He held up his hand, not looking at it; on the index finger the ring he had taken from the hut blazed, brilliant, in the morning light.
“Ether is the only element that came before fire, so it is the one that holds more power. Water came after it, then wind, then earth; over those three elements fire holds sway.”
“But water quenches fire,” Ashe said.
MacQuieth turned on him like a badger on its prey, his cloudy eyes leveled at him.
“Tell that to the people of Traeg, or any of the other villages that burned to ashes along the coast of the sea,” he said scornfully. “Tell that to the islands of Balatron, Briela, and Querel, that melted in the heat of the fire that burned, unquenched, in the boiling waves. I may have burned my eyes, staring at the sun on the sea, fire on the water, to the point of being sightless, but it is you, Gwydion ap Llauron ap Gwylliam, who are being blind.”
“Ashe,” the Lord Cymrian said quietly. “Call me Ashe. Then you don’t have to utter the name you loathe. I am not my grandfather; I would hate to have my kinsman think of him when talking to me.”
The ancient warrior smiled then, his eyes seeming to clear a bit.
“‘Ashe,’” he said, rolling the word around in his mouth. “Sounds like a version of the story of the cinder girl who becomes a princess. I am old; you will learn it in my tongue. ‘Aesch.’” The harshness of the sound scraped against Ashe’s eardrum like teeth on bone.
“And what am I to call you, Grandfather?”
MacQuieth shrugged.
“I could not care less what you call me,” he said. “I am not here to do your bidding. I will not answer unless I am moved to. I am only here to find the one you seek as well. But one thing — do not use my name. If he hears it on the wind, he will flee. Even as you see me now, old and wasted as I am, he would run rather than fight me.”
Ashe nodded. “You were telling me of long ago. What did you do?” he asked gently. “After you felt the death of the Island?”
The ancient hero stared off, still sightless, into the horizon at the waves rolling up the gleaming sand, over the fragments of shells and pebbles, rushing white to the end of the froth, slipping away, with the top layer of sand, back into the maw of the sea.
“I went to bury my son,” he said.
Above the crashing waves a seagull screamed; the shrill sound broke the thundering silence that rolled in, like the waves, on the warrior’s words.
“It is a strange thing, walking the world through the sea,” MacQuieth said, almost as if talking to himself. “There are wonders untold, great mountains that dwarf anything in the upworld, trenches and chasms that surely must reach to the center of the world itself; treasures of man, buried in the sand beneath wrecks of ships; treasures of the ocean, coral in colors never imagined, towering threads of spider-lace rock and creatures that defy description. More of the world exists down there, far from the minds of the ignorant masses, than ever will be known in the realm of land. There is magic unfathomable to be seen if a man’s eyes are open to it.”
He looked overhead as a flock of seabirds passed on the warm wind, following the shadow. His sight returns, Ashe thought. Thank the gods.
“But of course my eyes were not open to the sea’s wonder, but to its terror. I knew that I would find devastation there, but could not have begun to imagine how hellish, how truly terrible the sight of it would be. The towers of Tartechor, the great city of the Mythlin, once the jewel of the sea, gone, along with the rest, swept away by the roiling current. The hundreds of thousands souls that lived there gone as well, atomized, turned into vapor, foam on the waves. In breathing the water around the place where the city had been, I knew I was breathing the dead.
“It was a kindness that Tartechor went the way it did, however. For all that it was horrific to view the place where there had once been such opulence beneath the waves, and now was nothing but ever-shifting sand, it could not begin to compare to the horror of the sight that was once Serendair. Where there had been highlands, there was nothing beneath the waves but rubble and ruin, melted statues and stone gates jutting from great mountains of broken earth, the towers of Elysian castle now pebbles in the swirling current. They had built seawalls, levies, in the last days, in the vain attempt to hold back the inevitable.” MacQuieth shook his head, smiling sadly. “That must have been Hector. My son would have been filling bags of sand to the last.” The ancient soldier fell silent. Ashe stood alongside him as the sun crested the horizon and set sail for the pinnacle of the sky.
MacQuieth bent down and gathered a handful of sand, contemplating it for a moment, then allowed it to run through his fingers onto the ground again.
“If you know the ways of the Liringlas, you know that we bury our dead by committing their bodies to fire on the wind beneath the stars. We sing of the life of the dead, of their dreams, their accomplishments, their good works. There was much to elegize for Hector. He was a man of surpassing greatness; he was my hero.” The soldier exhaled deeply. “But there was nothing to bury, nothing to put on a pyre, just loose mountains of ruin that towered almost to the very surface of the sea. And ash; even in all the time it had taken me to walk through the sea to the other side of the world, when I came there were still clouds of ash swirling in the current, clouding the water, fouling it, despoiling it, with transient earth. How was I to find my son in all that rubble, all that thick, gray haze? I could not sing the requiem for my own son; how could I ever sing it for another?”
For a long time the two men stood, one lost in thought, the other in memory, listening to the whine of the wind. Suddenly MacQuieth looked up sharply to the north.
“He comes,” he said simply.
OFF THE NORTHERN COAST
The Basquela dropped anchor as the sun was at the pinnacle of the sky.
The seneschal’s face, even more drawn and thin than usual, hardened as the ship came to rest on a fallowing sea that was beginning to pitch with the winds heralding that a storm was coming.
He pulled the spyglass from his robes and fixed it on the pointed promontory, scanning once again the rocky crags, the jagged coastline.
“Where are you, Rhapsody?” he muttered, searching through the mist from the crashing surf, the haze of the misty sunlight darkening as clouds began to pass overhead.
Dead, the demon answered bitterly, or hidden far beyond your reach. One last time; abandon this madness and turn for home.
Defiantly, Michael clutched the rail and leaned into the wind, shouting her name at the top of his lungs.
On the depths of her tidal cave, working feverishly as she sat on the ledge to expanded the floating net of lava rocks, Rhapsody thought she heard her name in the whistle of the wind in the cave.
The salt is getting to me, she thought, desperately plaiting the strands of her hair she had shorn from her head with the broken crossbow bolt, eyeing the body that was swirling in the circular current, dissolving before her eyes. Tomorrow . We will get out of here tomorrow. It was a promise she had avoided committing to until this day.
The she heard it again, shouted in a voice filled with anger and obsession.
Rhapsody! I am coming for you! I know where you are; I see you! I will be with you today or on the morrow! Rhapsody!
She clutched the floating mat closer to her chest; then, after a moment, her fear turned to steely resolve.
Not in my lifetime.
50
THE CAULDRON
Shaene was snoring prodigiously in his bed within the ambassador’s chambers of Ylorc, having long given up on supping with Theophila, when he felt an odd sensation, as if his big toe had been licked.
In his sleep he pulled his foot away rapidly, only to feel his leg held down by pressure.
The Canderian glassmaker struggled to open his eyes. As he did, a thrill shot through him, originating at his crotch, where a warm hand other than his own had made itself at home.
He sat up slightly, only to feel the body that was hunched over his, head
between his legs, press him firmly to the mattress again.
The coverlet was pulled back by a woman’s hand, revealing a small dark head. Similarly dark eyes in a grinning face looked up at him.
“Shhhhh,” the woman said, running her hands briskly up and down his thighs. “I am sorry I am late.”
The sounds that came forth from Shaene’s throat were unintelligible as words.
Theophila returned to her task.
He let his head fall heavily back against the thin pillow of his bed, surrendering without any resistance whatsoever to the delicious sensations that were being visited upon him below the coverlet, watching the ceiling turn strange colors as the blood rushed away from his brain and streaked rapidly to other parts of his body. Arousal, long arrested, long denied, roared forth from deep within him; he went from soundly asleep to fully primed in a few beats of his rapidly pulsing heart.
“Theophila —”
As if to silence him, her ministrations became all the more eager, all the more intense. Fire of a sort broke out between Shaene’s ears; his head hummed with static, as though it had been completely cut off from the rest of his body.
He moaned foolishly as she pulled back suddenly, stopping before he lost control completely. The erotic sensations that had been flooding through him a moment before were now replaced by prickling guilt, an embarrassment that she had been able to tell how close to the edge he had come with almost no stimulation. He started to speak, to apologize, only to find his mouth covered with her own, her lips as hot as the forges under the mountain.
Shaene abandoned any conscious thought, any ability to move. He did not have the energy to marvel at his good luck, or pinch himself to ascertain the reality of his situation, or wonder at her motives. He merely lay back, rigid in all parts of his body, and tried not to laugh or wheeze or cough as the beautiful woman who had appeared in the dark beneath his blankets rode him vigorously, sending lightning strikes of pleasure through his lonely flesh.
She was a master at building him to the point of release, then backing him quickly down, only to soar to a dizzying, frightening height again a moment later. Her scent, a spicy blend that made his nostrils tingle and his head swim, wrapped around his conscious thought as she whispered erotic words to him in his ear, teased him, coaxed him to fantasize about making love in strange places — on a windswept mountain pass, near the heat of the forges, in the Bolg king’s own bed.
He found himself straining to answer, muttering replies and directions to each of the imaginary venues, only to find his mouth covered again with hers. After the last of the fantasies, when he had murmured how they would have to wait for the changing of the shift of guards at the ninth corridor in order to sneak down the left-hand hallway to the private chambers of Achmed the Snake, to copulate as she had wished on the silken sheets of his bed, she had stopped for a moment, causing waves of prickling shock to roll through him.
“Where?” she demanded, bearing down on him, causing him to gasp with pleasure. “Tell me. Where is the ninth corridor?”
“I — I don’t know,” Shaene answered breathlessly. “I’ve never been allowed near there.”
The Panjeri woman’s eyes grew steely; if he had been looking into them, Shaene would have been terrified, but he was spared from the sight because his own head was tilted back, gasping for air.
He was thereby also spared the sight of those angry eyes resolving into annoyance as she plunged deeper, knobbing him so relentlessly that he could no longer hold on to any semblance of restraint. Indeed, she ceased holding back altogether; if anything, Shaene had a fleeting impression that she went from being amorous to being impatient in the wink of an eye, wishing the act to culminate quickly.
Involuntarily he obliged.
Spent and brainless, he groaned as she rolled off of him, missing the fiery heat that had surrounded him a moment before. Shaene reached for the warm body beside him and missed; he raised his head and looked around.
Theophila was gone.
Omet was deep in the throes of a nightmare, a dream about his mother.
He had had many such dreams in his life, though they had been fewer and farther between since he had come to the mountain with the other slave boys rescued from Yarim. One by one those children had left Ylorc; orphans, they had no family to return to or that they remembered, so they had been placed by the Lady Cymrian with childless couples that she knew in Tyrian and Navarne, far away from the burning clay and horrific memories of the foundry of Yarim and the dark, clammy tunnels they had been forced to dig beneath it.
But Omet had stayed. He was no orphan, or at least he didn’t think he was; his mother had apprenticed him out of need and the desire to no longer pay for his upkeep. She had known the life to which she was sentencing him, had been fully aware of the guildmistress’s reputation, and had not come to visit him once in the five years of his apprenticeship. He blamed her for all but the last.
But now she was with him at his bedside, weeping quietly, begging his forgiveness as she often did in these dreams, telling him of her sorrow at his loss, and how she had mourned him each of the days of his apprenticeship, praying for him, making offerings on the Patriarch’s altar so that the prayers would be melded with those of other mothers of slave children, channeled through the benison to the Patriarch up to the Creator, the All-God himself.
I am so sorry, Omet, she said in the reverberating voice of the dream world. She brushed a heavy lock of hair away from his forehead.
Omet sighed in his sleep.
His mother’s fingers were callused from years of manual labor, but gentle as they caressed his forehead.
I’ve missed you, his mother whispered in his dream.
“Have you?” he murmured. “Have you missed me?”
“Oh, very much, Omet. Very much.”
The words were clearer, closer. Omet opened his eyes to find Esten sitting beside him on the bed, where his mother had been a moment before in his dream.
She was caressing his hair.
Her knife pressing against his throat.
Omet inhaled raggedly through his nostrils, letting his breath out cautiously, the knife blade sharp.
“You didn’t think I recognized you, did you, Omet?” she said sweetly, the light from the lantern on the bedside table making her eyes glow wickedly. “But I’ve known you from the beginning.” She ran her free hand through his thick, straight hair and cupped the beard on his chin, letting her fingers linger there. “Once I own someone they are mine forever. Surely you knew that, didn’t you, Omet?”
He stared at her in silence.
Esten moved closer, her back arched like a cat hunting. There was cruelty in her eyes that was mirrored in her muscles, an intense, deliberate movement that carried as much threat as his mind could imagine. She sat on his chest, pinning his arms down with her legs.
“Tell me what happened that night in the foundry,” she said softly, pressing the blade infinitesimally closer; the tension making his mouth taste iron. “How did the Bolg king get past all of you? How many men did it take to overcome my journeymen? Tell me, Omet, how did he do it?”
The artisan said nothing.
With an artless flick of the blade, Esten shaved off a tiny section of beard and the top few layers of skin, drawing but one drop of blood.
“Tell me,” she said menacingly, her voice dropping. “The vein that my knife leans against would be most difficult to close once opened.”
Thoughts of that night flashed before his eyes. He had been awakened, quickly tied and gagged by Rhapsody while Achmed scouted the area.
“Alone,” Omet whispered. “He was alone.”
Esten lifted her head at a different angle, studying his face. “Liar. There were thirteen men and two dozen half-grown boys missing as a result of that night. He could not have been alone.”
“He was alone,” Omet insisted, struggling to breathe with the knife at his neck. “He — killed most of them with — his cwellan.”
> “Cwellan?” The knife did not move as her other hand produced a blue-black rysin-steel disk. “The curved weapon he carries on his back, that fires these?”
“Yes,” Omet whispered. “He bound me, and the other apprentices. Vincane — fought him. The — Bolg king locked him — in the kiln.”
The cruel eyes glittered. “That explains the stench. Did he kill the slave children? Bury them beneath all that slip?”
Omet thought of the long ride to Ylorc with the rescued boys, Rhapsody and Achmed maintaining order until they could be turned over to the Bolg guards in the northern Teeth.
“Yes. All dead. Buried in the slip. Along with the journeymen.”
“Why? Why would he do that?” The lines of her brow knitted together, drawing her face into a terrifying mask of concentration. “If he is some sort of do-gooder king, off solving the problems of the world, why would he seal my slave boys under a fired mountain of clay?”
“It was — Vincane who upended the first vat,” Omet said quickly; it was the first truth he had told. “He was — trying to get away.”
Esten’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth drew into an even tighter line.
“How did he fire it? How did it become solid?”
Omet struggled to breathe, trying not to encourage the blade point any closer. “I don’t know. He had bound me and taken me out by then.”
“Hmmm. I still don’t know why he chose to risk my wrath by interfering with my work, though it may have had something to do with wanting his mudfilth artisans to be the ones to dig out Entudenin. He is a curious fellow, isn’t he? Well, no matter. He will get what is coming to him.”
Omet said nothing.
“Just as you will, Omet.” Her free hand reached behind her over her shoulder as her knife pressed deeper against the vein in his neck; the world went black for a moment. Omet fought to stay conscious.
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