Achmed turned to align himself with the space that he had seen a few seconds before.
And felt the odor he had identified move rapidly to his right.
Achmed fired his cwellan.
To his shock, the three sequential disks went wide, all except the first one, which cleanly bisected a small, thick towel that lay on the ground at his feet.
His reflexes, reputed to be some of the quickest in the Known World, noted the absence of the familiar scent.
Talquist was gone.
* * *
The Merchant Emperor had made a decision at the very last moment that made use of good common sense, an attribute he had relied on all of his life, particularly during his days plying the trade.
While the dagger in his hand might work once he got around behind the Assassin King, there was no possible way that he could make a successful strike against Achmed from the front.
Unless he wanted to be shot at point-blank range before he drew his next breath.
So he tossed the towel and bolted.
He had managed to get almost to the door of the tower room when a hail of disks whirled past him in an arc, whistling through the air and spinning out into the stairway beyond, where they clinked upon falling to the floor.
“Coward,” murmured the Bolg king.
Talquist felt his face go hot.
Perhaps, he thought grudgingly. But we will see who lives to hurl the next insult.
He remained, still as death and as invisible as the Afterlife, exactly where he had landed.
* * *
Where is Talquist? Achmed silently asked the compass again.
This time, he saw himself from a completely different angle and distance, far closer than he had imagined.
Too close for a cwellan shot.
He dropped his weapon and lunged.
And connected with Talquist’s soft stomach, driving his shoulder into the Merchant Emperor’s chest.
* * *
Taking Talquist’s breath from him.
The moment the connection was made, the emperor appeared on the floor beneath him.
A blade hovering in his hand, close to Achmed’s throat.
The Bolg king seized the emperor’s wrist and squeezed with as much crushing force as he could manage, shocking himself at how weak he had become in his travels across the twenty-one-mile-wide canyon and the tower climb.
Talquist, a man of many streetfights and tussels in the course of building an empire of merchants, gasped and twisted, managing to pull his shoulder around but not to free himself. He struggled to shout for help, but the pressure of the Bolg king’s shoulder against his chest just below the heart was beginning to interrupt his breathing, making him woozy.
“Help,” he gasped quietly, not even loud enough for the word to leave through the tower window where high-flying birds might hear it. “Help me.”
“Oh, please,” the Bolg king said disdainfully. “Surely you can do better than that.”
“You will—never—get out of—here—alive—”
“Perhaps not,” Achmed said, wedging his feet at an angle on the floor and driving more pressure from his shoulder into Talquist’s chest. “But we will be traveling companions in any case. Unless you make an unfortunate dive out the window.”
“Halt, or you shall both go over.”
52
The emperor, sweating and pale, looked up to see his supreme commander, crouched menacingly, his crossbow pointed. He was too close to the tower window to be relieved yet, but his hopes rose.
“Fhremus,” he whispered. “Help me.” He tried to pull free of the Bolg king’s grip, but it was like iron, as unforgiving as death.
The muscles of Fhremus’s shoulders tightened visibly as he gripped and sighted his weapon. They were the only muscles in his body to make any movement.
“Do not move, Majesty—I am here.”
He looked at the Assassin King without turning his head. “Release him and step back from the window.”
The Bolg king neither moved nor obeyed, merely tightened his grip and dragged the emperor’s upper body more fully in front of himself.
Fhremus took one deliberate step closer.
“I know you have no qualms about your own death,” he said in a toneless voice to the Bolg king. “But if you do not obey me, you will not be able to attend to your appointed task. Release the emperor.”
Talquist’s brows drew together.
“His appointed task?” he demanded, choking as the unforgiving grip tightened even more. “Fhremus, his—task is to murder me. This—is the second—assassin the augury warned—of—”
“No, Majesty, no.” Fhremus’s voice had the ring of false comfort. “I killed both assassins that came here, on your orders, before your eyes. This man is no assassin. He is merely a workman, a leavener. The sort of man you represented in the Mercantile when you were guild Hierarch—the ‘noble man who works with his hands,’ as you called people like him.” When Talquist squinted even more deeply in confusion, Fhremus’s eyes blackened and bored into his.
“He has come to repair the Great Scales, Majesty. It seems that someone unbalanced them deliberately last year and they have been weighing falsely since. This workman is a skilled craftsman who has come all the way from Ylorc to rebalance the Scales. It is the duty of every true Sorbold to assist him in his task.” He spoke to Achmed again. “Release him.”
The Bolg king stared at him a moment longer.
Then let go and stepped away.
The trembling emperor lunged forward.
Only to be caught full-force in the throat and driven back to the window by the supreme commander’s crossbow bolt.
Fhremus fired again, and Talquist fell onto the opening of the aperture, twitching and gagging.
He reaimed his weapon.
“Wait,” Achmed said, holding up his hand to the supreme commander. Fhremus paused.
The Bolg king stepped rapidly to the window and plucked the violet scale of the New Beginning from Talquist’s robes, then leaned over the emperor, who was drowning in his own gore.
“For a short while you lived in the guise of a king,” he said in his sandy voice that scratched the dying man’s eardrums. “In death, you are, for all time, still only a man, and not much of one at that. Greet Rhonwyn nicely when you hit the bottom; without her help I never would have found you.”
He held up the compass with his left hand before Talquist’s glassy eyes.
“Look well at this,” he said. “For the Present, you are still alive. Six to eight seconds from now, that will be in the Past.”
Then he shoved the Emperor of the Sun out the tower window.
A moaning gargle fell as Talquist did, disappearing quickly in the sound of the wind around the high tower.
Achmed turned to the supreme commander and opened his arms benignly.
“Shoot me if you will,” he said seriously. “I have done what I needed to do—completed my ‘appointed task,’ as you said.”
Fhremus watched him for a long moment, then lowered his weapon.
“So have I,” he said.
He walked over to the window and stared down at the broken corpse of the emperor, tiny in the canyon below, only discernable by its bright white robes of fine Sorbold linen.
Then he spat out the aperture.
“For Kymel,” he said to the wind howling around the tower. “And each man like him you betrayed.”
He looked in surprise at the floating lantern wedged in the tower roof, then turned to Achmed, thin and wraithlike before him.
“You climbed?”
The Bolg king nodded slightly.
Fhremus nodded in return.
“I assume you would prefer to leave by the stairs.”
“That would be a vast improvement, but not a necessity,” said the Bolg king. “It can only be easier climbing back down.”
The supreme commander beckoned to him, and Achmed followed him down the tower staircase. Fhremus led the Bolg
king into the library and opened the hidden passageway.
“Go down and out through the viaduct, taking the northern tunnel when you come to the main vein. No one will see you—by then we will all be mourning the disappearance of our emperor.”
The Bolg king gave the supreme commander of the armies of Sorbold a considered look.
“We are still at war, are we not?”
Fhremus met his gaze. “Yes. Until a halt to hostilities is called. That is more your area than mine, Majesty.”
“I thought so. Well, if we both survive until that time, come for a visit and I will favor you with a splendid single malt. If we don’t, thank you for the use of your stairway.”
Fhremus smiled slightly and nodded.
Achmed bowed and stepped through the passage.
He followed the hidden passageway for a great distance, into the underground sewer where the stench of centuries stung his sinuses, breathing easier in spite of it, until he finally found himself at the buried gate. He crawled out into the blinding desert sun, into a free wind, and expelled the smell from his nose.
Then he closed his eyes and tasted the sand in the air.
Only to be slapped by a wind from the southeast, carrying Rhapsody’s voice.
Screaming his name.
Achmed! Achmed the Snake! Come to me—oh gods—
He felt quickly around for a favorable breeze and, concentrating as Rath had shown him, caught it and was taken aloft by the wind.
53
ON THE SKELETON COAST
“Grunthor!” Rhapsody shouted into the sea wind. “Grunthor, where are you?”
Only to hear her voice drowned out in its call.
Frantically she slapped at the swells that threatened to pull her feet out from under her. The drawback from the tidal wave had receded, and now the waves of the sea were crashing on the shore as if nothing had ever happened.
All evidence of catastrophic destruction to the contrary.
Glancing all around her, she scanned the broken bones of the old Cymrian vessels, usually wedged in the sand and the fog, but now partially submerged in the surf that swirled and rushed around the new shoreline. The wind whistled through again, whipping her hair into her eyes, making it impossible to see clearly.
Fighting to keep from being swallowed by her terror, she was suddenly struck with the memory of her first of only two previous visits to this haunted place. The second time she had traveled here she had been with Ashe; the memory of that journey was as foggy as the coast itself, as most of her memories of him were. But the first time she had come with Achmed and Grunthor, seeking to study the shattered timbers of the ships, which had been made from the trees of Living Stone known as Earthwood that had been harvested in the buildup to the Cymrian exodus from their homeland.
Achmed had been seeking information about the blue-tinged wood of trees that they had discovered in the deep forests of Canrif, far beyond the engineering and artistic marvel that Gwylliam had carved into the edifice at the front of the mountain range. His research had suggested that they might be related to the trees of Living Stone that had grown outside the castle Elysian where Serendair’s king and family had resided in their day.
Rhapsody, who had never seen that castle but had been aware enough of its legends, had chosen to name her hidden grotto, the cavern full of stalagmites where a small cottage stood on an island in the middle of the underground lake in the Bolglands, after that palace.
As the thundering sea and the piercing wind rattled the bones of the ships all around her now, she thought back to that journey with her two dearest friends in the world, remembering how their presence had been the only thing that allowed her to keep from succumbing to the nightmarish gloom that kept most every other traveler away.
After they finished investigating the graveyard of ships, a bottle of fine rum had been passed around, far more potent than any of them had expected. The resulting merriment had been uncharacteristic, even for the Three, who had traveled the entirety of the Earth together and by that time considered each other the only family they had left in the world. Great merriment and hilarity had occurred, including an impromptu belching contest in which Rhapsody had enthusiastically been named the winner by the two Firbolg, an event that in itself had resulted in even greater tomfoolery.
Grunthor had been moved to offer a solemn toast.
’Ere’s to the Three, he had intoned, lifting the empty rum bottle high. As long as we’s togetha, the rest of the world can go get knobbed.
Rhapsody had sworn later that even Achmed had giggled, but in the sober light of the next morning, she realized that it must have been a mistake of her alcohol-infused memory.
The recollection came and went in the passing of a single heartbeat, leaving her with nothing in her memory but the visage and name of the man she needed, the only one in the world that could help her find their friend.
Even as diminished as she was from the loss of her name, she could still feel the importance of both of those men in her life.
She raised her head to the angry gray sky above her, heavy clouds racing past above.
“Achmed!” she screamed into the battering wind. “Achmed the Snake! Come to me—oh gods—”
Her voice choked off as her mouth was filled with water by a passing high wave.
Rhapsody struggled to stand and angrily spat out the brine, trying to keep from swallowing the seawater, and shouted again, and again.
The wind around her moaned and screamed in return.
“Achmed—”
“Peace,” the Bolg king said from behind her, his voice all but drowned in the tempest. “I am here. Save your voice and your breath.”
Rhapsody turned quickly and stared, wide-eyed, at her dearest friend in the world, the other side of her coin.
The Bolg king opened his arms to her.
“Achmed,” she said, trembling violently, “I can’t find him. I can’t find Grunthor. Please, help me, please help me find him.” She came, exhausted, into the Bolg king’s embrace and clung to him, finding a stronger anchoring in the sand with his weight.
“Where’s Rath?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know.”
I am here, Bolg king.
Achmed heard the words in his mind. He turned in a full circle, looking for the Dhracian, but all he saw were the crashing waves threatening his balance and the rolling gray sky.
“Where?”
From atop one of the fragmented wrecks that littered the coast, the detritus of history from which the shoreline gained its name, stuck unceremoniously in the crow’s nest, the ancient Dhracian hunter held up his hand shakily.
“Where is he? Where’s Grunthor?”
Rath shook his head. “I know not. He was out past the first sandbar when he took the titan beneath the waves.”
Rhapsody and Achmed looked out to sea.
“Can you feel his heartbeat?” Rhapsody asked. “As you did when you found MacQuieth?”
Beating back his hatred of the element of water, Achmed let go of Rhapsody except for one hand, tore back the hood of his veils, and, taking a deep breath, closed his eyes and plunged his head into the surf.
The howling of the wind and the noise of the gale disappeared, replaced by the bellowing, churning sound of the furious sea.
The Bolg king listened intently. At first he could discern nothing in the mayhem.
But after a moment, he thought he heard something familiar, though vastly changed, in the near distance beyond the first dropoff of the sea bottom.
His head broke the surface and he shook the watery hair out of his eyes, then looked at Rhapsody.
“Come.”
She nodded and followed him out past the pounding surf, where the water was deeper.
* * *
Achmed closed his eyes, following the tremulous sound of Grunthor’s heart. The Sergeant’s pulse was a rhythm he had known almost as long as he had known his own.
Fortunately, as with all things hav
ing to do with Grunthor, his heartbeat had very little subtlety.
Unfortunately, it also had very little vigor.
Achmed dragged Rhapsody in the direction of the sound, through the relentless waves.
“I could never—imagine—I would ever say this,” he gasped, “but I wish—your loathsome husband was here. He, at least, has some power over this disgusting element. This—is the worst—possible situation I can imagine.”
Rhapsody, barely able to breathe, merely nodded.
Finally Achmed stopped in water just above his waist.
“Here,” he said, indicating the sand on the ocean floor.
“He’s—what? He’s buried in the sand?”
“So it would seem.”
Rhapsody, shaking violently, crouched down and dragged her hands across the bottom.
“We—we have to dig—him—out—”
“I don’t know if we can,” the Bolg king said, gasping in between words as he scratched at the ocean floor. “Every handful of sand only gets replaced each time—another—wave comes in—”
“How—is he even—still alive?”
Achmed shook his head, his hair soaked with seawater.
“No idea—but I can still—feel his heartbeat. It’s getting weaker, of course. He’s failing rapidly.”
“This is the—curse of power,” Rhapsody said, digging as fast as she could, trying to sink her fingers deeply into the sand but getting nowhere. “All our weapons, all our titles—all our lore—and in the end we are left to helplessly digging in the sand of the sea—”
“I share—your frustration a thousand times over—believe me,” Achmed said in return, furiously gouging as much of the sand out of the ocean floor as he could, taking a breaker full in the face as he dug.
“Is there nothing—do you not have anything we can use?”
Achmed looked up at her seriously.
“Perhaps,” he said.
He felt inside his garments for a moment, struggling not to lose the contents of his pockets to the whipping tide.
And then held up a piece of violet oval carapace.
Which, had it been examined in gentler circumstances, had an etching of a throne on its convex side.