The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  The image he had seen once before, at the time nothing more than a hazy smudge, refined instantly into a crisp clarity that was painful in its sharpness. Despite being utterly clear, the picture still made almost no sense to Faedryth, whose eyes throbbed, threatening to burst.

  It was as if he was standing himself in the place where the image had been captured, a familiar dark hall that could have been within his own mountain. Faedryth sensed, by the thinness and striations of the stone, that it was within a peak. At the end of the tunnel an arm’s length away was an opening, past which there appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, within a large clear sphere suspended in the open darkness of the upworld sky. The colored illuminations he had seen and mistaken for the Bolg king’s Lightforge were in fact gleaming lights inside the dome, set in uniform lines into panels that encircled the transparent room. Beneath the panels was a table of sorts, with a doorway in the horizontal surface from behind which light as bright as the flame-well leaked.

  Beyond the clear walls of the sphere he could see the world down below, burning at the horizon, as fire crept over the edges, spreading among the continents he recognized from maps of the Earth.

  As bewildering and horrifying as these images were, they paled in comparison to what stood between him and the glass sphere.

  Hovering in the air before him was a being, a man of sorts, with the characteristics of several different races and all the aspects of youth except for his eyes, blue eyes, deep as the sea, scored with vertical pupils. Those eyes held the wisdom of the ages, and pain that matched it.

  His skin was translucent, motile, altering with each current of air that passed by or through it. The man glowed with the same light as the crystal throne, especially his hair, curls of brilliant gold that seemed almost afire. And despite his knowing eyes, and the calmness of his expression, his clenched jaw betrayed a quiver of nervousness. He stared at Faedryth, as if looking at him for the last time. His mouth moved, and words formed; Faedryth did not hear them in his ears, but rather internally, as if they were resonating in his own throat.

  Will I die?

  Faedryth felt his burning eyes sting with tears he had no connection to, felt his throat and chest tighten in sorrow he did not understand. He heard his own voice then, speaking as if detached from him; he heard himself cough, then form words that rang with awkward comfort.

  Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.

  The translucent being in front of him nodded, then turned away. Faedryth was suddenly gripped with a sense of sadness and loss that shredded his soul; in his mind he felt himself reach for the lad, only to watch the image fade into darkness.

  Then, as if underscoring that he was reliving someone else’s memory, he was surrounded with another notion, the impression of the Bolg king he had picked up from the first sight of the parchment scraps, and was left with one last thought, which he heard in the voice of the translucent young man.

  Forgive me. In my place, I think you would have done the same. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.

  He did not know why, but Faedryth was certain that the strange youth was speaking to the Assassin King.

  Overwhelmed and without even the slightest clue of the meaning in what he was perceiving, Faedryth’s mind threatened to snap. And worse, deep beneath him, channeling up through the living rock of the crystal throne, he felt a different vibration, atonal and physical and slight, almost imperceptible.

  As if the very earth was shrugging, dormant parts of it stirring to life.

  Terror consumed him as the speeding vision returned, because this time it was as if he was seeing in darkness into his own lands, his point of sight very far away but growing rapidly closer.

  Looking for him with the same clarity he just experienced.

  In that moment, the Nain king understood what he had done.

  He was seeing as a dragon sees because the sight he had called upon, had tapped with the elemental power of color, was dragon sight

  The inner sight of a blind wyrm long asleep in the very bowels of the Earth.

  The eldest Sleeping Child, said to comprise a good deal of the Earth’s mass. Witheragh, the dragon that had whispered the secret to him, had warned him of a prophecy that one day the Sleeping Child would wake.

  And would be famished with hunger after its long sleep that commenced at the beginning of the world.

  And he, Faedryth, was nudging it from its slumber, directing its vision into his own kingdom.

  A hollow scream tore from Faedryth’s throat, a war cry that had gone up from his lungs many times in his life. With the last of his strength he pitched himself from the crystal throne, feeling it strip years from his life as he broke through the column of elemental blue light, tumbling roughly to the floor, bruising himself against the crystal stalagmites. His falling body dislodged the pieces of colored glass, breaking the circle and extinguishing the blue light; leaving only the pulsating dance of the radiance from the flame-well spattering off the ceiling high above.

  As Garson pushed the lever with all his might, shutting the vent once more, and the yeoman lowered the crossbow sight, Gyllian hurried to her father. Faedryth was facedown on the stone floor; she turned him over gently and winced, seeing the new whiteness in his beard, the new wrinkles in his brow that had not been there a few moments before. It was as it always was, and yet the strong-willed princess never could become entirely accustomed to the sight of her father, so clear of eye and mind, staring wildly, blankly above him into the dancing fire shadows, panicked by the return of darkness when the vent was closed again.

  “What did you see?” she asked gently, stroking his hair and sliding her age-crinkled hand into his.

  Faedryth continued to stare, agitated, his eyes glazed, breathing shallowly on the floor of his throne room. Finally, when his eyes finally met Gyllian’s, they contained a desperation she had never seen before, not in the horrors of battle, or the nearness of defeat, not on the banks of the swollen river of fire that he had caused to return from its sleep, swallowing mining towns and miners with it. He clutched her hand, trying to form words, but only managing to resemble a fish gasping for the breath of water.

  “The Assassin King,” he whispered when he finally could generate sound. “We have to stop him.”

  28

  Northeastern Yarim, at the foot of the mountains

  No one living, nor anyone dead, had ever known, or at least recorded, the story of how the lost city of Kurimah Milani had come to be built.

  Or by whom.

  Jutting proudly from the multicolored sands of the western-most part of the borderlands between Yarim and the upper Bolglands, where the desert clay faded into steppes, then the piedmont, then mountains, Kurimah Milani was old when the oldest tales of history were written. Its minarets and heavy stone walls glistened with a sandy patina that was said to have turned iridescent in the sun, giving some of the merchants who first came upon it the impression that it was an illusion, a mirage at the edge of the vast, empty desert of red clay that stretched for miles at the base of the manganese mountains along the Erim Rus, the Blood River.

  The legendary city was said to have been located on the Lucretoria, the ancient merchant road along which trade in silks and seeds, spices, textiles, salt, jewels, and ore was known to have traveled. It was not known how long the indigenous population of the continent had been traversing that primitive road, but by the time the Cymrians arrived in what was now the province of Yarim, the Lucretoria had all but crumbled back into the red clay and the sand, and Kurimah Milani existed in nothing more than legend.

  The myth was alive enough still, however, to spawn the occasional pilgrimage, small caravans of the sick and infirm for whom all other options had been exhausted, desperately combing the empty desert for even the smallest sign of the renowned healing springs, the fabled sun-beds in which the suffering could bask, like desert lizards, absorbing
the red rays of a healing sun, the fountains of crystalline water that poured forth from the hands of gentle-eyed statues, said to be able to purge the most insistent of disease, or the great gemstone that had been rumored to clear mental deformities or illnesses of the mind with a mere touch.

  All they found was the wind and stinging red sand.

  Sometimes hope is the only thing that keeps a legend alive. The earthquake that took Kurimah Milani into the depths of the desert centuries before the Cymrians came swept all trace of it from human sight, but even that enormous temblor could not erase the deeper sense that somewhere, lost in the monotonous, endless landscape of cold red clay and scrubby vegetation, was a place where miracles still lurked, dormant for centuries, but nonetheless waiting to be found by the patient, the intrepid, or the desperate. Hope kept that sense alive, even when all other searching was exhausted.

  Sometimes, however, there is more than hope.

  Sometimes there is reason.

  The dragon could hear the music long before she knew what she had found.

  Exhaustion owned her now; she no longer had the strength to be a slave to hatred. She had long passed the point of return, her mind fading into the numbness that precedes death. Deep within the ground, her dragon sense could no longer discern any minutiae in the world around her, but rather it was monitoring her fading life, counting the beats of her three-chambered heart as it strained to pump the blood welling within her.

  And so, when her darkening mind heard the first notes of the ancient song echoing through the earth, she could not tell whether the sound was from the outside world, or whether it was just the noise of her own death approaching.

  After a mile or more of crawling toward it, her thoughts began to clear, her mind to focus, and the beast realized that the tone was modulating in a consistent fashion, following a musical pattern that was soothing to her fractured mind and desiccating body. She could feel her blood-starved tissues rehydrating slightly, humming with a renewed vitality. Her heartbeat strengthened, her sight brightened where it had gone dim.

  The dragon stopped and lay still for a moment, listening.

  The earth through which she was traveling seemed to recede, leaving her tattered skin buzzing pleasantly. The music reached deep into her torn flesh and revitalized it, giving her just enough strength to gather herself and continue her journey, her dragon sense, now awake again, following the song in the ground like a beacon.

  The louder the vibration echoed through the earth, the more confident the dragon felt. There was a sense of revitalization, rejuvenation, in each mile she traveled, stripping away the despair and fear, encouraging her even as the blood continued to flow from her, even as her heart began to fail.

  Perhaps I am entering the Afterlife, she mused as she crawled, though she had little remembrance what the Afterlife was.

  She was unaware of the disruption of earth she was causing in her journey. As always, when she traveled at a depth of less than a mile, the strata of earth erupted, leaving fissures in her wake, uprooting what few specimens of scrub vegetation remained in the lifeless desert, uncovering long-dead skeletons of men and animals and carts that had been long lost in the shifting sands.

  The music filled her ears now, humming in her skin beneath the scales of her hide. It filled her mind with dreams that bled over into her eyes, and so as she traveled, following the sound, the sight into the Past that was her birthright began to take over. What was visible to her eyes was the dry and lifeless clay that the desert had become in the Present, but the second sight within her envisioned something entirely different, a younger, newer land where desert flowers still bloomed, where low-growing trees offered shade to the native animals of the wasteland and the caravans of humans and dromedaries that plied the Lucretoria, passing by Kurimah Milani in great splashes of the color and noise of commerce.

  She was seeing the place not as it lay buried before her, but as it once had been, two millennia before.

  Looming before her was a glistening sight, shining in the rays of the setting sun. Minarets towered high toward the clouds, a musical welcome ringing from their domed towers. Beyond the entrance gates clear water from fountains leapt and splashed, catching the sunset’s rays and falling into lapis lazuli pools, carrying the warm colors with it.

  The dragon’s damaged heart leapt in excitement. The concept of mirage was completely beyond her ability to conceive, the understanding that she was still within the earth completely gone from her awareness. In her mind she could see all around her the glistening walls of the healing city as she passed through the great gated aqueduct, where streams of crystal water rained down on all those who entered. She closed her eyes as she passed beneath the memory of the medicinal waterfall, feeling the coolness of the spray as it showered her skin, easing her pain, cooling the fire within her.

  Insanity must cause the arms to grow, for nothing is out of reach of the madman, a sage once said within her hearing. Had her fragmented mind seen the darkness of the tunnels that, in reality, loomed around her, if it could grasp that the healing spray was nothing more than showers of grit and sand falling upon her, it might have kept her from discovering what treasure still actually remained beneath the blowing sand and red desert clay.

  Water, the beast thought as she burrowed past the broken towers buried in twenty centuries of sand, past the wreckage of stone walls and shattered statuary, leaving a trail of dark blood in her wake. Nothing but the song of the place was sustaining her now; her body, more shell than flesh, hummed with the vibration of this place of ancient healing, but even the power of the memory of Kurimah Milani could not replace the life’s blood that was leaking from her sundered heart. There is water here, I know it.

  And she was right. Even though the infamous water gardens had been utterly destroyed in the temblor, and while the copious healing pools and mineral baths filled to overflowing by hot springs running down from the mountains in the distance had been consumed at the same moment of cataclysm, deep beneath the surface sand there were still the remnants of a stream that trickled through the buried vaults that had once been public baths.

  In her confusion the dragon had come upon one of the central fountains of the city, a deep, long cavern that had, in its heyday, run the length of a vast interior courtyard surrounded by columns of gleaming marble encrusted with mother-of-pearl from mollusk shells culled from the Erim Rus. Her inner vision led her immediately to the stream, which she saw as a deep pool in which splashing spray danced skyward in time to the fluctuating music of the place. Greedily she drank from it, following its source in search of more water.

  A vibration surrounded her suddenly, humming in a tone very different from the one she had been following, irritating her eyes and parts of her skin, but she shook it off. At the headwaters of the stream her mouth and eyes were suddenly filled with sunlight, golden and thick enough to be palpable.

  The wyrm gasped in delight. The amber nectar was sweet on her tongue and soothing to the caustic burning of her throat that had been plaguing her since her injury. She drank in more of the thickened sunlight, swallowed it in desperate gulps, feeling its sustenance fill her, strengthen her, cooling the fire in her belly, bringing her peace.

  She rolled onto her back in the stream and exhaled slowly, then fell into dreamless, healing sleep.

  29

  The holy citadel of Sepulvarta, the City of Reason

  Before leaving Sepulvarta in secret to meet with the Lord and Lady Cymrian, the Patriarch had ordered the city sealed.

  Being the central location of all holy orders within the Patrician faith, as well as a place of pilgrimage to those of other practices, even as far back as the polytheistic religions of the continent that preceded the Cymrian era, Sepulvarta had a long reputation of religious tolerance and free access. The road that led from the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare south to the city, known as the Pilgrim’s Road, was always teeming with human and animal traffic, pilgrims and clergy, tradesmen and merchants, all makin
g their way for their own reasons to the independent city-state. On normal days it might take as little as an hour to traverse the road and enter the city; on holy days, or days of heavy import at the time of festivals or famine, the wait could be the better part of a full turn of the sun. On rare occasions visitors to Sepulvarta could pass more than a few nights, sleeping in the street or at one of the many hostels and inns that lined the roadway, waiting to be allowed entrance through the one gate in the enormous wall that circled the entire city.

  Sealing the city was a precaution that was not unheard of. Occasionally the flow of visitors to the sacred spots and shrines overwhelmed the places of hospitality within the city’s walls. With the inns and wayhouses full, the taverns and pubs gained more guests and patrons than they could accommodate, leading to long lines for food and ale, ugly dispositions and threats, and often violence, all of which was deemed unacceptable for a holy city. The previous Patriarchs, rather than removing the hospitality, as had been done in the oldest days, chose to keep the ale and remove the patrons, at least temporarily, until the holy days were over and the flow of traffic returned to normal.

  So when the city was ordered sealed, no one thought the better of it.

  As it turned out, it was the one thing that prevented its immediate destruction and that of the farming settlements around it.

  Sepulvarta. had the worst of both lands that it bordered. North of mountainous Sorbold, south of the wide-open plains of Roland, it was a city perched on a small hill on the edge of the low piedmont and in the midst of the flattest part of the Krevensfield Plain, which served to make it easily visible to travelers and all but indefensible. Fortunately, as the holy See of both nations, there had never been any reason for it to mount a defense. Even in the seven hundred years of the Cymrian War, as the Krevensfield Plain burned with atrocities and the mountains rang with horrific battle, the holy city remained untouched, though, as Anborn had informed the Council, that had merely been by coincidence. By the time his army had taken the farming settlements in the region, it had been far easier to quarter the soldiers in places of plentiful food where they were dispersed, rather than making a headquarters in an obvious place that was just asking to be laid siege. So Sepulvarta remained intact, unspoiled and untainted by the horror that took place all around it