“To the Void with you,” she whispered. “You dare to come to me? After all this time?”
From within the cold, dark fire she could hear an unmistakable chuckle.
Now, my dear, don’t be petulant. I come as I am able. You know this.
“Four hundred years?” she spat, drawing her brocade gown closer about her broad, thin shoulders. “You come only when it benefits you. What do you want this time?”
The firelight twinkled, almost merrily, but with an undertone that was sinister.
I’ve missed you. She turned angrily away in a swirl of ancient silk. And the time is coming soon. I thought perhaps you might wish to be ready.
“Curse your riddles. What do you want?”
A firecoal spattered, then exploded with a sharp pop, followed by a sustained hiss.
You, my love, the silky voice whispered from deep within the flames.
Something within the depths of her loneliness began to sting painfully.
“Begone,” she murmured, keeping her back to the hearth. “I have done as you asked. Look well on what became of it.” She gestured angrily at the immense, cavernous castle, empty and sparse. “You promised me sole dominion, and you fulfilled your oath—here I dwell, Queen Undisputed of the frozen world, banished from all I held dear, forgotten in the sight of the world and the minds of men. A thing of the Past; how ironic. I want no more of your hollow promises, no more of you. Begone.”
Draw nearer, sweet.
“No.”
Please. Gone was the wheedling tone, replaced by something darker, more ardent. It was the husky timbre she remembered from so long ago, and the flesh between her legs began to burn again. Reluctantly she turned; the fire leapt excitedly when it met her gaze.
Gwydion lives.
The serpentine eyes opened wide, then narrowed immediately.
“Impossible,” she said defiantly. “That pathetic Lirin traitor carried him to the Veil of Hoen, where he died. He never returned; I would have seen it.”
Sit beside me, sweet. The fire crackled invitingly. Please.
She continued to glare into the cold inferno, then slowly sank to the floor, her gown whispering around her as it fell in silken folds.
The fire gleamed ever brighter, casting flickering shadows and, finally, heat into the frigid chamber. Beads of perspiration moistened her hairline, the nape of her neck.
“Impossible,” she repeated.
Apparently there are things in this world that are hidden from your eyes, my flame. A roar of new heat, then the fire settled back, burning warmly. It matters not. He is no longer the one I seek.
“Why?” Her surprise made the word fall out of her mouth, and she swallowed hastily, as if that would help her call it back.
The firecoals glimmered. He must be even stronger now than he was then. As I said, it matters not. I have chosen another. A second pulsing glimmer. Then the voice again, whispering low. Take down your hair for me. Please.
As if it had a will of its own, her hand reached into the thick mane of tangled curls and touched the jeweled clasp at the nape of her neck. Her hand trembled as her fingers struggled to unbind it. Finally the clasp came free, and the mass of gleaming copper hair fell heavily across her shoulders. She could hear an audible intake of breath from within the hearth.
“You will spare him, then?” She hated the tremulous note that had crept into her voice.
The flames burned darkly for a moment, then resolved into bright heat again.
Do not ask questions you really don’t wish answers to, sweet. It dampens the mood.
The Seer laughed sharply. “Ah, so you don’t wish to be reminded of your own failures, then? I have not seen the death of the Patriarch that you predicted so long ago. Now, why is that? Did your plan fail you, as it did me? Or is the Patriarch your host now?”
The flames blackened immediately at her words, and the fire roared angrily.
Gentle, sweet. This is not ground on which you wish to tread. The fire burned hot, then settled once more into glowing warmth. The Three have finally come, as I assume you know.
She laughed. “Indeed. And they have taken Canrif, but what they are doing there defies my gift; I cannot see into the mountain.” Her tone grew darker. “When Gwylliam banished me he sealed that realm from my eyes; it is forever beyond my sight.”
The flames crackled erotically. Unlace your gown.
She laughed again. “You would pleasure me, then?”
Indeed. Unlace your gown, my flame, and I will tell you what else is beyond your sight. I will tell you of the Future.
The vertical slits in her blue eyes expanded in interest, though she fought to keep her face calm. Her fingers flew to her bodice, and quickly began to tug at the laces of her gown.
The voice in the fire chuckled. Ah, you still crave it, do you, sweet? It must be painful, never being able to experience the Present until it has become the Past. The flames danced as her fingers ceased untying the laces. Don’t stop, sweet. My time grows short.
Slowly she opened the bodice and slid the filmy sleeves from her arms. The firelight licked her golden skin, scored with infinitesimal lines resembling tiny scales, making it shine like burnished metal. She dropped her eyes, naked to the waist in the reflected glow.
You are ever beautiful, sweet. The warm words inspired a ferocious blush, starting at her lonely heart and radiating outward to the tips of her long fingers. Time has not marked even a day on you since last we coupled in passion on the floor of the Great Hall. Do you remember, my flame?
“Yes.”
Come closer. Remove your gown.
Slowly she stood, the bodice and sleeves gathered in her arms, clutched across her waist. Then, with one fluid movement she let go, and the brocade silk nightgown rolled to the floor like an ocean wave.
“Why do you not come to me in the flesh?” she whispered. “It is so lonely here in the cold mountain.”
Certain obligations of my current host proscribe that pleasure of the flesh from me now. But fear not, sweet. Soon I will give up this body and move on to one you are certain to enjoy more. The fire settled back into coals. Come into me.
She laughed, not the tinkling laugh of a young woman, but the strident sound of trumpets blaring victory. “Words I once spake unto you.”
I remember. The flames died back even further. Come into me, sweet.
Slowly she approached the hearth, then knelt down before the fire. Trembling in anticipation, she lay back and slid her long legs slowly into the maw of the vast hearth.
The firecoals gleamed gently, then more intensely. Tiny flames appeared, and began licking her legs, dancing over her body, heating her blood. She exhaled and moved closer, letting the growing heat melt the bitter sting between her legs.
Sweet.
Sweat trickled between her breasts now, as tongues of flame crawled over her thighs, seeking to explore her more intimately. The harsh loneliness that had taken root within her warmed and withered to ashes, leaving nothing but willing need, calling in silent, multitoned voices from within her wyrm blood.
The flames surged, rolling up over her waist, lighting her breasts with a glowing radiance. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the fire’s blissful ministrations, then spoke again as her excitement began to mount.
“Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me of the Future.”
A billow of heat pushed her legs further apart, reaching up into her, and she gasped in pleasure.
Soon I will take the Patriarchy, the voice from the hearth whispered back. The setback on the Holy Night was temporary. When I am Patriarch I will crown Tristan Steward king, and then take him as well, in the moment before the crown touches his brow, while he is still the weaker of us, discarding the old body like chaff. The fire surged again, wrapping around her, entering her fully, and she cried out in joy. Finally the army will be mine; Roland will join with Sorbold and Gwynwood. We will take the mountain. Then I will have the Child. And then the key. And then the Vault.
And then the Earth.
“From without? But—”
The flames crackled, sending hot shivers through her, and she gasped again.
No, sweet; I have already thought of that. Even you could not wrest the mountain from your accursed husband; the mountain fell from within, as well as without. The flame pulsed abruptly, showering her with sparkling embers. The means are already in place.
She began to breathe more shallowly, stretching her arms lazily above her head, feeling the fire move over her, swirling in rivers of flame around her breasts, caressing her throat. Her moan of ecstasy all but drowned out the quiet words.
I require your assistance, sweet. Say you will.
“How—”
No. The word was terse and cold; with its utterance, the fire died back, smoldering in angry coals. She shivered violently with its loss. No, my flame. Do not ask “how” first. Once you pledged me anything I asked to achieve your ends, and I fulfilled the bargain. You are still in my debt, sweet. You will deny me nothing. Say you will do whatever I ask.
“Please,” she whispered, lost amid the ache of denied passion and the grip of uncertainty.
Say it.
“I will,” she snarled. The air in the room grew thin and static, a sign of her dragon blood rising, rampant. “But then the scales are balanced; agreed?”
Agreed.
The fire roared back, swallowing her in its jaws, tongues of flame darting, serpentine, in all the places that cried out for its touch. She lay back again, her mouth open, panting, as the flames consumed her, pleasuring her ancient blood, her lonely flesh. She cried out in fury mixed with rapture; thunder rolled through the pale mountains, shaking the snowcaps loose, sending avalanches tumbling down into the distant valleys.
Later, as she lay, spent, in the shadows of the flickering hearth, she listened absently to the words whispered in the fire. She nodded slightly, trying to recover her breath.
I need your memories.
“I understand.”
Ylorc, in the Deep Tunnels
Achmed stood at the convergence of five tunnels, lost.
This was surely the place to which the Sleeping Child, through her hand-shaped map on the stone wall of her chamber, had directed him. He had stood for hours over the device in Gwylliam’s hidden library that monitored the movement of the Bolg throughout the mountains, watching this place, but no one ever came. He had listened with unending patience at the apparatus that led to speaking tubes throughout all of Canrif, trying to discern what was happening beneath his nose. His efforts were not getting him far.
Now, as he waited, hidden, at this strange, handlike crossroads, he felt something he had never truly felt before, a kind of growing despair that perhaps what faced him was beyond his means to keep in check.
Getting control of this mountain was like trying to inhale all the smoke from a forest fire. No matter how hard he drew it in, tendrils escaped, wisped away to lost, unknown places, old Cymrian claims, or the hiding places of those long dead. And he couldn’t inhale forever.
Only one word whispered up through the ancient tube had caught his ear in all his long hours of wait. It was a simple word, at the same time a strange one, with no explanation attached to it, spoken between a midwife and a common foot soldier in passing.
Finders.
Nonetheless, that single word was the key; he knew it deep within the parts of him that sensed the heartbeat of the Bolg kingdom, that gave him power over the land and its occupants. More and more since he had become the warlord in this abandoned ruin peopled by monsters of his own kind he was beginning to understand the concept of royalty, of kingly authority that ran in blood. Only it ran in more than blood—Achmed felt it in his nerves, in his teeth, in the hair of his head and his skin-web; these were his people, and they had a secret from him, a secret so well guarded that even Gwylliam’s endless library held not a single reference to it.
Now, as he waited at the place the Earthchild had suggested, he felt them, like mice in the dark, or the first stirrings of lice, and understood what Gwylliam must have felt trying to keep the mountain from exploding at the beginning of the end of it all.
He knew that though the Bolg were a mutable race, certain features held true: they valued strength, they prized children, they craved movement, they lived spare and traveled light. Even their language was all action and function, with few objects. So in that one word—Finders—he knew there was power, something deep and intrinsic to this place, something he should know about, but did not.
He carried no weapons but the cwellan and a concealed skinning knife that only Grunthor knew about. It had a dark, rainbow-black steel blade, and was a parting gift from the old world. In most circumstances he could rely on his path lore to find the way to what he sought, but he still was uncertain what he was looking for.
Slowly Achmed paced the centerpiece of the tunnels, listening at each one of the fingers, hearing nothing. Doubtless down one or more of them were the Finders that he sought, hiding at the edge of his awareness, taunting him, however inadvertently, like children playing a game of blindman’s buff. Whether they were the ones selling his weapons to Sorbold no longer mattered now. What did matter was that they had a secret from him, and he could not abide that.
But he would have to abide it a short while longer.
Perhaps, once Rhapsody returned with the blood of the demon, he himself would now be a Finder. He had often contemplated the ritual he would use once she delivered it to him; it would need to be done in a special place, a place secure from the wind, and from the eyes of the world.
He wondered, as he examined the openings in the Hand, if this were the place.
The proper site to have done it would have been beneath the great pendulum of the long-dead Dhracian colony, a place that allowed no essence to escape. He had trained with the Grandmother in the Thrall ritual there, learning the secrets of his Dhracian heritage, the primordial power granted them to hold both sides of F’dor, man and demon, in thrall, a skill bequeathed them as the jailors who once gave up life in the wind from which they originated to stand guard over the great Vault of the Underworld in which the F’dor had been imprisoned. But that place was sealed now; there was no way to get back in without risking the safety of the Sleeping Child. He spat on the sandy ground at the mere thought of it.
The five corners of the hand shared similar characteristics to the vast vertical chamber in which the pendulum swung. In a way it cycled the signals that fell to its center, like water in sea caves, washing away from the depth with the tide, but then falling back to level, unable to escape.
This was the place.
The last message she had sent with the bird had indicated she was successful in her undertaking, and would be home soon. The anticipation was painful.
Achmed listened once more, then hurried back up the corridor from which he had come.
In the distance, the Finders watched him go, wide eyes blinking in the dark.
27
Sorbold
The gambling complex of Sorbold was the largest group of buildings in the city-state of Jakar, and sprawled threateningly across the southern end of the borough of Nikkid’saar. On days when gladiatorial bouts were not scheduled it lay quiet and more or less undisturbed, except for the occasional delivery caravan and the entry and exit of the slaves and free workers whose efforts kept the complex running. On the days of the fights, however, this end of the borough writhed with humanity and animal life, as tens of thousands jammed the streets around the arena, teeming with the excitement and commerce of blood sport.
Rhapsody could see that Llauron was right about the schedule of events; this had been a day of contest, and an enormous stream of people, complete with its accompanying noise and smell, was flooding back into the roadway around the arena, filling the streets with the sounds of jostling and screaming, laughing and bickering. It was easy to get lost in the cacophony, and she happily did, blending in with the crowd until she found the entrance into th
e arena closest to the sprawling addition at the rear of the complex. This addition must hold the gladiators’ quarters, she reasoned, and she looked for a point of exit near to the southern gate of the borough, where she had left the horse and where Khaddyr and the reinforcements would meet up with her.
Rhapsody found a sheltered area to wait in as light snow began to fall, turning the streets to mud and the mood of the masses ugly. She watched carefully as she passed the time, noting that there were, in fact, a number of women dressed in clothes similar to those she was wearing under the woolen cloak. Their attire seemed drabber and more modest by comparison, but perhaps it was just a factor of her discomfort with the revealing nature of the disguise.
In addition, the women dressed as she was were often being roughly herded in and out of the complex, occasionally with the sting of a whip. Rhapsody’s blood boiled, and she could feel the fire within her rise to the surface of her skin, but she swallowed her anger at the sight and steadied her resolve. She was here to save the gladiator, not change the culture of Sorbold, however much she may have wanted to.
The streets surrounding the arena contained feeder alleys that led into small courtyards. In each of these central areas that she had passed, Rhapsody saw minor bouts of fighting taking place amid a smaller, loose crowd of observers, peasants and merchants who broke into hooting cheers as particularly bloody hits were landed.
The combatants in these street bouts often appeared to be barely out of childhood, boys and occasionally girls as young as perhaps nine summers, attacking each other with such zealous ferocity that the victor often had to be restrained from gutting his fallen opponent. Rhapsody shuddered as a great cry of delight rose, along with an arching spray of blood, from a contest between two young boys no older than her adopted grandson, Gwydion Navarne.
The closer courtyards to the arena held the semi-professionals, gladiators in training who were not yet deemed worthy to fight in the arena, but who had already garnered, in most cases, a large and devoted following among the street audience. Gambling was widely evident, with odds-makers working the crowd furiously, trying to coax from them some of the Sorboldian goldstones they had brought to wager in the arena itself.