The Merchant Emperor (The Symphony of Ages)

  “Apparently not,” Melisande said. She made another pass with the back of her sleeve at her mouth, succeeding only in filling it with more mud.

  For the first time since she had been with him, the Invoker laughed.

  “Follow me to the lake,” he said, taking her by the shoulder. “It will be cold, but better than dragging around twice your weight in mire. Did you find the dragon’s lair?” The little girl nodded in the dark. “And what did you discover there?”

  “I came upon the Bolg midwife Rhapsody asked your foresters to look for,” Melisande replied. She spat again into the underbrush as she walked beside the Invoker. “She is gravely injured—she needs help right away.”

  Gavin nodded. “And the dragon?”

  Melisande sighed sadly as the surface of Mirror Lake appeared beyond the bracken, gleaming with mist in the dusk. She went to the water’s edge and scooped what liquid was not in icy form into her hands, then splashed it onto her face. She did so again, but this time took some into her mouth, which she cleared, then spat out the liquid dirt.

  The taste of the grave remained.

  “Seal the cave,” she said.

  THE FAR NORTHEASTERN WILDS OF THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN

  Deep within the earth in the cold northeastern desert wastelands, another dragon, the dragon Anwyn, daughter of Elynsynos, felt herself dying.

  The beast had been lying within the relatively small comfort of the earth for as long as her tattered mind could remember. That she was in the broken ruins of a place of healing was only intermittently clear to her; her memory had been limited to only the things in the forgotten Past, a waste, given that she had once been the indisputably powerful Seer of that realm, into which only a few had sight.

  Today she was mourning, though she was not certain why.

  If her mind had been whole, it would have remembered that the event she was grieving was the relatively recent murder of her sister, the middle of the trio of triplets to which she belonged, born of an ancient mariner of a Firstborn race and the dragon who had fallen in love with him, taken a human form, and given birth to the three cursed and powerful offspring. Her sister Rhonwyn had been the one of the three that was mildest and gentlest, though her fragility of thought was maddening to most who knew her. She had been incapable of holding on to the Present beyond the moment that it had turned into the Past, a few seconds after it had occurred, and so she spent most of her life alone in an abbey in Sepulvarta, the holy City of Reason, sought after only by a few pilgrims looking for her fleeting guidance.

  Until recently, when she had been thrown a thousand feet to her death from a tower into a chasm, an ignominious end to the most harmless of the Manteids, the Seers of the Past, Present, and Future.

  Thrown by the hand of a man who was about to take hold of the royal scepter of state of a nation.

  Anwyn, who when in the human form she was given at birth was the Seer of the Past, would have felt the emotions of the event but could not remember the details. She could also not have seen that the third sister, Manwyn, whose gift of sight looked into the Future, had once foretold of their fragile middle sister’s death, because Anwyn’s sight had faded both by the imminence of her own impending death and by the word of a woman with the power of Naming, who had retitled her the Forgotten Past.

  It was a shame, the beast thought as she sensed the round blade of cold-fired rysin-steel, blue in color and jagged of edge, embedded in her body near her heart, that she only could remember the hate she felt for that woman.

  A woman whose name, at least, she remembered.

  Rhapsody.

  PART TWO

  Renaissance and Reunion

  THE POEM OF SEVEN

  Seven Gifts of the Creator

  Seven colors of light

  Seven seas in the wide world

  Seven days in a sennight

  Seven months of fallow

  Seven continents trod, weave

  Seven eras of history

  In the eye of God

  6

  GURGUS PEAK, YLORC, THE BOLGLANDS

  Rhapsody stood on a threshold, literally and figuratively, rubbing the nervous sweat from her hands. Behind her was the rubble of destruction, some of it cleared, much of it left as a reminder of the consequences of failure. Before her was uncertainty.

  And the sound of agony.

  The suffering of the man who awaited her ministrations in the vast room beyond the threshold would not be recognizable to most who heard it as expressions of pain. Indeed, the Firbolg guards who held watch outside the crumbled doorway seemed to take no notice of it whatsoever. But Rhapsody, attuned as she was to the vibrations of the world, knew that the soft whistling and scratching sounds foretold the imminent death of a being nearly as old as the world was old, and whose life force was slipping away with each passing second.

  And with him, he would perhaps take the last hope of that world.

  Behind her in the hallway was another sound, a wailing as intense as the dying gasps of the man beyond the door. No one else would have found it as compelling as Rhapsody, however, as she was attuned to this noise in a very similar, though more personal, way.

  “First Woman?” The Bolg midwife’s voice was tentative.

  Rhapsody smiled involuntarily. It was a name she had not heard in long time, a name the Bolg had given her when she and her two companions, one now their king and the other the commander of their military forces, had first come to the mountainous realm of Ylorc. She had been out of place here among the demi-human Firbolg clans, who had considered her a wasted source of food as long as she was still walking around, but she had gained acceptance here eventually. She had left them, gone on to her own life and lands.

  Now that she had returned, three years later, the name was a sign that she was still seen as being under the king’s protection, as the Bolg presumed she was his favorite courtesan.

  “Yes?”

  “Your child is hungry.”

  Rhapsody sighed, closing her eyes as she wished she could close her ears.

  “I know, believe me,” she said, pressing her forearm against her breasts, which were filling at the sound of the baby’s cries. “Please, Yltha, try and soothe him if you can. I can’t feed him right now.”

  The hirsute woman nodded and retreated down the stone tunnel with the squalling infant.

  Rhapsody’s gaze followed them into the darkness. The sound of her baby’s wails vibrated on her skin, burning, until he was long out of earshot.

  Another sound, almost as loud and less pleasant, drew her attention back to the doorway.

  “Any time you would like to favor us with your presence, Rhapsody, we would be ever so grateful.” The sandy, fricative words dripped with sarcasm so poisonous that they stung her ears.

  She exhaled deeply, then turned and made her way over the broken rubble and into the room beyond.

  Oil lanterns gleamed in a circle at the very edges of the room, casting shadows that flitted and danced ominously on the smoothly hewn stone walls. Rhapsody looked up to the ceiling of the cylindrical tower above her. It was shrouded in protective canvas and wood, having been the focus of intensive reconstruction after the explosion that had shattered the stained-glass dome, leaving unfractured only the red and blue panels of what had once been a full spectrum in rainbow colors. The towering room in which she stood, in actuality a hollow mountain peak, tapered up to that ceiling, causing every footstep to echo loudly as the noise bounced up to the dome at the top of the cylinder.

  In the center of the room around an altar of sorts made of black stone stood her two dearest friends in the world. Achmed the Snake, the Firbolg king, glared at her with an annoyance she could see even in the dark and the flickering shadows, his mismatched eyes staring her down as if she were prey. Looming beside him was his sergeant-major, Grunthor, seven and a half feet of musculature casting a shadow so large that it shaded the entire stone slab.

  “Don’t let us call you away from anything importa
nt,” the Firbolg king said.

  “I’m here,” Rhapsody replied steadily. “I have sung this man songs of sustaining all night, Achmed, but beyond ‘Rath,’ I do not know his True Name, and even if I did, I doubt I could pronounce it. I needed to clear my head before we attempt something that every ally you have has warned you against. Forgive me if I’m a little hesitant to delve into powers beyond my understanding that have consequences beyond my imagination should I misstep.”

  “Are you sure your hesitancy doesn’t have more to do with your howling brat?” Achmed said, gesturing out the doorway to the hall. “His screams are still irritating my skin. I should leave him out on the peaks for the hawks.”

  “Quite sure,” Rhapsody said acidly as she came deeper into the room. “I just sent him away, unfed. I believe I have my priorities straight, Achmed, but lest you forget, that howling brat is the reason I’m here, not your great glass instrumentality. I agreed to help you with this Lightcatcher, but that is not why I came back to the mountains with you.”

  “I don’t care why you came back. Now that you’re here, I need to focus your attention on Rath.”

  Rhapsody looked down at the suffering man on the stone slab. In the half-light he looked so different from the first time she had seen him. Like the rest of his race, this ancient Dhracian had translucent eyelids covering great black eyes that seemingly had no scleras, and skin traced with exposed veins from the crown of his bald head to the ends of his fingertips. Now, having returned a few hours before from tracking and unsuccessfully attempting to kill a demon even more ancient than himself, he was almost unrecognizable. Blood-red veins bulged in the paper-thin eyelids, ropey lines across his skull. His dusky skin was mottled and bruised, as if all of his blood had emptied beneath it, though no puncture wounds could be seen. Her songs of sustaining and healing had left him no worse off than he was when he returned, but not much better.

  “How soon until First-light?” she asked the Firbolg men.

  “Dawn’ll be breakin’ any moment now, Duchess,” Grunthor, the Sergeant-Major, said.

  “And how long until it rises high enough to reach the windows?”

  “The red panel, the panel of healing, is the closest to the horizon,” Achmed said. “Once the sun crests the peaks of the eastern Teeth, in the better part of two hours, we should have red light.”

  “I’m not sure he’ll hold on that long.” Rhapsody laid her hand gently on the dying Dhracian’s head. His skin was cold, as cold as a corpse’s; she could barely feel the tides of his breath. Live, Rath, she willed silently, watching the strange-looking man struggle to comply. Please live. I don’t know what I am doing.

  Achmed glanced up at the dark canvas, then turned to the depths of the room where a heavily bearded young human man lingered in the shadows.

  “Omet.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty?”

  “Take three of the other artisans up to the peak and remove the cover of the dome. It’s almost morning.” Achmed felt the slight vibration of Omet’s head nodding in assent, but kept his attention on the dying man in front of him as Omet started across the massive room for the door.

  Rhapsody exhaled, trying force the panic out with her breath. She pushed everything else from her mind and focused her concentration on Rath again.

  There was a beauty, a magic in this dying entity that she had seen before, twice. It defied her ability to put words to, strange for a Lirin Namer who by profession sought to know every True Name in the world. She could find the music in almost anything—the voice of the earth, the vibration of the stars, the whispers of meadow grass, the thundering of the waves of the sea, the crackling of fire—but there was something special about the wind, the element which carried the magic of her mother’s race, that reached down into her heart whenever she was in the presence of those born of it.

  As Rath had been born of it, purely and without the pollution of any other element, in the First Age of the world.

  Even her friend the Bolg king, as obnoxious and offensive as he could be, and was being now, had been born of it, and she held him in her heart in spite of his surly behavior.

  She bent back over the dying Dhracian. His eyes had gone glassy, and he was slowly turning the color of chalk.

  “Rath,” she whispered. “Live. Please.”

  “That’s the best you can do?” Achmed demanded. “I could have had the piss boy from the third column of the Blasted Heath do that, with seemingly the same outcome.”

  “The only other thing I can think of to try is empathic healing, taking his injuries onto myself,” Rhapsody said, searching his neck for his pulse and finding none. “But these injuries are not from the crushing blow of the titan that intervened in the Thrall ritual—it’s the damage done to his heart when it was suddenly torn from its connection with the demon he was attempting to kill. Were I to take that on, to absorb that damage, my guess is that you would then have to nurse and wean Meridion, Achmed.”

  “I’ve already told you my solution for that—hawks.”

  “Not funny, sir.” Grunthor’s voice was uncharacteristically serious. “Yer not to even think o’ doin’ that, Duchess, ’owever important or ancient this bloke may be. That’s an order. An’ don’t threaten the lit’le prince, sir—’e’s my friend and sleepin’ partner.”

  Rhapsody looked up at the dome again, then turned quickly and called to Omet, who had just reached the doorway.

  “Omet! Wait.”

  The young artisan stopped, looking questioningly at the Firbolg king, who exhaled in annoyance, then signaled his permission.

  “Do you have any of the frits of glass left over from the original firings?” Rhapsody asked. Omet nodded. “Any of the red?” The artisan nodded again. “Please bring one to me, a little bigger than your hand—but make sure it is one that you have matched exactly to the color keys.” The young man walked back into the recesses of the room as the Three returned their gaze to the dying Dhracian.

  “Clarify something for me, Achmed,” Rhapsody said as dark blood began to drip from Rath’s mouth. “In Gwylliam’s time, when this was a Lightforge, rather than a Lightcatcher, the power source was pure elemental fire from the heart of the Earth, piped here from the flamewell in the Loritorium below, right?”

  “Yes.” She could almost hear the dust of his clenched teeth in his voice. “It has been adapted to use the light of the sun now instead, as you bloody well know.”

  “Don’ think ’e has two hours left in ’im, sir,” Grunthor whispered.

  For a moment Rhapsody continued to stare down at Rath, bringing her right hand to rest on his fractured heart. Then, without looking up, she spoke two words, and they echoed strangely in the tower room, as if they came from a deeper part of her.

  “Step away,” she said.

  She put out her left hand as Omet returned to the stone altar and nervously placed a rectangular piece of red glass onto her palm, then carefully withdrew ten paces, his black eyes glittering in the light of the oil lanterns. Her eyes still locked on Rath, Rhapsody moved it into position in an angle above his heart exactly matching that of the spectrum of broken glass in the dome above.

  “Achmed,” she said quietly, “hold this. Here. Keep your fingers to the outside edge.”

  The Bolg king obeyed, his mismatched eyes watching intently.

  As soon as she was certain of the sureness of Achmed’s grip, Rhapsody slowly released the frit. Then, her hand still on the Dhracian’s heart, slightly lower and to the right in his chest cavity than a human’s, just as Achmed’s was, she took hold of the hilt of her sword and carefully drew it from its sheath of Black Ivory, the same inert stone from which the altar was made.

  Daystar Clarion, the ancient weapon of two elements, ether and fire, whispered forth from its sheath, a clear note like the sound of a horn winding as it came. Its blade gleamed with the light of the stars, while tongues of the purest flame licked up it from hilt to tip. Rhapsody took her eyes off Rath long enough to bring the sword
into place behind the frit of red glass in Achmed’s hand.

  A palm-sized ray of ruby-colored light shone through the frit, gleaming brightly, pulsing as the fire of the sword pulsed. It came to rest on Rath’s heart, just above where Rhapsody’s hand rested.

  Four sets of eyes watched intently.

  After a long moment, Achmed spoke.

  “Nothing is happening. I see no change.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Rhapsody whispered crossly. “Shhhh.”

  She opened her mouth and intoned a note, ut, the first in the common octave of Naming, voicing it a moment later with the word for it in the ancient lore, power from the Before-Time in the earliest days of the world.

  Lisele.

  At first there was no sign of any change.

  Rhapsody’s mind was racing, thinking methodically of the filmy parchment manuscript Achmed had showed her of the plans for this instrumentality, remembering the list of the True Names of the color spectrum, age-old lore that terrified her. It had been graphed in the manuscript in musical script, with the symbols for sharp and flat, and the words in Ancient Serenne, the language of the Lost Island of Serendair.

  Blood Saver #

  Blood Letter

  Understanding struck her. She made a slight adjustment to her tone, bringing it up a half-step to the sharp of ut, and sang the word again.

  Lisele #

  Above her hand, the area of Rath’s heart began to glow as red as the light that was shining on it through the frit. The tone that Rhapsody sang vibrated along the surface of his skin, echoing back in the ruby light.

  Omet and the Three watched in amazement as the color spread rapidly over and through Rath’s body until it began to shine with a translucence that stung their eyes. Within moments his body was ringing with the tone.