Requiem for the Sun
Fighting off the gale, he grasped the hilt at his hip and drew Tysterisk.
A shower of infinitesimal sparks of fire gusted forth from the scabbard, visible only in the blink of an eye.
The seneschal held the sword hilt aloft, slicing through the gale with a vicious sweep.
To any eye other than one as close as Fergus’s, it would have appeared that the seneschal was merely in possession of a handle of black steel. But Fergus, being close enough to touch the man, caught for a split second a glimpse of the blade, its edges faint black outlines that held within their boundaries a swirling of tiny currents, invisible except for the droplets of water from the spray that were caught and spun within them.
And in that split second, the reeve could see the tiny, formless faces of spirits, eyeless wraiths with dark mouths open in howling agony, that spun within the invisible blade; for that moment he could see the weapon’s heft, its power, crackling in the air around it.
That power radiated instantly through the seneschal, causing his body to stiffen, to surge with a strength that Fergus could feel in his grasp. The skin beneath the seneschal’s robes grew warm, then blistering, too hot to touch. With a guttural sound of pain, Fergus relinquished the lord’s arm.
There was little need to secure him now anyway.
Lightning crackled in the wind that swept the deck and sails.
Like the sword blade, the seneschal’s lean body seemed to take on a greater heft, a sinewy muscularity, as the power from the weapon surged through him. He threw back his head and laughed, then shouted into the wind.
“Bow to me!”
The twins, prone on the deck, stared up from the pools of vomit through their sodden hair, watching the transformation.
Watching their master instruct the wind itself.
“I am your lord!” the seneschal bellowed into the gusts that tugged at the mains’l. The sound of his voice was deep, cutting through the scream of the gale like the blade of the sword through snow. “Bow to me; I command it.”
In answer the thundering wind crackled with static, whipping in a cyclonelike spiral skyward.
Then, in a twinkling, the wind died down; the waves, absent its tormenting buffets, calmed. The sails, aback, their surfaces pressed aft against the mast by the force of the wind a moment before, slackened and fell, then filled again as a fairer breeze blew through, catching them.
The crew stood stock still, their eyes riveted on the seneschal.
The seneschal closed his eyes, a wide, triumphant smile on his lips. He raised his face to the sun, visible now that the clouds had been blown away. He stood for a moment, reveling in the glory of his mastery of the gale; then, as if coming to clarity, opened his eyes again quickly and leveled a displeased glance at the crew. The breeze around the hilt in his hand sparked angrily, tiny sparks of flame like windswept embers of a campfire taking to the air.
“Get on with it, then,” he said in a low, deadly voice.
The captain turned quickly to the pilot.
“Thus!” he called, the order to maintain the course. The crew, dumbstruck the moment before, scrambled to attention, returning quickly to their posts.
Fergus dried his stinging palms, blistered from the heat of touching the seneschal, on his breeches, then crossed the deck to where the crossbowmen still lay, sundered by nausea.
“Rise up,” he said in his gruff voice. “Get back belowdecks ’til you’re needed.”
The mate paused as he passed the captain on the way back to the quarterdeck, leaning close to his commanding officer so as not to be overheard, not realizing that the wind heard everything.
“What have we taken on, sir?” he asked nervously.
The captain did not flinch.
“I couldn’t say,” he answered, watching the seneschal return to his quarters below decks. “But surely our voyage is blessed. How can we ask for more than to have the wind itself with us?”
9
ON THE SKELETON COAST, SORBOLD
With the morning came the wind.
The man stood with the rising sun behind him, his face to the west, watching the rolling mist billow in waves half a heartbeat behind the surf as it broke over the black sand of the beach.
All around him the towering wrecks of ships dozed, their ancient timbers jutting from the sand like the cracked bones of giant mythical beasts, wrapped in dense blankets of fog.
The sea looks calm this morning, he thought, watching the gentle ebb and flow of the waves, foaming as they ran up the dark, sparkling sand of the beach, then retreating shyly. He knew it was all a pretense. The riptide a few feet from shore was deceptive and merciless, the rocky bottom jagged as broken glass from the volcanic shards of sand. Here on the lee of the Skeleton Coast, peace was only a pretty mask for a deeper, deadly threat.
The thought amused him.
On the windward side of the coast, the waves made no attempt at concealing their rage. They rolled in high white breakers, pounding the shore with an unforgiving fury, crashing against the rocks, blasting their spray violently into the air, churning madly until they were sucked back into the maw of the sea again, only to return insistently a moment later, over and over and over endlessly.
There was something much more appealing to him about that undisguised sea rage, that unapologetic hostility, unfettered by the need to hide, to appear passive. It was a rage he felt himself, an anger that lurked deep inside, needing to be disguised, tempered, cloaked in a gentle face, an amiable aspect, for the sake of cooperation. Like the leeward sea.
For now.
A beam of gold broke through the ever-present haze, illuminating the vapor in the cloudy air, making his dusky skin shine coppery, the color of the earth in sunlight. Sorbold skin, burnished by the desert wind, the unrelenting sun. There was a beauty to his people that did not exist in the other strains of the human race of the continent, a superior mettle that withstood the relentless sun, the pounding blasts of desert wind, the harsh clime, the brutal nature of the culture, and came out the other side stronger, honed, like a clay pot tempered in fire.
Soon to be put to the test.
A creaking whistle interrupted his musings, a groaning that could be heard from time to time along the Skeleton Coast. It was only the wind bending around the ruined masts of the ancient ships, whipping over the remains of the hulls, blasting the wood clean. The dead ships had been built from a strange wood, from a kind of tree not seen on this side of the world, wood that had not rotted even with the passage of fourteen hundred years. The wind seemed to caress the ruins lovingly, wrapping them in the steam of morning, moaning its plaintive song.
The man looked up, his thoughts refocused on the task at hand. He had been scouring the beach in the gray light of predawn, as he had been the day he first found treasure here, as he had done endless times since, to no avail. There were only a few moments left before full sun, when the misty beach would turn white and cloudy, the haze impenetrable, blocking any chance for a glimmer of magic to be seen. Quickly he cast his gaze around one more time, his eyes scanning the foaming waves, the black sand.
He saw nothing out of the ordinary, just as he had every time he had looked save that first time.
The man let out a deep sigh, resignation in his breath. The failure was not unexpected; after all, how many times in one lifetime can one be handed the keys of Time?
He dug dispiritedly beneath the prow of the skeletal ship he had been searching through, trying to catch sight of any scrap that the sea had not claimed, any glint, any tiny sparkle like the one he had seen that day, but to no avail.
The red-orange arc that had cracked the horizon at daybreak swelled to a complete sphere, filling the heavy, vaporous air with opacity. Full sun.
He sighed deeply, remembering the moment of his discovery fondly.
He had been a much younger man then, a man with unrealistic dreams of youth and the itching desire to see them to fruition being lessened a little each year as those dreams dissipated. He
had all but settled into the resentful acceptance that his life would turn out to be no more than ordinary when an impetuous dawn stroll along the black sand beach had yielded a fortuitous glimmer.
He had almost missed it; he caught it out of the corner of his eye, like a distant movement, and it had set his heart to heavy, painful thudding; legend said that gray lions, living ghosts of hunter-predators, prowled the Skeleton Coast, blending into the mist to invisibility until they were upon their unfortunate prey. He had seen enough human bones scattered amid the bones of ships to believe the tales. The purple glimmer on the periphery of his vision had terrified him, caused him to stop, frozen, where he stood, praying to the All-God to allow him to blend into the mist, to escape the jaws of the ghost lions.
When nothing sprang out of the fog at him after a few minutes he had cautiously made his way to the dark bones of the ship, the outlines of its crushed timbers turning from shadows to gray, then black, until he was there, inside what had been the hull. He had dug carefully in the sand, brushing the grains on the wet surface gently away, oblivious of the blood that was seeping from his fingers, his skin sliced into thin ribbons by the volcanic shards.
About a knuckle’s depth down, hidden in the lee of a broken timber, he found it.
At first he had thought it was a shell of some kind, or perhaps a piece of mother-of-pearl; it was violet in color, irregular in hue, flat as a whisper, with a ragged edge running the perimeter of an asymmetrical oval. It had taken him several moments to work up the courage to touch it, in fear that it might be a kind of poisonous coral or other sea plant he had never encountered before. When finally he did, he found it smooth as glass, but scored with fine lines, as if inlaid with countless tiny, perfect tiles.
However long it had been wedged in the sand had given the sea the opportunity to grind it down, blast the surface with uncounted gusts of wind and grit, and yet, still etched into its surface was a rune of some kind, a type of writing he had never seen. Gingerly, and with the greatest of care, he picked the odd thing up and held it up before his eyes.
At that moment the sun broke through the mist again. The ray of light touched the glass like surface and caught each tiny line; the object flashed with a glamour that almost blinded him. Ray upon ray of multicolored light rippled in a heartbeat over the pale violet surface, running in glistening rivers off the thin, tattered edge, dazzling his eyes.
And then, when the light moved on, it darkened again to the flat violet hue once more.
He did not feel the pain in his bloody fingers, or the sand in his eyes, or the growing heat of the sun as it climbed into the sky. All he felt was the magic radiating in his hands, the beating of his own heart keeping time with the ticking of some great unseen universal clock, a melodic hum in his mind telling him, without words, that his life would never again threaten to be ordinary.
He had feverishly sought its origins from that moment forward, had indentured himself as a ship’s cook on voyages to Manosse and the Hintervold, taken a position as an acolyte in Terreanfor, the great cathedral of Lord God, King of the Earth, Sorbold’s basilica of Living Stone, had served scholars and clerics and Filidic foresters, all to no avail. None among them had in their libraries, their memories, or their recounted lore a story of such a thing, and of course he could not ask anyone directly what it was, let alone show it to him.
He grew more and more frustrated as the years went by, searching for any clue, any explanation, but could not even find a sample of the writing that formed the rune on the object’s surface.
Until the day, quite by accident, he had happened upon the Cymrian museum, a little repository of dusty relics, rarely open and even more rarely visited, in the small keep known as Haguefort in the Orlandan province of Navarne.
The keeper of the museum was a pleasant young man named Lord Stephen Navarne, the duke of the province and an unabashed aficionado of Cymrian lore and history. He had inherited the responsibilities of the position of Cymrian Historian from his own father, who, like the other historians before him, had kept artifacts and records of that era locked away in secret, ashamed to be of the lineage of the people who had come to this continent as refugees from a disaster, and ended up consuming it, first in colonization, then in war. Those who were descended of that line rarely spoke of it, and almost never acknowledged its shameful history, its atrocities and destructive arrogance.
Stephen Navarne had been different, however. Knowing the advances that had been made before the Great War, the building of roads and cities, harbors and lighthouses, castles and cathedrals, he had chosen instead to be proud of that heritage, albeit subtly. He had lovingly built a small, unassuming depository of the historical treasures of that era with an eye toward preserving them, displaying them with a pleasant combination of pride, humility, and scholarship. He was always more than willing to give of his time to those seeking to know more about the time period and the race, the diverse, fragmented population that had escaped the volcanic fire of the Sleeping Child that had consumed their homeland, only to turn around and revisit that destruction on the lands of their hosts, then disappear into history.
It was there, in that tiny museum, amid the carefully tended displays, that the man who now stood beneath the Sorbold sun, wrapped in the mist of the Skeleton Coast, had discovered, in the tattered, water-soaked pages of a fragment of a book rescued from the same skeletal ships, several of the answers he sought.
The book, from the looks of its remains, had once been a thick tome, bound in leather and calligraphed in a careful hand, the annoyingly meticulous hand of a scholar. It existed now only in pieces, crumbling bits of pages and smeared ink, carefully preserved under glass. A few sections were intact, but by and large what remained was unreadable, or torn beyond recognition, or paste.
But one thing that had survived was the title, embossed on the tattered leather cover.
The Book of All Human Knowledge, it read.
He had missed a good deal of the explanation that the Duke of Navarne had proffered about the book, struggling to contain the exhilaration that was ringing in his ears, making him sweat in nervous euphoria, all the while attempting to come across as calm and mildly disinterested. It was the first of many subsequent performances in which he was able to utterly deceive the person talking to him, appearing in one face, while hiding a very different other one.
What little he had heard he had mostly forgotten now; it was some sort of incessant babble about an old-world Nain explorer named Ven Polypheme, who had compiled all the great lore and teachings he had discovered in the course of his travels around the world. It had also been necessary for him to inquire of several other meaningless entries in the book in order to avoid allowing Lord Stephen to suspect which item he was interested in, and so a good deal of the historical background had blended together.
But a few salient facts had penetrated and remained lodged in his brain.
The item he had was a fortune-telling talisman of some sort, a card in what the Nain explorer had described merely as the Deck. The Deck had belonged to an Ancient Seren seer named Sharra, and so on occasion Ven Polypheme referred to it as Sharra’s Deck. The seer, according to the explorer, was able to draw upon some elemental power with which to manipulate the cards to bring about significant events, though what that power was, or what those manipulations led to, had been lost to Time and the sea.
The symbols on some of the other cards in the deck had been crudely sketched in the book; indeed, if he had not recognized the throne symbol on one of the more intact pages he might have missed the connection altogether. But miraculously that drawing was intact in the exhibit, the inscription below it clear enough to be recognized.
He had struggled to remain blase as he gestured absently to the runes below the sketch of the throne, runes he had committed to memory, even though he could not read them.
“What language is this?” he had asked the young duke casually.
“Ancient Serenne,” Stephen had replied, his bl
ue-green eyes snapping with excitement. “It’s really more a magical code or musical notation than a language. Here; I have a small volume that is a folio of sorts on Ancient Serenne, if you would like to see it.”
He had searched feverishly through the slim book, writing the words and symbols with trembling hands, until a single phrase stared back at him, the translation of the runes he had struggled for so many years to decode.
The New Beginning, it said.
The only other information of note that he had discovered in the scant remains of The Book of All Human Knowledge regarding the Deck was that Ven Polypheme believed the cards were formed from dragon scales, though he acknowledged he had never seen their like in any of the many dragons he had apparently been privileged to meet in the course of his travels.
And since dragons were the race formed of elemental earth, he had a suspicion he knew what might help power the scale.
The time was almost right to test his theory.
He had already put the steps in motion; the Scales of Yarim had weighed in his favor. From the moment he had placed the totem of Living Stone on one plate and the violet scale of the New Beginning on the other and they had balanced, he had felt it, a blood-deep power coursing through his veins, an entitlement that transcended any other.
As the sun rose in the firmament, and the thick mist of the Skeleton Coast swallowed him into invisibility once more, the man knew that the time was at hand to see if he could wield it.
10
ON THE ROAD OUTSIDE YARIM PAAR
The sweet morning air rang with the sound of a glorious bass, slightly flat, echoing off the Teeth beyond.
My lover snores like a bear in its den,
She smells like a moose in ’eat,
She’s covered in mud like a pig in a pen
Six toes on each of ’er feet.
Oh, ’ow Oi ’ates to leave ’er side
When Oi ’ears the call to duty,
Oi ’ad to look far and ‘ad to search wide