knew the statue’s destination.

He ran from the balcony to the tower stairs, climbing two at a time, his heavy velvet robes no longer a cherished luxury but a fatal hindrance. He had barely broached the doorway of the tallest tower when he heard the shattering of the palace’s massive gates; the screams echoed throughout Jierna Tal, shaking the walls of the minaret.

There was nowhere else left to run.

Gray sweat poured from his brow and neck as the thundering steps of the titan approached. The resistance noise had disappeared; after the decimation of the soldiers sent to battle it, the household staff had fled or was hiding. Now the regent emperor could hear the heavy footfalls thudding as mercilessly, unfalterigly, the titan came closer.

The tower shook violently as Faron mounted the stairs, climbing four at once, honing in on his prey. Talquist lost what little was left of his composure and screamed, slamming and bolting the door of the highest tower shut behind him, knowing as he did what a pathetically futile action it was.

He had taken cover behind an overturned table of shiny walnut wood when the door split open and the titan emerged, dragging his massive body through the stone opening that was too small to accommodate his height.

Talquist screamed again. Knowing that Faron had come for vengeance, he dropped to the floor on his knees, hopelessly praying that the titan might recognize the gesture of surrender and be moved by it.

Faron broke through the stones of the doorway.

With all hope lost, Talquist began to weep.

“No, Faron,” he gasped, struggling for breath in the grip of terror. “Please—I meant only to—”

Fear got the better of him as the living statue’s eyes, blue and milky with cataracts, stared at him stonily, and he fell silent.

Slowly the titan crossed the small room until it was standing directly in front of the regent emperor.

Its stone arm reached out at the level of Talquist’s neck.

Its gigantic hand opened.

In it were five colored scales, each tattered about the edges, each inscribed with runes in a language long dead in the material world. Each was of a different hue, though in the fading light of dusk they gleamed iridescently in all the colors of the rainbow.

Humming a symphony of power.

With great care, the titan crouched down and placed the five scales on the floor at the regent emperor’s feet.

Dumbfounded, Talquist could only stare at Faron for the longest of moments. Finally he found his voice and thoughts again.

He reached into the folds of his robe where he always carried his treasure, the violet scale, and drew it forth, holding it up before the statue’s milky eyes.

“Is this what you seek, Faron? A return to Sharra’s deck? Are you looking to join forces with me, and combine them into a set again?”

The titan nodded slowly.

The regent emperor let out a sharp gasp.

Then a chuckle of relief.

And finally an unbridled laugh of manic glee that echoed off the broken tower, down the stairways, over the grounds of the palace, and out into the night, where it rang, triumphant, through the streets of Jierna’sid.

A thudding shook the foundations of the cavern that was once Llauron.

Achmed sat upright, jolting the baby awake.

Rhapsody had collapsed against the wall where she’d sung. She barely stirred as the thudding ceased.

A light appeared on the wall, forming a doorway in the side of the great stone beast. Achmed summoned the strength to rise to his feet, his eyes stinging, and pulled Rhapsody up behind him, still clutching the baby in his arms.

A dark humanoid shape, taller than a man by half over, filled the opening.

“Oh, right, ya can’t manage ta stay in Ylorc yerself, so now yer draggin’ me away from there now?”

Achmed stumbled forward, using his right arm to shove Rhapsody into Grunthor’s while cradling the baby with his left.

“Air,” he croaked.

The light dimmed and vanished. The giant Bolg grabbed the Lady Cymrian and lifted her out of the cavern, depositing her quickly and gently onto the snowy ground outside, then pulled Achmed through the opening as well. Then he leaned back into the cavern, letting out a low whistle as he did.

“Criton, what’s this?”

“It used to . . . be . . . Llauron,” Achmed said, choking on the fullness of the snow-filled air of the forest. He took a moment to catch his breath, then looked up at the giant Sergeant. “He died rescuing us from Anwyn,” he said when he could speak.

“Ah, she made it ’ere, then?” Grunthor said under his breath. “That bitch. Glad Oi brought this with me.” He held up the key of Living Stone that had once opened Sagia’s root. “Oi was right there in the vault when the call came, and Oi jus’ ’ad a feelin’.”

Grunthor looked down into Achmed’s arms and froze, his amber eyes widening in the morning light. “Whatcha got there, sir?”

Achmed shook his head and nodded at Rhapsody, who was rising weakly to her knees, staring at the carriage that was waiting in the glen a short distance away.

She was watching her husband approach the cavern, the end of the world on his face.

48

Winter had returned in all its fury by the time the caravan returned to the sheltered courtyard of Haguefort.

Gwydion Navarne watched the carriages arrive from the tall windows above the library; the firelight reflected off the glass in the panes, warming a room that had felt cold for some time. How long, he did not know; he waited anxiously for the doors to open, but the carriage driver took his time, endeavoring to position the coach as close to the steps as possible.

Melisande stood beside him, wrapped in the drapes, dancing impatiently to see the baby.

“Why aren’t they hurrying?” she demanded, pushing in front of her brother again.

Gwydion’s hands came to rest gently on her shoulders.

“They want to keep him as warm and safe as possible,” he said, thinking back to what he had seen in Ghant, and what it portended for the future. His hands gripped her shoulders a little more tightly, as if to hold on to her without worrying her. “I guess that’s the natural impulse with babies—and sisters.” He smiled as reassuringly as he could as Melisande looked up at him, her face contorted in humorous doubt.

They continued to stand at the window and watch as Ashe finally exited the carriage, followed by the shadowy cloaked figure Gwydion recognized immediately as the Bolg king. The coach swayed from side to side for a moment, and to his delight the young duke saw Grunthor step out as well.

“They’re—” His words choked off; Melly had already run from the room. He could hear her footfalls dashing down the steps of the Grand Stair. Gwydion smiled and followed her.

By the time he reached the entranceway of the keep, Ashe had already carried the newborn inside, and had handed him, with an awkward smile, to the chambermaid who had opened the door. The servant took the baby and moved out of the draft as the Lord Cymrian reached through the doorway and assisted Rhapsody over the threshold, where a bevy of other household staff descended upon them, taking cloaks, hats, and winter wear out of the way.

Excitement overran his natural reserve; he dashed across the foyer to the doorway and threw his arms around Rhapsody, whose smile was bright, though her face seemed pale and somewhat drawn. He looked up happily at his godfather, only to see him staring absently over his shoulder at the chambermaid, who was cooing to the baby; a chill went up his spine, though he had no idea why.

Melisande hugged Ashe, oblivious of his preoccupation.

“Can I hold him? Please, please?”

“By all means,” Ashe said quickly. “Portia, please bring the baby to Lady Melisande.”

The chambermaid nodded respectfully, then, seeing the door close behind the Firbolg king, carried the child across the entranceway and put him into the waiting arms of Melisande.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your homecoming,” Gwydion said quietly to Ashe, “but I have a matter of great urgency that I must discuss with you once Rhapsody and the baby are safely settled in. I regret having to impinge this way, but—”

A loud metallic clanking sounded down the corridor in the Great Hall.

The two Firbolg, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, the children of Navarne, and the household staff all looked up to see Anborn appear at the doorway of the hall, standing erect and without his crutches, in the center of the great silver walking machine that had been brought to him from Gaematria.

“Sweet All-God,” Ashe exclaimed. “I thought I’d never live to see this day.”

“May you live to see many such days that you’d never expect to see,” said Anborn seriously.

“What changed your mind, Uncle?”

Anborn exhaled deeply, his eyes going to the bundle in Melisande’s arms that had started to kick.

“The need to be ready for what is to come,” he said seriously. “You and I have need to speak now, Gwydion; your ward may already have told you what he and I have witnessed since we left. I have even worse news to add.” He blinked as Ashe took the baby from Melly, walked over, and offered the baby to him.

“Tarry a moment, Uncle,” Ashe said gently, “and meet your new great-nephew.”

A change came over Anborn’s stern face. He stared at the infant for a moment, then reluctantly reached out and took the infant in his arms, cradling him gently as Rhapsody came over beside him, smiling.

He smiled slightly down at the child for a moment, watching in wonder as the tiny fist curled around his finger. He looked up first at Rhapsody, then at Ashe, and spoke in a voice that was uncharacteristically gentle.

“Well done, my dear, and congratulations, nephew,” he said quietly. “To celebrate this occasion, Gwydion, I am going to stand here for a moment and marvel at this child, allowing you a few final moments of contentment before I tell you what I saw in Sorbold.”

Ashe exhaled deeply. “And I will return the favor by giving you yet a few more moments of happiness before I tell you what has happened to Llauron.”

The two Firbolg looked at each other, then turned away and started toward the door.

“I don’t envy Rhapsody her homecoming,” Achmed said, pulling his cloak around him and preparing to start out into the building storm.

Grunthor cleared his throat as he opened the door.

“Yeah, well, sir, Oi don’t especially envy you yours, either.”

The Bolg king’s eyes narrowed as he glanced back over his shoulder.

“What now?”

“Well, if ya thought that the ‘birthday party’ we had while you were gone the last time left a mess, wait until ya see the one that’s waiting for you when you get back this time, sir.”

Achmed sighed in annoyance. “Hrekin.”

“Actually, sir, that’s right. And lots of it.”