Requiem for the Sun

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “And yet the Scales confirmed him,” Ashe said. “I witnessed it myself.”

  “Why did you not say something before you left?” Achmed asked the Patriarch incredulously. “If you knew this was a potential outcome of the selection process, why did you not intervene?”

  “Because it is not for me to decry the Scales,” Constantin answered. “They are what confirmed me to my position in the first place. How could I decree their wisdom to be faulty without invoking a paradox?” He sighed heavily. “Besides, to acknowledge my past in the arena would be to open the realm of the Rowans to scrutiny that would not be welcome there. And finally, he was not the only man with blood on his hands who was in the running. If I were to decry everyone I thought unfit to be emperor, Sorbold would be a leaderless state. Truth be told, I was hoping they would decide to disband into city-states, but the Scales decided otherwise.”

  He rose and put his hand on Ashe’s shoulder.

  “I shall intercede with the All-God for your wife, and your child, each day,” he said. “As well as for your efforts to find this Wind of Death, which now is the Wind of Fire. I pray that, as I have undergone a change of heart in my time behind the Veil of Hoen, Talquist too will experience such a transformation. Perhaps the fact that he did not immediately demand coronation as emperor is a sign of that.”

  “I doubt it,” Achmed said. “In my experience, men who had a thirst for blood and power only grow thirstier the more they are fed it. You may be the only exception I have ever met.”

  The three men thanked the Patriarch and descended the stairs together, leaving him beneath the aperture of the Spire, staring into the sky.

  At the door of the basilica, Grunthor grasped Ashe by the shoulder.

  “Child?” he demanded. “Ya didn’t mention this; why?”

  “Leave for Ylorc at once,” Achmed ordered. “There is another Child who is our responsibility, a far more grave one than finding Rhapsody. Or Michael.” He turned to Ashe.

  “If we hunt for them together, we have a better chance of finding her,” he said, “though I still do not hear even a hint of her heartbeat. No matter how far she has been from me, ill or injured, even within the earth, I have never lost the sound of it until now. I suspect that he has killed her; that would be like him. So though I know you will be seeking her, blind to everything else, understand that I am seeking him now. If we find him, we might at least be able to discover what he did with her. Are we clear on the distinction?”

  “Yes,” Ashe said shortly.

  “All right then.” He pulled Grunthor aside to confer with him.

  “Back in Ylorc is a woman named Theophila, from a tribe of nomadic artisans known as the Panjeri. She has access to the forge and is to be given anything she needs for her work on the Lightcatcher. She also has a temper. Don’t anger her — I’ve searched for the last year and a half to find her.”

  Grunthor eyed him doubtfully. “Yes, sir.”

  “Travel well,” Achmed said. “I’ll bring Rockslide back when I return.”

  The Bolg Sergeant shook his head. “Bring back the Duchess, sir. Don’t get lost in the blood rage or the fact that it’s Michael, and forget who we’re really missin’ ’ere.”

  Achmed and Ashe were already gone.

  JIERNA TAL

  “If there is nothing else, m’lord, I will be going back to the Chancery now,” Nielash Mousa said to the new regent, bowing slightly with deference.

  Talquist looked up from the heavy mahogany table and smiled from among the depths of the sheaves of papers. His swarthy face glowed in the dusky light of afternoon, which was darkening outside the window in the advent of a coming rainstorm.

  “No, nothing in the world, Your Grace,” he said warmly. “I think all is well on its way to normalcy again. Thank you for everything you have done to facilitate this transition.”

  The exhausted benison smiled as well. “It has been my pleasure. Please send for me if you have any need, m’lord.”

  “I shall. Now go home and get some rest. What I need is you hale and healthy, and you won’t be if you don’t look after yourself.”

  “Very well. Good evening,” said the Blesser of Sorbold, bowing slightly again. He turned and followed his retinue from the enormous library.

  Talquist watched him go, then returned to his papers.

  After a few moments, a man slipped in through the open double doors, closing them quietly behind him.

  The regent looked up, amusement in his eyes. He reached for the Canderian brandy that was breathing in the open crystal decanter on the table next to his paperwork and pointed to an empty glass. The man shook his head, declining the drink.

  “I suppose I should actually have said those words to you,” Talquist said, refilling his own glass. “Thank you for everything you have done to facilitate this transition.”

  Lasarys blinked nervously, his eyes unused to the light.

  “You are welcome, sire,” he stammered.

  “You seem fretful, Lasarys. Why?”

  The sexton tried to meet the dark eyes of the regent, but found it too draining. “I — am merely tired, m’lord. It has been a difficult few weeks.”

  “Ah. I see.” Talquist sat back and crossed his hands over her stomach. “No doubt you have had to follow the benison about, tending to the guests of state — are they all gone now?”

  “Yes, m’lord. The Diviner left this morning.”

  Talquist glanced out the window to the courtyard below, where the column of the late empress was running drills.

  “Indeed. He and I were up quite late in discussions with Beliac. So you are now relieved of your duties as host, Lasarys. You may return to your dark hole within Night Mountain and tend to your beloved cathedral. The Living Stone you harvested from it for me was invaluable in achieving my ends; thank you.”

  The sexton looked ill. Talquist did not look at him.

  “What is the matter, Lasarys? Are you having second thoughts? It’s a bit late, wouldn’t you say?”

  “N — no, m’lord, no second thoughts,” the sexton said quickly, wringing his hands.

  Talquist rose and came to him then, laying his heavy hands on the trembling priest’s shoulders.

  “I know you love that dark cathedral as if it were your own mother,” the regent said softly, his voice caressing every syllable. “And that whittling off even the smallest of pieces of animate clay was like cutting off your own mother’s breast. You don’t have to make excuses, Lasarys; I know your heart. I learned much about you when I was your acolyte. And I wish that I could promise you that it was the last time you should ever have to endure such a thing, but there is no need to lie now. I am emperor; or will be in a year’s time.” He patted the priest’s cheek. “Now go back to Terreanfor, and tend to it as lovingly as you always do. While you are skulking about in the dark, begin looking for other places from which to harvest. It’s better to begin secreting it away now, rather than have to kill one of the Living Stone trees, or the elephants! Ah, how I love those elephants, those dark, glowering monsters. Let us spare them until the very end, shall we?”

  The sexton nodded, unable to speak coherently.

  Talquist smiled. “Good. Summer is high, but it will end in time. The earth will go dormant, life settling underground to hide, hibernate, as we hide and hibernate. But in spring, Lasarys! Ah, spring.”

  He strolled onto the balcony, whistling merrily.

  38

  THE CAULDRON, YLORC

  Omet was up all night, working feverishly.

  Shadows leapt madly across the rough stone walls of his chamber within the second wing of the guard barracks; Omet had always preferred living among the soldiers to sharing a guest quarter with Shaene, mostly because, in addition to snoring and having a penchant for the petty, Shaene was a hired artisan, temporarily housed in Ylorc for the duration of the stained-glass project. Omet had every intention of staying here.

  Somewhere in those mountains greatness is taking hold, Rhap
sody had said to him three years ago when they parted at the border of Yarim and Ylorc, following his rescue from the guildmistress’s foundry. You can be a part of it. Go carve your name into the ageless rock for history to see. From that moment he had been inspired to, in fact, do just that, rather remarkable given that a few days before he could not imagine his future past the next turn of the day, the next in an never-ending cycle of watching the ovens and kilns.

  And it was coming to pass. The Bolg had made him at home, as much as they were able, had taken him in as one of them, not as a distrusted stranger; he knew the rarity of his good fortune, and understood what made a half-Lirin woman like Rhapsody, so utterly out of place in the rough land of cannibalistic demi-humans, love the place and the people as much as she did her own race in Tyrian.

  He had the same unquenchable desire to spare the place, and its king, from whatever destruction Esten was planning. That desire fought with another strong urge.

  The urge to run as fast and as far as he could away from the Cauldron and never look back.

  But even as the rushes of panic swept through his blood, he knew there was no wisdom in flight.

  After all, sooner or later, everything made its way to Esten.

  He had taken one risk, however. In between stretches of drawing, to rest his hand, he had jotted careful notes, written in a bad combination of phonetically spelled Bolgish and the common tongue when necessary, detailing what he had seen the guildmistress do in the king’s absence, as well as recording his own actions, and the place in which he had hidden the original drawings.

  More of Rhapsody’s words came back to him now as he sweated in the light of the lantern, copying and blotting, copying and blotting.

  Don’t limit the uses of your skill and imagination. I believe that you could become one of the great artisans of the Rebuilding.

  Omet held the parchment he had been working on since leaving Gurgus up to the lanternlight. He chuckled at the irony of what she had said.

  The plans he had redrawn were an impressive copy of the original, even in his own modest estimation. He had rendered them on pieces of ancient parchment that had been discovered, in a casket full of rice, on one of the lower levels of the vaults in Gwylliam’s library, sealed with an ancient wax mark; undoubtedly they had once been documents, but the intervening centuries had caused the ink to dry up and disappear as if it had never been quilled into the paper.

  Having found a convincing canvas on which to scribe his deception, he devoted the remainder of his waking hours to the careful copying of just enough of the elements of the original plans to, with any luck, be convincing. With a careful hand he drew lines of scale where the piping schematic had been, deleting all references to the wheel, leaving only the very basic diagrams of where the colored glass was supposed to go.

  He prayed it would be enough.

  Once he put the falsified plans in Esten’s hands, it would be an endless game of cat and mouse, trying to stay out of her sight as much as possible without attracting her notice of his absence. Thinking about it made Omet’s skin erupt in cold beads of sweat.

  She had unconsciously given him until the morning to produce the plans, which would afford him the opportunity to stop by the forges and dry the ink on them. He pushed back his chair nervously, blotting the parchment one last time, then slipped quietly out of his room and down the corridor to the tunnels that led to the great forges.

  Fearing that Esten and some of the others might be touring the kilns and glass ovens, he climbed farther down the stone tunnels and passageways to the great searing inferno at the base of the mountain, where the steelworks lay.

  The heat was searing in this place of melting ore and glowing hot metal. Two separate forges blasted day and night, a commercial smithy that produced the standard weapons sold via trade agreement to Roland and Sorbold, and a specialty forge that produced Achmed’s original designs: svardas, the heavy but well-balanced circular throwing knives with three blades; short, compact crossbows with extra recoil for use in the tunnels of Ylorc; split arrowheads and heavy darts for blowguns, balanced and designed for deeper penetration; midnight-blue steel drawknives that were really razor-edged hooks that replaced the makeshift close combat weapon of many Bolg; and, of course, the disks of the king’s own cwellan.

  It was this forge alone that was allowed to run hot enough to shape the blue-black alloy of rysin and steel.

  And since Esten had been promised tools of her own design to be manufactured in his forges, no doubt she would be given access to this heavily guarded metalworks, whose source of flame was a vent to the fire that burned at the heart of the Earth itself.

  The prickles of cold panic rose from his feet again. He looked past the half dozen tiered galleries of anvils and fires, worked by three thousand Bolg at each shift, stoking the flames, smithing the ore, forging the steel, running the damper system that vented the heat and soot out of the mountain in summer, or recirculated it, filtered, through the tunnels of Ylorc in winter for heat. Satisfied that no one was watching him, he unfurled the scroll and allowed it a moment’s exposure to the searing wind from the forges, then quickly wrapped it in leather again before it could ignite.

  He was under siege, though he did not believe at the moment the enemy that threatened him was aware of it.

  What had brought Esten to the mountain was not in doubt for him. She was here to extract revenge. How she planned to do it was unclear, but her means of getting inside Achmed’s impenetrable mountain had been, like all her machinations, flawlessly plotted, brilliantly planned. The wolf was in the henhouse, and the farmer had unwittingly invited her in and held the door for her.

  It would not end well.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Here’s for it, then, he thought as he made his way up the dark corridors to the towering crag of Gurgus that would one day be made into a Lightcatcher.

  But not while Esten was still within the mountain.

  He only hoped he could live long enough to explain to the Firbolg king what he had done.

  Esten waited in the wind at the top of a bluff, watching for the mail caravan to arrive. The sun was setting over the Krevensfield Plain, reflecting on the clouds and the waving fields of grass, blanketing them with gold that turned red at the edges, a warmth that hinted ominously of things to come.

  The sweet sensations of summer hung heavy in the air around her. Esten allowed herself the momentary pleasure of closing her eyes and breathing them in: the smell of the wind on which rain would come soon; the odor of verdant grass, bursting with life, arching toward the descending sun in a kind of joyful agony; the relentless whine of insects, the ever-cooling gusts of air, the pinpricks of distant light in farms and outposts as lanterns were lit to battle the coming darkness.

  A moment was all she allowed herself. Esten opened her eyes again quickly, watching for the mail caravan that was arriving from Yarim. She pulled her knees up to her chest, thinking, allowing her mind to wander down metaphysical alleyways where death, ever-present, lurked, waiting.

  It had been six days since the Bolg king had brought her to this place, and six days that he had been gone.

  After almost an hour, the caravan pulled into sight on the steppes beyond the rocky hills where she lurked. In the lead were the first third of the two score and ten soldiers that accompanied it, followed by four wagons and a coach, with the balance of the forces deployed around them.

  Following the official caravan was the informal convoy, the travelers who sought the protection of the soldiers and each other, believing that safety did lie in numbers as well as in arms. There was a ragtag group with this particular caravan; a few farmers traveling to or returning from market, some pilgrims on their way back from holy sites.

  And one familiar business associate.

  While the caravan was putting in to the outpost at Grivven Tower, the guildmistress slipped quietly down from the foothills, clad in her simple black trousers, shirt, and summer cloak, a dark b
lue shawl over her close-cropped hair, blending in with the growing darkness. She hung back in the shadows, waiting patiently until the convoy dispersed for the night, the soldiers retiring to the guest barracks, the stragglers making camp. Then she stepped silently out into the moonlight long enough for Dranth to find her.

  He saw her right away, came to her quickly, following her into the shadows of the cliffs, carrying a small chest wrapped in burlap and a large sack. When she had determined their meeting place to be safe, she inclined her head; the guild scion nodded in return.

  “You are looking very well, Guildmistress,” he said quietly. “Is everything unfolding as you planned?”

  “Everything,” Esten said confidently. “It was easier than I could have imagined to infiltrate the Panjeri; they took me in without question. I would have never guessed my father’s upbringing would prove so useful to me one day. And the Bolg king is every bit as obsessed with his project as we had heard from the Hierarch in Yarim. A good thing that is; without the distractions he would be more formidable than I ever could have imagined. But between the deaths of the Sorbold royal family, the colored ceiling he wanted blown into the pinnacle of a mountain crag, and whatever took him away unexpectedly, he is not concentrating. He will be caught completely unaware.”

  “Good.” Dranth handed her the burlap-wrapped chest. “Here is the picric acid you asked for — do be cautious, Guildmistress. Remember to keep it wet, so it is merely flammable; when it dries —”