When his vision cleared she was holding up a shiny metal flask before his eyes. She uncapped it with her thumb and held the vial to his lips.
“Drink,” she said simply.
“No,” Omet replied. Death as the outcome had been something he had accepted from the moment he recognized that she had come to the mountain; a sense of finality and peace came over him, leaving him fearless for once.
Esten blinked. “You defy me? You are braver than I thought.” She bounced sharply on his chest, knocking the wind out of him; Omet gasped for breath, and as he did, she poured the scorching liquid down his throat.
The heel of her hand was up against his chin in a flash, snapping his neck back and forcing him to swallow.
Omet gasped again, her hand still sealing his mouth shut, as the caustic liquid tore down his gullet. In a matter of seconds he felt the heat spread to his limbs, leaving them weak, useless.
Esten climbed off him quickly.
“If you move it will bring on the coma more rapidly,” she said flatly, straightening her clothes and flicking her wrist; the knife disappeared. “I need you to linger in fever for a while to distract your friends, until the Bolg king returns to the mountain.” She cocked her head and watched him with interest as the heat rose up in his face. “Your mother would be proud of how you met your death, Omet, and I’m sure you are appreciative that I gave you this gentle way out, unlike the rest. At least you do not have to live with the effects of picric exposure, as the others will.”
Her face brightened and she leaned closer. “It really is a quite lovely substance. Those who get it on their skin or breathe it in, as your Bolg and glass artisan friends have done, will find their eyes, hair, and skin turning a glorious yellow, almost the color of goldenrod glass. They will succumb to a variety of lovely agonies — bloody urine, twisted and melting internal organs, convulsions, stupor, eventually leading to a blessed, if painful, death.”
Esten picked up Omet’s right hand, now flaccid and unresponsive, and dropped it heavily to the bed. She stretched out beside him, sliding her arm under his neck, as his breathing grew shallow and his face turned gray. With one last tender gesture, she laid her head on Omet’s shoulder, turning her lips so he could hear the words she whispered to him.
“But for the Bolg king — he has the best in store for him! The glaze we annealed into the ceiling glass — that was picric acid, Omet, a delightful substance when wet, as it is now beneath the wooden cover of the dome. I’m sure you recall it from your lessons in my foundry. When it dries, do you remember what it does?”
Omet, who was breathing shallowly, slipping into unconsciousness, did not respond, but he knew the answer in his last moments of awareness.
Picric, dry, exploded.
He was too far gone to feel the warm kiss she placed on his temple, too deep in the grip of the poison to hear her leave.
51
ON THE NORTHERN SEACOAST
That night they camped when the path along the seacoast grew too treacherous to be forded in the dark.
They passed the night without a fire, keeping low to the ground, until the edge rains of the storm began in earnest.
Lightning rippled through the sky in waves of heat, becoming more focused as the storm grew in intensity. Crackling flashes shot the heavens through with pulsating light, followed seconds later by the deep rumbles of thunder, echoing off the sea cliffs, frightening the horses.
The travelers broke camp and hurried northward along the seacoast, watching the thrashing waves pound the shore, ignoring the sting of salt spray mixed with the fresh water of rain.
Finally they took shelter in the ruins of a small village on a cold inlet, where the lava cliffs that lined the whole of the western coast rose even more dramatically into rocky ledges and promontories above them. One small brick building with a tiled roof half crumbled away remained standing near a tall seawall; all else was ashes.
They quartered the horses next to the seawall as the sky opened above them, drenching men and animals to the skin, then climbed one after another into the broken building, leaning up against the wall that still had a bit of roof to it, gaining only partial shelter.
A nest of rats that had been the only tenants prior to their arrival scurried out of the half-hut as the three men shifted uncomfortably, seeking whatever dry place they could find. The old man chuckled as the rodents disappeared into the rain.
“I slew the last Seren rat years ago,” he said. “Poor old Nick. I did him the favor of helping him pass through to the Rat Afterlife, if there is one. He must have come on one of the ships of the First Fleet.”
“The rats gained immortality in the passage from the old world as well?” Ashe asked incredulously.
“Aye,” MacQuieth said. “Cymrian rats. And you thought only the people wouldn’t die.” He shook his head at the memory. “Too grizzled for even his own kind to eat. I didn’t have the heart to eat him either.”
“Tell me something, if you will,” Achmed said, taking off the veil that shielded his face and wringing the water from it. “Something that has long puzzled me. It is said in legend that it was you that slew Tsoltan, the F’dorpriest who was once my hated master. How did you do it? You are not Dhracian, and yet you killed him, both man and spirit. I need to know, especially if it will help us in the battle that is to come.”
MacQuieth leaned back, oblivious to the rain.
“I hunted him,” he said, his voice heavy with the memory. “I was young then, in what I thought was my prime. I was the shadow of the king, the queen’s champion, the black lion. In those days, those times, there were those who said I had wings. And on days when the wind was at my back, I almost believed them. If you remember but one thing about me, remember this: I have never failed to complete a quest that I undertook alone.
“And I work best alone. I am no minister, no advisor, no ambassador. I had no wish to be a general, just in the vanguard.” He broke his gaze away from the endless sheets of rain long enough to meet Achmed’s eye. “In the days after you left, I was the vanguard.
“But I was also a fool. When the Seren War began I had no idea such a thing as F’dor existed; they had been long bound, imprisoned in the Vault of the Underworld for ages before. The lore of them had been lost, or I ignored it. I carried the courage of the fool, or it carried me. I had met children of the four other Firstborn races, Seren and Mythlin, the children of the stars and the sea. I had struggled with wyrmkin like you, Aesche, the spawn of earth, and knew the Kith well; many of them were Kinsmen, brothers of the wind, born as they were of the element of air. The missing element should have been obvious, but I forgot about the children of fire.
“Tsoltan had been the nemesis of my king, and therefore my nemesis, from the beginning of the war; it was just a matter of time before my comrades and I uncovered his identity. When we did, I went after him alone.
“I caught him outside the Spire, his lair in the old world, on an errand he could not leave undone.” MacQuieth’s voice warmed in the telling; his eyes looked out into the sheets of blinding rain, as if seeing past them into history. “His men, his retainers were nothing. I fell on them with such fury that the water sword smoked, atomizing lives, wrenching souls and organs from their houses like an avalanche, or a tidal wave.” He chuckled softly. “I love the sound of the blade, the feel of steel on bone. It was glorious.
“The demon itself, now, that was another matter. At first, of course, it fought. It had no idea who I was, or that I carried its doom in my teeth. It had every strength — strength of time, strength of element. And I had one advantage — it could not afford to kill me.”
“Why?” Achmed asked.
“Because,” MacQuieth said matter-of-factly, “I was carrying it within me. I was its host.”
Achmed choked on a stream of rainwater pouring from the broken roof, coughing violently.
“What did you say?”
“I took it into myself, into my body; like you said Michael has done
; I invited it in, swallowed it.” His face grew darker. “And then I wrestled with it.
“I had to unravel my own darkness from the demon’s so I could kill the spirit from vision rather than anger. My race, my sword, my solitude; I was the shadow of the king. That gave me a pool of strength. I drowned it. Held its fire under the waters of my life. Eventually it came to begging, wheedling, before it finally surrendered, whispered itself away. I had killed the body long before, so when it gave up and dissipated on the wind, it was well and truly gone. Not even enough of a spark of black fire to light a candle to guide me home from the depths of the Spire, a place of consuming blackness.
“You did not think it was merely time that has made me into the frail human refuse that I am? Gods, no. My frailty, my dissipation, comes from life, not time; from the things I visited upon myself, such as the battle I have just related to you, and the spirit-breaking demands that others have visited upon me.” He glared at Ashe for a moment. “None so much as Gwylliam.
“But I have no regrets about having spent myself as I have,” he said, his voice softer now. “Immortality is foolishness. Everything dies, goes. Mountains age and fall, islands slip into the sea. And if not these F’dor, with their endless appetite for destruction that brings the curtain down, then it will be someone else, some fanatic who will snare the sun and pull it into the earth. Sooner or later, life ends. Those who seek to cheat that concept are worse than the F’dor in their ceaseless hunger for oblivion.”
Achmed looked over to see Ashe trembling.
“What is it?” he asked sharply.
“I cannot do that,” the Lord Cymrian whispered. “I have lived with the touch of the F’dor, have felt the demon’s fingers reach into my chest and tear out a piece of my soul; I know the torments of sharing being with it. I cannot fight the beast like that.”
“Nor can I,” Achmed said.
MacQuieth looked at them both intently. “Not even to save your wife? Your friend?”
Neither man answered.
A flash of lightning crackled through the sky in the distance, lighting the sea.
The ancient warrior shook his head. “I am sorry. I have told you but one method to kill the demon; it will not work for you, though others might. You may be good men, good kings. Even a worthy husband and a worthy friend. But you are not Kinsmen. Neither of you are made for it; your senses of self are too strong. You were put on the Earth to rule; Kinsmen are not rulers. We are a brotherhood that sees through darkness and time, but one thing we are blind to is that we have a purpose other than to serve.”
“I will do it if I must,” Ashe said, looking up into the darkness of the half-roof. “If the demon slips away from Achmed during the Thrall, I will do whatever I must to keep it from escaping.”
MacQuieth smiled and tapped the scabbard that held Kirsdarke.
“I doubt you will need to,” he said, his voice clearer and stronger than they had heard it. “You bear the right weapon.
“We all live on the blade of balance, a slurry of water, air, fire, and earth. The great swords allow one to alter the balance. There were five elemental swords made. A million were forged, but only five made, consecrated — not all together, but each in its time by loving hands. Daystar Clarion by the Seren, born in the twilight of the gods. Fired and finished by starlight. It’s an old power, but it’s distant, far away from us. There was a fire sword, now gone, combined with the sword of the stars. The blade Michael bears is born of wind, but wind is fleeting. It is water that will vanquish dark fire when wielded by the right hand. The sea is the one thing that still touches us all. Earth is broken, wind is lost, fire is quenched. The waters touch us all. Kirsdarke is our sword.”
Achmed, loather of water, inhaled deeply.
“Look at me if you do not believe in the enduring power of water,” MacQuieth said jokingly. “Salt is a wonder as a preservative. There are fish in the depths of the sea hundreds of years old, did you know that? Trust in the sword, and in yourselves. And, if it appears you are about to fail, remember that living forever is not always a blessing.”
A rumble of thunder punctuated his words.
52
And then it was morning.
The rain remained, gray and foreboding, coming and going on the wind, leaving behind an ever-present mist that shrouded Achmed’s senses in a maddening fog.
They followed MacQuieth, trusting in his tie to his nemesis from the old world, though each step into the mist coming off the turbulent sea made their confidence, if not their resolve, wane slightly.
The ancient hero had stopped at one point along the rough land overlooking the sea and quietly lashed his horse to a tree in the last copse he saw. The others followed his example, noting that the forest of Gwynwood to the east still hung in heavy smoke from the fires that had so recently burned there.
“He is here,” MacQuieth said quietly. “Close to the sea.”
At the edge of the promontory, Michael glared impatiently down the cliff face at the two soldiers Fergus had chosen, hovering on ropes over the rocks below.
“What do you see?” he shouted into the rain-heavy wind.
One of the men looked up to the precipice and shook his head.
“Keep going!” he screamed. “She’s down there! I know she’s down there!”
You know nothing. You only hope she is down there.
The voice of the demon-spirit seethed with disgust.
Michael clawed at his face. “Silence!” he screeched. “Stop taunting me!”
Very well. I will leave that to the woman if you find her.
Down at the sand beach to the south the seneschal’s eye caught a flicker of movement; he turned to see Fergus, who was posted below, waving triumphantly.
He looked down the edifice below, where the two soldiers hung suspended over the thundering waves and black, jagged rocks. He made a beckoning gesture. The wind, in response, carried their voices up the cliff face to him.
“Cave down here, m’lord!”
“I knew it!” the seneschal shouted, clutching his hands tightly in excitement. “Rappel deeper, keep going.”
He was staring down into the updrafts from the sea, the salt spray buffeting his face, when he noticed that an odd sound, a vibration of a sort, had been scratching at his eardrum. He waved it away, like a bothersome fly, but the noise only grew louder, more intense; a moment later it grew almost painful.
He turned in the breeze and stared off to the east at the wide edge where the promontory began.
Three figures stood there in the mist, or two and a partial figure, he noted an instant later. To his left, farthest north, was a vague figure swathed in mist, blending into the heavy vapor as naturally as the rain itself. He wouldn’t have even noticed the figure if not for the sword it wielded, a sword that glowed intensely blue.
A sword he recognized from the old land.
Kirsdarke, he mused, his mind running slow. I thought it had been lost with the Island.
The demonic voice in his brain fell suddenly silent, giving him the sensation, for the first time since he had agreed to take it on, that he was alone in his own skin.
To his right, southward, stood another figure, this one draped in black. Its hand was raised in the air in a gesture of halting.
Between his ears he felt an explosion as the demon panicked, cursing in the profane language of its race.
A Dhracian, it spat.
Michael’s head turned quickly to the figure between them. At one time the man might have been tall, but now was bent, bowed with age; he stood, frail, looking as if the wind itself could blow through him, hanging back, out of the fray.
“I don’t have time for this!” the seneschal bellowed. “Begone!”
Achmed was in the throes of the Thrall ritual when the figure that MacQuieth had led them to gestured at them.
“I don’t have time for this — Begone!”
The irony caught him off guard, almost made him break the ritual, swallowing the wry
laughter that welled up within him.
So appropriately named, he thought, clearing his mind again. The Waste of Breath.
He raised his left hand, calling to each of the four winds, the entities that gave the Thrall ritual its power.
Bien, Achmed thought. The north wind, the strongest. He opened his first throat and hummed the name; the sound echoed through his chest and the first chamber of his heart. He held up his index finger; the sensitive skin of its tip tingled as a draft of air wrapped around it.
Jahne, he whispered in his mind. The south wind, the most enduring. With his second throat he called to the next wind, committing the second heart chamber. Around his tallest finger he could sense the anchoring of another thread of air. When both vibrations were clear and strong he went on, opening the other two throats, the other two heart chambers. Leuk. The west wind, the wind of justice. Thas. The east wind. The wind of morning; the wind of death. Like strands of spider-silk, the currents hung on his fingertips, waiting. Four notes held in a monotone.
The man on the edge of the promontory stared at him in shock, then reached to his side and drew his blade.
Tysterisk came forth from its scabbard in a blast of keening air. It hissed and howled like a gale blowing around a mountaintop.
Achmed’s hand contracted, and with a graceful swing of his arm he tossed the ball of wind that had formed in his palm, feeling the four winds knot together, anchored to his palm, around the demon-spirit that dwelt with Michael.
He tied the net, then wrapped the metaphysical threads around his palm.
Ashe, seeing the signal, stepped forward out of the mist that came both from his cloak and the rain-heavy air.
“Where is my wife?” he demanded, his voice ringing with the multiple tones of the dragon, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass; it vibrated through the earth of the precipice on which they stood.
Michael smiled, then turned and pointed off to the southwest at the shadow of a ship hovering in the sea.
“Servicing my crew,” he said, his grin broadening. “They are taking turns with her. By now she’s doubtless on her third or fourth round. I have ravaged her seven times myself. Like old times, it was. And will be again. And again.”