The smooth skin of a snake that darted over her hand put her in mind of the sluglike, carnivorous larvae that infested the root of Sagia, calling forth a deep shudder from within her memory. Rhapsody swallowed and crawled forward, struggling to see in the absolute blackness. Ahead of her she heard scuffling movements, larger than rats, she thought, but perhaps not just large rats.
Her internal bond to the sword, now housed in its scabbard of black ivory, seemed tentative, distant. Black ivory was an impenetrable material; no vibration passed through it, preventing anything held within a vessel made of the material from being scryed upon, an important measure of safety for the Iliachenva’ar. The disadvantage was that the power of the sword did not reach her, did not tie its strength to her, as it did when Daystar Clarion was unsheathed in her grasp.
Tentatively Rhapsody passed a hand through the murky water on the floor ahead of her, shuddering inwardly again, and pressed forward. The walls of the tiled tunnel began to feel closer, tighter than they had in the light; in her ear she could hear her own voice whispering her confession to the giant Sergeant-Major, then a stranger, now one of her dearest friends, in the dank tunnel along the tree root.
I’m Lirin. We don’t do well underground.
Oi can see that.
Her stomach rushed into her mouth, and she fought down her gorge as the world around her began to spin.
How did it feel to you? Elynsynos, the ancient dragon, had queried in her sonorous, multitoned voice. Were you, Lirin as you are, comfortable there, within the Earth, separated from the sky?
Her own reply came out in a whisper now, as it had then.
It was like a living death.
Her arms began to tremble. Balanced as she was on her hands and knees, her elbows shuddered under the strain, then buckled for a moment, causing her to lurch forward and splash, chest-first, into the fetid water, banging her chin on the wet tunnel floor.
Hurriedly she righted herself again. She wanted to shout to Achmed, as she had when the sword was still lighting the passageway, just to hear his voice, but realized immediately that she could not panic and call for help. The slave children hovering somewhere beyond her in the dark tunnel were still, for the moment, perhaps as frightened of her as she was of the catacomb, the snakes, the rats. One sign of weakness on her part, however, and they might take the opportunity to attack her as a group, pressing a clear advantage on this home turf, this dark land that they inhabited. She had no doubt that they were hard, brutal, toughened by the cruel life they were forced to lead.
They could tear her to pieces.
Her heart began to race. She thought desperately of Grunthor and his tie to the earth, wishing mindlessly that he were there. Child of Earth, Manwyn’s prophecy had declared him.
The Three shall come, leaving early, arriving late,
The lifestages of all men:
Child of Blood, Child of Earth, Child of the Sky.
If their speculation was right, and she, Achmed and Grunthor were the Three in the divination, then she was the Child of the Sky—the term Lirin used to describe themselves. It’s wrong, wrong for me to be here, she thought woozily, fighting growing nausea. She should be out in the open air, beneath the stars, singing her aubades and vespers to the sky.
Death was in the air; she could feel it hovering, squalid, thick. Had a child died in this place, perhaps many of them, succumbing to the back-breaking work, the vile conditions, the lack of air? Or was it her own death she could feel coming for her? She could sense the children closer now. Had they summoned the courage to come for her?
Coward, she thought as her trembling grew stronger. The Iliachenva’ar, the bringer of light into darkness. Struggling to keep from curling up like a babe in the womb. Mama—my dreams are chasing me. Come to my bed; bring the light.
The words of the Liringlas aubade, the morning love song to the sky, found themselves in her mouth. Shakily she began to sing, softly chanting the words her mother had taught her, words she had sung for many days with Oelendra, her mentor, words born in a place deep in her soul that was old as the ages.
In that deep place she felt a flicker of warmth, a pulse of light, as if she had physically touched the bond she had to the sword. The thought gave her courage, and she began to sing a little more strongly, loud enough to hear the notes echo slightly off the black tunnel walls ahead of her.
Then, a moment later, she heard another echo, softer than the first, and in a different voice, a voice that was familiar but not recognizable. A high voice, a frightened voice.
A child’s voice.
Mimen?
The word rang in her ears; it had come forth, spoken haltingly in Ancient Lirin, the language of the Liringlas, her mother’s people. Its meaning was unmistakable.
Mama?
Rhapsody raised her head up. In the tunnel ahead of her she could almost make out the silhouette of a head, shoulders—thin they seemed; scraggly. Or perhaps it was just her imagination; the darkness was so complete that her eyes could not focus. She felt a great exhalation of air come out of her, breath she had not known she had been holding.
“Nay,” she said softly. “Hamimen.” Grandmother.
“Hamimen?”
“Aye,” she replied, louder, a little more clearly, still in the ancient tongue of the Liringlas. “What be your name, child?”
“Aric.” The outline of the head vibrated in the dark.
“May I bring the light, Aric? Dimmer this time?”
A scuffling sound; the head retreated.
“Nay! Nay!”
Beyond him, in the tunnel ahead, a rustle of movement.
“Aric, wait! I’ve come to take you out of the darkness—all of you.”
Silence.
Desperation was beginning to claw at her throat. “Aric?”
There was no reply.
Rhapsody slid her hand over the hilt of the sword. She gripped it tightly, then gently pulled, loosing the blade from the scabbard just a little. She exhaled slowly, gathering control of herself; with the return of her calm, the sword burned evenly, and only the slightest of flickers issued forth from the scabbard.
The nightmares of the tunnel receded, leaving just the tiled aqueduct once more in dimmer light than before. Up ahead at the edge of the glow, two even smaller tunnels branched out, no doubt the area in which Achmed had said the children were sleeping.
She inched forward slowly, keeping the sword by her side, and peered into the branching tunnels. They ended in alcoves, where dirty scraps of cloth, perhaps used at one time for blankets, now floated in the filthy water. Rhapsody tried not to recoil from the overwhelming stench of sewage.
Huddled at the end of the alcove was a yellow-haired child, long of bone and translucent of skin, trembling in fear. Rhapsody’s throat went dry in memory; it was the same ethereal complexion, the same slender angles that had once graced her mother’s face. And yet there was something more, something almost feral, a hint of his inhuman father.
“Aric,” she said gently, “come to me.”
The child shook his head and turned his face toward the wall.
Rhapsody crept forward another few paces, then looked down at her arms. The water on the floor of the tunnel was now up to her elbows.
Impatience, spurred by fear, took over. “Aric, come now!” The child only quivered more violently.
A thought suddenly occurred to her. She pulled back out of the alcove and began to move backward on her hands and knees; once she was a short way away she began to sing a children’s song from Serendair, a tune with which she had once jokingly serenaded Grunthor.
Wake, Little Man
Let the sun fill your eyes
The day beckons you to come and play
She continued to back away, weaving her call into the lyrics and tones of the traditional song.
Come hither, come whither, come follow!
Come hither, come whither, come follow!
At the edge of the tiny sword flame’s glow, R
hapsody could hear movement, could see a few faces appear. She nodded slightly and kept backing away, still singing.
Run, Little Man,
To the end of the skies
Where the night meets the cusp of the day
Come hither, come whither, come follow!
Come hither, come whither, come follow!
Deeper down the tunnel more faces appeared, haggard, like the wraiths that sometimes stalked her dreams, blinking in the weak light. She continued to crawl backward, singing her song of summoning.
Play, Little Man,
Before you grow wise,
Chasing your dreams while you may
Come hither, come thither, come follow!
Come hither, come thither, come follow!
By the time Rhapsody reached the well shaft, a small herd, perhaps a score in all, of ragged boys, all heights, all thin, had crawled along after her, filling the tunnel until she could not see anything past them, just more heads, more faces, sallow beneath their smeared masks of red dirt, bulging, cloudy eyes, all but naked—human rats, Achmed had called them. She had had no idea how apt the name was.
A ramp of a sort had been constructed in the well shaft to take the place of the hook—she wouldn’t find out until later that it hid the body of the journeyman who had fallen down the shaft headfirst—from broken pallets and other debris of the firing room. Achmed’s face glared down at her from above. He took one look at the seemingly endless line of filthy children, exhaled, picked up a nearby rope, and threw one end of it down the well shaft to her.
“What’s taken so long? Here, start passing the brats up; we have to get out of here.”
Rhapsody took hold of the dirty Liringlas child, who shrank from her touch but didn’t pull away, and grabbed the rope that Achmed had tossed down to her.
“Did you have any trouble with the demon-spawn?” she asked as she looped the rope around Aric’s waist and helped him onto the ramp, holding on to him until Achmed began to haul him out of the shaft.
“Only a bit,” he said nonchalantly. “He’s in the kiln.”
Rhapsody whirled around from sorting out the other slave boys and stared up the well shaft. “In the kiln?”
“Sit there,” Achmed directed the first child, pointing to Omet, still hog-tied but back on his cot. He leaned over the well shaft again. “Yes, in the kiln. Like you, and some other accursed minions of his demonic father, he appears to be impervious to the effects of fire; has quite a tolerance for pain as well. But he should be all right, as long as his air holds out.”
With a new urgency Rhapsody pulled the next youth forward and looped him with the rope. “How long has he been in there?” she asked nervously.
Achmed yanked on the rope, dragging the child rapidly up the ramp. “A while. I’d hurry if you want to get him out before he turns into a vase.”
One by one the children, utterly silent, ascended the ramp. Finally, when the last one was out, Achmed tossed the rope down one last time and hauled Rhapsody back up the shaft and into the alcove.
“What on Earth happened?” she said, looking around the firing room in dismay at the mountain of hardening slip and the neat stack of bodies by the outside wall of the alcove. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Couldn’t you at least have hidden those? Look at how frightened the children are.”
“Good; that was the point. You’ll notice none of them bothered me or made any noise while I was hauling you out.” He sliced through Omet’s bonds with his dagger, then came next to her and pointed at the doorway through which the journeymen had come. “There are close to one hundred more where these came from, sleeping in shifts in the barracks beyond that entrance. In addition I would suspect that someone is watching this place very closely, given how near they are to their goal. We have no time to sort these children out—they’re witnesses, and I would guess whoever owns this place is not going to be particularly pleased with our emancipation of them.
“Now that you know our situation, let me suggest that you pull the demon-spawn out of the oven—he should be nicely browned by now—and we’ll leave with all due haste. The chance of any of us making it out of here alive grows slimmer with each passing second. And I mean that, Rhapsody—you know I am not given to hyperbole.”
Rhapsody nodded and hurried to the closed kiln, pulled the bolt, and swung the door wide open. The demon-spawn was slumped at the back, unconscious, breathing shallowly. Those slave children whose eyes had adjusted to the flickering light watched in amazement as she climbed into the red-hot oven, seized the boy, and pulled him by his feet out of the kiln. She checked him perfunctorily, then dragged him over to Omet’s cot, where the slaves were huddled together.
“Don’t touch him unless you need to; he’s hot and you’ll burn yourselves, at least until he cools down,” she said to the boys in the Orlandan dialect. “But if he moves at all, please jump on him, all of you, and sit on his back.” She looked back at Achmed. “How are we getting out of here?” she asked in Bolgish.
“The same service door through which we came. We can go down the inner alley—there are no windows on that side of the building—and get out of the city through the backstreets. We can take them to the northern outposts of Ylorc—” He raised a hand to silence her protest. “We can argue about this later. There’s no time now.”
“Agreed. But I have to do one more thing before I can go—I have to close the tunnel. Otherwise they’re just going to round up a new group of slaves, and send them down again, until they break through, if they haven’t already. I don’t want them to get away with drowning a bunch of boys for their own selfish purposes.”
Achmed walked over to the demon-spawn, bent down, and gauged his body temperature. He roughly bound him hand and foot, ignoring the dangling wrist and uneven shoulder, then picked him up and slung him over his shoulder.
“And exactly how do you propose to do that? Grunthor’s not here.”
“I know. Give me exactly five minutes—I promise that’s the longest I will take.”
Achmed shook his head as he beckoned to the slave children, who leapt from the cot and lined up next to him.
“We may not have that long.”
“Then go—I’ll catch up to you. Go.”
She ignored the hard look he gave her, then ran to the door and spoke the word of silence again. The door opened without a sound. The passage of the slave boys through it was equally silent, but that was due to the terror that the look on Achmed’s face was apparently inspiring in them.
Once they were all out into the antechamber of the foundry, Rhapsody went back into the firing room. She stared for a moment at the carnage before her, then strode to the first of the four remaining vats and upended it, dumping the contents onto the floor, where it ran like a muddy river into the alcove. She then went to the next vat, and the next, pulling the chains grimly, staying clear of the landslide of burning mud.
When enough had swelled into the alcove to fill the well shaft to the brim and more, she drew her sword. The flames of Daystar Clarion danced in the shadowy darkness, shining with a firm authority, burning a million times brighter than the fires that had now reduced to sleepy coals beneath the great vats in the firing ovens.
Rhapsody closed her eyes amid the lakes of slip, searching her soul for her bond to the sword, for her tie to elemental fire, now the core of her being as it had been ever since she passed through the wall of fire at the heart of the Earth. She concentrated on the well shaft, now gurgling with its burden of slip, and raised the sword slowly until it pointed where she knew the alcove was.
“Luten,” she said with a ringing authority. Bake.
An arc of flame shot forth from the sword, blasting the alcove with a heat far more intense than the kilns, hotter and brighter than the light of the sun. Rhapsody felt a thrill run through her as the fire soared into the alcove, firing the clay solid in a matter of seconds, filling the shaft with an unyielding plug as hard as the ceramic columns of Manwyn’s temple. The top of the
well shaft glowed red, then settled into the dull color of fired clay.
That’s the most I can do, she thought as she sheathed her sword, hurrying to catch up with Achmed and the boys. For the boys, and for Entudenin.
When they slipped out of Yarim Paar that night, past the Yarimese guards in their horned helmets, through the alleys of a city that slept like a drunken wastrel or a hibernating bear, she took a moment in their flight and cast a glance back at the dry fountain, the dead wellspring obelisk. May you return to life one day, she thought, and make Yarim bloom again.
Though she was many street corners away, she was certain she saw, in the dull red clay, a momentary shimmer, like a wink from a star.
9
On the Krevensfield Plain, Southern Bethany
The holy man stood with his face to the sun, on the edge of winter and the Krevensfield Plain. The mountains of Sorbold had receded into the southeastern distance like a grim nightmare. Now an endless vista of low, frosty plateau lay at his feet, the sky stretching out to the blue edge of the horizon all around, no longer broken by fanglike mounds of earth.
Night was coming earlier with the advent of the season of the moon; a red sun burned at the world’s rim, bathing the edge of the meadows in bloody light that spread slowly eastward as it set. He smiled. How prophetic.
His retinue of guards was encamped around a small fire in the frozen grass some distance away, preparing their supper. He had begged their indulgence and walked slowly to the edge of a deep swale, presumably to take the air, and now stood alone, undisturbed, watching the western horizon grow ever more crimson in the grip of coming night.
For almost three hundred years these lands lay fallow, a wide, fertile stretch of pastureland dotted in later centuries by the occasional farming community. These intrepid homesteaders came in groups consisting of four to six families, braving the bitter winds of winter, the brushfires of high summer, to live beneath the endless sky. Without exception those homesteaders were newlanders, immigrants from the south or west that did not share a drop of Cymrian blood between them. For if they had, they would never have even thought to put the first stake into the ground here, let alone build their homes and rear their children on this haunted soil.
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