Elegy for a Lost Star

1

When the mountain peak of Gurgus exploded, the vibrations coursed through the foundations of the earth.

Above ground, the debris field from the blast stretched for miles, ranging from boulder-sized rubble at the base of the peak to fragments of sand that littered the steppes more than a league away. In between, shards of colored glass from windows that had once been inlaid in the mountain’s hollow summit lay like a broken rainbow, glittering in the sun beneath an intermittent layer of sparkling dust.

Below ground, a small band of Firbolg soldiers felt the concussion rumble beneath their feet, though they were some miles east of Gurgus. A few moments of stillness passed as dust settled to the floor of the tunnel. When Krarn finally released the breath he was holding, the rest of his patrol shook off their torpor and resumed their duties. The Sergeant-Major would flay them alive if they let something as small as a tremor keep them from their appointed rounds.

A few days later, the soldiers reluctantly emerged under a cloudless sky, having reached the farthest extent of this section of their tunnel system, and the end of their patrol route.

Krarn stood on the rim of the craterlike ruins of the Moot, a meeting place from ancient times, now dark with coal ash and considered haunted. Nothing but the howl of the wind greeted him; no one lived in the rocky foothills that stretched into steppes, then out to the vast Krevensfield Plain beyond.

Having finished their sweep of the area, his men had quietly assembled behind him. Krarn was about to order them back into the tunnels when the hairs on his back—from his neck to his belt—stood on end.

It began as the faintest of rumblings in the ground. The tremors were not enough to be noticed on their own, but Krarn noted the trembling of vegetation, the slightest of changes in the incessantly dry landscape, little more than the disturbance that a strong breeze might make. He knew that it was no wind that caused this disturbance; it had come from the earth.

Silently ordering his men into a skirmish line, Krarn scanned the area, looking for any more signs. After a few minutes, the feeling passed, and the earth settled into stillness again. Nothing but wind sighed through the tall grass.

“Aftershocks,” he muttered to himself.

With a shake of his head, Krarn led his men back into the tunnels.

And in so doing, missed the chance to sound a warning of what was to come.

As the days passed, the tremors grew stronger.

The surface of the Moot, baked to a waterless shell by the summer sun, began to split slightly, thin cracks spreading over the landscape like the spidery pattern on a mirror that had broken but not shattered.

Then came steam, the slightest of puffs of rancid smoke rising up ominously from the ground beneath the tiny cracks.

By day it was almost impossible to see, had eyes been in the locality to see it. By night it mixed with the hot haze coming off the ground and, caught by the wind, wafted aloft, blending with the low-hanging clouds.

Finally came the eruption.

Waves of shock rolled through the earth as if it were the sea, waves that intensified, growing stronger. The earth began to move, to rise in some places, shifting in its underground strata.

Then, with a terrifying lunge, it ripped apart.

The rumbling beneath the surface suddenly took on movement. It started outside of Ylorc but traveled quickly. It was heading north.

Unerringly, determinedly north, toward the icy land of the Hintervold.

All along the eastern rim of the mountains, then westward across the plains, a movement within the ground could be felt, a shifting so violent that it sent aftershocks through the countryside, uprooting trees and splitting crevasses into the sides of rolling hills, causing children miles away to wake in the night, shaking with fear.

Their mothers held them close, soothing them. “It’s nothing, little one,” they said, or uttered some similar words in whatever language they were accustomed to speaking. “The ground trembles from time to time, but it will settle and go quiet again. See? It is gone already. There is nothing to fear.”

And then it was gone.

The children nestled their heads against their mother’s shoulders, their eyes bright in the darkness, knowing on some level that the shivering they had felt was more than the ripples of movement in the crust of the world. Someone listening closely enough might sense, beyond the trembling passage, a deeper answer from below the ground.

Much deeper below.

As if the earth itself was listening.

Deep within her tomb of charred earth, the dragon had felt the aftershocks of the explosion of the mountain peak.

Her awareness, dormant for years, hummed with slight static, just enough to tickle the edges of her unconscious mind, which had hibernated since her internment in the grave of melted stone and fire ash in the ancient Moot.

At first the sensation nauseated her and she fought it off numbly, struggling to sink back into the peaceful oblivion of deathlike sleep. Then, when oblivion refused to return, she began to grow fearful, disoriented in a body she didn’t remember.

After a few moments the fear turned to dread, then deepened into terror.

As the whispers of alarm rippled over her skin it unsettled the ground around her grave, causing slight waves of shock to reverberate through the earth around and above her. She distantly sensed the presence of the coterie of Firbolg guards from Ylorc, the mountainous realm that bordered the grave, who had come to investigate the tremors, but was too disoriented to know what they were.

And then they were gone, leaving her mind even more confused.

The dragon roiled in her sepulcher of scorched earth, shifting from side to side, infinitesimally. She did not have enough control of her conscious thought to move more than she could inhale, and her breath, long stilled into the tiniest of waves, was too shallow to mark.

The earth, the element from which her kind had sprung, pressed down on her, squeezing the air from her, sending horrific scenes of suffocation through her foggy mind.

And then, after what seemed to her endless time in the clutches of horror, into this chaos of thought and confused sensation a beacon shone, the clear, pure light of her innate dragon sense. Hidden deep in the rivers of her ancient blood, old as she was old, the inner awareness that had been her weapon and her bane all of her forgotten life began to rise, clearing away the conundrum, settling the panic, cell by cell, nerve by nerve, bringing clarity in tiny moments, like pieces of an enormous puzzle coming together, or a picture that was slowly gaining focus.

And with the approaching clarity came a guarded calm.

The dragon willed herself to breathe easier, and in willing it, caused it to happen.

She still did not comprehend her form. In her sleep-tangled mind she was a woman still, of human flesh and shape, not wyrm, not beast, not serpentine, and so she was baffled by her girth, her heft, the inability of her arms and legs to function, to push against the ground as they once had. Her confusion was compounded by this disconnection between mind, body, and memory, a dark stage on which no players had yet come to appear. All she could recall in her limited consciousness was the sense of falling endlessly in fire that had struck her from above, and blazed below her as she fell.

Hot, she thought hazily. Burning. I’m burning.

But of course she was not. The blast of flame that had taken her from the sky had been quenched more than three years before, had sizzled into smoky ash covering the thick coalbed that lined her tomb, baking it hard and dry in its dying.

Fighting her disorientation, the dragon waited, letting her inner sense sort through the jumble, inhaling a bit more deeply with each breath, remaining motionless, letting the days pass, marking time only by the heat she could feel through the earth when the sun was high above her tomb, and the cooling of night, which lasted only a short while before the warmth returned.

Must be summer’s end, she mused, the only cognizant thought to take hold.

Until another image made its way onto the dark stage.

It was a place of stark white, a frozen land of jagged peaks and all but endless winter. In the tight containment of the tomb the memory of expansiveness returned; she recalled staring up at a night sky blanketed with cold stars, the human form she had once inhabited, and still inhabited in her mind, tiny and insignificant in the vastness of the snowy mountains all around her.

A single word formed in her mind.

Home.

With the word came the will.

As the puzzle solidified, as the picture became clearer, her dragon sense was able to ascertain direction, even beneath the ground. With each new breath the dragon turned herself by inches until, after time uncounted, she sensed she was pointed north-northwest. Across the miles she could feel it calling, her lair, her stronghold, though the details of what it was were still scattered.

It mattered not.

Once oriented in the correct direction, she set off, crawling through the earth, still believing herself to be human, dragging a body that did not respond the way she expected it to relentlessly forward, resolute in her intent, slowly gaining speed and strength, until the ground around her began to cool, signaling to her that home was near. Then, with a burst of renewed resolve, she bore through the crust of the earth, up through the blanket of permafrost, hurtling out of the ground in a shower of cracking ice and flying snow, to fall heavily onto the white layer that covered the earth like a frozen scab, breathing shallowly, rapidly, ignoring the sting of the cold.

She lay motionless for a long while beneath that endless night sky blanketed with stars, thought and reason returning with her connection to this land, this place to which she had been exiled, in which she had made her lair. The dragon inhaled the frosty wind, allowing it to slowly cleanse her blackened lungs as the dragon sense in her blood was cleansing her mind.

And along with thought and reason, something else returned as well, burning hot at the edges of her memory, unclear, but unmistakable, growing in clarity and intensity with each moment.

The fury of revenge.

2

The king of the mountainous realm was away when the peak exploded.

A man born as an accidental by-product of depravity and despair, of mixed bloodlines that came from the earth and the wind, his skin was almost magically sensitive, a network of traceries of exposed nerves and surface veins. He was, as a result, innately aware of the vibrations in the wind that others defined as Life, could oftentimes tell when things were not as they should be, when something was disturbing the natural order of the earth, especially the earth that was his domain. Had he been in his kingdom when the wyrm awoke from her sleep, he would have known it.

But Achmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg and lord of the realm of Ylorc, was half a continent away, traveling overland on his way home when it came to pass.

So, like his subjects, the guards who walked the edge of the grave itself, he missed the chance to intervene, to stop what was to come.

And, by chance, because of a weapon of his own design, the cwellan, which he had adapted just for the purpose of penetrating the hide of a dragon, he alone might have been able to do so while the wyrm lay in her sepulcher, prone and disoriented. His weapon had drawn her blood before.

By the time he returned home, the beast was long gone.

His mission in the west accomplished, he had chosen to return to his kingdom in the eastern mountains alone, riding the same route as the guarded mail caravans, but refusing to wait to travel with them in the safety of numbers. In addition to his natural tendency of isolation, his complete disdain for the majority of the human race, and his desire not to be slowed down in his return by traveling with others, Achmed needed time alone to think.

The heat of summer’s end was waning as he traveled the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, the roadway built during the most prosperous days of the previous empire. The thoroughfare bisected the land of Roland from the seacoast to the edge of the Manteids, the mountains known as the Teeth, where he now reigned. The cooling of the season and the fresh wind that came with it gave him a clear head, allowing him to sort through all he had experienced.

The western seacoast he had left behind him was burning still, though the fires had begun to be extinguished by the time he left. The ash from the blackened forests had traveled east on the wind as well, and so for the first few days of his journey his nostrils and sensitive sinuses were sore from their exposure to the soot. But by the time he reached the province of Bethany, the midpoint of the realm of Roland, the wind had turned clearer, and so had his head.

His mind, distracted by the disappearance of one of his two friends in the world, was able to refocus on what had been his priority for the last few months. Now that she was safe, his thoughts were locked obsessively on the completion of his tower.

Many of the reasons for his obsession with rebuilding the instrumentality that had once been housed in the mountain peak of Gurgus were lodged in the past. But the most important one was the future.

The pounding of the horse’s hooves was a tattoo that drove extraneous thoughts away. The Panjeri glass artisan I hired in Sorbold has had a good deal of time to make progress on the Lightcatcher; the ceiling of the tower must be complete by now, the king thought, ruminating on what Gurgus would look like when restored. A full circle of colored glass panes, seven in all, each precisely fired to the purest hues of the spectrum, the mountain peak would soon hold a power that would aid him in his life’s mission.

Keeping the Sleeping Child safe from the F’dor, fire demons that endlessly sought to find her.

From the time he had begun the undertaking of building the tower, the Firbolg king’s mind had known even less peace than usual. His obsession was coupled with uncertainty; he was by training and former trade an assassin, a murderer, an efficient killer who had for centuries plied his trade alone, choosing only the contracts that interested him, or that he felt warranted his attention. Life and circumstance had taken him from an old land, his birthplace, now dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea, and deposited him here, in this new and uncertain place, where he had put his skills to good use, seizing control of the loose, warlike tribes of mountain-dwelling mongrels, forging a ragged kingdom of demi-humans. Under his hand, with the help of his two friends, he had built them into a functioning nation, a realm of silent strength and resolute independence. Now he was a king. And he was still a skilled killer.

What he was not was an engineer.

When he had discovered the plans for the Lightcatcher buried deep in the vault of the kingdom he now ruled, once a great civilization fallen into ruin by its own folly, he had broken into a gray sweat. He could not read the writing on the ancient parchment; it was drafted in a tongue that had been old when his long-dead homeland was still young. As a result, he could not be certain of the specifications of the drawings, of the directions to build the instrumentality, and, more important, of what its powers were. He only knew he recognized in the detailed renderings something he had known in the old world as an apparatus of unsurpassed power, a device that had held an entire mountain range invulnerable from the same evanescent demons that were now seeking the Earthchild he guarded.

That device had apparently been duplicated here long ago.

From that moment on it had become a challenge to rebuild it. For the first time in his life he’d had to rely on outside help, on expertise other than his own, to fashion something that was part weapon, part scrying device, part healing instrumentality. And it was being done in secret, in the hope that he was not being betrayed or misled. Achmed did not really believe in hope, and therefore had suffered mightily, plagued with doubt and worry mixed with the burning belief that this apparatus, and this apparatus alone, would be able both to make his kingdom invulnerable to the invaders he knew would someday come, bent on its destruction, and, far more important, to help him protect the Sleeping Child from those invisible monsters that endlessly sought to find her.

One of his two friends in the world was a Lirin Namer, schooled in the music of words, ancient lore, and the dead language of the drawings. She had been disquieted by the depth of the magic she saw in the renderings, had implored him not to meddle in matters he didn’t fully understand, but in the end her loyalty to and love for him had won out over her reservations, and she had given him a brief translation of one of the documents, at his insistence. It had contained a poem, a riddle really, and the schematic of the color spectrum, along with the power each color held.

He chanted them to himself now as he rode, trying to commit them more naturally to his memory, and finding that the words refused to remain there. He had never been able to recall the words in the ancient tongue; he could retain only the color translations, only for a short while, and only by concentrating resolutely. Even then, he was still uncertain of them, as if some innate magic within them was refusing him right of entry.

Red—Blood Saver, Blood Letter, he thought, trying to employ the techniques of visualizing the words that Rhapsody, the Namer, had taught him. That one, at least, was easy for him to recall. Orange—Fire Starter, Fire Quencher. He was fairly certain of that one as well. Yellow—Light Bringer, Light . . . Queller? His mind faltered. Damnation. I can’t remember.

But soon it would not matter. He had finally found a glass artisan in the neighboring kingdom of Sorbold, a Panjeri master from a tribe known the world over for their expertise in molding the sand of the desert and the ashes of wood into the most exquisite of glass, capturing rainbows in a solid yet translucent form to adorn the windows of temples and of crypts. He had given her free rein, under the eye of Omet, his head craftsman, to move ahead with the firing and inlay of the glass ceiling of Gurgus, which, once finished and outfitted with the other pieces of the apparatus, would become the Lightcatcher. He had even dared to look forward to that being completed by the time of his return.

So it was with more than a little shock moving to unbridled fury that he dragged his hapless mount to a halt upon discovering the rainbow grit that was scattered across the Krevensfield Plain at the foothills of his kingdom.

Achmed dismounted slowly, his considered movements mirroring the motion of the reptile he had received a nickname from. He walked in measured steps to a place where the layer of colorful glass powder was somewhat thicker, crouched down, and scooped some of the tiny shards up in his perennially gloved fingers. The glass was little more than dust, but it still contained the unmistakable colors that he had seen being fired when he left home some weeks back.

Achmed sighed deeply.

“Hrekin,” he swore aloud.

He glanced up from his crouch to the multicolored peaks of the Teeth, where he reigned over the Firbolg hordes in what was known in their tongue as the kingdom of Ylorc. Gurgus, the peak in which the colored windows had been inlaid, was deeper in, past the guardian ring of mountains at the edge, so it was impossible to see what had befallen his tower from this distance. He could, however, see that the guard tower of Grivven, one of the westernmost and highest peaks, was still standing.

At least the entire bloody kingdom didn’t blow to bits while I was gone, he thought ruefully. I suppose I should be grateful.

He tossed the glass powder angrily behind him, mounted, and urged his horse into a steady canter, growing more irate with each breath of the wind that poured over his face as he rode.

Sergeant-Major Grunthor, commander of the united Firbolg forces and Achmed’s only other friend in the world, was directing a massive reconstruction that had clearly been under way for quite some time when the king returned to the mountain. As Achmed strode down the interior mountain corridor leading to the former entrance to Gurgus, he could hear the Sergeant bellowing commands to the workers, his voice occasionally straining with exertion as he moved massive broken pieces of earth himself.

The Firbolg king rounded the corner and stopped for a moment, beholding him. Grunthor was paused as well, though he hadn’t caught sight of Achmed yet; with a dray sled at his feet piled high with broken basalt, a hand cart gripped in his massive hands, the giant commander was catching his breath, his skin, the color of old bruises, glistening with sweat from the exertion. Even at rest he was a terrifying sight, seven and a half feet of musculature at rest for the moment, preparing to resume the strenuous task, directing a squad of Firbolg soldiers in their tasks while he rested.

The sheer scope of the destruction took its toll on Achmed’s limited patience. The king stormed to the end of the hallway, stopping just short of the Sergeant’s presence.

“What in the name of every ridiculous evil god that never existed happened here?”

An ugly light came into the giant Sergeant’s amber eyes.

“Birthday party got a little out o’ hand, sir,” he said, his voice sharp with sarcasm. “So sorry. Won’t ’appen again.” As the cords in the king’s neck tightened, Grunthor tossed the cart aside. “You might want ta pose that question to that ’arpy glassmaker you brought in ’ere to build the tower windows. Oh, no, wait! Can’t do that.”

The king’s eyes narrowed in rage that was tempered with panic. “Why not?”

The Sergeant crouched down and grasped another massive rock, lifted, and heaved it angrily into the dray sled.

“Because Oi cut the bitch’s head off ’er shoulders,” he snarled as the small boulder bounced against the earthen floor with a resounding thud. “Then Oi tossed it in a crate and shipped it back to the assassin’s guild in Yarim, from whence she had come in the first place.” He watched without sympathy as the fury in his sovereign’s eyes muted into realization. “ ’At’s right, sir, the artisan you ’ired in Sorbold to build yer bloody glass tower turned out to be the mother of all assassins, the mistress of the Raven’s Guild.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and indicated the destruction around him. “This was the lit’le present she left just for you. We’re findin’ all sorts of other traps, lots o’ nice surprises—”

“The Child?” Achmed demanded, sounding as if he were strangling.

Grunthor exhaled deeply. “Safe, for now,” he said more calmly, the latent anger in his voice gone. “Oi combed every inch of the tunnel down to ’er chamber; appears that it was broached, but only a few feet of it. The assassin didn’t ’ave time to get down there, by sheer bleedin’ luck. But if Oi was you, sir, Oi’d be careful not to insult any ridic’lous gods that never existed, as they apparently been watchin’ yer back in a major way.”

“Now there’s a terrifying thought.” Achmed crossed the broken hallway and stopped before the thinning pile of rubble. “How?”

“Picric acid. Apparently she ’ad it shipped in from the guild while you were gone. In a liquid state it’s stable, but explodes when it dries. She ’ad it annealed into the glass of the dome; kept a wooden cover over it ta keep the sun off. But Shaene and Rhur—both dead, by the by—pulled the cover; the sun ’it it square on, the ’eat dried the enamel, and—well, you can see the rest.” The Sergeant ran the toe of his enormous boot through the grit of the floor. em“Except the Sickness—lots o’ dysentery and a lot of Bolg bleedin’ out their eyes. That seemed to come with it.”

Without a word the Firbolg king turned and left the scene of the destruction.

“Oh, by the way sir,” called Grunthor as Achmed disappeared around the corner, “welcome ’ome.”

The tunnel down to the chamber of the Sleeping Child began in Achmed’s bedchamber, its entrance secreted in a trapped chest at the foot of his bed. It took him only a moment to ascertain that each of the guardian traps, deadly locks he had set himself, had been serially disarmed, their triggers sprung with an expertise he had not witnessed since his own assassin training at the hands of an undisputed master a lifetime before.

“Hrekin,” he swore again.

Grunthor exhaled. “Aye, well, at least she was a master. Oi remember back in the old land when the thieves’ guild kept sending their trainees after ya for a while. Remember that, sir? That was just plain senseless carnage, it was. Not even really useful as target practice for you.”

Achmed said nothing, but rose from the chest and traced the path around his chambers, looking for all-but-invisible signs of disturbance.

They were everywhere.

Dust disturbed in only the slightest patterns, the occasional repositioning of an object in such close proximity to where it had originally been left that only one trained at the level he was trained would have seen it. Subtle traps as well; a thin rim of poison on his mealtime cutlery, his comb, on the brace of the doorframe, so discreetly laid out that he might not have noticed, which meant that only a master assassin could have laid them. Achmed’s already sensitive skin prickled with gray sweat at the thought, because it was clear that the woman had only had a few moments in the room before being discovered.

“If you ever find that I have misplaced my head this badly again, Grunthor, please be sure to have me bend over and check my arse for it,” he said gloomily, removing a tiny spring-loaded pin from the toe of one of his spare boots. “It must be wedged up there tightly enough to qualify me as a Cymrian.”

“Very well, sir,” Grunthor said with exaggerated respect. “Oi ’ave a button ’ook ya might be able to use ta get it out o’ there, but it may not be long enough.”

Achmed opened the door to his chambers carefully, avoiding the mercury-coated wire that had been filed hair-thin and positioned invisibly along the doorjamb.

“Get me a set of glass calipers,” he ordered one of the guards standing watch in the hallway. “Drop them outside the door loud enough for me to hear, then withdraw. Do not touch the handle.” The Bolg soldier nodded and jogged up the corridor.

“Is Omet still alive?” Achmed asked Grunthor, closing the door again.

The Bolg Sergeant nodded. “She poisoned ’im and left him for dead, but Rhur and Shaene found ’im and took ’im to the tower.”

The Bolg king’s eyes, mismatched in color and position in his pocked face, darkened at the significance of the Sergeant’s words.

“Is that why they pulled the tower dome cover off? They were trying to use the Lightcatcher? To heal Omet?”

Grunthor nodded, his expression guarded.

Achmed’s movements slowed and he ran a gloved hand over his mouth, pondering.

“And you say Omet is alive?”

“Yeah.”

The Bolg king’s head snapped up sharply. “How alive? Is he debilitated, or hovering near death?”

Grunthor exhaled, his jaw set so rigidly in disapproval that the tusks showed over his bulbous lips.

“Good as new,” he said finally. “As if it ’ad never happened.”

Achmed stood motionless, pondering, even the tides of his breath invisible in the intensity of his concentration. Grunthor could see the realization spreading, first over his face, then through his body, like a stain. “It worked,” the king said finally. “The Lightcatcher worked—or at least the healing aspect of it, the red section.”

“One might believe that the orange section worked as well,” muttered the giant Bolg. “Started the fire that blew the damned thing up.”

A clank of metal sounded in the hallway, followed by the noise of footsteps hurrying away.

“It worked,” Achmed repeated. “You fail to see the significance now, Grunthor, but I can assure you, if we can rebuild it, make it function completely, we are setting in place a defense for both Ylorc and the Child that is unparalleled.” He strode to the door, disregarding the Sergeant’s rolling eyes, and carefully opened it. He retrieved the metal calipers lying on the stone floor, then closed the door again.

“Before anything else, I want to see the Earthchild,” he said.

As they traveled the rough-hewn tunnel that led from the chest at the foot of Achmed’s bed to the chamber in which the Earthchild slept, Achmed could still smell a hint of the smoke of the battle fought to save her four years ago. To any other nose it would have been indiscernible, but along with his skin-web of nerve endings and surface veins, Achmed’s sinus cavities and throat were exceptionally sensitive. This strange anatomical system, bequeathed to him by his Dhracian mother and his unknown Bolg father, was both blessing and bane; it gave him early warning of hazards others might miss, and a memory of things others had long forgotten.

Even Grunthor. He cast a glance at the Sergeant-Major as they descended, noting the blank expression on his friend’s face in the cold light of their lantern formed from glowing crystals that had been found in the depths of the mountains. Grunthor was in a state of watchful autonomy, listening to the song of the Earth that only he could hear. Whatever the Earth was singing had him guarded, concentrating, but he was not feeling the same dread that Achmed felt every time he came down to this place.

Each time he descended into the fractured remains of the Loritorium, the sepulcher deep within the mountains where the Earthchild slept, the Bolg king was assailed with frightening memories of the battle they had fought near there. The F’dor had corrupted a root of one of the World Trees, using it to slither through the Earth’s crust, past the guard towers and bulwarks he and Grunthor had painstakingly assembled, into the very heart of the mountain range to the hidden chamber in which she had slumbered for centuries.

They had had no warning at all, except for the nightmares of the Child.

And the Child could not speak, could not tell them what was coming.

Achmed quickened his pace as they neared the opening to the chamber. He ran to the rough-hewn entranceway and climbed quickly over the barricade of rock and loose stone that was the last bulwark before the broken Loritorium. He held his breath as he crested the gravelly hill.

In the distance he could see her there, still slumbering. Achmed exhaled slowly, then nodded to Grunthor, who followed him down the slippery rockpile and over to the altar of Living Stone on which she slept. They peered down at the Earthchild, their eyes searching for any change, any discrepancy since the last time they had seen her.

An icy chill descended on them both at the same time.

“She’s withering,” Grunthor whispered.

Achmed nodded. He pulled out the glass calipers and carefully measured the body that at one time had been taller than his own. She had lost some of her smoothly polished flesh, once alive with the colors of the earth, green and brown, vermilion and purple, twisting bands of color that now seemed to have faded somewhat beneath her silver-gray translucent skin. How much was lost he was uncertain, but at least now he had a point of reference.

Hesitantly he stretched out his hand and brought it lightly to rest in the Earthchild’s hair, brittle as strawgrass at summer’s end. The roots of her hair were golden as ripening wheat, a sign that the earth from which she had come was preparing to celebrate harvest before slipping into slumber with the coming of winter. But below the grasslike locks were strands of wasted black weeds, burned as if in fire or slicked with poison.

“No,” Achmed whispered. “Gods, no.”

“Do ya think she’s sick, sir?” Grunthor asked in concern, his eyes scanning the empty vault. Achmed didn’t answer. “ ’Ere, let me ’ave a look.”

The Bolg king moved numbly aside as the giant Sergeant stepped up to the catafalque on which the Sleeping Child lay. He watched as Grunthor stared down at her pensively for a moment; the giant was tied to the earth as the king was, but more so, had a connection with it that had been established long ago. Earth spoke to him in his blood. Sometimes all Grunthor gleaned from this connection was an impression, an image in his mind, and could never communicate it fully to the Bolg king in words. But that wasn’t necessary anyway. Achmed could gauge the severity of the message by the expression on Grunthor’s face.

He continued to watch, nervous, as the giant reached out a hand and laid it gently on the Child’s midsection, resting it on top of the blanket of eiderdown Rhapsody had covered her with years ago. The Child’s face was the same cold and polished gray it had always been, as if she were sculpted from stone, but Achmed felt a nauseating dizziness as he noticed tiny rivulets of muddy water trickling down her forehead.

It looked like she was sweating in the throes of a fever.

The tides of her breath, once almost indiscernible in sleep, were now ragged. There was a wheeze in the depths of her inhalations, a sound that did not bode well for her health, if an ancient being formed from Living Stone could have such a thing as health.

Let that which sleeps within the Earth rest undisturbed; its awakening heralds eternal night, the words over her chamber had once read, words that had been inscribed in letters the height of a man, as if to emphasize their importance. Whether the prophecy referred to the Child herself, or other, more terrifying things that slept within the Earth, Achmed did not know. But having seen some of those things with his own eyes, he knew that keeping this being at peaceful rest was of consummate importance, not just to his safety, or that of his subjects, but to the whole of the world.

And now she was flinching, moving from side to side, as if preparing to awaken.

Achmed thought back to the first day he had seen her, almost four years before. He had been shown her by the Grandmother, a Dhracian woman of ancient years who had lived alone with the Child for centuries, guarding her, the last survivor of a colony of his mother’s race who had given their lives in the Child’s rescue and protection. He had stared down at the remarkable creature under her guardian’s careful eye, observing that her features were at once both coarse and smooth, as if her face had been carved with blunt tools, then polished carefully over a lifetime. He had marveled at her eyebrows and lashes, which appeared to be formed of blades of dry grass, matching her grainy hair, delicate sheaves of what looked like wheat.

She is a Child of Earth, formed of its own Living Stone, the Grandmother had said in her delicate buzz of a language. In day and night, through all the passing seasons, she sleeps. She has been here since before my birth. I am sworn to guard her until after Death comes for me. So must you be.

He had taken the edict seriously.

“Well?” he finally demanded softly, unable to restrain his anxiety. “What is happening to her?”

Grunthor exhaled, then walked away from the catafalque, out of the Child’s possible hearing.

“She’s bleeding to death,” he said.

For time uncounted they waited together in the darkness in which smoke from years past still lingered, standing watch over the Sleeping Child, searching for any clue as to what was causing her to wither.

Grunthor, in whose veins ran the same tie to the Earth, whose heart beat in the same rhythm as her own, attempted futilely to find the source of her dissipation by communing silently with her, but discovered nothing more than an agonizing sense of deep loss. He finally stepped away, shaking his massive head sadly.

“P’raps you can give it a try, sir,” he suggested to Achmed, who crouched beside the Earthchild’s catafalque, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands entwined before his veiled lips. “Can ya use yer blood-gift?”

The Bolg king shook his head as well. “That was broken long ago,” he murmured in a passive undertone so as not to disturb the Earthchild. “The gift is but a sporadic one now. And it only was truly in place with those born on Serendair. So while I am useless in helping her, the heartbeat of every living Cymrian still rings clearly in my head, and you know how much I love those idiots. The irony is sickening; the gods must be choking with laughter.”

The Sergeant-Major exhaled sharply. “Yeah? Well, let ’em choke. What do you want to do, sir?”

Achmed rose from his crouch and rested his hand on the Earthchild’s own. He leaned over her, brushed the grassy wisps of hair back from the muddy sweat of her forehead, and pressed a kiss on it.

“Do not worry,” he whispered. “We stand guard. We will find what is doing this to you and make it stop.”

He turned away and walked off into the darkness, back toward the rubble barrier and the tunnel entrance. As soon as they were out of earshot he spoke the only three words he would utter the rest of the night.

“Summon the Archons.”

The dragon lay still as day came and brought light, if not warmth, to the frozen world around her.

As night followed day, the cycle repeating itself again and again, her broken mind was slowly knitting, coming back to itself, though she still had not comprehended her form, could not yet remember how she had come to be entombed in a cavern of smoke and ash so far away from this place of cold clarity.

The world here had already been in the grip of autumn when she arrived; now winter, early and bitterly windy, was signaling its imminence. Though she was still not whole, her instinct told her that warmth and shelter must soon be found, or she would die.

With great effort the beast lifted her head, then hoisted herself onto her forearms, crawling over the earth as once she had crawled through it; across the frost-slick ground and the endless plains pocked by dry vegetation, to the shores of an almost-frozen lake. In the distance she could see what looked like steam rising from it, though in all likelihood it was merely the crystals of ice taking to the wind as it gusted sharply over the tundra.

As she made her painful way through the thick brush at the lake’s edge she tentatively extended her hand to touch the surface, endeavoring to ascertain whether the water had frozen deeply enough to bear her weight.

The mirrorlike surface, not yet fully ice, reflected a sight that caused her breath to choke in her throat.

No hand hovered over the meniscus; instead she could see a gnarled claw, red-gold and scored with scales, ending in cruel talons, some razorsharp, some broken, one missing, jointed with phalanges that no longer resembled anything even vaguely human.

The beast recoiled in horror.

The great claw disappeared, leaving only ripples in the frigid water.

The dragon’s still-foggy mind fought off the implications of what she had seen, but realization was taking hold in her belly.

Slowly she crawled forward, steeled her resolve, and looked down into the water.

Partially obscured by fireweed and bracken was a face that rang a chime in her memory, but it was not one she recalled as her own.

She tore the vegetation aside and looked again.

Then loosed a cry of rage, a long, sustained howl that trailed off in despair, dragging the snow from mountain faces in great white avalanches.

When she could force herself to look once more, her eyes were cloudy with unspent tears.

Gone was her proud beauty; she had been a handsome woman, with the tall, statuesque frame of her Seren father, and the gold cast of his skin in hers as well. The dramatic bone structure of her face, which long ago had adorned myriad court paintings, statues, and coins, was gone as well, replaced with the hideous aspect of a beast, a wyrm, as her despised mother had been.

The dragon continued to stare at her face, locked in disbelief mixed with dread, her nose and mouth jutting forth in a serpentine snout, her skin now mottled red scales that glinted in the light with traces of black and copper, horned at the edges, metallic, with webbed wings, one of them brutally scarred, hanging limply from her back. Only her eyes remained as they once had been, blistering blue eyes that could level a man with a glance, eyes so compelling that she had been able to enslave, enchant, or entreat almost any soul she had ever caught in her gaze.

Staring now at her reflection in the almost frozen lake, those commanding blue eyes spilled over with grief. The rocks on which her tears fell glistened gold in the sunlight, as they would forever after.

The dragon shook herself violently, as if the force could shake the body in which she was now housed from her. She willed her form to change back to what it had once been, resorting finally to scraping at her hide with her cruel talons, leaving brutal gashes in her own thick flesh. It was all for naught—the fire that had struck her, that had haunted her awareness from the moment she had awakened—had come from the stars, the element of ether, purified in living flame. The form she had chosen to wreak havoc in was now her own permanently, the human aspect of it having been purged forever by power that was older than her own earth lore.

Her stomach rushed into her mouth and she vomited caustic flame, kindled in the firegems that now were part of her viscera. The patchy vegetation ignited beneath its hoary coat and crackled, blackening immediately and filling the air with dull smoke.

As bright blood blazed in stripes and flecks on the permafrost, the dragon’s grief mutated into anger. The easy and inadvertent destruction of the grass pleased her on some level, lessened the pain somewhat.

She took a deep breath and exhaled, allowing her fury to vent itself in her breath.

A billowing wave of orange heat rolled over the frosty plain, melting the snowcap and singeing the small trees, leaving the landscape smoldering all around her.

Destruction, she thought in the mind that was still not entirely clear. Destruction eases the pain a bit.

It was easy medicine to take.

In the distance she could feel the place that had been her lair calling to her from the west.

Too weary to yet be able to contemplate the ramifications of her new form, the wyrm dragged herself forward, aiming for the place she hoped to find answers.

And rest that would cause her strength to return.

3

When Quayle the fisherman first found Faron on the beach, he thought he had stumbled across nothing more than a thick strand of pale seaweed clogging the inlet.

Upon further investigation, he discovered what resembled a large jelly-fish or squid, a grotesque mass of colorless skin hanging on a frame that did not resemble anything human.

Except that it had a head vaguely shaped like that of a child, its eyes closed, thick lips fused together in front, with black water draining out the sides of its mouth.

The fisherman’s first impulse was to pummel it with a board and toss it to the cats to shred. This is what he would have done, in fact, had he not observed the shallow chest quivering with breath.

His dockmate, Brookins, who was trimming the nets, saw him recoil in disgust and called to him from the pier.

“What is it?”

Quayle shrugged. “Somethin’ from a nightmare,” he called back.

Brookins wiped the slime from his hands onto his trousers and made his way over to where Quayle stood, staring down at the mass entangled in the weeds at the edge of the inlet.

“Sweet All-God,” he said, shielding his eyes.

The creature lay in the fetid water, still as death, with only the faint movement of the nostrils in its flat, bridgeless nose and the shallow rise and fall of its chest to indicate otherwise. Its sallow skin, faintly golden but bleached gray by the sun, hung loosely over a skeletal frame that the men could tell was monstrously misshapen, even beneath its blanket of seaweed.

“Do you think it’s alive?” Brookins asked nervously after a moment.

Quayle nodded silently.

Gingerly Brookins picked up an oar and lifted some of the seaweed off the creature.

Both men cringed as more of its body was revealed—twisted limbs that appeared almost boneless, as if fashioned from cartilage instead, were bent at all-but-impossible angles beneath its torso. The creature was lying on its side, mostly naked; the ratty remains of fabric that covered its body bulged slightly in spots to suggest both nascent male and female traits.

Brookins swore again, then tossed the weeds into the sea.

“A freak of nature, that’s what it is,” he said, having no idea how little nature had had to do with what he saw in the inlet before him. “Part jellyfish, part man, or somethin’ akin to it.”

“Perhaps part woman,” Quayle noted, pointing at the buds of what appeared to be breasts.

“Pour pitch on it and light it,” Brookins muttered. “I’ve got some in the boat.”

Quayle shook his head, thinking. “Naw,” he said after a moment, “we may be able to turn a crown or two on it. The catch was miserable today.”

“Turn a crown? Are you daft, man? Who would be willing to eat something so vile?”

“Not to eat, you fool,” said Quayle contemptuously. “We can sell it to a traveling carnival, a sideshow—that’s what buys freaks like that. There was one up the coast in Windswere just a sennight or so back.”

Brookins cast a glance up the coast, where smoke from the forest fires that had only recently been quenched still hung in the air. Until a few nights ago, the entire western seacoast had burned with rancid heat, acrid black flames that carried with them the unmistakable taint of evil. Now that the conflagration had been extinguished, a few of the evacuated villagers had begun to return, to pick through the rubble of the scorched homes on the water and in the charred forest. There was a stillness to the air that was unnerving, as if the coast was waiting for the next wave of destruction.

“If they was in Windswere, they probably fled east to Bethany with the other refugees,” he said, poking the creature gently with the oar. “This thing’d never make it that far.”

“Ayeh, looks to be a fish of some sort,” Quayle agreed. “The fish-boy.”

“Or girl.”

“Ugh. Well, the types that deal in curiosities and freaks and the like might have use for it, whatever it be, alive or dead. I’ll get the net; we can drag the thing out of the inlet and put it in the wagon. Might as well smoke the pitiful catch we have and cart it into Bethany. We’ll sell the wares and buy the ropestock and whatever provisions we were gonna get later in the month, and while we’re there we can look for that sideshow. The thing won’t take up much room in the cart.”

Brookins exhaled. “If you think so,” he said doubtfully. “But I’m thinking we’re going to need to keep it wet. After all, The Amazing Monstrous Fish-boy won’t survive out of water all the way to Bethany. Alive or dead, it will start to stink. Maybe will stink less if we can keep it alive.”

Quayle, already on his way to the boat, chuckled at the thought.

Faron was jarred to semiconsciousness by a violent jolt when the cartwheel made contact with a deep rut in the road. The creature opened one wide, fishlike eye, covered with a milky cataract, and winced, too weak to even recoil from the pain. The midday sun was baking its fragile skin with both light and heat, two elements that caused its body to blister. It closed its eye and wheezed with the exhalation of its breath. Faron was already so frail and ill from exposure that, in its foggy perception, death could not come quickly enough.

Despite being imprisoned all its life in a monstrous and malfunctioning body, Faron’s mind, while primitive, was keen, and even as close to death as the creature was, it was aware enough to recognize the vibrations that reverberated on its sensitive eardrums through the water in which it lay as voices, and unfamiliar ones. Involuntarily it shuddered, trying to piece together what had come to pass.

Having been kept from birth in darkness in a comfortable pool of gleaming green water, the creature had very little understanding of the outside world, although its father had told it tales during the evenings when he came to visit, bringing marinus eels for its supper. Faron’s father had been a tender caretaker, even if he had been given to sudden outbursts of rage and cruelty. Faron loved him, as much as an unevolved mind could love, and was bereft in his absence, so bereaved at his loss that death now was welcome.

Faron curled up a little more tightly, wishing it would come.

The sun beat down on the creature’s back.

And in the midst of its agony, it sensed another source of pain.

Hazily Faron tried to concentrate on the sharp edges that bit into the flesh between its arthritic fingers, in the sagging folds of its underbelly.

With the last ounce of available strength Faron unbent an elbow, bringing the soft bones that, formed normally, would have been a forearm up close to the fishlike eyes in its face.

And opened its eyes in tiny slits to spare them from the sunlight.

The creature’s hideously deformed mouth, with its lips fused in the center and gapping open over the sides, curled slightly at the corners in a shadow of a grimacing smile.

The scales were still there, one wedged into the flesh between its fingers, the others digging into the folds of its belly where they had been hidden.

Faron opened the first two fingers on the hand before its eyes, just slightly enough to see what they held.

The sun glimmered onto the irregular green oval, pooling there, making the center shine like the light in a glade, leaving the tattered edges of the scale cool and dark as the forest’s core.

The creature’s failing heart leapt. It peered into the scale, fighting off the assault of sunlight in its stinging eyes.

Faron twisted the scale slightly, allowing the light to run in shining ripples off the lightly scored surface; in the creature’s hand the scale took on an infinitesimal film, an iridescent surface, like a veil of mist, behind which a cool and verdant wood seemed to beckon. When it ascertained which card it held, its smile grew brighter.

It was the Death scale.

Since the creature had taught itself to read the scales, it only knew how to summon into its primitive mind the future they could foretell. Ofttimes in the past, when scrying with the scales for its father in the cool and delicious darkness of its safe haven, Faron would become confused, bewildered by the images that it saw reflected in them.

Thankfully, the Death scale was clearly interpretable.

Faron tilted the scale and peered into it.

All around the scale, the world melted away, replaced by darkness.

Life as Faron knew it was now depicted in, and limited to, the small oval surface defined by the tattered borders of the scale.

Against the frame of flat blackness, the scrying card hummed with power, like the deep green iris of an enormous eye.

Within its center Faron could make out a forest, the same sunless glade that was always visible in the Death scale. No birds sang in this place; stillness reigned unchallenged by even a breath of wind.

Faron waited, oblivious of the bumps in the road and the excoriating sun on its skin.

After a few moments a translucent figure formed in the glade, as if from the mist itself. It was the figure of a pale man, garbed in robes of green that blended seamlessly into the forest behind him. His eyes, black and devouring as the Void, were crowned by thick thundercloud brows, the only part of him that seemed solid, which gave way to snowy white hair. It was Yl Angaulor, the Lord Rowan, whom men called the Hand of Mortality.

The peaceful manifestation of Death.

Despite his stern appearance, Faron had never feared Yl Angaulor. The creature watched, entranced, as the Lord Rowan slowly shook his filmy head, then disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.

The Death scale went dark.

Faron’s eyes closed as the heat of the day returned.

Not for me, the creature thought in its semiconscious mind. I not die now.

A single caustic tear welled beneath a heavily veined eyelid and burned as it fell.

The snow muted the sun’s light as it hung over the edge of the world, pausing as if reconsidering its descent.

With the last measure of her strength, the beast pulled herself up from the chasm, over the ice-covered battlements that scored the mountaintop in wide, frozen rings, to rest on the flat, cold ground outside the walls.

The word that had been driving her on, inspiring her to fight off the sleep that hovered on the edge of her consciousness and the numbness of her limbs, echoed in her brain, growing louder as she climbed.

Home.

She stopped and wearily inclined her head, her three-chambered heart thudding loudly.

Above her in the snowy air a castle reached to the clouds, formed of marble that had long ago been coated with so much ice as to appear chiseled from it. The three towers loomed above her in haughty splendor, unchallenged in the winter sky.

Home. Home. Home.

The dragon’s eyes opened slowly, widely, the vertical pupils that scored the searing blue iris contracting in the last of the afternoon light, drinking in the sight of the vast fortress and with the sight, the memory of it.

In her foggy mind the pieces of those memories were scattered in the dark corners, confused. Slowly, however, they seemed to crawl together and form a clearer picture.

The first memory that returned was an old one, the sight of the castle as she had first beheld it in her exile. She had come to believe she might have been a queen at one time, or a woman of some kind of import, because even as she had been walked to the edge of the icy slopes by someone whose face had not yet come into the picture, even as he had turned and left her in the blinding snow, alone for all time, her back had remained straight, her head unbowed.

As the wyrm stared up at the frost-covered crenulations, the icy windows glazed over so thickly that sunlight would never again pass through them clearly, the towers piercing the clouds above, the images continued to return. She could now recall years of being alone in the cavernous halls that lay beyond the gates, the silence of her marble prison broken only by the echoes of her own footsteps and the crackling of the fires that burned in the mammoth hearths. Each century, each year, each day, even down to the hour came slowly back to her, her dragon blood surging with each beat of her heart, recalling the infinitesimal details as none other than a wyrm could recall, obsessing over them as none but a wyrm could obsess.

They exiled me to this place, she thought bitterly, an anger whose source she could still not remember burning in her blood now. Left me alone in the cold mountains, alone with nothing but memories. And now someone has taken even those from me.

At that thought, another image began to form in her mind. It was of a face, a woman’s face, though she could not make it out completely. A woman with golden hair and emerald green eyes, though little else was clear.

At the edges of the dragon’s mind, the fire of hate began to burn again. She still did not know who the woman was, or why her own caustic blood boiled with fire at the thought of her, but she knew that the memory would return eventually.

And when it did, she vowed that all the unspent fire, all the contained hate, would be unleashed in a thunderous fury that would rock the very foundations of the world, cracking the endless ice into hoary dust and shattering even the marble walls of the prison that was her home, her lair.

The beast crawled on toward the castle, seeking shelter from the coming night.

4

Gwydion Navarne waited anxiously in the opulent hallway outside the doorway of the Great Hall of Haguefort, the rosy-stoned castle that was his ancestral home. His sixteen years had been marked by loss, first of his mother, then his father, and scarred by near-loss as well, so whenever the doors closed on the place where critical discussions were undertaken and decisions of great import were made, leaving him out in the corridor, it made him anxious.

He was particularly nervous now, given that his guardians, the Lord and Lady Cymrian, had gone to great lengths to include him in virtually every decision of state that had been made since his father’s death three years prior. That they had politely requested he remain outside during their discussions was upsetting, though he told himself there was no reason for it to be. He trusted both his godfather and his godfather’s wife, the woman who had adopted him as an honorary grandchild, implicitly. Somehow, despite that trust, his nerves were on edge this morning.

His anxiety deepened into genuine dismay as one by one his guardians’ most trusted advisors began to arrive in the corridor outside the Great Hall. Each was announced, and quickly admitted, while Gwydion continued to cool his heels on the thick carpet of woven silk.

Finally, when a familiar advisor entered the corridor, Gwydion intervened. That he chose to approach Anborn, the great Lord Marshal and General during the Cymrian War, was less because the man had been a mentor of sorts to him than because the Cymrian hero was lame. Anborn had to be carried in on a litter, there had been a delay in his announcement, and so Gwydion seized the opportunity to speak to him before he entered the Hall.

“Lord Marshal! What is going on in there?” he asked, coming alongside the litter and interposing his body between it and the doorway.

Anborn signaled to the soldiers who bore the litter to set him down and step away. His azure eyes, blue in the color of the Cymrian dynastic line, blazed beneath his wrinkled brow in a mixture of annoyance, amusement, and fondness.

“How would I know, you young fool? I haven’t even made it past the door, thanks to you. Move aside, and then perhaps I will have an idea.”

“Will you come back out once you do know and tell me, then?” Gwydion pressed. “If Rhapsody and Ashe have invited you to confer, the subject must be of great importance.”

The general shook his mane of dark hair streaked with the silver of age and snorted.

“Certainly, though I doubt I am going to stay for much of the discussion. Where you attend a trade apprenticeship is of little interest to me.”

Gwydion’s face contorted in shock as the icy horror took hold of his viscera.

“A trade apprenticeship? They are sending me away to be apprenticed? Please say it isn’t so.”

The general signaled to his litter bearers. “All right, then. It isn’t so. Now move out of the way, cur, and let me get this cursed conference over with so that I might get back to more useful pursuits—training my men, cleaning my boots, picking my nostrils, moving my bowels—anything other than this folderol.”

“Apprenticed?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, buck up, boy,” the General said as the soldiers lifted his litter. “Going away to continue your education is a necessary part of your training to be duke one day. Your own father was apprenticed to any number of different masters in his youth. You will survive and be better for it.” The doors opened; the General’s litter was carried into the Hall, and the doors shut decisively behind him.

Gwydion sank onto a bench of carved mahogany and groaned.

“What’s the matter?”

He looked up to see Melisande, his nine-year-old sister, watching him, concern in her dark eyes. Gwydion smiled quickly.

“Perhaps nothing, Melly,” he said reassuringly. Melisande had suffered many of the same tragedies he had suffered, but she was much younger. It had been an unspoken agreement between Gwydion and his guardians that her life be made as stable and free from worry as possible.

“You’re lying,” Melisande said evenly, tucking away a bag of jackstraws and sitting down beside him on the bench.

“No, I am not,” Gwydion said. He turned in time to see a man he recognized as Jal’asee, the ambassador from the distant Isle of the Sea Mages, enter the far end of the corridor. Both siblings watched in respectful silence as the elderly man walked past with his retinue of three. Jal’asee was an ancient Seren, born of one of the five original races of men that originated in the time before history. His race was unmistakable in his tall, thin frame, his golden skin and dark, bright eyes; the Seren were said to have been descended of the stars. Gaematria, the mystical island on which they made their home, along with other ancient races and ordinary humans who had come as refugees there centuries before, lay three thousand miles to the west, in the midst of the wide Central Sea. It was said to be one of the last places on the earth where magic was still understood and practiced as a science.

“If the Sea Mages are sending a representative, there must be something else going on here,” Gwydion mused aloud. “It would be vain beyond measure to imagine that my schooling was of any interest to them—or to anyone else in that room except Rhapsody and Ashe, and perhaps Anborn.”

“Maybe they are going to execute you instead,” Melisande said jokingly, rising from the bench and drawing out her jackstraws again. “Your report from the tutors must have been worse than we imagined.”

At that moment the doors opened, and their guardian emerged. Both children stood immediately. The Lord Cymrian, whose given name was also Gwydion but whom they both referred to in private as Ashe, was attired in court dress, a happening so rare that it made both Melisande and Gwydion begin to fidget.

The Lord Cymrian’s eyes, cerulean blue with vertical pupils that told of the dragon’s blood in his veins, sparkled warmly as he beheld the children.

“Melly! You’re here as well. Excellent. Please remain here in the hallway for a moment, and then they will bring you in.” He held out his hand, banded at the wrist in leather at the end of a sleeve of white silk slashed with dark red, to Gwydion. “Will you come with me, please, Gwydion?”

The youth and his sister exchanged a terrified glance; then Gwydion followed Ashe through the vast double doors, which closed almost imperceptibly behind him.

As they passed through the entrance to the Great Hall Gwydion’s eyes went to the vaulted ceiling on which historical frescoes representing the history of the Cymrian people had been meticulously rendered in a circle around a dark blue center. When his father was alive, they had entered the Great Hall only on rare occasions, spending most of their time in the family quarters and the library, so the grandeur of the Hall never became commonplace to Gwydion. He found himself unconsciously following the story of his ancestors who had refugeed from the doomed Island of Serendair fourteen centuries before.

Each vault on the ceiling covered a period of the history. Gwydion stared up at the first panel, a fresco depicting the revelation made to Lord Gwylliam ap Rendlar ap Evander tuatha Gwylliam, sometimes called Gwylliam the Visionary, that the Island would be consumed in volcanic fire by the rising of the Sleeping Child, a fallen star that burned in the depths of the sea. It made him even more nervous when he realized that the court clothing that Gwylliam was wearing in the painting was very similar to what Ashe, who was walking before him, was wearing now.

Each of the additional ceiling frescoes told more of the story—the meeting of the explorer Merithyn and the dragon Elynsynos, who had once ruled undisputed over much of the middle continent, including Navarne; her invitation to the people of Serendair to take refuge in her lands; the construction and launch of the three fleets of ships that carried the Cymrian refugees away from the Island; the fates of each of those fleets; the unification of the Cymrian royal house with the marriage of Lord Gwylliam to Anwyn, one of the three daughters of the dragon Elynsynos; the building of the mighty empire over which the first Lord and Lady Cymrian had ruled, and its eventual destruction in the Cymrian War.

Gwydion had once suggested to Ashe that the blank blue panel in the center be painted to commemorate the new era into which they had recently passed, known as the Second Cymrian Age, with his godfather’s ascension to the Lordship along with Rhapsody, who had been named Lady by the Cymrian Council three years before. Ashe had merely smiled; the panel remained blank.

In the Great Hall itself numerous chairs had been set up. Occupying those chairs were the dukes of the five other provinces of Roland and representatives from each of the other member nations of the Cymrian Alliance, the loose confederation of realms loyal to the Lord and Lady. Rial, the viceroy of the forested kingdom of Tyrian, where Rhapsody was also the titular queen, nodded to him pleasantly, but with a look of sympathy that was unmistakable. The back of Gwydion’s neck began to tingle.

Before they passed under the arch that demarked the second vault, Ashe turned and took him by the arm.

“Come in here for a moment,” he said, diverting him into a side room.

Gwydion followed blindly, his stomach clenching with worry. Ashe closed the door behind him. The echo of the vast hall was swallowed immediately by the smaller room’s carpets, drapes, and tapestries.

In the room near the windows the Lady Cymrian was standing, watching the leaves on the trees beginning to lose their verdant hue and turn the color of fire. She, too, was dressed in heavy velvet court clothing, a deep blue gown that hung stiffly away from her slender frame, hiding the swell of her belly. Her golden hair was swept back from her face and plaited in the intricate patterns favored by the Lirin, her mother’s people. She turned upon hearing them enter the room and eyed Gwydion intently for a moment, then broke into a warm smile that faded after a second into a look of concern.

“What’s wrong?” Rhapsody asked, coming away from the window. “You look like you’re about to be executed.”

“You’re the second family member to suggest that this morning,” Gwydion replied nervously, taking the hand she held out to him and bowing over it formally. “Should I be worried?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, pulling him close and tousling his hair fondly. The skin of her face, normally a healthy rose-gold tone, paled visibly; her clear green eyes brightened with tears of pain. She released him and walked over to a chair where she sat quickly. Her pregnancy was a difficult one, Gwydion knew, and she became fatigued and nauseated easily.

“We have a few announcements to make shortly, but since all of them concern you directly, I thought you should hear of them before the general council does,” Ashe said, pouring a glass of water for his wife and handing it to her. “And, of course, if you object to any of them, we will reconsider.”

Gwydion inhaled deeply. “All right,” he said, steeling himself. “What are they?”

Ashe hid a smile and put his hands on Rhapsody’s shoulders. “First, Highmeadow, the new palace I’ve been having built for your—grandmother”—his dragonesque eyes twinkled in amusement at the word—“will be ready on the first day of autumn. I plan to move our lodgings there; it is time we leave Haguefort and set up our own residence.”

Gwydion’s stomach turned over. Rhapsody and Ashe had been living in his family’s home since the death three years prior of his father, Stephen Navarne, who had been Ashe’s childhood friend. Their presence was the only thing that had made living in Haguefort tolerable; otherwise the memories would have been too strong to bear. Even though he had been a young boy, and Melisande an infant, when their mother was murdered on the road to town, he still remembered her, and missed her when the night winds shrieked and howled around the castle parapets, or on warm, windy days, like the ones on which he and his mother had flown kites together. And the loss of his father in battle, before his eyes, had dealt a death blow to his optimism. Though he knew he would always carry the weight of these tragedies, the load seemed lighter when shared with people who loved him, and who had loved his father.

“We also think it would be a good idea for Melisande to come with us for the time being, and live at the new palace,” Ashe continued.

“Melly? But not me?”

“Right. We will get to that in a moment.”

Gwydion nodded numbly, his every nerve screaming inside. They are sending me away, he thought, his mind reeling at the thought.

“Second,” Ashe continued, oblivious of his consternation, “Rhapsody and I would like to reinstitute the winter carnival this year.”

Gwydion’s nausea grew exponentially. The winter carnival had long been a family tradition at Haguefort, something his father had relished hosting, on the days that spanned the winter solstice. Each year a great festival was undertaken, coinciding with holy days in both the Patriarchal religion of Sepulvarta and the order of the Filids, the nature priests of the Circle in Gwynwood, the two faiths of the continent. The festival lasted for three days, marked with games of winter sport, feasting, singing contests, minstrelsy, and dozens of other forms of merrymaking.

The last of the carnivals had taken place four years before and had turned into a bloodbath. The horror of it was still raw in Gwydion’s mind.

“Why?” he asked, unable to contain his revulsion.

“Because it is time to get back to the business of living,” Rhapsody said gently. “Your father loved that celebration, and understood how important it was to the folk of his province, and in fact all of Roland. It is the one time of year that the adherents of the religion of Sepulvarta and that of Gwynwood convene for a happy purpose; that is critical to advancing understanding between both sects. And besides, we have an announcement to make; that seems like the best place to make it.”

“What announcement?”

“Third,” Ashe said, “we have decided, after deep discussion and consultation with a few of our most trusted advisors, that you are ready to take on the full mantle of your inheritance, as duke of Navarne.”

Gwydion stared at his guardians in silence.

“That is why we are offering to take Melisande with us,” Rhapsody said quickly. “Once you take on the responsibility of the duchy, there will be much for you to accustom yourself to, and caring for your sister, as much as we know you are willing to do it, should not be a distraction to you. Our new home is less than a day’s journey on horseback anyway; she can come and see you whenever either of you wish.”

Ashe came over to the young man and stood in front of him, looking down gravely into his eyes.

“Your seventeenth birthday is the last day of autumn,” he said seriously. “You have more than proven yourself worthy of being fully invested as duke; you are both brave and wise beyond your years. This is not a gift, Gwydion; it is both your birthright and a title you have earned. I need you as a full member of my council, and Navarne needs a duke who looks out for its interests as his main concern. Anborn believes you to be ready, and that is high praise indeed. My uncle is not the quickest to offer support or praise; if he feels you merit the title, there are few that will gainsay it.”

“But there may be some who do,” Gwydion said, his heart still racing.

“None,” Rhapsody said, smiling. “We have met already, and all agree. We’re sorry for keeping you waiting in the hall, but the council needed to be able to speak freely. You would have been flattered to hear what they said. No one objected.” She glanced at Ashe; Tristan Steward, Gwydion Navarne’s cousin, had expressed concern, but in the end had acceded and given the idea his support.

“And even if there are, that is something you may as well become accustomed to,” Ashe said. “It is the lot of a leader to be questioned; it is the sign of a good one when that leader takes the praise and blame with equanimity, without being swayed too far from what he believes by either of them. So, what say you? Shall we call in Melisande so that she can witness the first moment of her brother’s investiture?”

Gwydion walked over to the window where Rhapsody had stood and pulled the drape back, causing a bevy of winterbirds that had been perching in the nearby trees to scatter noisily. He gazed out over the rolling green fields of his ancestral estate, scored by a twelve-foot-high wall his father had built to fortify the lands around the castle. The townspeople had begun to move their dwellings within the wall, turning it from the once-pristine meadow into a village, as Stephen had predicted would happen. It was an ugly reality: the trading of innocence and beauty for safety and security.

“I suppose this is childhood’s end,” he said, his voice tinged with melancholy.

Ashe came to the window and stood behind him. “In some ways, yes. But one could make the case that your childhood ended long ago, Gwydion. You’ve seen more loss in your young life than any man should have to see. This is just a formal recognition that you’ve been a man for some time.”

“Your father never truly lost the innocence of childhood, Gwydion,” Rhapsody said. “He had seen the same kinds of early loss that you have—his mother, your mother. Even your godfather—for many years Stephen believed Ashe to be dead. But he had you, and Melly, and a duchy to be strong for. He could have embraced the darkness of melancholy, and he would have had every right to do so. He chose instead to laugh, to celebrate, to live in the light instead of the darkness.” She rose slowly. “That choice is yours as well, as it is for each of us.”

Gwydion turned back and regarded his guardians. They were watching him closely, thoughtfully, but in their eyes was the silent, common understanding of people who had taken on leadership reluctantly, at great personal sacrifice. He knew that they had both lost much, too—most everyone in the world they had ever loved. In their loss, they clung to each other.

Something his godfather had said to him on their wedding day three years before came to mind.

If your grandmother were to have her way, she would abandon all of the trappings and the power and live in a goat hut in a remote forest somewhere. Grow herbs, compose music, raise children. And with but one word from her, I would move the mountains with my hands to make it happen.

Then why don’t you? Gwydion had asked.

Because there are some things that you cannot escape, for they are inside you, Ashe had said, putting on his wedding neckpiece. One of them is duty. She is needed in the positions she has been given, as I am. His eyes had twinkled. But on the day when we are no longer specifically needed, I will ask for your help in building that goat hut.

Gwydion met the eyes of the Lord and Lady Cymrian.

“I’m honored to accept,” he said simply.

Rhapsody and Ashe smiled in response.

“Know that we are here for you, always,” Rhapsody said.

“Let us go share the good news, shall we?” Ashe added, crossing to the door of the small room and opening it. “We have a festival and an investiture to plan.”

On his way down the aisle of the Great Hall behind the Lord and Lady Cymrian, Gwydion Navarne paused long enough at Anborn’s seat to lean in and utter one word.

“Apprenticeship?”

The Lord Marshal broke into an evil grin.

“I told you it wasn’t so,” he whispered back as the duke-to-be walked past.

Through Ashe’s announcement, Gwydion kept his eyes fixed on the Lord Marshal’s face. It remained frozen in the same formal aspect, a court face, Ashe would have called it, immutable and showing no emotion, giving no indication of his thoughts one way or the other. But in the Cymrian hero’s azure eyes Gwydion thought he saw more—sympathy, perhaps; he and Anborn had forged a strong bond, and he knew that Anborn disdained titles and court responsibilities, valuing instead his freedom from duty. Given the sacrifices he had made as a young man in the court of his father and mother, Gwylliam and Anwyn, and the war his father forced him to lead against his mother, Gwydion well understood Anborn’s distaste for titles and the responsibilities they carried. The Lord Marshal had long counseled Gwydion to stay away from them until he could avoid them no more; now that day had come.

When finally the announcement was over, and the congratulations had all been passed around, Ashe announced that a state dinner in Gwydion’s honor would commence immediately following. The invited guests swirled politely around him, proffering their congratulations again, and talking among themselves.

Just as the group prepared to depart the Great Hall for the dining room, the ambassador from Gaematria, the Island of the Sea Mages, Jal’asee, bent his head slightly and spoke in a tone inaudible to all but Ashe. The Lord Cymrian nodded.

“Uncle,” he called to Anborn, who was preparing to be carried out of the Hall, “indulge us for a moment?”

The Lord Marshal’s brow furrowed, but he signaled to his bearers to wait.

“Go along to the dinner, Melly,” Gwydion Navarne said to his sister. “I will be right there.”

“I’ll see if I can save a seat for you,” Melisande said, amusement in her black eyes. “It would be unfortunate if you had to stand in the back at your own celebration.” She turned and followed the heads of state out of the Great Hall, her golden curls bouncing merrily.

The dukes of the provinces of Roland and Tristan Steward, the Overlord Regent, remained as well, watching with interest as Jal’asee walked slowly down the carpeted aisle and came to a stop in front of the Lord Marshal. He nodded to two members of his retinue, who opened the doors of one of the side rooms and disappeared inside, returning a moment later with an enormous pallet on which a huge wooden crate was carried. With great effort they set it down in front of Anborn, then respectfully and quickly withdrew.

“What’s all this?” the Lord Marshal demanded, eyeing the wooden crate suspiciously.

The elderly Seren cleared his throat, his golden eyes gleaming.

“A gift from your brother, Edwyn Griffyth, High Sea Mage of Gaematria,” he said. His voice, soft, deep, and crackling with an alien energy, sent shivers down Gwydion’s spine. The duke-to-be glanced over at Rhapsody, and saw that she was similarly affected; she was listening intently, as if to music she had never heard before.

Anborn snorted. “I want nothing from him,” he said disdainfully, “least of all something that has to be carried in on a litter. It’s an insult. Take it away.”

Jal’asee’s placid expression did not change in the face of the harsh reply. He merely reached into the folds of his robe and pulled forth a small sheaf of cards, and held them up silently, indicating they were instructions from Edwyn. Ashe nodded.

“With respect,” the tall man said in his pleasantly gravelly voice. He consulted the first card, cleared his throat again, and read it aloud.

“ ‘Don’t be a childish ass. Open your gift.’ ”

A low chuckle rippled through the hall among the dukes. Anborn glared at them, then at the Seren ambassador. Jal’asee smiled benignly. The Lord Marshal inhaled deeply, then exhaled loudly and signaled to the attendants to open the crate.

The members of Jal’asee’s retinue hurried to unlatch the crate, then stepped back as the wooden walls fell neatly away.

Inside was a gleaming machine, fashioned in metal. It stood upright, with steel foot pads supported by articulated joints, which seemed to be controlled by two geared wheels with handholds. The assemblage took in its breath collectively; otherwise, silence reigned in the Great Hall.

“What in the name of my brother’s shrunken, undersized balls is that?” Anborn asked scornfully.

Jal’asee coughed politely, flipped the top card to the back of the sheaf, and peered at the next one.

“ ‘It’s a walking machine, you dolt. It has been designed precisely to your height, weight, and girth, and should serve to allow you to walk upright, assisted, once again. And you would do well not to comment on the size of my genitalia—it may give rise to embarrassing questions about your own manhood.’ ”

Anborn raised himself up angrily on his fists. “I don’t want it!” he roared. “Take that infernal contraption back to my brother and tell him to bugger himself with it.”

Patiently Jal’asee flipped the top card back again, and read the next one.

“ ‘There is no need to be foul. And I am not paying to transport it back. It’s staying. You may as well make the best of it.’ ”

Anborn eyed the metal walker with a blackening brow, then suddenly turned in the direction of the Gaematrian ambassador once again.

“Tell my brother I said ‘thank you,’ ” he said with exaggerated politeness.

Jal’asee blinked, then quickly riffled through the remaining cards, finally looking up with a pained expression on his ancient face.

“I—er—do not appear to have a response to that,” he said in amused embarrassment. “I don’t believe your brother anticipated that as a possible reply.”

“HA! Got him!” Anborn crowed. He signaled to his bearers. “Get me out of here; I’m missing dinner.” His attendants picked him up and carried him from the Hall, leaving the dukes, the ambassadors, and the lord and lady staring after him in a mixture of humor and bewilderment. The dukes, talking among themselves, followed behind him.

Ashe went over to the walking machine and examined it carefully. “Edwyn’s abilities as an inventor and a smith never cease to amaze me,” he said, a tone of wonder in his voice. “It is marvelous to see the genius he inherited from his father put to good and helpful uses, rather than the destructive ones that Gwylliam employed.”

“Gwylliam wasn’t always destructive,” Rhapsody said, watching as Ashe turned the hand crank slowly, making the right foot pad rise and step forward, then reversing it. “He is responsible for many useful and pleasant inventions—the halls of Ylorc are lighted with sconces he designed; the mountain is warmed and cooled through ventilation systems of his making; there are even privies within the depths of the mountain. When Ylorc was still Canrif, his masterwork, it boasted some of the most sophisticated and clever inventions in the world. You should take pride in your grandfather’s accomplishments as well as ruing his follies.”

She felt a light touch on her elbow, and turned to see Jal’asee standing behind her. She looked up into his face and returned his smile.

“M’lady, if I might, I would like to speak with you alone for a moment,” Jal’asee said pleasantly.

Rhapsody looked over at Ashe, who was watching her questioningly, and nodded.

“Go ahead with the dukes, Sam,” she said quietly, addressing him by the name she called him privately. “I will be along in a moment.” She waited until her husband and Gwydion had left the room; once alone, she looked back up at Jal’asee.

“Yes?”

The Ancient Seren ambassador’s pleasant expression faded into one that was more serious.

“M’lady, is the Bolg king to be invited to young Gwydion’s investiture at the winter carnival?”

“Of course,” Rhapsody said. “Why?”

“Is he likely to attend?”

She exhaled, then shrugged. “I really couldn’t say. He has been away from his kingdom for an extended period.” Her face flushed; it was her rescue that had required him to be away thus. “Why do you ask, Your Excellency?”

The tall man looked down at her seriously. “I am hoping that you will do me the honor of introducing me to him, and arranging a brief moment of consultation.” The gravelly voice was light, but Rhapsody could hear in it the unmistakable seriousness of the words.

“I can certainly introduce you if he is there, but I cannot promise he will be willing to speak at length with you,” she said. “Achmed is—well, he can be—unpredictable.”

“I understand,” Jal’asee said. “And I am grateful for whatever intervention you can provide. I plan to stay until the solstice and attend the investiture; it would be impossible to travel home and back in the two months’ time from now until then.” His eyes sparkled brightly. “Without extraordinary measures, that is.”

Rhapsody smiled. “Someday I would like to learn about such measures,” she said, rising and gathering her skirts in preparation of leaving the Hall. “Though I understand that the Sea Mages are very guarded when it comes to their magic.”

The ambassador nodded noncommittally. “I would be honored to tell you a little about it, given your status as a Namer, m’lady,” he said, offering her his arm. “Your vow of speaking the truth and guarding the ancient lores makes you one of the few people outside of Gaematria with whom it would be appropriate to discuss such things. When you are feeling up to it, perhaps we can take a walk in the gardens and do so.”

“Thank you; that sounds very appealing,” Rhapsody said, taking his arm.

“And perhaps in return you can tell me a bit more about the Bolg king,” Jal’asee continued, starting across the floor of the Great Hall. “He is one of the two men with whom you traveled along Sagia’s roots to this land from Serendair, is he not?”

The Lady Cymrian jerked to a halt in shock. She pulled her arm away, shaking. Other than Ashe, no living soul knew of how she and her two friends from the old land had escaped the death of the Island of Serendair, to arrive here, on the other side of time.

“How—how did you know that?” she asked, her voice trembling. She had been caught by surprise so deeply as to be unable to cover gracefully; the nausea of her pregnancy and the exhaustion she was routinely fighting prevented her from it.

Jal’asee smiled at her.

“Because I saw you leave,” he said.

5

Dusk was coming, taking the remaining light of the afternoon sun with it.

Talquist, regent of the vast, arid empire of Sorbold, had been scribbling notes and poring over balance sheets throughout the latter part of the day in the back of his opulent coach, the shade of the window up to allow him both fresh air and illumination in the course of his task. Now, with the approach of night, he paused in his work for a moment, taking care to blot the last of his writing before allowing himself to stare out the window at the sunset.

For all that he had modestly chosen to remain regent for a year, even when the Scales of Jierna Tal had weighed in his favor and selected him as emperor, Talquist did not deny himself any of the luxuries of the position that would soon be his. He had been nibbling all day upon the bounty of the shipping trade from which he had arisen as the hierarch of the western guilds: sweetmeats from Golgarn, flaky pastries layered in honey and cardamom, roasted nuts and delicate wine from the Hintervold, where the frozen grapes were pressed through ice to make an incomparable nectar. He had worked in the trade of the shipping lanes of the continent all of his life, and as a result he had developed a taste for and access to the finer things, even when he was a mere longshoreman. Once he became First Emperor of the Sun in a few months, he would have even better gastronomical delicacies to look forward to. The kitchens of the palace of Jierna Tal were considered among the finest in the world.

The splendor of nightfall over the Sorbold desert was impossible to ignore, even for so focused a man as Talquist. The air, normally static and dry to the point of bringing blood from the nose, took on a sweeter, moister aspect for a moment, as if tempting the sun to return in the morning. The winds had quieted, leaving that air clear as well; the firmament of the heavens was darkening to a cerulean blue in the east, with tiny stars glimmering through the cloudless veil of night. In the west was a swirling dance of color, fiery hues that tapered away to a soft pink at the outer edges, wrapped around a blazing ball of red orange flame descending below the distant mountains.

Talquist sighed. There is such beauty in this land, he thought, the fierce pride of his nation welling in his heart. She is a harsh land, this dry, forbidding realm of endless sun, but her riches are undeniable.

The clattering of the hooves of the horses in his escort, fifty strong, roused him from his musings. Talquist reached for the platinum tinderbox, removed the flint and steel, and struck a spark to the wick of the lamp of scented oil on his table. A dim glow caught, then expanded, bringing warm light into the deepening darkness of the coach’s velvet interior.

Three more days until we reach Jierna Tal, Talquist thought, his eyes returning to the detailed ledger before him. The thought made him itch; he was eager to return to the grand palace with the parapets nestled deep in the mountains of central Sorbold after so much time on the western coast, attending to business there. An unfortunate accident at the time of his selection by the Scales had taken the life of Ihvarr, the hierarch of the eastern guilds, Talquist’s friend, cohort in trade, and only real competition. Talquist had quickly absorbed Ihvarr’s network of miners, carters, tradesmen, and store owners, which required extensive oversight, and he himself had always had the shipping concerns, which needed even more. But the heavy workload didn’t bother him, because Talquist was an ambitious man.

The sound of a horse approaching broadside of his coach drew his attention away from his books. Talquist looked out the window to see one of his scouts riding up, signaling for the coach to slow. He tapped the interior window at the base of the coachman’s seat.

“Roll to a stop,” he ordered, then leaned out the window.

“What is it?” he called.

The soldier, attired in the emperor’s own livery, reined his horse to a halt as well.

“M’lord, there is a caravan ahead approaching the mountain pass, four wagons.”

“Yes?”

“They appear to be traveling under cover of darkness to avoid detection. The wagons are full of what appear to be captives.”

Talquist leaned farther out the window, his brows drawing together in displeasure.

“Captives?”

“Yes, m’lord. They are bound and blindfolded; probably were brought ashore to the south along the Skeleton Coast.”

Talquist nodded angrily. Slave trade was increasing by leaps and bounds in Sorbold; the sale of human prisoners into the mines and fields had been on the rise since the death of the previous ruler, the Empress of the Dark Earth, whose demise had led to his ascension. Renegade slavers who attacked villages or caravans and impressed their captives into fieldwork or sold them were one of Talquist’s greatest irritations.

“Where do they appear to be going?” he asked.

The soldier removed his helmet and shook the sweat from it. “Based on their route, I would hazard they are headed for the olive groves of Baltar,” he said.

“Intercept them,” Talquist ordered. “Divert my procession; I want to see who is smuggling slaves in my realm and put a stop to it personally. I’ll batten down in here; tell the coachman to go full out.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

Talquist lowered the shade and put out the light, seething with anger.

Evrit rubbed his tongue futilely inside his mouth, hoping to generate spit, but there was none to be had.

Five days with his eyes blindfolded and his hands bound before him had made him somewhat more aware of things around him: the cooling of the air with the coming of night, the stench of the waste in the wagon, the moans of pain and whimpers of fear among his fellow captives, especially those of his young sons, whose voices he could recognize even when no words were spoken. He tried to listen for any sign of his wife, who had been thrown, struggling, into another wagon, but the endless clatter of the horses and the clanking and groaning of the wagons made it impossible.

Selac, the younger of his two boys, had ceased making sounds some hours before. Every time the wagon noise lessened, Evrit had called to him, his ragged voice all but unrecognizable, but had received no reply. He prayed that the boy had merely fallen asleep or unconscious rather than trying to remain upright in the stench and the thirst, but could not rid his mind of the thumping sound that occurred every time the wagons slowed for the daily feeding and watering of the captives. He had counted five such sounds. The whipping sands of the desert wind stung against his skin, serving as a fine substitute for the tears of fear that could not come from his eyes for lack of water and the blindfold.

Over and over again he cursed himself for being enough of a fool to undertake the sea voyage to Golgarn. He was the titular leader of the expedition; he and his fellow passengers on the Freedom had timed their departure to take advantage of the last of the southerly summer trade winds, before autumn turned the current near the Skeleton Coast deadly. They had taken to the sea ultimately seeking tolerance of their gentle religious sect in Golgarn, which was a state that espoused no particular faith. They had survived the sinking of their vessel only to find themselves prisoners of the people who had helped them ashore—the people they had thought were rescuers.

Their captors had not been completely unkind to them; there had been no rape of the women from the sundered ship, as far has he could tell, no beatings or abuse. They had been bound and blindfolded after being given water and food, and allowed to relieve themselves, though the harshness of the summer in the desert, the roughness of their transport, and the general conditions could not help but add to their collective misery. The leader of the slave traders had even asserted that two seasons of olive picking, were it done dutifully and well, would buy their freedom. Evrit was not addled enough to believe the word of a slaver, but at least it had given the women and children hope. Ever since their vessel had lost course on its way to Golgarn and had struck the savage reef at the outskirts of the Skeleton Coast, Evrit had believed it was just a matter of time before death took his family. Their survival had thus far not proved to be a better lot than death would have been.

In the distance he heard a horn blast, once, long and sustained, then again, three times short. Evrit could feel the men in the wagon around him sit up or go rigid; they had heard it as well.

Around them their captors began to shout to one another, calling out in a tongue he did not understand. There was panic in their voices.

“What’s—happening?” the man next to him murmured.

The ground beneath the wagon began to rumble. Evrit recognized the sound.

“Horses,” he whispered. “Many of them.”

The wagons slowed, the creaking giving way to the sound of thundering hooves muted by the sandy roadway.

One of the captives began praying aloud; the others joined in quietly as the vibrations of the oncoming horses whipped up the grit of the desert against their skin.

Evrit tried to sort out the maelstrom of sounds that followed. It seemed to him that some of their captors had tried to run, abandoning the wagons and fleeing on horseback, but were quickly pursued by other horsemen greatly outnumbering them. The din around them made it clear that the wagons themselves had been surrounded, and from the shouting of commands, he could tell they had been taken into the custody of a military entity, though what it was he could not be certain.

Finally, after a long time of noise and confusion, he heard a carriage roll to a stop beside the wagons, and a door open amid the sounds of protocol. He listened intently, trying to catch the words, but they, too, were in a tongue he did not recognize.

At last a command was uttered, and someone leapt into the wagon, causing it to shudder violently. A moment later, he felt hands gently removing his blindfold.

At first he thought he might have lost his sight entirely; the world around his eyes, freed from their bandage, was dark, but after a moment they adjusted and he could see a soldier, dressed in dark red cloth studded with leather strips, releasing the eyes of the rest of the captives in the wagon.

Evrit looked around quickly, desperately, and caught sight of his eldest son, who sat across from him, staring wildly back at him. He nodded encouragingly, then looked behind him.

Standing in the midst of the four wagons was a swarthy man with heavy features, dressed in loose white robes with a heavy neckpiece inlaid in gold. The robes were embroidered with the symbol of a sword and the sun. He was giving orders to what appeared to be an entire cohort of mounted soldiers, similar in skin texture and features to their leader, some of whom rode between the wagons while others released the eyes of the captives or passed out water.

A wineskin was offered to him and he drank gratefully, his hands still bound, then looked around for Selac, finding him in a nearby wagon. Evrit bowed his head in relief, whispering a prayer of thanks for their rescue.

Finally the man in the robes waved the soldier he was conferring with away, then turned and addressed the captives in the common tongue of the maritime trade.

“I am Talquist, regent of Sorbold and emperor presumptive. I welcome you to my lands, and apologize for any mistreatment you may have suffered at the hands of my subjects. The ringleader has been executed, and the rest of these renegade slavers are now in the custody of my army.”

Evrit exhaled in relief and flashed a slight smile at both of his sons to reassure them.

“You will be continuing on with the my caravan now, so that my soldiers can protect you,” the regent continued. “In a moment, you should all be freed from your blindfolds if you are not already. If anyone is in need of water, tell the soldier attending to your wagon. Who among you is the leader?”

For a moment there was silence. Then Evrit found his voice.

“Our—our expedition had no real leader, m’lord,” he said, his voice cracking. “But I signed the bill of lading when we set sail on the Freedom.”

The regent turned in his direction and walked over to the wagon, smiling agreeably.

“The Freedom, did you say? A fine ship. I have sent cargo aboard her many times. Did she founder?”

“Yes, m’lord, I’m sorry to say, against a reef. We came ashore at the Skeleton Coast, but were taken prisoner by the men whom you have captured.”

“Well, on behalf of my nation, I apologize. They had no right to do that.” The regent gave another command to the soldiers, who in turn broke off into four groups of two and mounted the wagons, preparing to drive them on. Then he started back toward the carriage from which he had descended.

“Er—m’lord?” Evrit called nervously, compelled by the looks of shock on the faces of his fellow captives.

The regent stopped and turned around. “Yes?”

“Might—might we have our hands unbound?”

The regent considered for a moment, then walked back to the wagon and stood next to Evrit, regarding him thoughtfully.

“The woman in the green skirt—she is your wife, is she not?” he asked finally.

“Ye—yes,” stammered Evrit.

The regent nodded. “Would you like her brought to sit beside you?”

“Yes, yes, m’lord,” Evrit said gratefully.

The regent placed his hand on the wagon slat, and leaned closer in toward Evrit. “I fear I may have unintentionally misled you. You see, the slavers who took you captive had no right to do so, because all slave captures are specifically sanctioned and controlled by the Crown—in other words, me,” he said pleasantly. “And while these miscreants probably would have sold you to an olive farmer or the owner of an apple orchard, I have much better use for you men—in the salt mines of Nicosi. You look like a strong lot. You should survive awhile. The women we will put to work in the linen factories, the children will labor in the palace as chimney sweeps and cleaning the sewers while they are small enough to fit.”

The regent turned and headed back to his carriage, pausing long enough to call to the captain of his guard.

“Mikowacz, bring me that woman in the green skirt. I’ll start with her. By morning I want you to have found the youngest and prettiest among them. We have three days until we reach the mines.”

He cast a glance back at Evrit, whose face was white as the crescent moon that hung over the Sorbold desert.

“When I’m finished with the leader’s wife, you may allow her to sit beside her husband in the wagon until we reach the salt mines.”

He climbed into his carriage, leaving the door open.

6

Yabrith, petty thief, assassin, and thug that he was, had a gift for knowing when a man was about to crack. He had used this talent many times over the course of his criminal career, amassing an impressive reputation for prying information and secrets from the most unwilling of victims.

His sensitivity to situational precariousness was in a heightened state of alarm now, deep within the dark confines and crumbling walls of the Raven’s Guild hall in the Inner Market of Yarim Paar. The air was thick with the static of danger, of black rage only slightly held in check.

Yabrith had no desire to be the weight that tipped the scales. He set the heavy crystal glass down in front of the guild scion and stepped quickly to the side of the table, trying not to draw the man’s notice while hoping silently that the spirits he was providing would quell the nervousness that had taken hold of the scion, and all his fellows in the Guild over the last few weeks.

Dranth, the guild scion, extended a hand that shook only slightly and seized the glass, downing the amber liquid in one bolt. He clenched his teeth and inhaled over the burn, drawing the vapors into his sinuses, hoping they would soothe his mind, and realizing dully that they could never be strong enough.

For a full cycle of the moon he had been plagued, for the first time since childhood, with nightmares from which he woke drenched in sweat and the sour smell of fear. Dranth had taken to pacing the floor after these dreams, hoping to drive the images from his mind, but he could only succeed in making the pictures fade into the dark recesses for a short while, lingering in the shadows until sleep took him.

Whereupon they would emerge to clutch at him again.

He dropped the glass onto the thick board of the new table, wincing as it thudded. It was a sound similar to the one that haunted him, the dull thump of a box that had been placed on this table’s predecessor two fortnights before.

Dranth had opened the small, leather-bound crate, sealed and wrapped in parchment paper carefully, believing it to be yet another package sent home by the guildmistress, who was working surreptitiously in the mountains of Ylorc, deep within the Bolg king’s lair. Upon removing the internal wrapping, however, he had discovered instead the guildmistress’s own head, her eyes open and festering with maggots that crawled through the sockets, her mouth frozen open in an expression of surprise.

He had lurched back and vomited all over the floor of the guildhall.

It was not horror at the ghastly fate that had befallen the guild’s erstwhile leader which caused Dranth’s stomach to rush into his mouth. Nor was it any loss he might have felt for the woman herself. In the twenty years he had known Esten, there was no one to whom he had been more devoted, more enslaved, more loyal, but now, beholding her disembodied head rotting before him on the table, it was not grief or revulsion that racked Dranth.

It was abject fear.

Because, until he beheld the evidence of it himself, he would never have believed it possible that anyone could visit death of any kind, let alone such a gruesome and violent one, upon the guildmistress.

From the moment he had first seen her in a dark alleyway, ripping her blade mercilessly into the belly of a startled soldier at the tender age of eight summers, eviscerating the man as coolly as she might play jackstraws, Dranth had been painfully aware of Esten’s extraordinary powers of murder and self-preservation, as well as her utter lack of a soul. She had held the guild, the city, and much of the province of Yarim in her merciless grasp for her entire adult life, propagating the Raven’s Guild’s undisputed reign in black-market trafficking, murder, thievery, assassination, and a host of even more brutal crimes, raising their skullduggery to the level of pure artistry.

Dranth, the man who loved and respected her more than anyone in the world, believed her to be Evil Incarnate, and more—he believed she was invulnerable.

Yet someone had managed to kill her, to rip her head from her shoulders, beheading her while alive.

And whoever it was had caught her completely by surprise, something else Dranth had believed impossible.

So if invulnerable Evil could be so stripped of life, so torn, snuffed without so much as a skirmish, it was clear to Dranth that he had lived his entire life underestimating just how powerful his enemies, and those of the guild, could be.

He was still shaking now, a month later. He had slipped into the desert when the moon was new, and in the devouring darkness of the wilderness buried Esten’s remains beneath the sandy red clay, blinded by the blackness of the night and his tears. Dranth did not wish to remember where her grave had been, because there were so many who would seek to steal its contents, to mock her in death as they never had dreamed of doing in life, putting her skull on display in some ignominious place like a tavern, a brothel, or a privy.

As she herself had done to innumerable opponents.

He had burned the leather crate, the table, and everything it had touched.

Dranth glanced up from staring at the new table board. In the dim light of the guildhall three score or more of thieves stood, clinging to the shadows, waiting for instructions.

When his voice was able to be forced into his mouth, it was soft, harsh, deadly.

“It was to the court of the Bolg king that the guildmistress went, seeking revenge for an old wrong,” he said, his eyes glinting black in the fireshadows that roared on the hearth behind him. “It was from the court of the Bolg king that the package containing—that the package was delivered.

“Esten built this guild with the labor of her hands, with her very blood. Any that would dare to spill that blood must answer to the guild.”

A quiet chorus of voices rose, murmuring assent, then fell into silence once more.

“The Bolg king has earned our undying enmity, and he shall have it visited upon him. But anyone with the strength to fell Esten will not be vulnerable to traditional attack, not even the kind of murder we practice in the shadows.” He lapsed into silence as well.

“What, then, Dranth?” one of the journeymen asked.

Dranth stared into the fire. He watched the flames flicker against the soot that stained the bricks of the back of the hearth, letting his mind wander with them. Finally he turned back to the guild.

“We will stand ready to aid his enemies,” he said simply. “Before her death, the guildmistress sent back meticulous plans, maps of his inner realm, details of his stockpiles, armaments, treasury, manpower. This information will be invaluable to anyone who seeks to bring him down, and has the army to do it.”

He tossed the crystal glass into the fireplace.

“There are any number of such men out there,” the guild scion said. “But I think I will make inquiries first in Sorbold. It lies on his southwestern border, and has a new regent. I hear he was once a guild hierarch himself.” Dranth’s eyes glittered. “And as the mistress always said, a guildsman knows the value of the goods; it is merely a matter of making him feel an overwhelming need to have them, whether he needs them or not.

“So we will make them available at a price he cannot resist.”

The gargantuan doors of the ice castle were frozen over almost beyond recognition.

The dragon stared at the entranceway, her body beginning to slow from the loss of heat. Snow now caked her mammoth claws, packed between the phalanges of what had once been her fingers, hardening with each painful step. Her eyelids stung from the crust that had formed on them, her skin peeling under the weight of the ice on her scales.

The life that she had felt returning to her after so long in the grave was ebbing now.

Open, she whispered, please open.

Her dragon sense, fading along with her life force, felt a stirring in the doors, as if the very steel of them had recognized something in her, but was too weak, or too unwilling, to respond.

Deep within her, in the part where her will remained, steely and haughty, the refusal rankled.

The dragon’s ire at the rebuff sparked, then roared like a hedgefire through her.

“Open,” she said, louder now, her voice stronger. It issued forth from her mind and her sinuses, rather than her throat—wyrms are absent vocal cords, and thereby must manipulate the element of air to be able to speak as men do—in a tone that could be heard above the howling of the autumn wind.

Before her the gigantic slabs of ice seemed to soften slightly. The crack between them shuddered; the doors trembled, but remained closed.

The beast trembled, too, but with rage. Fury, full-blown and all-encompassing, heated her blood, and her anger radiated out from her, causing loose snow on the distant crags to crumble and fall into the crevasses below.

“Open!” she howled, the winds shrieking with the sound of her words. “I command it!”

The ice that had glazed the doors for three years undisturbed cracked and began to slide down in great rolling sheets, avalanches of snowy shards falling onto the frozen stones of the courtyard. The dragon, her searing blue eyes burning hot in frenzy, inhaled, then loosed her wrath in her breath.

The blast of acidic fire from the brimstone in her belly almost blinded her with the intensity of its light.

The wave of boiling breath blasted the frozen doors, melting the ice completely, along with the snow that caked the walls around them. Rivers of liquid steam rushed like waterfalls down them, even as the ice underneath sublimated into the air in the beat of a three-chambered heart, revealing sheets of towering steel.

Slowly the palace doors swung open.

The beast watched, panting, triumphant, as the vast, cold inner chamber of the palace was revealed. I may not have reclaimed my memories yet, she thought, watching the melted ice refreeze in rivers of gleaming glaze, but I recall that this is mine. And all that is mine will bow before me.

Ignoring the pain in her limbs, she crawled forward, dragging her stinging body through the vast doorway and onto the cold stone floor beyond.

The great doors swung shut silently.

The cavernous halls echoed with the sound of metal on stone as the beast pulled herself across the floor of the towering center hall, scraping her claws on the granite as she moved.

Before her in the central hall was a massive fireplace, black with long-cold soot. The vault of the ceiling towered above, not far from where her head would reach should she rise to her fullest height. Behind her, tall windows thickly glazed with ice allowed muted light to enter.

Her dragon sense, as innate a sensory tool as her sight, hearing, or touch, rose from within her, dormant from the cold, as if it were thawing gradually. She was distantly, then more acutely, aware of the contents of the castle—its three towers, the winding stairs, the deep basements filled with stores, frozen now that the fires of the enormous hearths had been extinguished for years. She turned slowly, absorbing the information, as if through her skin, from the air around her.

There were very few memories here; she had lived alone, from what she could glean, within these frigid walls, these empty rooms. She could tell that there were chambers above and below that she would never be able to see again because of her massive size; the doorways to all but the largest common rooms of the ground floor would deny her access. Still, at least there was shelter here from the endless cold of the pale mountains.

A powerful hum drew her attention; she turned her massive head away from the empty hearth in the direction of the tall window. Before it stood an altar, simple, of heavy, carved wood; atop of it lay a tarnished spyglass.

The dragon closed her sore eyes.

Even blind, she could still see the instrument, power radiating from it in the darkness behind her eyelids. All of her focus was drawn inexorably toward it; the vibrations rippled over her skin, thrumming with the rhythm of her blood.

Remember, she thought desperately. What is it?

She opened her eyes again and made her way across the cold stone floor to the altar, then stared intently down at the spyglass.

In her mind images swirled willy-nilly, scenes of ferocious battle, desperate suffering, struggles, triumphs, events of world-shaking import and the tiniest significance, all vying for her attention. The dragon’s mind burned with the intensity of it; bewildered, she slithered back away from the altar, closing her mind as if in defense.

Pain, hollow and clutching, twisted inside her, even more than the constant ache of her broken body. It gripped strongly enough to make her weak; her head sagged rapidly toward the ground, leaving her dizzy, until she righted it.

Then, amid all the confusion, she heard a voice ring clear in her scrambled memory, like a bell tolling through a storm at sea; it was that of a woman speaking clearly, as if pronouncing a sentence.

I rename you the Past. Your actions are out of balance. Henceforth your tongue will only serve to speak of the realm into which your eyes alone were given entry. That which is the domain of your sisters, the Present and the Future, you will be unable to utter. No one shall seek you out for any other reason, so may you choose to convey your knowledge better this time, lest you be forgotten altogether.

The great beast shuddered.

She thought for a moment about slapping the spyglass from the altar, shattering it, crushing it beneath her weight, or hurling it from the castle battlements into the crevasse below, but the thought brought her pain, physical pain, as if her mind were being stabbed with the icepick thought. In the limited scope of what she knew, she was certain that the instrument was older than she, ancient, from a realm that was no more, a place the winds could no longer find, that Time had all but forgotten. She also felt sure that it was tied to her in some way, some deeply significant, almost holy way.

I rename you the Past.

The spyglass glimmered in the fading light.

It sees the Past, the dragon thought, and with the thought came new certainty, as if it had unlocked doors in her mind to small, hidden places previously inaccessible. It sees the Past.

It can see me.

With the realization came a surge of power, of revitalization. The beast, still lost in her own life, was no longer invisible to the eyes of Time, no longer alone in the vast white of the endless mountains. Somewhere in the Past her memories were hiding, waiting for her to find them.

And the glass could see them.

The pain in her belly grew stronger, followed again by the weakness. Hunger, the dragon thought. This is what hunger feels like.

She moved to the icy window but could see nothing beyond the frozen panes. Innate survival mechanisms began to burn within her, her dragon sense making note of everything that might possibly be considered sustenance within the range of her senses, about five miles.

Minutiae became mammoth; the tiniest crumb of grain was suddenly as clear to her as the sun. She knew instantly that there was food to ease human hunger in the subterranean vaults of the castle, but that to get to it would require the breaking down of walls and strength she did not, in her weakened state, possess. Her mind turned outward, scanning the hillsides and the crevasses.

An eagle was passing a mile and a third away, flying southeast at thirty-two—no, thirty-one—knots. Farther out a flock of ptarmigans was scattering to the wind. The dragon discarded the thought. She did not know if she was capable of flight yet; one of her wings ached with an infuriating stiffness and hung off-kilter, likely a result of whatever wound had scarred it so deeply. She would have to seek food on the ground for the time being. She concentrated harder.

A glacial stream ran through her lands, she realized, the water silver-gray and cold, having been ancient blue ice a moment before it turned to runoff and slipped, laughing, down the frozen hillsides. She might find food there, she thought, but discarded the notion a moment later. Winter was coming; the great red and silver fish had come and spawned, laid their eggs and died, having completed what life expected of them. There would be nothing to ease her hunger in the gray water now.

Then, tickling the very edges of her consciousness, she felt something else.

Near the river’s edge, tucked away beneath a wide, sheltering ridge, was a small hunting camp.

Men. Humans, from the smell that the dragon sense inspired in her nostrils.

At first the thought repulsed her. She was, or at least had been, a being like them once herself, a woman, though not human—her blood was much older than that, she suspected. Dimly she recalled words spoken to her by another dragon, a beast she believed might have been related to her; her mother, perhaps. Hate, bitter and foul-tasting, came to her mouth at the memory.

If they are encroaching on your lands, why do you not just eat them? she heard herself saying in the voice of a child.

Eat them? Do not be ridiculous, the wyrm had said. They are men. One does not eat men, no matter how much they may deserve it.

Why not?

Because that would be barbaric. Men are alleged to be sentient, though I admit I have not seen evidence of that. One does not eat sentient beings. No, my child, I limit myself to stags, sheep, and tirabouri. They digest well, and carry none of the guilt that men would in the stomach.

I know no guilt, thought the dragon bitterly. Only hunger.

She allowed her dragon sense to explore further, to wander closer to the hunting camp, where the snow had walled the huts inside the ridge, forming a frosty barrier between the humans and the river. They had dug a pathway—four feet, three and three-quarters inches wide, seven feet, four and five-eighths inches high, her dragon sense noted—between the camp and the river. In her mind’s eye she could see the footsteps that had tramped to the water’s edge, and the skids where the buckets had been hauled back.

With the rising hunger and the expansion of her dragon sense, the wyrm’s eyes narrowed in thought.

I have no such qualms about men, she ruminated. They are a large source of meat, warm of blood and thin of skin. I imagine they roast nicely, and will keep well.

And I am famished.

The decision was an easy one.

Open, she commanded the doors of the castle in a voice that rang with bloody intent. They slammed open in response; the icy wind blew in, swirling angrily through the cavernous hall.

Spurred by hunger, and the desire to vent her pain in destruction, the beast slithered out through the doors into the dusk, over the battlements, and down into the crevasse, where she disappeared into the earth beneath the snow.

7

The Rampage of the Wyrm was an epic poem penned in the Cymrian era, inscribed on an illuminated scroll and found, after centuries uncounted, hidden deep in the vaults of the library of Canrif by Achmed, who presented it, with wry amusement, to Rhapsody just before she undertook a long journey with Ashe to find the dragon Elynsynos. The Bolg king had sat smugly, scarcely able to contain his glee, watching her expressive face as she read the tale, which told of the murderous exploits of the dragon she was about to seek.

Elynsynos, the wyrm for whom the continent was named, was older than Time, the manuscript said. It related in breathless detail the story of the primordial dragon, said to be between one and five hundred feet long, with a mouthful of teeth the size and sharpness of finely honed bastard swords. As dragons possess some of each of the five elemental lores, she was able to assume the form of any force of nature, such as a tornado, a flood, or a blazing forest fire, the manuscript said. She was wicked and cruel, and when her lover and the father of her three daughters, the sailor Merithyn the Explorer, did not return to her as he promised, she went into a wild fury and rampaged through the western continent, burning it with her caustic breath and decimating the lands up to the central province of Bethany, where her fire sparked the eternal flame which burned to that day, in Vrackna, the basilica consecrated to the element of fire.

Rhapsody was quick to point out to the gloating Bolg king that the account was mostly nonsense, which was evident to her without even meeting the dragon. As a Namer she was familiar with folklore as well as lore, the first told by untrained storytellers and woven over time into tales that tended to be filled with falsehoods and exaggerations, as opposed to the latter, which was as pure as possible, related by those trained to keep the history accurate.

Even so, the descriptions in the tale carried enough possible truth to make her nervous.

Sometime later, when she finally did meet the wyrm in her lair, Elynsynos quickly debunked the manuscript and its false account of history.

You’ve been reading that tripe, The Rampage of the Wyrm, haven’t you?

Yes.

It’s nonsense. I should have eaten the scribe who penned it alive. When Merithyn died I thought about torching the continent, but surely you must be able to tell that I didn’t. Believe me, if I were to rampage, the continent would be nothing but one very large, very black bed of coal, and it would be smoldering to this day.

The continent and its people, for all their fear of the dragon legends, for all the tremulous whining in the manuscripts that recounted their history, had never in fact seen the immolation the tales told of, had never lost more than a stray sheep to the beasts, and certainly had never experienced a true rampage.

And therefore were totally unprepared.

The men of the Anwaer village in the midlands of the Hintervold were a quiet lot.

Unlike the seasonal nomads who spent the summer culling fish from the area’s fertile streams and trapping fur-bearing animals, then relocating to the southern part of the realm when autumn came, the families of Anwaer braved the bone-chilling cold and the towering snowfall to stay together in their ancestral lands. They were all related in some manner, and found the beauty of the isolated tundra, the verdant forests of spiraling spruce, and the silence that reigned unchallenged by any but the mountain winds to be reason enough to endure the harsh winter in the place their families had called home for generations.

So when the autumn came, and the nearby villages thinned out, Anwaer ended its season of transport of skins and fishing and prepared to hunt.

Usually the hunting time lasted only a few weeks, less than one turn of the moon. With the heat of the summer fading and the merciless swarms of blood-sucking insects dispersed by the approaching cold, the game animals of the Hintervold would come out from their summer hiding places, down from the summits of the white crags and into more sheltered areas, seeking vegetation or prey, and a more hospitable clime for the coming winter.

The endless expanse of the land at the top of the world caused game animals to grow to substantial size, and a single one, carefully dressed, was generally enough to feed an Anwaer family for the winter. So the hunters moved away from the villages into the thicker woods, and waited for the game to come.

But this year, it never did.

After two weeks without a single kill, the men determined that something was terribly wrong. Whatever had spooked the game animals had frightened them not individually, or in clusters, but as a herd; the caribou and the northern tirabouri had last been seen ranging north, contrary to nature. The solitary animals, the moose and the predators that the Anwaer men hunted for pelts, were gone as well. The hunters sat in their blinds in silence, hearing little and seeing less. Even the customary birdsong of the migrating raptors had been stilled.

Finally, with winter approaching, the men of Anwaer decided it would be necessary to follow the herds north. If the hunting party could come upon a cluster or even the outer edge of a ranging herd, it might be possible to bring down enough meat to salvage the winter. If they could do it within another turn of the moon, the shallow glacial river would not yet be fully frozen, and could be floated in makeshift barges back to Anwaer in time before the heaviest snow came. If the new moon came before they had gathered their stores, however, it would be too late, and for the first time in memory, the village would have to join the migration, hurrying to keep ahead of the weather.

Should the men not be back by the time the moon had faded to a slim crescent, the women were told to start ahead alone.

The youngest member of the hunting party was tying down the boats on the rushing silver river when nightfall came.

The wind was chill; the water, shallow in most places to the depth of a man’s knee, with deeper spots up to his shoulder, was rippling beneath the breeze, causing the makeshift rafts to bump against each other on the shoreline, tugging at their rope and stone moorings.

Sonius, as the hunter was known, struggled to keep the barges from breaking apart in the chilly water. Racing against the falling sun, he muttered obscenities under his breath, finally pulling the doeskin gloves from his hands in an effort to handle the ropes more efficiently.

He glanced back at the smoke seeping from the vent in the snowpack that sealed the huts into the shelter beneath the wide ridge. The landfall from an avalanche soon after they had made camp had fortuitously sealed in the area they inhabited, keeping them sheltered from the worst of the winds and any predators that might come, lured by the scent of their kills. They had brought down five moose and two tirabouri, and were in the process of smoking the latter to assure it keeping until their return to Anwaer. Sealed behind a solid wall of snow, with nothing but the tunnel they had carved out to the river and a crescent-shaped opening at the top of the snow wall where the smoke escaped, the rest of his hunting party was settling down to sleep before heading for home on the morrow.

Sonius had drawn the short straw, and so, despite his exhaustion, he kept at his task until he was certain the boats were secure. When at last he had tied the final knot, he rose tiredly and looked out over the silver-gray river before him.

The wind had died down to almost still; white chunks of ice from farther up the glacier were floating downstream now, spinning slowly in the rushing current. The dim light of the crescent moon reflected off the river, pooling in swirls, then vanishing into darkness again.

Sonius wondered absently why the silence had deepened, then exhaled, casting the thought from his mind, and turned around to head back through the tunnel in the snow into camp.

At first he didn’t see the movement, but as he came within a few steps of the snow wall a flicker in the mountains above him caught his eye. He stepped back and looked up, trying to get a better glimpse, thinking that it was the mountain ice calving again, praying that it was not another avalanche that would bury his fellow hunters inside the sheltering ridge.

Sonius stared up into the endless crags of snow, and thought he saw a shadow slithering down the mountain face. He shaded his brow from the dim light of the moon. There is some movement of snow, he thought, perhaps just from the wind.

But there is no wind.

He rubbed his eyes, then looked back up to the peaks.

The movement was gone.

Sonius shook his head, then started for the tunnel.

The dragon’s massive head crested the ridge, rising above the snow wall, then thrust down directly in front of him. The stench of brimstone filled the air, which cracked in the heat.

The serpentine eyes narrowed, the vertical pupils expanding in the light of the moon.

A ragged gasp tore from the young hunter’s throat. He stared, glassy-eyed, at the beast looming before him, then made a scrambling dash for the tunnel below her.

Suddenly the shoreline of the river was drenched in light as bright as day. A rippling blast of flame rolled in a caustic wave down from atop the ridge, illuminating the human shadow, lighting his young face to brilliance for a split second before it turned black and withered to skeletal ash, along with the rest of his body.

Then, in an instant, the light was snuffed; darkness returned again.

The dragon lay crouched on the top of the rock ridge, staring ruefully down at the baked skeleton in the pile of ashes at the edge of the snow wall. Damnation, she thought. The skin is even thinner than I had imagined. This will not serve if I want the meat.

She turned around on the ridge. With a thundering slap, she brought her spiked tail down on the snow wall, crushing the top of it and causing the ice to collapse into the tunnel. Then she climbed down onto the wall and slithered to the crescent-shaped opening, behind which her dragon sense told her the humans were sleeping before a dwindling fire.

There were eleven, she knew; her mind, flooded with the sensory information from the primordial element in her blood, was aware of each of them, how much each one weighed, where he was sleeping, and the relative depth of slumber each of them was enjoying. There were also four dogs, all in various stages of repose. She stared at the camp behind the snow wall for a moment, thinking what a good place to store this cache of meat it would be.

Then she slid through the opening.

The first man was in her grasp before any of them had a chance to waken; the dogs saw her, smelled her probably, and began to bark agitatedly as she barreled over the wall and slid through the fire into the first makeshift hut, crushing it like a nutshell beneath the weight of her body. He was wrapped in wool blankets; the beast squeezed him with a crushing force in her talons and slashed his throat, then tossed his dripping body to the ground to turn her attention to the man who had been lying beside him.

That man, who watched in stark terror as she disposed of his bunkmate, began to scream, a gargling, high-pitched sound that rippled painfully over the dragon’s sensitive eardrums. He continued to caterwaul as she seized him and lifted him from the ground; she severed his head in one clean bite and spat it into the fire to make it stop squealing.

From that point on it became an elegant, joyous dance of death. The men, trapped behind the immense wall of snow, scattered to the corners of their small shelter, hiding behind rocks, scrambling in vain to the wall itself and trying piteously to scale it. They fired their crude hunting weapons—spears and longbows—at her, but the missiles bounced off her armored hide, impotent.

The firecoals, scattered about in the fray, cast weak shadows on the massacre, sparked with bright blood.

And in the heat of the skirmish, as one by one she cornered the hunters and slaughtered them, the beast laughed aloud with delight, a harsh, ugly sound that rang with soulless malice. Destruction eases the pain, she thought as she seized the last of them, crushing him slowly, taking pleasure watching the life being squeezed from him inch by inch, while the dogs, who had ceased to bark, whined in terror. And I have so much pain to ease.

Then the feast began.

8

It was deep in the night of the Bolg king’s return when Trug was summoned.

He felt as if he had been called to rise even before he had finished exhaling his first breath of sleep, yet he did not complain. Complaints were useless, and something about the quiet nervousness of the guard who had come for him told him he was being observed. Trug rose silently and dressed quickly in the manner of all of Achmed’s Archons. He had experienced many such midnight summonses in the seven years of his schooling.

He followed the guard past his training ring, noticing by smell that the two horses he had quartered there for the night had been taken, and replaced with two others of similar size and markings. His brows knit together in puzzlement; such a test of his notice had been undertaken less than a year into his training, when it might still have been possible that he did not yet know every one of the three hundred fifty head that he was responsible for stabling. But that trick had not even worked at the time; why anyone was attempting it now was perplexing to him.

Trug, like most of his race, did not give voice to his inner thoughts but rarely, and so he kept his silence as he walked behind the guard. He listened for signs of conversation or movement, but heard nothing except his own breath and the footsteps of the man leading him out of the mountain tunnels.

Unlike most of his fellow subjects, it was part of Trug’s training to be able to speak; what he was speaking, however, were the thoughts of the Bolg king, both within the mountain and outside it. It was his path to be trained as the Voice, the Archon that King Achmed expected to handle all of the communications, both official and secret, on behalf of the Bolglands, including the management of the miles of speaking tubes that ran throughout the mountains, left over from the Cymrian Age. In that capacity he had been trained from childhood for the last seven years, selected at an early age by Rhapsody as having the potential for the task at hand, and systematically familiarized with language, cryptography, anatomy, and a thousand other studies of communications, verbal and otherwise. A year ago he had been deemed worthy to supervise the aviary, with its extensive fleet of messenger birds, as well as the mounted messengers who rode with the mail caravans. Eventually it was planned for him to assume responsibility for King Achmed’s network of ambassadors as well as his spies.

But even though he would one day be the master of all the communications within Ylorc and from the Teeth to the outside world, Trug had not been told why he was being summoned. Nor did he expect to be.

An hour’s walk, up out of the mountain to a small softened peak, like a cavity in the Teeth, brought him to a listening post, a way station in the system where the Eyes, Achmed’s elite spies, made daily reports on what they had observed in the mountain passes. The guard stopped inside the hollow peak, lit and hung a lamp, and motioned for him to take a seat at the table that became visible in the light.

On the table was a tube made of bone, sealed with the king’s imprimatur. Trug said nothing, but beads of sweat broke out on his dusky forehead. The guard motioned to the tube, then stepped away from the wind cave.

Trug stared at the tube for a moment, knowing that what it contained would mark a turning point in his destiny. He, as well as all his fellow students, had long been told about the eventual arrival of this sealed message, and he knew what it foretold. It would hold either the order of his banishment, as it had for at least one other Archon-in-training, or his elevation to full status, along with all the others. Either way, at least one part of his life would end that night.

With clammy hands he broke the seal and opened the tube.

He stared at the page, trying to absorb its import. It contained nothing more than the imprint of a hand.

Trug stood up, held the edge of the parchment in the flame of the lamp until it ignited, waited for it to burn completely, then cast the ashes into the wind atop the hollow mountain peak.

When the very last black cinder had caught the updraft and was carried away, Trug doused the lantern and hurried down the mountainside, making his way in the darkness for a passageway into the depths he knew all too well.

Deep within the mountain, at the convocation of five tunnels known as the Hand, they gathered, each summoned in the same manner.

Upon arriving, the Archons nodded to one another but did not speak. It was not only customary to remain silent until the king or his representative spoke, it was mandatory. Achmed wanted to be certain that when his Archons were called to assemble, the words that their ears heard were as pure and unpolluted by secondary noise as possible.

The future Archons were, in a way, Achmed’s children, though none of them had ever seen his face. Taken from their clans when he first became king, as hostages some thought, they had been kept apart as a new clan, with the Bolg king and Grunthor, and Rhapsody for a time, as masters and parents, along with such tutors and models as he could hire and trick and persuade from the outside. Grunthor was known as the Chief Archon, lending a credit to the title that instantly made it coveted.

They were raised as Achmed had been raised, in study and to an unrevealed purpose, given knowledge as a religion, fed, threatened, and cajoled into the belief that they must grow into their potential or their people would be doomed.

None of them had seen more than eighteen summers.

They came from an assortment of tribes that before Achmed’s arrival had roamed the Teeth, preying on each other and whatever unfortunate creatures, human or otherwise, they could catch. Some were the spawn of the Claw clans, the warlike marauders that had lived in the borderlands, the lower foothills and rocky steppes that abutted the human realm of Roland. Others had been culled from the Guts clans, those living deeper in the realm of what they called Ylorc, past the guardian ridge of the Teeth into the deep forest glades and decimated cities that had once been the inner lands of the Cymrian stronghold. Possibly the most valuable of them had come from the Eyes, those demi-humans most adapted to thinner air, who crawled the ledges and peaks of the Teeth, watching the world from above, wrapped in clouds.

And some had come from the Finders. The Finders were not a clan in and of themselves, but rather were the descendants of those unfortunate Cymrians who had remained or been left behind a thousand years before when the Bolg overran Canrif. Their blood still contained some of the odd, magical elements of longevity and elemental power that their unknown and hapless ancestors had bequeathed them, but until Achmed came, they had no idea how to put that power to use.

Achmed saw them regularly but rarely, coming in to test them and redirect them. They were uncertain about his motives, as if it were not clear to this small grove whether the forester measured them in anticipation of cutting, or to be confident they could bear his weight on a climb to the clouds. There were ten of them that remained in this, the fifth year of training; some of the original children sent to him had been redirected to other lessons, one had perished, one had been banished. Those who had been released no longer studied the history of the Cymrians and of Roland, world geography and currency, and were no longer subject to the rigors of the king’s direct attention.

It was a sweet relief to them, and a horrific dishonor to their clans.

Those Archons that had survived the training came now, one by one, to the black tunnels of the Hand, where no light entered or escaped.

The first to arrive was Harran, the Loremistress, a Finder who had been selected by Rhapsody and trained by her personally until she had left Ylorc to rule the Lirin realm of Tyrian. Harran was thin, even by wiry Bolg standards, and her shadowy form barely disturbed the darkness at the bottom of the tunnel in which she hovered, waiting.

A few moments later came Kubila. His long shanks made him a superior runner, and generally guaranteed that he would arrive before most who had to travel to the Hand, even though his abode was the farthest away. He nodded to Harran in the dark, then came over to the finger in which she lingered and sat down before her to wait.

One by one they came, Yen the broadsmith, training to hold the position of Armorer, whose responsibility for building the unique weapons that armed Ylorc and were sold for trade already had made him one of the most powerful men in the kingdom; Krinsel the midwife, who came from a long line of respected clan mothers that managed all the medical needs of the realm; and Dreekak, Master of Tunnels, the brilliant young engineer who was in the process of inspecting and renovating the hundreds of miles of passageways and underground complexes that the Cymrians had built a thousand years before. Additionally, he had restored a number of the systems that Gwylliam had designed to make life within the cavernous mountains more civilized; the Cauldron, the great inner city of the guardian mountains, now had working ventilation, sanitation, and irrigation systems that circulated heat and air, provided rainwater for drinking and cooking, and channeled waste into vast central cisterns at the base of an unoccupied mountain crag, where once it had been ubiquitous and uncontrolled. In these matters, the demi-human Bolg were considerably more advanced, more civilized, than their neighbors in the human nation of Roland, who had long considered them monsters beneath contempt.

Until the arrival of King Achmed, the Earth Swallower, the Glowering Eye, the Night Man, Warlord of the entire deep realm, that had in fact been true. But he had changed all that, had forged the Bolg as he had Trug, into something greater, for a greater, if unknown, purpose.

A whisper of sound was heard at the arrival of Vrith, the Quartermaster, whose duties included the inventory and supplying of the entire kingdom, in particular the Bolg army. Vrith had been born with a clubfoot, a deformity that had resulted in him being left out on top of Kurmen crag to die on his tenth birthday. Rhapsody had rescued him and, seeing in him a fastidiousness for detail and an impressive head for numbers in his early lessons, had trained him to keep track of all the kingdom’s stores as Ylorc was evolving from a wasteland of loose marauders into a realm whose army was feared, its leadership respected, and its goods coveted.

Greel, the mining Archon known as the Face of the Mountain, arrived in the company of Ralbux, who had been trained as a scholar to oversee the education of the Bolg populace. They took their places on the ground at the index-finger tunnel.

Finally, the only Archon who was not Bolg arrived. Omet had been rescued from slavery in Yarim by Achmed and Rhapsody three years earlier. A human child whose mother had given him over to the mistress of the Raven’s Guild to broil in indentured servitude in the tile factories of that desert city, he had adopted Ylorc happily as his home. Somewhere in those mountains greatness is taking hold, Rhapsody had said upon setting him free. You can be a part of it. Go carve your name into the ageless rock for history to see. They were words that had echoed in his heart, and in his own words now, and led him to his post, the most secret of all the Archonic responsibilities.

Omet was the builder of the Lightcatcher.

After a few moments’ silence, the ten Archons became simultaneously aware of the presence of the king among them. Each knew that had Achmed not wished to be observed he would not have been, but the static hum of the tunnels indicated silently to them that their attention was being commanded. If any of them had been deaf to that hum, they might have also been made aware by the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall shadow that lurked behind the shade of the king in the darkness.

They crowded into the Hand, and the king motioned for them to sit. Grunthor stood in the Thumb, with Krinsel the midwife seated on the stone floor in front of him. Kubila and Harran sat at the opening of the next passage, the index finger, he with his lanky legs stretched out and his hands spread behind him, she crouched, knees drawn up as if she felt cold this deep in the mountain. Omet and the broadsmith Yen chose the next passage, while the others grouped into the last of the fingers. When they were in, silent and motionless, Achmed took his place in the large central passage, the palm of the Hand, on a stool that had apparently been waiting for this ceremony. He looked at them for a dozen breaths. “My children,” he said, his sandy voice as flat as any of them had ever heard it, “your trials are nearly over.”

Half a score of exhalations echoed through the chamber, and the Archons sought each other’s eyes in the blackness.

For Harran, the Loremistress, who was barely fifteen, this was especially welcome news. She had been commanded to recite a hundred genealogies, Cymrian, Nain, Lirin, and Bolg; read and memorize pages she was never allowed to see more than once in seven languages, a few of them long dead; commit to memory the names and leaders of every Bolg clan, as well as each soldier of the army; and manage a score of resources scattered or buried in the Great Library of Canrif, where the librarians and lore students under her direction researched meticulously in shifts that never ceased.

Seeing the relief in her eyes, Achmed smiled slightly. “That does not mean the tests are over, Harran,” he said dryly. “That is not the way of things. The tests of your knowledge are to come soon, and for the rest of your lives. The sword is tested when it leaves the forge, before it is finished and cooled in water—but that is not the real test of the sword. That comes later, in clashing and blood. But for now I am satisfied.”

He stared at the broadsmith.

“Yen. I know the metal from which you were made, drew the hammer across your edges myself, but have not yet cast you to the stones to see if you sing or shatter.” The smith swallowed visibly, but said nothing.

The king then turned to the Archon he was training in diplomacy and the ways of trade. “Kubila. I know your stock, taught you speed for the great mountain race, yet you will still need to show whether you or the coming storm shall prevail. But enough of tests for now.

“You are my Archons, keepers of our thousand and one secrets. Remember to count and hold them carefully.”

The young trainees turned to each other in puzzlement. None had ever heard him refer to anything by that name before. Achmed took notice of their confusion, and turned to Trug, who would one day be the Voice, and nodded his permission to speak. Trug cleared his throat.

“We hold many secrets, sire,” he said in a voice that had been trained to lose the harsh tones of the Bolgish tongue. “Which, my lord, are the thousand and one secrets?”

The king’s mismatched eyes, one light, one dark, gleamed with intent. “Who can answer?”

The Archons looked at each other again, then returned their gaze to their leader.

“The secrets of the fortifications, the breastworks and trapped tunnels,” the Master of Tunnels, Dreekak, whispered nervously.

“The secrets of the spies,” said Trug.

“The secrets of the Lightcatcher,” added Omet. His voice always scratched on the Bolg ears when he spoke in his attempt at their tongue, but none of the Archons winced.

“Those are all worthy answers,” the king replied. “There are greater secrets, secrets I will impart to you in a moment, to keep locked in your hearts, guarding them with your very souls. But we are guardians of many smaller, sometimes more urgent secrets as well.” He turned to Vrith, the Quartermaster. “How long can we stand a siege of the mountains if we are totally beset and surrounded?”

“Two months and sixteen days during this season,” Vrith answered rotely, as he had done many times before in several different languages. The Archons were accustomed to being questioned in this manner, and had been since early childhood. “Two days less in winter.”

“How many of our traders and agents are now outside Ylorc?”

“One hundred twelve,” Kubila replied.

“How many of the invisible routes used by the doves of Roland has the master of hawks discovered?”

“Nine,” said Trug.

“What lies at the bottom of the passage opened by the recent explosion of the Lightcatcher?”

“We don’t know yet, sire,” Dreekak said reluctantly. It was an answer that an Archon hated to give, but was best given quickly, lest the king believe that one was covering a weakness in his or her training.

The king nodded. “All these small secrets, and countless others, make up the thousand. But what is the one?” He watched them for a moment, then turned to Harran and called upon her wordlessly.

The young Loremistress thought for a moment, then answered. “The secret of why you have chosen us, what you are training us for.”

“That is it,” Achmed replied, pleased. “Your training is finished, at least that which was needed to bring you to the status of Archons. This is my last word to you as students: What is the secret of wisdom?”

Greel, responsible for mining, spoke. “Before acting, envision your act carried out a million times.”

“Before speaking also,” added Yen.

Achmed assented silently, then gestured for them to move closer.

“For all this time that I have taught you such secrets, I have kept one to myself, unshared, unrevealed to any but Grunthor.” And Rhapsody, he thought bitterly, but she did not retain it. “But if you are to fulfill my wishes for you as Archons, there can be no secrets between us. I share with you now the thousand-and-first secret. But you will need light in this lightless place in order to grasp it.”

Achmed took from his cloak an egg-sized stone that glowed clearly with light as bright as that of midday. The Archons shrank away from the radiance, but discovered a moment later that it was cold, and did not sting their night eyes, the eyes of cave dwellers who had lived in the belly of the mountains for centuries.

“The Nain discovered these stones a thousand kings before Faedryth, their present ruler. Their use was lost and found a hundred times between then and now. Let none of the lore you learn be ever lost in the same way.” He handed the glowing stone to Harran. “You will need this to see what must be seen before you can understand.”

As he spoke, he slowly lowered his hood and began to unwrap the cloths from his face. Between the mesmerizing effect of his words, and the vision in the bright light before them, only Grunthor, who had seen and heard it before, was breathing.

“To comprehend my purpose, my reasons for training you thus, you must understand something that you do not know about me as of yet. I was born from an unholy union to a terrible purpose: to find, hunt, and kill a spirit that no one could see. That purpose came to me as a racial imperative; I never knew my mother, but feel her blood in my veins still.”

The pale, purplish skin of his forehead, etched all over with veins, was no preparation for the sight of the whole of his eyes, mismatched in color, shape, and position, resting in skin so translucent and light that they might have been floating unsupported in his skull. The Archons swallowed in unison.

“While through my veils you may have recognized the traits of my Bolg father, one of a dozen soldiers that raped my Dhracian mother, who they chose to kidnap by a toss of the bones, what you now see is the bastardization of the race of which I was the first of a generation. The Dhracians are an old people, born of the wind, descended from the race of Kith, as you have studied, Harran. But the purpose of the Dhracians was singular—we were jailers, guardians. Eventually, when we failed in that task, we became hunters. But instead of being brought up with the training, the knowledge, and the understanding of the lot that was bequeathed to me by my Dhracian blood, I was instead raised by Bolg on the other side of the world, tortured and tormented and eventually imprisoned.” The voice held no trace of regret, no plea for sympathy, just a flat, toneless sound that indicated the import of the words.

“One day the urge in my blood became too great to deny; I knew I needed to find out what was driving me to murder. In order to escape from the Bolg, I was forced to kill he who had been made to guard me, my brother of sorts, really not much older than myself.”

The Archons stared at the newly revealed nose, its flaring nostrils almost like that of a horse, but made of delicate flower-petal filigree, underlaid all through with the vein lattice.

“In order to survive my flight, I was forced to consume him.”

The Archons nodded nonchalantly. Cannibalism had been common among their tribes before Achmed took the mountain. At Rhapsody’s insistence, it had been outlawed; the king had acquiesced not because of any of her arguments against savagery or because of how the practice was viewed by the outside world, but because he needed as many of his subjects whole and intact, and therefore uneaten, as possible.

The king’s virtually lipless mouth, made for tasting air for traces of fear, whispered in the darkness.

“Now that you have finally seen my face, you can understand. This is how I know what I know. How I feel you enter a room. How I hear you breathe any curse, smell your fatigue. It is in my skin. It is my blessing, and my bane. I can feel the rhythm of the world around me; I cannot hide from it. It is not flawless, but it is rarely wrong. And now I will tell you what you need to know in order to understand why we guard the thousand and one secrets.”

He turned to Harran and leveled his uneven gaze at her, as if he were sighting down a weapon. The Loremistress maintained a stoic aspect, but her thin body was quavering like a leaf in the wind.

“I have allowed you to study the lore of Roland, and of other lands on the continent, but have often indicated to you that what you were learning was really folklore, tales that have been polluted because they were told by generations of idiots, rather than preserved by Lirin Namers and others skilled in the art and sworn to the truth. What do you remember about the lore of the F’dor?”

The young scholar swallowed, her dark face growing pale.

“F’dor were the children of Fire, the ancient culture that sprang from it,” she intoned, reciting from the texts she had studied. “It was the F’dor who tamed fire, and gave it to mankind for its use in protection, in the warming of homes in winter, in the forging of weapons. The F’dor, now long deceased, were the forefathers of steel, of hearths, and the givers of the gift of flame to man.”

Achmed nodded thoughtfully. “That is what texts say, indeed. That is what the imbeciles who tend the Fire Basilica in Bethany preach to the hapless numbskulls who attend services there. That is what the world believes. I tell you now, it is the greatest lie that has ever been told.” His eyes glistened and he motioned them closer, to keep his words so soft as to barely be audible.

“In the Before-Time, when the world was being formed, there were five races that sprang from the primordial elements. Four of these races—the Seren from ether, the material that makes up the stars, the Kith from air, the Mythlin from water, and dragons from earth—lived in a fairly harmonious state, it is said, in that era of prehistory. The F’dor, the secondborn of those Firstborn races, however, were not an ancient culture that gave the world the hearth and smithing—they were demons of unimaginable destructiveness, bent on consuming all the life on the Earth, and finally the Earth itself. They were formless, evanescent, without corporeal bodies, and were able to take possession of a human host—or one any other race, as long as its victim was lesser in power than it was. They did an impressive job of almost bringing the world to an end until the other races joined forces and thrust the lot of them into an impenetrable Vault of Living Stone, deep in the Underworld, the belly of the Earth near its fiery core. Each race played a part in the capture and imprisonment, but it was the responsibility of the Kith to act as jailers. And so a tribe of them, the Elder subrace of Dhracians, was given the onerous task of guarding the Vault, living deep within the earth, separated from the wind that is their mother, day into day into eternity.

“All went as it was prescribed for millennia, until one day a star fell from the sky into the sea, and its impact ruptured the Vault, allowing many of the F’dor that had been imprisoned there, biding their time in futile dreams of destruction, to escape to the upworld, and take their place among the unsuspecting human population that had evolved from those Firstborn and Elder races. And so the destructive element was free.”

Achmed paused in his diatribe. The Archons were barely breathing, probably from the combined shock of seeing his face for the first time and hearing more words spoken together than he had uttered since coming to Ylorc four years before. He willed himself to be calmer, to make his voice less harsh.

“Those beings still live, some of them imprisoned in the remade Vault, others free, hiding in broad daylight, their poisonous, parasitic spirits clinging invisibly to a human host. They are almost impossible to discern from the rest of the mass of human flesh that walks the world. And those that are upworld want but one thing: to free their kin in the Vault from their imprisonment, so that together they can satisfy the primal longing that consumes their race—the hunger for destruction, for annihilation, for the obliteration of all life, not just in this world, but beyond it. They seek a return to utter Void, even at the cost of their own existence. And their presence is felt in the tides of the universe, in war, in conquest, in murder, in betrayal. In short, in the ways of men.

“And what they ultimately seek—that is the last secret. I tell it to you now. A prophecy long ago told of a Sleeping Child—three such children, actually. Do you know this prophecy, Harran?”

The Loremistress nodded, closed her eyes, and intoned the words in a soft, toneless voice.

Achmed nodded as Harran fell silent. “The first child in the prophecy is sheltered within these very mountains,” he said gravely, watching the faces of the Archons, their eyes glittering in the darkness. “She is an Earthchild, a being made of Living Stone, left over from when the world was born. For all I know she may even be the last of this race, which the dragons fashioned out of elemental earth. The ribs of her body are made of the same Living Stone that comprises the Vault—and would thereby act as a key to it were she to fall into the hands of the F’dor. And they know she is here.”

An audible shudder arose from the assemblage. Achmed glanced at Grunthor, whose face remained impassive. The Bolg king exhaled, then continued.

“The second Child mentioned in the prophecy is the star that fell millennia ago into the sea on the other side of the world, the same star that shattered the Vault. That burning star, which slept beneath the sea for thousands of years, rose and consumed the Island of Serendair in fiery cataclysm centuries ago. And for all the destruction that ensued, for all the lives that were taken, she brought about far less damage than the other two could.” The Bolg king fell silent, the noise in the tunnel disappearing with the sound of his voice.

Finally Omet spoke. “And the third, sire? The eldest?”

The Bolg king remained quiet for a long time. Finally he spoke, and when he did, his voice was soft.

“Long ago, at the beginning of Time, when there were none on the Earth but the five Firstborn races, the F’dor stole something from the dragons—from the Progenitor of the race, the eldest of all wyrms. It was an egg. They took this nascent dragon, this unborn wyrm, which had in its blood all the elements, and tainted it, made it impure, though it was kept in a state of stasis, allowed to grow until it was part of the very fabric of the world. Deeper even than the Vault, lies the last Sleeping Child; a beast of unimaginable size, slumbering in cold downworld caverns, waiting for its name to be called, to be summoned to life, as all dragons must be in order to hatch. It has grown thus, and remained asleep, because when the F’dor were imprisoned in the Vault, all the heat of their evil fire was taken with them. But should they be freed, they will immediately call it to life—and it will awaken.

“And it will consume the world.”

The king stood a little straighter, trying to avoid noticing the glances that were being exchanged in the Hand.

“I fled from the grip of an upworld F’dor more than a thousand years ago, because in the course of my servitude I looked across the threshold of the Vault itself. And seeing what was inside caused me to understand that there are things worse than death, worse than exile, worse than endless torture. And seeing that, knowing that, I came to understand why the Dhracian blood in my veins screams for the death of all F’dor, why I must hunt down whatever hint of their foul stench I catch on the wind, to rid the Earth of each and every one that I can find. It is a calling that surpasses all other duties. And while I am a hunter, I am also now a guardian—the guardian of the Earthchild. The guardian of the Bolg. And, in a hideously ironic sense, I am the very guardian of the Earth. Trained and experienced as a killer, an assassin, a dealer in a catalogue of death that once held an entire continent in fear, I am now the one who has the ultimate responsibility for guarding Life, and possibly the Afterlife, for the F’dor hate them both, and seek to snuff both of them out if they can.

“So, my involuntary children, while there are some who believe that age will never take me, that I can die, but not by the hand of Time, there is a legacy that I must not only leave to you, but must enlist you in, beginning now, as you come into adulthood. I can no longer carry this mantel alone. Grunthor has always been my aide in this, but he cannot do it alone, either. I do not know what direct power the F’dor have outside the Vault, how many demonic spirits are abiding in human hosts, but I can see their influence growing in the hearts of men, that longing for destruction rising beyond the mountains where we reign. You will stand with me—like me, your destiny is not a choice that you made, but was made for you. It is as much beyond your control as the beating of your own heart. There is no option, no way of shirking or avoiding it.

“This is the thousand-and-first secret: Your lives will be spent in endless vigil, guarding the Earth, and all that lives on it, and after it, from that which seeks to extinguish it. Your training, your dedication, your wisdom—your very lives—are pledged to hold these mountains, to guard the Earthchild, as I guard her, to be the first, and possibly last, barrier, between the F’dor and the wyrm that sleeps in the heart of the world.”

The Archons nodded one by one in understanding.

The Bolg king lifted his veils back into place.

“But lest you think the task is too onerous to be borne, remember that at least you were born Bolg. If you begin to feel sorry for yourselves, keep in mind that you could have been born human or, far worse, a human Cymrian. Self-pity usually disappears when you consider that could have been your lot.”

Grunthor chuckled for the first time that night.

“Yeah, and if ya want ta see what it’s like being one o’ those, Oi can rip ’alf yer brain out and send ya to Roland to live. Any takers?”

The vigorous shaking of heads raised a faint cloud of dust in the stolid corridors of the Hand.

Upon returning from the Hand, Achmed discovered a nervous messenger waiting for him in the Great Hall.

Impatiently he put his hand out to him, a boy even younger than Trug, and was quickly given the ivory tube which had been delivered by the mail caravan. He broke the wax seal, and, seeing that it was from Haguefort, drew the parchment it contained across his veiled face between his nose and lips. Rhapsody’s scent still clung to the paper, the fresh aroma of vanilla and spiced soap. The odor pleased him, though he was not consciously aware of why. Where it could have carried the perfumes of myrrh and amber sought by other queens, other monarchs, the scent was instead that same sweet spice she learned to cleanse herself with as a farm girl on the other side of Time. It was innately comforting to know that at least some things about her had not changed in the time since she had taken on the title of Lady Cymrian, and the role of being Ashe’s wife.

“Somethin’ from the Duchess?” Grunthor inquired.

Achmed nodded. “Just a note requesting in code that I be on the lookout for a messenger bird to arrive sometime in the next few days.”

The Sergeant-Major let out a low whistle, and reached into the bandolier that adorned his back. The hilts of his prized collection of weapons, spread out in a fan like the spines of some ferocious reptilian creature, squeaked as he felt around for one to play with. Upon settling on The Old Bitch, a serrated short sword named in honor of a hairy-legged harlot he had known in the old world, Grunthor drew the weapon forth and ran it along the palm of his hand.

“Sounds like we may be seein’ ’er again soon. Good; Oi’ve missed ’er.”

The Bolg king exhaled. “Let’s just hope that she’s not going to need rescuing again. She hates that even more than I do, if that’s possible. But for now, I can’t be concerned about her and whatever she wants. I have a shattered kingdom to rebuild.”

9

For most of the wagon trip to Bethany, Faron was mercifully unconscious.

The creature’s insensible mind, primitive at its best, sank into an almost comatose state, a hazy realm where half-formed dreams and images appeared in fragments, dashed away by the splash of tepid water the fishermen routinely tossed on its body, causing it to sizzle in the hot sun. Faron lay beneath the seaweed that the fishermen had blanketed its pale body with, wishing for death when conscious, flitting through nightmares when not, burning in the sun in either case.

Finally, after a time that seemed endless, the wagon rolled to a slow stop and did not show signs of starting up again.

Quayle climbed down from the wagon and stretched painfully. He shaded his eyes and looked at the round-walled capital city of Bethany, surrounded by its exterior ring of villages and settlements, then pointed into the depths of the shops and huts and foot traffic swirling within it.

“The tinker said the fellow in charge of the sideshow is in the alley out back of the Eagle’s Eye Tavern,” he said to Brookins, who stretched as well and nodded. “You go into the city proper and sell the catch to the fishmonger, and I’ll go into the outer circle, see if we can make a bargain for our Amazing Fish-boy.” Brookins nodded and clicked to the horse.

Quayle watched as the cart wended its way up to the western gate, one of two of the entrances that were allowed by law to give access to animals of trade and other mercantile traffic. Entry through Bethany’s eight gates was strictly enforced, and therefore much of the trade that did not fit within the law was conducted outside the ringed ramparts, in the external villages and settlements.

It was to this place he went now, seeking the Eagle’s Eye, and the alleyway behind it.

Quayle was no stranger to this place, or places like it all over Roland. He chose to sell his wares and spend his profits in just such fringe settlements—the margin was higher, and the goods were cheaper. In addition, there was a variety and availability of merchandise that no self-respecting merchant in the city proper would handle.

Along the route to Bethany they had passed many other tradesmen of their ilk, asking if anyone had seen the traveling circus that had been performing along the coast a few weeks prior. Finally a tinker had told them, amid the rattle of the pots and pans hanging from his cart, that the carnival had traveled to Bethany and was doing a fair business in the grim streets outside the walls.

He had also provided directions to the tavern.

Quayle made his way through the cobbled streets, past the rows of small shops, inns, and houses, absorbing the sights and sounds of the place—the squawking of chickens at the poulterer, the merry, screeching laughter of street children, the haggling of the old women in the air market, the appetizing smell of food wafting from within the taverns. Quayle was hungry, and he wanted to remain that way until he had made his bargain; it assured that he would be more virulent in his negotiations.

Finally he came to the place where the tinker had directed him. The Eagle’s Eye was a seedy building in need of repair, fronted on a dark thoroughfare known as Beggars’ Alley. Quayle slipped into the lane that led behind the building, following the sound of commerce in the back streets.

A small group of men, with a plain-dressed woman and a few boys, were gathered in a circle around a brawny, bald man, shirtless, wearing hobnail boots and a length of wire whip looped around his shoulder that hung to his waist. He was leading something on a chain, a bear perhaps, that was jumping around on the filthy street, growling and squealing. Quayle moved closer to get a better look.

Once he broached the circle he could see that the creature on the end of the leash was a man, or at least manlike; it was covered completely with hair, even to its eyelids, walking around like an ape on its knuckles. Every now and then the freak would lunge at the crowd, causing them to reel back in amused consternation; the huge man dragged the hairy being back by the leash, growling at him in a menacing voice. Quayle’s lip curled in disgust.

His obvious disdain caught the keeper’s eye, and the muscular man glowered back, then loosed the chain a little and nodded in Quayle’s direction. The hairy creature lunged wildly at the fisherman, scratching at his leg and crawling in frenzied dementia up as far as his waist, slobbering on his clothes, before the keeper tugged on the chain, dragging him back to the ground again. The other bystanders stepped hastily away from Quayle. The fisherman’s gaze did not waver; he glared at the keeper but otherwise did not move.

“All right, then, who wants a ticket?”

The voice came from behind Quayle. He continued to stare down the keeper as the others moved away; he could hear the sound of coins being exchanged and directions to a place at the outskirts of the town being given. Finally when the people who had been watching moved away, the man behind him came around to the keeper’s side.

He was tall and thin, with a similarly thin black beard that brushed the edges of his cheeks. The man was dressed in gaudy silk pants, striped in red and gold, with a green waistcoat and a tall black hat.

“Well, my friend, can I interest you in a ticket?” the man said; his voice was deep and pleasant, with a sinister ring to it.

“If that’s what you call a freak, I think not,” said Quayle, pointing to the panting creature.

The tall man stepped closer. “I assure you, my good man,” he said, his voice inviting and threatening at the same time, “the Monstrosity is a sideshow of incomparable interest. There is something for every taste. You can’t help but be entertained. As for freaks”—he leaned closer, speaking as if he were delivering a secret—“the darkest recesses of your mind cannot possibly imagine all the horrors the carnival holds.”

Quayle rubbed his chin, as if considering. “And who is in charge of this carnival?”

The tall man’s dark eyes roved over Quayle’s face.

“Who’s asking?”

“Someone with somethin’ to sell,” the fisherman replied stoutly. He had seen too much dark action in his days on the wharf to be intimidated by a clown in striped pants, a muscle-bound deadglow, and a hairy man behaving like a monkey.

The tall man’s eyes narrowed.

“I am the Ringmaster of the Monstrosity,” he said darkly. “And I doubt that you have anything that is of interest to me. I have collected the finest specimens of freakdom from every corner of the world—”

“What about a being that is both man and woman, and part fish?” Quayle interrupted.

The Ringmaster snorted. “Got one,” he said.

Quayle crossed his arms. “This one’s real.”

Rage began to brew in the tall man’s black eyes. He cast a glance around the alleyway to ascertain whether anyone had heard Quayle’s derisive comment. “All of the Monstrosity’s freaks are real,” he said, unmistakable menace now in his voice. “And now, if you don’t wish to buy a ticket, you should leave.”

Quayle considered without blinking. “Tell you what,” he said, ignoring the blackening anger on the face of the keeper, “I’ll buy me a ticket, but you will come meet me outside the sideshow half an hour before it opens at dusk. I’ll show you my Amazing Fish-boy, and if you want him, you’ll buy him from me—and buy back the bloody ticket. Bargain?”

“Half a crown,” the Ringmaster said, extending his palm.

Finally Quayle blinked. “Truly, I am in the wrong business,” he muttered, pulling forth his coin purse and depositing the coin grudgingly in the tall man’s hand. “But at least I know that when you want to buy my freak, you will be well flush to pay me handsomely.”

Quayle met up with Brookins outside the western gate.

“How’d the catch sell?”

Brookins offered him his hand and pulled him into the wagon.

“Surprisingly good,” he said, taking the reins again. “The fires on the western coast shut down the flow of fish. The mongers were pretty hungry for it. An’ I found ropestock for dirt cheap.”

Quayle rubbed his hands with delight. “This is shapin’ up to be a very prosperous trip, Brookins,” he said importantly. “How’s our fish-boy?”

“ ’Twas alive the last time I checked him, but he’s startin’ to shrivel. They’ll need to get him into a tank or something fairly soon. And he stinks to beat all.”

“By sunset he will be out of the wagon; we can scald it good before headin’ back,” Quayle said. “Well, I’d best check on him and see if we can pretty him up before he meets the Ringmaster tonight.”

He crawled into the back of the wagon, stepping gingerly around the seaweed blanket, and pulled it back carefully from the creature’s face.

Unconscious, exposed to the sun, Faron merely blinked and exhaled, the air escaping through the fused sides of its mouth in a hiss.

Quayle reached over and shook the creature, recoiling at the slimy feel of its skin.

“Hey! You! Wake up, beast. You’re going to the grand ball! At least for your kind.”

The creature did not move.

Quayle’s brows drew together. “Wake up,” he urged the creature again. When it still did not respond, he looked over his shoulder at Brookins. “Not good—they won’t want to pay as much if all he does is lie there.”

“Mayhap he’s sick,” Brookins suggested.

“Mayhap. Fish out of water—can’t be feelin’ too well.” Quayle steeled himself, then gingerly took hold of the creature’s thin wrist and raised its soft arm, folds of skin hanging loosely, only to have it fall limply at its side again. The fisherman exhaled in annoyance, then blinked, moving closer for a better look.

In between the long, arthritic fingers something was wedged.

Quayle reached out and took hold of one end of it. It was thin and hard, with a ragged edge, green. At first it had blended into the seaweed so that he had not seen it. He gave a tug.

The creature’s eyes flickered open.

Quayle tugged again.

The fishlike creature hissed, louder this time, its head lolling back and forth, struggling to awaken.

“What the—?” murmured Quayle. He tugged once more, with as much torque as he could muster. The object broke free of the creature’s grip, leaving a thin trail of black blood dripping between its spindly fingers.

The creature’s eyes snapped open, and its fused lips shook with agitation. It hissed wildly, and flailed its weak arms, reaching for its treasure.

Ignoring its protestations, Quayle held the object up to the light of the afternoon sun. It was hard, like an insect’s carapace, with tattered edges, at the same time flexible, with tiny etchings that scored its surface. At first he would have said that it was green in color, but when the light hit its surface, it refracted into a million tiny rainbows, dancing over the object.

“Bugger me,” Quayle whispered, entranced.

The creature hissed louder and spat, its eyes focused on Quayle, brimming with anger. It made another weak grab for its object, but Quayle moved easily out of reach.

He stared at the thin disk for a moment more, then looked back at the creature, who was glaring at him with all of its remaining strength.

“You want it back?” he asked softly. The creature nodded angrily. “Good—you do understand me. Well then, my friend, if you want it back, you’d best look lively in front of the Ringmaster; if he likes you enough to buy you, then you can have your treasure back. And only then.” He slid the ragged disk into his shirt and climbed back onto the wagon board, turning a deaf ear to the piteous wails and whimpers coming from the back.

The Monstrosity was set up to the north of the city, just beyond the edge of the outer villages, in a ring of torches and lanternlight that cast twisting shadows on the Krevensfield Plain beyond.

In the light of the fading sun and the flickering brands, Quayle and Brookins could see ten circus wagons, each painted gaily in dark, rich colors with images that defied the imagination. In addition, there were several carts and a number of dray horses, with a multitude of tents set up all around.

A steady stream of people were en route to the sideshow, a host of wide-eyed spectators mixed with unsavory characters undoubtedly seeking other pleasures than the mere spectacle of viewing the monstrous. Quayle knew that sideshows were often fronts for peddling flesh, particularly flesh of the more perverse nature.

A ring of burly guards, dressed in the same fashion as the keeper he had seen in Beggars’ Alley, stood at intervals around the perimeter of the sideshow. The ticket taker, a hunchback with a harelip, waited at the entrance, carefully collecting the pieces of fishskin parchment that the Ringmaster had sold to the curious in the alley; sideshows often operated only with presold tickets, to avoid keeping their lucre on the premises in case of bandits or authorities who wished to harass them or shut them down. The hunchback waved two young boys away, followed a moment later by one of the guards, who growled at them.

“Ya can come back tamarra!” the hunchback shouted as they ran. “We here fer two more days!”

Brookins shielded his eyes from the torchlight and looked around. “I don’t see anyone waitin’,” he said nervously. He clucked to the horse, who was dancing anxiously in the torchlight.

Quayle glowered in agreement. There was no one outside the ring of tents and wagons waiting to meet them.

“I can go in and find him,” Brookins offered.

The other fisherman laughed. “I’d forgot you had a taste for this sort of thing, Brookins,” he said, scanning the scene again and still seeing no sign of the Ringmaster. “But we don’t want to meet him on his own twisted ground. Such places are havens of monsters, after all.”

“So how are we gonna talk to him?”

“We’ll get him to come out to us.”

Brookins scratched his head, perplexed and agitated. “But what if he don’t come out?” he said, watching the crowd begin to enter the gate.

“Oh, mark my words, he’ll come out,” Quayle said confidently.

He jumped down from the wagon, then pulled the oilcloth covering back. The creature in the seaweed hissed at him, its eyes full of hate.

“There ya go, bucko, hold that thought,” he said to it, ignoring its withering glare as it struggled to reach him with its bent limbs.

He pulled the oilcloth covering over the creature once more, then stood up in the wagon, cleared his throat, and began calling in the barker’s voice he had used in his days as a monger on the wharf.

“Step rightly, lads and lasses, come one, come all—see the Amazing Fish-boy! A better freak you’ll not find within the show you’ve already paid for—and what’s more, it won’t cost you a thing!”

The crowd of onlookers heading into the Monstrosity continued streaming past him, though a few turned and looked in his direction.

Quayle tried again. “Come now, if you dare, look into the face of true monstrosity! Come and take a gander at a being who is half man, half woman, and half fish!”

A few men slowed their gait, but otherwise the crowd ignored him, hurrying to the tents.

Not to be deterred, Quayle addressed a heavyset woman strolling with her husband, a redheaded man with a barrel chest.

“You, madam! You appear to be a right brave soul. You want to be the first to see the real freak? Somethin’ so frightening that the Ringmaster of the Monstrosity himself is afraid to come out and see it?”

The woman paused, intrigued, and plucked at her husband’s arm. The man shook his head disapprovingly, but she dug in her heels.

“Come along, Percy, he picked me! I want to be the first!” she bleated. “Come on, now, love. Let’s have a look.”

“Yes, manny, listen to the little lady,” said Quayle in a manner he believed to be smooth. “You can look, too. And it won’t cost you nothing. Be the first! Or move on.”

The barrel-chested man cast a longing glance in the direction of the Monstrosity, then looked back at his wife’s expectant face and sighed.

“All right, Grita, but then we are late for the gate,” he said grudgingly.

Quayle clapped his hands together in delight. As he had expected, a small crowd had started to form, willing to delay for a moment their entry into the carnival of freaks in anticipation of what might be hiding in the wagon. The light from the torches cast long fireshadows that scurried across the oilcloth, making it seem like a menacing bog or a cave from which something hideous was about to appear.

“Come ’round this side, missus,” he said to the woman, who eagerly made her way around the wagon to the place where the fisherman had indicated; her husband followed her, exhaling loudly. Quayle glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the sideshow; as he expected, enough of the crowd had been diverted to have caught the attention of the hunchback at the gate. The ticket taker muttered something to one of the bare-chested guards, and the muscle-bound man slipped through the gate and disappeared into the Monstrosity.

Quayle returned his attention to the woman, who was dancing impatiently next to the wagon. He adopted as polite a tone as he could muster.

“Are you ready, missus?”

The woman nodded eagerly.

“Now, make sure you stay within grasp of your fine husband here. This is a savage beast.”

“Get on with it,” her husband growled.

Quayle glanced up at the small crowd once more, and, determining the size to be right, he nodded.

“Very well, then. Behold the Amazing Fish-boy.”

He grasped the oilcloth and tugged it up so that the woman and her husband could see inside, while the rest of the crowd around the wagon watched their faces.

The man and the woman peered into the depths of the wagon.

At first all they could see was darkness. The woman stood on her tiptoes and leaned in for a better look, while her husband crossed his arms, looking annoyed.

“I don’t see nothin’,” he said in a surly voice.

“Neither do—”

Just as the words left the woman’s lips, the creature in the wagon lunged at her with all its might, hissing and screeching ferociously. Black water poured from its gaping mouth, its lips fused in the center over its soft yellow teeth, its eyes, cloudy with cataracts, filled with unmistakable murderous rage.

Both of them reeled back in shock, then screamed in unison. The woman’s face went completely gray, and she darted behind her husband, sobbing; he could do little to help, as he seemed rooted to the spot, gibbering like a monkey.

The unveiling had its desired effect. The response was so genuine, the husband and wife so aghast, that it caused ripples of residual horror to wash over the small crowd, which gasped in fear, even without seeing the freak in the wagon.

Quayle chuckled at the shock on Brookins’s face; the ripple of terror had caught his dockmate unaware. He pulled the oilcloth back over the wagon.

“All right,” he called to the crowd around his wagon, which had tripled in the wake of the scream, “who’s next?”

Brookins, recovering, had been watching the gate. “Quayle,” he murmured, “he’s comin’.”

Without looking, Quayle nodded. “You, sir?” he asked quickly, pulling a tall, brawny man in from the wagon’s edge. A group of other people around him stepped quickly back.

The man was coaxed into place just as the Ringmaster and two of his keepers came into the circle around the wagon. Quayle timed his revelation to coincide with the Ringmaster’s arrival; when he was just a few steps away, the fisherman pulled the oilcloth off again, once again eliciting a strangled gasp and a cry of genuine horror rising from the brawny man’s viscera.

The crowd of peasants began to talk among themselves in an enthusiastic blend of excitement and fear. The Ringmaster shoved his way through the convocation, followed by his keepers, trying to talk above the din of chatter, endeavoring to convince the group to move on to the gates of the sideshow, but the promise of free viewing of what must be a heinous monster served to make them insistent upon seeing it for themselves.

“What do you think you are doing?” the Ringmaster demanded angrily of Quayle, who was watching the proceedings with a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

“Why, just giving your sideshow customers a little—a little—”

“Side show?” Brookins piped up.

Quayle chuckled. “That’s it! A side show to the sideshow.” He glanced from the boisterous crowd, which was now jockeying to see who would peer into the wagon next, to the livid Ringmaster and his bristling henchmen, and leveled an insolent stare at the man. “Now, don’t get uppity, Ringmaster,” he said patronizingly. “Remember, it’s you what stood me up. I offered you first crack at this freak, and you didn’t bother to come to our arranged appointment.”

The Ringmaster pushed his way through the crowd and came around to the side of the wagon where Quayle stood.

“Let me see it,” he demanded. He seized the edge of the oilcloth.

“Ah, ah,” Quayle chided, slapping his hand away. “It’s not free for you, Ringmaster. You charged me to come into your show. Seems only fittin’ that you should pony up a crown to see mine.”

The crowd, caught up in the excitement, began to babble in agreement.

Inhuman sounds began to issue forth from under the oilcloth.

The Ringmaster’s face slackened. “I don’t carry money,” he said sullenly.

Quayle nodded. “Mayhap that’s true. So I will show you what a gentleman I can be. Despite how rude you’ve treated me, I will spot you the crown. But if you want to buy my fish-boy, you will have to pay me my price, plus the crown, plus the first half-crown you charged me.” He looked to the growing throng for support. “Does that seem fair?” he asked the assembly.

A chorus of assent replied.

“All right,” the Ringmaster snarled. “Show me your damned freak.”

Quayle broke into a wide smile and stepped aside, bowing and gesturing politely at the wagon. “Be my guest, sir.”

The Ringmaster lifted the tarp high.

A pale arm shot forth from the bowels of the wagon, its sickly skin almost green in the flickering light of the brands, followed a moment later by the misshapen head, its huge, cloudy eyes blazing, its grotesque mouth hissing and screeching sounds that were clearly inhuman, and possibly demonic. It clawed at the Ringmaster, clutching his waistcoat and dragging itself toward him. The man pulled free and stepped away. The creature swiped helplessly at Quayle before sinking weakly back into the depths of the wagon.

The crowd gasped collectively, the spectators in the front pushing and shoving to get clear of the wagon.

Only the Ringmaster stood still. He turned to Quayle, who was still unable to disguise his gloating.

“How much do you want for it?” he asked tersely.

Quayle pretended to consider. “Well, this afternoon I had planned to ask for fifty crowns,” he said, continuing on through the Ringmaster’s shocked intake of breath, “but since you’ve been so downright rude, the price is one hundred gold crowns. Plus two.”

The Ringmaster started to protest, but then caught sight of the crowd surging enthusiastically toward the gate of the Monstrosity, and reconsidered.

“Done,” he said. He motioned to one of the keepers, and the man disappeared in the direction of the outer villages of Bethany.

“We’ll give you an hour,” Quayle said, climbing back into the wagon. “My friend Brookins here would like to use his ticket, if you don’t object. Then we’re gone, with our money and without our fish-boy, or without it and with him. So if your lackey ain’t back with the money—”

“He’ll be back in time,” the Ringmaster said through his teeth.

“Good,” said Quayle, stretching out on the wagon board. “And just to show you what a generous chap I am, you can take its fish; that’s what it eats, though it likes eels better. And maybe next time you’ll show up when you’re expected.”

The creature was handed over in the dark, when the sideshow had closed for the night. It had spat and hissed, but its soft bones and weakened state made its transfer a fairly easy one.

“Don’t forget to keep it wet,” Quayle had cautioned the Ringmaster as the creature was placed in a canvas sling and carried away beyond the gate and into the strange world of the Monstrosity. “It dries out easy.”

“Take your money and get out of here,” said the Ringmaster, watching the keepers carry the creature into one of the tents within the carnival. He turned and followed them without another word.

Later that night, as they rejoined the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, heading back west to the coast, Brookins finally spoke. He had been staring directly ahead of him for hours, trying to process what he had seen beyond the gates.

“There was a—woman in there with two—two—purses,” he whispered, gesturing between his legs. He shook his head, trying to expunge the sight from his memory.

Quayle laughed aloud. “Good thing I was holding the gold, Brookins,” he said with a crude tone. “You wouldn’t want to deposit any of your ‘coin’ in either of those ‘purses.’ ”

“And one that ate manflesh,” Brookins continued, still attempting to exorcise the experience. “Severed arms all around her, tearing at the muscle and fingers with her teeth—”

“Stop now,” Quayle directed, annoyed. “I just want to enjoy our good fortune.” He patted his chest where the wallet of tender was kept, and felt something sharp scratch across the skin over his ribs. He reached inside his shirt and pulled forth the ragged, multicolored disk he had taken from the creature. It shone, prismatic and radiant, in the light of the sliver of the setting moon.

“Well, lookee here,” he said, pleased; he had forgotten about the strange object altogether. “I guess we have another memento of our fish-boy.”

“Didn’t you promise to give that back?” Brookins asked.

Quayle shrugged. “A promise to a fish don’t count,” he said nonchalantly. “I make ’em promises every day to lure them into the nets. I don’t keep those, neither. Besides, by the time we would get back there, that sideshow will have packed up and moved on.” He turned the scale over, admiring his own face in the reflection.

“Did they say where they are goin’ next?”

Quayle thought for a moment, trying to recall, then nodded.

“Sorbold,” he said.

They drove most of the rest of the way in their accustomed silence, Quayle planning how he was going to spend his share of their good fortune, Brookins trying to forget how they got it.

10

Faron awoke in water.

The creature blinked; it was dark inside the tent. It could make out dim shapes through the blurry glass of its container; with a little effort it floated to the surface and took a breath, bumping its soft skull on the ceiling of reinforced canvas that had been chained around the outside of the glass.

It tried to remember what had occurred to bring it to this place, but the picture in its limited mind was hazy and painful to contemplate. Faron vaguely recalled being wrestled from the wagon onto a sling of some kind, and fearing drowning when plunged into the tank, but other than that, everything was a blur.

It banged helplessly on the glass, futilely pressing its bent hands against the canvas ceiling, but gave up after a few moments, spent. At least it was out of the blistering sun, back in the comfort of water without salt.

The thought of salt water made Faron melancholy. The last time the creature had seen its father was aboard a ship; he had left and gone ashore in an angry state and never came back. Faron had seen him pass through the Death scale into a deep abyss; the Lord Rowan, Yl Angaulor, had refused him entrance to eternal peace. Its father’s death had broken Faron’s heart; deep despair had set in, but only for a moment.

Grief had fled in the wake of the tidal wave that followed its father into the Underworld.

Faron had been belowdecks, down in a pool of glowing green water in the darkness of the ship’s hold, when the wave struck the ship broadside. The creature could hear the screams a second before, but had no idea what was going on above until the ship lurched violently, upending the pool and slamming the creature into the hull. Faron had lost consciousness and awoke in the sea, surrounded by flotsam and jetsam, and no sign of another living being.

And remained thus, suffering the sting of the salt and the thunder of the waves, until it washed ashore, unconscious, in the fishermen’s net.

The flap of the tent was pulled aside, spilling light within. Faron winced.

A stout woman in many tattered layers of ragged dresses, soiled aprons, and torn petticoats came into the tent, a tray in her sharp-nailed hand. She wore no shoes; her enormous feet, easily twice as large as would seem proper, were splayed at an odd angle, flat and covered with calluses. The toes appeared to have a webbing of skin between them.

She came straight up to the tank and peered inside. Faron wrenched away to the back wall, treading water furiously. The woman’s wrinkled lips skinned back, revealing an almost toothless smile; what teeth she did possess were black or broken.

“Yer awake! Aw, dearie, Sally’s so glad to see yer feelin’ better.”

The woman set the tray down on the dirt floor, clucking sympathetically.

“Now, now, little ’un, nothin’ to fear. Old Sally would neva hurt ye.” She undid the knot in the chain that held the canvas cover on the tank and, reaching over her head, slid it off and onto the floor.

Faron’s arm went up defensively, and the creature hissed at the odd woman. She didn’t blink, just crossed her arms and regarded the new arrival fondly.

“Now, you just stop that, little ’un, my sweet. Ye got nothin’ to fear. Ye hungry?”

Faron’s cloudy eyes narrowed. The creature looked askance at her, then nodded guardedly.

“Poor dearie. Well, I’ve brung ye some nice fish, live ’uns. Will that do ye?”

A mix of hunger and excitement came into Faron’s eyes. The woman chuckled at the response, then pulled the cloth from the tray to reveal a small bowl full of goldfish. She held it up before Faron’s face, and chortled with delight as the creature began salivating and whimpering with anticipation. She extended a long taloned finger and, with a motion so quick Faron could not follow it, speared one of the fish on her nail, then held it, wriggling, over the tank.

“Here ye go, my beauty, my sweet little ’un,” she whispered. “Come an’ eat.”

Faron floated in the back of the tank for a moment, considering; finally, hunger won out over suspicion and the creature swam forward, bracing itself against the front wall of the tank. With quivering lips Faron reached up and plucked the writhing fish from the woman’s nail, shivering with delight as it slithered down its gullet into a stomach that had known nothing but hunger since the shipwreck.

Outside the tent, voices could be heard as two men walked past.

“Ye seen Duckfoot Sally? Ringmaster’s looking fer her.”

“Ayeh, she went into the tent ta feed the new ’un.”

The canvas tent flap pulled aside again. Faron shrank away from the light. Duckfoot Sally scowled at the man who opened it.

“Sally—”

“I ’eard him. Tell him ta keep his stripes on; I’m busy feedin’ the new ’un,” she said harshly. She turned back to Faron, and the snaggletoothed smile spread over her face again.

“So sorry, my luvly; come back now. Here’s another.” She speared a second fish and held it up.

After a moment’s hesitation Faron returned to her and allowed her to continue to spear fish and hold them up to be eaten. She didn’t seem to mind the touch of the creature’s lips; in fact, took delight watching the wriggling fish disappear, sating its hunger. She spoke softly to Faron, crooning occasionally as a mother would to a child.

Her ministrations were so tender, so kind after so long being tossed about in the sea, abused on the land, that it brought a memory back to Faron’s mind, the recollection of the father that had tended the creature so gently, even though given to fits of rage and cruelty. Then there welled up a sense of loss as profound as Faron had ever felt, and a tear rolled out of one cloudy eye and down the loosely wrinkled cheek beneath it.

Duckfoot Sally’s grisly smile dissolved to a look of sympathetic consternation.

“There, there,” she said quickly, setting down the empty fishbowl and turning back to the weeping creature, “what’s wrong, luv? Ol’ Sally’s here, and she won’t let no one harm ye.” She extended her hand and carefully closed the talonlike nails into a fist to keep from scratching the creature, then ever-so-gently brushed the tear from its cheek with her knuckles. “Don’t cry my sweet little ’un, my fair ’un.”

Faron’s eyes snapped open, recognition clear for a moment in them.

Duckfoot Sally’s eyebrows shot to the top of her forehead at the reaction.

“What, luv?”

The creature’s gapped lips quivered, and its gnarled hands banged against its chest.

Sally’s brows now drew together in puzzlement. “ ‘Fair ’un’? That be yer name?”

Faron nodded enthusiastically.

The hag clapped her hands together in delight.

“Well, well,” she said brightly, reaching out to caress the creature’s cheek again with her knuckles, “pleased ta meet ye, Fair ’un. Be ye man or woman?”

The creature blinked, no understanding in its eyes.

Duckfoot Sally shook her head. “Never mind; doesn’t matter. There are many here that dun’ know, either. No worries, luv. Sally’s lookin’ out fer ye, and that’s all ye’ll need.” She drew closer, her tatters rustling as she pressed herself against the glass. “Jus’ ’member this, my Fair ’un: yer as good as any livin’ soul born in this wide world. They may pay to see folks like us, ta laugh and throw things, but mayhap where you come from, why, yer king of yer kind! Mayhap somewhere, in a distant sea, yer the lord above all the fish that swim, an’ all the clams; the oysters, too! And what are they that laugh at ye? Peasants, all of ’em. Mindless peasants who save up their miserable coppers to go hoot at others, all in the ’tempt to ferget that their lives are of no consequence.” Her smile brightened, and her voice grew warmer.

“But ye and me, my Fair ’un, we perform fer kings and queens! Kings and queens, ladies an’ lords, Fair ’un! We go to grand cities, and palaces the likes of which those wretches will never see. So never ye mind when they laugh at ye, my Fair ’un. It’s us, ye and me and our like, that will have the last laugh.”

The Monstrosity remained three more nights in Bethany, one night longer than they had planned. Each night the crowds swelled to capacity and overflowed in long lines, waiting to catch sight of the horrific fish-boy. Word had spread from the outer towns into the city proper, and there was so much interest that even the Ringmaster, who kept to a rigid schedule, could not resist the business.

But after keeping the sideshow open from dusk to the end of the dark hours just before dawn three nights in a row, the Ringmaster decided there was such a thing as too much good fortune. He called for his exhausted menagerie to pack up and put rein to horse.

An entire empire awaited, a harsh realm where trade and commerce of all sorts, honest and otherwise, flourished.

Sorbold.

11

Rhapsody was pale throughout the dinner in Gwydion’s honor. After the meal had been cleared away Ashe hoped that she would regain some of her stamina and that her stomach would settle, but she remained nervous and quiet, even when the toasting began.

Ashe had been worried ever since he had walked back into the Great Hall and found his wife conversing with Jal’asee. Rhapsody’s choice of professions, attuned to the music of life as it was, usually assured that the vibrations in the air around her matched her mood. For the most part, ever since she had been returned to her home and family, she had been at peace. But the dragon sense within Ashe’s blood told him now that behind the calm court face she was terribly distressed. Whatever the Sea Mage ambassador had said to her had unnerved her immeasurably, but she had declined to tell him what it was.

Now, as the various dukes of Roland rose, each in turn, and offered words of wisdom and congratulations to his young ward, Ashe reached over and silently took Rhapsody’s hand. It was blazingly warm, either from the pregnancy or the element of pure fire she had absorbed, long ago, on her trek through the belly of the Earth with Achmed and Grunthor. In addition, it was perspiring, the nervous sweat of panic. He leaned over casually and whispered in her ear.

“Do you want me to make a polite excuse?” Rhapsody shook her head imperceptibly. “Are you all right, beloved? You are frightening me.”

“I have to find the time and strength to speak with the Sea Mage ambassador,” Rhapsody murmured. There was very little air in her statement; Ashe heard it in his ear, a Namer’s trick.

“Tomorrow,” he said quietly in return. “I think you should offer your toast and then rest. I can ask Jal’asee to come to the garden after your morning devotions. Will that suffice?”

Rhapsody exhaled, then nodded reluctantly. Finally, when the dukes of Roland had finished saluting Gwydion, and toasts had been offered by Rial of Tyrian and the other ambassadors from members of the Alliance, she rose a little unsteadily and turned to her adopted grandson.

“Gwydion Navarne, you are the son of a great man and the namesake of another. You have carried both their names, and the honor that accompanies them, all your life. On the last day of autumn you will finally come into your own name. I have no doubt that when the Singers and the Namers of history record it, the tales they will tell will be songs of greatness; of nobility, honor, bravery, loyalty, leadership, and kindness toward your fellow men. You have shown all these traits, even before gaining your birthright. Carry that forward into your life, as a man, as duke of Navarne.” She paled, then reached for her husband’s hand. “I’m sorry—I—must go lie down now.” Ashe started to rise, but she waved him back to his seat. “No, no—please stay, all of you, and keep the merriment going. I want my grandson to be properly celebrated, even if I am not in appropriate voice as a Singer of lore tonight. My apologies, Gwydion, and congratulations.” She wanly lifted her glass to Gwydion Navarne, finishing her toast, then smiled and blew him a kiss. She gathered her heavy velvet skirts.

Ashe rose and took her arm. “I will return forthwith,” he said to the guests, “as soon as the Lady Cymrian is safely settled. Pray continue, ladies and gentlemen.” The dukes and ambassadors stood as the couple left, then returned to their dinner conversations.

“Are you in pain?” Ashe asked as the two made their way through the resplendent hallways of Haguefort toward the Grand Stair, past the lovingly displayed suits of armor, heraldry, tapestries, and other antique objects that Stephen Navarne, once the Cymrian historian, had collected. “More than usual? Is the baby in distress?”

Rhapsody slowed her steps as they came to the foot of the Stair, and shook her head.

“No,” she said, her face paling. “I think I am just unsettled by what happened earlier.”

“You can tell me about it once I have you safely ensconced in bed,” Ashe said, slipping an arm behind her as she prepared to ascend, then reconsidered, lifted her into his arms, and carried her up the stairs. Her lack of resistance worried him; Rhapsody hated to be carried.

A palace guard opened the door to their tower chamber as Ashe approached, then closed it behind the couple and withdrew, leaving the hallway quiet.

Ashe carried Rhapsody to their bed and laid her down, drawing the bedcurtains around them in the candlelight. Then he sat beside her and looked deeply into her eyes, trying to assess her condition. He allowed his dragon sense, that innate part of his blood bequeathed to him by his lineage from Elynsynos, his great-grandmother, to wander over his wife, examining her on a level that was invisible to the eye.

Her breathing was shallow, a sign of the discomfort she routinely bore in the course of her pregnancy. The Seer of the Future, Manwyn, the Oracle of Yarim, had predicted her pain, but had offered a comforting reassurance.

The pregnancy will not be easy, but it will not kill or harm her.

Watching his wife now, struggling to breathe, clenching her jaw to maintain control over the pain, Ashe wondered angrily how broadly the Oracle defined harm.

Rhapsody’s green eyes, which darkened to emerald when angry, amused, or deeply touched, were blazing the color of spring grass. Ashe had noted that her blood was changing as the child grew within her; the dragon essence of their offspring was strong, palpable already, asserting itself, however innocently, by controlling the environment in which it was growing.

His stomach sank as he remembered the words of warning that Llauron, his father, had imparted about their marriage, and the death of his mother in childbirth.

I assume you are aware of what happened to your own mother upon giving birth to the child of a partial dragon. I have spared you the details up until now—shall I give them to you? Do you crave to know what it is like to watch a woman, not to mention one that you happen to love, die in agony trying to bring forth your child, hmmm? Let me describe it for you. Since the dragonling instinctually needs to break the eggshell, clawing through, to emerge, the infant—

Stop. His own voice had rung out in draconic tones.

His father’s eyes had held a stern light, but there was something more—a sympathy, perhaps. Your child will be even more of a dragon than you were, so the chances of the mother’s survival are not good. If your own mother could not give birth to you and live, what will happen, do you think, to your mate? I watched with horror the greatest sadness of my life in the face of what should have been my greatest joy. And I don’t wish for you to repeat my mistake, nor do I want to lose Rhapsody to our world.

Rhapsody had been unwilling to allow his father’s warnings to dictate their lives, however. She had insisted they visit his great-aunt, the Oracle, and ask about what her fate would be should they undertake to have a child. Manwyn, the Seer of the Future, was unable to lie, and her answers seemed quite clear. Rhapsody had indeed suffered in the throes of the pregnancy, but seemed to be getting better day by day. At least now she could see most of the time, where at the beginning her eyesight had been adversely affected. Ashe knew she was suffering, and hated it, but endured it, knowing that she had made her choice, was happy in it, and that the end result would be worth the discomfort she was routinely in.

For now, however, she appeared more distressed by whatever the Sea Mage had said to her than by anything that was happening within her. He squeezed her hand gently.

“Tell me.”

Rhapsody’s grip on him tightened. “He knows. Jal’asee knows about Achmed and Grunthor and me traveling through the Earth from Serendair.”

Ashe blinked, then considered for a moment. “All right,” he said finally. “What is the harm in that, Aria?” He addressed her by the name he called her in the most tender of moments, the Lirin word that meant my guiding star, in the hope that it would ease some of her distress.

Rhapsody released his hand and drew the pillows behind her. “It has always been a secret that we have held closely,” she said uncomfortably, as if the words pained her. “You are the only living person, outside of the three of us, who knows the details of how we got to this place—or at least we believed that until now.”

Ashe caressed her face, then began to unlace the bodice of her court dress, loosening the stays to allow her to breathe more easily.

“I can understand why learning what you believed is not so in this manner would upset you,” he said, pulling the cord from the holes, “but when you examine the impact of it, I think you will see that it was only a shock because you had believed it to be unknown. The knowing of it—where is the harm?”

Rhapsody exhaled as the garment loosened, pondering his words. “Achmed was always very specific about the need to guard this information closely,” she said, raising herself up to allow her husband to remove the heavy velvet outer dress, leaving her clad in the lighter white chemise beneath. “I think knowing that there is someone—someone from as distant and mysterious a place as Gaematria—that knows our past, our history, would make him angry, or at least suspicious.”

“When is Achmed ever not angry and suspicious?” Ashe said humorously, tossing her dress into a nearby chair; his dragon sense noted the inner flinch that resulted in Rhapsody, whose upbringing on a farm had engendered a sense of neat orderliness in her that he, the child of a royal line and the head of a religious order, had never learned.

Rhapsody smiled slightly. “True,” she admitted. “But it unsettles me as well.”

Ashe pulled back the crisp sheets and the duvet for her, then tucked them around her body, his hand pausing on the swell of her belly. “When the dinner is over I will ask Jal’asee to meet you tomorrow in the garden after your sunrise devotions,” he said, feeling the movement of the child within her and smiling. “Then you can ascertain what he knows, and whether it is a threat or not. The Sea Mages guard many secrets lost to time and the rest of the world. My guess is that yours is safe with him. But you can be the judge of that in the morning. In the meantime, there is nothing more to be done about it tonight.” He leaned forward and kissed her gently, then lowered his lips to her belly and pressed a kiss on their child as well, and rose. “Sleep now, beloved. I will return in a very short while.”

Rhapsody caught his neck and drew him into another kiss, then patted his face. “Very well,” she said. “Please make my apologies again to Gwydion for my poor attempt at a toast. When we name him duke in two months’ time, I will be in better form.”

“Rest now,” Ashe said, then extinguished the candles and left the room.

Rhapsody turned on her side in the dark and allowed sleep to take her. Her dreams were filled with unsettling images, recalled from the recesses of her mind. For what seemed like forever she was back in the darkness and cold, wet fear of traveling through the belly of the Earth along the Axis Mundi, the centerline of the world, crawling along the root of Sagia, the great tree her people worshiped as sacred. In her dreams she stepped forth from the ground, emerging into the world they had come to on the other side of Time, only to find it in the grip of war and terror; before her, people were running in every direction, screaming in fear, their voices swallowed in the cacophony of destruction that was burning all around them. What war is this? she wondered, walking through the devastation that encircled her, charred bodies littering the landscape. Is this the Seren War that tore my homeland asunder after we left, or the Cymrian War that shattered this new land while we were still traveling within the Earth?

In the distance the sky lit up with fire; Rhapsody strained in her dream to see what was illuminating the clouds. She thought she could make out the image of a winged beast circling, a billowing cloud of black-orange flame that smoldered of acid raining down from its maw. It’s Anwyn, she thought hazily, tossing in her sleep. This is neither war; it is a memory of the battle that took place three years ago at the Cymrian Council, when the wyrm called forth the Fallen of history from the dead to wage war on us. She willed herself to breathe easier, reminding herself that the battle was over, that the wyrm was long dead. Ashe’s draconic grandmother lay buried in a grave outside of Ylorc, having been struck by starfire from the sky.

By Rhapsody’s hand, and the power of Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of starfire she carried as Iliachenva’ar.

But the memory of Anwyn’s destruction did little to assuage her unconscious fears, did not drive from her mind the dreams of annihilation and death. It only permuted into the present, making her heart pound even more furiously, as images assaulted her unawake mind, pictures of herself running from a wave of caustic fire, her hands on her belly, shielding her child. In some scenes she was pushing the child before her, sometimes carrying it in her arms as a baby; sometimes it was within her still as she hid in darkness, calling to its great-grandmother, giving their location away. Each time she found a new place for them to hide, the dragon would find her; Rhapsody fled with the child, until at last she looked down to find herself alone, her arms empty.

Her dreams changed to visions of the sea roiling, of ships on fire and the coastline burning beyond the edge of the shore, of a continent, a world, at war. Great winged shapes circled above the land, strafing down suddenly on the dark human shadows that ran through the smoke, plucking them from the ground and taking them, writhing, back into the sky.

She was in a gray sweat by the time Ashe returned, muttering to herself in a low, panicked voice. He hurried to the bed and took her into his arms, gentling her down, quieting her as his dragon nature chased away the nightmares, banishing them from the ether that surrounded her. He whispered words of comfort to her in her sleep until her breathing deepened, her fever broke, and she slept dreamlessly on his shoulder.

He lay awake for a long time, stroking her damp forehead, caressing the silk of her golden tresses, wondering what could have caused the nightmares she had once suffered from, and from which she had been free for so long, to return so virulently. Perhaps it was the kidnapping she had lived through recently at the hands of a depraved man from the old world, who had long ago made a pact with a demon to ensure immortality, then had come to find her. Even her captor’s destruction, and her return to safety, could certainly not be expected to expunge all of the horror from her mind. Perhaps that was what was plaguing her.

Eventually he drifted off into dreams of his own, dreams in which he was walking through water, traveling through the ocean, formless and without bodily limitations, communing with the element to which he was bonded, as Rhapsody was bonded to fire. It was something he had done many times in the past, wading into the sea, turning his body porous while he was within the waves, letting it cleanse his soul and his mind from care.

What neither of them knew, as they slept in the darkness of their bedchamber, their hearts beating in time, if not in unison, their breathing measured breath for breath, was that while Ashe dreamt of the past, Rhapsody was dreaming of what was to come.

Her hunger sated, the wyrm ascended the cold peaks again.

The night sky stretched out, endless with promise; stars winked at the dark horizon, but above, all across the firmament of the heavens, the aurora blazed, pulsating bands of multicolored light, dancing to the silent music of the universe.

The dragon inhaled the frosty wind. I remember this, she thought, watching the twisting light strands gleam in the darkness above her. The northern lights; how intensely they shine; how cold. She could recall standing beneath them in a woman’s body, beneath the black sky and the glistening stars, watching her breath form icy clouds in the darkness as she pondered the power of the aurora, its beauty, its distant majesty. It was a sign of the power of ether, the element that was born before the world was born, that lighted the stars, that burned beyond the Earth, out in the vast void of space. As a being with dragon’s blood in her veins, she had been able to feel a whisper of the element within herself then; now, in dragon form, it pulsed within her, in tune with the vibration of the aurora.

Ether. Its cold beauty was hypnotic to her. But it was also the power of ether, mixed with that of pure fire, that had trapped her forever in this form, this wretched, serpentine body.

At the remotest edge of her awareness, a fragment of a memory jangled.

A young memory, recent; not from the old time, when she was a still a woman, but in her dragon form.

She was flying, hovering on the hot wind, something grasped in her taloned claw. It struggled, like the man whose head she had bitten off had struggled in her grasp.

A pretty sight, isn’t it, m’lady? How do you like the view from up here?

An image flashed through her mind, duplicated in her skin a moment later; it was the flash of a burning weapon, the sting of a wound in her wing, as the searing heat ripped through her, tearing her flesh. The agony of it echoed in the webbing between the hollow bones in the crippled appendage; involuntarily she winced at the recollection of the pain.

Damn your soul, Anwyn!

Too late, the wyrm whispered, her voice echoing her own in her memory.

She followed the path of the memory back, looking down in her mind’s eye into her blood-drenched claw. It seemed to her that the creature struggling within her grasp was a woman, a small woman with golden hair, brandishing a weapon of flame. She tried to form the woman’s name in her mouth, but the word escaped her still.

Hatred, black as the night sky above her, burned like the cold fire of the aurora within her three-chambered heart.

Anwyn, she thought; the name resonated, ringing a chime in her memory. Anwyn.

Her name.

Her own name.

She remembered.

12

Morning crept through the eastern windows, unbidden and unwelcome.

In the gray light of foredawn Rhapsody sat up, hazily aware and partially refreshed. She pressed a warm kiss on her sleeping husband’s cheek, then leaned back and watched him for a while, lovingly admiring his face, its chin and jaw shadowed with a night’s growth of beard. With his eyes closed, his human and Lirin heritage was more evident than when he was awake; the vertical slits in his eyes were the only real sign of the draconic blood that ran in his veins. Asleep, he was human, undeniably human. Rhapsody’s heart swelled at the sight.

Finally, when Ashe sighed in his sleep and rolled over she rose, running a hand gently across his shoulder, then made her way into the privy closet to dress for her morning devotions.

The air in the garden was chilly; autumn was coming, and the earth was beginning to cool in preparation for its long sleep that would soon begin. If this year was to be as most were, the snow would fall a sennight or so before the winter solstice, blanketing the middle continent with an unbroken layer of frost that sank deeply below the ground until Thaw, that time in midwinter, after the yule, when the harsh weather abated for one turn of the moon before going back to its frozen dominion until spring came. That warmth in the depth of winter held a special place in Rhapsody’s heart; it had been Thaw when she, Achmed, and Grunthor had first come to this place, stepping out of the dark belly of the world into the relative warmth of winter’s abatement.

But before winter came again, there would be autumn, harvest time, which was her favorite season. She had seen the first signs of it upon returning to Navarne from the seacoast, where her abduction had left the shoreline burning from Gwynwood to Avonderre. After Ashe and Achmed brought her back she had been confined to her bed for almost a sennight before she rebelled, and had hurried to the window in time to see the beginnings of the autumnal change, the tips of the leaves turning bright hues of red and orange, yellow and brown, in the trees beyond the balcony of her tower chamber.

Now, as she wandered the neatly manicured pathways of Haguefort’s gardens, waiting for the first ray of sun to crest the horizon, Rhapsody took the time to inhale the morning wind, scented with hickory and pine, and the sharp odor of leaves burning. It was a smell that put her in mind of her childhood home on Serendair, the farm country where she was born, where harvest had been a time alive with excitement, with urgency, with the year growing shorter, the days growing darker as each one passed.

She watched the sky now; Liringlas, the skysingers of the Lirin race, were accustomed to greeting the dawn with songs called aubades, and therefore could sense when the cobalt hue of the horizon lightened to the richest of cerulean blues, signaling the sun’s approach.

The first ray of morning cracked the horizon, sending a thin shaft of radiance into the clouds, bathing them with golden light. Rhapsody cleared her throat, and slowly began the ancient devotion, the song of welcome that her Liringlas mother had taught her while her human father stood and listened, entranced.

She sang the first aubade welcoming the sun, then turned westward and moved into the second one, the song which sang the daystar farewell. Rhapsody watched as the bright celestial light dimmed in the brightening sky, then began to sing her last customary aubade, the song to Seren, the star she was born beneath, on the other side of the world.

Aria, she chanted softly; my guiding star. Tradition held that each Liringlas soul was tied to the star which ruled the day of his or her birth; Rhapsody’s birth star had been Seren, the bright celestial body for which the island of Serendair had been named. The aubade to Seren had always been particularly poignant when sung in this new land, as she could never see it; it sparkled in darkness half a world away when the sun was high above her, and slept in the light of day when she was out beneath the stars of this new land. Rhapsody had taken to chanting the traditional evening blessing in the morning out of a sense of futility, choosing to honor her birth star at the time it was shining, even if she could not see it.

As she sang the namesong of the star, she heard a rich, crackling voice join with her, chanting in the same tongue she sang in.

Seren, si vol nira caeleus, toterdaa guiline meda vor til.

Blood flushed her face; she broke the song off in midnote and whirled around to see Jal’asee behind her, smiling pleasantly. His expression faded at her reaction.

“Pray forgive me, m’lady,” he said, bowing respectfully, “I did not mean to intrude.”

Rhapsody crossed the garden, her hand going instinctively to her belly in an unconscious gesture of protection.

“How—how do you know the Lirin aubades?” she asked nervously, struggling to keep her own voice in an appropriate tone.

Jal’asee smiled. “You forget, m’lady, that when the Liringlas of your homeland—our homeland—refugeed from Serendair, most of them sailed with the Second Fleet. And most of those that did chose to land in Gaematria after the fleet was blown off course by a storm, rather than continue on to this continent, or to follow the rest of the fleet to Manosse. So I live among a good number of your people. No doubt more than you have ever seen, if you were raised among humans.” He tucked his long-fingered hands into the sleeves of his robe and stepped cautiously toward her as the sun crested the horizon and the sky lightened to robin’s-egg blue.

“I have only met a few of my mother’s race in my life,” Rhapsody admitted. A wave of nausea rose and she struggled internally to force it down. She mimicked Jal’asee’s gesture, her hands suddenly cold, either from the morning chill or from the shock of surprise at his joining in her aubade.

The elderly, golden-skinned man stepped closer, then stopped when he was within gentle earshot. “In addition, it might be noted that I am of a race even older than your own, ancient as the Lirin may be,” he said congenially. “The Seren are said to be descended of the stars, a race born at the place where the element had its birthplace on Earth, where starlight first touched this world. We are, of course, named after that star, as was the Island. Your aubade is the musical vibration that rings the star’s true name. So I suppose it is not beyond reasonability that I might know the song as well.” He winked at her. “Failing that, I have a good ear for catchy tunes, I’m told.”

Rhapsody chuckled, half embarrassed. “How arrogant of me. I beg your pardon, Your Excellency.”

“Please, m’lady, address me by my given name. Among my people that is a sign of friendship as well as respect.” Rhapsody nodded. “Your husband asked me to meet you here; I apologize if I am early.”

“Not at all.”

“Excellent. Now, what I can do for you? I am at your service.”

Rhapsody struggled to keep her voice calm, while her stomach churned in distress. “You can elucidate your comments of last night, as I am confused by them.”

“About seeing you leave the Island?”

“Yes.”

Jal’asee studied her face; Rhapsody noted that he seemed aware of the rise and fall of her nausea, the movement of the child within her. When the sickness abated for a moment, the Sea Mage ambassador extended his arm and led her to a marble bench at the foot of a splashing fountain.

“Do you know why people become seasick?” he asked in his gravelly voice as they sat down on the bench. “Humans especially—for all that they are descended of a race born of water, and are themselves composed largely of it, one might think they would be naturally attuned to the rhythm of the ocean. But it is in their unconscious resistance to it, the desire to be a separate entity, that the vibration is unbalanced, thereby making them ill. If only they could learn to embrace the element within them.” He reached out one hand to the water cascading in pulsing rivulets in the fountain, the other to Rhapsody’s forehead. Unconsciously she closed her eyes.

She heard the sound of the fountain grow louder, and realized after a moment that it was Jal’asee’s voice, perfectly matching the vibrational tone of the splashing water. Within her she felt the nausea abate; her stomach settled, and her balance returned, along with the clarity of her sight that had been blurry since the child’s conception. She felt a sudden sense of wellness, as if she were floating in a bubble, protecting her from the jounces and jolts of the air that had been assaulting her for the last few months of her pregnancy. She opened her eyes to see the tall, golden-skinned man with the bright eyes smiling down at her.

“Better?”

“Yes, thank you,” Rhapsody said. “Now, please tell me what you meant last night.”

Jal’asee looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. Rhapsody was certain that she heard the splashing of the water in the fountain growing louder.

“When you lived on the Island of Serendair, had you ever seen one of my race?” he asked finally. His voice was soft, less scratchy than before, blending into the sound of the falling water.

Rhapsody considered his question. “No,” she said, “though I had studied a bit about the Ancient Seren. My mentor, Heiles, the man who instructed me in the science of Singing, had introduced me to the ancient lores, and told me of each of the Firstborn races, but before we could go into more depth he disappeared. I never saw him again, so I had to finish my studies alone.”

Jal’asee nodded. “Had you lived always in the fields, or did you ever go to a major city?”

“I—ran away from home as a young girl, and lived for several years in Easton.” Rhapsody’s face flushed with the memory of her life there and what she had done to survive.

“Easton was the largest city on the Island, a port city, with commerce from all parts of Serendair, as well as from other lands. And yet you never saw an Ancient Seren in all the years you lived there?”

“No. In fact, I thought they—you—were extinct; that except for Graal, the king’s vizier, who was known in the tales of the traveling storytellers, your race had died out in an earlier age.”

The Sea Mage settled himself more comfortably. “M’lady, long ago, before the grandfather of the king that ruled the Island you knew as a child was crowned, I was an instructor, a lecturer, at Quieth Keep, the royal college of Serendair. I also am a professor in the study of natural magic and tidal vibration in the academy of Gaematria. I tell you this for two reasons—the first is that I wish to present my information to you and have you see it, as a Namer, as close to lore in its accuracy.” Rhapsody nodded. Jal’asee chuckled. “Additionally, while telling you my tale, should I adopt an imperious, condescending, or arrogant tone, it is because once an academician, always an academician. I mean in no way to condescend to you, but some things are bred into professors, and sanctimony is one of them. I apologize heartily in advance.” Rhapsody laughed.

Jal’asee cleared his throat. “Forgive me for reiterating anything you already know,” he said. “In the history of this world, the earliest age, before recorded history, was known as the Before-Time. It was in this age that the Firstborn races, those sprung directly from the five elements themselves, came into being. The Seren were the first to evolve, as the element of ether was the first element. Ether came into the world from another place; it is the fire of the stars, and has a natural music to it, the music of light—I assume you know this, yes?” Rhapsody nodded. “Good. And had you ever seen a member of another firstborn race? Had you ever met someone who was Kith, or Mythlin, or a F’dor? Nor wyrm—you had never met a dragon in the old world, had you?”

“No,” Rhapsody said. “Mostly humans. A few of later races descended of the Firstborn—I saw a few Gwadd, and my mother was Lirin. I think I may even have seen a few Nain, though I did not know what they were at the time. But I never saw someone of a Firstborn race. I thought they had all died out, as we had been taught they had.”

“Well, as you can see, we did not.” Jal’asee covered his eyes as the sun rose higher in the sky, brightening the garden with intense light.

“So where were you, then?” the Lady Cymrian asked.

“In hiding,” the Sea Mage ambassador said seriously. “For many ages.”

“Why?”

“Self-preservation,” Jal’asee said. “The Seren were the first race to appear on the Island, but we were not alone for long. In the early days, after the F’dor were imprisoned deep within the world, peace reigned for a time; a long time by your measure. But eventually came the younger races, the Lirin, and the Nain, who did not care for each other’s ways. In their day, the Island still saw peace for the most part, because the place each race chose to live was distant from and unlike that of the other race, so there was little conflict.

“But then, after millennia had passed, came man—humans, or half-men, in our language. They were long generations removed from the primordial magic which had brought the Firstborn races into being, and mortal, bent on living short, violent lives. At first it seemed they would come and go more quickly than the wind, snuffing themselves out in their impatience, but we underestimated their strength, their endurance—and their pure bloodthirstiness. They were avaricious, jealous of land and power, and they set about taking it in any and every way they could, through war and murder and genocide.

“And there were many of them. They filled our once-open and spacious land with their settlements and cities, their fortifications and their prisons, continuing to multiply, until they had all but choked out what had gone before. We had welcomed them as refugees—and now they were poised to eradicate all the civilizations that had come before. Much the way Gwylliam did, ironically, to this land.”

Jal’asee paused for a moment, as if the tale had winded him. Rhapsody looked into his eyes; within the golden irises a dark swirl was dancing, as if he were looking directly back into a painful history. She waited quietly for him to continue, watching the bronze color return to his lanky, hairless forearms after a moment. Finally he shook his head and looked down at her, an awkward smile crooking his wide, thin mouth.

“I beg your forgiveness, m’lady,” he said hastily, mopping beads of sweat from his forehead with a quick motion. “When one is designed to live forever, history sometimes takes on an immediacy that Time strips from it in the eyes of those over whom Time has sway. It is as if a thousand years ago was yesterday.”

Rhapsody nodded, continuing to wait. Finally the Sea Mage shook himself, as if shaking off sleep.

“And that is the way of the world, I have learned over Time. In each era of history a civilization is formed, holds sway for a time, and then is displaced by another, either over centuries, or quickly, brutally, in conquest, until history is but a swirling sea of change, supplanting what had been before, keeping pieces of it, moving on. It is foolishness to hope that what you have built will survive—though we all do.”

The golden-skinned man blinked in the light of the sun, then turned his gaze on her once more.

“When, in the Second Age of history, known to scholars on Gaematria as Zemertzah, literally ‘The Broken World,’ it became clear to the Ancient Seren that our culture and in fact our people were facing destruction from the advancement of the human habitation of Serendair, and the conflicts that habitation brought with it, we decided there were but two choices for our people if we were to survive. We could leave the Island, emigrate to a distant and unoccupied land, as Gwylliam later did at the end of the Third Age, or we could go into hiding in the earth, deeper than the mountainous realms where the Nain lived, in catacombs left over from the birth of the world.

“The first choice was unimaginable—our race, few in numbers as it was, had been spawned from the very light of the stars, sprung from the clay of the Island where the starlight touched. Even in the face of war, of death, we could not abandon our birthplace, our home. So instead we disappeared from the sight of the world, the bulk of our population slipping away to those undercrofts, those vaults deep in the earth, leaving a few of our number in the air of the upworld to watch out for us, to wait for a time when it might be safe to return.

“The races of men, the Nain, the Lirin, the humans, and their like, barely noticed we were gone. They were busy in their own racial wars, and when the dust settled, the humans emerged victorious, as your history must have taught you. Each racial kingdom maintained its sovereignty under the human High King, the line which eventually ended with Gwylliam. That confederation of kingdoms shaped the Island to their will. So it was when you were born, and until the time that the fleets left it was still so. All that remained, in the eyes of the world, of my race was a handful of upworld Seren, Graal, the king’s vizier, as you mentioned, myself, and a few others numbering less than would need two hands to count. Eventually only Graal remained; when one of our remaining number of upworld brethren was brutally killed, the rest of us save for Graal quit the air and sought refuge in the catacombs with our people.

“And there we remained, until the Sleeping Child began to signal it would arise. Then we came up into the world again, those of us who chose to leave Serendair for life elsewhere beyond the Cataclysm.”

“I had no idea,” Rhapsody murmured.

Jal’asee smiled. “Had you remained, rather than leaving the Island with your friends, you might have known it. But it happened while you were traveling through the Earth, along the root of Sagia. And yes, m’lady, I know that you entered the World Tree with a key of Living Stone, in the company of he who is now the Bolg king, and his Sergeant-Major, because when you were climbing down into the darkness, along the Tree’s taproot, I looked out from the catacomb entrance that the Tree guarded and saw you myself.”

The memory of the journey within the Earth roared back in Rhapsody’s mind, the suffocating feeling of being underground, disconnected from the sheltering sky, and beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. She closed her eyes and swallowed, trying to fight back the fear that she could still taste, even four years later, though the journey within the world had been timeless. When they had emerged, they discovered that fourteen centuries had passed without them; all they had known in the world was gone. It was a loss she no longer thought about consciously, but still felt keenly when it was recalled.

“What did you see?” she asked haltingly.

The smile left Jal’asee’s eyes, and he regarded her seriously.

“I saw a girl, fearful and yet brave, an unwilling captive who struggled futilely but did not give in. I saw a creature, half Bolg, half Bengard, I would wager by the height of him, who seemed intent both on holding her captive and helping her along at the same time. And I saw someone else, someone I thought I recognized.” His forehead wrinkled deeply, but otherwise his face did not change. “I may know your friend, the Bolg king, but I will not be certain until I see him again.

“Those of us who lived beneath the surface of the world were in a state of half-sleep, m’lady. Had I been able to aid you, and had I been certain you were in need of such aid, I would have tried. But all that I saw, all that I relate to you now, was like a very intense dream; for a long time thereafter I was not even certain if it had been real or only a prescient vision, which the Ancient Seren were prone to. I apologize for not being able to help you, but it seems as if you have come out the better for surviving whatever hand Fate has dealt you.”

The Lady Cymrian smiled slightly. “Ryle hira,” she said softly, intoning the old Liringlas adage. “Life is what it is.”

“Indeed,” Jal’asee agreed. “I know that your path has not been one that followed a predictable pattern, but it has led you to places you might never have lived to see, and inspired in you powers that you might never have known had you followed a more traditional route. You say that your mentor disappeared before you had finished your study of Naming, and that you had to complete your training alone. Forgive me when I say this, but it shows. I have had the privilege of knowing many Lirin Namers, both on Serendair and Gaematria, and it is evident that you missed out on the final step of the process of becoming one—the baptism in the light of Aria, the Namer’s guiding star.”

Rhapsody flushed red with embarrassment. “I—I don’t even know what you are referring to,” she said nervously.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and not surprising that you do not know of it,” said Jal’asee soothingly. “It is a ceremony that marks the end of a Namer’s studies, and is not revealed to him until it is upon him. If your mentor was not with you at the end of your training, it is not surprising that you did not benefit from the baptism. As you are undoubtedly aware, each Lirin soul is tied to the star he or she was born beneath—and each day and each night of the year is dedicated to a different one. That is what you think of as Aria, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Rhapsody. “I was born beneath Seren itself. My aubades have always been to Her.”

Jal’asee nodded. “And they have no doubt drawn power from that star, even half a world away. So while you are self-taught, while you have not had the advantage of the final baptism in the light of your guiding star, you have undoubtedly gained other strengths, other insights, because you have had to make your own road, rather than following the prescribed path, much as you and your companions found your way within the Earth. If anything, your link to the star may be even stronger than it would have otherwise been, because you have kept vigil for it, lost as it is to you. It is a special celestial body, you know, an old star by the way the universe reckons. Your husband carries a piece of it within his chest—how it came to be there, I do not know, but I sense its song within him.”

A chill ran through Rhapsody’s blood again. It was as if Jal’asee knew not only all of her secrets, but those of the people she loved as well. The Sea Mage ambassador noted the change in her eyes and took her hand in his long, articulated one.

“Your child will be blessed, and cursed, with the power of all the elements, Rhapsody,” he said in a voice as warm as Midsummer’s Day. “You walked through the fire at the heart of the earth—do not fear; of course I know this, because you clearly absorbed it. In what the rest of the world mistakes for mere beauty, one such as myself, who has seen the primordial elements in their raw form, can recognize them. You and your child were cradled in the arms of the sea during your recent captivity—I know this too, not by seeing it, but because the waves told me of it during my journey here from Gaematria. Your husband is the Kirsdarkenva’ar, the master of the element, so there is a tie to water in both parents. The earth is in you both as well—you because you have traveled through Her heart, your husband because he is descended of the wyrm Elynsynos, and thus linked to it, as you are both linked to the star Seren. And finally, as the Lirin Queen you are a Child of the Sky, a daughter of the air. So your child will have all of the elements nascent within his blood. Do you know what all of those elements add up to?”

“Tell me,” Rhapsody said. Her voice came out in a choked whisper.

Jal’asee smiled broadly. “Time,” he answered. “He will have the power of Time. I hope you will do me the honor of allowing me, when the child is old enough and the occasion permits, to help teach your child how to use it.”

The child within her belly lurched. Rhapsody flinched; the song of the fountain’s splashing had come to an end, and with it her nausea returned. She stood slowly, trying to maintain her balance, and put a hand over her brow to shield her eyes from the ascending sun.

“Thank you,” she said noncommittally. “I will discuss that with Ashe when the time is right. I thank you for all the lessons you have imparted to me today, and hope that you will convey my thanks to Edwyn Griffyth for the walking machine he sent to Anborn.” She sighed regretfully. “I hope he will deign to make use of it. I confess that it strangles my heart to see him so impaired.”

The Ancient Seren ambassador rose as well and looked down at her, his shadow blocking the sun.

“Why?” he asked, taking her arm and leading her back up the garden path to the keep.

“Because he was injured in battle saving me, as I assume you know,” Rhapsody said, struggling to walk steadily. “I tried to employ my skills as a Singer and Namer to heal him at the time, but as you can see, the hapless state of my training and the limits of my abilities kept him from healing completely. Perhaps that is because, lacking a baptism in my guiding star’s light, I am only fooling myself into believing I can draw on its power.”

Jal’asee continued walking, but his voice moved closer to her ear, as if he could cause it to sink on the air.

“A tie to a guiding star, like love, is often stronger when it has to be found at great cost,” he said softly. “And Anborn is not crippled because you were unskilled to heal him, but because he was unwilling to allow you to do so. Perhaps someday he will forgive himself, and then you might try again. But having watched him over the last seven centuries, I am not going to wager anything valuable on it. Your child may benefit from the blessings of all five primordial elements, but he will undoubtedly be cursed with pigheaded stubbornness of epic proportions. It runs in deep rivers on his father’s side of the family. You have my deepest sympathy in advance.”

Rhapsody laughed in spite of herself all the way back to the garden gate.

13

True to her word, Duckfoot Sally set herself up as Faron’s protector.

The long ride south from Bethany to Sorbold was a difficult journey under normal circumstances; housed in a fragile tank of fetid water, in the back of a circus wagon lurching over pitted and unkempt roads was just short of agony. Sally moved her cot into Faron’s wagon after the first night, when the creature’s tank was nearly shattered by the lion-faced man and the sword-toothed geek, two of Faron’s wagonmates, who saw the new arrival as a source of jealousy or food, or both. Duckfoot Sally had interposed herself between the ravenous freaks and the cowering creature’s tank with a broom handle and a snarl of such intensity that the men, both more than twice her size, had shrunk back into the dark recesses of the wagon, muttering threats and grousing quietly until sleep took them into a realm of relative silence.

For several days the Monstrosity traveled without stopping except for the night; no shows were given, because there was no place along the route with a population worthy of the effort. The Ringmaster had chosen to avoid the holy city-state of Sepulvarta, which was the citadel of the Patriarch of the largest religion in Roland, knowing the Patriarch would have them arrested and tried for peddling human misery. So there was little to do but travel by day, and camp by night. Duckfoot Sally tended lovingly to Faron, and the creature seemed to settle into relative calm, though it still shrank away whenever anyone else came into the wagon. Sally happily took on all of the responsibility of Faron’s maintenance herself.

The keepers, the Ringmaster’s henchmen who served as control for the freaks and guards for the audiences, began grumbling among themselves about Sally’s new obsession. Malik, an older keeper with a scar running from the base of his skull down the centerline of his back to his waist, took to lying in wait outside the new freak’s wagon, watching her comings and goings and reporting them back to an increasingly displeased Ringmaster. On the night before they came to a small farming settlement on the Krevensfield Plain to the south of Sepulvarta, he caught her as she came off the ladder, empty fishbowl in hand. Malik leaned around the wagon’s side and grabbed her around the waist.

“Ahoy, now, Sally, where ya been? Seems like yer slightin’ the rest of us to wait upon the fish-boy hand an’ foot—if he had a foot, that is.”

Duckfoot Sally gave him an impatient shove, extricating herself from his grasp. “He has feet, ye rock-headed lout. They just be soft.”

“Aye, an’ I’ll betcha all the rest of his parts are soft as well,” Malik grinned, catching her waist and turning her around again. “But you know that ain’t the case with me, Sally, doncha, girl?” He buried his bearded face in her neck, nibbling playfully.

“Yeah, ye have a right hard head, Malik,” Sally said crossly, but the keeper’s lips were having an effect.

“ ’Sss been a long time, Sally,” Malik crooned, his hands moving higher. “You fed him jus’ now, right?” The carnival woman nodded, her eyes starting to glaze over. “And is he asleep?” Another nod. “Then he should be all right for the moment, eh? Let’s go off behind the privies, and I can have my way with you.”

Sally snorted contemptuously. “ ’Twill be the other way round,” she said, setting the fishbowl down on a barrel and glancing furtively around the camp for any sign of the Ringmaster; he was not to be seen. “Always is.”

“Either way,” said Malik agreeably. He took her clawed hand and led her into the darkness.

As soon as Duckfoot Sally had disappeared into the night, three of the other keepers came out of nearer shadows and made their way quietly into the wagon.

The creature was asleep in its cloudy tank, floating limply in the water, as the shirtless men crawled through the dark wagon, stepping carefully over the bedding of the other freaks who were out taking the air or eating their nightly meal. When they were finally in the back of the circus cart they conferred quietly through hand signals, then leapt out of the darkness, banging noisily on the tank, pressing their faces up against the glass walls and screeching hideously.

The new creature bolted awake, squealing piteously, its fused mouth flapping at the sides, gasping and cowering in the back of the tank.

The keepers were still making faces at the creature, banging on the canvas lid of the tank with sticks, when Duckfoot Sally charged into the wagon, fastening the stays of her many bodices, fire blazing from her eyes. Behind her Malik, his pants still unlaced, glowered angrily.

She raked her nails savagely across the backs of two of the keepers, drawing blood, and bellowed in a voice that threatened to shatter the glass tank.

“Ye bloody bastards! Get away from my Fair ’un!”

The only keeper not in range of her swinging talons gave her a mighty push that sent her sprawling backward, where she landed at the feet of the Ringmaster, who stood in the doorway of the wagon, a lantern in his hand.

“What is going on in here?” the tall, thin man demanded.

“They’re bedeviling my poor Fair ’un!” Duckfoot Sally spat, rising furiously from the floor and starting into the fray again, only to be pulled back as the Ringmaster seized her arm.

“If you idiots have harmed the fish-boy in any way, I will draw and quarter you,” he said in a deadly hiss. “That freak has tripled our take.” He turned to Malik and gestured at the floor. “Move this bedding to the carnivore wagon, and bring the dead displays in here.” He turned toward the trembling creature in the tank. “I don’t want to take any more chances with the fish-boy’s bunkmates.”

“The contortionists and oddities won’t get no sleep in with the meat-eaters,” one of the keepers protested. “All that howling and pacing don’t bother the dead ’uns.”

“Get out of here, and do as I ordered!” the Ringmaster snarled, shoving the man toward the curtained door.

He stepped aside and let the sullen henchmen pass, then turned back to Duckfoot Sally.

“You can stay in here. Make certain nothing else happens to him.”

“Aye, that I’ll do,” Sally said, still panting from the fight.

The Ringmaster glared at the creature in the glass tank once more, then turned and disappeared through the curtains.

Duckfoot Sally wiped her nose with the back of her arm, then made her way across the wagon to the tank that gleamed dully in the dark. She untied the canvas cover, then pulled a small wooden chest over to the tank and stood atop it, plunging her arms into the unclean water.

“There, there, Fair ’un,” she said softly, gesturing, making smooth ripples in the creature’s prison. “Yer safe. I won’t leave ye; and the Ringmaster’s word is law here. No one will bother ye again. Come, my pet. Let Sally rock ye back to sleep.”

The creature hovered in the water at the back of the tank for a long time, staring wildly at her in the dark. She could see the cloudy eyes, open and round like moons, above the wrinkled skin of its face, the rest fading away into the watery green. Finally it swam cautiously over to her, and laid its head in her open hand.

Duckfoot Sally smiled her broken smile, curled the fingers of her other hand into a fist, and wordlessly caressed the creature’s cheek with her knuckles, crooning a melody she had heard, though where she had long ago forgotten.

The night before the sideshow caravan entered the mountain pass leading into northern Sorbold, the Ringmaster opened the gate to a contingent of Sorbold’s mountain guard, soldiers in the elite unit that patrolled the border between that nation, Roland, and the Firbolg realm of Ylorc.

The soldiers, long away from home and without anything much to do except train and watch for invasions that never came, welcomed the Monstrosity enthusiastically. While the whoring tents saw the longest lines, the tents that housed the most deformed and grotesque exhibits were patronized eagerly as well.

Faron had been displayed between the dead specimens of preserved freakdom with which it shared a traveling wagon, the two-headed baby, the winged man, and a score or so of other malformations that floated, pickled, in salt solution. The creature by that time had grown so despondent that the crowds of soldiers didn’t even notice that it alone in the tent was a living specimen; they walked through, talking among each other, much as they would at a museum, then hurried on to the more exciting tents where danger, however staged, lurked.

Afterward, when the keepers were loading the wagons up for the night, the Ringmaster stormed angrily through the curtains at the door of Faron’s wagon and strode over to the tank, slamming his hand against the glass.

“Wake up, you damned fish!” he snarled, shoving a horrified Duckfoot Sally, who had been sewing on a stool next to the tank, out of the way. “I paid dearly for you, lad, one hundred gold crowns, plus two! Rescued you from those imbecile fishermen. And why?” He slammed his hand against the tank again, causing it to rock crazily, water leaking from the seam at the side. “Because you were a hissing, spitting nightmare, that’s why! And how do you repay me? By floating lifelessly in your tank, no different from the dead ones, who the audiences think are fake!”

“Leave my Fair ’un alone!” Duckfoot Sally shouted indignantly.

The Ringmaster wheeled and belted the odd woman to the floor with the back of his hand.

Faron, who had shrunk to the far side of the tank, cowering, while the Ringmaster ranted, screeched in rage and slammed against the front glass pane, scratched futilely with its soft, curled hands.

“Ah!” the Ringmaster exclaimed, his dark eyes glinting with understanding, “that’s it. You need to be angry, do you?” He turned and kicked Sally squarely in the forehead as she tried to rise, knocking her unconscious, then smiled as the creature screeched again, yellow teeth clenched, its eyes bloodshot with hate. It pressed itself against the glass, clamoring to get out, scratching at the canvas covering above its head.

The Ringmaster’s eyes widened in amazement.

Jutting from the folds of the creature’s belly was something he had never noticed before. A series of multicolored fins, or something like them, were hidden in the freak’s sagging skin, one of which dangled at the edge of the skinfold, ready to fall. A moment later it did, as the fish-boy continued to pound on the canvas covering, its arms elevated. An irregular oval, the size of the Ringmaster’s hand or so, with tattered edges, blue in color, drifted down into the offal at the bottom of the tank, sparkling as it fell.

Faron stopped rampaging at the look of amazement on the Ringmaster’s face and followed his eyes down to the tank floor. Fury fled in the face of panic; the creature darted quickly to the bottom and snatched the blue scale, returning it rapidly to its belly folds, glaring at the Ringmaster.

Shouting for his henchmen, the Ringmaster began to roll up his sleeves.

“Give it to me,” he said in a low, menacing voice.

The creature shook its head, retreating to the far side of the tank.

The Ringmaster grasped the edge of the glass and rocked the container violently.

“I said give it to me, freak. Before I pull you from the water and toss you into the sand of the Sorbold desert to wither.”

Faron hissed and spat in return.

Amid loud tromping the keepers came into the wagon. With an efficiency born of years of experience dealing with unwilling monstrosities and beasts of violent capabilities, they wrestled Faron to the back of the tank and pinned the creature, amid sloshing water and shrieks of inhuman noise. Then, once the freak was secured, the Ringmaster, his clothes drenched in fetid water, plucked the blue scale from Faron’s belly, ignoring the creature’s howls of distress, and stared at it in the lanternlight.

It was a concave oval, tattered slightly at the edges, gray when held flat, its blue coloration only noticeable when it was turned in the light, which then refracted into a shimmering spectrum that danced across the scored surface. On one side of the scale the image of an eye was engraved, surrounded by what appeared to be clouds. The Ringmaster turned it over carefully in his hand, noting that the other side, the convex one, bore a similar etching, but the eye on this surface had clouds obscuring it.

He looked back at the trembling creature, bound in the arms of the keepers, still squealing in fury, black blood trickling from the skin folds of its abdomen, clouding the water.

“Well, isn’t this a pretty thing?” he mused, holding up the scale, taunting Faron with it. “At least now I know how to make you perform the way you should, Fish-boy.” He nodded to the keepers. “Let him go.”

The henchmen released the creature, allowing it to slide back into the now half-full tank, and trooped out of the wagon, followed a moment later by the sodden Ringmaster.

Faron continued to howl, sometimes angrily, sometimes piteously, until Duckfoot Sally finally came around. She pressed her hand to her bruised forehead and made her way amid her wet, rustling tatters to Faron’s side, whispering words of comfort and solace, until the creature finally gave in to racking sobs.

“There, there, my Fair ’un, don’t fret, luv. It’s all part of the life, I’m ’fraid.” She stroked the soft head gently with her knuckles. “All part of the circus life.”

14

Achmed had been poring over his dusty volume for more than an hour when the messenger bird arrived.

Grunthor had become accustomed to standing or sitting in silence of late, contemplating the field maps and reports that came from the Eyes in the farther outposts, the more distant guard towers in Ylorc, past the Blasted Heath and the blue forests of the central kingdom, deep into the crags of the Teeth. The Sickness had spread throughout the Claw and Guts clans, but the Eyes had seemed to remain unscathed, so most of the information now being delivered to him was from their leaders, as they maneuvered to consolidate his favor in the absence of competition. The news they were sending his way was increasingly disturbing.

The stone walls hewn from the mountain that formed the Cauldron’s main meeting room were flecked with shadows from the large hearth fire that burned steadily in the corner, the occasional crack and pop of the wet wood the only sound in the room. When the messenger from the aviary opened the door, therefore, the hum of the hinges and the whine of the wood reverberated through the silence. Grunthor looked up to see the hairs on the Bolg king’s sinewy arms standing at irritated attention.

The soldier coughed politely, a sound that a human would have thought to be a grunt. Achmed waved him in impatiently.

He stared at the scrap of oilcloth that the messenger handed him for a long time, then sat back in his heavy wooden chair, his hand resting on his thin lips in the position he frequently assumed when contemplating. Finally he looked up and leveled a sharp glance at the Sergeant-Major.

“I’m going to need to leave again in a few weeks,” he said to Grunthor.

“Ya just got back,” the Sergeant said grumpily. “What is it now?”

“I have to go to a carnival,” Achmed said.

“Oh. Well, if that’s it, certainly, by all means, ’ave a wonderful time, sir,” Grunthor said sarcastically. “Bring me back some of those pretty lit’le sugared almonds if they ’ave any.”

Achmed tossed the oilcloth scrap into the fire and watched it burn before he spoke, appreciating the hiss of cured paper in smoke.

“Rhapsody and her ne’er-do-well husband have decided to confer the title of duke of Navarne on Stephen’s son Gwydion,” he said finally. “Hard as it is for me to imagine the words coming from my lips when pertaining to someone or something Cymrian, I have to admit I have taken a liking to young Gwydion, as I took one to his father.”

“Yeah, ol’ Lord Steve was a dandy fellow,” Grunthor said, the earlier gruffness in his voice dissipating a little. “But, if Oi might be so bold to suggest it, sir, you ’ave a few other things to attend to, if ya know what Oi mean. The Sickness is spreading—or at least those who survived coming in contact wi’ the glass of the Lightcatcher all seem to be in fairly great agony. Strange rumblin’s in the breastworks, word from the Eyes that Sorbold seems unusually quiet—Oi don’t like the feel o’ the wind these days. Might be a good time to stay close ta home.”

“Undoubtedly it is,” Achmed agreed. “But I have my reasons for going other than court ceremony and the appeal of spending a frivolous day in the company of a bunch of self-important Cymrian nobles.”

“Oi never would o’ guessed that, sir,” said the Sergeant dryly. “We all know ’ow much ya love those sorts o’ parties. Oi assume that givin’ the Duchess what she wants is at least a part of it?”

The Bolg king rose and crouched near the fireplace, allowing the pulsing heat to ripple over the sensitive exposed nerves of his skin. “Not at all, actually. I have something I need her to do for me. And she owes me.” He rose and returned to his dusty reading. “In addition, I have something I want to give to Gwydion Navarne—a spoil of fortune in the rescue of Rhapsody. I claimed it, though Ashe had already determined Gwydion was the one to have it. I want to be the one to confer it to him, so that it is used properly. I need to make that clear to all involved. Finally, I want to test the Archons in my absence. They’ve been commissioned at last, brought into the light. They understand what I expect of them, what their purpose is now. I will only be gone for less than a fortnight. Surely you can hold things together without incident that long, Grunthor.”

The giant Sergeant did not answer, but stared into the twisting flames, wondering what new horror would come to pass this time.

High at the topmost frozen peak, the wyrm clung to the snowy rocks, trembling in the wind. She had slithered out through the gate of the frozen palace and up into the mountaintops, battling the screaming wind all the way to the dark peak.

Wrapped around the summit, the spines of her serpentine tail anchored into the frost, she set her teeth against the wind and struggled to open her eyes. The gale that whipped around the mountaintop slapped her again, digging icy fingers into her eyelids.

Damnation, the beast thought.

She did not feel the cold as much as she had, for within her a fire of a sort had been lighted. With the remembrance of her name had come a burning power, smoldering deep in her viscera, a source of strength and energy that had been sapped from her by her near-death and entombment. Not knowing her name, her past, how she had come to be in the state she now was in had left her weak, disoriented, impotent. But now that she had remembered at least part of her past, she was hell-bent to seek the rest of it.

And return whatever power resided there to herself.

She steeled her will against the icy blast and shouted with all the power of her mind into the screaming wind.

Anwyn! Anwyn!

From the beast’s draconic throat, absent a traditional larynx, no sound emerged. But the will to speak was enough; from all around her the air thickened, then vibrated, bent to her will as all the elements bend to the command of a dragon.

Anwyn!

The updrafts caught the elemental sound, stretching it on the gusts of air until it hovered, dancing around the mountaintop, in long, moaning circles.

Annnnnnnwyyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnn!

The sound molded, swelled, and filled the thin air of the summit. It grew in volume and intensity, the vibrations of it shaking the snow from the peaks, causing avalanches to slide, shimmering, down the mountains and into the foothills below.

The noise of it grew and ebbed, catching currents of wind and stretching across them, whispering off into the wide world on the breeze, multiplying the noise of her shout over and over again, until it had expanded to the edge of the sea.

The beast clutched the icy stones of the peak, the fog in her mind lifting as much as it had since the time of her Awakening. She braced herself in the wind, her reptilian blood coursing in a sort of ecstasy, feeling the echoes of her name’s reverberations in the world, sensing its vibrations as it danced on the wind, thundering off the hillsides, wailing down through the chasms.

And then, in the distance, a thousand leagues or more away, a noise rose up to greet it, to echo its sound. It was a vibration from a history long past, centuries old, rumbled in a voice that was unlike that of the wyrm, though it had silt in its timbre, as if it, too, had in some way been tied to earth. Though the word was the same, the elongated melody of its syllables almost identical, the power of it was vastly different. Where the dragon’s shout had been victorious, the call that answered it was from a voice in torment. Even centuries later, thousands of miles away in time and space, the fury in the word, the hatred that swelled to an agonized lament was unmistakable.

Annnnnnnwyyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnn!

The beast’s head rose above the wind, her senses immediately heightened to crystalline clarity.

Her inner dragon sense, honed and eager, caught the answering vibration like a beacon from the Past. She turned slowly, ignoring the icy buffeting of the insistent gale, and concentrated, shutting out all other thought, all other interference, and locked her mind onto the sound of her name, fragile and windblown now as the breeze on which it was carried began to dissipate.

Her name, spoken in hate, rang like the deepest note sounded from a iron bell, like the roar of the sea, the music of the stars in the cold lifelessness of the night sky.

And her mind had caught it. Now it rang, over and over again, ceaselessly behind her eyes, calling to her from the darkest depths of history.

She did not know who had invoked her thus, or why it had been with such animus, but that didn’t matter. Somewhere south of the frozen peaks, somewhere beyond the viewable horizon, somewhere in the past someone had known her. Someone possessed of a power similar to her own. Someone whom she had enraged; there was a grim joy in her heart at that aspect of it.

She had a tie now to whatever place that scream had occurred.

She could find it now, and in so doing, perhaps find more of herself, her power.

And the woman she hated.

The wyrm slithered down from the peak, following the sound of her own true name, mindlessly through the jagged wind, heedlessly over the barren wasteland, southward until the never-ending winter gave way to late summer again. Once the ground was warm enough, she burrowed into it, following the harsh song of her name below the surface of the earth.

Hunting for echoes.

Her joyful excitement in the anticipation of bloodletting building with each mile she traveled.

15

Talquist waited impatiently in the gray light of foredawn.

Whenever he came to Night Mountain now, rather than approaching through the ravine that twisted and wound its way through the dry rocks that served as a natural fortification, as all the other visitors to the temple did, he instead scaled a small hidden trail that he had found many years ago, when he was an acolyte in the basilica. In his younger days it was a climb that left him winded; now, though an older man, he had learned enough, had strengthened himself enough, to make the journey without breathing hard.

While he waited for the secret door to open, he glanced around at the dry, stony rock formations that ringed Night Mountain. Their colors were glorious—streaks of pale pink and burnt rust, hints of green and darker purple that had all baked in the hot and merciless sun of Sorbold, drying them to a pale wash of their former splendor in the sandy brown stone of the desert. Deeper within the holy mountain, in the cool realm of Living Stone where the light never touched, those colors were true, deep and rich with life.

A hint of deeper glory hiding within the mountain, he thought. How appropriate.

The stone slab before him rustled; Talquist turned back to see a dark doorway appear in the shadows. He hurried inside.

Lasarys, the sexton of Terreanfor, stood just past the doorway, holding a dim lantern. Talquist noted, as the stone doorway swung shut again, blotting out the light, that the Earth priest’s pale face was more sallow than usual.

“Good morrow, Lasarys,” Talquist said solicitously. “How does this new day find you?”

“Very well, m’lord,” the chief priest whispered. “And yourself?”

“Well, that depends, Lasarys. How has your project been coming?”

Lasarys swallowed visibly. “I—I have found a few more places to harvest, my lord.”

“Excellent!” Talquist said, trying to contain his glee. He knew that shearing the flesh of the living earth was a task beyond onerous to Lasarys; as a cleric consecrated to the element, it was much like being asked to cut off one’s own mother’s breast. “Show me.”

Lasarys bowed slightly and held up the cold light, illuminating the pathway down into the cathedral.

Terreanfor was the most ancient of the five basilicas dedicated to the elements, and the only one housed in Sorbold. It was old as the earth, one of the last repositories of Living Stone on the continent, and the most well known. The magic of the place was extant in the air; from the moment he came from the hot, dry wind of the outside world into the cool, moist depths of the hallways leading into Night Mountain, Talquist could feel its power.

He followed the shadow of the sexton through the winding tunnels he remembered from his days of servitude here, the dark walls gleaming in shades of green and rose, purple and blue as the light flickered over them. Living earth, unlike its dark counterpart, was alive with color.

The ceiling of the tunnel disappeared into a huge vault above them as they entered the temple proper. Lasarys extinguished his lantern; the only fire that was allowed within the outer hallways of Terreanfor had been kindled in a golden plate by the sun. Inside the basilica itself, no light was allowed save for the glowing phosphorescent stones that gleamed with a cold radiance of their own in the otherwise complete darkness.

They passed the first of the immense pillars shaped like trees that reached to the towering ceiling into the main apse, where a great menagerie of animal statues stood, life-sized sculptures of lions and gazelles, elephants and tirabouri that, carved as they were from living earth, seemed almost to breathe. Above, in the pillar trees, Living Stone birds were perched, their feathers the deep, rich colors of the earth in the cold light. Talquist thought he could almost hear them twitter.

Lasarys led him through the earthen garden to a pathway flanked by immense statues of soldiers, a score and ten of them, each standing ten feet in height atop a three-foot base. The stone warriors formed an arch with their primitive swords, their faces reflecting the features of the indigenous people who had lived in this place long before the Cymrians came, the people who had found and preserved Terreanfor, had carved the beautiful stone tributes within Terreanfor by planting within the living earth the seeds of the trees, the feathers of the birds, and an unknown essence of the animals that had grown, as if by magic, from it.

Finally, when they were standing in a dark alcove in which a bevy of earthen flowers grew, their petals shaped like tiny stars, Lasarys stopped, then slowly pointed at the ground.

“There,” he said sadly. “I have been through the entire cathedral, and though it pains me greatly, I suppose if you must have more of the Living Stone, we can harvest one or two of these flowers. There are more of this kind than any other.”

Talquist coughed, choking on a laugh, then cleared his throat and put his arm around the shoulder of the sexton.

“Lasarys, surely you jest.” He gave the man a friendly squeeze, then released him, his face growing more solemn in the almost-dark. “I’m afraid you misunderstand, my friend.”

He turned around and surveyed the stone garden, its trees and plants, flowers and lily pads all formed from Living Stone, pulsing in the light of the phosphorescent crystals. “When I asked you to harvest the stone that I used to tip the Scales in my favor, and end the Dynasty of the Dark Earth in favor of my ascension as Emperor, I needed only a small amount, because I had this.” He reached into his robe and drew forth a tattered oval, slightly concave, violet in color had it been visible in the light. “The New Beginning; that’s what this scale portends. Its power is older even than the Living Stone, or so the ancient books say. And between the stone you gave me, and the scale, that new beginning has come to pass.

“But it was only a beginning, Lasarys. What I plan requires much more than the tip of some ancient Scales, the rigging of a weighing. No, Lasarys, I have much bigger plans. When I am crowned emperor, I want my domain to be worthy of my vision. And I can see for miles, Lasarys.” His eyes glowed brightly in the dark. “Thousands of miles.”

The elderly priest began to tremble. “I don’t understand, m’lord.”

“That’s all right, Lasarys, you don’t need to. You served me well as a teacher many years ago, when I was your acolyte. I came to you long ago in the hopes that I would discover how to use this scale that I had found, buried in the sand of the Skeleton Coast. You were unable to shed any light on that for me, but it wasn’t waste, any more than my apprenticeships with scholars and foresters, ships’ captains and Filidic priests were, because in each place I looked for answers, I found other things that would one day complete the picture, like—well, like pieces of a puzzle.” He smiled, pleased with his analogy. He held up the violet scale. “And this, Lasarys: this is the centerpiece.”

“Yes, m’lord.” Lasarys settled into quiet compliance, as he always did when the emperor began to pontificate in this manner.

“Where is the benison?” Talquist inquired. Nielash Mousa, the Blesser of Sorbold, was the chief cleric of the patrician faith in the nation, and one of the five benisons of the Patriarch, his highest religious councilors. Lasarys maintained Terreanfor under his supervision.

“He’s—he’s in Sepulvarta, at the Patriarch’s meeting, with the other benisons. He won’t be back for another six weeks.”

“And he isn’t scheduled to be in Terreanfor until the high holy days, on the first day of summer next year, correct?”

“Yes, m’lord,” Lasarys whispered, a sickening feeling crawling through him.

“Excellent.” Talquist’s black eyes gleamed in the dark. He turned away from the garden and walked back to the arch of soldiers, their expressionless faces staring stalwartly above them. He pointed to the last in the line on his right.

“I think this will do nicely, Lasarys.”

The sexton’s eyes grew wide in the darkness. “The soldier, m’lord?” he asked in horror.

“Yes. I want you to harvest it.”

“Which—which part of the soldier?”

“The whole soldier, Lasarys. I need a great deal of Living Stone, and he will provide just what I need.”

The cleric choked audibly. “M’lord—” he whispered.

“Save your pleas, Lasarys—you are too deeply entrenched, and too deeply compromised, to protest now. I will return on the morrow, and when I do, I want you to have felled this statue and left it for me on the altar of Terreanfor. Use all of your acolytes to help you carry it so that it will not be damaged. Do be careful—I’m sure it is over two tons, possibly three. Slice it through the base to avoid damaging the feet; I will make use of whatever stone is left from the base as well.” Talquist patted Lasarys, who was weeping silently, on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Lasarys. There is always pain in birth. And when you behold what is about to be born, and the nation that will come from it, you will finally understand its worth is a thousand times the suffering.”

He turned and strode past the sexton and made his way through the dark cathedral back to the light and hot wind of the upworld.

Later that afternoon, as he pored over the reports of the shipping transactions from the western coast, Talquist’s eyes were drawn once more to the scale.

He paused in his work, putting down his quill long enough to reach out his hand and absently caress the brittle surface of it, to run his finger over the lines etched in it, the tiny tatters along its perimeter that looked like the edge of baleen from a whale.

How beautiful it is, he mused, recalling his first sight of it, as nothing more than a purple glimmer in the misty sand of the Skeleton Coast. He had known from the moment he first held it in the bleeding fingers of his hand, the flesh torn by digging it out of the volcanic sand, that it was an ancient thing, an artifact of great power. It had tasted his blood then, and had done so again recently.

He thought back to the night, in the height of the last summer, when he had placed it, his hands trembling slightly, on the Scales of Jierna Tal, the enormous instrumentality from the old world whose gigantic column and beam, balanced with large weighing plates of burnished gold, towered in the square outside the royal palace where the empress of Sorbold had reigned undisputed for three quarters of a century. Until that night, the dynasty of the Dark Earth had held the nation in a death grip of control.

He had changed that, had broken the death grip with a death blow of his own. And the violet scale had allowed him to do it.

The scale on one great golden plate; a totem of Living Earth, carved in the shape of the Sun Throne of Sorbold, had balanced the scale in the other plate.

Talquist glanced down at the back of his wrist, marred by a fading scar, a reminder of the last element of the equation—seven drops of his blood, freely given, counted meticulously as they fell, one by one, onto the scale in the plate.

A blood offering to join the one of Living Stone; his life essence on one side, the Earth’s on the other.

The Scales had shifted; the bloody scale was lifted aloft, then the Scales balanced. The totem of Living Stone had burned to ash in a puff of crackling smoke.

And the power of the Dynasty of the Dark Earth had ripped in one metaphysical heartbeat from the hand of the empress to his own.

Later, amid great ceremony after the empress’s death, each of the contenders to the throne from the various factions of Sorbold made their way to the Scales of Jierna Tal to be weighed against the Ring of State, the symbol of power. Each that stepped into the plate before him had been found wanting, until finally he took his turn and was lifted high, for all the assembly to see, by the holy artifact that had been used to make the most important of state decisions for centuries. The Scales, and the benison, had proclaimed him emperor, but Talquist, aware of the political instability caused by the sudden turn of events, had modestly offered to only be confirmed as regent for one year’s time, after which, if the Scales confirmed him again, he would ascend as emperor.

And he was using that time well. The strictures the empress had put upon his trade were now gone; his domain over aspects of sea mercantile and indentured human labor was growing like wildfire. The arenas of blood-sport, once only tolerated by the Crown in a few places and strictly regulated, now were flourishing throughout the land; slave captures at sea and to the south, in the Lower Continent, were filling the mines and rocky hillside vineyards with much-needed workers. The coffers of the royal treasury were being filled handsomely.

In short, life was good.

And he owed all of it to his beautiful discovery, the ratty-edged scale of the New Beginning.

A knock at the study door shattered his musings.

“Come,” Talquist said, closing his books and tucking the scale back inside the folds of his garment.

The chamberlain entered, a man of the same swarthy skin and dark chestnut hair as the rest of Sorbold bore, as Talquist himself had.

“M’lord, a representative from the Raven’s Guild in Yarim has begged an audience with you under the auspices of the golden measure.”

Talquist sat back in his chair. The golden measure was a guarded code, known only to hierarchs of guilds, a tradesman’s countersign.

“Show him in.”

The chamberlain stepped aside to allow the visitor to enter. The man moved through the doorway like a shadow, stepping instinctively around the patches of hazy afternoon light that shone dustily through the windows, clinging instead to the dark spots, blending in with them as he moved. He was dressed in the simple garb of a traveler, plain brown broadcloth cloak and trousers, his dark eyes glinting from within his hood. As he approached the emperor presumptive’s desk, he took down his mantle to reveal a cadaverous face topped with thinning hair, with long tapers of sideburn joining the razor-sharp beard that darkened his cheeks like the shadows he traveled through.

“I bring you greetings on behalf of my cousin in the hills, m’lord,” he said. “I am Dranth, scion of the Raven’s Guild of Yarim.”

Talquist rose slowly and gestured the man forward, sizing him up as he walked nearer. The code he had uttered was an even more secret one than that of the golden measure, used only in the gravest of times.

“To what do I owe the honor of a visit from the guild scion himself?” Talquist asked, pointing to a chair before his desk. “My condolences, by the way, on the demise of your guildmistress.” He watched Dranth’s face carefully for a sign of surprise that he knew of her death, but the man merely nodded. “I had not met her, nor had we done business together, but her reputation was well known to me.”

“Doubtless,” Dranth said dryly. “M’lord.” He sat down slowly in the chair.

“Since you have approached me under the auspices of the golden measure, tradesman to tradesman, one guild hierarch to another, I am obliged to help you in whatever way I can, if the request be reasonable. What do you want?”

“Actually, I believe what I bring may be of aid to you, m’lord,” Dranth said respectfully. He drew forth a parcel wrapped in sheepskin from within the folds of his cloak and laid it on the table in front of the emperor-to-be. “Please examine this.”

Talquist nodded to the package. “Open it for me,” he said pleasantly.

Dranth smiled. “Gladly, though you have nothing to fear from me of traps or poisons, m’lord. Your long life and robust health are quite important to me; you will see why in a moment.”

He pulled from the sheepskin parcel a sheaf of documents, each in the spidery script of assassin’s code, next to carefully rendered schematics of tunnels, bunkers, and breastworks.

“The guildmistress was doing reconnaissance in the Firbolg kingdom of Ylorc at the time of her death,” Dranth said softly. Talquist noted that his voice was both sweet and poisonous, like the scent of almonds in arsenic. “She had gained the Bolg king’s trust, and thereby had unfettered access to his inner sanctum, his secrets, and his plans. She sent back a great deal of information, including troop numbers and schedules, hallway and infrastructure diagrams, munitions caches, and a host of other very important material.” He tossed the documents on the table in front of Talquist. “Among the other things she discovered was that he is planning to move against Sorbold.”

Talquist snorted. “If he is, I’ve seen no evidence of it. The Bolg have been busy redecorating Canrif more than building up for war. King Achmed doesn’t seem the land-grabbing type to me; he wants the demi-human monsters he reigns over to be seen as men, and to that end he is pursuing manufacturing and trade agreements, not war.”

Dranth nodded thoughtfully. “What is he manufacturing?”

Talquist shrugged. “The Bolg produce a strange but interesting array of goods,” he said. “They make a very light, very tensile rope, that is prized in the shipping trade. They also spin some finely delicate ladies’ unmentionables, which has always amused me. A unique type of wood from their inner forests past the mountains bears a faint blue tint beneath its dark natural hue, and that is highly sought after, especially overseas.”

“And they also make weapons,” Dranth noted. “Extremely effective and deadly weapons.”

“Yes.”

“But while they have trade agreements with you to buy and broker their rope, their wood, and their lacy folderol, they do not sell you their weapons.” Dranth smiled icily. “Do they?”

Talquist stared at the guild scion for a long time, then looked down at his desk and smiled.

“What score are you looking to settle with the Bolg?” he said finally, tracing the pattern of the wood grain in his desk.

“The death of our mistress,” Dranth answered.

“And none other?”

“No. She was seeking revenge for another matter, the theft of water, but that is no longer of consequence. The Raven’s Guild has sworn to avenge her death to the exclusion of all missions, or contracts, sparing no expense, no cost of any kind, human or otherwise, until the very end of Time, if necessary.”

Talquist chuckled. “My. That is certainly a very intense sentiment.” He looked up into the serious face of the guild scion, his smile dimming slightly. em“If you wanted my help in achieving your revenge, you should merely have requested it under the auspices of the golden measure. It is not required that I agree with your vendetta; only that it is not against my interests.” His smile broadened. “And it is not.”

Dranth nodded, relief in his eyes that was not mirrored on the rest of his face.

“In fact, I believe that if we join forces, we can both exact your revenge and further my plans very nicely.” He pushed his chair back, rose, and walked slowly to the tall windows that overlooked the city’s central square where the Scales stood, their immense wooden arm casting a dark, rectangular shadow over the streets. “First, you do understand that our conversations are guarded by the sacred vow of the guildmason?”

“Of course.”

“And that, as brothers in the guild, we are sworn to deal honestly with one another?”

Dranth’s brows narrowed. “The Raven’s Guild abides by the same ethics and vows as all other guilds, m’lord. Our area of business notwithstanding.”

“Do not misunderstand me, guild scion,” Talquist demurred, opening his hands in a benign gesture. “I fully respect your guild’s reputation and your expertise. I have dealt with many of your brother guilds in my time as guild hierarch in western Sorbold. I just need to know the truth—did the guildmistress truly uncover a plot by the Bolg to invade Sorbold, or—”

“No.”

“Ah. Good. Well, then, pray join me at supper to discuss how we might be able to mutually achieve our ends.” Dranth nodded, and Talquist rang for the chamberlain.

When the cordials were served, and the last of the trays taken away, Talquist leaned over the table.

“Now that I understand the capabilities of your organization, I believe I have a way to fulfill your request.”

Dranth interlaced his fingers. “I’m listening.”

“All of the intelligence you brought to me is genuine, except for your erstwhile claim that the Bolg intend to attack Sorbold, is that correct?”

“Yes,” said the guild scion, his eyes darkening. “Why?”

Talquist swirled the liqueur in his snifter gently and inhaled the bouquet.

“What do you know of the kingdom of Golgarn?”

Dranth shrugged. Golgarn was a distant realm, to the southeast of Ylorc and Sorbold. The forbidding mountain passes of the Teeth prevented overland trade and travel between Roland and Ylorc to Golgarn, so the only real method of communication was by avian messenger, the only manner of trade by sea. “There is a brother guild there. Esten was in infrequent contact with them, on rare occasions when a debtor of one kind or another attempted to make his way there, or here, to outrun a debt. She always found them very cooperative, and reciprocated quickly. They are on friendly terms with Sorbold, are they not?”

“They are,” Talquist agreed. “But not friendly enough.” He took a sip of the golden liquid as Dranth raised a questioning eyebrow. “You will go to Golgarn, infiltrate their networks of information that make their way back to the king. And you will tell them the same fairy tale you told me—that you have incontrovertible evidence that the Bolg king is building up his army with the intent of invading them.”

“They won’t believe that any more than you did,” Dranth said darkly. “They have the mountains to protect them. The Bolg tunnels do not approach their realm within five hundred miles.”

Talquist grinned. “Yes, you are correct. If someone were to go to Beliac, the king, and tell him such a fanciful story as you told me, he would see through it immediately. Which is why you have to let him uncover the information himself.” He drained his glass, then reached for the decanter to refill it. “If documents with the authenticity of these, enhanced a little to show that the Bolg actually have tunnels with five miles, rather than five hundred, of Golgarn, were to be found in, say, a raid of an establishment of questionable loyalty—such as your brother guild—it might cause Beliac to worry enough to go investigate.”

Dranth poured himself another drink as well. “And what would he find, should he travel five miles into the mountains?”

“An encampment of Bolg preparing for war,” Talquist said.

Dranth paused in the course of raising the glass to his lips. “But there are no Bolg there.”

“There can be. At least enough to convince Beliac that he has a serious problem on his border.”

“A charade? A simulated encampment?”

“Exactly.”

“How? How will you persuade, intimidate, or capture enough Bolg to go along with such a farce? They are singularly loyal to their king and their commander, not to mention primitive and untrustworthy. I can’t imagine they would be willing to stage such a charade, even under torture or pain of death.”

Talquist took a sip, then opened his lips enough to allow air to pass over the burning liquid, filling his mouth with the vapors. He swallowed.

“Dranth,” he said, leaning forward, “no one in Golgarn has ever seen a Bolg. Not since before the Cymrian War a thousand years ago, anyway. I could dress an ox or a gorilla in a pink camisole and prop it in the mountains with an ugly mask and a spear beside it, and the Golgarn would believe they were about to be invaded.”

The guild scion stared at the regent for a moment. A hint of a smile cracked his otherwise impassive face; he saluted Talquist with his glass, then drank.

“So are you attempting to destroy Golgarn, then?” he asked. “Mislead them into attacking the Bolg?”

“Destroy Golgarn? Don’t be ridiculous, Dranth. Golgarn is an important ally, and Beliac is my friend.”

The guild scion shook his head in puzzlement. “I am not following your intent, then. Because if you convince the king of Golgarn that the Bolg are massing against him, and he attacks, the Bolg will eat him and the entire kingdom alive, literally.”

“Beliac will not attack the Bolg,” Talquist said. “At least not alone. He will turn to me. Sorbold has a force ten times the size of the army of Golgarn which, while sizable, is certainly ill prepared to act unilaterally. Beliac is an ally who doesn’t even know that he has thrown his lot in with me yet. But he will soon.”

“Your willingness to manipulate your friends so mercilessly is admirable,” Dranth said, finishing his drink and replacing the snifter on the table, where it caught the firelight and reflected it, in a golden pool, on the desk. “Not many men have the viscera for it.”

Talquist shrugged. “I’m a merchant, Dranth. You’ve heard the aphorism that we would sell our own mothers for a profit? Well, I actually did. Got a respectable price for her, too.”

“And when the king of Golgarn joins you in an alliance against a fictional Bolg invasion, what will that gain you?”

“An army worthy of my plans,” Talquist said.

“And what are those plans?”

The regent of Sorbold smiled. “I will let you figure that out,” he said amiably, rising as if to indicate that the meal, and the conversation, were over. “Rest assured, your desire to see the Bolg king pay his debt to you will more than be accomplished. But I will share one more little secret with you, guild brother to guild brother: I need a northern ally as well. The Diviner in the Hintervold—he is also my friend, a dear one. Virtually all of the prosperity I enjoyed in my career as a merchant I owe to him; he even saved my life once. And when you see how cruel the methods are that I will use to secure his allegiance to my goals, you will fully appreciate how truly worthy I am to be considered a brother to your guild.”

Talquist pulled up the linen hood of his robes of regency. “And now, Dranth, go with the chamberlain and have a rest; we have specific planning to do in the morning. I have other things to attend to. A carnival of freaks has come into town, and I have arranged for a private showing. I love oddities and the like. Good night.”

16

The sun’s departure was fading the sky to colors of cobalt and indigo at the eastern edges, turquoise where the light still touched it in the west. Talquist inhaled the evening breeze, cooler with night’s approach and with the turn of the seasons in more northern lands. In the desert of Sorbold, autumn was mostly just a slightly fresher gust of air in the morning and evening; otherwise, the endless desert sun continued to beat down, baking the dry land into sand.

From his balcony he could see the firebrands of the traveling circus burning steadily, sending light and thin trails of black smoke skyward in welcome, an invitation to him and him alone. He sighed; there was a time when he was merely a powerful merchant that he would have been able to indulge all of his darkest fantasies in such a place, but now that he was known to the world as the emperor presumptive of Sorbold, he would be constrained to merely wander between the wagons, amused, but unable to partake in some of the more sinful pleasures that traveled with such sideshows. A pity, he mused as he came away from the window and made his way down the stairs to the place where the carnival waited. Look, but don’t touch. Ah, well.

When he arrived at the gate of the circus, the Ringmaster was waiting for him.

“Your Excellency,” the Ringmaster said, bowing low, his striped silk pants bending comically as he did.

“Oh, come now, Garth, you and I have done business for years now,” Talquist admonished. “We’ve had many high times, have protected each other’s backs in several potentially deadly circumstances. There’s no need to be so formal, now that I am, well, emperor, for all intents and purposes. You may address me as ‘m’lord.’”

“Yes, m’lord,” the Ringmaster muttered, opening the gate.

He followed the emperor-to-be through the dark pathways, in and out of the tents, as Talquist admired the strange human inventory. In one tent, they stopped before the small woman with almond-shaped eyes who sat, chained by an enormous collar around her neck, on a small stool. The woman recognized Talquist, and began to tremble violently, causing both men to laugh aloud.

“Ah, the Gwadd! I had all but forgotten about her,” Talquist said. He leaned closer; the tiny woman shrank away in fear. “No need to worry, little lovely,” he murmured, “I’m afraid I’m too important to play with you anymore.” He turned to the Ringmaster as they moved along through the exhibits. “You had best be careful if you go back into Roland that the Lord Cymrian not discover you have her. Gwadd are not technically freaks; they are old-world people, an ancient race that came over with the Cymrian exodus. She is thereby one of his citizens, and he will take action to free her and imprison you if he discovers her presence in your carnival.”

“Now, how would the high and mighty Lord Gwydion do that, unless he were to be patronizing the Monstrosity himself?” the Ringmaster asked disdainfully. “My audiences don’t tend to be the type who have luncheon invitations at Haguefort where they might accidentally drop my secrets to him.”

“Too true,” Talquist agreed, wandering in front of a fragile glass tank with a floating morass of wrinkled human flesh in the water. “Now, this is new. What sort of freak is this supposed to be?”

“We call it the Amazing Fish-boy,” said the Ringmaster, tapping on the glass to waken the creature, “but as you can see, it could just as easily be the Amazing Fish-girl. We don’t know what it is, exactly. I bought it from two imbecilic fishermen from Avonderre.”

“Does it have a name?” Talquist asked, peering closer into the murky green water.

The Ringmaster shrugged. “Duckfoot Sally calls it Faron,” he said.

The creature in the tank, waking and recognizing the Ringmaster, began to hiss menacingly. Its rubbery lips, fused in the center above soft, yellow teeth, gapped at the edges over its jaws, causing water to spurt out in streams of unmistakable anger.

“Good heavens,” Talquist exclaimed, chuckling. “What a horror.”

The creature hissed again, swimming forth in the tank to claw at the Ringmaster, hatred in its cloudy eyes.

“He seems to like you,” Talquist said humorously, putting up a hand to avoid the spittle as the creature pressed its body against the glass, reaching for the Ringmaster.

In the light of the tent’s lantern, his eye caught a flash of iridescent color, a quick twinge of a sparkle in the creature’s abdomen as it futilely tried to grasp the Ringmaster with its gelatinous arms. He blinked, thinking that perhaps he had caught a grain of sand from the wind in his eye, then stared harder at the wrinkled freak’s underbelly.

He had to watch for a moment, as the layers of fatless flesh undulated beneath the water, but a few seconds later he saw it again. There were spines of a sort protruding from between the skinfolds, as if they had been tucked there, the tips of oval scales that looked very much like the violet one in his possession. Talquist felt the cold rush of excitement spread through his body, the blood rushing away from his racing brain to a heart that was racing faster, leaving him weak, perspiring.

He coughed to cover his excitement. “Where did the fishermen find this—this thing?” he inquired, trying to keep his voice light, his manner nonchalant.

The Ringmaster shrugged. “They didn’t say. Probably tangled in a net somewhere. Well, come along, m’lord, and I will show you our new maneater.” He took hold of the flap of the tent’s exit.

“Wait,” Talquist said, his voice hardening at the edges. He continued to stare at the creature in the tank, but it shrank away from the glass, turning its back and glaring balefully over its skeletal shoulders at the Ringmaster.

The Ringmaster let go of the tent flap and came back to stand beside the Regent, his eyes gleaming at the sight.

“It is a truly amazing freak,” he said, frank admiration on his face. “In all my years of travel, I have not come upon one quite so grotesque, quite so hideous, that was still alive. It’s been a windfall—our gate has increased enormously ever since I bought him.”

“I want him,” Talquist said impulsively. “Name your price.”

The words knocked the Ringmaster speechless; he laughed shortly, as if he had been hit in the midsection.

“Do be serious,” he said a moment later, forgetting he was addressing the Emperor Presumptive.

“I am entirely serious,” insisted Talquist. “I will give you ten times what you paid for him.”

The Ringmaster shook his head. “I have made that back already,” he said, his face beginning to harden at the unwanted negotiation. “He is not for sale, m’lord.”

Talquist’s hands were starting to sweat. “Twenty times, then.”

The Ringmaster turned his back and walked to the tent flap again. “That thing guttles down a gallon of eels in a sitting; it has eaten all but a dozen of my breeding goldfish, thanks to Duckfoot Sally, who risks stripes across her back to give it treats. It is tremendously hard to maintain and sickly to boot. Besides, what possible use could you have for it? No, m’lord, I cannot sell him to you, and as your friend, I cannot imagine you really want him. Come along, and I will show you some new horrors almost as fascinating.” He looked over his shoulder nervously; the regent was still staring at the fishboy, entranced. Another thought occurred to him in his desperation. “I also have a new pleasure wagon; I could have the keepers stand guard if you would like some private entertainment, much as in the old days—”

Talquist turned and shot him a look that stung like an arrow in his forehead. “My final offer—twenty times what you paid for him, and your safe passage from my lands.” The threat in his voice was unmistakable.

The Ringmaster inhaled deeply, then let his breath out slowly, seething silently. “Very well. I paid two hundred gold crowns for him—plus two,” he added quickly, still rankling at the thought of the arrogant fisherman.

“You’re a liar,” Talquist said contemptuously, “but I don’t care. I will send my soldiers to get him in two hours. They will deliver your money then, but I will be paying you in gold Sorbold suns—our coins are worth two Orlandan crowns.”

“I expect you’ll want his food as well,” the Ringmaster said angrily. “You are unlikely to have the amount of fish he requires in the middle of this desert. That’ll be costly.”

“That won’t matter, keep your food,” the emperor presumptive replied, his eyes never leaving the tank. “Now leave. I want to observe my new purchase for a while without you. It’s obvious he doesn’t like you much.”

He continued to stare into the green water, watching the pale, fishlike creature, its cataract-covered eyes following the Ringmaster out of the tent and into the darkness of the Monstrosity.