The Assassin King

31

The dragon extended her claws in her torpor, reveling in her ease and the dimming of the pain that had been chewing on her since the turn of the moon.

With the partial healing of her body came a similarly partial revival of her memory. Deep in slumber, she was dreaming now, and in those dreams she did not inhabit the draconic form that was her current reality, but rather she was a woman, the Lady of legendary beauty and power that she had been only a short time ago.

The wyrm stretched lazily, allowing herself to enjoy the motion of her torn muscles as they mended. She was recalling her halcyon days, flashes of memories she didn’t understand—the echoes of childhood laughter with two other shapes that seemed to be those of young girls, like herself, chasing after each other in a virgin forest, no adult, or in fact any other person, in sight. She did not remember her sisters, nor the dragon mother who left the three of them at the foot of the Great White Tree, save for a sour taste in her mouth that was pittance beside the hate she felt for the woman named Rhapsody. But she did recall the laughter, the sense of freedom, and of loneliness, from those times, and little else. Her breaming grew deeper as it grew easier. The image in her mind faded from childhood revels to the day when, as a young woman alone on a bluff overlooking the same beach where her mother had first spied her father coming off of the ocean, she saw the arrival of ships, storm-tossed and broken, landing one after another on the heels of a terrible storm. The people who debarked from those ships were like none she had ever seen—some tall and fair, some broad and sturdy, some the size of children with slender hands and enormous eyes that spoke in flowers rather than words, a panoply of mankind, their skin arrayed in all different colors; one by one, the ships unloaded their living treasure, leaving her breathless, her golden face scored with tiny lines was wet with tears for the first time in her life. My horde, she thought, then and now, the closest she had ever come to love at first sight. The other memories that loomed, threatening to displace those happy ones, she pushed away, shrinking from the pain they caused in much the same way as she had from the broken shards of metal still wedged within her. No, no, she thought hazily, banishing all other thought from her mind and returning to happier times, images of celebrations at the seaside, feasts and joyous dancing and a ceremony at the foot of the Great White Tree in which she was elevated above all and called Lady by the living treasure whose name she still could not recall. The Cymrians, the refugees of the First Fleet from the dead Island of Serendair. I want to stay asleep, she mused, stretching again, luxuriating in the memory of a time when she was honored, not despised, celebrated and sought after, not cast out and ostracized. She opened her mouth and, as before, the liquid gold of sunshine, sweet and healing, dripped within it. The fire in her, brewed by the firegems that all members of her race had in their bellies, cooled, leaving her dreamless and at rest. For the moment.

The windy silence was shattered simultaneously by the sudden squeal of the infant and the ringing slap of leather glove against flesh a split second afterward. Achmed reined his horse to a stop, the delicate nerve endings in his skin burning from the sound. “What now, Rhapsody?” he demanded, glaring over his shoulder as she opened the folds of the mist cloak, a look of consternation on her wind-stung face. “You just fed him; this demanding brat is becoming far too much of an irritation. One more sudden shriek without cause and I’m going to skewer him on a horse spike and leave him for carrion.”

“How do you know it was without cause?” Rhapsody asked, examining the baby. Achmed glanced over at Grunthor, who was rubbing his neck. “What’s the matter?”

“Somethin’ stung me,” the giant muttered.

“Probably a sand fly of some sort,” said Achmed. “They can be brutal, though one would think you’d be fairly invulnerable to them, given your Bengard skin.”

“One would think,” the giant agreed, still examining his neck, “but this was no lit’le sting. Oi got right bit. Ow. Bloody ow.”

“So did Meridion,” Rhapsody said. She plucked the stinger from a large red welt on the screeching infant’s leg and ran her finger over it, warming it gently with her fire lore to soothe the pain. At that moment Achmed became aware of the hum. He signaled to Grunthor and reined his horse to a stop, following the irritation in his skin. He draped the reins over Rhapsody’s arm and dismounted, letting the buzzing guide him over the sand, until he found the source.

Several small wells pocked the otherwise unbroken layer of sand, over which a few itinerant bees were hovering while others appeared to be burrowing into the ground near the wells. “I’ve found your assailant, Grunthor,” he said, crouching down and examining the wells, which resembled large anthills. “Do you wish me to wreak vengeance on your behalf? I could piss on them if you want. Or are we ready to move out?”

“What are bees doin’ out ’ere in the desert?” the giant Bolg wondered aloud. “Nothin’ for them ta eat, no flowers, vegetation. No real water. Strange.”

Achmed mounted again and took the reins back. He clicked to the horse and they returned to a smooth canter, riding the rising and falling dunes and drumlins with alacrity, heading east as the distant mountains seemed to grow closer, their red and purple hues gleaming at the horizon like a promise of shelter that would not be reached before the coming of night. The light had already begun to fade as the red sun made its way down the welkin of the sky; the wind picked up, sweeping the sand across the cracked earth in great spinning devils of dust. They had not gone very far when Achmed yanked his horse to a stop again, this time making a grab for Rhapsody to keep her from falling forward. Grunthor stopped a few seconds later, a few strides ahead of him, staring, as he did, into the east.

“Criton,” the Bolg commander murmured. “Whaddaya make o’ that?”

“Gods,” Rhapsody whispered, drawing the mist cloak closer to her to calm the baby. Achmed said nothing but stared with mismatched eyes at the sight before them. Jutting from the seemingly endless desert was a broken tower, a minaret, tilted on its side. It seemed to appear from nowhere, emerging from the red sand in which little to no vegetation or in fact any sign of life had been seen for days.

Around it were similar ruins, remnants of domes and walls, uprooted from the sand as if they had been pulled and tossed aside like weeds. The scale of the rains was enormous, as if the original occupants of whatever city they had once been part of had been giants, or perhaps it was just that the city itself had been mammoth. The sun overhead beat down on the detritus, which shone eerily in the light with an almost translucent radiance. “Did we not come through this place before, years ago, when we were returning to Ylorc with the slave children of the Raven’s Guild in Yarim?” Rhapsody asked. “I don’t remember seeing ruins then.”

“They were not here,” Achmed agreed. He continued to stare at the husks of what had once been walls, now little more than building blocks scattered in the hot sand. Somewhere nearby the hum he had heard from the ground-nesting bees had grown stronger. “These ruins appear to have been evicted from the sand. I suppose that happens from time to time, especially if there has been an earthquake or other disturbance of the strata of the earth. The ground here is riven—there are rifts and cracks in the clay.” He pointed to a great fissure where the sunbaked ground had been rent apart north of them, which the wind was beginning to fill in with sand.

“I don’t remember feelin’ any tremors lately,” Grunthor said seriously. He dragged back on his reins again and dismounted; the sand atop the red clay sprayed in all directions as he thudded to the ground. “That looks pretty recent.” He knelt down and rested his hand on the ground. “Somethin’s wrong ’ere; everything’s all jumbled up, distressed-like. As if this place had been asleep, or dead, even before we left the world, and then was suddenly shocked awake.” Rhapsody and Achmed exchanged a glance; the earth lore that Grunthor had absorbed, like the two of them, when passing through the fire at the Earth’s core, was never wrong. Rhapsody rocked the baby, gentling him back into sleep again, as Achmed scanned the horizon. The wind picked up; Rhapsody pulled the hood of the mist cloak lower and Achmed raised the veil on his face over his eyes against the sting of the sand. “Even our patrols at the northernmost edge of our borders are days from here,” he said finally. “I’ve no idea what this is, or was, but another sandstorm appears to be brewing. Either we ride full out and see if we can find shelter over those hills, or we may be forced to take it here. Whatever this is, I am not certain I want to be trapped in this place in another dust devil,” Grunthor shrugged. “Might be as good a place as any, sir,” he said, surveying the towering fragments of walls sprouting from the sand before them. “Looks pretty solid—that wreckage ain’t goin’ nowhere. Should provide decent cover if you think another storm’s comin’. There’s nowhere else we could make it to before nightfall.” He looked over to where Rhapsody had been standing, then tapped Achmed’s shoulder and pointed. The Bolg king turned back to look as well.

The Lady Cymrian had wandered slightly to the south, as if following a call only she could hear. She crouched down as they watched, still listening. From within the billowing folds of the mist cloak they could see her reach out her hand and pass it over the ground. Then her arm withdrew into the cloak; she looked down at the baby, then turned to meet their gaze. “How’s your neck, Grunthor?” she asked.

The giant shrugged again, then reached up and patted it. A look of surprise came over his massive features.

“Good as new,” he murmured aloud. Rhapsody rose and came back over to them. She stopped in front of Achmed and pushed aside the folds of the cloak of mist to reveal the infant’s leg. The welt was gone, healed as if it had never been there.

She turned around, taking in the sight of the vast desert behind them, the mountains in the distance to the east, listening intently. “What is it?” Achmed asked. “Can’t you feel it?” she asked. “There’s a very deep vibration here, a vibrant song, but I missed it in the hum of the bees and the howl of the wind. It is ancient in tone, the musical note Lisele-ut, attuned to the color red in the spectrum.”

“Blood saver,” said Achmed. “Healing?”

“Yes. But I can’t even fathom how strong this is—it’s too deep to be audible; I can only feel it. Can you as well, Grunthor?” The Sergeant-Major nodded in assent. “We should stay ’ere tonight, sir,” he said loudly, watching Rhapsody as she wandered northward, her eyes closed, following the tone. Then he leaned over and spoke quietly to Achmed.

“Look at ’er, look at ’er face.”

As they had done once long ago in the light of a campfire, having just emerged from their long trek through the belly of the Earth, the two Bolg stared at Rhapsody. Then they were seeing the effects of the elemental fire she had absorbed in the Earth’s core, a purging of physical flaws, a brightening of her eyes and hair until it radiated the same warmth as the element. She had become hypnotic to behold, an experience similar to gazing into roaring flames on a hearth. Now what they saw was different, but similarly compelling. The woman who had ridden with them from Haguefort had been wan and pale, thin and listless from the difficulty of bearing a dragon’s child. Even though she had remained fair, she was waiflike, a shadow of herself, her health fragile, her vitality, so much a part of her before, weak and sapped. She seemed almost dry, bloodless, as though color had been drained out of her in childbirth.

As she passed northward, however, guided by the tune the Earth was singing in this place of endless arid clay and merciless cold sun, she seemed to rehydrate, as if she was drinking in the color from the world around her. The flaxen hair peeking from beneath the hood of the mist cloak was growing brighter, back to the gold of the old days, her pale skin turning rosier, her flesh gaining more solidity and heft the farther along she walked. Even her gait grew stronger; there was more vigor in her step, more energy in her movements. As she approached the fissure in the ground, the Sergeant started back to the horses. “Whatever this place is, sir, it seems to be ’ealing the Duchess. Oi think we oughta just settle ’ere until she gets a lit’le better; she was lookin’ about ready ta drop.”

Achmed watched as she knelt down next to the fissure, then nodded. “All right,” he called to Grunthor, “let’s see if we can find a sheltered spot within the ruins where we won’t be buried if another sandstorm blows through.” Then he walked over to where Rhapsody was kneeling and stood silently while she listened to the music only she could hear. At last she looked up, her face shining brightly in the light of the setting sun. “I think I know what this place may have been,” she said excitedly, her eyes shining green as the forest canopies in Tyrian. “When we were in Yarim Paar, drilling beneath Entudenin to restore water to the province, do you recall hearing a legend of a lost city named Kurimah Milani?” Achmed chuckled wryly. “No, when the Bolg artisans were in Yarim Paar we were not being accorded fancy hospitality and having legends related to us—we were digging every hour of the day and night, sweating blood and enduring the hostile stares and jeers of the imbeciles who we should have allowed to die of thirst in the heat. You, on the other hand, were the guest of mat idiot duke, Ihrman Karsrick, if I recall correctly, so I can see how you may have had a moment to indulge in the gathering of lore and legend.” He stopped, seeing her face fall, and remembering mat in fact she had arranged for better housing and treatment for the Bolg workers, which he had refused. “Tell me the tale.”

Rhapsody stood, cradling the baby close to her.

“I don’t know the tale, I only have heard snippets of the lore. In the oldest days, long before the Cymrians came to this continent, there was said to have been a marvelous city called Kurimah Milani somewhere around here, in the lee of the northern mountains. I’m not sure of the origin of the name, but the sounds it contains are all the musical notes that promote healing, much like the red spectrum of your Light-catcher is supposedly I heard fragments of the tales from the Shanouin priestesses, that tribe of well-diggers who alone were able to locate water in the desert clime of Yarim. The Shanouin are said to have been descended from the inhabitants of Kurimah Milani, but the city has been lost to the ages for so long that even they do not know if that is truth or fantasy.

“I know little else about it, except that it was said to be a place of hot springs rich in minerals, runoff from the Manganese Mountains to the north of the Teeth. The legends said that the hot springs imparted healing and other magical properties to those fortunate enough to bathe in or drink from them. That’s all there was; the lore is too old for anyone now living to remember. It may all have been a mirage of the mind, a fantasy that desert dwellers told each other in the hot seasons when water was scarce and they were made a little insane by thirst. “But somewhere beneath here a song of immense power is resonating, emanating from the One-God only knows what. It is a melodious tune, deep and slow, faster than the heartbeat of the Earth that we heard when we were walking within it, but regular, like tides of the sea; strange, all the way out here in the desert. The power is vibrating within the ground—can you feel it?” Achmed lowered his veil to allow his skin-web access to the open wind, then pulled the glove from his left hand. He crouched down and held his palm over the fissure. “I can,” he said after a moment. “Then perhaps these are the ruins of that place,” Rhapsody said. “Interesting, and potentially useful. I think Meridion needs changing.”

The Bolg king flinched against the wind as it roared through again, stinging his eyes. Grunthor jogged back to them, having settled the horses and the provisions in the shelter of the ruins. “Right nice spot, out of the wind,” he said cheerfully. “C’mon, Duchess, I got a place set up fer you an’ the lit’le one; you should be clear of the wind, most part.”

The Bolg king gestured at the ground.

“Grunthor, can you tell what is beneath here? Is it sand and clay for as far as you can sense, or are there other strata? Is there a city below?”

The Sergeant-Major walked to the edge of the fissure, then jumped down onto a clay ledge and examined the ground. “The ruins o’ one, maybe,” he replied. “Can’t rightly tell— there’s somethin’ powerful in the way makin’ noise, masking whatever the Earth says. There seems ta be a lot o’ broken bits below, but that’s all Oi can tell. O’ course, we could just go see fer ourselves. There’s a right big tunnel just beyond this fissure, tall and wide—we could go below; we done it before, after all.”

Rhapsody shuddered. “Don’t remind me, please. The nightmares will only get worse. Let’s take shelter with the horses in the ruins.”

“Oi’ll go get the diaperin’ supplies and the rest o’ the provisions,” Grunthor said, jogging to the ruins. “Oi think you’re right about the young prince needin’ changin’.Hrekin.”

“You don’t want to see what’s below the sand?” Achmed asked while they waited. “No. I want to get to Ylorc, get out of the wind, and get started working on your bloody Lightcatcher. I don’t need a reminder of our travels along the Axis Mundi, thank you very much. I’m Lirin; we don’t belong underground, and you well know it.”

“Oh, come now, you said you were looking forward to returning to Elysian, and that’s underground,” said Achmed in exasperation. “What’s the difference? How can you, a Namer, pass up the chance to possibly find what sounds like it would be one of the greatest recoveries of lore in the Known World? If this is Kurimah Milani, do you want to leave it for someone else to find?”

“Yeah,” said Grunthor, dropping her pack in front of her. “What would ol’ Talquist make of this place, Oi wonder?”

“I will not deliberately take the baby into danger just to—”

“It can’t be any more dangerous than being out in plain sight, especially with night coming on,” Achmed said. “It could be a good deal less dangerous, miss,” said Grunthor seriously. “Look be’ind you.” Rhapsody and Achmed turned around simultaneously and were slapped full in the face by the sandy wind. From the west a great wall of dust was approaching, sweeping ahead of it whatever scrub vegetation had been drying in the wide expanse of red clay desert, its force growing with each second.

Grunthor leapt down into the fissure again and began clearing the sand away from in front of the rift where he had indicated a tunnel to be present.

“ ’urry in if you’re goin’,” he said. “Can’t ’old the bloody sand up fer long. Give me good ol’ Bolgish basalt any day.”

Achmed climbed down into the fissure and crawled within the rift, emerging a moment later. “It’s all right, Rhapsody—the ceiling is high, and it appears to be a vault or cavern of some sort. We can stay in here until the sandstorm passes, then be on our way.”

The Lady Cymrian exhaled, then climbed down behind him, followed by Grunthor, into a place of vast and endless darkness.

As the gathering windstorm approached, a shadow followed silently behind them.