Prophecy

  Nightmares

  Rhapsody did not sleep well the night before she handed herself over to a man she barely knew, a man whose face she had never seen. Having been gifted with prescience, the ability to see visions of the Future and the Past, she was accustomed to restless nights and terrifying dreams, but this was different somehow.

  She was awake for much of the long, torturous night, fighting nagging doubts that were very likely the warnings, not of some special foresight, but of ordinary common sense. By morning she was completely unsure as to the wisdom of her decision to go overland with him, beyond the stalwart protection of her strange, formidable friends.

  The firecoals in the small, poorly ventilated grate burned silently while she tossed and muttered, neither awake nor really asleep. The mute flames cast bright sheets of pulsating light on the walls and ceiling of her tiny windowless bedchamber deep within the mountain. Upon becoming king of the Firbolg in Ylorc, Achmed had named his seat of power the Cauldron, but tonight the place more closely approximated the Underworld.

  Achmed had made no secret of his disapproval at her leaving the mountain with Ashe. From the moment they had met on the streets of Bethe Corbair, the two men had exuded a mutual mistrust that was impossible not to notice; the tension in the air made her scalp hum with negative static. But trust was not Achmed’s common state. Aside from herself and Grunthor, his giant sergeant-major and long-time friend, as far as she knew he had extended it to no one.

  Ashe seemed pleasant enough, and harmless. He had been willing to visit Rhapsody and her companions in Ylorc, their forbidding, mountainous home. He had not appeared uncomfortable with the fact that Ylorc was the lair of the Firbolg, primitive, sometimes brutish people that most humans feared as monsters.

  Ashe had exhibited no such prejudices. He had dined agreeably at the same table with the glowering Bolg chieftains, taking no notice of their crude table manners and ignoring their propensity to spit bone fragments onto the floor. And he had taken up arms willingly in defense of the Firbolg realm against an attack by the Hill-Eye, the last holdout clan to swear fealty to Achmed, whose reign as Warlord was still new and sorting itself out. If he was amused or displeased in any way by Rhapsody’s obnoxious companion’s ascent to monstrous royalty, Ashe did not show it.

  But there was little, in fact, that Ashe did show. His face was always carefully covered by the hood of his cloak, a strange garment that seemed to wrap him in mist, making him even harder to discern than he already was.

  Rhapsody rolled over in bed and let out a painful sigh. She accepted his right to concealment, understood that the great Cymrian War had left many of its survivors disfigured and maimed, but still could not escape the nagging thought that he might be hiding more than a hideous scar. Men with hidden faces had plagued many different areas of her life.

  Rhapsody opened her emerald eyes in the darkness of her cavelike chamber. In response, the coals on the fire glowed more intensely for a moment. The remnants of charred wood, reducing in the heat to white-hot cinders, sent forth wisps of smoke that rose above the coalbed and up the chimney that had been hewn into her chamber centuries before, when Ylorc was still Canrif, the old Cymrian seat of power. She drew a deep breath and watched as more smoke billowed up, forming a thin cloud above the ashes.

  She shuddered; the smoke had seeped into her memory, bringing back an unwelcome picture. It was not one of the lingering images from her old life on streets of Serendair, her island homeland, gone now beneath the waves of the sea on the other side of the world. Those days of abuse and prostitution that had haunted her for so long rarely plagued her sleep anymore.

  Now she dreamt mostly of the terrors of this new land. Almost every night brought the hideous memories of the House of Remembrance, an ancient library in this new world, and of a curtain of fire that formed a hazy tunnel. At the end of the column of smoke a man had stood, a man in a gray mantled-cloak, much like the one Ashe wore. A man whom the documents they had found identified only as the Rakshas. A man who had stolen children, sacrificing them for their blood. A man, whose face she had also not seen. The coincidence was unnerving.

  The coals were doing little to dispel the dampness of the room, she thought hazily. Her skin was clammy, causing the blankets to cling to her and scratch. Beads of sweat tangled the hairs at the back of her neck in the chain of the locket she never took off, pulling painfully as she writhed again, struggling to break free of the clutching bedding.

  Just as her stomach was beginning to twist in cold worry, a pragmatic thought descended. Achmed was arguably her best friend in this land, the surly other side of her cheerful coin, and he tended to walk the world veiled from sight as well.

  It never ceased to amaze her, after all this time, how she could be so close to this assassin-turned-king, a man who seemed to make it a life’s goal to annoy anyone with whom he came in contact. The fact that he had dragged her through the Earth itself, against her will, away from Serendair before the Island was consumed in volcanic fire, saving her life in the process, had not inspired gratitude in her. Although she had ceased to resent her kidnapping over time, a tiny corner of her heart would never forgive him for it. She had learned to love him and Grunthor in spite of it.

  And she had learned to love the Firbolg as well, largely through the eyes of these two friends, whose blood was half-Bolg. Despite their primitive nature and warlike tendencies, Rhapsody had come to appreciate many aspects of this cave-dwelling culture that she found surprisingly sophisticated, and far more admirable than some of the behavior she had seen exhibited by their human counterparts in the provinces of Roland. They followed leaders out of respect and fear, not arbitrary or dubious family heritage; they spent what meager healing resources they had on bringing forth infants and protecting mothers and their young, a moral tenet Rhapsody shared. The refined social structure Achmed and Grunthor had introduced, was just beginning to take root when the need for her journey had become clear.

  Rhapsody writhed onto her back, seeking refuge from her dreams and a more comfortable position, but neither was to be had. She succumbed to the rapid whirring of thoughts through her brain again.

  Finding the claw had changed everything. From deep within the vaults of Ylorc they had unearthed the talon of a dragon, fitted with a handle for use as a dagger. The claw had rested undisturbed for centuries, even as the Bolg took over the mountains, making the abandoned Cymrian realm their own. Now it was in the air, and the dragon to whom it belonged would feel it, would taste its vibrations on the wind. Rhapsody believed she would come for it eventually. Having heard the tales of the mighty Elynsynos, and seen the fierce and horrific statues of the beast in the Cymrian museum and in village squares across Roland, she had no doubt that the dragon’s wrath would be virulent. Images of that wrath had led the parade of nightmares on this last night in Ylorc, causing her to wake for the first of many times, trembling.

  It was to spare the Bolg from the devastating consequences of that wrath that she had decided to find the wyrm first and return the dagger, though both Achmed and Grunthor had objected strenuously. Rhapsody had stood firm in her decision to go, her determination fueled by the thought of her adopted Bolg grandchildren withering to ashes beneath the dragon’s breath. It was another of the dreams that haunted her, though sometimes the victims changed. Her dreams did not discriminate.

  She feared for Jo, the teenaged street child she had found in the House of Remembrance and adopted as her sister. She also feared for Lord Stephen, the pleasant young duke of Navarne, and his children, whom she also had taken into her heart. Each of these loved ones took turns in her nightmares, roasting alive before her eyes. This night the honor had belonged to Lord Stephen.

  It was within his castle that she had first seen a statue of Elynsynos. He had already suffered the loss of his wife, his best friend, Gwydion of Manosse, and countless people within his duchy to whatever evil was plaguing this land, causing inexplicable outbreaks of violence. The loss of Rhapsody’s world
and her family had almost killed her; the Bolg and her friends, this was her family now. To leave that family open to attack would be almost as bad as losing it the first time, in some ways worse. Ashe said he knew how to find the dragon. It was well worth risking herself and her safety to save them. She just couldn’t be sure, in this land of deception, that she was not endangering them even more by going with him.

  Rhapsody twisted onto her side, entangling herself in the rough woolen blankets again. Nothing made sense anymore. It was impossible to tell whom or what to trust, including her own senses. She could only pray that the dreams of the coming destruction were warnings, not like the foregone premonitions that had told her of the death of Serendair, but either way, it would be impossible to tell until it was too late.

  As she drifted off to troubled sleep it seemed to her that the smoke from the fire had thickened and formed a ribbon in the air, a translucent thread that wound around her dreams and settled behind her eyes.

  Achmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg, was having nightmares as well, and it irritated him. Sleeping terrors were Rhapsody’s personal curse; generally he was immune to them, having lived out more than his share of torments in the waking world, the old world, a life that he was well glad to be rid of.

  The inert stone walls of the Cauldron, his seat of power within the mountain, normally provided him with dark and restful sleep, dreamless and undisturbed by the vibrations of the air to which he was especially sensitive. His Dhracian physiology, the burdensome gift granted to him by his mother’s race, was both a blessing and a curse. It gave him the ability to read the signals of the world that were indiscernible to the eyes and minds of the rest of the populace, but the toll was great; it left him with little peace, having to daily endure the assault of the myriad invisible signatures that others defined as Life.

  He was, therefore, unintentionally appreciative to find this fortress hewn deeply into the mountainous realm of darkness that was Ylorc. The smoothly polished basalt walls held in the quiet, stagnant air of his royal bedchamber, keeping the noise and tumult of the world at bay. As a result his nights were generally free from disturbance, tranquil and comforting in their silence.

  But not this night.

  In a flurry of growled curses Achmed spun over in his bed and rose to stand, angry. It was all he could do to keep from striding down the corridor to Rhapsody’s room and dragging her out of her own sleep, demanding to know what was wrong with her, why she was so oblivious to the danger in what she was about to undertake. There would be little point in doing that, however; Achmed already knew the answer to that question.

  Rhapsody was oblivious to almost everything. For a woman whose brain was keen and mind vibrant with an intelligence he could feel in his skin, she was capable of disregarding even the most obvious facts if she didn’t want to believe them.

  Initially he had assumed that this was a factor of the cataclysmic transformation they had each undergone, a metamorphosis that occurred when they walked through the inferno that burned at the center of the Earth during their escape from Serendair. Upon exiting the conflagration Rhapsody was vastly different; she had emerged from the fire physically perfect, her natural beauty enhanced to supernatural proportions. He had been fascinated, not only by the potential power that was inherent in her now, but by her utter inability to recognize the change. The open-mouthed gawking that she experienced in the street whenever she put the hood of her cloak down had done nothing to convince her of the magnificence of her visage; rather, it made her feel like a freak.

  Achmed gave the bedsheet that had remained wrapped around his foot a savage kick. Over time, as he had gotten to know Rhapsody better, he realized that her self-deceptive tendencies had long preceded their walk through the fire. It was actually her way of protecting the last shred of her innocence, her fierce desire to believe in good where none existed, to trust when there was no reason to do so.

  Her life on the street had clearly been one from which innocent belief could not hide easily. She had commerce with one of his master’s servants, Michael, the Wind of Death, and had doubtless been introduced to the harshest of realities by him. Nevertheless, she was always looking for the happy ending, trying to recreate the family she had lost in volcanic fire a thousand years before by adopting every waif and foundling she came across. Up until now this tendency had only served to set her up for heartache, which didn’t bother him a bit. Her latest undertaking, however, threatened to compromise more than her life, and that aspect of it disturbed him deeply.

  Somewhere out in the vastness of the lands to the west was a human host harboring a demon, he was sure of it; he had seen the work of F’dor before. He had, in fact, been the unwilling servant of one. A twisted race, evil and ancient, born of dark fire, he had hoped that the demise of their Island homeland would have taken the last of the F’dor with it. Had he been there during the Seren War that raged after they left he would have seen to it as his final act of assassination, the trade he had plied in those days.

  But he had escaped the Island early. The war had come and gone, Serendair had disappeared beneath the waves a millennium before he emerged from the Root, half a world away, on the other side of Time. And those that had lived through the conflict, had seen the cataclysm coming and had possessed the wisdom to leave before it did, had undoubtedly brought the evil with them to this new place.

  It had all the pathos of the World’s Cruelest Joke. He had broken the unbreakable chain of the demon, fled from something from which flight was impossible, had made a successful escape from that which could not be escaped only to find it here again, waiting out there somewhere for him, indiscernibly bound to one of the millions of inhabitants of this new land, biding its time. For the moment they were safe from it, it seemed; the evil had not broached the mountains yet, as far as he could tell. But now this brainless harlot was leaving the protection of his realm. If she survived, she would undoubtedly come back as its thrall without even knowing it.

  In earlier days, this would actually have been, in a warped way, a good thing. The possibility that the F’dor had bound itself to her would have alleviated the need for him to go in search of it. Upon Rhapsody’s return to the Teeth, the Firbolg mountains, Grunthor would have killed her in front of him while he performed the Thrall ritual. It was another racial gift he possessed as half-Dhracian, the strange death dance he had seen but never performed that would prevent the demon from escaping as the host died, destroying it eternally along with its human body, in this case Rhapsody’s. If she had not, in fact, been possessed, her needless death would have caused neither of them a second thought.

  But that was no longer the case. Grunthor loved Rhapsody fiercely, defended her with ever fiber of his monstrous being. At seven and a half feet, and the same width as a dray horse, that was a lot of ferociously determined protection.

  Even he himself had come to acknowledge that she was useful to have around. In addition to her compelling beauty, which frightened the Firbolg or at least made them hold her in awe, there was Rhapsody’s music, one of the most useful tools they had in their arsenal aimed at bringing about the conquest of the mountain and the advancement of the Firbolg civilization.

  Rhapsody was Liringlas, a Skysinger, proficient in the science of Naming. There were pleasing aesthestics to the music that was inherent in her, part of her physical makeup. She emanated vibrations which soothed the sensitive veins that traced the surface of his skin. Achmed had decided long before that this was one of the reasons that he found her endearingly irritating, rather than a genuine annoyance, as he found most people to be.

  The more useful aspects of her musical ability, however, were its powers to persuade and to inspire fear, to heal wounds and cause damage, to discern vibrations that even he could not identify. Rhapsody had been instrumental in their taking the mountain; without her, the campaign would certainly have taken much longer and would have been far bloodier. Unfortunately, though these were the talents he valued, Rhapsody did not
.

  She spent an inordinate amount of time, instead, using the comforting aspects of her musical healing, singing to the injured to ease their pain, soothing anxiety, ministrations that he felt confused the Bolg and annoyed him beyond belief. But eventually he had come to tolerate her need to alleviate suffering; it secured her assistance in the necessary things.

  In addition to helping win the mountain, she had been responsible for negotiating the treaties with Roland and Sorbold, organizing the vineyard plantings and establishing an educational system, all things that were critical to his master plan. So he had come to respect her ideas and rely on her almost as much as he did on Grunthor, which was why her leaving with Ashe felt like betrayal. At least that was the reason he attached to the stabbing sense of frustration he had felt ever since she had announced her plan to go with this interloper, this stranger shrouded in mist and secrets.

  Just the prospect of her departing Ylorc in the morning made him feel physically cold. Achmed cursed again, running thin hands through sweaty hair and sitting down angrily in the chair before his uncooperative fire. He stared at the minuscule flames for a moment, remembering the sight of Rhapsody as she came back from her walk through the wall of fire within the belly of the Earth, having unintentionally absorbed its power and lore, purged from even the smallest of physical flaws. From that moment forward any fire, from the flickering flame of a candle to roaring bonfires, responded to her with the same adulation that men did, mirroring her mood, sensing her presence, obeying her commands. It was power that he needed here, within the cold mountain.

  The Firbolg king leaned forward, elbows on knees, his folded hands resting on his lips, thinking. Perhaps he was worrying unnecessarily. Rhapsody’s initial work was done and progressing nicely. The hospital and hospice were running smoothly, the vineyards tended carefully, even through the winter, by the Firbolg she had trained in agriculture. The Bolg children now were studying the techniques that would make their clans healthier and more long-lived, more prepared to stand their ground against the men of Roland. The lifeless mountain had grown warm under her ministrations. The Cymrian forges constructed by Gwylliam, the fool who had built and ruled Canrif and had started the war that destroyed it, blazed night and day in the fabrication of steel for weapons and tools, the residual heated air circulating within the mountain. The Bolg would barely miss her presence.