In spite of being the king of a nation proudly known for not having a state religion, Beliac began to pray, thoughts that made no sense offered in supplication to a deity or deities he had never believed in.
Just before the last shark seized his flailing arm and dragged him down to the depths in pieces, a final irony occurred to him.
The last picture in his dissolving mind was that of the tiny tip of the shark fin that had topped his pe’detroi.
And now was being torn out of the stomach into which he had swallowed it.
50
ON THE SKELETON COAST
Faron was growing frantic.
Day by day the place where his arm had broken off was crumbling more, leaving him off balance and weak. The dry, sandlike interior of his formerly smooth flesh of Living Stone chipped away with the slightest of contact, making the former freak-show exhibit feel as if he was dissolving.
Largely because he was.
In the first few moments of shock after the greenish beast had struck him with the rock on a stick, shattering his arm, it occurred to Faron that once he was free of Hrarfa, nothing was preventing him from going where he wanted and getting away from the demands of the demon that had rent his brain, day and night, with the endless call for more destruction, more fire, more blood.
And more speed in the achievement of her overall goal, the finding of the Earthchild in the mountains of Canrif and, in turn, the key to the Vault of the Underworld.
The overwhelming and relentless demands of the demon had made Faron long even more for the days he had spent in the company of his father. There had been comfort in the warm green water, comfort that his almost boneless body had craved. As each day passed and he became more and more brittle, all he wanted, above everything else, was to return to that time, and if not that time, at least to that sensation.
Which is why, for the first time in his life, Faron craved the sea.
When he first had come to awareness on the Scales, encased in this new, unwieldy, and uncomfortable body of Living Stone, he had panicked, had run from Jierna Tal down the forbidding mountainside, all the way to the shore, where he could feel some of the dragon scales his father had given him in a stranger’s hands, a stranger who had stolen them from him when he was compromised, weak and dying after the destruction of his tank of green water on his father’s ship. He had come to the water’s edge, but had balked at going in it, terrified of the massive blue monster that had taken his father from him.
But now the sea no longer made him fear.
Now it was, perhaps, the only place where he might find the comfort he had experienced with his father.
He was able to run day and night, because his stone body required neither rest nor sustenance. All he knew was that he could hear his father’s voice, calling to him lovingly from somewhere far away, all that he wanted in the entire world.
And, when he finally reached the Skeleton Coast, the fog and the water, the cool mist and the breeze that gently buffeted his missing arm all managed to obscure the giant and the shadow that were waiting for him there.
* * *
Grunthor waited in the shadows of the broken ships, partially buried in sand for a millennium and a half.
Rath had been tracking the titan from the moment they left the Bolglands, had kept silent while he was following the flickering fire of the demon’s essence. It had been more difficult to track than even the most elusive of the F’dor he had followed in the past, largely because the creature that the Sergeant called Faron was so largely dilute, so clouded with other bodily legacies that the part which was dark fire was evanescent, hard to keep a mental grasp on.
And yet he did.
So when the titan was within a league or so, he turned from the silence of his meditative position.
“He’s coming.”
“Yer certain?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Oi’ll be ready.”
By the time Faron’s shadow appeared, long and thin in the morning light, they both were.
* * *
Faron came to the shore, alone in all the world, it seemed.
For as far as he could see up and down both sides of the beach and everywhere behind him, he was the only moving object.
Gingerly he waded out into the water, feeling the soothing sting of the cold salt. It seemed to him that something was strange about the water; it was very far away from the shore, farther than he ever could imagine. On the wet sand of the beach, revealed when it pulled back, fish and crustaceans were flapping and moving awkwardly, struggling with their sudden lack of cover.
For a short while, the seabirds had a feast.
But then the world became quiet.
Disturbingly quiet.
* * *
And then Grunthor struck.
Hiding below the crest of the waves in the shallow water, he had been waiting.
Faron was caught unaware.
The Sergeant-Major lunged forward, throwing his arms around the titan’s knees and slamming it onto its back in the surf.
Almost immediately the counterpunch broke his nose as his body was hurled into the air above the froth by the hardest impact he ever remembered sustaining from anyone. As the surface of the sea was streaked with his blood, Grunthor looked up to find the titan towering over him, the hand on the end of his remaining arm clenched into a fist that came down on his head, causing the world to go black for a moment.
Grunthor, woozy, felt around in the surf until he located his pick hammer. When the titan reared up again before him, he swung with all his might, nicking the statue’s chin and breaking the area around its eye.
Blinded, Faron rose and slammed himself down onto Grunthor’s head, flattening him into the beach.
His one good arm shot out and grasped the Sergeant’s throat.
He squeezed, crushing the windpipe.
Until another swing of the pick hammer broke his remaining elbow.
Armless, Faron fell back, struggling to rise.
Grunthor, clutching his throat, rose shakily to his feet and readied the hammer again.
When off in the distance, something caught his eye.
At the horizon, the water from the sea had shifted, it seemed. Blood was gushing from a gash across his brow, but Grunthor was fairly certain he could tell what was coming.
He glanced around, but could find no trace of Rath.
The wall of water was moving quickly, sweeping broken ships and houses from the other side of the world in front of it.
The Sergeant-Major looked at the statue, panting furiously in the sand at his feet.
Then back at the coming tidal wave.
And, given the odds, decided to go for the kill.
He raised the hammer one final time and brought it down on the statue’s head.
Shattering it.
Then, with the last of his breath before the towering wave swept in, he began to chant.
By the Star, Oi will watch, Oi will wait, Oi will call an’ be ’eard.
He could see no sign of Rath.
He was waiting, standing vigil, when the wave crashed down, taking everything in its path away with it.
51
THE TOWER OF JIERNA TAL
The first indication Achmed had that the Merchant Emperor of Sorbold was on his way up the stairs was the slightest repugnant stench of human flesh in fire.
The trace odor was extraordinarily faint, a mere whisper of the fetid smell of demonic spirits, the F’dor specifically, but even just a hint of it was enough to fill his Dhracian sinus cavities with the stinging indication of the presence of ancient evil that his blood screamed to stamp out.
The long journey across the massive canyon followed by the extraordinary climb he had undertaken had stripped him of more of his strength than he had expected. The life he had lived prior to coming to the new world had kept him fit and wiry; while he still kept himself in trim, there was no denying the softening of his hardness, the diminution of his
ironlike grip. The hard vitality that he had always counted on, while still mostly present, was not something to take for granted, he had learned.
So he pressed himself up against the corner behind the stairs in the tower room overlooking the vast vista, much of which he had traveled through, and waited, willing his heartbeat to slow and his breath to be silent. He held Rhonwyn’s compass in his right hand and, with caution that surpassed extreme, waited for the emperor to come into sight.
And it almost worked.
* * *
Talquist was humming as he climbed those stairs, drying his hair, wet from the scented bath he had just taken, with a thick, small towel.
The routs of Avonderre and Tallono had established an impressive foothold along the eastern coast of the Middle Continent; the international network of slave traders and armed merchant vessels, cleverly hidden for so long by the blue scale that Faron had employed, still seemed to be maintaining control of the seas, even now that the magical occlusion was no longer present; armaments of all kinds were being produced at record speeds by his slave factories; and, by far his favorite bellwether, word had come from Navarne that the Lord Cymrian was, in the words of the scouts, “dead or fled.”
He could not be happier.
Granted, there had been losses as well. The Great Forest to the north and Tyrian to the south had proven thus far impervious to the tests for widespread burning with the long-smoldering ores the slaves had accidentally discovered in the mines of Jakar, where seven hundred of them had inhaled the toxins, only to breathe out increasingly heated blood with each exhalation. By now he had anticipated occupying the western forests from his own borders to those of the Hintervold in the north.
But it was coming, he knew.
All in good time.
He was almost at the top of the stairs leading to the tower room when the mirror placed unobtrusively in the corner caught a flash of movement, ever so slight, behind the tower staircase.
Talquist froze on the stair.
* * *
Hrekin, Achmed thought. He’s seen me.
He glanced out the stairway door to the place where the string of an alarm bell hung.
He had not yet caught sight of Talquist himself; the emperor had come to a halt just beyond the range of his vision from beneath the staircase above him. But he had been a student of human behavior long enough to recognize the signs of being seen, had been able to detect a change of heart, plan, or mind, knew the sound of the quick intake of breath or the expulsion of similar air that indicated an unseen person knew of his presence.
One thing that cheered him somewhat was the fact that the odor of F’dor did not grow stronger as the emperor stopped. Achmed had been around enough targets with whom the ancient demonic race had interacted that, while he could not always catch a trail of a demon, he could usually gauge the level of its connection to the human host. Whether a person had come into the most distant of contacts and was therefore only under the slightest of suggestions, or the full-fledged host of the demon itself, Achmed could never be certain, but he had come to be able to often weigh the density of a demonic presence.
And, though he silently acknowledged that he could be wrong, he decided the likelihood that Talquist had either been taken against his will or, a little more nerve-racking, had offered himself as the demon’s actual host, was minimal.
Or at least he prayed it was.
Come on, you demonic knob, he thought. Come out and play.
* * *
Exhaling quietly, Talquist drew the violet scale of the New Beginning from the folds of his robes of state, garments of the finest bleached white Sorbold linen, trimmed with gold.
And held it up in the moonlight streaming through the window.
He watched as it cleared to almost an outline of itself, the violet hide and primitive scratching of the image of a throne inscribed on its surface fading until nothing but the outline remained.
Talquist waited patiently, listening for sound from beneath the stairs, but hearing none. He glanced without moving his head into the stairway mirror again and saw nothing.
Much the way he had as a child in the orphanage when he had heard footsteps or a sudden bump on the stairway, potentially indicating the approach of the despicable bastard caretaker who gleefully used the penniless children in his care for his own nefarious purposes, he suppressed the urge to scream threats or issue commands—Leave here now! Leave us alone! I have a knife—and waited until his own hand and forearm went clear as the scale did.
The moonlight being as strong as it was that night, it only took a moment.
As Talquist felt the density of his body change, he smiled with the irony of what he had just undertaken. It was this scale, this precious object he had found in the sand of the Skeleton Coast a lifetime ago, that had allowed him to walk through the streets of Jierna’sid in the dark of night, to enter both Crown Prince Vyshla’s bedchamber and the royal suite of the Empress Leitha and absorb into the carapace of the scale all of their Right of Command, all but dissolving the prince and desiccating the empress almost immediately.
And, with the removal of the Ring of State from the dead empress’s hand, giving him the object he needed, drizzled with a few drops of his blood and placed on the Weighing plate of the great Scales of Jierna Tal, to take the throne for himself.
Just one more time, he thought as he watched the rest of his body turn clear and vanish. Please, please. I will never leave the tower window open again if you just assist me in this, please.
And smiled, knowing that he, one of the true disbelievers in the world, who had chosen to publicly worship the old animist gods that he didn’t believe in rather than acknowledge the Cymrian deities he didn’t acknowledge either, he, the Royal Cynic, had just uttered a bartering prayer.
If it wouldn’t lead his predator to him, he would have laughed aloud.
If there is anyone there, it must be the second assassin that Faron’s augury spoke of, he mused. Fhremus was right; that second fellow with Dranth could hardly have been mistaken for an actual assassin.
Fortunately, the moonlight was bright that night.
He tucked the violet scale into the pocket in the folds of his robe.
* * *
Achmed did not know why he was certain, but somehow he knew that Talquist had stepped off the stair.
One of the reasons he knew was that when he leaned incrementally farther out from behind the corner of the staircase, he could no longer see the emperor’s stout belly as he had a few moments before.
Hrekin, he thought to himself. He’s got something that hides him from sight.
He set about moving the cwellan forward with motions that were agonizingly slow, tasting the air in front of him to see if the flavor changed.
And in a moment, it did.
* * *
Talquist stepped off the stair.
He came around the corner as slowly as he could, holding the dragon scale in front of him.
And silently drew the blade that he always kept in a sheath on his lower leg, even now that he was the emperor of the Known World, with the greatest soldiers on the continent protecting his every breath.
I will have to discipline Fhremus for allowing this breach in security, he thought, highly displeased.
He stopped and took a breath.
Crouched behind the stair was a man in black garments, simple trousers and a shirt, with a hooded scarf that covered his neck.
Talquist’s blood ran cold.
He had seen this man before, at the funeral of the empress and her son, as well as his own coronation.
He thought of curses vile and vulgar that had been part of the world he had inhabited for most of his life and decided that none of them were even vaguely sufficient.
Well, he thought ruefully, if someone is going to try and take the emperor of the Known World down, at least it’s appropriate that it’s the king of assassins.
He stood, not breathing, for the span of eighty heartbeats
, then gingerly stepped forward.
Only to have the man beneath his staircase swing his strange, crossbow-like weapon around and point it squarely in his direction.
Talquist’s throat ran dry.
And yet, even as his heart pounded heavily and his blood ran faster, he had the innate understanding, though he was not certain why, that the gifted killer did not see him.
At least not yet.
He’s following his nose, the emperor thought, judging by the angles at which the veiled man aimed his weapon, and glanced about. He regretted immediately the salt bath he had enjoyed that morning, perfumed with sacred oils and ambergris from across the sea that was now plied by ships flying his colors.
The assassin’s eyes were not aligned with him.
He lifted his dagger and positioned it for a killing strike.
* * *
Achmed knew that he could only take one cwellan shot, and if he missed, it would give the invisible emperor a clean shot with his blade at him.
When the thought occurred to him he couldn’t decide if he was amused by it or horrified.
Indeed, were the tales of his life to be written, it would be embarrassing beyond belief to have met his end at the hands of such an utter imbecile.
At the same time, the potential of that happening was far stronger than he was comfortable acknowledging.
His sinus cavities stung slightly, and Achmed put his finger to the side of his nose.
And, in doing so, felt the compass that he had placed in his sleeve shift slightly.
Rhonwyn’s compass.
Or, more correctly, Merithyn’s.
With some effort he slid the ancient artifact from his forearm into his hand without moving otherwise. The tool felt warm, probably from being up against his bare skin, but once it was in his hand he saw a vision ripple through his mind.
It was the quick, evanescent picture of himself in the tower stairway room.
As if it were reporting to him about his own whereabouts.
Where is Talquist? he thought quickly.
The image changed to a picture of himself from a much closer angle.