Requiem for the Sun

3^rd Thread The Lee

The realm of Sorbold was a place of relentless sun. Mountainous and arid, it stretched like the fingers of a grasping hand southward from the rim of the Manteids, the mountain range known more commonly as the Teeth, arthritic phalanges of spiny hills reaching across the barren desert and into the rocky steppes of the Lower Continent, to the ghostly inland seacoast, where the skeletons of ships lost centuries before still littered the black sand, shrouded in mist coming off the warm sea.

In winter the icy winds swept across the land, scattering crystals of snow, howling through the bleak dunes, shifting the desolate landscape like a child playing in a box of dirt. At night those winds carried sprays of golden sand aloft into the sky, where they drifted for a moment among the stars, mirroring the silent streaks of blazing light above, shooting stars that fell into the edges of endless blackness encompassing the vast, echoing desert.

In spite of the harsh reality of the land, the occasional sense that the Creator had forsaken the place and its people, Sorbold was a realm of deep magic.

The harsh climate did not engender a hospitable nature in the people of this rocky land. Sorbolds were known for the shortness of their attention, of their tempers, of their alliances. The only thing that seemed to be long in the national personality was memory. Sorbold held its history tightly; every battle loss, every betrayal, every perceived injustice counted and recounted silently but consistently as the years turned into centuries and eventually millennia. Ages and dynasties came and went with the shifting sands of the desert, but the memories remained, hidden, brooding, deep within the vaults of Time.

For three-quarters of a century Sorbold had been under the rule of Her Serenity, Leitha, the Dowager Empress, a humorless woman whose cold attitude stood in marked contrast to the climate of the realm she held locked in her tiny but iron grip. The empress was short of stature but long of will. When she was coronated she was almost a perfect globe in shape; as the years of her reign passed she desiccated slowly, like a drying apple, as if the heat of Sorbold were sucking the water, fat, and muscle tissue bit by bit from her body, leaving her withered, hard, and leathery well into old age. The process made her stronger, like steel that was tempered in fire, or leather cured in smoke. For all that the bordering nations of the continent had quietly distrusted her father, the Fourth Emperor of the Dark Earth, they openly feared his daughter, who seemed bound and determined to live forever, and was doing a fair job of accomplishing that goal.

The bravest of her subjects and adversaries on occasion referred to the empress (well out of her earshot, of course) as the Gray Assassin, after a poisonous spider commonly found in dark, cool hiding places in the mountainous clime. Like the arachnid, the empress was rumored to have mated only once. Her consort, a pasty-faced noble from the Hintervold, was found the morning after their wedding, his rigid body carefully dressed and lying on top of the neatly folded sheets in the royal bedchamber, a hideous grimace sealed forever into his features by the richtus of death, while the empress was out for her morning ride.

The momentary union produced the empress’s only progeny, the Crown Prince Vyshla. The Crown Prince favored his father; his skin was sallow and pale, even in a clime that produced swarthy complexions in everyone else who lived there; his hands and body were soft as a woman’s, some soldiers of the Columns were known to have joked once, though in doing so they learned quickly that the mountains, and even the desert sand, had ears. Their eyeless remains, dried and mummified by the harsh winds and waterless air, swung for more than a year from a parapet outside the palace of Jierna Tal before the prince was finally prevailed upon to have them removed so that they did not clash with the street decorations celebrating the rites of spring.

It was not the prince, however, who was responsible for the grisly ornaments, but his mother.

The Crown Prince had remained unmarried all his life. At first it had been rumored by those outside his realm that the reason was his deeply held standards, set too high for any mortal woman to reach. As the years passed, however, other reasons were proffered when the topic came up over tankards of ale around inn hearth fires or in sewing circles.

Perhaps it was the prince’s own noxious personality that kept him from winning a bride; he was said to be fussy and high-strung, easily offended and given to spates of impotent smoldering. In addition, other types of impotence were widely rumored. But, for all that Vyshla was, without question, annoying and childlike, he certainly was not the first ruler of a powerful nation to be devoid of a pleasant personality. That lack of personal charisma had never been a barrier to a royal marriage before; on the contrary, it had been more or less proven that the most attractive appendage in a royal man was the scepter he held in his hand by divine right, not anything more centrally attached to his body.

As time went on, the gossip shifted. Crown Prince Vyshla’s lack of betrothal, marriage, and progeny, it was now believed, had been engineered entirely by the Dowager Empress. Jealous and avaricious, the woman who had ruled Sorbold for more than seventy-five years had broken the aggressions of her enemies, held armies at bay, and elevated a dry, resourceless land into a realm of tremendous power and influence by the mere force of her will and vision. Quite simply, the stories said, she was not willing to entertain the possibility that an heir was necessary, because she was never planning to leave the throne. One of the more exaggerated tales claimed that she had wind-dried the unfortunate soldiers who joked at her son’s expense as an experiment to see how better to preserve herself post mortem, so that she might continue to rule without interruption after her death.

For all the iron-clad avarice of the self-serving dowager, and the finicky, spoiled behavior of the pampered prince, however, there had been one moment in recent history that showed that the Empress of the Dark Earth and her son were levelheaded monarchs, reasonable in their policies of international relations, acting in the best interests of Sorbold.

They had more or less willingly agreed to, and ultimately signed, treaties of trade and nonaggression with the new Cymrian Alliance.

Initially the elderly queen and her son worried when the benison of Sorbold, the foremost clergyman in their land and the dowager’s personal confessor, had returned from Sepulvarta, the independent city-state that was the capital seat of the religion of the realm, with news of the alliance between the central human nation of Roland to their north, the forested Lirin realm to their west, and Ylorc, the savage kingdom of Firbolg monsters across the mountainous barricade to the east.

The new queen of the Lirin, a half-human woman named Rhapsody whom Vyshla had halfheartedly sued for the hand of, and Gwydion of Manosse, the Heir Presumptive of the Cymrian line that had ruled Roland, Ylorc, and Sorbold itself for a time a thousand years before, had been selected by a council of the surviving Cymrians and their descendants to reign over a loose alliance of the realms of the central continent, while each kingdom retained its sovereignty. The empress was able to see the value in being perceived from the outset as a friendly independent nation, rather than have the alliance of men, Lirin, and Bolg test their mettle as a possible conquest later on.

The Dowager Empress had a remarkable gift for looking forward. Her visionary glance saw down the road into a future where cooperation from the outset would yield protection in later days.

As with most visionaries, what her eyes couldn’t see was the shadow that loomed behind her.

The three-quarter moon rose heavily over the streets of Jierna’sid, the capital seat of Sorbold, glowing sparingly on the sand that blasted the formal gardens and well-kept roadways, a constant reminder of the endless desert that flanked the city on two sides. The wind seemed to laugh in time at the moon, teasingly blowing wisps of clouds in front of the pale sky-lantern, shrieking fitfully over the sleeping city. Try to tame me, the wind seemed to taunt. I dare you.

That moon, in answer, doused the central object of the city with a particular shine.

Towering above the palace of Jierna Tal, the Place of Weight, stood the holiest artifact in the land. It was a gigantic set of ancient scales, the wooden column and beam planed smooth by artisans of the old Cymrian empire a thousand or more years before, the ancient metal pans even older, trays of gleaming gold carried across the ocean on ships fleeing the destruction of the place they had been smithed, burnished by the relentless sand and wind.

The last time those mammoth scales had been used to weigh a decision of heavy import had been three years prior, when the Patriarch in Sepulvarta died. The Patriarch had decreed in his final moments that, rather than naming his own successor, he wished to allow the Scales to select one. The benisons of the religion, those clergyman directly beneath the Patriarch in power and influence, had gathered in Jierna Tal for the Weighing, a long-revered rite in which the ancient Scales passed judgment on a candidate’s worthiness. Historically the Scales had at one time made determinations on many different kinds of offices, as well as the innocence or guilt of accused criminals, and whether treaties were balanced and fair, but in recent memory their wisdom was only consulted on matters of state or great import. The selection and investiture of a new Patriarch was deemed a worthy cause for consulting the Scales.

The Ring of Wisdom of the Patriarchy had been placed, amid solemn ceremony, into the tray that aligned with the west wind, Leuk, the wind of justice, to serve as the weight. One by one, each of the benisons had stepped onto the eastern tray.

One by one the Scales had tilted crazily and the eastern tray upended, finding the candidate unworthy, and depositing him unceremoniously onto his hindquarters at the base of the enormous scaffold amid roars of amusement from the immense crowd that had gathered to watch the selection. The youngest of the four benisons, Ian Steward, had bravely volunteered to go first. He landed with a resounding splat, his body splayed out in such an unflattering manner that the eldest benison, Colin Abernathy, had decided to forgo the process and pass up a chance at the Patriarchy altogether.

Finally, when each of the existing benisons had been deemed unworthy of the Ring and the Patriarchy by the Scales, another man had stepped forward. He was tall and broad of shoulder, despite being advanced of years, his white-blond beard and hair curling in streaks of gray. He had stepped onto the scale tray as if it were something he had done many times before, and stood, as if listening to a voice in the clouds, as the enormous arm and chains of the Scales raised him on high, over the heads of the now-silent crowd, then balanced the trays.

As the stunned crowd recovered from its shock and roared assent, the man quietly spoke but one word, his name.

Constantin.

The noise from the crowd dimmed for a moment. The name was renowned in Sorbold, shared with a famous gladiator in the western city-state of Jakar, a cool and bloodthirsty arena killer who had disappeared from the gladiatorial complex some months before. The thought that this elderly holy man, soon to be anointed and invested with the powers to become the most potent healer in the land, had the same name as the gladiator was such a great irony as to invoke a sea of rippling laughter across the city square that rattled the bell towers of Jierna Tal.

Later that day, long after the decision of the Scales had been officially inscribed in the holy tomes of Sepulvarta, many hours after the crowds in the square had dispersed, the new Patriarch could still be seen, standing at the foot of the Scales, staring up at the holy instrumentality, a look of reverent amazement etched into the lines of his face.

In the light of the waxing moon a man again stood, a different man, gazing at the Scales, a look of similar awe molding his heavy facial features into an aspect of reverence. His swarthy hands were at his sides, awash in the silver illumination, fingering something smooth as he watched the magnificent instrumentality of justice gleam in the intermittent brightness.

The last watch of the night had changed while he stood in the shadows of the palace of Jierna Tal. The soldiers of the Second Steppe Column, sweating beneath their helmets of cured leather banded in steel and wrapped in linen, passed by within a few strides of him as if he were not there. Now the street was silent, the lights in the palace dimming, then winking out into blackness.

He exhaled, then took a deep breath of the hot summer air, dry, rich with portent, letting it fill his lungs.

Then he slowly mounted the steps leading to the titanic Scales.

The inconstant moonlight gleamed off the golden trays, large enough to hold a two-ox cart and more. He stared contemplatively at the center of the pan, at the fine lines long ingrained in the metal, the surface marred by time and weather, shining with their own radiance. This had been the birthplace of many new beginnings.

His left hand opened.

In it was a weight shaped like a throne.

The carving on the weight was in and of itself worthy of appreciation; the tiny throne was rendered, curve for curve, angle for angle, engraving for engraving, in the likeness of the throne of Sorbold, down to the image of the sword and sun that decorated the ancient seat of power now occupied by the Dowager Empress.

But more of notice was the material that comprised the weight. It was cool to the touch, even in the heat of the desert night, its rockflesh striated in colors of green and purple, brown and vermilion.

It hummed with life.

Carefully the man set the throne weight into the western tray. He then walked deliberately around the massive machine and stood in front of the eastern tray. He opened his right hand.

The fleeting moonlight had vanished; at first, darkness cloaked the item in his hand. After a moment, as though curious, it returned, shining on the irregular oval, violet in color, though when the light touched the surface it seemed to shimmer radiantly like the flames of a thousand tiny candles. In its smooth-weathered surface a rune was carved in the tongue of an island long settled beneath the rolling waves of the sea.

It was a scale of a different kind.

With consummate care he placed it in the empty tray, marveling at the waves of violet light that rolled to its edges like ripples of a pebble thrown in smooth water.

The man’s dagger, worn a moment before at his side, glinted in the dark.

He rolled up the sleeve of his belaque and drew a quick, thin line, black in the darkness, across the back of his wrist, then bent down and held his bleeding hand above the tray.

Seven drops of blood dripped onto the scale, each one meticulously counted.

Then the man stood up, ignoring the oozing of the blood into the sleeve of his garment, watching the Scales intently.

Slowly the enormous plates shifted, skittering across the stones of the square slightly.

Then the plate bearing the bloody scale was raised aloft, the light of the moon flashing off the golden tray as it moved.

The Scales balanced.

The piece of Living Stone carved in the shape of the throne of Sorbold ignited and burned to ash in a puff of crackling smoke.

The man at the foot of the Scales stood stock-still for a moment, then threw back his head and raised his arms in triumph to the moon overhead.

He did not cast a shadow.

In the opulent darkness of his bedchamber, the Crown Prince was thrashing about in the clutches of disturbing dreams. He began to sweat, struggling to breathe.

Sergeant-Major Grunthor had been somber all night.

The entire ride home to the Cauldron he did not speak a word, did not allow his eyes to move from the ground in front of him. He just spurred his horse to as consistent a canter as he could maintain, rushing to get back to the Firbolg seat of power.

He had actually been quite cheerful earlier when riding the enfilade line, shouting playful obscenities in the Bolgish tongue at the guards on the Sorbold side of the border, grinning widely and waving to the stern-faced sentries, trying to crack their resolve while appearing as nonthreatening as seven and a half feet of green-skinned, tusked musculature can appear. It was his favorite way to end a border check.

“Hie! Sweet’eart! My ’orse ’ere wants a word with you! She thinks ya might be the jackass who fathered the mule she popped t’other night!” The light from the border fires illuminated his broad face, causing his impeccably kept teeth and tusks to mirror the waxing moon overhead.

The Sorbolds, strictly trained not to respond unless attacked, continued to stare due east into the lands of Ylorc, steadfastly holding their watch.

The giant Sergeant-Major tugged at the reins, guiding the heavy war horse to retrace its steps, then stood in the stirrups, balancing perfectly against the skill of his mount.

“Speakin’ o’ fathers, did ya know I coulda been your dad, but the dog beat me up the stairs?”

Not so much as one Sorbold eyelash fluttered. The Bolg line of guard under his command snickered intermittently.

A wicked gleam appeared in the Sergeant’s eye as a new taunt occurred to him. He reined Rockslide, his war mare, to a stop and began to dismount, still shouting taunts at the border guards.

“Why are you all so sore-balled, anyway? What, ’ave you been knobbing the sagebrush or—

As his foot touched the earth Grunthor stopped.

His skin, generally the color of old bruises, went pale enough to be noticed by his men, even in the dim light of the fires.

He bent quickly and placed his hands on the ground, struggling to maintain consciousness over the din in his ears; the internal noise rocked him, made him weak, threatening to bowl him over in pain and despair.

The earth beneath his hands and knees was wailing in terror.