Requiem for the Sun

  And in that moment Ashe knew he would not be able to hold on to either of the two people he was clutching when the wave reached them.

  Their bodies rose on the last foreswell as the wave neared, blotting out the sun.

  In the final seconds before the wave hit, Ashe recalled the look of certainty in MacQuieth’s eyes, the eyes that in the morning were blind to the world of the sun.

  He may command the wind, but I am the sword.

  The waters touch us all.

  Kirsdarke is our sword.

  From the salt in his blood the answer came.

  The waters touch us all.

  Kirsdarke is our sword.

  I am the sword as well, he thought.

  He opened his fingers of the hand that gripped the water-stunned Firbolg king and called on his bond to Kirsdarke.

  He could feel its hilt, the only solid manifestation of the weapon when it was in the sea, brushing the tips of his fingers, at the edge of his grasp.

  He clutched it, willing it to take a vaporous form, and, loosing the Bolg king for the space of a heartbeat, drove the sword into Achmed’s chest, wrapping his arm around him once more.

  “Hold on to the sword!” he shouted over the thunder of the roiling sea. “Breathe!”

  Ashe turned to the unconscious Rhapsody in his other arm and snapped her head back, trying to find her face in the tangle of hair and seaweed. He pressed his mouth against her blue lips, then gripped the hilt of Kirsdarke, sending all of the water in his body, all the power of the element he could summon from the raging sea around him, into the watery blade, hoping his air would transmute into Achmed as well. Drawing the water from Rhapsody’s lungs, blasting the exhalations of air through the weapon into those of the Firbolg king.

  And, still clutching his wife and the impaled Firbolg king, kicked down to the depths of the sea.

  The scream of the waves muted instantly into a deep rumbling thudding as he sank like the heaviest of stones, dragging the other two down with him.

  Rhythmically he breathed into Rhapsody’s lungs, feeling his breath spill out of her mouth as it rose in a swirl of bubbles that were instantly lost in the dark churning water above them. His hand still grasped the sword that pierced the Bolg king, but whether Achmed was alive or not he could not determine.

  Around his ears the sea bellowed in rage at the affront, the violation of the elemental battle, screaming angrily as the black fire of the demon churned on its surface, spun into its depths. He could hear the ocean’s anger, and its fear, felt in his mind its tale of the events as they unfolded, of the struggle between the two beings of flesh and element, the raging maelstrom of water against wind and an even more ancient and dark fire.

  From the corner of his eye he could see the wave pass above them, felt the swells beneath it pass through his body, one with the water now, concentrating on keeping the breath in his wife’s mouth, the sword hilt one with his hand.

  From the deck of the Basquela, Quinn saw the wall of water towering off the shoreline, felt the backswell, then watched in horror as, in direct controversy to nature, it began to rush toward them, into the open sea.

  “About!” he screamed to the thunderstruck crew, who broke out of their rigid stares and scrambled aloft and to their posts, endeavoring to take the ship into the wind. Quinn himself could only stand at the rail, frozen, his keen sailor’s eyes wide with horror, his mind calculating the impact and the inevitability of it.

  There was no escape.

  “Turn her into it!” he shouted into the wind to the mate who was frantically trying to gain control of the wheel. “If it hits us amidship we’re done for!”

  The blast of wind that tore around the approaching monolith of water swallowed the mate’s reply.

  Quinn turned back one final time, riveted by the sight of lightning and blazing fire rolling within the tidal wave, swirling in dark colors of brimstone and blood.

  In the moment before it hit the ship, Quinn could swear he saw the wave’s yawning maw, a towering face in the vertical sea of sightless black eyes and a titanic mouth screaming in demonic madness, turning the very ocean against itself.

  He whispered a prayer to the god of the Deep, a sailor’s entreaty he had learned as a cabin boy, wondering dully as the deck rose into the air amid the sharp cracking and snapping of the ship being rent into pieces how the sky and the sea had become one.

  When the wave passed, Ashe could feel it, sweeping out to sea, contrary to nature, flattening as it went, dissipating into nothingness. The current steadied, then resumed rolling toward the shore, eternal.

  As if nothing had happened.

  Slowly he kicked up to the air, dragging the Bolg king, his wife still locked against his chest in a mad embrace of breath. They broke the surface, the sun stinging their eyes, the salt excoriating their nostrils.

  Ashe tilted Rhapsody back so that her head pointed to the sky and pressed her against his chest, drawing the seawater from her lungs, willing her to breathe, then turned to Achmed, still impaled on the vaporous sword. He pulled the elemental weapon from the Bolg king’s chest and slid it through his belt. He looked out to sea where the ship had been, and saw the rapidly sinking mains’l disappearing beneath the surface of the waves.

  Suddenly exhausted, he lay back in the tide, holding tight to Rhapsody and Achmed, and let the eternal pull of the sea carry them to shore.

  54

  HAGUEFORT, NAVARNE

  When Caius entered Haguefort, there was no guard at the gate, no one in the foyer, no one in the corridors or on the stairs. It was as if the keep had been abandoned in the advent of a coming hurricane.

  Which, in a way, it had been.

  He crept quietly through the entranceway, taking pains to not allow his footsteps to echo on the polished stone floor.

  The crossbowman was making his way through the enormous dining hall when a middle-aged woman in an apron appeared in the buttery doorway; Caius shot her through the forehead one-handed without breaking his stride, and without looking back.

  Berthe crumpled to the floor without a sound, the blood that pooled beneath her forehead and into her open eyes whispering quietly as it bled.

  Caius walked silently through the corridors, past the beautiful displays of armor and antiquities, looking for anyone who might have been the husband of his master’s quarry, but finding nothing but empty silence.

  Until he entered the Great Hall.

  At the far end, beneath the tall windows, a man was sitting in a heavy wooden chair at a similarly heavy wooden table, sorting through parchment scrolls. When he looked up, their eyes met, and Caius froze.

  It was the soldier he had seen in his dreams, the crippled man who rode in a high-backed saddle through the burning leaves swirling on the forest wind to rescue the woman his master sought.

  The man who had killed his twin.

  Caius could read the man’s thoughts as he raised his crossbow and sighted it at the soldier’s heart. The soldier’s first glance had gone to the windows behind him, trying to determine if escape through them was possible, the thought immediately discarded because of the height. Next the soldier glanced around for another exit, but there was none between Caius and him. He could see the futility register as the last thought came into his head.

  There was no escape.

  Generally Caius never spoke to his victims, determining conversations with the imminent dead to be a waste of energy. But in this case, the look on the face of the man who sat behind the desk was so insolent, his expression so hard, that he made an exception.

  “You killed my brother,” Caius said accusingly.

  The soldier’s expression did not change as he spoke a single word, likely to be his last.

  “Good,” he said.

  The anger of insult coupled with the grief of loss flooded through Caius. He raised the bow a fraction of an inch higher, taking the time to be deliberate, to enjoy this moment.

  He cocked the crossbow.

  There
was a flash seemingly behind his eyes as his bolt whizzed harmlessly over the head of his brother’s killer.

  Impossible, he thought.

  It was his final musing as he fell sideways, a white-feathered arrow skewering his brain through the temples.

  Anborn, who had been gritting his teeth and tensing his abdominal muscles in the hope of twitching as little as possible when the arrow pierced him, blinked and pushed himself up with his hands on the table. He stared down at the body on the floor, then looked to his left where the arrow had originated.

  Gwydion Navarne stood, still in his archer’s stance, his hand holding the bow trembling slightly. His other hand was still frozen at the anchor point behind his ear.

  After a long moment, he turned to meet the gaze of the Lord Marshal, who still remained behind the table, rigid in body and face. Gwydion regarded his mentor seriously.

  “I believe you owe me, or rather, my bow, an acknowledgment of your misjudgment,” he said blandly. “I told you, as an archer I merely needed to be sufficiently proficient to penetrate a haybutt.” He walked over to the corpse and turned its head over with his toe, admiring the clean breach of the man’s skull between the temples. “And as you can see, I can.”

  Anborn only continued to stare at the crossbowman on the floor. Finally he shook his head and turned to the future Duke of Navarne.

  “Are those the albatross arrows Rhapsody brought you from Yarim?”

  “Yes.”

  A reluctant smile broke over the General’s face.

  “I suppose we have to acknowledge a center shot for both you and my mad Auntie Manwyn. Two miracles have occurred today; you managed to pull off a fine shot, even with a silly longbow, when you weren’t even supposed to be here, and she actually got a prediction correct. I do believe the world is coming to an end.”

  Gwydion Navarne smiled. “Or perhaps it is just beginning.”

  55

  THE CAULDRON

  Esten waited in the shadows impatiently, watching with grudging admiration the precision with which the semi-human beasts that were the Bolg held a watch. There was no perfunctory movement, no yawning or evidence that the ritual was rote. The king’s guards took their duty seriously.

  All the better.

  She would have preferred to slip in and slit their throats but she had taken so long and spent to much time setting the trap that she didn’t dare tip her hand now.

  So she waited.

  It had required painstaking hours to covertly search the general vicinity of the corridor whose general location she had knobbed out of Shaene. But in the end, it was the Bolg king’s meticulous security that gave her the clue she needed. His inner sanctum must lie beyond this most guarded of intersections.

  Somewhere in the distance she could hear an uproar, a sound of muster, or something like it, rumbling through the mountain, but the guards did not deviate in their watch. Upon consideration of it, she realized that the noise had been building for the better part of the day, like preparations in the face of a coming storm. This deep inside the mountain, however, little impact could be felt.

  In truth, she mused, hearing the three-quarter-hour bells sound, it probably is overkill to trap the king’s bedchamber. The tower had been brilliantly constructed, the subterfuge of the snare was so subtle, so unexpected, that she fully expected to blow the top off of Gurgus, crumbling the rest of the peak in upon itself, burying the king and all the Bolg he allowed to be present at the inauguration of the tower with it.

  But it never hurt to have a backup plan. And she wanted to be certain that the Bolg king paid for his incursion into her guild, for the loss of her tunnel into the artery below Entudenin.

  She wanted him to suffer horribly before he died. If her timing was good, he would be enjoying the full effects of the exposure before he was crushed to death.

  The last communique she had sent to Dranth had included the general directions she had knobbed out of Shaene. The memory of riding his shapeless body, his pathetic wheezing beneath her, gave her a chill of disgust that she shook off, wanting to be ready when the watch changed. As long as the idiot’s information was good, the Raven’s Guild would have detailed maps and schematics to the most sensitive areas of the inner Teeth, she knew, along with the intelligence she had gathered and passed along previously.

  Her opportunity presented itself just as the soldiers crossed in front of the triple pass, a juncture where three major tunnels met in the dark basalt walls of the inner sanctum. Esten had been timing the dead space, the moments in between when one shift of soldiers had left and the next arrived; it was never more than a matter of seconds. When she saw it, she slipped around the corner of the corridor and down the left-hand hallway, blending into the shades of dim light and fuzzy darkness, running her hands along the veined walls, until she was standing before what could only be the doorway to the king’s own bedchamber.

  Like everything else about the king, the doorway was concealed, hidden amid the striations that marbled the stone of the walls. Esten marveled at the masterly hiding of such a large aperture; had she not known that this was the right corridor, in a labyrinth that contained hundreds of corridors, even she, with her extensive training and experience in ferreting out the hidden, never would have found it.

  That disgusting tumble was worth it after all, she thought.

  The catch that served as a handhold to the door was locked.

  With the speed born of years of practice, she took her thin picks from her mouth where she carried them and set about opening the lock; it was a puzzle lock of ancient design, with an undoubtedly obscure code, but she did not need to know what it was to pick it. Instead, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small vial of quicksilver mixed with filings of lead; a drop applied to the shaft of the pick formed an impression of the inner works of the lock. With the lightest of touches, she turned the makeshift key.

  The door opened silently.

  Esten slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind her.

  Her bright, dark eyes, raven’s eyes, scanned the room.

  The king’s bedchamber was a surprising mix of austere decor and lush linens. The walls, the sheets, the wooden canopy over the bed draped in satin, were all in black; the marble desk, the wooden chairs, the enormous chest at the foot of the bed, everything formed of dark materials. It was a place of deep quiet; there was a sense of thick, solid softness evoked in the room, a place where someone with much on his mind could sleep restfully.

  Esten smiled.

  Quickly she set about searching the chamber, opening each small chest, each drawer, examining the nooks in the wardrobes and finding very little. The Bolg king might be lord of the ruins of one of the richest empires in history, but he had taken little material wealth for himself.

  Methodically she continued her search, finding nothing of note, until she pulled back an area of the silk tapestry on the floor and discovered a tiny irregularity that would have been unnoticeable to any but the sensitive fingers of the mistress of a guild of professional thieves.

  She ran her finger around the outline, checking for traps and finding none, then carefully sprang the locking mechanism.

  A small reliquary in the slate of the floor opened, in which a rectangular box the length of two of her hands rested, swathed in a velvet covering.

  Esten stared into the hole for a moment, then reached in and took the box; when she opened it, her brows drew together.

  In the box was a key of a sort, a strange, curving key that looked like it was made of bone, like a large rib.

  She slipped the key into an inner pocket of her shirt, closed the box, put it back in its velvet pouch, and resealed it in the reliquary. Then she went back to her search.

  The chest at the foot of the king’s bed gave her the greatest effort. The traps were so devious she could not wait to put some variations of them to use back home in Yarim. When she finally was able to spring the lock, she opened the lid, only to have a dank wind slap her across
the face. Esten blinked in surprise; she was staring down a long passageway of rough-hewn steps. Where it led to, she had no way of fathoming.

  “Sandy! Get up, you lazy sinner!”

  Shaene pounded on the door again; the noise of the barracks was so ever-present that Omet had no doubt grown used to it. Why the boy insisted on bunking with the soldiers in the ascetic quarters was beyond Shaene’s understanding; the ambassadorial suite to which he had been assigned was far more comfortable, though certainly not opulent. If one was to be forced to live, as a result of an ill-thought-out contract, in the land of the Firbolg, one might at least opt for the most comfortable accommodations available.

  Hearing no reply again, Shaene turned to Rhur.

  “Maybe he’s ill,” he said the to the Bolg artisan.

  Rhur grasped the door handle, expecting to find it locked; Omet was fanatical about locking his door of late, ever since Theophila came to the mountain. To his surprise, and that of Shaene, it opened easily.

  The stench of illness hung in the tiny windowless room.

  “Gods!” Shaene cried. “Omet?” He and Rhur hurried into the room; in two steps they were at the young man’s bedside.

  Omet’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His skin was the color of the stone walls around them, except for his cheeks, in the center of which two bright spots of fever burned, hot as the fires of the forge.

  “Get a healer!” Shaene screeched, the sweat of fear springing from his skin, leaving his hands trembling. Rhur disappeared; Shaene stumbled to the bedside table and, with shaking hands, poured water from the face-washing basin atop it onto the towel that was folding neatly next to it. He hurried back to Omet’s bedside and laid the wet cloth gently over the boy’s forehead; the towel turned quickly warm.

  Shaene clutched the hot, limp hand atop the covers and began to rotely chant the prayers he could recall from youth, from the last time he had sat vigil by a young man’s beside. In the earliest days of his apprenticeship his old brother Siyeth had contracted scarlet fever, had wasted and died in his bed before Shaene’s eyes; the sights and smells never left his memory.