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 h
er 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
FISHING VILLAGE AT
JEREMY’S LANDING, AVONDERRE
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 f
oggy 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.