Destiny: Child of the Sky

9

The holy man stood with his face to the sun, on the edge of winter and the Krevensfield Plain. The mountains of Sorbold had receded into the southeastern distance like a grim nightmare. Now an endless vista of low, frosty plateau lay at his feet, the sky stretching out to the blue edge of the horizon all around, no longer broken by fanglike mounds of earth.

Night was coming earlier with the advent of the season of the moon; a red sun burned at the world’s rim, bathing the edge of the meadows in bloody light that spread slowly eastward as it set. He smiled. How prophetic.

His retinue of guards was encamped around a small fire in the frozen grass some distance away, preparing their supper. He had begged their indulgence and walked slowly to the edge of a deep swale, presumably to take the air, and now stood alone, undisturbed, watching the western horizon grow ever more crimson in the grip of coming night.

For almost three hundred years these lands lay fallow, a wide, fertile stretch of pastureland dotted in later centuries by the occasional farming community. These intrepid homesteaders came in groups consisting of four to six families, braving the bitter winds of winter, the brushfires of high summer, to live beneath the endless sky. Without exception those homesteaders were new-landers, immigrants from the south or west that did not share a drop of Cymrian blood between them. For if they had, they would never have even thought to put the first stake into the ground here, let alone build their homes and rear their children on this haunted soil.

Time had erased most of the visible scars of the Cymrian War. In Tyrian and Sorbold, great battles had devolved into heinous slaughter and reckless carnage, streaking the earth red beneath the bodies of the innumerable fallen. With the passage of the centuries, however, the forest had reclaimed in Tyrian the places no Lirin soul would have thought to rest his head in sleep. The song of the wind in the new trees’ leaves had drowned out the whispers of battlefield ghosts, except on nights when the breeze was high. Then Lirin fathers drew their progeny around the warm hearths of their longhouses and told them stories of war hags, spirits of widows long dead who walked the slaughtering grounds still, eternally mourning their soldier spouses, even longer dead.

In Sorbold to the south, the mountains had taken back the battlefield passes as well. It was said that in the north the blood of the dead had stained Yarim’s clay its rubeous hue, had made its river run scarlet with gore. Anyone surviving from the First Generation knew this to be a myth. Yarim’s soil and river had always been red in the memory of men, colored by the runoff from great deposits of manganese and copper in the foothills of the northern Teeth. In all the lands that ringed Roland, it was neither Anwyn nor Gwylliam but Time that had been victorious. Time had at last covered the memory of grim pandemic death, even if other scars, the wounds of souls and memory, remained.

But here, in the bowl of the continent, the center lands betwixt the sea and the mountains, the blood of the multitudes who had died in that glorious war had pooled, had sunk into the ground, making the soil fertile and the pall of death heavy in the air, so heavy that even the strongest wind, the most driving rain, could not wash it away. This truly was the realm of ghosts, irrespective of the fact that the Bolg had purloined that name for Kraldurge, their own place of restless spirits within the mountains.

It was almost time. A few more sunsets, a few more days, a season, maybe two, and it would finally be at hand. After all the centuries he had waited, his patience was about to be rewarded.

Soon he would have the army. Then he would take the mountain. Then he would have the Child. Once he possessed her, the ultimate goal was assured. The rib of her body, formed as she was from Living Stone, would open the vault deep within the Earth, the prison in which his kind had been held since the Before-Time. The thoughts of destruction that raced through his mind had to be reined back, or he would give himself away in his excitement.

The day was coming soon. All in good time.

He glanced over his shoulder casually at the guards, who were laughing and passing a flask between them, then turned westward again with a smile.

With a sudden violence he bit down hard on the back of his tongue, puncturing the surface and drawing blood into his mouth. He then opened that mouth ever so slightly.

The holy man inhaled the evening air, stinging his nostrils with chill and the scent of dried grass in fire. Softly he began to chant into the wind, keeping his voice low so that it had no chance of being overheard by the drunken oafs who called themselves his escort.

Had his retinue been paying attention they would have heard the cleric whispering the names of ancient battles, moments of carnage frozen in time, inhaling their names into his mouth and breathing them back out again, coated with the taste and vibration of blood. But the day had been long and uneventful, as had the rest of the journey thus far, and the soldiers were too engaged in their banter, too involved in their games of dice and throw-spikes to notice.

In fairness to the guards, they felt safe here, the holy man noted in the back of his mind. After all, there was virtually no chance that they would be attacked, here in the middle of the endless meadow, with the plain stretching for leagues to the horizon. There was no place for an enemy to hide in all that space, no opportunity for surprise.

He chuckled in amusement at the inaccuracy of supposition.

The wind grew colder. As he spoke the words formed evanescent clouds of frozen steam and hovered before him in the crimson sky, as if too heavy with grief to rise on the breeze now.

The raid, on Farrow’s Down, he whispered. The siege of Eethe Corbair. The Death March of the Cymrian Nain, the burning of the western villages. Kesel Tai, Tomingorllo, Lingen Swale. One by one, a litany of death and disgrace, spoken softly into the wind. The slaughter at Wynnarth Keep, the rape of the Tarimese water camp. The assault on the Southeastern Face. The evisceration of the fourth column. The mass execution of the First Fleet farming settlements.

Only the snow answered him, and even it did not appear to be listening. Flakes of ice blew about in the stiff breeze, masking his words and the frosty breath that uttered them.

He felt the flush of excitement begin to creep over him, starting in his groin and radiating outward with each beat of his failing heart. The spirits of the dead called out in the wind, as they had for centuries, the anguish of their cries vibrating over his skin in delicious ecstasy. It was the sound, or more accurately, the feel, of brutal suffering, of violence, that remained in the earth and the air, dissipated only slightly over time when the memory was recalled, like blood pooled at the bottom of a deep bowl. Even those without his unique abilities could feel the noise of it, could sense the agony that was extant in the place, and hurried to be away from here. He, of course, could more than feel it. In a way, he could take credit for it.

The holy man inhaled the vibrations of suffering from the wind, tasted the death in his mouth, savoring it. His inner demon shouted for the joy of it, roiled in the orgiastic pleasure of the destruction that had occurred here, and would occur again soon. It was all he could do to keep from being carried away on an orgasm of bloody memory.

Now, Mildiv Jephaston, he whispered into the wind. “Your Grace?” The lieutenant was standing directly behind him. He spun quickly around, struggling to mask his annoyance. “Yes, my son?”

“Is everything all right, Your Grace?”

He struggled to set his features in a smile. “Yes, of course, my son,” he said, sliding his hands into the sleeves of his robe. “And how kind of you to be concerned. Is the fire going well?”

“Fairly well, Your Grace,” said the young soldier as the two began to head back. “The wood’s a trifle wet to really catch thoroughly.”

The holy man smiled as he returned with the young armsman to the camp. “Perhaps I can be of assistance,” he said. “I’ve always had a touch with fire.”

By the time they reached the rocky swales that lay east of the city of Yarim Paar it was clear to Achmed that the lives of the slave children had been purchased at the cost of gathering at least one of the additional demon-spawn. Given his dislike of people in general and children in particular, he was not particularly aggrieved at the development, but he suspected that Rhapsody would be.

Nine living brats of the Rakshas and one yet to be born, scattered all the way across the continent—it would be a daunting task in a season without snow, when time was not working against them. Now, entering winter, with but nine weeks before the birth of the last child, and taking on this new problem, her plan to obtain all of them seemed very much in doubt.

He did not know how many tainted children it would require to extract the necessary amount of blood for him to find the F’dor, or if this insane quest for it would even work at all. Blood will be the means Jo find that which hides from the Wind, the ancient Dhracian prophecy had said. Rhapsody had interpreted it, had set the plan in place, arranging with her Lirin mentor, Oelendra, to take the children in as they found each of them, and guard them until all had been found. Then Rhapsody would take them, assuming she could find it, to the Veil of Hoen, a place she said was legendary for healing.

With each passing day Achmed had grown more impatient, more uncertain, both of the plan’s potential success and of the likelihood of their own survival. Rhapsody was certain that the Lord and Lady Rowan, the mysterious figures who dwelt beyond the Veil of Hoen, would be the ones to separate out the blood without killing the children. They healed Ashe when his soul was torn asunder, she had argued. The Lady is the Keeper of Dreams, the Guardian of Sleep, Yl Breudiwyr. The Lord is the Hand of Mortality, the Peaceful Death, Yl Angaulor. They are the only ones I can think of who can take out the demon’s blood without killing the children. It’s the place to do this, I know it is. If I can just make it there in time—time passes differently in that place; I know, because Oelendra told me. If anyone can help it is they.

He had not had time to discuss the change of plans with her; it had been a mad race to escape before dawn broke over Yarim Paar. Behind them in the distance he could hear the faint ringing of alarms, or at least he thought he could—perhaps it was more a matter of imagination and fear. After all, they had only stolen slave children who were being illegally used. And what thief reports the theft of his own stolen property?

Those of the ratty children who were willing to endure human contact had gravitated to Rhapsody as they fled; the others had tried to stay as far away from both of them as would be allowed. Twenty-two in all; some of them took turns riding in pairs on the horses, while others preferred to walk the entire journey. Two pairs had had to be tied together to keep them with the group but away from the frailer boys and the apprentices, whose maltreatment of them in their captivity was deeply resented. It made for excruciatingly slow traveling, but Rhapsody did not seem to mind.

She spent a good deal of her walking time talking with the bald apprentice named Omet, and most of her resting time comforting the yellow-haired child whose mother had been Liringlas, whose leg was infected, bordering on septic, singing her healing songs and music to keep the children compliant, applying her medicinal herbs. Now, as they made camp at sunset, breaking open the rations intended for the longer journey to feed so many starving mouths, Achmed looked east, musing silently.

It was another two days’ travel to the Bakhran Pass, the second northernmost Firbolg outpost in the Teeth. They had agreed to leave the children there, in the hands of the Bolg army garrison, all but the two demon-spawn. Every child they had rescued except the apprentice was an orphan, and Omet had assured Rhapsody that he was leaving behind nothing in Yarim Paar.

Seeing Rhapsody now, sitting near the crackling flames of the campfire with the boy named Aric in her lap, Achmed felt a shiver of a sort pass through him. The child, like Rhapsody herself, was rosy of skin with golden hair; there were definite racial similarities. Still, there was a fae air to him that made him seem alien, a feral aspect that made Achmed nervous. It was almost as if Rhapsody were cuddling a blanket-wrapped badger in her lap, cooing over it as if it were a Liringlas baby, oblivious of its deeper, threatening nature. It did not bode well in his mind for the times ahead.

Many leagues to the south, at the northernmost edge of the mountains of Sorbold, the watch had just changed. The third column of the Western Face had returned only half a sun’s span ago from maneuvers in Otar, a distant city-state famous primarily for the linens of Otar’sid, the capital.

It was had been a fairly light rotation, guarding the underbenisons who were making their annual pilgrimage to Sepulvarta to deliver new white robes to the Patriarch for the Blessing of the Year ceremony that would take place half a year hence, at the vernal equinox.

The mission had been completed without event, and now the soldiers were encamped along the lee of the Western Face, their campfires beginning to catch in the thin, cold air, forming a bright sea of ground-torches in the growing darkness. Morning would find them, after a brief march, back in base camp at Keltar’sid. The ground forces were especially eager to return to the city-state of soldiers, looking forward to further training with the strange weapons of Bolg manufacture that they had been outfitted with before departing for Otar. Mildiv Jephaston, the column leader, was coming off watch, preparing for supper and sleep, when he heard the voice, warm on the winter wind, tickling his ear.

Now, Mildiv Jephaston.

The soldier shook his head; he was accustomed to hearing strange things in the wind, especially after a long march, but never before had the breeze spoken so clearly.

And it had never before called his name.

He stopped in his tracks, rubbed his ear, shook his head again, brushing the imaginary summoning aside, and sat down by the larger of the two camp-fires, taking his plate of stew from the column’s cook as he passed by. He was almost comfortable, almost ready to eat, when he heard it again, softer.

Now, Mildiv Jephaston.

Warmer and softer than he could have said it in his own head himself.

Jephaston looked around at the column, encamped by unit—five hundred sleeping, three hundred on watch, with all one hundred twenty of the cavalry quartered in the field with their mounts. “Who is calling me?” he asked the other commander, sitting next to him. The man looked up over his stew, glanced around, then shook his head.

The column leader listened once more, but heard nothing. He decided to ignore it and returned to his supper.

Perhaps it was the sound of his own mastication, the grinding of his teeth, the clatter of the spoon against the metal plate, the crackling of the fire, the conversation of the men, the hooting, cheering, and cursing that cut through the night at each toss of the bones. Perhaps one or more of these noises was responsible for the masking of the change, camouflaging the silent words that crept into his brain through his ear and found a connection there, lying dormant, planted but a short time ago, awaiting the arrival of the demon’s command.

And while the change was a subtle one, he did feel it, even if he was unaware of what was occurring. Like waves it came over him, endless waves of the sea, waves of pulsing heat from a fire, waves of blood from a beating heart, lulling him, sinking into him, absorbing only into the surface of his soul, because there had been no blood pact, no permanent bond; he was not bound to the demon eternally.

But, unlike the others who lay about their own fires, succumbing to their own waves of heat, their own internal summonses, Mildiv Jephaston had given the F’dor his name.

He was perfectly comfortable with the new elongation of focus, so that all objects, whatever their distance, were equally clear, as if the world had flattened. His own arms and legs appeared comfortably distant, and the aches in his back relaxed and slipped away. He felt intensely light, and strong, as if he were drawing air and warmth from all around, and ineffably calm.

And as the command ensnared his conscious mind, it spread unconsciously to those who had sworn fealty to him, who followed his commands without hesitation.

So when he decisively stood up, packed his gear, mounted his war horse, and issued the call for the column to fall out, there was never even an eyebrow raised, not a single question considered. The column mustered out and followed him, in two divisions, four-fifths of the soldiers in the first, the remainder in the second riding a day behind them, battle-ready, down from the Western Face, into the biting wind of the Krevensfield Plain.

On their way to Navarne.