“Absolutely.”
For the first time since taking down his hood, Constantin smiled.
“Good. Then let us set to defending your province.”
25
THE JUNCTURE OF THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN AND NORTHEASTERN SORBOLD
The morning shadows of the Teeth were serving to hide the invasion force well for the moment, Hrarfa noted.
The longest shadow other than that cast by the sun through the towering, fanglike peaks of the mountains was her own, or, rather, that of the titanic stone body that she shared with the Faorina spirit, Faron. She had been unable to sense his presence for all of the night and the better part of the day before, when she had felt a glimpse of his simmering anger, a flash of resentful rage, or something like it. The caustic burn that rippled briefly over her consciousness had caused her nagging worry; Hrarfa knew that if they were to assault the Bolg mountains together in one stone body, the potential that the demonic child might balk, resist, or outright refuse at a time when his cooperation was critical could bring about disaster.
Faron, she whispered in the empty darkness of the Living Stone sepulchre. Faron, please speak to me. We need to be of one mind again before we go forth.
We have never been of one mind.
The words, spoken harshly, in close proximity to her conscious mind, startled Hrarfa, sending waves of shock through her amorphous being.
Thudding silence followed.
Faron, Hrarfa whispered, trying to keep her thoughts from angering the Faorina further, tell me what has you distressed. Please.
For what seemed like forever, the silence remained unbroken. Finally, she heard the voice of the Faorina, distinct and calm.
What you want is not what I want.
The F’dor spirit went cold.
How can that be? Hrarfa whispered when she recovered her ability to do so. You are one of us, Faron, one of the firstborn race of this world, the Children of Fire. We all want the same thing—to shatter the Vault of the Underworld, to set the Earth to flame as we dance upon its surface, free.
No. The rejection was so intense that it made Hrarfa’s consciousness vibrate. No. That is not what I want.
What—what do you want, then, Faron?
An image formed in Hrarfa’s awareness almost immediately. It was that of a man, the long-lived escapee from the Island of Serendair that had been known as the Seneschal, the human host of the demon that had fathered the Faorina child. In the image, the man was sitting beside a pool of gleaming green water, feeding eels to a misshapen monster that Hrarfa assumed was Faron’s true form. There was, for a fleeting moment, a remembrance of the comfort of the water, a fondness beyond her understanding, a tenderness in the thoughts that she found disturbing. When it abated, and the image faded, she spoke in careful thoughts again.
I know that you wish to be reunited with him, Faron, and in order for that to happen—
I saw him pass through to the depths through the green Death scale, the Faorina spirit spat in return. You can do nothing to reunite us, your promises to the contrary.
He is in the Vault with all the others of our race, our family, Hrarfa thought insistently. As are all the others who have gone back there from this world before him. All we need is the key to the Vault, the rib of the Sleeping Child—
Have you ever returned to the Vault since your escape?
This time silence reigned from Hrarfa’s locale.
I thought not, Faron said bitterly. So you have never seen for yourself if those spirits that die upon the Earth are sent back there for Eternity. For all you know, when we open it, it will be empty.
No, Faron, no, Hrarfa thought desperately. I can hear them. I can hear their dark voices, chanting, gleeful. Our kind can never die—we can but be contained. Your father awaits you. Come—let us go to the Bolglands, take the rib from the Earthchild, and go to the Vault. You will see.
The silence that followed did not surprise her.
Finally, when she did not sense a reply forthcoming, Hrarfa began to chant softly, whispering the incantations of elemental fire. She wove into them the lust of battle, the glee at the smell of carnage, the excitement of the energy of fear that had always raised gooseflesh on her human bodies when she had inhabited them. She spoke ancient words, sounds more of crackling flames and howling wind than those that were uttered by worldly tongues, countersigns in the evilest of speech, dire words of prehistoric power.
A lullabye she suspected the demonic half of his father had whispered to him at one time or another.
Now spiced with the buildup to the glorious fornication of assault, of battle, of savage destruction.
Of war.
With each new phrase, she could feel the stone body of the titanic soldier stiffen, a tumescence akin to that of sexual desire, as the lore of the element reached into the thoughts of the child who was half born of it. She spoke the poetry of beheadings, chanted the rhymes of savage rape and disembowelment, whispered the percussive noise of crunching bone and slithering brain as it escaped the casing of the skull. She crooned the paths of blood rivers, intoned the thump of organs being exploded by the stomping boot, hummed the timber of agonized wailing and the gasping of fear.
And smiled to herself as she felt the Faorina spirit respond, at first unwilling, though aroused, then more excited as she intoned her symphony of death, her serenade of widescale brutal murder.
She could all but feel him panting.
She had knobbed enough men in human form to recognize the point after which she was in utter control of his thoughts, and chuckled to herself in the knowledge that her abilities of seduction had not left her even when she had been evicted from her flesh host. When the bloodlust was all but orgiastic, she allowed her song to rise to a resounding crescendo, then urged the stone body to turn to the assembled armies, its eyes gleaming a ferocious blue, the sign of Faron’s utter mania.
Let us go now, Faron, she whispered. We will destroy everything in our path—none will keep us separated from your father any longer.
The statue obeyed, its Living Stone genitalia erect, tumescent with bloodlust.
Hrarfa was almost as excited.
Come! she shouted in the shrill voice that had become that of the titan upon Faron’s acceptance of her. The screech rippled up the mountains to their summits and shouted angrily at the cloud-strewn sky. To Canrif—leave nothing in one piece. Adorn yourselves with their gore.
A war scream that shook the roots of the mountains answered her.
The titan turned again, at the phalanx of a valley of moving soldiers and matériel.
Heading east into the rising sun.
THE IRON MINES, VORNESSTA, SORBOLD
And then it was the day.
Or the night—Evrit had no concept of time in the depths of the mine, but it didn’t matter; he only knew that in this one moment everything was different from the endless torture that had been each waking moment of his existence prior to it.
It took more than a few heartbeats for him to realize what was happening. He was hunched over, scraping the bottom rank of the wall section he had been assigned, when a strange wave of motion swept through his cave.
The four lashmen who patrolled his workspace, the muscle-bound men who had been walking their regular beat up and down the aisle that bisected the line of scratchers on either side of the cave, suddenly turned to the guards also on patrol.
With a coordinated attack of lightning-fast whiplashes, they encircled the guards’ necks with the falls of their whips and, with teeth gritted, pulled tight, lifting the men off the ground as they strangled or broke their necks outright.
“Come!” one of the lashmen shouted to the petrified slaves as he dragged back on the whip. “Here’s your chance!”
Evrit remained frozen, trembling, as several of his fellow slaves leapt from their crouches and charged the compromised guard, swinging their diamond-edged trowels with a vicious vengeance. He rose to a stand as they began to gouge the man’s eyes and
guts from his body, ripping open his leather armor and screaming in glee as the guard’s entrails were exposed. They continued to hack at him, joined seconds later by more of their fellow captives, until the lashman swung the mutilated corpse from side to side, shaking them off.
“Back away!” he commanded. “Plenty more to be done!”
Then, with the newly empowered slaves jumping and dragging the others up from the floor behind him, he carried the body to the edge of the cave and hurled it perfunctorily over the side to the track on the floor below, then spat down over the ridge.
A roar of ferocious delight bellowed through the cave, building to a feverish howl of joy as similar bodies began to rain down from the levels above and across from them. Evrit felt his blood inflame at the sight of the falling guards, often torn limb from limb, from each of the caves across the great cavern from them.
From the highest level of the cavern, the crossbowmen moved hurriedly into defensive posture, falling to a prone position with their weapons, taking aim at the caves across the cavern from them.
As if bursting forth from cocoons or hives, the slaves flooded out of the caves, scrambling up the ladders and swarming the ridge. Evrit saw blood behind his eyes as his heart leapt in rage; he bolted forward, pushing aside the bodies of slaves that had been struck with bolts, and clambered up with those who had led the charge, screaming in fury as they climbed.
A number of those who had been first fell from the ladders above, shot in the face or throat, but within moments the climbers swelled over the tops and into the ranks of the archers. They fell on the bowmen, hacking and gouging; Evrit joined them, rage blinding him to anything but the thought of freeing his son and himself, and finding the rest of his family.
With a savage swipe, he put all of the muscle he had built since his captivity began into a roundhouse swing of his trowel, slashing the throat of the bowman in front of him open, releasing a wellspring of blood, and sending the man’s eyes spinning back in his head as he fell at Evrit’s feet. With his bare heel, the former pacifist leader of the Blessed stamped the rest of the man’s life out, breaking his nose and eye sockets, then assisted his fellow slaves in tossing the man’s body over the edge, watching it fall four levels into the growing stack of corpses on the stone floor below.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see the lashmen, who were stripping the guard bodies of their weapons and armor, leading a cohort of former slaves to the front doors of the mine, in a great river of roaring voices and slashing arms, pushing the reinforcements back, and barricading the entrance against the onslaught of army troops. Every bin, crate, lift, wagon, tool, and broken body was hoisted and tossed into a growing mountain reinforcing the enormous doors.
For a moment his rational mind resurfaced out of the darkness of his rage, wondering what would happen now that the slaves and lashmen controlled the mine that they were barricaded within. The mountain of slag would defend the back entrance; the massive doors beyond it were hewn into the side of the peaks, hovering well above the ground below, even if the towering pile could be broached, which was impossible.
But long-term survival beyond their revolution seemed in doubt to him; foodstuffs and fresh water had never been in great store, and the army of Sorbold, for the moment sealed out of the ironworks, would surely bring far greater force than the tens of thousands of slaves could muster when they regrouped.
But then the realization that, whatever was to come, he and his fellow captives had just thrown off their servitude, if only for a short time, had broken the will of the emperor of Sorbold, and would live, or die, free once more banished any doubt or concern from his mind.
He threw his head back and joined the swelling cry that was echoing throughout the iron mine, rattling the rock dome of the ceiling far above, laughing as the grit rained down on free men.
Free men, entombed by choice, within a molten mountain.
26
VLANE, MANOSSE
The streets of Vlane, the capital city of Manosse, looked almost exactly as they had the last time Ashe had walked them.
Vlane was a city on the water, one of the earliest built on the continent that ringed the western edge of the Wide Central Sea. It was sometimes also called the City of Sunrise for its eastern exposure and breathtaking morning views. Vlane had chosen to preserve its historic architecture of stone homes with neatly thatched roofs and a beautifully appointed waterfront where glistening white docks reached eagerly out into the thriving harbor toward the coming day. It was an amazing sight each morning as thousands of vessels, primarily fishing and crabbing boats, set off simultaneously into the rising sun, gathering the riches of the golden seacoast a few miles from shore.
Ashe stood for a moment, shedding the water from his clothes and allowing his lungs to adjust to the air of the world again after his long trek through the sea. He had arrived just as the fishing fleet set out as it always did, to the sound of joyful bells ringing tidings of wishes for good luck, fine weather, and plentiful catches.
The glistening sound caught in his throat; he could almost see Rhapsody standing before him, exactly as she had a little over two years before, watching the sunrise ceremony with a look of wonder so encompassing on her face that he thought his own heart had stopped at the sight of it. The sky had been reflecting the morning light very much as it was today, causing her golden hair to outshine the sun in its rising, making her smooth cheeks glow and her green eyes sparkle with life.
Ashe closed his own eyes for a moment, bidding the image in his memory to remain as long as it could. Over the last few years he had thought back to that moment many times, especially in times of great despair, because of the power it had to banish any sadness from his heart.
Rhapsody had always dreamt of going to sea; she had first told him so on the night they had met in their youth, the eve of her fourteenth birthday, outside a foreharvest dance in her hometown of Merryfield in the old world of Serendair. He still did not know to this day, almost two thousand years later, how he had come to be plucked from his own time, from the road to town he had been walking, a fourteen-year-old himself, and thrown back in Time to meet her in that place, that innocent farming village full of unknowing souls who could not have foreseen the tragedies of war and cataclysm that were to come upon them.
But nonetheless they had met, had instantly recognized in each other the other half of each of their souls, had decided to marry and had consummated that marriage beneath the lacy shadows cast by the willow tree near the stream that wound through the pasturelands of her family’s farm. In those few sweet hours together, before he was ripped back in Time to what for him had been the Present, she had confided to him the desire she had always felt for leaving her little village, studying music, traveling the wide world, and, most of all, seeing the sea which her grandfather had plied as a sailor.
With his eyes closed, he could still hear the excitement in her young voice at the thought of being able to go there with him, calling him by the name he had been given by the people of her village, a name commonly used for an unknown stranger, and which she had continued to use when they met up on the other side of time and had fallen in love again.
Sam?
Yes?
Do you think we might see the ocean? Someday, I mean.
Of course. We can even live there if you want. Haven’t you ever seen it?
I’ve never left the farmlands, Sam, never in my whole life. I’ve always longed to see the ocean, though. My grandfather is a sailor, and all my life he has promised me that he would take me to sea one day. Until recently I believed it. But I’ve seen his ship.
How can that be, if you’ve never seen the sea?
Well, when he’s in port, it’s actually very tiny—about as big as my hand. And he keeps it on his mantel, in a bottle.
The screech of the ropes from the vessels in the harbor now, the cry of the gulls, the smell of the salt air stung his ears and nose as tears stung the corners of his eyes.
Ge
nerally, when he recalled her voice speaking those words to him, it was the sweetest of recollections. But now, in a more recent memory of the last time they had seen each other, just before he departed into this same sea but half a world away, the woman whose face graced his dreams had been entirely different than the one in his sight.
She had come to him through the power of the blue element of the light spectrum that was the central power source of the instrumentality Achmed had rebuilt from Gwylliam’s Lightforge, designed and manufactured by the Nain of Canrif a millennium and a half before. The blue light, in concert with a musical note and the sounding of his true name, had given them a few moments together before she went off to war and he went into the sea to summon aid for that war.
He had barely recognized her, not because her face had lost any of its seraphic beauty, but because the name she had been given at birth, a name no one living beside himself had heard sounded, Amelia Turner, as well as the nicknames by which he, her friends, and her family had called her in the old world, Emily and Emmy, had been stripped away from her. She had given to their infant son, Meridion, to keep him safe, to keep him company, to comfort him in her loss when she left him with the beloved women who were her friends and adopted family in the Deep Kingdom, the place known as Undervale, tucked away in the northeastern mountains of the Nain of the continent, the safest place she knew to leave him, to hide him from Talquist, who sought to eat the baby’s beating heart in a quest for immortality.
A wave of nausea, loss, and wrath so violent and all-consuming swept over him then, leaving him shaking as he stood, the clothing that clung tightly to the heavy muscles of his chest, arms, and legs all but dry now in the morning sun and the sea wind.
The woman he had last beheld before he went into the sea looked a good deal like his wife, whose aspect the dragon in his blood had memorized down to the tiniest detail. He had carried the picture of her in his heart across two lifetimes, and so when he saw the filmy image, the wyrm within him had panicked.