“Very well.” Ashe retrieved his gloves from the fire iron, then went to the door and opened it. “I just thought that perhaps you might wish to ask my name.”
Anborn’s eyes, clear as the azure sky, grew suddenly dark. His gaze came to rest on Ashe for the first time. After a moment he motioned to his followers. “Leave us,” he said to the men at the table without breaking his gaze away. “Tend to Shrike.” Hurriedly the armsmen climbed the stairs and disappeared into the room at the top, the last one up closing the door resoundingly.
When the men were gone, Anborn allowed his glance to wander over the curtain of mist that shrouded Ashe from normal sight.
“Close the door,” he commanded. Ashe complied. “I dislike games of the mind and the men who play them,” the general muttered darkly. “I assumed you were trying to keep your identity hidden, and offered you the respect of allowing you to do so. It is rare that anyone toys with me, and even more than rare, it is unwise. Who are you?”
“Your nephew.”
Anborn snorted. “I have none such.”
Beneath his hood, Ashe smiled. “My name is Gwydion ap Llauron ap Gwylliam tuatha d’Anwynan o Manosse,” he said patiently. “But you may address me as ‘Useless,’ if you’d prefer; you generally did.”
Anborn’s sword was in his hand; the movement that put it there was invisible to Ashe’s eyes, though the dragon in his blood sensed it and could follow the arc of electric sparks the motion left hanging in the air.
“Reveal yourself.”
Carefully Ashe took the edge of his hood in hand. He pulled it back slowly, watching the reflection from his shining copper hair catch the firelight and reflect in Anborn’s widening eyes. Almost as quickly the azure eyes narrowed again, retaining the gleaming light. He did not sheathe his sword.
Ashe could feel the weight of Anborn’s gaze as it assessed his face, could feel the same dragon sense that ran in his own blood, tiny pinpricks of energy where Anborn’s inner nature made note of the changes in his nephew’s physiology. The examination lingered longest in his eyes, eyes that had taken on reptilian pupils since the last time his uncle had beheld him. He stood as still as he could, waiting for Anborn to finish, trying to ignore the panic his own dragon sense felt at the intrusion. Finally the ancient Cymrian warrior spoke.
“Your father has been claiming for twenty years that you were dead,” he said in a tone touched with menace. “My wife’s mourning dress for your funeral was encrusted with a king’s ransom of pearls to honor the tragic passing of the Heir Presumptive; the cost of the blasted thing damn near beggared me.”
“Sorry about that.”
“How woefully inadequate. I suppose your inadequacy should be no surprise. You are, after all, spawned of Llauron. What transformed you thus?”
Ashe shook off the sting of the slight. “That matters not. What does matter is that I am here, and though I choose not to be foolhardy, I will hide no more. Not from any man, nor any demon.”
“Cocksure as always. I guess even death, or its proximate, cannot change a reckless fool.” Finally Anborn sheathed his sword. He returned to the table, where he took up his tankard and downed the contents, then looked back at Ashe again. He refilled the mug.
“I’d be a little more wary than that if I were you, Gwydion. Your newly won wyrmdom will make you all the more savory a target than you were before.”
“It also makes me a more formidable one.”
Anborn laughed harshly and took another drink, but said nothing. Ashe stood by silently, waiting for his uncle to speak again. Finally Anborn gestured at the door.
“Well, then, what keeps you? Be off.”
Ashe was taken aback, but gave no outward sign of it. He watched Anborn’s gaze grow in fierce intensity as he wiped the ale roughly from his lips with the back of his forearm. The air in the room became warmer, drier, with an undertone of threat.
“Did you want something else?” Anborn demanded.
“I thought perhaps we could put aside old enmities and talk.”
“Why?” Anborn slammed the empty tankard down. “I have nothing to say to you, whelp of my once-brother. Why would I waste another moment in fruitless conversation when my supper’s growing cold, my man-at-arms needs looking in on, and there’s a bedwench upstairs, awaiting my attention?”
Ashe took hold of the door cord. “I can’t imagine.” He pulled his hood back up.
Anborn’s eyebrows drew together as his nephew opened the door. He reached hurriedly into his pocket and drew forth a small cloth sack, which he tossed at Ashe’s feet.
“There. That should pay you for your trouble.”
With a sweep of his foot Ashe kicked it back to him. The air in the room hissed on the verge of cracking.
“Keep it. Your offer of it disappoints me.”
Anborn laughed menacingly. “Not enough? I’d forgotten you would know the contents of the sack, down to the last coin, with your inner sense. Name your price, then, so that I may be rid of you.”
Ashe struggled to keep his voice calm, though the jeering tone had enflamed the dragon, and its wrath pounded behind his eyes. “You may be rid of me by the mere request of it. Not precisely the warm family reunion I had pictured, but I will depart if that is what you wish, Uncle.”
“What did you expect, Gwydion—a lawn fete held in your honor? You and your accursed father have been lying to me for a score of years.” The general drained the tankard.
“It was necessary.”
“That may be. Further contact with you, however, is not. The truth be told, nephew, while I bear you no enmity, I felt little sorrow at the loss of you. Your return may bring joy to your confederates, to Navarne, to your mother’s House in Manosse, but to me it means nothing. I couldn’t care less what happens to you now. I am in your debt for the return of my man-at-arms. If you have a boon to ask, do so, and I will grant it if I can. Other than that, I have no need of your company. Be on your way.”
Ashe pulled up his hood. “As you wish, Uncle,” he said simply. “You deserved to know the truth about me, and now you do. Goodbye.” He opened the door and disappeared into the snowy mist.
Anborn waited until he could no longer hear the hoofbeats of Gwydion’s horse, then took another long draught from the tankard. He watched silently as the fire burned down to coals, snapping and hissing in impotent fury. Then he rose slowly, wiped the ale from his lips, and made his way up the rickety staircase to the room above.
In the pale light of a rusty lantern his men stood around the hay mattress, quietly tending to his armsman and friend. Shrike’s tattered eyes opened when Anborn came to the foot of his bed, darting quickly from man to man until their gaze came to rest on the general. He winced in pain as he turned to his fellow armsmen.
“Leave us,” Shrike said, his voice a ragged whisper.
The armsmen looked questioningly to Anborn, and he nodded silently. They quickly gathered the basin and the bloody cloths that had served as bandages, and quietly left the room.
The general took a clean cloth and soaked it in the water of the pitcher on the floor. He crouched down beside Shrike’s bed and gently wiped the dried blood from his eyes. Shrike turned, and fixed his failing gaze on his commander.
“Thank the gods I lived to see you again,” he said haltingly.
“Indeed I shall,” Anborn replied, smiling slightly.
“Get—the—cutlass.”
“Later,” Anborn said. “Rest now.”
“Bugger later,” Shrike scowled. “It may never come. This may be the last time I can show you, m’lord—Anborn. Would you pass up that opportunity?”
Anborn fell silent for a moment as he dabbed the cool cloth on the wounded man’s gray face.
“No,” he finally admitted, reluctance in his voice.
“Get it, then.”
Anborn rose wearily and strode to the corner where Shrike’s belongings had been hastily tossed. He searched quickly and found the battered cutlass; he held it for a mom
ent before bringing it back to the bedside.
“This can wait until you’re stronger,” he said to Shrike, who scowled again.
“Void take you. Look into the lantern.”
Anborn reached out a hand that trembled visibly, and plucked the tarnished lantern from the bedside table. He held it up before his eyes.
Shrike watched as those azure eyes, the hallmark of Cymrian royalty, began to shine. He lay back against the hay pillow and closed his own, breathing raggedly.
21
Deep within the Tunnels of Ylorc
The lore of the Finders
From the very oldest of days, in the very darkest corners of Firbolg history, there had been Finders.
The Bolg of Canrif had no recorded legends, no traditions immortalized in a permanent fashion; they were as a race illiterate, or at least had been until Achmed, himself of their bloodline by half, appeared as if by magic from the other side of the world and took the mountain almost by the mere demand of it.
Subduing the mountain had been a simple undertaking, really. One of the first places that the Three had found in the abandoned ruin which had once been Gwylliam’s seat of power was the royal library, the heart of Canrif. It contained an endless collection of maps, plans, and manuscripts, some brought from the Lost Island of Serendair, all carefully catalogued and preserved in scroll tubes of marble and ancient ivory, stored under the watchful eyes of the enormous red-gold dragon fresco sprawling across the domed ceiling, its silver-gilt claws poised in mute threat.
The library also guarded the entranceways to the deeper treasure vaults and reliquaries in which items of great value to the long-dead king had been kept. It had even contained the body of the long-dead king himself; they had discovered Gwylliam’s mummified corpse sprawled on its back amid the rotting fabric of his robes of state, his shriveled chest cruelly sundered. His simple crown of purest gold lay on its side next to him, testament to exactly how the mighty had fallen.
But the items in the library of most value to Achmed’s conquest of Ylorc were the apparatuses the Cymrian king had built to track movement within the labyrinth, and the series of listening and speaking tubes that ran throughout the mountains, some visible, some hidden, most of them still operational, all of them useful. It had only been a matter of manipulating these inventions, along with the ventilation system that brought heat and fresh air into Canrif, to convince the current inhabitants that they were outmatched in their own land.
The Bolg surrendered more or less willingly to their new warlord, someone who could return the mountainous cities of the “Willums,” as they called the Cymrians, to their former glory, this time under the hand of a leader who was half-Firbolg. They knew nothing of his other nature, the Dhracian side, which sought above all things to find any of the F’dor demon-spirits that might have escaped the great Vault of Living Stone which the dragons had built to imprison them in the Before-Time. It was a blood vow far more ancient than any he swore to them as their new king, but the Firbolg were utterly ignorant of it.
Once Achmed’s reign had begun in Ylorc, Rhapsody had insisted that educating the Bolg in lessons other than warfare was necessary if they were to be able to stand on their own and not only hold the mountain against the bloodthirsty men of Roland, but build a culture that would hold currency outside the mountain. Until this year those men had participated in an annual genocide known as Spring Cleaning, a ritual of butchery in which the Bolg had offered up their old, weak, and ill in exchange for being left alone for the rest of the year.
This past spring, however, a new wind was blowing through the peaks of the Teeth. The soldiers of Roland had come as usual, this time two thousand strong at the insistence of Tristan Steward. They had discovered, much to their woe, that the monsters they were used to dispatching with indifference had been learning the lessons of slaughter that they themselves had inadvertently taught. Achmed had delivered the news of the Orlandan brigade’s massacre at the hands of the Bolg to the Lord Roland personally, waking him from his sleep in his own bedchamber with the ultimatum that would lead to a reluctant peace treaty ten days later.
I’m the Eye, the Claw, the Heel and the Stomach of the Mountain. I have come to tell you that your army is gone.
The Lord Roland had risen shakily from his slumber, trembling as he listened to the sandy voice that seemed to be part of the darkness itself.
You have ten days to draft a trade agreement and to sue for peace. My emissary will be waiting at the present border of my realm and Bethe Corbair on the tenth day. On the eleventh day the border will begin to move closer, so as to facilitate our meeting. If the inclement weather discourages you from traveling, you can wait a fortnight and hold the meeting right here at the new border.
Tristan Steward, his cousin, Stephen Navarne, duke of the province that bore his family name, and Tristan’s brother Ian Steward, the benison of Canderre-Yarim, had indeed appeared at the border, the first two prepared to pursue political ends, the benison religious ones. They had all been easily bested in their negotiations by Rhapsody, who had charmed them into trade agreements generous to the Bolg and peace accords restrictive to Roland with little more than an unconscious blink of her green eyes. Tristan Steward had returned home to his central province and his unpleasant fiancée with the disturbing sense that he had handed over both his birthright and his soul to Ylorc.
What Tristan Steward could not have known was the nature of the fuse his misguided decision to send a full brigade against Achmed’s troops had lighted.
The natural process of establishing diplomatic ties with a new regime is traditionally a long one for good reason. It takes time for a freshly crowned monarch to learn everything he needs to know about his kingdom from his newly ascended throne, to sort out the positive and negative aspects of having a relationship of any kind with neighbors, allies, and enemies.
The destruction of Tristan’s army had hastened that legitimizing process. The horror of it rippled like wildfire through the provinces of Roland and the outlying continental lands of Sorbold to the south, Gwynwood to the west, the Hintervold to the north, and even the nations beyond the Teeth to the east. Only the Lirin realm of Tyrian, the vast forest that abutted the southwestern seacoast, sent no ambassador to Ylorc, gave no indication that the ascension of a Firbolg warlord to Gwylliam’s throne had made any impression upon them at all.
With that exception, all the neighboring realms of Ylorc were eager to press for whatever accords they could to ensure the continuation of peace with the Bolg and to perhaps engender a little bit of commerce on the side.
Particular interest existed in Sorbold, the arid realm of sun that had once been part of the Cymrian empire but now stood alone, an independent nation tied to Roland only through the common religious connection to the elderly Patriarch of Sepulvarta, the head of the religion of both lands. The Sorbolds craved access to the fine weapons being produced in the fires of the Firbolg forges. There were few natural resources in their land, and steel production there was expensive and difficult.
They pressed the issue through Syn Crote, their ambassador, who was noted for his persuasiveness. But Achmed, while signing trade treaties for other goods, withheld the sale of armaments to Sorbold, reasoning that it was singularly unwise to outfit a bordering nation, no matter how friendly its ambassador, with the weapons of his own arsenal. The Crown Prince of Sorbold bit his tongue and smiled painfully, but any fool could see that the resentment of this arrangement would sooner or later lead to, at bare minimum, renewed discussions, and probably worse. For the moment, however, peace reigned.
Once the trade agreements were set in place, King Achmed drafted a plan to protect those transactions and other correspondence from the random and inexplicable violence that had been a staple of this new land since he, Rhapsody, and Grunthor had crawled out of the Root into this place.
A series of guarded caravans, accompanied at weekly intervals by two score and ten of Tristan Steward’s soldiers, made the rounds of
all the interconnected lands of the middle continent—Ylorc to Bethe Corbair to Sorbold to Sepulvarta, across the Krevensfield Plain to Bethany and Navarne, then on to Tyrian to Avonderre to Gwynwood and Canderre, north to the frozen Hintervold, then east to the heat of Yarim and back, at last, to Ylorc. The route was a fairly easy one, though it traveled through varied terrain, making use of the old Cymrian road system that had been built in the empire’s heyday.
With the return of relatively safe mail and selective travel came at last some relief from the sense of isolation the different realms of the continent had felt over the last twenty or so years, since the violence had escalated to its terrifying level. Those traveling in carriages and merchant carts would schedule journeys, when possible, to coincide with the weekly caravans, grateful for the opportunity to benefit from their protection.
For one group, however, one unknown, secret group in a little known land, the mail caravans provided something completely different. To the Finders, it was an opportunity, the first in history, to seek something in a distant place that might help bring the Voice to them again at last.
Even the Bolg populace that shared the same mountains, held the same watches, and had inhabited the same realm for five centuries knew nothing of the existence of the Finders who lived among them. It was a society that was secret, membership seeming to pass inconsistently through certain clans, its lineage unclear. The harsh reality of Firbolg existence coupled with a decided lack of sophistication when it came to genealogy tended to prevent a trend from being recognized. Even within families the secret was kept—it was not spoken of from father to son, or between mates. No one knew of the Finders except the Finders themselves, and even they did not seek to know the names of all who felt the calling.
And it was a calling in the strictest sense that brought them together. They had nothing else in common that they could discern—no physical attributes that they could see as similar. Part of the reason for this was the widespread pollution of the Bolg bloodline; they were a truly bastard race, adulterated with the blood traits of every other race they had contacted, and so no pure Bolg racial characteristics existed. Another reason, however, was that they met in the dark, and therefore could not see what others might have—that there was a unique aspect to most of them, a slightly more human, or perhaps just slightly more refined, appearance than the other Bolg.