The men watched as the Lady Cymrian turned around again, still struggling to see the place they first came when they arrived in the Bolglands. She extended her arms out in front of her and made her way to where the passage had been, then felt about on the rock wall. She turned back to them, her face contorted with grief.
“The opening is still here, Achmed,” she said. “Please; I want to see the grotto. I need to know what has happened to my house.”
“Oi don’ think that’s a good idea, Duchess,” said Grunthor gently.
“Are you telling me that the structure of the cave is unsafe?”
“No,” said the Sergeant-Major, unwilling to lie to her. “Nuthin’ but an earthquake will take down that dome. That cave’s right solid, and the lake is there still. But there’s nothing left of your house; nothing worth mentioning, anyway.”
“Are you certain?” Rhapsody pressed, numbly feeling the wall face again. “My instruments, my clothing? Did nothing survive?”
“Nothing Oi saw,” said the giant Bolg. “I didn’t row out to the island itself, o’ course, but that was partly because Oi could see pieces o’ the house floating all about the lake. If ya want to come back at some point and see if there’s anything we can salvage, Oi’d be glad to come with you. But for right now Oi think we should get you settled inside the complex. It’ll be good to have you in there again, miss.”
“What are you looking for specifically?” Achmed asked impatiently. “Whatever need you have, it can be met within the walls of Canrif.”
Rhapsody sighed and began to walk back to them, her hand on her swollen belly.
“I doubt it,” she said. “But we can go if you wish. There was a Naming garment there, one that no doubt had been worn by the three brothers, Meridion’s grandfather and great-uncles. It was a family heirloom, and I thought perhaps it would’ve been nice for him to be able to wear it when we have time for a proper Naming ceremony.”
Achmed snorted and started out of the meadow.
“Perhaps you ought to wait and see when and if he decides to be born again,” he said, following the pathway out of Kraldurge. “If I heard the prophecy correctly, he’s not subject to the whim of Time. For all you know you could be carting him around in there until his eighteenth birthday or beyond.”
“All right,” Rhapsody said briskly, ignoring him. “Let’s get to Canrif; now that I’m pregnant again, I’m in desperate need of a privy.”
Rath had not expected to find what he did in Canrif.
He had not had occasion to walk within the mountain for centuries, a reasonably long period of time, even for one of his advanced age. At that time he had been tracking the demon known as Vrrinax, a F’dor with an inordinate amount of patience that had taken refuge on the last of the ships of the Cymrian Third Fleet, too weak to subsume any host but a sickly cabin boy. The demon had bided its time, slowly growing stronger, passing to more and more powerful hosts as it could, until it had learned to hide so successfully that Rath had been asked to take it on.
For all that he was modest, and had not shared the information with Achmed, Rath was the most accomplished of all the Gaol, the single greatest hunter of the Brethren.
In short, an Assassin King himself.
He could still smell its essence as he silently traversed the hallways of the underground city that the Cymrians had called Canrif, the word meaning Century in their now-dead language. It had been a very long time, but some traces of evil remained in stone, in water, in wood where great wrongs had been perpetrated, or great deeds of maliciousness formulated.
Something of that ilk must have happened here, he reasoned. And in particular, he believed it had begun on the floor of the throne room.
Still, the Three were inured to it. Even the Firbolg king did not notice as he trod the floors of the place, an action that made Rath almost sick with disgust. Only the Lady Cymrian avoided the place where the taint was emanating from, as if she had seen a vision there, or was made uncomfortable by the traces of memory.
What troubled Rath about that was the lack of racial memory. While the Lady Cymrian and the Sergeant could hardly be expected to do so, those of Dhracian blood carried within them forever the scent of the blood of every beast they slew.
And Achmed had killed two of them in relatively short time.
It did not bode well that the Assassin King could even sleep within the walls of such a place, the place where the blood of a F’dor that had died at his hands still vibrated in the walls, the very floor of the place.
He followed his hosts silently around as they went about their business, to the corridor where his quarters were, to the hallway outside the mountain peak of Gurgus, where the Lightcatcher was being rebuilt, and even to the overlook of the underground city itself, still in the process of being restored. Everywhere he looked, he saw Firbolg artisans and soldiers, archons, educators, and masons, all working to restore what had been one king’s vision. It was clear to Rath that the Bolg were another king’s vision, a king who saw himself as building a people, not a mountain stronghold, a noble cause in the eyes of men, but a distraction for one who could be an even greater hunter than Rath.
He would watch closely.
When the two Bolg, Rhapsody, and Rath entered the room at the base of Gurgus Peak, a tall young man with a full beard and head of dark hair came up to the Lady Cyrmian immediately, smiling broadly.
“Hello, Rhapsody,” he said. “Welcome back; it’s wonderful to see you.”
Rhapsody stared at him, befuddled. “I’m sorry,” she said, “do I know you?”
The two Bolg and the bearded young man laughed.
“You don’t remember Omet?” Achmed asked mockingly. “And you were the one that insisted on saving him in the kilns of the Raven’s Guild.”
Rhapsody’s bright green eyes opened wide in shock. “Omet?” she asked in amazement. “You are twice as tall as you were the last time I saw you—and were you not bald?”
“I was,” said the young man agreeably. “But it was hot in Esten’s kilns, and it is cold here in the mountain.”
“Omet has taken the lead in the annealing of the glass and building the Lightcatcher,” Achmed said. “He’s one of the few artisans I allow alone in the room.” His voice fell away awkwardly; Omet had been gravely injured in the explosion that rocked Gurgus Peak, and it was the red spectrum of the Lightcatcher itself that had saved his life.
Rhapsody hugged the young man warmly. “I’m so very glad to see you,” she said.
“Well, you’re the one that told me to go carve my name in the mountains for history to see,” Omet said, smiling. “I’m only doing what you told me to do.”
Rhapsody looked around. Any evidence of destruction from the explosion was no longer present; the room had been restored as if nothing had ever happened. A wooden dome covered the ceiling of the tower, beneath which she could see colored glass of all hues.
“I look forward to you showing me what you’ve done,” she said.
She looked behind her to see Rath standing beneath the dome of the ceiling, staring up into the circle of glass. “Are you all right?”
The Dhracian nodded. “I have seen this before,” he said, still staring up into the tower. “It was in such a place I first learned the Prophecy of the Decks.”
The Bolg king inclined his head.
“Care to elaborate?”
The Dhracian finally broke his black gaze away and stared at Achmed.
“You have not been told the Prophecy of the Decks?”
“No.”
“It is this,” Rath said. “‘That which was Stolen will be given freely. That which was freely Given will be stolen.’”
“It means nothing to me,” said Achmed crossly.
Rath inhaled deeply.
“I will tell you the tale. And then you will know what you are up against.”
38
“In the Before-Time, a great battle was waged against the F’dor by the four remaining primordial race
s born of the elements,” Rath began. “Our race, the Brethren known to man as the Kith, banded together with the Serenel, the Mythlinus, and the Wyrmril, that which men call dragons. It was determined that unless these four races, separate and distrustful of one another, worked together and sacrificed some of what was most precious to them, the unbridled destructiveness of the F’dor would shatter the world.”
“Before this battle began, the F’dor managed to steal one of the first six eggs produced by the Progenitor Wyrm, the being that was mother and father to the race, and secreted the egg away in the bowels of the Earth beyond the fiery core, where it could never be found. The wyrmling from this egg was known to the dragon race as the First Child. The F’dor removed the heat from this wyrmling, allowing it to grow, unborn, perverting it, feeding it on the earth itself, until its mass began to become part of the heft of the world.”
“We have seen it,” Achmed said. “It still sleeps—Rhapsody wove a song of endless change around it, a pattern of confusion that she hoped would prevent any speaking of its name to be heard.”
Rath’s eyes of liquid black gleamed. “Let us hope you are right. From this Sleeping Child the F’dor harvested seven precious scales, and took the two more that served to protect its blind eyes. Because dragons have lore from each of the other elements, there was power in these scales that encompassed the entire color spectrum, the vibrations of light and musical tones that make up the magic of the universe. Each of the colors in the seven scales has a specific power attuned to its wave length, as well as a note in the scale, which are the visible and audible manifestations of those vibrations. As your Namer can tell you, there are many more manifestations that are neither visual nor audible. You know this yourself as well, Bolg king—you can feel them in your skin-web as each moment of the day passes.
“The F’dor, therefore, were able to make use of these dragon scales to affect the material world which they otherwise could not be part of, because they were without form and noncorporeal. Thus, they had control of a complete color spectrum of seven, plus the two most powerful opposites, one black, representing Void, and one white, representing Life, from its eyes. They used these powers destructively, to scry, ignite volcanoes, shed blood, steal heat, and otherwise wreak havoc on the material world.”
“It was for this reason the other primordial races joined together in the battle against the F’dor. For all that history relates this as if it were an obvious conflict, I can assure you that was not the case. While it may seem to you that the elements of starlight, earth, water, and wind are in opposition to that of fire, in fact they were all like siblings, more similar than they were disparate. This decision was undertaken in agony, not in triumph, nor in conquest; the pact to remove that which brought warmth and light to the world, and condemn those races to be less than they could have been in the mind of the Creator. For all that it was the only thing that can be done, we were all poorer as a result of it. This is lost lore, something that history, and even some who lived it, have forgotten.
“When the decision was finally made, it was determined that terrible sacrifice would be required from each of the four remaining races in order for it to come to pass. You know what it is that our race sacrificed, Bolg king—the sons of the wind had a unique ability to track and trace the movements of that which was noncorporeal, and so it was decided the tribe of Kith known as the Dhracians would serve as jailers, would give up their tie to the wind and their ability to walk the upworld, for the purpose of guarding the Vault. The Dhracians abandoned the wind that was their father, and moved forever to the black and airless quadrant of the Earth, a soulless, lifeless sector of the world to guard against that which would see the world in flames.
“The dragons contributed most of the remaining Living Stone of the earth, their most prized possession, for the construction of the Vault to contain the F’dor. In the course of the battle, and the confinement of the F’dor, the scales were taken back from the demons. The Progenitor Wyrm, horrified at the desecration of his child, ripped seven similar scales from his own hide, for the purpose of being melded to the first set, to balance out their destructive power with the positive aspects of the same vibrations, the sharps to the flats of each note. The Progenitor sacrificed his life in the course of the battle, surrounding the fragile prison and Ending, becoming effectively a lead casing for the Vault, inert and totally devoid of any lore the demons could use. The seven colored scales were melded to the ones given by the Progenitor in the fiery core by the Seren who led the campaign. This group of scales, plus the white and black, became known as the Stolen Deck.”
“The remaining eggs hatched, producing the Five Daughters, known to the Wyrmril as the Guardians, the matriarchal wyrms who each protected one of the World Trees that grew at the sites where each of the five elements first appeared in the world. In order for the power of the Stolen Deck to be broken, each of these dragons was given one of the scales that had once been part of both their sibling and their father. The other four scales were given into the care of other beings in different parts of the world, to keep them as far apart as possible. This is referred to in the Prophecy of the Decks: That which was Stolen will be given freely.”
The Three exchanged a glance.
“Do you think that Elynsynos was still in possession of such a scale when she—up until now?” Rhapsody asked nervously.
“I would hope so,” Rath said. “Elsewise it is in other hands, and one of the Stolen Deck in the control of an evil entity could bring about the end of the world all by itself.”
“Ducky,” Grunthor muttered. “Just ducky.”
“All went well throughout the end of the Before-Time and into the First Age,” Rath continued, “until the day when a falling star crashed to Earth and shattered open the Vault. Some of the F’dor escaped and went upworld, chased by their Dhracian jailers, while others of the four primordial races sought to contain the F’dor and mend the Vault. Many of the race of dragons each contributed a scale to serve as a patch of sorts while the Vault was being resealed. These scales had powers in the color spectrum as well, and while they were not as powerful as the embryonic scales of the First Child, they were strong enough to hold the remaining F’dor at bay while their prison was restored. While I do not know exactly how many dragons contributed, there were at least forty-three identified scales that survived the rebuilding intact. These scales were gathered, and the dragons left them in the care of the Seren leader who led the undertaking, in case the Vault ever needed to be patched again.”
“The F’dor that escaped to the upworld sought the Stolen Deck, hoping to retrieve all of it, because the series of tones it produced was the True Name of the First Child, and would call the beast to life if it could be ‘spoken’ aloud. In addition, they desperately sought the black scale also, as it was a key that could open the Vault and free their imprisoned comrades. In the ensuing pursuit of the Dhracians, however, only one scale was ever recovered by a F’dor who had taken on a human host.”
“I caught a whisper of your old name, Ysk, in the course of my searching for one of the Younger Pantheon. I was on the hunt for a demon named Krisaar, a brash and arrogant F’dor who had an even greater need for control than the members of his race were known for having. He survived the destruction of the Island of Serendair by making a pact with a soldier of similar ilk, exchanging eternal life of a sort for an agreed-upon parasitic arrangement. To my knowledge, this is the only time in the entire history of the Known World where a human being has voluntarily taken on a F’dor as its host.”
“The Waste o’ Breath,” Grunthor said.
“Michael,” Rhapsody whispered, as if the name itself caused a bad taste in her mouth.
“The other scales, the ones donated by the dragons to seal the Vault, became known as the Given Deck. It was kept in the safekeeping of the Seren lineage for many generations, and the powers of the scales were recorded by the Seren Seers and Namers who could read them. Unfortunately, sometime in the Secon
d Age they came into the possession of a Seren Namer who was cataloging them. This woman, Ave, fell victim to the solitary silver scale, the Fallen Moon, which was a mirror of endless reflection that distorted her view of the world. She then took it upon herself to mark the cards in a way that made them into a deck of prediction and power granting, and secreted them away among her tribe, where they remained in the hands of one Reader at a time. The same prophecy notes this action thus: That which was freely Given will be stolen.”
“I remember this vaguely from the old world,” Achmed said. “In the Gated City of Kingston, a market of thieves the likes of which I’ve never seen again, there was such a Seren woman. She was almost impossible to find if you were looking for her, but if you were not, you might perchance come upon her in a booth or behind a tent. She would offer you a reading from her deck in exchange for gold.”
“Did you ever take her up on it?” Rhapsody asked.
Achmed gestured impatiently at Rath. “Go on,” he said, ignoring her.
“After many centuries a Nain explorer and historian met up with the last of the great Readers, Sharra, who taught him about the deck. It became an obsession of his to reclaim the deck and return each of the scales to the dragon who donated it, in return for which he received a story for a book he was writing. Other scales remained scattered across the world, where they were hidden, used, destroyed, or fell into the hands of people who would eventually come to bring them together—to terrible ends. One such person was the demon’s host I told you of, the one you called Michael. The Faorina child he had fathered of a Seren woman was believed to have inherited the power of her tribe to read the scales; if that child survived, those parts of the Decks are still out in the world, where they might be put to unimaginable purposes.”