Elegy for a Lost Star

  He was following a sound now, a distant call in a vibration he had known all his life, the ancient, primordial song of the scales he had lost. If it had been possible for him to forget the tune, he would have been reminded by the humming of the ones within his possession, their power reverberating through his stone body.

  Ofttimes the noise of day served to mute the call, and when it did Faron became angry beyond all measure. The cry of a winter bird, of geese flying overhead in formation, caused him to stop in his snowy tracks, looking up to the firmament of the sky above, muttering silent curses in a long-dead language deep within his brain. He craved the silence of the world, for in that silence, he could hear the call clearly. Once he got a fix on it, he followed it ceaselessly.

  Until at last one night he found what he was looking for.

  He had come to the top of a rise above a small, low-lying valley, one of the undulating hills of the Orlandan Plateau, on the wide Krevensfield Plain, and there it was below him.

  The full moon was shining, bright as day. Its light glazed the snowy fields, making them gleam silvery blue. Even in the dark, the moonlight was so intense that it was easy to see the brightly colored wagons, the crimson and purple flags dressing the carts that by day were pulled by horses. Those beasts were quartered together now, blanketed for the night; they alone noticed the chain in the earth, and nickered in a growing panic.

  Within the Monstrosity’s camp torches and barrel fires burned, sending sparks skyward to dance with the blazing moonlight.

  Around those barrel fires some of the men who served as guards and laborers sat, drinking foul ale and telling fouler jokes. The hunchback ticket taker had imbibed more than he could handle, and was now being used as a human ball in a grotesque game of Tossabout, to which he seemed to proffer no objection and was, in fact, cackling aloud. The laughter echoed off the empty world of hummocks and rises around them, fading off into the night.

  Masking the call of the scales.

  Malik held his battered mug to his lips, blowing the dirty foam off, the ale spattering into his beard as he laughed. He had pulled his legs against his chest in the attempt to warm them when out of the corner of his eye he spied movement.

  He looked again, peering out into the darkness, but whatever had been moving was gone. Nothing more ’an a snow devil, he decided, taking another draught. Wind’ll be a bitch tonight.

  The wagon closest to their barrel fire reared up off the ground, then was slammed down on it again, shattering into pieces.

  For a split second, no sound was heard on the wide expanse of the great plain except for the splintering of the wood. Then the screaming began.

  The freaks that had survived the initial impact inside the wagon started to scream; their harsh, alien voices rose in a discordant wail that sliced through the winter wind and the crackle of the fire, blending with the frightened whinnying of the horses. Malik and the others around the barrel fire fell back, covering their faces, then scrambled to their feet in shock. The keeper’s mouth flapped, forming two words.

  “What the—”

  The next nearest wagon suddenly skidded sideways toward them, as if it were being swung from behind. It smashed into the wreckage of the first, doubling the screams and filling the night air with the sounds of gruesome snapping and grinding.

  Then it was hoisted up into the darkness, and tossed in much the same manner as they had been tossing the hunchback the moment before, right into their midst.

  Through the sheer luck of reflex and favorable positioning Malik dropped on the snow and rolled to his left, bruising himself from face to knee but spared from being crushed, as three of the other men he had been drinking with the moment before were.

  As the cacophony swelled around him, and the blood pounded crazily in his ears, Malik’s mind tried to determine what was happening, why a pleasant night’s drinking in the cold had suddenly become a nightmare. All he could imagine was they had been caught in the middle of a terrible winter storm that had whipped up from nowhere, catching the wagons and sending them flying.

  He struggled to regain his feet and his gorge, which had risen into his throat and was choking him; just as he did, Malik thought he saw a shadow pass between the destruction and a third wagon, from which freaks and others that traveled with the Monstrosity were streaming, gibbering in confusion and fear. In the tattered light of the remnants of the barrel fire that had been in their midst and now was scattered over the snow the shadow appeared to be human, but elongated into gianthood by the undulating flames.

  The roof of the next wagon splintered into pieces as the chorus of confusion grew into screams of terror.

  This time Malik looked up over the top of the broken wagon in time to see the silhouette of two enormous arms and upper body slamming down with fury again. The shadow seized the wagon, shaking it violently, causing whatever other creatures had still been inside, crowding their ways to the exit, to be thrown clear onto the snowy ground, where they huddled, their eyes fixed above them, as it brought the wagon down directly on top of them with a resounding slam.

  In the fading light of the barrel fire Malik thought he could make out the entire silhouette now. For a brief moment he had believed that one of the freaks was rampaging; such things had happened before, and a number of their exhibits were very strong. But as the titanic shadow lurched away in the snow toward the Ringmaster’s wagon, he could see that whatever was assaulting the monstrosity was no freak, nor was it any man he had ever seen.

  And it was making its way to the Ringmaster’s abode.

  “Fire at it!” he shouted hoarsely to the men who had been on duty while he and the others were drinking with the hunchback. Those men were leveling their crossbows, shaking; they were in better sight of what they were facing, and whatever it was must have been far worse than Malik could imagine by the sight of their faces, frozen in a rictus of fear. His shout seemed to waken them; in unison they fired, one of the bolts going wide, but the other three finding their marks on a target that was hard to miss, even when moving.

  The bolts glanced off or shattered, as if they had been fired into a stone wall.

  “Again!” Malik screamed, but two of the crossbowmen had already dropped their weapons and run while the third stood motionless; only one of the guards had the presence of mind to fire again, which he did even as the moving earth in man’s form brought its arms down in a single clenched fist onto the guard who had frozen.

  Amid the spattering of blood and crunching bone that followed, a tiny metallic clink could be heard.

  The statue reared upright, clutching at the vicinity of its ear, immobile for a moment.

  Malik saw the opportunity. “Run!” he screamed to anyone still standing, stunned, in the area. He waved his arms wildly, then glanced about him. “Sally? Sally darlin’! Sally, where are ye?!”

  “’Ere, Malik,” answered a small, terrified voice behind him as Duckfoot Sally appeared on the step of one of the wagons, logjammed with the others trying to make their way out.

  At the sound of her voice, the enormous man stopped, then turned sightless eyes toward her that in the gleam of the torches of the remaining wagons shone blue and milky.

  Then began to stride in her direction, following the sound of her voice.

  Malik was between them, and saw the intent in the statue’s stride. “Run, Sally!” he screamed, interposing himself in the statue’s path and grabbing hold of a broken tent pole. “He’s coming fer ye! Run!”

  The giant slapped him away like a leaf in the wind, shattering his bones and flinging them into the snow in several discrete sections.

  Duckfoot Sally and the freaks crowded around her screamed in unison. The sound seemed to infuriate the approaching titan; its speed increased, along with the menace in its stance. For a second there was jostling on the porch of the wagon; then the freak known as the Human Bear seized Sally from behind and tossed her over the railing into the statue’s path.

  She squealed as she tumbled t
o the ground, then looked up to find two unearthly eyes, eyes whose scleras were stone, but whose irises were blue with filmy cataracts, staring down at her intently.

  Choking on her horror and on her own tears, Duckfoot Sally skittered backward a short distance, hampered by the rustling tatters of her many layers of skirts and aprons. Under her breath she began to mutter soft prayers she remembered from childhood, even though their meaning was long lost to her.

  The titan continued to observe her, unmoving. It watched her as she began to sob, then slowly knelt in front of her, oblivious of the arrow fire that was glancing off its back and sides.

  One of the statue’s enormous hands curled into a fist, eliciting a gasp of horror from Sally and every other freak who had been trapped on the wagon’s porch or by fear.

  Silence fell over the devastated ruin of the camp, save for the crackling of the remaining barrel fires and the soft moaning of the dying.

  The titan reached out slowly and ran the back of its stone knuckles over the cheek of the terrified woman, brazing it slightly from the roughness of the stone, but wiping away the flood of tears that had cascaded down her face.

  Exactly as she had always done for him.

  No realization came into the terrified woman’s eyes.

  From his wagon across the campsite, the Ringmaster finally emerged, tucking his nightshirt into his striped pants, the double-pursed woman behind him.

  “What is going on here?” he shouted, his voice thick with rum, unspent arousal, and annoyance.

  The shocked silence broken, the freaks and carnies, Duckfoot Sally among them, began to shriek again.

  The statue’s head snapped upright.

  For a moment Faron had been feeling a sensation that had not been present since he had been encased in the body of Living Stone. It was the sensation of sadness.

  She no remember me, he was thinking.

  There was something devastating to him about that; without Sally and her kindness, there would be no one now in the world who had known him as he was.

  Had loved him as he was.

  He put his free hand up to his ear, where the lucky shot had torn a chink in his flesh; there was no pain, just a sense that the damaged area was drying in a way that the rest of his earthen body was not, as if the stone was no longer alive.

  Suddenly he could hear the sound ringing clearer, the song the scales emitted.

  His head jerked up at the realization, but as it did, the garbage noise, the interference that deadened the song of the scales, rose to meet it, blocking its sound, hindering him from finding it.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it of the noise, but that only made it grow louder.

  Loudest of all seemed to be coming from immediately in front of him.

  His balled fist opened, his fingers wrapped around Duckfoot Sally’s neck, and squeezed until the noise she was making stopped.

  In horror, the remains of the Monstrosity watched the titan rip Duckfoot Sally’s head from her shoulders and drop it idly on the ground to its side, then straighten up and turn slowly in the direction of the Ringmaster.

  The Ringmaster stumbled down the steps of his wagon, barefoot in the snow.

  “Do something, you misbegotten idiots!” he squealed at the remaining guards, but the carnies were running, fleeing out into the darkness of the Krevensfield Plain along with whatever freaks could still move. The woman he had been attempting to fornicate a few moments prior gaped raggedly and ran back inside the Ringmaster’s wagon, a miscalculation apparent a moment later when the titan grasped the rail of the porch and hurled it over the Ringmaster’s head, blocking his exit as it smashed to the ground.

  The Ringmaster froze. He glanced wildly around, looking for any exit he could find, but behind him his path was blocked by his shattered wagon, the bi-pursed woman’s broken body sprawling from what had once been his window.

  Before him was a giant angry shadow, formed of stone but moving now as a man.

  A man with murderous rage in his eyes.

  Quickly the owner of the Monstrosity dug his hands into his pockets, searching blindly for whatever valuables he might find, knowing there was little likelihood that anything so destructive might be bought off with gems or gold, but not knowing anything better to do.

  His trembling hand caught hold of something sharp and rough at the edges; it was the tattered blue oval he had removed from the belly of the fish-boy a long while back. He kept it in his pocket for good luck, and because the vibration it emitted had a warm and sensuous effect on his nether region. He seized the scale and tossed it into the darkness at the approaching titan’s feet.

  Faron stopped in his tracks on the snowy ground.

  The scale gleamed before him, reflecting the fires and the crazy light of the moon. It was the scrying scale, the blue talisman etched with the picture of an eye surrounded by clouds on one side, the convex one, and obscured by them on the other, the concave one. It was the scale in which he had first found this place, had tracked the woman with the long hair over the sea at his father’s insistence, had helped his father keep track of his fleet of pirate ships on the sea. It was possibly his greatest prize, and the loss of it had left him bereft.

  Now it was lying, unobstructed, at his feet, singing its clear and bell-like song.

  Reverently Faron bent down and scooped up the scale, then held it aloft in triumph to the light of the cloud-draped moon.

  Then he turned away, lost in the joy of a treasure recovered.

  Behind him, the Ringmaster let out his breath in a ragged sigh of relief.

  Faron stopped in midstride.

  For a moment he had almost forgotten, in the reverie of the scale’s recovery, the torture that he had endured, the agony of the scale being torn from him, the teasing to force him to perform, the endless abuse and isolation in the darkness of a bumping circus wagon. He did not understand his torment then, nor did he understand it now.

  But he remembered it.

  He thought back to the image of Duckfoot Sally, swinging her nails like a sword in his defense; the Ringmaster had belted her into unconsciousness with the back of his hand. In his primitive mind Faron did not even remember what he himself had done to Sally, but the rage of the memory returned, along with that of all the other torment he had suffered at the hands of the man in the striped trousers.

  He turned and was on the Ringmaster in a heartbeat; the man didn’t even have a chance to open his mouth to scream before Faron backhanded him into the broken wagon. Then, for the first time since gaining this new body of living earth, he attacked for the sheer, sweet pleasure of revenge, pummeling the man’s lifeless body into jelly, then flinging it out into the night where even the carrion did not recognize it the next morning.

  The song of the scales swelled in his ears now, drowning out the whine of the wind, the whimpering of the injured, the agonized howls of the dying. It was the only thing he could hear, and it sustained him.

  He listened as, in the distance, the last of the tones sounded, calling to the others. Faron turned to follow it, heading south, away from the broken remains of the Monstrosity.

  Toward Jierna’sid.

  35

  YLORC

  In the moments before the assault on the Bolglands began, Grunthor was experiencing a sense of foreboding that was unlike any other he had been granted in all his years of war. It was not the presence of some sort of fear, nor the queasiness in the stomach and dull thudding at the base of the brain that a commander of fighting men feels when something is not right. He certainly had known that sensation enough to recognize it. Rather, it was an artificial absence of any feeling of concern at all, as if some unknown entity had reached directly into his warrior’s soul and ripped out every instinct, every trained alarm, that had been his from birth and developed over a lifetime of soldiering.

  In short, he felt nothing.

  Suddenly all the unconscious points of reference that a man whose life consists of perennial vigilance marks
with each breath were gone, as if in all the world there was nothing to worry about. The sensation did not include a false sense of well-being, just a total numbness to the ever-present need to be on guard, at the ready.

  Had he not been shocked by this sudden ripping of his soldier’s wariness, he might have recognized it for what it was. It would have made no difference in the outcome of the events that followed, and perhaps would have only served to frighten him more.

  Because what he felt in those moments, that utter sense of nothingness that numbed his senses and left him blank, was the total subversion of his earth lore as the dragon subsumed it.

  The elemental heartbeat that rang in his blood, the thudding pounding of the world’s pulse, disappeared. Had his own heart suddenly ceased to beat it would not have been more shocking. His connection to the earth, deep and intrinsic as it was to him, vanished, leaving him frozen, dizzy, for a split second, before he took another breath, and his heartbeat returned to its regular tempo.

  By the time his awareness returned, the ground was already beginning to sunder.

  Rhapsody had given the underground grotto, with its tiny cottage and gardens in the middle of a dark, subterranean lake, the name Elysian, after the castle of the king who had ruled in her homeland of Serendair. The daughter of a human farmer and his Lirin wife, she had grown up in wide green fields beneath open skies, and had never seen anything so enchanting as the quiet solitude of the dark lake, dotted by tiny shafts of sunlight that shone through holes drilled in the rocky ground above it. She had never seen Elysian Castle either, but its name conjured magical images in her mind as a child, so she thought the name appropriate.

  But the place had had other names long before she came. The Firbolg called the ring of rocky crags that towered above the grotto, hiding it from sight and the wind of the upworld, Kraldurge, which in their tongue was translated as the Realm of Ghosts. Whether this was because of the mournful howling of the wind as it whistled around the bowl formed in those towering rocks, or for a deeper reason, was lost to memory. In any case the name was apt, because both the dark underground lake and the grassy meadow above it held unholy secrets, unforgiven sins that could only have been remembered by one living being, the beast who until her awakening at summer’s end had been forgotten as well.