Rhapsody looked back out the window at the glistening plain, the mountains coming to rosy life in the light of dawn. She stood silently for a moment, breathing the frosty air and listening to the silence broken only by the occasional whine of a bitter wind turning ever colder.
“Everywhere,” she said. “I think it’s coming from everywhere.”
High off, from his vantage point in the Future, hanging between the threads of Time in his glass globe observatory, Meridion stared in dismay at the people he had changed history to bring to this place in the hope that they would avert the fiery death that was now consuming what was left of the Earth.
He put his head down on the instrument panel of the Time Editor and wept.
Light was breaking over the whole of the Krevensfield Plain as Achmed and Rhapsody departed, cloaked, gloved, and hooded, riding the mounts Grunthor had provisioned for them through the light snow that had come on the morning wind.
The path that led down from the foothills to the steppes was a rocky one, and necessitated a slow passage. Rhapsody scanned the sky thoughtfully, her thoughts darker than the hour before dawn. It was impossible not to notice that she had grown quiet and pensive, and finally Achmed broke the silence.
“What’s troubling you?”
Rhapsody turned her emerald gaze on him; her walk through the pure Fire at the Earth’s core had caused her to absorb the element, making her hypnotically attractive, like the element itself. When she was excited, she was breathtaking; with an undercurrent of worry in her features she was absolutely captivating. Achmed exhaled. The time was coming when his theories about the power of her beauty would be put to the test.
“Do you think the Earthchild will be all right while we’re gone?” she asked finally.
Achmed looked into her anxious face, considering the question solemnly.
“Yes,” he said, after a moment. “The tunnel to the Loritorium is finished and all the other entrances sealed. Grunthor is moving out of the barracks while I’m away and sleeping in my chambers to guard the entranceway.”
“Good,” Rhapsody said. She had stood at the tunnel entrance in the darkness of early morning and sung to the Sleeping Child, the rare and beautiful creature formed from Living Stone that slumbered perpetually in the vault miles below Achmed’s chambers. It had been hard to keep her voice steady, knowing that the F’dor they were seeking was in turn seeking the Child.
Let that which sleeps within the Earth rest undisturbed, the Dhracian sage had said. Its awakening heralds eternal night. Of all the things she had learned in the time they had been in this new world, one that frightened her the most was that such prophecies often had more than one meaning.
Yarim, she thought miserably, why did the first demon-spawn have to be in Yarim? The province lay to the northwest, on the leeward hollow of the arid plain that abutted the northern Teeth. She had been to the rotting, desolate city once before, with Ashe, looking for answers in the crumbling temple of Manwyn, the Seer of the Future. Those answers had led them to the journey they were now undertaking. Rhapsody shook her head to clear her memory of the madwoman’s maniacal laugh.
“Are you ready?” Achmed’s voice shattered her thoughts.
Rhapsody looked around; they had reached the steppes, the rocky footlands at the base of the mountains. She clucked to her horse.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s finish this.”
Together they eased their horses into a steady canter. They didn’t look back as the multicolored peaks of their mountainous home faded into the distance behind them like a memory.
In the shadows of Grivven, one of the highest peaks of the Teeth and the westernmost military outpost, four sets of Bolg eyes, night eyes of a race of men who had risen up from the caves, followed the horses until they had crested the steppes and had disappeared into the vastness of the Orlandan Plateau.
When the Bolg king could no longer be seen, one turned to the others and nodded slowly. Four men exchanged a final glance, then disappeared into the mountains, traveling in four different directions.
Meridion watched them go as well, struggling to contain his despair.
Light from the Time Editor, the now-dormant machine before him, spilled over the glass walls of his spherical tower, suspended here among the stars. Below, the world was growing dark, the black fire that was consuming it nearly at land’s end.
Soon it would consume him as well. In light of the rest of the devastation, that hardly mattered.
He leaned back against his aurelay, the vibrational field generated by his namesong, shaped now like a cushioned chair, and folded his hands, trying to remain calm. All around him the lights of his laboratory gleamed, standing ready.
Meridion sighed. There was nothing more for him to do. He reached forward and snapped the lever that closed off the blinding light of the machine’s power source from the Editor’s main bay. Nothing more.
In the new dark he could see only the viewing screen, the ghostly projection of the last strands of the timefilm he had cobbled together, using threads from the Past. He had spliced them, hoping to avert the disaster that loomed below him. It never occurred to him, in the face of the coming nightmare, that his solution might be even worse than the original problem.
How could I have known? he mused. Total destruction of the Earth in blood and black fire had seemed absolute, as horrific as any fate could have been. It never occurred to him that taking the paths he had might doom it to an even greater devastation, one that survived death, that lingered into Eternity.
Please, he whispered silently. Open your eyes and see. Please.
Even as he watched, the Time-strand grew filmy, changing from the Past to the Present. Soon it would be the Future. Whatever came to pass, he could no longer intervene; the thread would never again be solid enough to manipulate.
Meridion settled back into the humming chair and closed his eyes, to wait.
Please…
1
Yarim Paar, Province of Yarim
In winter the dry red earth that had given Yarim its name was akin to desert sand. Granular specks of it hung heavy in the air of the decaying province, sweeping it like a vengeful wind demon, stinging with cold.
That blood-red clay-sand glistened in the first light of morning, sprinkled with a thin coating of crystalline frost. The frost painted the dilapidated stone buildings and neglected streets, dressing them for a moment in a shining finery that Yarim’s capital had no doubt known long ago, an elegance that now existed only in memory, and for a few fleeting moments in the rosy haze of sunrise.
Achmed reined his horse to a stop at the crest of a rolling hill that led down into the crumbling city below him. He stared down into the valley as Rhapsody came to a halt beside him, musing. Looking down at Yarim from above gave him the opposite sensation to looking up at Canrif from the steppes at the edge of the Krevensfield Plain. While the Bolg were reclaiming the mountain, reaching skyward along with the peaks, Yarim sat broken, fetid, all but forgotten, at the bottom of this hill like dried mud left behind where a pond had been. Where once there had been greatness now there was not only decay, but diffidence, as if even the Earth were oblivious of the state of ruin that was Yarim. It seemed a pity.
Rhapsody dismounted first, walking to the edge of the hill’s crest. “Pretty in the light of first sun,” she said absently, staring off beyond the city’s walls.
“Like the beauty of youth; it’s fleeting,” Achmed said, descending himself. “The mist will burn off momentarily, and the sparkle will be gone, leaving nothing but a vast carcass rotting in the sun. Then we’ll see her for the aged hag she really is.” He would be glad to see the glistening vapor go; mist such as this hung wet in the air, masking vibration. It might hide the signature of the ancient blood that surged in the veins of the F’dor’s spawn hidden somewhere amid all that standing rubble.
An inexplicable shiver ran through him, and he turned to Rhapsody. “Did you feel that?”
She shook her hea
d. “Nothing unusual. What was it?”
Achmed closed his eyes, waiting for the vibration to return. He felt nothing now but the calm, cold gusts of the wind. “A tingle on the surface of my skin,” he said after a moment, when he could not reclaim the sensation.
“Perhaps you’re feeling Manwyn,” Rhapsody suggested. “Sometimes when a dragon is examining something with its senses, there’s a chill of sorts; a presence. It’s almost like a—a hum; it tickles.”
Achmed shielded his eyes. “I had wondered what you could have possibly seen in Ashe,” he said sourly, gazing down into the morning shadows as they began to stretch west of the city. “Now I know. Manwyn knows we’re here, then.” He gritted his teeth; they had hoped to avoid the notice of the mad Seer, the unpredictable dragonchild who wielded her Seren father’s ancient power of vision and her dragon mother’s control over the elements.
Rhapsody shook her head. “Manwyn knew we were coming before we got here. If someone asked her a week, or a day, or even a moment ago, she could have told him so. But now that we’re here, it’s the Present. Manwyn can see only the Future. I think the moment has passed. We’re gone from her awareness.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.” Achmed glanced around, looking for a high rise of ground or other summit on which to stand. He spied a jutting outcropping of rock to the east. He set his pack on the ground, pulling forth a scrap of fabric that had once been soaked in the blood of the Rakshas, now dried to the same color as the earth in Yarim. “That’s the place. Wait here.”
Rhapsody nodded, and drew her cloak closer as she watched Achmed lope over to the small hilly rise. She had witnessed his Hunting ritual once before, and knew that he required absolute silence and stillness of movement to be able to discern a flickering heartbeat on the wind. She clucked softly to the horses, hoping to gentle them into a quiet contentment.
Achmed climbed to the top of the outcropping and stood with nothing but the wind surrounding him on all sides, staring down into the skeletal city. Somewhere amid its broken buildings a tainted soul was hiding, one of the nine children spawned of the ancient evil through a systematic campaign of rape and propagation. The blood in his own veins burned at the thought.
With a single, smooth motion he pulled away the veils that shielded his skin-web, the network of sensitive nerves and exposed veins that scored his neck and face, casting a final glance back at Rhapsody. She smiled but did not move otherwise. Achmed turned away.
He knew Rhapsody was aware that because of his Dhracian heritage he was predisposed to disposal, not rescue, of anything that contained the blood of F’dor. This undertaking, should it prove successful, would undoubtedly be the first time one of his race would hunt a creature spawned of the F’dor and not exterminate it immediately upon capture.
The natural detachment that the Dhracians felt when confronting the malignant filth had deserted him, leaving him shaking with hatred. It was all he could do to remain calm, to keep from allowing his racial proclivities to roar forth, launching him into a blood rage that would culminate in the efficient, traceless slaughter of this demon-child and all its misbegotten siblings. He swallowed and began to breathe shallowly, trying to keep focused on the greater outcome.
That ancient blood, which pulsed softly now in the distance like a trace of perfume across a crowded bazaar, could eventually help him find the F’dor itself.
Achmed closed his eyes and willed the landscape from his mind, emptying it of conscious thought, concentrating on the rhythm of his own pulse. As always, when this moment of the hunt came, he could almost smell the odor of candle wax in the monastery where he was raised, could hear his mentor speak again in his memory.
Child of Blood, Father Halphasion had intoned softly in his fricative voice. Brother to all men, akin to none. The Dhracian sage, dead more than a thousand years now.
The hunt required of him a tremendous sacrifice, both mental and spiritual. It was in the power of those words that he had been able to divert his kirai, the Seeking vibration inherent in all Dhracians, to hone onto the heartbeats of non-F’dor, his own unique gift. Brother to all men. He had been known only as the Brother most of his life, a deadly relative to his victims, whose pulses had briefly shared a rhythm with his.
Let your identity die, the Grandmother had instructed him; the ancient guardian and mentor so recently gone. It was more than his identity, however. At the moment when he subdued his own vibration, even that part of him which might be called a soul disappeared without a trace, replaced by the distant, thudding rhythm of his target.
He once wondered casually what would happen if instead of emerging the victorious stalker, he were to die while following his kirai. The place to which his identity went while in the throes of the hunt was undoubtedly the Void, the great emptiness of space, the opposite of Life. He suspected, when he allowed himself to think about it, that should luck turn against him and his victim instead overpower and kill him, everything that had been part of his identity would dissipate instantly, shattering in that empty space into tiny particles that would burn out forever like firesparks, robbing him of any existence in the Afterlife.
It was a risk he could abide.
All thought receded, replaced by a distant thudding that grew ever louder with each breath.
The pulse was at the same time alien and familiar to him. There was a hint of the old world, a hum that had beat in the veins of every soul born on Seren soil; the deep magic in the Island of Serendair had a unique ring to it, and it permeated the blood of those whose lives had been brought into existence there. But this was only the slightest trace in the rhythm that made up the rest of the heartbeat.
When he had first learned to listen to his skin, he had heard a roar of drums. Countless chaotic, cacophonous rhythms had thundered directly into him, threatened to overwhelm him, to drown him like the echoes of waves in a canyon. Here he heard barely a whisper.
Because the blood that pumped through the demon-spawn’s heart was almost totally of this world, he could not discern its rhythm, could not track it. The blood of the new world swirled around the evanescent flutter from the old world like ocean waves, like a windstorm of dried leaves in the last vestiges of autumn; and occasionally he could taste some of its traits. He chased them with his breath, tasted the mix and dip of tones, looking for the deep shadow tone he was hunting.
There would be warmth in a pulse-wave that broke over him—that must be from the child’s unknown mother—followed by the chill of ice; bequeathed by its father, the Rakshas, the artificial being that had sired all these cursed progeny of its demonic master. There was something feral in there as well, something with red eyes and a wild, brutal nature. Rhapsody had said the F’dor used the blood of wolves and other night creatures when it constructed the Rakshas. Perhaps that was it.
Still, each passing moment the ancient rhythm grew slightly louder, a bit clearer. Achmed opened his left hand and held it aloft, allowing the gusts of wind to dance over his palm.
Each intake of breath became slower, deeper, each exhalation measured. When the pattern of his breathing matched that of the distant beating heart, he turned his attention to his own heart, to the pressure it exerted on the vessels and pathways through which his blood flowed. He willed it to slow, lowering his pulse to a level barely able to sustain his life. He drove all stray thoughts from his mind, leaving it blank except for the color red. Everything else faded, leaving nothing but the vision of blood before his mind’s eye.
Blood will be the means, the prophecy had said.
Child of Blood. Brother to all men, akin to none.
Achmed held absolutely still, remained utterly silent. He loosed the pulse of his own heart, willing it to match the distant heartbeat. Like trying to catch a flywheel in motion, he could only synchronize with one beat in every five, then every two, until each beat matched perfectly. He clung to the tiny burr of the ancient blood, followed it through distant veins, chased its flow, gathered its ebb until from that whisper
of a handhold he crawled into his victim’s rhythm. Their heartbeats locked.
And then, as the trail became clear, as his prey became unerringly linked to him, another tiny, discordant rhythm shattered the cadence. Achmed clutched his chest and staggered back as pain exploded like a volcano inside him.
Over his agonized groan he could hear Rhapsody gasp. His body rolled down the rocky outcropping, battering his limbs against the frozen rock ledge. Achmed struggled to find consciousness, catching intermittent glimpses of it from moment to moment, then fading into darkness between. The two heartbeats he had found wrestled inside his own; breath failed him. He clenched his teeth. The sky swam in blue circles, then went black.
He felt warmth surround him. The wind that tickled his nostrils was suddenly sweeter. Achmed opened his eyes to see Rhapsody’s face swimming among the circles.
“Gods! What happened?” Her voice vibrated strangely.
Achmed gestured dizzily and curled into a tight ball, lying sideways on the ground. He took several deliberate, measured breaths, the cold wind stinging his burning chest. He noted absently that Rhapsody was still beside him, but had refrained from touching him. She’s learning, he thought, strangely pleased.
With the grind of sand in his teeth and a painful growl, he forced himself into a crouch. They sat in silence on the windy hilltop above the crumbling city. When the sun was overhead and the shadows shifted, Achmed finally looked up. He exhaled deeply, then rose to a shaky stand, waving away the offer of her hand.
“What happened?” Her voice was calm.
Slowly he shook the sand from his clothes, retied his veils, staring down at Yarim below. The city had come to life of a sort while he had been coming back to himself, and now human and animal traffic shuffled through the unkempt streets, filling the distant air with sound.
“There’s another one here,” he said.
“Another child?”