“I’ll procure four horses for you, three riders and a packhorse,” he said, not slowing his gait. “They’ll be here when you are ready to leave. If you need but three, leave whichever you judge to be least hale.”
“Thank you,” Ashe said; Achmed nodded.
All around them the wharf was growing busy with passersby, workman clearing away the rubble of the burnings, urchin children begging alms, fishermen bringing in the day’s catch, hauling nets that had seen better days’ bounty.
The closer they came to the waterfront, the stiffer the wind became. At high gusts it was almost a struggle to stand upright; after one particularly violent squall Barney turned to them and, seeing their hair and veils plastered against their faces by the wind and spray, laughed aloud.
“Welcome to Traeg, by the way,” he said, holding up a crooked arm to shield himself from the gale. “’Tis our claim in history, the home of the wind in this part of the world, or at least a place it feels comfortable enough in to stay for long stretches without abating.”
How appropriate, Ashe thought as they followed the barkeep off the loosely cobbled road and across a sandy bluff. The great Kinsman, a Brother of the Wind, makes his home near Traeg. It’s fitting.
Barney stopped a dozen yards from the edge of the bluff, pointing down a rocky train to the beach.
“If you’re to find him, you’ll find him down there most likely, m’lords,” he said, pulling his hat down farther over his eyes. “He’s sometimes out near the breakwater, or walking near the seawall, though some days he remains in his keep, attending to whatever business an ancient hero attends to. But do have a care; there are sometimes wastrels and floaters around these parts, beggars, sailors that were tossed off their ships when their captains put into port here and refused to be allowed back aboard. They are a ragged lot, with desperation in their eyes; hunger’ll do that. I used to bring food to them occasionally, the day’s leavings, until they fell upon me and beat me bloody one day. Since then I’ve stayed clear of the beach. Watch your backs.”
“Thank you,” Ashe said, giving his hand to the old man, resting the other on his arm. “For this, and for what you did those many years ago to spare Rhapsody. When I find her, I will bring her by so that you two might visit and reminisce.”
The old man smiled sadly, but said nothing.
He stood and watched as the sovereigns made their way down the rocky path to the beach below the bluff, then walked to the bluff’s edge and looked down from below.
He could see them in the distance, making their way across the sand to the water’s edge, looking up and down the shoreline, buffeted by the fierce wind.
Barney then looked out at the beach at the foot of the bluff. The tide was rising, the waves creeping ever closer, rolling in amid a swirl of windy froth.
In the wet sand at the water’s edge was a strange drawing, a vast picture of simple lines, depicting a skull, Barney thought, or perhaps, upon second reflection, it was a head, its eyes set wide apart in a shallow, soft face, the line of the mouth missing below the flat nose.
As if the lips were fused.
ON THE BASQUELA, OFF THE NORTHERN COAST
The seneschal put the spyglass to his eye, scanning the black lava coastline, watching the breakers batter the jagged rocks below the promontory.
It was a sight that had come to haunt him not only in his waking hours, but in his dreams as well. As a demonic host, Michael had little need for sleep, passing a few hours in a sort of dreamlike meditation, the voice of the F’dor droning in his mind like an endlessly crackling fire.
It was during those times that the promontory appeared in his inner vision, as if it were mocking him. That jagged cliff, coming to a point over the rocky water, seemed to laugh as the brutal tide smashed over it.
She is here, hiding from you, it jeered at him. The words had played in his mind, burning like acid, until the seneschal no longer knew whether they were portents of some sort of prophecy, the taunting of his infuriating guest, or his own self-doubts, which had always been vociferous, clanging at him, chewing on his confidence.
He watched the rocks for a long time, looking for a sign of life of any kind, and saw nothing but the endless crash of the waves, the boiling froth of salt water and foam.
Then, as if put into his mind by a less malevolent spirit than the one that actually lived there, a thought occurred to him.
Perhaps there is a cave behind all those rocks, behind that swelling tide, he thought, though his mind rejected the notion that she could have survived in such a thing. He and his men had certainly seen many such crevices in the towering rockwalls all along the coast, but they had been shallow enough that even at low tide they were submerged. Still, the cliffs here were taller than most, the wind more violent, so it seemed worth examining that such a thing could be so.
“Quinn!” he shouted to his appointed captain.
“Aye, sir?” Quinn answered, exhaustion in his voice. He had not had a decent night’s sleep since assuming the captaincy, and was now praying daily that the seneschal would give up and let them go home to Argaut.
“Take us back. I want to drop anchor tomorrow, and put in to shore the next morning.”
“Yes, m’lord,” said the sailor wearily.
The seneschal turned to his reeve. “Fergus, select two of the remaining crew and get a strong cordon of rope. I want them to rappel down those cliffs and see if she is hidden in back of the rocks.”
The reeve’s face remained placid. “As you command, m’lord.”
“You and they will accompany me in day after tomorrow. If we do not find her, there will be fiery repercussions for all involved.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
The seneschal moved closer and spoke softly into the reeve’s face.
“Even you, Fergus.”
The reeve sighed. “Yes, m’lord.” He had expected nothing less.
47
TRAEG
For two hours the men waited in the biting wind, wandering up and down the beach along the shoreline.
After an hour the sun had begun its descent; it was still high, given the length of the summer days, and the afternoon still bright, but the light had shifted into the hazy gold of later day, and with that shift came the human pigeons.
Where the ragtag wanderers and beachcombers had been hiding during the brighter hours was a mystery. Ashe thought his dragon sense had discerned them in and among the rockwalls, in flat depressions and tidal caves where they could sleep away the day’s heat at low tide. Now that the current was flooding and the tide rising again, they came out of the rocky edifices, some making their way to the docks, others shambling out onto the sandbar, searching the edges of the seawall for the remains of the day’s catch caught and tossed back.
Achmed was growing more surly with each passing moment. Water was an element he loathed in any form; it masked the vibrations of the world to which he was sensitive. Beside the sea, at its windiest, his irritation was at its high; the conundrum of the crashing surf not only made it impossible to concentrate on any signal he might normally have felt on the air, but in fact added to the cacophony that already was assaulting his sensitive skin.
“I used to come down to the seacoast to practice adjusting for air currents with my cwellan shots,” he remarked to Ashe near the fire they had laid after a batch of raggedy women had assailed them, begging alms. “I am a little rusty. Perhaps I should take some target practice.”
Ashe said nothing, tossing a handful of coins to the women, who scurried after them in the sand, then ran off, gibbering, up the path to the remains of the village.
“Stop that,” Achmed said angrily. “They’ll only come back with their friends and whatever leprotic spawn they have waiting up there.”
“They’re sea widows,” Ashe replied mildly, his eyes beginning to burn from staring so long down the shoreline. “Women whose husbands plied the seas, sailors, fisherman, who never returned. My whole family’s sorry history began w
hen Merithyn never made it back to Elynsynos. Alms for starving widows is the least I can do.”
Achmed rolled his eyes. “When are you ever going to understand that penance and penitence for the deeds of others who died long before you were born, but happened to share the same blood, is ridiculous? You can’t make up for the sins of the past that your family committed; in truth, if you go back far enough, you would be responsible for the misdeeds of everyone in the world. Get a hold of yourself.”
Ashe made an ugly masturbatory gesture in response. “You get a hold of yourself,” he said contemptuously. “Spare me your bile and worldweariness; my wife would not agree with you.” Then he returned to his vigil.
“Well, you are correct at least in that,” Achmed retorted, shielding his eyes. “Rhapsody thinks the world’s pain is her personal responsibility to heal. Fortunately, if she lives, she will have enough time to waste in the ultimate discovery that even if it is, she is not up to the task.”
“If she lives?” Ashe demanded, turning on the Bolg king in anger. “Did you really just say that to me?”
“Yes, that was not the cry of the wind echoing between your ears,” Achmed replied. “Have you not noticed that her presence is missing from the wind? I find no semblance of her heartbeat. I hope I am wrong, but you must prepare yourself to face the possibility that she is dead, that he killed her, certainly violated her, threw her in the sea, or took her away with him. Give in to the hatred that the possibility spawns in you; it will make you even more focused on what needs to be done — finding the F’dor.”
“Stop,” Ashe said, his face growing florid with effort to keep the dragon from rampaging. “Do not speak of such things to me — not yet. I do not need more reason than I already have to hate this man, to hunt this demon, to rend him when I come upon him until there is nothing but a shadow where he once occupied space in the wind. You are prodding powers within me that it is already a daily struggle to contain; don’t enflame my ire for your own purposes. Whether you think you are assuring my concentration on the task at hand, or merely tormenting me for taking her away from you, all you are doing is treading on the thin ice of disaster.”
Achmed opened his mouth to respond, then shut it quickly. He exhaled angrily.
Near their fire a ragged old man was wandering aimlessly, flicking a long stick of driftwood, drawing shapeless patterns in the wet beach. The pursuit of his artwork was tossing sand onto the fire, making it hiss and threaten to die.
“Move back from there,” he called out in annoyance, but the ragged man ignored him, continuing his lazy patterns amid the dunes and sand drumlins.
Achmed strode over to the fire and interposed himself between it and the elderly sand artist.
“Shoo,” he said. “Warm yourself if you wish, otherwise back away.”
The man turned in the general direction of his voice; Achmed could see that his eyes were cloudy with the cataracts of age, possibly of exposure to the sun; they seemed almost burned on the surface. The irises of those eyes, like his skin and long, unkempt hair, were the color of driftwood; in fact, the Bolg king noted, the old man had been sleeping in a sand drumlin near the water’s edge since they had been there, and he had mistaken him for a long pile of jetsam washed up on the shore.
After a moment, it seemed as if he had finally heard Achmed’s instruction. The man turned away and walked off purposefully into the sea.
“What — what did you say to him?” Ashe said in disbelief, watching the frail legs disappear in the waves. The breakers were growing in intensity; it seemed unlikely that so little body mass as this elderly man had could stand up to even the gentlest of them.
“Stop — come out of there,” Achmed shouted. He grunted in exasperation and then, seeing the old man had not heard him, followed him reticently out into the shallow surf.
“Come out of the water, you old fool,” he growled. “I’ll not fish you out if you get sucked away by the undertow.”
The old man spoke, his voice carried to them by an incoming gust of wind.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “Go away.”
“Come out of the water.”
In response, the elderly fellow squatted down in the surf. He turned slowly, facing them. It was not clear if the squint on his face was a grimace or a smile. Then he stood, turned toward the depth of the sea, and walked away from them again.
He was in surf up to his calves before Achmed broke into a run to catch him. The Dhracian grabbed the old man by the arm.
“What are you doing? Are you deaf?”
The ancient face turned to look at Achmed’s hand on his arm, but the man took another step, knee-deep now. Achmed grasped the other shoulder and turned the old man’s whole body toward him, away from the depths.
“Don’t hurt him,” called Ashe, looking down at the scratching the old man had made in the sand.
Achmed wasn’t even certain that the face in front of him could see. The clarity was mostly gone from the eyes. In the breath while he was pondering, trying to think of something calming and harmless to say, he thought he caught a flash of recognition in the hazy eyes.
Suddenly his feet were out from under him. Whether it was a wave or a leg that had upended him, he had barely time to inhale before his whole body was submerged.
His hatred of water overwhelmed his senses, and he tried to push with his elbows against the gravelly bottom of the sea to get up, but he felt the old man’s knees come down on both of his forearms, and he suddenly realized that it had been no chance wave that swept his feet out from under him.
He was being intentionally drowned.
He struggled to stay calm in the face of the panic that was threatening to consume him. He made another attempt to overpower the man holding him beneath the waves, to slip or shift the old man off, but it was like trying to move the weight of the whole ocean.
At the sound of the splash, Ashe looked up; Achmed was gone.
The old man was stooped, almost on his knees in the water, expressionless and calm. Ashe strode out into the surf a step or two before he could see Achmed’s legs flailing underwater. He ran the remaining steps, drawing Kirsdarke, and leveling it at the old man’s ear.
“Get off of him,” he commanded.
Never before, with dragonesque eyes staring down the shining blue coral filigree of the sword, had a man not lost his breath, dropped a beat, been given pause at least. But the old man, like a rising tarpon, flung one hand from the water to Ashe’s wrist and twisted the hilt away from him with the other hand, simultaneously, with hardly a splash. A surge swept through his arm and hand, like a cross-wave; Ashe blinked. Kirsdarke was gone from his grip, now clutched in the bony grasp of the old man.
He had no need to turn around to know that the sword was now stretched at his own neck. He cursed silently and grabbed Achmed’s robe, dragging him out of the water.
Underwater, with his eyes closed, Achmed felt the flutter of what he thought were Ashe’s footsteps. As he realized he couldn’t break free on his own, he willed himself to calm, to wait for the opportunity that Ashe’s attack would present. As his struggles ceased amid the rushing rhythm of the waves around him he heard a great sounding, almost a bell of a heartbeat, which he hadn’t heard since he left Serendair.
It was MacQuieth’s heartbeat.
And it was thudding directly above him, practically pulsing through his own forearms where the ancient hero was kneeling on him.
He nearly gasped, and listened harder, knowing that if the ancient hero had recognized him as the Brother, the master assassin from the old world, it would explain why he was drowning right now.
Distantly, in echoes and waves, impossibly far and faint, he heard another familiar tone. Before he could really catch hold of it, he was being dragged upward, as abruptly as he had been submerged, Ashe’s face before his eyes.
For a few moments there was nothing but the attenuated silence of the beach, the surf cuffing the rocks, their soaked clothing dripping, Achme
d choking, while Ashe witnessed a transformation with his dragon sense. The already tall figure who now held the water sword was growing, not in the sense of size, but like a sponge or a dried plant or fruit, revivifying.
As the life, the vigor returned to the driftwood-gray skin and eyes, it returned to the voice as well. It was still somewhat salty, but resonated as much as it had whispered before. There was flesh in it, where before it had been merely skeletal.
“Where did you get my son’s sword?” The unwavering blade dripped slightly and glowed a fierce blue. “If you speak more than five words, you will die.”
Ashe’s mind raced in shock, pondering what to say.
“We’re hunting Michael,” Achmed spat, slavering seawater. “He’s alive.”
48
Shades of expression blew over MacQuieth’s features in rapid succession as if huge gusts of wind threw great masses of cloud across his face. Possession of the sword, recognition of an old foe, Ashe’s affront, and that name, all had to be chewed into a mass for comprehension, by a mind whose reason spent most of its time adrift.
“He can’t be” was all the ancient hero could muster.
Ashe found words this time.
“Yes, lord. He carries Tysterisk. He’s taken my wife, put the forest and the shore to flame. He’s become the host of a F’dor.”
The old man drew the sword toward him and took it in both hands. For the first time, he seemed to feel weight in it. He slowly crouched until he was almost sitting in the surf again, with the tip of Kirsdarke dangling in the waves, his eyes resting on the sword, but wide, as if he couldn’t really tell whether he actually held it before him.
“Who are you?” he said again softly. “I don’t know you. Go away.” He ran his hand down the shimmering blade, which was glowing more intensely blue than either man had ever seen it in Ashe’s hand. “If the tyrant sent you, return to him and tell him I’ll see him in the Afterlife. Tell him to bring his sword.”