The cackling around the massive chamber and high above the turgid lake diminished.
Achmed’s face darkened, the way it did when he was sighting his cwellan.
He raised both blades simultaneously.
And, with all the dexterity he had been gifted with since birth, he slapped the turgid waves of the lake with Kirsdarke.
The water surged and leapt like a tidal wave, reaching to the very top of the domed ceiling, immersing the hovering flame demons.
As, with a countersweep, Achmed summoned the wind of Tysterisk, spiraling it in vast, ragged rings swelling through the massive canyon.
The Vault was silent of demonic sounds for a moment; nothing could be heard save the roar of the water and the screech of the dusty wind blasting over the lake.
The howls of terror began, then were summarily choked off, as the flame demons expanded and blew apart, slammed into the cavern ceiling and walls, drowned, gagging and choking as their fiery, formless bodies sagged under the weight of the airborne water, or fell, spiraling, like a flock of thousands of birds plummeting into the cold lake.
They did not make so much as a plink as they winked out, wrapped in an all-consuming storm of complete and utter silence.
The Master, hovering at the center of the conundrum, let loose a roar of rage in the multitude of voices, all of which were smothered in the heavy blanket of water-filled air.
Rendering him speechless.
Achmed saluted again, then tossed the flagon into the lake.
The waves settled, ice floes spinning helplessly amid the still-floating souls, as silence resolved in the cavern, this time naturally.
Achmed reached out and put his hand on Jarmon’s trembling shoulder.
“Look well upon this, the extinction of the bastard race, or the race of bastards, from the Before-Time,” he said quietly. “I’m glad we lived to see this day.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jarmon mumbled.
The Master alone remained, hovering in the damp air. Its flame visage, roaring orange and yellow in panic the moment before, settled into a red burn.
“You’ve come a very long way for nothing, I fear, Ysk,” it said in a solitary voice of surpassing anger, cold and deadly.
Achmed snorted. It was a laugh of pain and victory at the same time. He swallowed the blood in his mouth that had come from clenching his jaws, his lips contorting into a sneer.
“How do you see nothing in this moment?”
The monstrous shadow’s vibration darkened to the color of blood.
“You will never leave here,” it said menacingly. “You cannot get out again any more than we ever could. It will be a living death for you. You will be trapped, as we were trapped, in this place of endless darkness, away from all that you once knew, once ruled. You will never get out.”
“I never expected to,” said the Bolg king smugly. “I have lived most of my life redecorating underground palaces that have been crudely inhabited in the past. This may be a challenge compared to Canrif, but I have all the time in the world now.”
The beast’s vibration cooled slightly.
Achmed could taste its fear.
“You are the last one,” he said, each word slow and deliberate. “The—last—one. All the others are gone, dead, dissipated, silenced—every target you had for hate, because you could not spread it to the world at large, is no longer here. You think that because your kind have craved freedom and wanton destruction in the wide world, every other living thing does as well. Wrong.
“All my life, the wind that is in my blood has been both bane and blessing. While I can ride it and find the heartbeats of my enemies on it, I have also found it to be an irritant. There is no wind to speak of down here, especially now that your playmates have been spun into oblivion. All of that cacophony is stilled. It will be a fine place to sleep. I am quite content, actually. If you could see how I decorated my royal bedchambers in Ylorc, you would know what a joy this will be for me.
“So,” he finished, “I offer you an honor you and your kind definitely don’t merit, but it is my pleasure to give it to you nonetheless. While I may not dance much, I have been known to sing. It is not for you that I do so, however; it is a dirge, not for your kind, but in honor of one who suffered at your lies, who vanquished your brethren in the upworld, and, like the rest of the world, has no need to fear you ever again.”
In a harsh voice, filled with the grief and pain and loss he had carried all his life and in the recent past, he raised the sword of air and pointed it at the Master, then began to chant.
Mo hale maar, my hero gone—
The beast wrenched as currents of wind encircled it, wrapping it tightly in elemental bonds of power.
World of star become world of bone
Grief and pain and loss I know
The monster let out a roar of rage that echoed off the walls of the cavern, only to be swallowed a moment later by the whine of the wind as it rose in reply.
My heart is sore, my blood-tears flow, Achmed intoned, his throat ragged now.
He continued to sweep Tysterisk about, choking and dragging the flame that was the Master around the obelisk throne in the air.
His brow darkened as he held up Kirsdarke again. As the dirge neared its end, the lake beneath the monster rose up once more, this time in an immense column of black water centered around the stone.
Then, with a surging roar, the water swallowed it, blowing the beast and the stone into a thousand sparks that shot to the corners of the cavern, then winked out in the blackness.
To end my sorrow I must roam, Achmed whispered, his voice bloody and dry.
My terrors old, they lead me home.
41
The Bolg king looked around.
All throughout the cavern there was a heavy silence, but it was not as caustic as it had been moments before. The shadows of the tens of thousands of gray-faced innocents that had been tempest-tossed for ages, and especially in the throes of the ending of the race of F’dor, stared at him gauntly from the now-stilled lake.
He let out his breath slowly. “Where is the door?” he asked Jarmon.
The living corpse pointed to the lake.
“At the bottom,” he said.
Achmed closed his eyes and muttered a muted curse.
“Of course it is,” he said. “How good a swimmer are you, Jarmon?”
The remains of what had once been an intrepid soldier turned and looked at the Bolg king in what appeared to be terror. Achmed sighed humorously.
“That’s what I assumed you would, er, not say,” he said.
He slid Tysterisk into its sheath in the twin bandolier, then shook Kirsdarke free of the condensation that was soiling its blade.
“I beg your pardon,” he said to the ancient weapon of water. “As truly as you deserve to be cleansed and placed back on the altar stone of Abbat Mythlinis, I fear I am going to have to make what I hope will be one last request of you.”
Achmed took off his knapsack and felt around in the bottom. He pulled forth the last of the glowing spores, the large flask of Canderian brandy, which he tucked in a pocket, and the key of bone.
“Can you carry my gear, Jarmon?” he asked. The old soldier nodded quickly. “All right. Get everyone you can out of the lake, every shadow, every shade, every child, whomever you can. I’m going to the bottom to see if I can find the door. If I don’t return, get these people out of here through the other door if you can.”
“Majesty,” Jarmon stuttered, “we—we are all—dead, sir.”
Achmed shrugged. “I think I’ve done all that I can do in that regard, Jarmon,” he said, checking the viability of his boots. “The woman who—the mother of my child told me often that she believed that paradise was not a common meeting ground in the Afterlife, but that each person made his or her own place in it. You will all just have to find your own paradise now.”
“Aye, sir,” said the withered soldier. His sunken teeth and parched skin seemed to spread in
to the approximation of a smile.
“If I am able, I will be back presently,” Achmed said. He held the hilt of Kirsdarke tightly, squeezed the glowing spore in his other hand, and, making certain there was no one below him in the icy black lake, stepped off the rocky edge and fell, feet-first, into the water.
The sting of his eyes almost made him drop the sword.
Achmed waited for a moment for the ability to breathe underwater to kick in. When it did, the air in his lungs was dry and heavy, like that in the Vault.
He held the glowing sword, and the spore, outstretched in front of him, then kicked down to the bottom of the lake.
He started at the base of where he and Jarmon had entered this last part of the Vault, the ghostly light of the sword and the spore bringing a bluish illumination to the horrors of the black lake’s depths. He swam past skulls and skeletal limbs, rusty swords and manacles and a host of other terrifying objects, brushing them aside and searching each rock, each silty patch, for something resembling a keyhole.
He found nothing.
How long he remained in the water, the element he loathed, carefully examining the bottom, he had no guess. The ringing bell that had led him on all his previous expeditions was sickeningly silent; the great Kirsdarkenvar had traveled the length and breadth of the sea, its trenches and abyssal plains, but Achmed imagined even MacQuieth had not ventured into this cold black lake of haunted water and ice.
After what seemed to be an endless search, he saw the obelisk above which the Master had been hovering and swam over to it, holding up the sword to aid in its examination.
Almost immediately he saw the runes glowing brighter with his approach.
A key-shaped hole outlined in what appeared to be gold was proudly displayed in the center of the runes.
Is this even possible? he thought sourly as he swam closer. Can that possibly be the keyhole?—of course not. That never happens. Probably I will put the key in and it will snap off, condemning me to this place of everlasting darkness with ten thousand shadows, an old fisherman I have not met yet, and a living mummy who shows potential as a poet for all eternity, because Life has a terrible sense of humor.
The keyhole gleamed.
Just as one like it had gleamed when he had approached Sagia, the Oak of Deep Roots, with just such a key, two thousand years before, on the other side of Time, with his Sergeant-Major friend and a struggling female hostage.
Achmed held his breath, and inserted the key into the hole in the obelisk.
He had to kick violently a few seconds later as the giant rock column began to turn and grind, disappearing before his eyes into a oxcart-sized hole in the bottom of the lake.
Well, he thought as he snatched the key from the spinning lock and swam back, still facing the obelisk sinking quickly from view, I do suppose after walking the Vault of the Underworld, anything has to be luckier by comparison.
The water around him began to race toward the hole. Achmed swam to the surface and signaled to Jarmon.
“Try to be calm,” he shouted over the flailing of the panicking shadows. “It will all be over soon, one way or another.”
* * *
After an indeterminate amount of time, the frigid water of the dark lake had drained, and the Bolg king sat at the edge of the hole in the floor of the Vault of the Underworld.
He was listening to the silence.
Jarmon had managed to help him round up the Lost, as they had been called, empty, lifeless souls without memories of who they had been or where they had even come from, men, women, and children who nonetheless complied with the dead soldier’s commands and had formed an enormous line, waiting to enter the corridor through which the waters of the icy lake had drained.
“Take them into the corridor beyond the door, and wait for me there,” the Bolg king had instructed.
Jarmon nodded.
Once the Lost had left the cavern, Achmed stood alone in the center of what had been the lake, listening to the silence.
He thought of the Dhracians he had known, Father Halphasion, the Grandmother, and Rath, and those he had met in the course of the Hunt, when he had deigned to join it. Stalwart protectors, with no thought of any life beyond the endless vigilance demanded of their race; he wished they could have been there, just for a moment, to see the Vault, now empty.
He thought of the night when he and Rath had sat out atop one of the peaks of Canrif, the ancient Dhracian telling him of his heritage, of his mother, of the race that sought him endlessly, wanting to bring him into the Common Mind so that he could be one of them.
Rath had looked at him with his strange, scleraless eyes, imparting all of the seriousness of his belief.
You could walk the Vault alone, and when you were done the silence would ring with nothing but the whisper of your name.
He closed his eyes, feeling the echo of the silence.
Ysk, the Bolg had called him. A grievous insult, the word for spittle or vomit. And yet from that race, that name, he had gained the lore to walk this place, to have standing here.
To vanquish it.
“Ysk,” he whispered.
The circular vault caught the sounds and spun them around, ascending and descending what had once been the thoracic cavity of the first dragon in the world.
Ysk—Ysk—Ysk—Ysk—Ysk—Ysk—
Even as it layered onto itself, there was a fricative percussion to it, almost like the hand drums that the monks had played in the monastery where he had sought sanctuary as a youth, where he had been brought, close to death, by the first person who had ever shown him mercy and kindness.
In his mind he could hear the voice of Father Halphasion, the gentle Dhracian monk, as the priest bound up the wounds he had sustained in his escape from the Bolg. He could almost smell the candle wax of the monastery.
Child of Blood—brother to all men, akin to none.
He whispered those words next, listening with his eyes closed to them rise and fall in the dusty air, repeated endlessly, as if dancing with the fricative name the Bolg had called him.
Brother—the Brother—the Brother—the—
And then, a sweet voice, recently having achieved Namer status, even though she hadn’t known it yet, spoke in the now-comforting darkness of his thoughts.
This is my Brother—Achmed—the Snake.
His voice trembled as he whispered the name she had given him, hearing the Vault ring with it.
Achmed—the—Snake—Achmed—the—Snake—Achmed—the—Achmed—Achmed—Ach—
Achmed clenched his jaw in memory, then spoke the names by which the Firbolg had called him.
Firbolg king, the Night Man, the Earth Swallower, the Glowering Eye.
The song of his name was beginning to become cacophonous, ugly almost, as all the appellations by which he had been called over the course of his lengthy life were clashing with each other, thick in the air.
He waited until each of them had winked out, like a disembodied F’dor spirit in the air of the upworld.
And then thought hard, trying as much as possible to recall the exact tone of voice, difficult given that it was the only one of all the names he had ever been given that had only ever been spoken once.
Welcome, little one. Meet your father.
The name rang like a small silver bell in the dark torture chamber.
Then it swelled to a symphonic sound, bright and warm, harmonic.
Until it descended again, into a quiet echo.
Father.
Achmed smiled at the overwhelming irony.
This would have been an even better name to have chosen if I wanted to hide it, he thought. No one ever would have guessed it.
He contemplated the only time he had used that word to address someone, Father Halphasion, his mentor and rescuer. The humble monk, brutally killed for a few coins given to a group of poor men, who had truly been the only parental figure he had ever known, not a father of blood, just as he was not to Graal, but of love, and sacrifice.
>
He stood in the silence of the Vault echoing with the word, only a whisper now.
Father—father—father—father—father—fa—fa—fa—
The Bolg king listened to the repetitive song until the word finally dissipated, leaving no sound whatsoever.
Well, listen to that, Rath, he thought in wry amusement. Turns out you were right after all.
He thought again for a moment about the ancient Dhracian, serving as guardian to the Sleeping Child, and hoped that his oldest child knew that she no longer had anything to fear from the Earth but the other Sleeping Child that slumbered within it.
With any luck, not for much longer, he thought.
He turned and went into the corridor, looking at the line of gray-faced souls, numb and terrified, with Jarmon at the lead, a glowing tube of firefly liquid in his remaining hand.
“I assume I don’t have to remind you all of the need for silence,” he said tonelessly.
The shades nodded or just stared in the requested state.
“Very well,” Achmed said. “Follow me—let’s go find paradise.”
42
OUTSIDE THE VAULT WITHIN THE DEEP EARTH
Beyond the door that had not been opened but once in all of history, the Earth was wet, dripping moisture from the radix, the hair-like roots that had filled its vast caverns and shallow tunnels all through the journey that the Three had once made through it. The scent filled Achmed’s nostrils immediately, making him shiver with memory.
The rough tunnel branched off in numerous directions, some into even larger openings, some that withered down to dead ends.
The Lost, however, lost no longer, seemed to know exactly where to go.
Before Achmed could lead them anywhere, the gray-faced souls turned rapidly in multiple directions and quickly made their way, as if summoned, to different passages in the tunnel. It almost seemed as if they were in no need of following the openings, but rather rose slightly off the ground as they passed into the Earth, like dandelion seeds on a warm summer wind, disappearing into the black, cold darkness.
Achmed turned to see the desiccated corpse that had once been the soldier named Jarmon waiting beside him, still holding the glowing vial aloft, even as its light was beginning to dim.