The endless expanse of the land at the top of the world caused game animals to grow to substantial size, and a single one, carefully dressed, was generally enough to feed an Anwaer family for the winter. So the hunters moved away from the villages into the thicker woods, and waited for the game to come.
But this year, it never did.
After two weeks without a single kill, the men determined that something was terribly wrong. Whatever had spooked the game animals had frightened them not individually, or in clusters, but as a herd; the caribou and the northern tirabouri had last been seen ranging north, contrary to nature. The solitary animals, the moose and the predators that the Anwaer men hunted for pelts, were gone as well. The hunters sat in their blinds in silence, hearing little and seeing less. Even the customary birdsong of the migrating raptors had been stilled.
Finally, with winter approaching, the men of Anwaer decided it would be necessary to follow the herds north. If the hunting party could come upon a cluster or even the outer edge of a ranging herd, it might be possible to bring down enough meat to salvage the winter. If they could do it within another turn of the moon, the shallow glacial river would not yet be fully frozen, and could be floated in makeshift barges back to Anwaer in time before the heaviest snow came. If the new moon came before they had gathered their stores, however, it would be too late, and for the first time in memory, the village would have to join the migration, hurrying to keep ahead of the weather.
Should the men not be back by the time the moon had faded to a slim crescent, the women were told to start ahead alone.
The youngest member of the hunting party was tying down the boats on the rushing silver river when nightfall came.
The wind was chill; the water, shallow in most places to the depth of a man’s knee, with deeper spots up to his shoulder, was rippling beneath the breeze, causing the makeshift rafts to bump against each other on the shoreline, tugging at their rope and stone moorings.
Sonius, as the hunter was known, struggled to keep the barges from breaking apart in the chilly water. Racing against the falling sun, he muttered obscenities under his breath, finally pulling the doeskin gloves from his hands in an effort to handle the ropes more efficiently.
He glanced back at the smoke seeping from the vent in the snowpack that sealed the huts into the shelter beneath the wide ridge. The landfall from an avalanche soon after they had made camp had fortuitously sealed in the area they inhabited, keeping them sheltered from the worst of the winds and any predators that might come, lured by the scent of their kills. They had brought down five moose and two tirabouri, and were in the process of smoking the latter to assure it keeping until their return to Anwaer. Sealed behind a solid wall of snow, with nothing but the tunnel they had carved out to the river and a crescent-shaped opening at the top of the snow wall where the smoke escaped, the rest of his hunting party was settling down to sleep before heading for home on the morrow.
Sonius had drawn the short straw, and so, despite his exhaustion, he kept at his task until he was certain the boats were secure. When at last he had tied the final knot, he rose tiredly and looked out over the silver-gray river before him.
The wind had died down to almost still; white chunks of ice from farther up the glacier were floating downstream now, spinning slowly in the rushing current. The dim light of the crescent moon reflected off the river, pooling in swirls, then vanishing into darkness again.
Sonius wondered absently why the silence had deepened, then exhaled, casting the thought from his mind, and turned around to head back through the tunnel in the snow into camp.
At first he didn’t see the movement, but as he came within a few steps of the snow wall a flicker in the mountains above him caught his eye. He stepped back and looked up, trying to get a better glimpse, thinking that it was the mountain ice calving again, praying that it was not another avalanche that would bury his fellow hunters inside the sheltering ridge.
Sonius stared up into the endless crags of snow, and thought he saw a shadow slithering down the mountain face. He shaded his brow from the dim light of the moon. There is some movement of snow, he thought, perhaps just from the wind.
But there is no wind.
He rubbed his eyes, then looked back up to the peaks.
The movement was gone.
Sonius shook his head, then started for the tunnel.
The dragon’s massive head crested the ridge, rising above the snow wall, then thrust down directly in front of him. The stench of brimstone filled the air, which cracked in the heat.
The serpentine eyes narrowed, the vertical pupils expanding in the light of the moon.
A ragged gasp tore from the young hunter’s throat. He stared, glassy-eyed, at the beast looming before him, then made a scrambling dash for the tunnel below her.
Suddenly the shoreline of the river was drenched in light as bright as day. A rippling blast of flame rolled in a caustic wave down from atop the ridge, illuminating the human shadow, lighting his young face to brilliance for a split second before it turned black and withered to skeletal ash, along with the rest of his body.
Then, in an instant, the light was snuffed; darkness returned again.
The dragon lay crouched on the top of the rock ridge, staring ruefully down at the baked skeleton in the pile of ashes at the edge of the snow wall. Damnation, she thought. The skin is even thinner than I had imagined. This will not serve if I want the meat.
She turned around on the ridge. With a thundering slap, she brought her spiked tail down on the snow wall, crushing the top of it and causing the ice to collapse into the tunnel. Then she climbed down onto the wall and slithered to the crescent-shaped opening, behind which her dragon sense told her the humans were sleeping before a dwindling fire.
There were eleven, she knew; her mind, flooded with the sensory information from the primordial element in her blood, was aware of each of them, how much each one weighed, where he was sleeping, and the relative depth of slumber each of them was enjoying. There were also four dogs, all in various stages of repose. She stared at the camp behind the snow wall for a moment, thinking what a good place to store this cache of meat it would be.
Then she slid through the opening.
The first man was in her grasp before any of them had a chance to waken; the dogs saw her, smelled her probably, and began to bark agitatedly as she barreled over the wall and slid through the fire into the first makeshift hut, crushing it like a nutshell beneath the weight of her body. He was wrapped in wool blankets; the beast squeezed him with a crushing force in her talons and slashed his throat, then tossed his dripping body to the ground to turn her attention to the man who had been lying beside him.
That man, who watched in stark terror as she disposed of his bunkmate, began to scream, a gargling, high-pitched sound that rippled painfully over the dragon’s sensitive eardrums. He continued to caterwaul as she seized him and lifted him from the ground; she severed his head in one clean bite and spat it into the fire to make it stop squealing.
From that point on it became an elegant, joyous dance of death. The men, trapped behind the immense wall of snow, scattered to the corners of their small shelter, hiding behind rocks, scrambling in vain to the wall itself and trying piteously to scale it. They fired their crude hunting weapons—spears and longbows—at her, but the missiles bounced off her armored hide, impotent.
The firecoals, scattered about in the fray, cast weak shadows on the massacre, sparked with bright blood.
And in the heat of the skirmish, as one by one she cornered the hunters and slaughtered them, the beast laughed aloud with delight, a harsh, ugly sound that rang with soulless malice. Destruction eases the pain, she thought as she seized the last of them, crushing him slowly, taking pleasure watching the life being squeezed from him inch by inch, while the dogs, who had ceased to bark, whined in terror. And I have so much pain to ease.
Then the feast began.
8
TUNNELS OF THE HAND, Y
LORC
It was deep in the night of the Bolg king’s return when Trug was summoned.
He felt as if he had been called to rise even before he had finished exhaling his first breath of sleep, yet he did not complain. Complaints were useless, and something about the quiet nervousness of the guard who had come for him told him he was being observed. Trug rose silently and dressed quickly in the manner of all of Achmed’s Archons. He had experienced many such midnight summonses in the seven years of his schooling.
He followed the guard past his training ring, noticing by smell that the two horses he had quartered there for the night had been taken, and replaced with two others of similar size and markings. His brows knit together in puzzlement; such a test of his notice had been undertaken less than a year into his training, when it might still have been possible that he did not yet know every one of the three hundred fifty head that he was responsible for stabling. But that trick had not even worked at the time; why anyone was attempting it now was perplexing to him.
Trug, like most of his race, did not give voice to his inner thoughts but rarely, and so he kept his silence as he walked behind the guard. He listened for signs of conversation or movement, but heard nothing except his own breath and the footsteps of the man leading him out of the mountain tunnels.
Unlike most of his fellow subjects, it was part of Trug’s training to be able to speak; what he was speaking, however, were the thoughts of the Bolg king, both within the mountain and outside it. It was his path to be trained as the Voice, the Archon that King Achmed expected to handle all of the communications, both official and secret, on behalf of the Bolglands, including the management of the miles of speaking tubes that ran throughout the mountains, left over from the Cymrian Age. In that capacity he had been trained from childhood for the last seven years, selected at an early age by Rhapsody as having the potential for the task at hand, and systematically familiarized with language, cryptography, anatomy, and a thousand other studies of communications, verbal and otherwise. A year ago he had been deemed worthy to supervise the aviary, with its extensive fleet of messenger birds, as well as the mounted messengers who rode with the mail caravans. Eventually it was planned for him to assume responsibility for King Achmed’s network of ambassadors as well as his spies.
But even though he would one day be the master of all the communications within Ylorc and from the Teeth to the outside world, Trug had not been told why he was being summoned. Nor did he expect to be.
An hour’s walk, up out of the mountain to a small softened peak, like a cavity in the Teeth, brought him to a listening post, a way station in the system where the Eyes, Achmed’s elite spies, made daily reports on what they had observed in the mountain passes. The guard stopped inside the hollow peak, lit and hung a lamp, and motioned for him to take a seat at the table that became visible in the light.
On the table was a tube made of bone, sealed with the king’s imprimatur. Trug said nothing, but beads of sweat broke out on his dusky forehead. The guard motioned to the tube, then stepped away from the wind cave.
Trug stared at the tube for a moment, knowing that what it contained would mark a turning point in his destiny. He, as well as all his fellow students, had long been told about the eventual arrival of this sealed message, and he knew what it foretold. It would hold either the order of his banishment, as it had for at least one other Archon-in-training, or his elevation to full status, along with all the others. Either way, at least one part of his life would end that night.
With clammy hands he broke the seal and opened the tube.
He stared at the page, trying to absorb its import. It contained nothing more than the imprint of a hand.
Trug stood up, held the edge of the parchment in the flame of the lamp until it ignited, waited for it to burn completely, then cast the ashes into the wind atop the hollow mountain peak.
When the very last black cinder had caught the updraft and was carried away, Trug doused the lantern and hurried down the mountainside, making his way in the darkness for a passageway into the depths he knew all too well.
Deep within the mountain, at the convocation of five tunnels known as the Hand, they gathered, each summoned in the same manner.
Upon arriving, the Archons nodded to one another but did not speak. It was not only customary to remain silent until the king or his representative spoke, it was mandatory. Achmed wanted to be certain that when his Archons were called to assemble, the words that their ears heard were as pure and unpolluted by secondary noise as possible.
The future Archons were, in a way, Achmed’s children, though none of them had ever seen his face. Taken from their clans when he first became king, as hostages some thought, they had been kept apart as a new clan, with the Bolg king and Grunthor, and Rhapsody for a time, as masters and parents, along with such tutors and models as he could hire and trick and persuade from the outside. Grunthor was known as the Chief Archon, lending a credit to the title that instantly made it coveted.
They were raised as Achmed had been raised, in study and to an unrevealed purpose, given knowledge as a religion, fed, threatened, and cajoled into the belief that they must grow into their potential or their people would be doomed.
None of them had seen more than eighteen summers.
They came from an assortment of tribes that before Achmed’s arrival had roamed the Teeth, preying on each other and whatever unfortunate creatures, human or otherwise, they could catch. Some were the spawn of the Claw clans, the warlike marauders that had lived in the borderlands, the lower foothills and rocky steppes that abutted the human realm of Roland. Others had been culled from the Guts clans, those living deeper in the realm of what they called Ylorc, past the guardian ridge of the Teeth into the deep forest glades and decimated cities that had once been the inner lands of the Cymrian stronghold. Possibly the most valuable of them had come from the Eyes, those demi-humans most adapted to thinner air, who crawled the ledges and peaks of the Teeth, watching the world from above, wrapped in clouds.
And some had come from the Finders. The Finders were not a clan in and of themselves, but rather were the descendants of those unfortunate Cymrians who had remained or been left behind a thousand years before when the Bolg overran Canrif. Their blood still contained some of the odd, magical elements of longevity and elemental power that their unknown and hapless ancestors had bequeathed them, but until Achmed came, they had no idea how to put that power to use.
Achmed saw them regularly but rarely, coming in to test them and redirect them. They were uncertain about his motives, as if it were not clear to this small grove whether the forester measured them in anticipation of cutting, or to be confident they could bear his weight on a climb to the clouds. There were ten of them that remained in this, the fifth year of training; some of the original children sent to him had been redirected to other lessons, one had perished, one had been banished. Those who had been released no longer studied the history of the Cymrians and of Roland, world geography and currency, and were no longer subject to the rigors of the king’s direct attention.
It was a sweet relief to them, and a horrific dishonor to their clans.
Those Archons that had survived the training came now, one by one, to the black tunnels of the Hand, where no light entered or escaped.
The first to arrive was Harran, the Loremistress, a Finder who had been selected by Rhapsody and trained by her personally until she had left Ylorc to rule the Lirin realm of Tyrian. Harran was thin, even by wiry Bolg standards, and her shadowy form barely disturbed the darkness at the bottom of the tunnel in which she hovered, waiting.
A few moments later came Kubila. His long shanks made him a superior runner, and generally guaranteed that he would arrive before most who had to travel to the Hand, even though his abode was the farthest away. He nodded to Harran in the dark, then came over to the finger in which she lingered and sat down before her to wait.
One by one they came, Yen the broadsmith, training to hold the pos
ition of Armorer, whose responsibility for building the unique weapons that armed Ylorc and were sold for trade already had made him one of the most powerful men in the kingdom; Krinsel the midwife, who came from a long line of respected clan mothers that managed all the medical needs of the realm; and Dreekak, Master of Tunnels, the brilliant young engineer who was in the process of inspecting and renovating the hundreds of miles of passageways and underground complexes that the Cymrians had built a thousand years before. Additionally, he had restored a number of the systems that Gwylliam had designed to make life within the cavernous mountains more civilized; the Cauldron, the great inner city of the guardian mountains, now had working ventilation, sanitation, and irrigation systems that circulated heat and air, provided rainwater for drinking and cooking, and channeled waste into vast central cisterns at the base of an unoccupied mountain crag, where once it had been ubiquitous and uncontrolled. In these matters, the demi-human Bolg were considerably more advanced, more civilized, than their neighbors in the human nation of Roland, who had long considered them monsters beneath contempt.
Until the arrival of King Achmed, the Earth Swallower, the Glowering Eye, the Night Man, Warlord of the entire deep realm, that had in fact been true. But he had changed all that, had forged the Bolg as he had Trug, into something greater, for a greater, if unknown, purpose.
A whisper of sound was heard at the arrival of Vrith, the Quartermaster, whose duties included the inventory and supplying of the entire kingdom, in particular the Bolg army. Vrith had been born with a clubfoot, a deformity that had resulted in him being left out on top of Kurmen crag to die on his tenth birthday. Rhapsody had rescued him and, seeing in him a fastidiousness for detail and an impressive head for numbers in his early lessons, had trained him to keep track of all the kingdom’s stores as Ylorc was evolving from a wasteland of loose marauders into a realm whose army was feared, its leadership respected, and its goods coveted.