Prophecy: Child of Earth

55

Achmed had expected Rhapsody to be late coming back from seeing Ashe off, so he had taken his time getting to the Heath. As a result, when he came over the top of the last rise he found two figures there, one enormous, one slight, both looking grim, and both waiting for him. Achmed cursed. She was predictable in her unpredictability.

“He’s gone, then?” he demanded, handing Grunthor the morning’s report from the night patrol. Rhapsody nodded. “Good.”

Grunthor shot him an ugly look, then put a hand on her shoulder. “When’ll ’e be back, darlin’?”

“He won’t,” she said shortly. “Perhaps I’ll see him at the royal wedding in Bethany, but that will be the last time I expect to. He’s off to fulfill his destiny.” She looked back into the sun rising over the crest of Griwen. “Let’s go fulfill ours.”

The tunnel to the Loritorium had echoed with their footsteps, and with the memory of voices.

Is she still there, sir?

Damn you, Jo, go home or I’ll tie you to a, stalagmite and leave you until we return.

I want to go with you. Please.

Achmed closed his eyes, his head heavy with the weight of the memories.

The torch Grunthor carried flickered uncertainly, a pale candle compared to the roaring flame that had first lighted their way into the hidden vault of magic. Achmed wondered if the weak fire was an indication that the concentrated lore, once heavy in the stale air, had begun to dissipate as the wind from the world above made its way down the ancient passages. Or perhaps it was more a sign that the fires of Rhapsody’s soul were burning a little more dimly.

She said nothing, following them silently down into the belly of the moun tain, her face drawn and ghostly white in the pale torchlight. All the length of the tunnel to the Loritorium she remained quiet, so unlike their travels overland or along the Root, where she and Grunthor had passed the time with songs or whistled tunes. The absence of noise was deafening.

After they had gone a thousand paces Achmed heard a slow, broken intake of breath, and she knew she was hearing voices in the echoing tunnel as well.

Do you mean to tell me that the Lord, Roland sent an unarmed woman into Tlorc without the protection of the weekly armed caravan? These are unsafe times, not just in Tlorc, but everywhere.

I’m just doing my lord’s bidding, m’lady.

Prudence, you must stay here tonight. Please. I fear for your safety if you were to leave now.

No. I’m sorry, but I must return to Bethany at once.

Ghosts, Achmed thought. Everywhere ghosts.

Finally the tunnel widened into the entrance to the marble city. The flame from the firewell was burning brightly, steadily, casting long shadows about the empty Loritorium.

“Everything seems all right here,” Achmed said, examining the fiery fountain. “I don’t feel any strange vibrations here.”

They left the Loritorium and wandered down the corridor to the Chamber of the Sleeping Child.

The Grandmother was in the entranceway, as always.

“You’ve come,” she said; each of her three voices was trembling. “She’s worse.

From within the chamber the sound of moaning could be heard. They hurried past the enormous doors of soot-streaked iron, into the well of the chamber.

The Earthchild thrashed about on her catafalque, murmuring in panic. Rhapsody ran to her, whispering soothing words, trying to gentle her down, but the child did not respond.

Achmed grasped Rhapsody’s upper arm with a grip that hurt. When she looked up, he turned her toward Grunthor.

The giant stood beside the Earthchild’s catafalque, his sallow skin ashen in the dim light. His broad face was pickled with beads of sweat.

“Somethin’s coming,” he whispered. “Somethin’—” His words choked into a strangled gasp.

“Grunthor?”

The giant was trembling as he reached for his weapons.

“The Earth,” the Grandmother whispered. “It screams. Green death. Unclean death.”

As if to mirror the Firbolg giant, the ground began to shudder all around them. Pieces of rock and granite crumbled from the walls and ceiling as dust streamed down in great rivers, blackening the air.

“What’s happening? An earthquake?” Rhapsody shouted to Grunthor. The sergeant was drawing Lopper, his hand-and-a-half sword, and the Friendmaker, his expression grim. He barely had time to shake his head.

Soft popping sounds erupted around them, like sparks from wet wood in fire. From the floor, ceiling and walls, thousands of tiny roots appeared, black and spiny, poking through the dirt like new spring seedlings. Within a few moments they had grown to the size of daggers, slashing menacingly at the air. By the time they had, Achmed was across the cavern, almost within arm’s reach of Rhapsody. She stifled a gasp as the roots began to hiss, and held up her hands over the head of the Sleeping Child.

Then the world exploded.

From every earthen surface massive vines, each thick as an ancient oak, broke forth, rending the air and crushing the walls. The ground below their feet buckled and reared up violently, shattering beneath the swirling wall of spiny flesh as even bigger roots ripped out of the earth, surrounding them and tossing them about like acorns.

A great wave of stench roared forth, blinding them, causing them to choke and gag. The malodor was unmistakable.

F’dor.

Achmed covered his head as a large chunk of falling debris glanced off him, sending waves of shock through his shoulder and torso. He could feel the heartbeats of the others racing in a cacophonous crescendo, pelting his skin like hard rain. Rhapsody had been thrown out of his line of sight by the violent upheaval of the earth and the lashing vines. “Get out!” he shouted to her, coughing to clear the dust from his lungs and hoping she could hear him over the noise of the chaos.

In answer, a humming light appeared amid the falling rubble, shining through the black ash clouds that obscured all other vision. A metallic ring like a clarion call accompanied it, reaching down into Achmed’s heart, sending an electric thrill coursing through him. The rippling flames hovered steady in the air for a moment, then began a furious, humming dance as the sword hacked into the thrashing vines, throwing flashes of light around the darkness of the crumbling cavern. The Iliachenva’ar was standing her ground, fighting back.

An ear-splitting roar exploded next to him. Achmed turned as a huge tendril lashed around Grunthor’s foot and dragged him from the slab of ground he had fallen against, lifting him upside down into the smoky air. Dozens of whipcords wound like lightning around his neck and limbs, then simultaneously snapped with a gruesome force. Grunthor screamed again, more in fury than in agony, before the nooses tightened, choking off his roar.

With a flick of both wrists, daggers were in Achmed’s hands, and he leapt to where the giant was hanging, slicing at the writhing tendrils in a flurry of gouging slashes. He grabbed for one of the weapons, hanging upside down in Grunthor’s backsheath, and began to strike at the vine with both hands. He aimed first for the vines around giant’s wrists, freeing one of them before a large clawlike vine flexed and slapped him against a slab of upturned earth, pinning him beneath itself.

Achmed breathed shallowly, trying to minimize the pain from the crushing blow to his ribs. In the distance he could still hear the ringing of Daystar Clarion, the screaming of the vines as Rhapsody sawed through them, searing the ends. Her heartbeat was remarkably slow and focused, given the thunderous pounding he knew must belong to Grunthor. By the sound of it, the sergeant had wrestled himself free and was hacking ferociously at the vine above Achmed that was holding him captive. A moment later the great root snapped in two, proving him correct. He grabbed hold of Grunthor’s hand, and the giant Bolg hauled him free of the morass of slithering roots that flailed beneath him, hissing and striking at his heels like serpents.

“Hrekin,” the sergeant swore, gulping for air. It was the last thing Achmed heard him say before the ground beneath his feet buckled again, hurling him back toward what had been the cavern entrance, now in ruins.

One of his daggers was wrenched from his hand and fell as he did, though he couldn’t hear where it landed in the fury around him. The cold, gangrenous hand of terror clutched at his viscera as he realized the impossibility of escaping this monstrous root, this demon-vine that was devouring the cavern of the Sleeping Child. The Earthchild’s catafalque was gone, blasted into the air in the initial moments of the attack. Her body was now undoubtedly buried beneath a mountain of rubble or, far worse, wrapped in the tendrils of the serpent vine, being dragged back to the clutches of the F’dor, just like Jo. He could taste his own death in his mouth.

Frozen waves of fear washed over him. It was not death itself he feared, but the hands that were delivering it. He had become used to the freedom that had been his since that humid day in the backstreets of Easton a lifetime ago when Rhapsody had changed his name, snapping the invisible collar of demonic servitude from his neck. He had almost learned to breathe again, to believe that his life, his soul, were his own once more. And now he was about to die, back once again in the demon’s iron grasp.

And worse, so were his only friends.

The scratching sound of the wind filled his ears, spreading a moment later into four separate notes, held in a monotone. The ritual singing rang through his head, vibrating in his Dhracian blood. He could not see the Grandmother through the upheaval, but he could hear her clearly, the fifth note of the Thrall ritual cutting through the noise like a knife.

As the ritual clicking joined the monotonous tune, the tangled sea of roots and vines pulsed for a moment with the same rhythm as the Thrall ritual, then went rigid. For a moment Achmed was acutely aware of all the sounds around him—the throbbing of the colossal network of vines, now filling the entire cavern above and around him, dwarfing him in their titanic size; the ringing hum of Daystar Clarion, gleaming in the darkness beyond his reach; the spitting growl of the thousands of snakelike tendrils that hovered near him, threatening to strike at any moment; Rhapsody’s flickering heartbeat, and the ritual cadence that was the heartbeat of the Grandmother.

He could not hear Grunthor’s heartbeat.

“Achmed.” Rhapsody’s voice was barely audible, and smoke was wafting from the place it originated. He pushed past a tangle of wriggling rootlets, ignoring their failed strikes, and climbed over to where he had heard her, following the sound of her heart.

He found her, wedged between two great slabs of earth, searing the end of an enormous stalk with the flames from Daystar Clarion. The tributary of the demon-vine was moaning, withering to blackness in the ethereal fire. Her eyes met his, burning green with the same intensity as the sword.

“Elemental fire cauterizes it,” she said softly when she knew he was close enough to hear her. “Do I hear the Thrall ritual?”

Achmed nodded, wincing from the shooting pain that tore through his head with the movement. “The vine’s an extension of the demon, a construct like the Rakshas was,” he answered, taking care to avoid the ropy flesh. “She may be able to hold the demonic essence in stasis for the moment, but she won’t be able to kill the root; it’s much too powerful.”

“Vingka jai,” Rhapsody said to the flame glowing on the root’s edge. Ignite and spread. The fire leapt as if in righteous anger, and the vine shrieked in fury and pain.

“Get—out of there,” Achmed ordered, gesturing toward where the exit to the Loritorium had been. “I don’t know how long she can hold it off.”

“Where’s Grunthor? The child?”

Achmed shook his head. “Get out of there now,” he commanded.

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know!” he snarled. The loss of Grunthor, coupled with the knowledge that the keys that would open the prison vault were on their way to the depths of the earth, was more than he could contemplate without losing his mind. The one thing he could concentrate on was getting Rhapsody out of the shards of the Colony before it collapsed. Distantly he wondered if that was doing her a favor, given what was coming. “Damnation! Get out while you can!

She still wasn’t listening. Instead, she was staring off into the crumbled ruin of the cavern, her mouth open in astonishment. Achmed turned toward where she was looking.

There, standing amid the clouds of ash and dust hanging in the air, was the Sleeping Child. Her eyes still closed, the Earthchild was standing erect, her feet melding into the rubble that littered die Colony floor. The light from Daystar Clarion, now rigid in Rhapsody’s grasp, was breaking in rippling waves over her, illuminating the smoothness of her face, the polished gray of her skin. In the firelight she seemed enormously tall, taller than she had appeared in repose, her long shadow dancing off the broken cavern walls.

“No,” Rhapsody whispered, choking. “No, please. Stay asleep, little one.”

i.e. a

Slowly the child pulled first one foot, then the other, from the ground and took a step forward.

The sleepwalker.

“Please,” Rhapsody whispered again. “Not yet, little one, it’s not time now. Go back to sleep.”

The Earthchild paid her no heed. With a lumbering gait she began climbing through the hills of littered stone, gliding through the rock as if wading ankle-deep in the sea, her eyes still closed. Whipcords and tendrils of the colossal vine flexed and lashed impotently toward her, straining against the thrall caused by the strange insectoid music that the Grandmother was still making.

Achmed put his hand out to Rhapsody. “Come on,” he said. Involuntarily she obeyed, following him over the boulders that had once been part of the ceiling.

They followed in the wake of the Earthchild, whose movements left an open passage in the rocky wasteland that the Colony had become. As they passed the great arms of the demon-root it began to tremble, causing even more dust and grit to rain down from the crushed walls and ceiling. Rhapsody coughed, trying to expel the debris from the back of her throat, as Achmed hauled her over a mound of earth and under a mammoth, hissing vine. Tiny tendrils writhed in the dark, lunging in serpentine strikes, to be reined back by the power of the Thrall ritual. Unable to reach their target, the roots spat in snake-like fury.

At the sound Rhapsody’s eyes suddenly narrowed, brightened by hate and the memory of Jo’s death. She let go of Achmed’s hand. With a movement so sudden that he couldn’t follow it with his eyes, she lashed out with a vicious sweep of the sword and struck off the tendrils, tossing them onto the floor of the cavern. The vine shrieked and shuddered, the tiny branches igniting and burning to ash on the ground.

“Not now!” Achmed hissed. “Listen.”

The Thrall ritual was diminishing. The echo of the Grandmother’s voice in the distance was thinner, rasping, as the strain of maintaining the difficult song began to take its toll.

“She’s failing,” Achmed said, dragging Rhapsody out from under the quivering root and up the tunnel. “We have to get to the Loritorium.”

“Grunthor—”

“Come,” Achmed insisted. He could barely keep the same thought from his mind. The heartbeat of the Grandmother was beginning to wane, the exertion of the ritual wearing her down rapidly. Her ancient heart would give out soon. If it did before they got to the Loritorium, there would be no chance for escape, not for them.

And not for the rest of the world, upon whom the prisoners of the ancient vault deep within the Earth were about to be loosed.

A horrific crash and the sound of falling rock rumbled through the passageway ahead, and a thick fog of dust rolled over them. Instinctively they covered their eyes and heads. When the noise abated, they looked up simultaneously and waved their arms to clear the air of the gray dust. Achmed nodded, and they hurried forward, only to stop.

A solid wall of newly fallen rock blocked the passageway ahead of them. Achmed ran his hands over it desperately, then pointed off to the side. A tiny opening beneath heavy stone slabs was the only break in the wall.

Quickly Rhapsody sheathed her sword, dropped to the ground, and crawled into the hole, breathing in the bitter dust as she did. The broken fragments of basalt ripped through the fabric of her trousers and the skin of her hands as she pulled herself through to the other side, then immediately began clearing as much of the debris as she could from around the hole.

A moment later, Achmed’s head appeared, his face contorted in pain. His shoulders caught as he struggled through, wedging him in the hole. With great effort he pulled himself back again, then reached an arm through first. Rhapsody grabbed his hand and pulled, bracing herself against the rockwall with one foot. She could feel the crack of the bones in his hand and shuddered.

“Pull harder,” Achmed mumbled, his face in the gravel of the floor.

“Your ribs—”

“Pull harder” he growled. Rhapsody set her teeth and repositioned her foot once more, then pulled with all her strength. A sickening popping vibrated through her hands, and she heard the intake of breath as Achmed swallowed the sound of agony. His head and shoulders emerged. Rhapsody slid her hands under his armpits and tugged again, hauling his upper body free of the hole and striping his back with streaks of blood as it grazed against the jagged rocks of the floor. A moment later he was free, clutching his broken ribs, and she helped him rise. They exchanged a quick nod, then turned and ran up the passageway again.

They scrambled over a pile of broken granite that had once been the great archway, the shattered words of the inscription now littering the ground in mute testimony to the wisdom they had once held. The Sleeping Child was no longer within their sight. Achmed’s foot slipped as he reached the summit of the mound and wedged in a crevasse. Rhapsody pulled it out before following him over the hill.

Before them yawned the tunnel opening to the Loritorium.

“Can you see the Earthchild?” Rhapsody gasped. Achmed shook his head, then rapidly descended the hill, running until he reached the smooth marble of the Loritorium floor.

The flame of the firewell was twisting brightly in its fountain, casting grim shadows around the streets and over the silent buildings. Rhapsody ran to the central square where the cases that housed the elements stood, then stopped and exhaled in relief. The Sleeping Child was standing there, near the altar of Living Stone, eyes still closed. The Sleepwalker.

Rhapsody slowed her gait and walked toward the tall figure as quietly as she could, taking care not to frighten her. The Earthchild ran her hands blindly over the altar of Living Stone, then turned slowly. She sat down on the top of the slab and then lay back, crossing her arms over her waist, resuming the position in which she had once rested on her catafalque. The shadows from the firelight illuminated her face, relaxing into a peaceful countenance, as they danced over her. She let loose a deep sigh.

Then, as Rhapsody stared in astonishment, the body of the Sleeping Child seemed to become liquid and began to shift and expand. Her chest and head glistened, then glowed with a light of their own. The flesh of her long, stone-gray body became translucent, gleaming in the flickering light from the firewell, then stretched in an absurd dance, twisting hypnotically, grotesquely, in earth-colors more intensely beautiful than Rhapsody had ever seen, a multiplicity of subtle shades of vermilion and green, brown and purple. Like bread dough being kneaded, she thought as the child’s abdomen elongated, then distended upward. Ethereal bread dough.

An acrid odor shattered her reverie and snapped her to awareness. Rhapsody turned away from watching the transformation the Child of Earth was undergoing to see Achmed raking his sword through the slender channels of the Loritorium’s street lamp system, as if driving a herd of small animals within the narrow arteries. The blistering odor brought water to her eyes and nose, and panic flashed through her as she recognized the smell.

He had unplugged the stone dam of the lampfuel. She looked behind him to see it was gushing from the reservoir, running in a great corpulent river from the center of the square to the tunnel into the Colony, filling the streets and pooling dangerously close to the firewell.

“Gods, what are you doing?” she cried. “Get away from there! It will ignite!”

Achmed continued to drag the blade through the channels, directing the thick ooze back to the halfwall closest to the tunnel leading back to Ylorc.

“That’s the idea.” He turned and stared at her as he shook the thick liquid from his sword and sheathed it again. “How else do you propose to kill the vine? You said yourself that fire cauterizes it. It’s already tapped into the power of the Axis Mundi, in case you couldn’t tell. If we don’t cut if off, burn it into oblivion here, now, that root will eventually reach all the way down to the other Sleeping Child.” He slammed the plug back into place and stared at her again. His mismatched eyes glittered ominously in the shadowlight. “Light it.”

“We can’t yet,” Rhapsody answered, feeling suddenly cold. “Grunthor and the Grandmother are still in there.”

Achmed nodded behind her, and she whirled around. The Sleeping Child’s body had become incongruously distended, swollen out of all proportion. An oblongated peninsula of earth-flesh grew large, stretching vertically, then horizontally. It surged upward in a smooth rolling motion, as if dividing itself, and rose to a monstrous height. The section made a final, twisting turn and then separated from the body of the child, now lying, significantly smaller and motionless, on the Living Stone slab.

The glowing light of the newly separated piece dimmed into the color of stone, then warmed before her eyes into gray-green skin, oily and hidelike. Instant by instant it took on a more delineated shape, taking on human lines where a moment before it had been a formless mass. Rhapsody’s eyes widened.

“Grunthor!”

The giant exhaled and stumbled forward, catching himself by clutching the altar of Living Stone. “Hrekin,” he muttered weakly.

Rhapsody started toward her friend, only to feel a viselike grip around her upper arm. She looked up into the eyes of the Firbolg king, burning with a fury hotter than the flames of the firewell. He pointed to the trail of lampfuel, a liquid fuse from the firewell into the darkened cavern of the Colony.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if he had been in there still. There’s no other choice anymore. Now light it.”

Rhapsody shuddered at the all-consuming anger in Achmed’s eyes, the hallmark of the unquenchable racial hatred his half-Dhracian nature held for the F’dor and all their minions. It was an animus that no love, no friendship, no rational thought could sway or defuse when it was in full rampage. “The Grandmother is still in there,” she said haltingly. “Would you leave her to die with it?”

Achmed stared down at her a moment longer, then closed his eyes and let the path lore he had gained in the belly of the Earth loose. His inner sight sped through the pale marble streets, following the flood of lampfuel through the hole in the earth-dam they had crawled under, over the broken walls and slabs of shattered stone that had once held the last colony of his kind. His mind flew over the crumbled archway and its scattered words, under the twisting vines and rootlets writhing with mounting strength. Even where he stood in the streets of the Loritorium he could smell the stench of the F’dor growing, see the clay of the Earth shuddering as it prepared to give way.

Within the ruins of the cavern of the Sleeping Child his second sight stopped. He could see the Grandmother there, surrounded by a veritable cage of hissing vines, poised to strike, one leg pinned beneath a fallen granite slab amid the buckled walls of the chamber. Her left hand was upraised, trembling with strain, her right one braced against the slab that held her captive. Rivers of poisonous lampfuel gushed over her, beginning to fill the cavern.

She seemed infinitesimal in size, dwarfed by the colossal vine that hovered menacingly above her, its massive offshoots swollen with rage, tangled within the remains of the chamber’s floor. Its roots were snarling now, coated with glistening lampfuel, lashing out at her, coming nearer to reaching her as she began to fail.

Then, just as his mind was absorbing the horror of the sight, the Grandmother turned toward him, and her eyes met his vision. A tiny smile, the only one he had ever seen her indulge in, came over the ancient face, wrinkled and lined with age and so many centuries of somber guardianship. She nodded to him, and with the last of her strength turned back to face the vine that was threatening to break the Thrall.

Achmed fought back the primordial rage that was singing through his blood in the presence of the race he hated with every fiber of his being. He choked back the bile that had risen to his constricted throat as the vision disappeared. Then he squeezed Rhapsody’s arm again.

“Light it,” he repeated in a low, deadly voice.

With a vicious tug Rhapsody pulled free from his grasp. “Let go,” she snarled.

Angrily Achmed grabbed for Daystar Clarion. “Damn you—” He pulled back in pain and shock as she drew the sword like lightning and raked it across his open palm, singeing the skin.

“Don’t ever attempt to wrest this sword from me unless you are prepared to draw your own,” Rhapsody shouted.

“Skychild?”

All three companions stopped, glancing around the Loritorium for the origin of the Grandmother’s voice. The fricative click, the sandy sound that Rhapsody had only heard in one other voice, was unmistakable. The single word came with great effort, spoken very softly.

It was Grunthor who found the source first. He gestured to Rhapsody.

“

“Ere, darlin’.” He was pointing to the Sleeping Child.

In a daze Rhapsody came to the altar of Living Stone where the child lay. She stared down at the smooth gray skin, the coarse brown hair so like high-grass in the heat of summer. Tenderly she ran her hand over the child’s forehead, brushing the clods of fallen dirt from her brow. She could feel a surge of power, a vibration issuing forth from the stone of the altar through the body of the Earthchild, tingling across the skin of her hand and speaking directly to her heart. She had to struggle to bring herself to answer.

“Yes, Grandmother?”

The Sleeping Child’s brow wrinkled with the effort of speech. Her eyes remained closed, grassy lashes wet with tears. Her lips formed the Grandmother’s last words.

“Light it.”

The ancient Dhracian’s voice had passed through the ground, as if the Earth itself had wished to serve as the stalwart guardian’s final messenger. It had traveled through the slab of Living Stone and through the Earth’s last living Child. The irony brought tears to Rhapsody’s eyes. The Grandmother would never hear the words of wisdom she had waited a lifetime for from the Earth-child’s lips. The only words the Sleeping Child would speak would be the Grandmother’s own.

Rhapsody looked up into the faces of her two friends. The men watched as her sorrowful expression hardened into a resolute one.

“All right,” she said. “I will. Get out of here.”