The Bolg king jogged over to the quartermaster, who was standing ready to take the Sergeant’s mount, and waited.
The ground beneath his feet rumbled ominously with the party’s approach, the dust of the steps and rocky terrain rising like smoke from bursts of fire around them. There was a look in Grunthor’s eves that Achmed could see even from a great distance and didn’t like; those amber eyes had seen more than their share of death and devastation, had faced foes of human and demonic nature, and always maintained a steady gaze. What he saw now was confusion, something Grunthor rarely exhibited.
“What’s happened?” he shouted into the mountain wind as the Sergeant brought his mare to a halt and tossed the reins to the quartermaster.
The giant Bolg stared down at the king, then shook his head. “Oi was about to ask you the same question, sir,” he said as he dismounted. “Oi ’alf expected to find the place in flames.” He dismounted with an earthshaking thud.
Achmed watched until the quartermaster led the war-mare away. “What has you so worried?”
Grunthor bent down and laid his hand reverently on the ground. The earth, the entity to which he was tied on an elemental level, no longer wailed in fear, but was quiet.
“Somethin’ was wrong at the pass, somethin’ terrible,” he muttered, running his thick fingers through the dust and pebbles on the ground.
The Bolg king watched silently as the Sergeant stood and turned around several times, then shrugged.
“’Twas like there was a rip, a gouge of some sort,” he said, more to himself than aloud. “Can’t explain it past that. Like the Earth was bleeding to death.”
“Is it still there?”
The giant shook his head. “Naw. Everything’s quiet now.”
Achmed nodded. “Any guesses as to what it was?”
Grunthor inhaled and let his breath out slowly, feeling the heartbeat of the Earth pounding in his own blood. His union with the element had come to him during the trek he, Achmed, and Rhapsody had once made, refugees from their doomed homeland, crawling through the depths of the world along the roots of Sagia, the World Tree. In the course of that seemingly endless journey across time, he had absorbed its ancient rhythms, breathed in the secrets that lay dormant in its depths, had come to know it intimately, innately, though he could never give voice to what he had learned.
Grunthor, strong and reliable as the Earth itself, Rhapsody had Named him in the moments after walking through the purifying fire at the Earth’s heart. The name had come to embody his bond to the element. Being above ground now made him feel somehow bereft, away from the comforting warmth of the Earth.
So the wound the Earth had sustained, whatever had caused it to scream in fear, had reverberated in his soul, leaving him frightened, a feeling he had rarely experienced in his life.
He shook his head again. “Naw.”
Achmed glanced through the gate over the battlements to the steppes below. Dawn was coming, wrapping the world in cold light; the wind whipped across the desolate plain, making the grass bow low in supplication, unbroken waves of vegetation that covered the bulwark of hidden battlements, ditches, and tunnels that formed the Firbolg first line of defense. There was something ominous in its passage.
When he looked back his eyes met Grunthor’s, and an unspoken thought was passed between them.
Together they hurried into the Cauldron.
Achmed carefully checked the corridor outside his bedchamber before locking and bolting its door. He nodded to Grunthor, who carefully removed the intricate traps and opened the many locks on the heavy chest at the foot of the Bolg king’s bed, finally lifting the top to reveal a dark portal. He climbed inside, followed a moment later by Achmed, closing the lid of the chest behind him.
They traveled the dim corridor in silence, the rough-hewn walls of basalt swallowing all sound of their passage. The air of the upworld, clear with the relative freshness of morning, quickly flattened and became stolid, dank, as they traveled deeper into the mountain.
The farther in they went, the harder it became to breathe. The heavy odor of destruction, smoke-stained air that hung heavy with grit, still remained, three years later; the fire that had raged deep in the belly of the mountain had long since burned out, leaving behind acrid soot and bitter dust that stung the eyes and the lungs.
Neither Bolg spoke as they traversed the tunnel Grunthor had built to the Loritorium. There were ghosts in these passages; specters of people and dreams, both of which had died horribly. They concentrated instead on avoiding the traps Grunthor had set, which would seal the tunnel in the event it was broached by anyone other than the two of them or Rhapsody, who came once a year to tend to the Child.
Deep within the mountain, at the bottom of the tunnel, a hill of rubble rose, ominous, in the dark, a moraine of stones and broken basalt that served as a bulwark, a last barrier before the Loritorium. Achmed paused for a moment and hung back, waiting for Grunthor to open a passage in the mound of stony wreckage.
While he was waiting, he looked up at the ceiling above him, stretching into the darkness of the Loritorium’s dome. Seeing this place never ceased to cause him to reflect sadly on the overwhelming loss of it all, the ruin of what had once been a masterpiece, a deeply hidden city of scholarship, once a shining example of the genius of Gwylliam, the Cymrian king who had fashioned Canrif and the lands around it many centuries before. Now it was but a metaphor to the destruction that comes when vision gives way to ambition, and ambition to the avaricious hunger for power.
Bugger it, he thought, anger burning in the back of his throat. I can only rebuild so much of what that idiot destroyed.
Even as the thought formed, it dissipated. There was no end to what he could, and would, build and rebuild in these mountains, because ultimately it was not the outcome of the construction that was his purpose, but the process. The renovation of Canrif, and the additional projects he was fomenting, were all undertaken with one motive in mind: the building up of the Bolg, his unknown father’s race, from scattered tribes of primitive, demi-human, nomadic cave dwellers into a real society — a warlike, austere society to be certain, but nonetheless a culture with value, a contribution to be added to history.
And he had an immortal lifetime to spend on that undertaking. How else was he to spend forever?
But not this place, he thought. Never this place. This remains as it is, undisturbed.
He took stock of the hidden measures he had set in place to insure the sacrosanctity of the place in the event something happened to either of them, musing idly for a moment about the devices attuned to their heartbeats, their own innate vibrations, set to seal the tunnel in the presence of any intruder. If Grunthor were to die, I would have to bring in a score of work crews to open and clear the tunnel and then kill them afterward, he thought. Such an unfortunate loss of manpower.
An orange-red glimmer caught his eye; he turned to see the wall of shale and dust gleam like molten lava around Grunthor’s hands, which were outstretched, forming an entryway in the mound, leaving a tunnel with walls as slick as glass. Achmed blinked away his musings and followed the giant Bolg through the opening.
On the other side of the mound was what remained of the Loritorium, silent now. A haze of old smoke snaked heavily through the space beneath the overarching dome, disturbed perhaps by the vibrations of their movements and the introduction of the air from the world above.
In the center of what remained of the courtyard the altar of Living Stone appeared undisturbed; the Sleeping Child, formed of the same elemental earth, lying supine upon it.
Achmed and Grunthor approached the altar quietly, careful not to disturb the Earthchild. The chamber in which she had once rested before its destruction had borne a warning inscribed in towering letters:
LET THAT WHICH SLEEPS WITHIN THE EARTH REST UNDISTURBED; ITS AWAKENING HERALDS ETERNAL NIGHT
The two Bolg had long paid heed to that warning, having seen the threat to which it referred, a far more d
eadly Sleeping Child, with their own eyes during their travels through the center of the Earth.
The child still rested as she had when they had first found her, her eyes closed in eternal slumber. Like the altar on which she slept, her skin was a polished gray surface, translucent, beneath which veins of colored strands of clay in hues of purple and green, dark red, brown and vermilion could be seen. Her body, tall as that of an adult human, seemed at odds with the sweet young face atop it, a face with features that were at the same time coarse and smooth, roughly hewn but smoothly glossed; she was like a living statue of a human child sculpted by a being that had never really seen one in close proximity, without any sense of perspective.
The hair of the child was long and coarse, green as spring grass, matching the lashes of her eyelids. Those eyelids twitched intermittently but remained closed, as did her heavy lips.
Mutually the Bolg sighed, unspoken relief evident in the relaxation of their stances. They drew closer to the altar.
“Does she look — smaller to you, sir?” Grunthor asked after a long moment.
Achmed squinted, examining the outline of her form on the altar. There was no shadow, no visible indication that her body had lost any of its size; still, there was something different, a frailer air to her that he couldn’t place, and didn’t like.
Finally he shrugged. Grunthor crossed his arms, staring down at the Earthchild intently. Finally he shrugged also.
“Oi think she’s lost some of ’er, but it must be a very small amount,” he said, his heavy forehead wrinkling in worry. He tucked the eiderdown blanket beneath which she slept around her tightly, then gently caressed her hand.
“Don’t ya worry, darlin’,” he said softly. “We got yer back.”
“She doesn’t seem ill, or hurt?”
“Naw.”
Achmed exhaled. Grunthor’s description of the wound he had felt in the Earth had unnerved him, had made him fear that the Earthchild might have been compromised or injured, or worse. It was an unending worry anyway; she was, to his knowledge, the last living Child of Earth, a being formed long ago from the pure element and sparked into life by an unknown dragon.
The rib of her body was a Living Stone key that could open the Vault of the Underworld, where in the Before-Time the demons of elemental fire, the F’dor, had been imprisoned. It was the blood oath of the Dhracians, his mother’s race, to guard that vault, to keep the F’dor locked away for all time, to hunt down and destroy any that might have escaped. Likewise, it was the endless quest of upworld F’dor to find a way to free their brethren from the Vault, unleashing the chaos and destruction of the world that they, children of fire, craved incessantly. The Earthchild, therefore, was the fuse, the catalyst that could light a sequence of events that could not be undone. The fate of the Earth was dependent on her safety, and he, as a result, was sworn to an eternity of guardianship to see that she remained unharmed, hidden here, away, in the dark vault that once was to have been a shining city of scholarship and lore.
It was a small enough price to pay, though not an easy one.
“Sleep in peace,” he said quietly to the Earthchild, then nodded toward the passageway.
As they passed through the tunnel Grunthor had made in the moraine, Achmed looked up one last time at the firmament of the dome that towered into the blackness above the Loritorium and, finding that it appeared sound, glanced back at the altar of Living Stone.
The Earthchild slumbered on, oblivious, it seemed, of the world around her, and of whatever might have threatened it.
The Firbolg king watched her for a moment, then turned and walked back through the tunnel ahead of Grunthor, who closed the hole in the moraine behind them, his black robes whispering around him.
“What do ya think did that, then, caused the Earth to scream that way?” the Bolg Sergeant asked, glancing one last time over his shoulder before turning to follow the king up the corridor.
“I have no idea,” Achmed replied, his voice echoing strangely off the irregular walls of the ascending tunnel. “And there’s little more we can do, other than prepare, because sooner or later whatever it is will no doubt find me. Let’s make our way from one ruined landmark to another.” Grunthor nodded and caught up with him, traversing the rest of the corridor to the upworld in companionable silence.
They were on the other side of the moraine, halfway home, and so were unable to see the single muddy tear slip down the Earthchild’s face in the darkness of her sepulcher.
Grunthor stepped gingerly over the scattered shards of colored glass and looked up into the thin, towering dome hollowed into the mountain peak Gurgus, the Bolgish word for talon. The levels of scaffolding that ringed the interior of the structure were silent now, the artisans gone, leaving only the king and himself.
And an increasingly large pile of broken glass.
“Not going particularly well, Oi take it?” he said humorously, kicking aside the debris. He reached down and picked up a crumpled piece of parchment lying beneath the detritus that bore the markings of an architectural plan.
“Don’t open it,” Achmed advised sourly. “It’s full of spit. I encouraged everyone to take a turn at it after a particularly trying day early last week. You might want to stay away from any other wads, too; as the week wore on, the bodily fluids we applied to the plans reflected our progress, or lack thereof. You can imagine where we ended up.”
Grunthor grinned, his neatly polished tusks gleaming in the half-light, and tossed the wad of parchment back into the pile.
“Why ya driving yerself mad with this, sir?” he asked, his tone at once light and serious. “If you really feel the need to be irritated to the point o’ going insane, why don’t we just send for the Duchess? She generally ’as that same effect on you, and she costs less than rebuilding the dome of a mountain, at least if you pay by the hour.”
Achmed chuckled. “Now, now, let’s not reference our beloved Lady Cymrian’s sordid past. We’ll be seeing her soon enough. I heard from her last night by avian messenger; she wants us to meet her four weeks hence in Yarim.”
“Oh, goody,” the giant replied, staring up into the tower again. “What now?”
“She wants our assistance — your assistance, actually — in bringing Entudenin, that dead geyser obelisk, back to life.”
Grunthor nodded, arranging the piles of colored glass with the toe of his boot.
“Oi told ’er a long time ago ‘twas probably a blockage o’ some sort in the strata. She got ’em to agree to let us drill?”
“Apparently.”
“And you’re willing to drop everything and leave at ’er request?”
Achmed shrugged, then went back to the pile of colored rubble.
The giant raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, returning his attention to the tower.
When Gwylliam founded Canrif he seemed to have a penchant for hollowing out mountain peaks. The Teeth were full of them, jagged summits that stretched into the clouds, multicolored, threatening, dark with beauty and secrets. They must have posed a challenge to the arrogant Cymrian king, because he spent a good deal of his time reinforcing them while chipping away at the mountain strata inside them, filling them with needless rooms and grand domes. Grunthor, tied to the earth as he was, found the practice repulsive to the point of feeling violated.
When he, Achmed, and Rhapsody had come to Ylorc, they had found and restored a ruined guard-tower post in the western peak of Grivven, attached to a fortress and barracks that housed more than two thousand Bolg soldiers, and a towering observatory above the Great Hall, from which thirty miles of the Krevensfield Plain could be seen in all directions save east.
He, as a military man, understood the need for these renovations. He could even grudgingly abide the rebuilding of the inner mountain cities and the restoration of the art and statuary, things he had little use for. But none of the reconstruction projects had taken on the import, or produced the aggravation, that the Bolg king’s current undertaking had, and
for the life of him, he had no idea why.
The Sergeant squinted as he looked up into the pinnacle of the broken tower, trying to discern what it was about this Cymrian artifact, this particular hollowed-out mountain peak, that so captivated Achmed’s attention. Each time he returned from maneuvers the king’s mood was blacker; now it had taken on approximately the same hue as pitch.
There were endless opportunities for renovation in the Bolglands. The place had once been almost a country, a multiracial settlement nestled in the protective arms of the mountains, inside the earth and in the open-air realm beyond the canyon, housing the greatest minds of the times, undisturbed for three hundred years, allowing great advances in every aspect of science and art to germinate and grow, unfettered. Even the seven hundred years of war that followed had not destroyed those engineering feats and architectural marvels completely. Besides, Grunthor reasoned, Achmed had all the time in the world to build them back up again.
All the time in the world.
“What is it about this thing that has ya so bollixed up?” he asked finally, gesturing at the tower. “Oi think it might be a good idea to ’ead off ta Yarim just ta get you away from this place. It’s enslaved your mind. Ya look downright awful.”
“I’m Dhracian. I always look downright awful.”
“More awful than usual, sir.”
“You can tell that even behind the veils?”
“Yup. Yer eyes’re all yella and red. Thought for a moment ya might ’ave gone F’dor on me while Oi was away.”
“Now that would be interesting; a Dhracian F’dor. I wonder what would happen if a demon tried to possess me. My guess is that I would explode or dissolve, so diametrically opposed are the two races, which might be worth it; at least I would take one of them with me. But no, I’m not possessed; we have merely been meeting with failure at each turn here. The domed ceiling is defying me, and I hate being defied by glass.” Achmed sighed and crouched down, running his gloved hands through the colored sand and shards. “Omet says we need to find a glass artisan of a much higher level of expertise, a sealed master.”