Satisfied, he turned his gaze skyward. The firmament holding the heavens in place had blackened patchily, with blue clouds smudging the panorama of stars that winked in the night wind.
He stared beyond the darkened rim where the canyon turned southeast; then he took down the veil and closed his eyes, letting the wind rush freely over his face and neck, bristling against the veins of his skin-web. He opened his mouth, and let the breeze fill it.
In his mind he sought a heartbeat, a distant rhythm on the wind. It was his blood-gift to be able to match his own to those ancient rhythms born in the same land as he had been born, the lost Island of Serendair, silent beneath the waves of the sea a thousand years again by half. A gift now shared only with a few thousand other living souls, all ancient beyond years, caught at whatever age they had been when they left the Island, frozen forever in time.
He quickly caught the heartbeat he was seeking, felt his pulse slow slightly and beat in the great, voluminous tympani of his oldest friend. Achmed exhaled; the nightly ritual brought him something akin to relief.
Grunthor lives, he thought, satisfied as always. Good.
He turned and sought another rhythm on the wind, a lighter, quicker one, more difficult to find, yet still unconsciously familiar. He knew it as well as his own; he was bound to its owner, bound by history, by friendship, by prophecy, by oath.
By Time.
He caught this one quickly as well, far away, past the Teeth and the seemingly endless Krevensfield Plain that lay beyond, over the rolling hills of Roland, almost to the sea. It was there, flickering in the distance, like a comforting song, the ticking of a clock, the ripples in a stream.
Achmed exhaled again. Good night, Rhapsody, he thought.
He sensed Omet’s presence even before his polite cough sounded, and waited until the tile artisan had come up to his side, continuing to stare down into the canyon.
Omet stared down into it as well.
“Quiet night,” he observed.
Achmed nodded. “Are the last deliveries in yet?”
“Yes.” Omet handed the king a leather pouch, then shook his head as the wind caught his hair, blowing it into his eyes. It had finally gained the length to do so again, after he had shaved it off while apprenticed to the tile ovens of Yarim, and their dark mistress. The thought made him shudder involuntarily. He stood quietly as the Bolg king leafed through the messages from the aviary. Achmed’s system of messenger birds was as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun.
“Nothing from Canderre yet,” the king said, turning the small slips of vellum over one by one, holding on to one in particular.
Omet nodded. “Francis Pratt, their ambassador, has been in ill health, I hear.”
“From Shaene?”
Omet chuckled. “Yes.”
“Then Pratt’s probably in a brothel bedding half of Canderre. Shaene is more consistently wrong than any form of life I have ever encountered.” He kicked a pebble into the canyon, knowing he would never hear its impact. “Pratt’s probably had trouble finding an artisan in the western provinces.”
“Probably.” The word came out lightly, but the night wind caught it and held on to it, adding weight, leaving it hanging in the air above the ledge.
The Bolg king turned the remaining piece of paper over in his hand. “If Pratt can’t find us one in Canderre who can be trusted, perhaps there is one in Sorbold. Or we can send across the sea for one from Manosse.”
Omet let his breath out as lightly as he could. “We could take our chances in Yarim. The best are there.”
Finally the Bolg king turned, leveling his mismatched gaze at Omet, and smiled slightly.
“Well, it’s interesting you should mention Yarim,” he said, “because there is a message here from Rhapsody. She wants Grunthor, you, and me to meet her there two fortnights from today.” He chuckled at the look of shock on the young man’s face.
“I’ll be happy to stay behind and look after the works while you and the Sergeant are gone,” he said hastily when he recovered the use of his tongue.
“I thought you might see it that way,” Achmed said. “So if you’d rather, you can stay here with Rhur and the Bolg artisans, and that idiot Shaene, listening to him call you Sandy.”
Omet sighed. “I can endure that, I suppose. Better than the alternative.”
Achmed nodded. “If you say so. Me, I would take any chance I could to spare myself from Shaene.” He pulled the veiling back over his lower face, made one more check of the mountain walls, the canyon, and the Blasted Heath beyond, then turned and strode back down the causeway into the depths of the Cauldron again.
On his way to his bedchamber, he stopped in the smithy, where Gwylliam’s ancient forges, refitted now with his own accoutrements, blazed through the night, turning out steel for weapons and tools, armor and architecture. Three thousand Bolg toiled through each shift in the blinding light and heat, adding to the strength of the mountain with every pull of the bellows, every clang of the hammer.
The Bolg Master of the Forge nodded to him, as he did every night at this time while Grunthor was away. The Firbolg king completed the Sergeant-Major’s tasks quickly, checking to make certain the cull pile was not being pilfered, the smiths were not using excessive amounts of iron ore in the mix as they had a few seasons back, and that the balance of the svarda, the circular, triple-bladed throwing knives that the Bolg exported to Roland, was being attended to.
Finally, assured that the smithy was functioning properly, he bade the forgemaster good night and headed for his chambers, stopping to finger the newly minted supply of disks for his cwellan, the primary weapon he used. It was of his own design, similar to an asymmetrical crossbow, curved to employ greater recoil on the spring. Instead of firing bolts, however, it made use of thin metal disks as the ammunition, razor-sharp, three at a time, staggered, each disk forcing the previous one deeper into the wound made by the first.
He held one up for a moment to the blazing light of the forge fires burning below, smelting steel into fiery near-liquid to be beaten into an endless number of shapes. The fireshadows danced across the cwellan disk, sending waves of rippling light over the blue-black rysin-steel surface.
Suddenly weary, the Firbolg king hastened to bed.
Third Thread
The Lee
JIERNA TAL, THE PLACE OF WEIGHT, SORBOLD
The realm of Sorbold was a place of relentless sun. Mountainous and arid, it stretched like the fingers of a grasping hand southward from the rim of the Manteids, the mountain range known more commonly as the Teeth, arthritic phalanges of spiny hills reaching across the barren desert and into the rocky steppes of the Lower Continent, to the ghostly inland seacoast, where the skeletons of ships lost centuries before still littered the black sand, shrouded in mist coming off the warm sea.
In winter the icy winds swept across the land, scattering crystals of snow, howling through the bleak dunes, shifting the desolate landscape like a child playing in a box of dirt. At night those winds carried sprays of golden sand aloft into the sky, where they drifted for a moment among the stars, mirroring the silent streaks of blazing light above, shooting stars that fell into the edges of endless blackness encompassing the vast, echoing desert.
In spite of the harsh reality of the land, the occasional sense that the Creator had forsaken the place and its people, Sorbold was a realm of deep magic.
The harsh climate did not engender a hospitable nature in the people of this rocky land. Sorbolds were known for the shortness of their attention, of their tempers, of their alliances. The only thing that seemed to be long in the national personality was memory. Sorbold held its history tightly; every battle loss, every betrayal, every perceived injustice counted and recounted silently but consistently as the years turned into centuries and eventually millennia. Ages and dynasties came and went with the shifting sands of the desert, but the memories remained, hidden, brooding, deep within the vaults of Time.
For three-quarte
rs of a century Sorbold had been under the rule of Her Serenity, Leitha, the Dowager Empress, a humorless woman whose cold attitude stood in marked contrast to the climate of the realm she held locked in her tiny but iron grip. The empress was short of stature but long of will. When she was coronated she was almost a perfect globe in shape; as the years of her reign passed she desiccated slowly, like a drying apple, as if the heat of Sorbold were sucking the water, fat, and muscle tissue bit by bit from her body, leaving her withered, hard, and leathery well into old age. The process made her stronger, like steel that was tempered in fire, or leather cured in smoke. For all that the bordering nations of the continent had quietly distrusted her father, the Fourth Emperor of the Dark Earth, they openly feared his daughter, who seemed bound and determined to live forever, and was doing a fair job of accomplishing that goal.
The bravest of her subjects and adversaries on occasion referred to the empress (well out of her earshot, of course) as the Gray Assassin, after a poisonous spider commonly found in dark, cool hiding places in the mountainous clime. Like the arachnid, the empress was rumored to have mated only once. Her consort, a pasty-faced noble from the Hintervold, was found the morning after their wedding, his rigid body carefully dressed and lying on top of the neatly folded sheets in the royal bedchamber, a hideous grimace sealed forever into his features by the richtus of death, while the empress was out for her morning ride.
The momentary union produced the empress’s only progeny, the Crown Prince Vyshla. The Crown Prince favored his father; his skin was sallow and pale, even in a clime that produced swarthy complexions in everyone else who lived there; his hands and body were soft as a woman’s, some soldiers of the Columns were known to have joked once, though in doing so they learned quickly that the mountains, and even the desert sand, had ears. Their eyeless remains, dried and mummified by the harsh winds and waterless air, swung for more than a year from a parapet outside the palace of Jierna Tal before the prince was finally prevailed upon to have them removed so that they did not clash with the street decorations celebrating the rites of spring.
It was not the prince, however, who was responsible for the grisly ornaments, but his mother.
The Crown Prince had remained unmarried all his life. At first it had been rumored by those outside his realm that the reason was his deeply held standards, set too high for any mortal woman to reach. As the years passed, however, other reasons were proffered when the topic came up over tankards of ale around inn hearth fires or in sewing circles.
Perhaps it was the prince’s own noxious personality that kept him from winning a bride; he was said to be fussy and high-strung, easily offended and given to spates of impotent smoldering. In addition, other types of impotence were widely rumored. But, for all that Vyshla was, without question, annoying and childlike, he certainly was not the first ruler of a powerful nation to be devoid of a pleasant personality. That lack of personal charisma had never been a barrier to a royal marriage before; on the contrary, it had been more or less proven that the most attractive appendage in a royal man was the scepter he held in his hand by divine right, not anything more centrally attached to his body.
As time went on, the gossip shifted. Crown Prince Vyshla’s lack of betrothal, marriage, and progeny, it was now believed, had been engineered entirely by the Dowager Empress. Jealous and avaricious, the woman who had ruled Sorbold for more than seventy-five years had broken the aggressions of her enemies, held armies at bay, and elevated a dry, resourceless land into a realm of tremendous power and influence by the mere force of her will and vision. Quite simply, the stories said, she was not willing to entertain the possibility that an heir was necessary, because she was never planning to leave the throne. One of the more exaggerated tales claimed that she had wind-dried the unfortunate soldiers who joked at her son’s expense as an experiment to see how better to preserve herself post mortem, so that she might continue to rule without interruption after her death.
For all the iron-clad avarice of the self-serving dowager, and the finicky, spoiled behavior of the pampered prince, however, there had been one moment in recent history that showed that the Empress of the Dark Earth and her son were levelheaded monarchs, reasonable in their policies of international relations, acting in the best interests of Sorbold.
They had more or less willingly agreed to, and ultimately signed, treaties of trade and nonaggression with the new Cymrian Alliance.
Initially the elderly queen and her son worried when the benison of Sorbold, the foremost clergyman in their land and the dowager’s personal confessor, had returned from Sepulvarta, the independent city-state that was the capital seat of the religion of the realm, with news of the alliance between the central human nation of Roland to their north, the forested Lirin realm to their west, and Ylorc, the savage kingdom of Firbolg monsters across the mountainous barricade to the east.
The new queen of the Lirin, a half-human woman named Rhapsody whom Vyshla had halfheartedly sued for the hand of, and Gwydion of Manosse, the Heir Presumptive of the Cymrian line that had ruled Roland, Ylorc, and Sorbold itself for a time a thousand years before, had been selected by a council of the surviving Cymrians and their descendants to reign over a loose alliance of the realms of the central continent, while each kingdom retained its sovereignty. The empress was able to see the value in being perceived from the outset as a friendly independent nation, rather than have the alliance of men, Lirin, and Bolg test their mettle as a possible conquest later on.
The Dowager Empress had a remarkable gift for looking forward. Her visionary glance saw down the road into a future where cooperation from the outset would yield protection in later days.
As with most visionaries, what her eves couldn’t see was the shadow that loomed behind her.
The three-quarter moon rose heavily over the streets of Jierna’sid, the capital seat of Sorbold, glowing sparingly on the sand that blasted the formal gardens and well-kept roadways, a constant reminder of the endless desert that flanked the city on two sides. The wind seemed to laugh in time at the moon, teasingly blowing wisps of clouds in front of the pale sky-lantern, shrieking fitfully over the sleeping city. Try to tame me, the wind seemed to taunt. I dare you.
That moon, in answer, doused the central object of the city with a particular shine.
Towering above the palace of Jierna Tal, the Place of Weight, stood the holiest artifact in the land. It was a gigantic set of ancient scales, the wooden column and beam planed smooth by artisans of the old Cymrian empire a thousand or more years before, the ancient metal pans even older, trays of gleaming gold carried across the ocean on ships fleeing the destruction of the place they had been smithed, burnished by the relentless sand and wind.
The last time those mammoth scales had been used to weigh a decision of heavy import had been three years prior, when the Patriarch in Sepulvarta died. The Patriarch had decreed in his final moments that, rather than naming his own successor, he wished to allow the Scales to select one. The benisons of the religion, those clergyman directly beneath the Patriarch in power and influence, had gathered in Jierna Tal for the Weighing, a long-revered rite in which the ancient Scales passed judgment on a candidate’s worthiness. Historically the Scales had at one time made determinations on many different kinds of offices, as well as the innocence or guilt of accused criminals, and whether treaties were balanced and fair, but in recent memory their wisdom was only consulted on matters of state or great import. The selection and investiture of a new Patriarch was deemed a worthy cause for consulting the Scales.
The Ring of Wisdom of the Patriarchy had been placed, amid solemn ceremony, into the tray that aligned with the west wind, Leuk, the wind of justice, to serve as the weight. One by one, each of the benisons had stepped onto the eastern tray.
One by one the Scales had tilted crazily and the eastern tray upended, finding the candidate unworthy, and depositing him unceremoniously onto his hindquarters at the base of the enormous scaffold amid roars of amusement fr
om the immense crowd that had gathered to watch the selection. The youngest of the four benisons, Ian Steward, had bravely volunteered to go first. He landed with a resounding splat, his body splayed out in such an unflattering manner that the eldest benison, Colin Abernathy, had decided to forgo the process and pass up a chance at the Patriarchy altogether.
Finally, when each of the existing benisons had been deemed unworthy of the Ring and the Patriarchy by the Scales, another man had stepped forward. He was tall and broad of shoulder, despite being advanced of years, his white-blond beard and hair curling in streaks of gray. He had stepped onto the scale tray as if it were something he had done many times before, and stood, as if listening to a voice in the clouds, as the enormous arm and chains of the Scales raised him on high, over the heads of the now-silent crowd, then balanced the trays.
As the stunned crowd recovered from its shock and roared assent, the man quietly spoke but one word, his name.
Constantin.
The noise from the crowd dimmed for a moment. The name was renowned in Sorbold, shared with a famous gladiator in the western city-state of Jakar, a cool and bloodthirsty arena killer who had disappeared from the gladiatorial complex some months before. The thought that this elderly holy man, soon to be anointed and invested with the powers to become the most potent healer in the land, had the same name as the gladiator was such a great irony as to invoke a sea of rippling laughter across the city square that rattled the bell towers of Jierna Tal.
Later that day, long after the decision of the Scales had been officially inscribed in the holy tomes of Sepulvarta, many hours after the crowds in the square had dispersed, the new Patriarch could still be seen, standing at the foot of the Scales, staring up at the holy instrumentality, a look of reverent amazement etched into the lines of his face.
Requiem for the Sun Page 3