The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  The door of the Great Hall opened again, admitting Garson ben Sardonyx and the royal yeoman, wearing a miner’s helm with a dark visor, bearing his enormous crossbow across his back and carrying a heavy stand. Faedryth swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and gestured impatiently to Garson, who doubled his pace until he was standing in front of the king. The blue-yellow tapetum in the back of his eyes, the physical attribute that allowed all Nain to see in the blackness of their underground dwellings, caught the torchlight and gleamed, making him appear like a feral animal approaching in the dark.

  “Tell me again what the Bolg king said during your visit to him,” Faedryth demanded as Gyllian returned to his side. “Recount each detail—there may have been something we missed on the previous reports.”

  Garson’s broad shoulders and chest expanded as he inhaled deeply. He ran a hand over his magnificent beard, brown at the chin, tapering to a silver middle and curling into white at the tips; Garson was Faedryth’s official upworld ambassador, the only Nain of the Deep Kingdom to speak in diplomacy with men of other races, and had been trained since childhood in perfection of memory. His brows furrowed, but patiently he began to recount the conversation he had already related on three other occasions since returning from his state visit to the Bolglands.

  “King Achmed was annoyed from the beginning at my presence, of course,” Garson said. “I gave him your message—that you knew he was attempting to reconstruct the Lightforge of Gwylliam and Anwyn in the mountains of his realm, and that you had bade me to tell him that he must not.”

  Faedryth nodded. “And?”

  “He told me I was a brave man with too much time on my hands to have traveled all the way from our lands to dare to instruct him in such a manner.”

  “Pompous fool,” muttered Faedryth. “Go on.”

  “I told him you had commanded me thus, and he said that he was puzzled, then. He said he knew of no Lightforge, and yet you had risked his ire, which you knew to be considerable, by sending me to barge into his rooms in the middle of the night to issue him an order regarding it. He stated that even he, who places less stock in diplomacy and matters of etiquette than anyone he knew, found that offensive.”

  “No doubt,” said Faedryth dryly. “And he then denied knowing of the Lightforge?”

  “Yes. I suggested that perhaps he did not call it by the same name, but that I suspected he knew to what I was referring. I told him that the Lightforge was an instrumentality that the Nain built for Lord Gwylliam the Visionary eleven centuries ago, a machine formed of metal and colored glass embedded into a mountain peak, which manipulated light to various ends. It was destroyed in the Great War, as it should have been, because it tapped power that was unstable, unpredictable. I told him that it poses a great threat not only to his allies and enemies, but to his own kingdom as well. I told him that he was attempting to rebuild something that he did not fully understand, that his foolishness would lead to his destruction, and very possibly that of those around him. I reminded him that he had already seen the effects of this; the tainted glass from his first attempt still littered the countryside around Ylorc. I repeated that this is folly of unspeakable rashness, and that you, Your Majesty, commanded that he cease at once, for the good of the Alliance, and for his own as well.”

  Gyllian sighed. “You expected a different answer than the one you got, Father? Did you really think the king of the Firbolg would listen sympathetically to a demand phrased thus?”

  “I should have asked you to craft the missive,” muttered Faedryth, beginning to pace again. “But the Bolg king has always been a plainspoken man. I thought that by speaking plainly I was sending him a message he would respect; obviously I was wrong. Then what did he say?”

  “He asked me casually how I knew this, citing the distance of our kingdom and our isolation from the world of man. When I told him that you made it a point to monitor events that might have a dangerous impact on the world, he called me a liar, then said that he knew we had one of our own, and were using it to spy on his lands.”

  Faedryth exhaled dismally.

  “A reasonable guess,” Gyllian said. “He was half right.”

  “He then demanded I leave his lands and deliver this message to you,” Garson went on. “He said, and I quote, ‘Return to your king and tell him this from me: I once had respect for him and the way he conducts his reign; he has as low an opinion of the Cymrians as I do, and is a reticent member of the Alliance, just as I am. He keeps to himself within his mountains, as do I. But if he continues to spy into my lands, or send emissaries who tell me what to do, when my own version of your so-called Lightforge is operational, I will be testing out its offensive capabilities on distant targets. I will leave it to you to guess which ones.’”

  The air seemed to go out of the vast cavern.

  “When I said that I doubted very much he wished for me to convey that message to you, he said, ‘Doubt it not, Garson. Now leave.’”

  Faedryth wheeled and stared at Gyllian.

  “Do you still believe that there is another option?” he demanded.

  The princess came slowly to her father’s side and gently kissed his cheek.

  “No,” she said simply. Then she bowed slightly and left the room, casting a glance at the yeoman but not looking back at Faedryth.

  “Prepare, and be quick about it,” Faedryth commanded the yeoman. The man nodded and quickly began to assemble the stand, setting the crossbow atop it, aimed at the crystal throne.

  “Stand ready,” he said to Garson.

  “I am, m’lord,” Garson replied stiffly. “We will be making use of the blue spectrum?”

  Faedryth exhaled again. The blue power of the spectrum was the only one with which he was at all familiar; while he did not know the words in the ancient tongue that had been used by Gwylliam, he thought he recalled that they had translated to Cloud Caller or Cloud Chaser. He did know that the strength of elemental blue was in scrying, seeing across vast distances, to hidden places or, when reversed, to hide from eyes that might be similarly seeking him.

  He had only made use of one other color on one other occasion; when the Molten River of magma that perennially flowed on the border of his lands went dormant two centuries before, his sage advised him to use the orange power of the spectrum, Firestarter, to summon the lava back from beneath its dome of ash. Had the river not served as a protective wall between his kingdom and the lands of a neighboring wyrm, and had its liquid fire not been critical to the survival of the Deep Kingdom in winter, he would never have attempted it. The resulting explosion and destruction had convinced him never to do so again.

  He nodded curtly at Garson, trying to block the image of that devastation from his mind.

  Without another word he went to the gleaming crystal outcropping, stepping carefully through the opening in the otherwise fitted pieces of colored glass that formed a spectral circle at the base of his throne, and sat slowly down on the seat ledge. He stared at the box in his hands a moment longer, then looked up to see Garson, his official witness of state, watching the king unflinchingly behind the yeoman, whose crossbow sight was trained on his heart.

  “Close the circle,” Faedryth commanded. His voice was deep and resonant, containing none of the uncertainty it had held a moment before.

  Garson moved quickly to the center of the vast, dark hall and knelt at the foot of the king. Faedryth blessed him impatiently; Garson rose and stepped out of the circle of colored glass, then carefully took hold of the last piece, the one fired in the color of the purest of amethyst, and gently moved it into place, the final piece of the circular puzzle.

  As the king watched his upworld ambassador adjusting the violet arc, he thought suddenly of Garson’s great-grandfather, Gar ben Sardonyx, who had helped him fire that very piece in the annealing oven centuries ago. He tried to close his mind to the flood of memories, but it was impossible; the power of the throne, though still sleeping, was alive, opening long closed places in his mind, heedles
s of the wards or locks he might place in its way.

  The memories it brought back were painful ones, pockets of acid in the recesses of his brain. He had been the original builder of the first Lightforge, the one in the Bolg king’s now-broken tower, had constructed it at the command of his lord and friend, Gwylliam the Visionary, only to see its power misused, its mission corrupted by that very lord and friend in the course of a long, bloody, and pointless war. Faedryth had turned his back on Gwylliam and those who had followed him then, had tossed his sword into the king’s Moot in disgust and quit the place, returning to the Distant Mountains and his Deep Kingdom, and had remained there until recently summoned again by the Lady Cymrian, asking the Nain to rejoin the Alliance for the good of the continent. Against his better wishes he had agreed; now, as he sat within one of the wonders of the world above a source of its primeval power, he wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.

  As Garson maneuvered the piece into place now, Faedryth thought dryly of how he had condemned Gwylliam’s thirst for power, had left all the plans and glass color keys behind him, disavowing all that he had done in the building of the Visionary’s great empire, only to find himself, deep within his cavernous realm, thinking endlessly about the rainbow of glass that channeled the very power of life.

  The thoughts that had at first plagued him in those days long ago had come to haunt him; like demonic whispers in his ears, the memory of colored glass spoke to him in his dreams, reminding him that their knowledge was fleeting, evanescent, that he would need to hurry if he was to re-form the instrumentality. Even he had needed a detailed schematic when building Gwylliam’s original Lightforge, a set of drawings drafted by the greatest of Cymrian Namers that was impossible to commit to memory, which he had consulted every day in the course of the project, staring at them each morning as if he had never seen them before, he, the builder of one of the greatest mountain cities in the world, the man with a ferocious memory who had taken the Visionary’s prescient ideas and brought them to reality.

  Now he couldn’t remember from day to day what was on the drawings.

  Because he had left behind in the library of Canrif the fired bricks of colored glass keyed to the exact hue on the spectrum necessary to make the instrumentality work, he had no tool with which to compare any future firings. The only thing that saved him was the memory that each of the glass pieces in the dome of Gurgus Peak had been the same color of the light spectrum that was reflected in different gemstones in their purest state.

  And his kingdom had no shortage of pure gemstones for reference.

  So he had reproduced the glass spectrum in a simple circle, while the voices in his head had screamed cacophonously at each step of the way, with the pouring, the annealing, the cooling, the engineering of the crystal throne, urging him onward, only to fall into a complete, almost smug silence when the Lightforge was finally finished.

  So now he had one of his own, albeit a much smaller one that was only assembled on extremely rare occasions, only a handful of times over the past four centuries. The only thing he feared more than using it was the thought of losing the power altogether.

  The deep, melodic voice of the Earth itself hummed around him, rousing him from his musings. The circle was complete.

  “Open the vent,” Faedryth commanded through gritted teeth.

  The yeoman lowered the visor of his helm to shield his eyes.

  Garson grasped the lever that was masked by the lower stalagmites of the crystal throne, and pulled it toward himself until it aligned with registrations of the blue arc. He then fell back, shielding his eyes, as a concealed slab of stone below the throne moved aside into the rock below, revealing the light of the flame-well over which the crystal had formed, a direct vent to the fire that burned, thousands of miles below, past the crust and mantle of the Earth, in the very heart of the world. Even with his hands before his eyes, the light was blinding.

  The pulsing flames from deep within the Earth sent flashes of hot blue light spinning through the Great Hall, illuminating the distant ceiling, dancing off the stalactites, spitting and hissing in time with the fire below the giant crystal, making it glow like a star hidden in the darkness. The radiance engulfed the crystal throne and the Nain king upon it, turning them both the color of a cloudless sky on a summer’s day in the upworld, a color so pure and clear that it stung the back of Garson’s eyes through the shield of his fingers.

  Breathing shallowly and willing his racing heart to slow, Faedryth, translucent in the grip of the Lightforge’s power, opened the black ivory box.

  At first he saw nothing, and panic tickled the outer edge of his consciousness. The contents of the box had been brittle, almost vaporous when they were first discovered, and in the dazzling blue luminosity of the crystal throne, lit from below by the very fire of the Earth’s core, they clung to the shadows, all but invisible.

  Faedryth tilted the box until the contents caught the roaring light. As if it were a living entity, that light growled into the corners of the box, seeking its contents and catching them, illuminating them, giving them color and shape.

  At first they emerged from hiding as little more than an evanescent glow, dusty and changing, second by second, like summer sunlight filtering through a window. The Nain king gingerly reached inside the box and lifted one of the scraps into the blue radiance that was pulsating around him.

  Draped across his finger was a fragment of what looked like clear parchment, though it was filmy and inconstant and yellowed with age. It seemed to be a made thing, part translucence of gem, part gossamer. Faedryth had never seen its like, not in sixteen centuries of life, nor on either of two continents, nor had any of the advisors to whom he had apprehensively shown it.

  The place where it had been found—the deepest reaches of the crystal mines, where the diamond-like formations believed to have been brought to the Earth from the stars in the form of meteorites lay beneath immeasurable tons of age-old granite—was in and of itself a miracle of recovery; it had taken thousands of years for the Nain to broach that mine. That anything had survived the pressure and cold of the crystal bed was improbable at the very best; but here, now, between his fingers was a scrap of delicate material, fragile and changing with each breath he drew. Faedryth disliked the concept of magic, distrusted most of those who used it, who manipulated words or songs or vibrations to alter the world, but even a skeptic and unbeliever as curmudgeonly as he could not help but be awed, and terrified, in its presence.

  It was, as far as he could tell, like nothing that existed anywhere in the Known World.

  And for that reason, he had to know what it was.

  “All the way,” he muttered.

  Garson, the blinding blue light leaking in behind his closed eyelids, felt for the lever again and pulled with all his might.

  The double metal disk below the throne that Faedryth’s smiths had sawed through the base of the immense crystal to install four hundred years before ground into place again, focusing all the light from the flame-well through the center of the blue arc, turning the crystal, the king, and the room beyond an even more intense, pure, and imperceptible hue of blue, a holy, elemental color at the very center of the spectrum.

  The crystal formation sang with a primal vibration, the clearest of notes, inaudible to Garson or the yeoman, but Faedryth could hear it in his soul, felt it ring through his blood, opening his eyes, not only in the darkness of his throne room, but beyond it, to the world around him, across the plains to the horizons, to the very edge of the sea.

  Faedryth gripped the throne, knowing what came next.

  The yeoman, who knew what might, sighted his crossbow on the king’s heart.

  Suddenly Faedryth was engulfed with sight of a capacity beyond anything imaginable by a human; it was as if all the world, in every bit of its detail and magnitude, was apparent to him instantaneously. Like being swallowed by a tidal wave, he was suddenly drowning in information, exposed to every flock of sparrows’ migration pa
ttern, every racing front of every storm, the number of shafts of wheat bowing before the sun, the heartbeats of the world, assaulting him from every side.

  His mind raced at the speed of a flashing sunbeam, shooting crazily skyward like an arrow off the string, then plummeting suddenly down into the earth, where the passageways sculpted by his own subjects scored the crust like tunnels in an anthill. It swept briskly over troves of treasure, of volcanic lava flowing in the Molten River, dark shafts of endless anthracitic night, speeding beneath the roots of trees and the burrows of forest beasts, until it burst through the Earth’s crust again, absorbing all there was to see, all there was to know.

  Seeing everything.

  In that instant, the Nain king realized he was seeing as a dragon sees, with wyrmsight that transcends all physical limits.

  And it terrified him, as it always did.

  With great effort Faedryth tore his mind’s eye away from the racing vision by dragging his head down and staring at the piece of fragile parchment in his hand. He knew there was an image on it, an image he had only glimpsed when the brittle piece of solid-yet-ever-changing magical parchment was first brought to him. At that moment, he could sense that there were colored lights in some form of spectral arrangement, some source of power, light as bright as that from the flame-well beneath him, which he had assumed to be the rebuilt Lightforge of Gurgus Peak. In addition, he had felt something then, just a brief sensation of being aware of another person’s thoughts, and it had seemed to him that the Bolg king was present in those thoughts. For a man who eschewed magic lore and vibrational study, whose joy was engineering, mining, the smelting of iron and the building of tunnels, the sensation of reading another’s mind, especially when the thinker was unknown and most likely long dead, was particularly unsettling.

  With immense difficulty he kept his vision fixed away from the avalanche of images swirling before him and held the fragment up in the clear blue light before his eyes.