The artisan arched an eyebrow. “Are you certain?” she asked, looking through the test piece again. “There is wood of all different sorts around here. You’ve used the soft woods of the eastern forests, have you not?”
“Yes.”
She chuckled. “You should be looking west, not east. The foothills on the western side of your realm are full of cherry and, even better, beechwood, which has more sodium in it — much better in glass making. Additionally, you can find wormwood and nettles strewn all over the steppes — we passed enough of them to realize your brave boast about lining every mountain peak of the Teeth with stained glass. And finally, we can harvest the szeksos.”
“Szeksos?”
The artisan nodded. “Salt crusts that you find on arid land, such as that between here and the Sorbold border. Very commonly seen on steppes. They are probably the remains of ancient saltwater ponds. Whenever the Panjeri come across them, we harvest them. They make a wonderful additive.”
Achmed had been listening in an almost grateful admiration. Hearing the confidence in her voice, after so many months of failed trial and error, gave him renewed hope that his undertaking might have a chance after all.
“I’ve brought back barrels of minerals to use as colorants,” he said quickly, stepping over the broken glass and nodding to Rhur as he came into the tower. “I’m assuming you’ll want manganese for the purple, copper for the red, iron for the yellow, cobalt for the blue —”
“Perhaps,” Theophila shrugged. “I may use the traditional metallic oxides, but I have my own recipes as well. Different types of ash make for different colors, different temperatures do as well.”
“What are the ingredients?”
The Panjeri woman did not smile. “Your two hundred thousand gold suns purchases my time and labor,” she said blandly. “It does not buy my secrets.”
Rhur signaled for the Bolg king to excuse himself; when Achmed waved at him dismissively, the Firbolg artisan cleared his throat and spoke, something that occurred so rarely that both the king and Shaene were startled by the sound of his voice.
“Majesty.” He beckoned with his head again.
Achmed tossed the shard into the pile and hurried across the room. He took the small scrap of oilcloth that Rhur held out to him; it was a message that came in from the aviary.
In Grunthor’s hand.
He stared at it for a long moment, trying to make sense of the words, then suddenly looked up at all three artisans.
“I must go,” he said quietly to Rhur. “I don’t know when I will return. Make certain she gets anything she needs — anything. Have the tool casters begin work on whatever she designs. See to it that she is made comfortable in the ambassadorial guest quarters. But confine her to that section of hallways. I don’t want her loose in the Cauldron while I’m gone.” Rhur nodded. “Now, go to the quartermaster; tell him to reoutfit me right away. I have to leave immediately for Sepulvarta.”
He turned back and met the stares of the men and the woman.
“I have to leave suddenly, Theophila.” He looked around quickly. “Rhur will see to everything you need. I—I will check in with you as soon as I get back. You can work independently, without my oversight, from what you have seen, yes?”
“Once I have the plans, yes.”
“Good. Shaene, make certain she gets them.”
Without another word, the Bolg king fled the chamber.
Out along the corridors of the inner Cauldron he ran, past hallways and guards who blinked but said nothing as he rushed by. Firbolg workmen and citizens passing in the corridors moved quickly up against the walls to keep clear of him; from the look on his face, the last thing they wanted to do was get in his way.
Achmed slipped into a thin tunnel that served as a vent for the circulating system of heat that warmed the inner reaches of the mountains in winter, now dormant in summer’s heat, and followed it out onto a rocky eastern ledge that overlooked the Krevensfield Plain. He tried to calm his frantically racing heart, inhaling deeply until he could feel his internal center, focusing on his own heartbeat.
Then, tremulously, he closed his eyes and pulled back the veil over his skin-web, letting the gusts of warm summer air billow over it, searching for the familiar rhythm on the wind.
Only the wind answered him.
He cast a wider net, opening his mind until his head throbbed with the effort of it, combing each pocket, each gust, desperately striving to catch even the tiniest flicker, the smallest flavor of Rhapsody’s heartbeat, a rhythm that was as familiar to him as his own. He waited a long few moments, tasting the air, inhaling it deep to see if he could capture an infinitesimal particle of it within himself.
Nothing.
Rhapsody, he called silently, casting her name like a net into the wind, then pulling it back with his mind, hoping for a fragment, a flicker, anything.
Nothing.
Cold waves of fear began to rise and fall, radiating from his stomach out to his extremities.
He barely felt them.
Achmed shifted his focus and combed the wind, seeking Grunthor’s heartbeat. It thrummed in his skin-web immediately, pulsing in the familiar rhythm of his friend’s life signature. Distantly the buzz of the other thousand or so survivors from the Island were there as well.
Only Rhapsody’s was missing.
Breaking from his search, Achmed ran at breakneck speed to the livery where the quartermaster had saddled his horse, mounted, and rode off west toward Sepulvarta before almost any of the Bolg had even realized he had returned.
Omet returned to the work site in the tower a few minutes later, having completed his rounds of kiln-checks, to find a stranger in the inner sanctum, the Bolg king’s second-most-restricted area after his own chambers.
She was consulting with Shaene and Rhur, crouched over a pile of wood ash and glass shards when he came in. At first he didn’t even realize that she was a woman, because her build was so slight, her hair so short, and her stance so aggressive that immediately he assumed she was a man.
All misconception of that was shattered a moment later, when Shaene noticed him standing there.
“Ah, Sandy!” the oafish artisan called, waving Omet into the room. “You’re just in time to meet the king’s new hire, a sealed Panjeri master. Theophila, this is our fellow suffering glassmaker, Sandy.”
The woman crouching on the floor looked up and nodded, her face impassive, dark eyes lighting on Omet for a moment, then returning to her conversation with the two men.
“Say, Sandy, do you have the plans? The king wants Theophila to have them.”
At those words, both Theophila and Rhur looked up at him again.
As their eyes met, Omet went suddenly white. His jaw clenched into a firm grip, so tight that the tiny hairs in his beard vibrated.
“Well?” Shaene demanded impatiently after a moment. “Do you have them plans or not?”
“Er, no, not with me,” he lied, holding as still as possible and hoping the drawings would not be revealed in the canvas he carried. “I must have left them near the kilns. I’ll have to go to the forge and get them.”
“Well, for the gods’ sake, don’t lose them. The king will push you into the kilns himself if you do.”
“Where — where is the king?” Omet asked, running a hand through his sweaty hair.
Shaene looked up from the ash pile on the floor. “He just left the mountain on somethin’ urgent. Said he didn’t know when he would be back.” He took in the pale look on Omet’s face, noted where the boy was staring, and laughed.
“Slacken your trousers, lad. She’s too old for you.”
The woman rolled her eyes and turned back to the table. “No hurry on the plans today. I’ll want a tour of the forge and the ovens first, and an inventory of the materials and tools you have.”
“Very good, mum,” said Shaene.
“Excuse me,” Omet said quickly, then slipped out the door again.
Once around the corne
r, he leaned up against a wall for support, suddenly light-headed and sick.
He knew this woman, though her hair had been cropped short, and she was wearing clothes the like of which she never would have been seen in normally.
He prayed she did not know him beneath the head of hair and the full beard he had grown since last she had seen him.
In the foundry of Yarim.
All the world began to spin, and fear worse than any he had known roared forth, threatening to consume him.
The guildmistress had come to Ylorc.
34
On the heartbeat before she bolted for the edge of the cliff, Rhapsody remembered something.
The last time she had run from Michael, in the company of Achmed and Grunthor, they were in the Wide Meadows of Serendair. They had come across a cadre of nomadic Lirin, wanderers known as Lirinved, the In-Between, who traveled betwixt forest and field, making homes in neither place. She and the two Bolg, though meaning no harm to the Lirinved, were nonetheless strangers in their lands, in bad days to be strangers. Achmed and Grunthor, hidden with her in the highgrass of the meadows, had drawn weapons silently in preparation for the confrontation that no one wanted, but was to come.
That was the first moment she had understood the true, deep and inexorable power of a Namer, the rank of Singer she had just achieved through her selfstudy and constant practice.
Because she knew the true name of the highgrass, Hymialacia, in which they were hiding, she had been able to whisper it, over and over, weaving into her chant the names of other distractions — the clouds above, the warm wind, hummocks and pits. In that way, just for a moment, she had altered the vibrational signatures of each of the companions, camouflaging them, blending them into the highgrass until they actually became the Hymialacia while she sang. For the time they were hidden, transformed thus, the wind had blown through them, the sun had beat down upon them, but cast shadows that looked like those belonging to blades of grass, not a Firbolg man, a giant, and a Lirin woman. The Lirinved had walked past, close enough to touch them, never knowing they were there.
That power, that Naming ability, was the only thing that had even the slightest chance of saving her now.
Even if it would not, there was no other recourse than but to try, she reasoned. Preferable to die in a fall from the precipice than to live in the fetid clutches of a human-demon who would defile her body, torture her soul, and worst, eventually become aware of her child.
Her mind refused to imagine what he would do then.
There was no other option.
But what word, what name, could possibly spare her from a fall from that height? Her mind raced furiously as she lay on the ground where Michael had thrown her, the cloth of her torn shirt rippling in the wind raging up the cliff face, spilling over onto the promontory, tangling her flying hair, as he conferred with his men.
Droplets of salt spray borne on the wind slapped her face, stinging her eyes with salt. Her mind registered them first as rain, making unconscious note of them a moment later, then shifting suddenly back to her first impulse.
Rain.
Typta, she whispered in her Namer’s voice, feeling the hum of the different vibration in her teeth.
The tone was true.
She concentrated on her own note, ela, and prepared to alter it with the roundelay.
Within the next beat of her heart Rhapsody was on her feet, running with all her strength for the cliff’s edge, chanting with the last of her breath.
Typta. Typta, Typta.
She felt the wind waft over her, lift her slightly, like raindrops on an updraft, caught the exhilaration of speed, hearing the shouts behind her, but blocking them, focusing with all her concentration on the edge of the precipice looming before her.
Typta. Ty —
She felt the reverberation of the bolt in her back and side before the pain, a thudding lurch that threw her balance off, shattering her concentration. Then an instant later the waves of shock radiated through her, a sickening jolt of opposing vibration that tore the breath from her.
The impact strained the muscles of her abdomen; Rhapsody bent over, trying to catch her breath, and as she did she saw Michael at the place where the land began to split into the promontory. A look of shock was frozen on his face, a face with eyes that burned red at the edges, whose ancient skin was drawn like a mummy’s over the sharp bones. It was a face far worse than the one that had haunted her dreams; seeing it made any other option unthinkable.
She closed her eyes before she leapt, fearing that if she saw the sight of the crashing waves, the jagged rocks at the shoreline again, she would lose her nerve. The wind that caught her was cold, coming off the northern sea; it clouted her awake, forced her eyes open as she fell, swirling toward the ocean in the careless embrace of the air.
Typta, she chanted as she plummeted, her hands still bound, her cheeks distended in the breeze and from the pull of the Earth. Typta. Typta, Typta —
A wave swelled suddenly over her face, filling her mouth with water, chocking her. She did not feel the impact of her fall; not then. The breath was knocked out of her, so she could not inhale, which in the initial seconds probably kept her alive.
A roar of green and white, then an echoing silence as she was pulled below the surface, followed by a thick drumbeat, like an underwater wind. Rhapsody’s eyes burned from the salt, her lungs from the lack of air. Above her, before all went green, she could see Michael’s face and the faces of his cohorts staring down from the cliff top, or at least she imagined that she could. She could hear their voices, though her ears sank into the water quickly.
They were staring directly down at her.
They didn’t see her, even though she was there beneath them.
Because, for a moment, she was rain.
The incoming tide caught her then. In the first moments she had been floating in the crest of the waves, the foam itself, light as a raindrop, skittering across the surface. As soon as the chant was broken, her mouth filled with water, her mass returned, and with it the whole force of the raging sea.
Like a heavy curtain falling, the world suddenly went from green to black.
Don’t breathe, she thought, fighting to find the surface in the darkness, and failing. The thick noise of the waves, muted, pounded in her ears.
Then, with a great swell, she was caught up, spinning wildly, struggling for purchase where there was none, nothing to grasp or bear against, nothing but evanescent water slipping through her hands, out from beneath her. It was a sickening sensation, akin to being hurled through the air, only worse, roiling and tumbling with the madness of the waves.
Until she was slammed into a wall of solid rock.
Against her will, Rhapsody gasped, inhaling a rush of caustic seawater. Before her lungs burst she broke the surface, gagging, choking, spitting, clawing desperately in the dark at the vertical rocky surface before her, a wall that rose as far up as she could reach.
Above her there was only enough air space for her nose and the upper part of her face to bob out of the water; past that, overhead, her tied hands scraped a similar rockwall, this one horizontal. She was bleeding, she noted distantly, as her face impacted the hard ceiling above her with a swell of the waves, her side stinging as well from where the bowman had shot her.
The noise of the sea had diminished a bit; it echoed now in the dark, roaring with the ebb and flow of the waves, but not with the same broad, endless crashing she had heard atop the cliff. That was only when her ears were above the surface; with each new wave she was submerged again, hearing only the muted swishing and the sound of bubbles beneath the water.
How long she continued to bob in the dark, catching insignificant breaths of air, Rhapsody could not be certain, but it seemed hours, days, years, a punishment of eternal proportion. Her skin stung from the salt; her limbs grew tired, so she gave up the struggle to move and instead concentrated on floating, trying to quell the panic that swept over her with each wave, poun
ding on her lungs.
Finally it seemed as if the space above her where there was air was growing larger; she could no longer touch the ceiling with her hands when she crested the surface. After some time light broke through the darkness behind her, a small, white slice of visible sky that her stinging eyes could barely make out. It grew ever larger with each rolling wave, until finally there was a goodly space above her, and enough light to make out where she was.
She had been swept on an incoming wave into a tidal cave, a volcanic hollow in the endless cliff face that made up the many miles of shoreline from the northern Hintervold all the way down to her own lands in Tyrian, half a thousand miles away. Rhapsody choked back the irony; it was in just such a cave that she had postulated the water source that fed Entudenin had its mouth.
In the back wall of the cave she could see a shallow ledge of sorts, hewn from the rock over millennia by the slow, insistent carving of the currents; she let the next incoming wave carry her to it, clutching with all her might as she was battered once more against the back wall of the cave. It took her three tries to roll up onto the ledge and remain there after the wave receded, but when finally she was able she sat upright, her back against the smooth, irregular cave wall, and struggled to clear her lungs of the brine she had inhaled. Her stomach rose to her mouth and she retched, glad to be clear of the saltwater.
Numbly she felt for the locket around her neck; it was still there, hanging on its thin gold chain. Still coughing, she opened the clasp; a tiny, thirteen-sided copper coin that Ashe had given her in their mutual youth, and she had carried through two worlds, tumbled into her hand. She sighed in relief; having it with her still was like having a part of him there, too. Rhapsody quickly closed the coin back inside the locket and set about clearing her lungs.
When she could breathe again she stared out the cave’s opening; the light that spilled into the cave over the swirling waves was pink. Dawn, she thought weakly. I have been here all night. Now the tide was going out, emptying the cave slightly, though she could still not see the bottom in the swirling water beneath the ledge.