Achmed winced and rolled his eyes. “The Sea Mages are on my list of Most Hated Entities, right up there with priests and academicians—well, I suppose they are a little of both, come to think of it.”
Meridion nodded, too encompassingly sad to appreciate the humor.
“With your permission, I believe I will make use of your suggestion and will take him first to Analise,” he said, thinking back to one of the few Liringlas he knew, his mother’s oldest friend from the Island, for whom Rhapsody had sacrificed much in those bad days. “She is a midwife of consummate ability, and has been like an aunt to me all my life. She will be able to assess him in Manosse to best determine his needs as a summoned child, and give him a peaceful place to spend his earliest days—I fear I need to help my siblings cool the preparations for war which were enacted a short time ago. When peace has returned to both sides of the Middle Continent, I will plan to take him and keep him in my care, until you return.”
“Whatever you decide, I’m certain you will take good care of Graal. Having seen how you dealt with your younger brothers and sisters, I know you will do well by him.”
Achmed reached into his pocket and pulled out the golden locket that he had taken from Rhapsody’s neck.
“This was your mother’s. I don’t really ever remember seeing her without it.”
Meridion’s eyes filled with tears. “Aye.”
“I thought you might want it. Do with it what you will. Now, let us get to blessing Graal with the violet spectrum of light, and I will provision your journey personally, as my soldiers are still affected by the indigo light.”
Meridion nodded. He turned to the Lightcatcher, sang the note for the violet part of the spectrum, Grei-ti, and set about bathing his baby brother in the light of the New Beginning, feeling both guilty and relieved.
He had spared Achmed the last detail of the story of the time-threads and the change in the Weaver’s tapestry.
It was a piece of information that would haunt his own father, should it ever become known to him.
That in the first iteration of Time, once his own birth had been accomplished, and Rhapsody had succumbed to her gruesome death, he himself had eventually been found by the guards, by his grandfather Llauron, by Oelendra and Faedryth and the other refugees in the Distant Mountains, cradled gently in his father’s arms.
He was covered in his mother’s blood—blood that was dripping from his father’s mouth, the remains of her flesh in his teeth.
Just as Ashe had dreamt about in his nightmares on this side of Time.
It was the cost of seeing the Weaver’s tapestry that would ruin his own sleep for the rest of his life.
He had not chosen to give the Bolg king the satisfaction or the grief in the knowledge that, while Achmed had been partially responsible for her death by aiding her in a decision she had made herself on this side of Time, Ashe had, in his last remaining moment of clarity, tried to put her out of her agony in the only way the dragon within him knew how on the first strand of it.
If for no other reason, the fact that my alteration of Time prevented that from happening was well worth it, he thought.
PROPHECY OF THE LAST GUARDIAN
Within a Circle of Four
Will stand a Circle of Three
Children of the Wind all, and yet none
The hunter, the sustainer, the healer
Brought together by fear, held together by love,
To find that which hides from the Wind
Hear, oh guardian,
And look upon your destiny:
The one who hunts will also stand guard
The one who sustains will also abandon
The one who heals will also kill
To find that which hides from the Wind
Listen, oh Last One, to the wind:
The wind of the Past to beckon her home
The wind of the Earth to carry her to safety
The wind of the Stars to sing the mother’s song most known to her soul
To hide the Child from the Wind.
From the lips of the Sleeping Child will come the words of ultimate wisdom:
Beware the Sleepwalker
For blood will be the means
To find that which hides from the Wind.
31
CLAPPERCLAW MOUNTAIN, YLORC
There should have been light.
Achmed had been sitting at the top of the peak of Clapperclaw Mountain, the tallest of all the fanglike peaks of the Teeth, waiting for hours for the morning to come.
And it had come, he supposed, after a disturbingly long time waiting for it. The black night had faded somewhat to a duller gray-blue, the color left over in the sky when the sun has finally taken all the ribbons of colored clouds with it beyond the horizon, but sunlight did not come with morning.
He looked down from his lofty perch at the world below, a world that had changed after a thousand years of being the same to something he could not fathom, let alone recognize.
Even now, the Firbolg soldiers were wandering the mountain paths, or the steppes, or the breastwork tunnels beyond Grivven Post, lost, it seemed, in the lands they had traveled all their lives. The night had been called, and it had come, refusing to leave. All the thrill of the buildup, the excitement of the camaraderie of brothers-in-arms, ramping up to ride off and wreak havoc in the act of avenging a beloved leader, was dissipating as they stood, waiting to be summoned by the bugle call of reveille that wasn’t coming.
Once he had stood in this very place, seeking the heartbeat of a F’dor spirit that had used its host’s blood to form a tainted construct called a Rakshas, a creature, by ironic coincidence, that had looked exactly like Ashe. He had stood at the summit of the mountain, silently calling for the heartbeat to lock itself on to his own, while Rhapsody and Grunthor had accompanied him in silence, waiting to follow him once his prey was snared.
And when at last he had found it, had located its trail, they had followed him down the mountain blindly, had run as he ran, until at last the Three had come upon the first of their great quarries and had worked as a team to destroy it.
He breathed in the cool, thin air of the mountaintop, and closed his eyes, trying to hang on to the memory for just a moment longer.
They were gone now, he knew, the only two people he was certain he had ever loved. Dear as Rhapsody’s children were to him, the esteem in which he had held her was not in the same realm as his affection for any of them.
She had referred many times to Ashe as being the other half of her soul; now Achmed wondered if, in fact, the other half of his had been Grunthor. There was something comforting about the friendship that Achmed imagined would have been impossible to expect from a woman, a silent acceptance and fit that had always felt easy on his shoulders.
Achmed wondered if the darkness he had called would ever give way again.
“I am here, Bolg king.”
Achmed opened his eyes.
Standing before him on the summit of the mountain was a face he had known only on this side of Time, but which had taught him more about his own beginnings, his roots—the mother he had never known—than any other.
Rath.
The Dhracian was looking down at him with what he grudgingly assumed was sympathy within the ancient man’s liquid black eyes without scleras, and it irritated him.
Achmed had been Rath’s quarry for centuries before they had finally come upon one another. Given that every other name Rath had been seeking was that of a demon, Achmed did not find that notion flattering.
And yet, not long after he, Grunthor, and Rhapsody had taken the mountains, Rath had appeared, finally having located him by the name the Bolg of Serendair had given him at birth, Ysk, the word for spittle. The Dhracian had explained to the incredulous king that not only he but all the upworld Dhracians, those who hunted for the loose spirits of F’dor demons in the material world, were seeking him as well, because he, as a Dhracian, should have been part of the Common Mind, the hi
ve-like consciousness to which all with Dhracian blood had a connection.
But, Rath had said, the Bolg king had something more. The accident of his birth, the mass rape of his mother by a contingent of Bolg in the old world, had produced in him ties not only to the wind, the element from which Dhracians had sprung, but also to Earth, the origin of his father’s race, whoever that father might have been.
It was a birthright that would give him the ability to not only find the elusive F’dor spirits in the air of the upworld, which all Dhracians possessed, but the ability to walk their prison of Living Stone, known as the Vault of the Underworld, and draw strength from the element from which it was made.
Rath had hounded him, more or less ceaselessly, from the time he had come across him, to take up that task.
You will need to answer this question, Assassin King—are you more assassin, or are you more king?
His first reply, a thousand years before, had been that he was a king, the ruler of a realm of monstrous men he was trying to reclaim, to take the bastard race of Firbolg, that of his unknown father, and make them a force to be contended with in the eyes of the world.
With Grunthor’s help, and Rhapsody’s, he had done that.
But now that they were both gone, and their goal had long been accomplished, Achmed could feel a change in the wind from which his mother sprang.
“You beckoned?”
Achmed exhaled and nodded.
“What is your need?”
“I have a proposal for you, Rath,” he said.
The Dhracian said nothing, waiting.
“You have long been after me to join the Primal Hunt with you and the others of our race. And while I have assisted you in the capture and killing of a few of the names on your list, I have resisted taking on that task as my first priority—something I know that has bothered you immensely over the centuries.”
Rath studied his face.
“I am not bothered, Majesty. I am just perplexed at how one of our race has managed to deny the primordial urge, the needles in our veins that demand we submit to the Primal Hunt before all else.”
“Just lucky, I suppose. I have a question to ask you.”
The Dhracian waited.
“Has the Hunt been completed? Or do you have a new list of names?”
The Dhracian’s pupils expanded, watching him intensely.
“I no longer have a list. You helped with some of them on it.”
“Is that because all the upworld F’dor are dead—or just because the hunters have killed all that they know about? Could there be more that we do not know about?”
Rath stared at him.
“There could always be more that we do not know about, Majesty,” he said darkly. “That is why we continuously comb the wind, looking for a trace of the odor of burning flesh in fire. Having the names of some of the Older and the Younger Pantheon was a helpful tool, but finding those on the list was not an end in itself.”
“I thought so. So the Primal Hunt continues?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
The Dhracian’s mouth drew tight in annoyance. “I should not have to answer this question for you, half-breed or otherwise.”
“Humor me. As I said, I have a proposal for you. I need these answers to be clear before I offer it.”
Rath’s jaw, taut a moment before, slackened. He understood the need to apply questions to any situation in which there was uncertainty.
“The Primal Hunt continues until the Earth does not, because if there is a chance that a F’dor spirit has been overlooked, the Earth will not. If a demon is hiding, unknown, somewhere in the cracks of the Earth, or within the wind itself, the possibility remains that it will continue to grow in strength and power until it finds a way to open the Vault of the Underworld and set the rest of its race free.
“We know that there is still at least one more living Earthchild, a child that slumbers eternally within your own kingdom, and whose rib would serve as a key to the Vault. Unfortunately, we know that they are also aware of this. They know that she lives, and where she sleeps—and that it is unlikely you would ever seek to move her, for you fear her death, whereas her rib is of value to them whether or not she is alive. And you are more than aware of the answer to your own questions—so what is it you are thinking?”
The Bolg king leaned back and let the thin wind and the wisps of clouds at the mountaintop race over the sensitive skin of his face.
“What am I thinking?” he mused, almost to himself. “I am thinking about my children.”
Rath blinked his enormous eyes.
“Your children?”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me, I was unaware that you had any.”
“So was I, for the longest time.”
The Dhracian looked uncomfortable. “I would have thought that such news would have been passed along through the Common Mind, given how important progeny are to the continuation of our guardian race.”
“They are mostly not of our guardian race,” Achmed said. “The first was the child you have already referenced—the Earthchild. She was the first vulnerable entity to whom I have sworn protection, with my life. You asked me once if I was more assassin, or more king—being a king allows me to guard her with considerable resources, rather than being out chasing ephemeral demons in the wind across the wide world. Chasing and killing demons would have been ever so much more fun and rewarding, but she needed me here. So here I have stayed, as much as I could.”
“I see,” said Rath. “Are there others?”
“Rhapsody told me early on that the Bolg were my children, though I scoffed at her at the time. But if children are brutish, unevolved resources that you put your time and your guidance, your knowledge and your faith into, for a purpose greater than your own selfish desires, I suppose she was right.”
He glanced down from the mountain into the blue shadows, where the children he had just mentioned were moving slowly, wandering aimlessly, waiting for a war that, with any luck, would never come.
“And there are children who call me ‘Uncle,’ the strangest of experiences for one who had neither siblings nor parents in his life. Rhapsody’s children, six in all, and a multitude of their own progeny. She made it a point to bring them to these mountains at least once a year during their childhoods, to visit, to learn their great-grandfather’s engineering brilliance, military training from Grunthor, weapons and other manufacturing, nit-picking skills, snot assault skills and other Firbolg manners—”
Rath raised an eyebrow.
“—and, the most important lesson, that the Bolg are beings entitled to the same treatment that the people of Roland enjoy. And to know their uncles.”
He sighed. It was a sound full of memory.
“And, at last, my actual son.”
“You have a son?” Rath’s tone was cautious.
“Yes.” Only in the thin air of a mountaintop could my head be so light as to be talking of this, he thought.
“Of whom?”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s dead.” Achmed sat forward and leaned an arm on his leg.
“Condolences.” Rath looked away to the east, where the sun seemed absent. “Was he conjured?”
Achmed sat up, his eyes narrowing. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I felt a momentary trembling in the Common Mind a few days ago, a new song on the wind, if only for a moment,” Rath said. “It put me in mind of the Lady Cymrian, who has studied the conjuring of a child with me, as well as with others knowledgeable of the lore. I do not know if you recall this, but long ago, when I met her first son, I asked if he had been conjured, because there was such a magical air about him.”
Achmed lapsed into silence.
“What has put you in mind of them all today?”
The wind whistled through suddenly, bringing a chill with it.
“I am trying to find a reason to do something ultimately selfless,” Achmed said. “That has never been in my natu
re; I am a selfish bastard of famous reputation. But an idea has come into my head that I cannot displace, as much as I might try. It’s utterly illogical and undoubtedly suicidal. So I have been undertaking to determine what knobbing arse is manipulating my thoughts in this way.”
“An unpleasant thing to say about your children.”
The Bolg king smiled wryly.
“I am the knobbing arse, Rath.”
“Well, I cannot dispute that.” The ancient Dhracian’s serious expression eased slightly for a breath, then returned to its stolidity. “What do you propose to undertake that would be for your children, and not yourself? Are you finally ready to join the Primal Hunt?”
“No, and never.” Achmed brushed the rocky dirt from his hands and stood, looking west. “I think I am finally ready to walk the Vault.”
An even heavier silence fell.
Rath was making the attempt to breathe quietly.
“But I cannot do it alone.”
The Dhracian shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a gnat from his ear. “Who would you imagine could do it with you?”
“You, Rath.”
“I have no lore of Earth—”
“I know. And I had no intention of taking you in with me.”
“Then, what do you—”
“I want you to guard my oldest child,” Achmed said to the Krevensfield Plain beyond the Teeth and the steppes leading up to them. “When she was first brought to the tunnels below the mountains by the Dhracians in the Colony that fought to protect her, she always had a guardian, an amelystik, who cared for her day into night into day.” He took in a measured breath and let the moist fog fill his mouth, cooling the acid of the words forming with it. “She has recently lost that guardian.”
Rath’s eyes closed.
“I am so sorry. Was it in childbirth? A result of conjuring?”
Achmed’s mind roiled at the intrusion he would normally feel at Rath’s unwanted perception, but he merely nodded. “So if you would like the event you predicted long ago to take place, you would need to agree to remain with her, day into night into day, and protect her with your life. You alone of anyone I know, at least those still among the living, are uniquely qualified to do so. You could sense a F’dor coming, more likely than anyone else, and you are a master hunter. She would be safer with you than with any other choice I could make.”