The Weaver's Lament

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “But the opposite is possible as well, depending on its chemical composition. Some structures and bodies decay quickly because of the acidity of their sap or blood, and can wither quickly, even in the absence of air. I could not say definitively even if I knew what you are referring to.”

  The Bolg king nodded and indicated the door. The monk rose quickly from the table and, with a puzzled look at the two remaining Sea Mages, made his way out of the room.

  “Anything else you might possibly want to know?” Edwyn Griffyth asked archly. “We are clearly at your disposal, Majesty—or at least you seem to think we are.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Achmed said. He pointed to the armor that had clung to him upon his exit from the sea. “Do you have any knowledge of this?”

  Jal’asee coughed.

  “I sailed with the Second Fleet, on MacQuieth’s ship,” he said quietly. “That appears to be his armor—or something like it.”

  The Bolg king merely nodded. “Do you know what material it is made from?”

  The Ancient Seren shook his head. “I only know that it was always full of moisture, even when he was abovedecks on his ship, standing in a brisk wind that would strip the water from anything else. He wore just those few pieces, preferring freedom of motion to heavier armament. I believe it was made from the discarded carapace of a rare sea creature, but what that was, I do not know.”

  Achmed rose from the table.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Now, with one more indulgence, I will be on my way and out of yours.”

  “And how do you wish to be further indulged, Majesty?” Edwyn Griffyth asked through gritted teeth.

  Achmed smiled. “I would like to be taken to the tower.”

  Both Sea Mages looked at one another in astonishment.

  “You know that is not possible,” Edwyn Griffyth said tersely. “Only trained mages are allowed in that artifact, and only the most senior—”

  “Is the conversation in this room secure? Spells and such having been cast to make certain it is not overheard, as I believe Rhapsody once told me?”

  “Yes,” said the High Sea Mage. “Everywhere in this building, as long as the door is shut, but as for the tower—”

  “I am planning to enter the Vault of the Underworld,” the Bolg king said quietly. “If I survive, highly unlikely as that is, I plan to see if there is anything I can do to address that which sleeps within the depths of the world, whose mass is a sixth or so of that world. Unless there is something else you know about that entity, or any special tool you wish to give me, I believe it will most likely continue sleeping after my visit. But if I survive, I will report back on its status.”

  The complete lack of sound from the two academics, whom he had long asserted were in love with the noise of their own voices, was devouring. Achmed smiled in amusement, then leaned forward and spoke in his sandiest tone.

  “Now, take me to the fucking tower.”

  36

  After the Sea Mages had recovered and assented to his request, Achmed made his way back to the beach again.

  The telescope at the top of the White Ivory Tower had been useful in finding the coordinates of where Serendair had once been, and had shown him the shallow reefs that had once been where he believed the land bridge stood, but there was little else that it could do to reveal to him anything he else he sought.

  This was largely because everything else he sought was hidden from the sight of the world, either beneath its crust, or beneath the sea.

  He had left without as much as a word, leaving the Sea Mages stunned. They followed him down to the beach, hurrying behind him across the glimmering sand and nattering at him. What they said did not penetrate the sound of the wind in his ears or the words in his mind, spoken long ago by Rath.

  You could walk the Vault alone, and when you were done the silence would ring with nothing but the whisper of your name.

  You have often been given to wild assumptions that have not always proven true, Rath, the Bolg king thought, ignoring the two men desperately trying to keep up with him as he approached the water.

  The voice in his memory turned sweeter.

  You said that at some point this beast will be summoned, Rhapsody had said in the cold tunnel deep within the Earth, the wall of which was a scale in the skin of that very beast.

  Yes.

  What if it didn’t hear the call? In order to summon something, you need to know its true name. Of course, I don’t know this thing’s name. But if we could obscure the call, keep the beast from hearing it properly, or feeling it, perhaps it would just stay asleep and not answer. At least for a little while.

  The harp she had set in place had laced the air of the massive tunnel with threads of light, the vibrations of music she had played on the instrument to interfere with the hearing of the beast.

  But the “little while” had passed long ago.

  He walked into the arms of the sea, paying no heed to the shouts of the academics who chased him all the way to the water’s edge.

  SOUTHERN OCEAN, NEAR THE GRAVE OF SERENDAIR

  If Achmed had believed his journey to Gaematria to be a long one, he had not known the meaning of long.

  His travels to reach the grave of Serendair introduced him to the definition.

  He had come to realize early in his ocean trek that because he was carrying Kirsdarke across his back, he was benefiting from the power it granted for its bearer to become formless, no longer solid in the drift, much as the Firstborn race of Mythlin were said to be. That lack of solidity was an uncomfortable state for him, but at least it allowed him to pass, unnoticed, beneath the surface.

  Days and nights blended, one into the next, as he made his way through some of the deepest parts of the ocean, across wide expanses of the undersea world. The creatures that passed him were so nightmarish in some parts of the wide expanses of water that he took to walking with his eyes closed.

  He was able to do that because the bell that sounded every now and then grew stronger the deeper the sea got, calling to him insistently, louder as he got closer to the place where he had once been able to feel the heartbeat of every living person on the Island.

  The place where the sound was the loudest turned out to be a small peninsula in Sithgraid, where MacQuieth had long ago stood vigil for his son, Hector, with no one but his daughter-in-law and grandson allowed by his side. Achmed had walked the sea respectfully there; the agony that the ancient hero had suffered at the loss of Hector was still present, nascent in the very water of the place.

  Finally, he began to hear a different call, the sound of horrifying devastation and destruction in the distance.

  Even as far away from it as he was, the Bolg king had no misconceptions about what he was hearing.

  MacQuieth had described it to him once, staring out into the rolling surf that battered the rocks of Traeg.

  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 of 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.

  Achmed, who, unlike MacQuieth and Rhapsody, had left nothing of sentiment behind when he ran from the Island, still could feel the unrelenting terror and sorrow in the turbulent waves of the sea, almost three millennia later.

  He followed the sound of the bell slightly away and north of the dismal symphony of death that still rang in the depths of the ocean on his way to the small islands north of where the
Island had been taken to its grave.

  NORTH OF SERENDAIR, THE GRAVE OF THE SLEEPING CHILD

  The night before Achmed made landfall on the Northern Islands, a ferocious storm had come through, a storm whose intensity was so fierce that he could not hide from it, even as deep as he allowed himself to sink into the sea.

  He had passed the night hovering in the drift, trying to keep from being carried too far out to sea, keeping his eyes closed against the whirlwind of sand and sea bottom that was filling the water amid the roaring storm. He had struggled to maintain consciousness, but even that seemed impossible during much of the storm’s duration.

  Until, with morning’s light, he found himself hip-deep in crashing surf at the edge of what looked like a sandbar, exposed by the storm from the shallow sea around it.

  The Bolg king dragged himself out of the churning water onto the semi-dry land that led to what once had been a peninsula where the water met on three sides, to a failed land bridge.

  And, shaking the water from his garments, he straightened the lightweight armor that matched the Mythlin scabbard he carried and made his way across the tidal wasteland, where the sea had once swelled to the land, now nothing but a desert of ocean sand.

  The sea’s retreat had laid bare the bones of ships, broken reefs, shells of every imaginable kind, cracked and jagged in the wet grit where the water once broke against the shore. Achmed ran around or jumped over them, hurrying to find the doors to the Vault before the sea roared back into place.

  He ran for three or more miles, past waves of sand and flapping fish, sea creatures caught unaware by the storm and the drawback of the sea, expecting each time he crested a long sand hill that the crevasse the Sea Mages had described would be on the other side of it, but each hilltop yielded only another view of the endless expanse of sand.

  Until finally, after struggling up a tall sand dune, he had to pull himself to a hurried stop.

  He was standing on what appeared to be a great ridge in the seabed, a towering wall that led down into a crevasse a thousand or more feet deep, at the bottom of which the remnants of seawater pooled. Achmed followed the perimeter with his eyes, and could not see its beginning, nor its end. The depression seemed to stretch to the horizon; the cliff wall beneath him made the seabed seem as if he were standing in a vast meadow atop a mountain. Whatever the actual dimensions, it was clear that a man could not see all of it at once; it stretched out beneath the sand, hidden for millennia by the sea, into the place to which the water had retreated from the storm.

  Achmed gazed down into the crevasse, deeper than the one in the Bolglands that separated the Cauldron and the guardian mountains from the Blasted Heath and the Hidden Realm beyond it.

  There appeared to be an ancient path in the face of the cliff wall where it slanted inward, which seemed as good a possibility as any.

  Achmed closed his eyes and loosed the pathfinding lore he had absorbed during his trek along the Root with Grunthor and Rhapsody. She had sung them through the fire at the heart of the Earth with namesongs that had approximated what she thought their true names were. As a result, by changing his name from the Brother to his silly current title she had cost him the ability to discern the heartbeats of any person in the world.

  She had, however, given him the ability to unerringly track a path.

  Grateful, finally, he thought as the second sight kicked in, looking around for the trail. Heartbeats would be of no use at this point anyway.

  He closed his eyes and stood as still as he could as the inner sight took off, leaping over the rim in front of him, spinning madly toward the path that led down the face of the slanted cliff, until it came to a stop at the bottom of the crevasse.

  Then it disappeared.

  All right, then, the Bolg king thought. Here’s for it.

  He climbed over the rim and began sliding down the wall that his path lore had indicated.

  He hurried down into the crevasse, slipping and falling occasionally, sliding on his knees or even on his back, rising and cursing. The seabed was thick here, like rock beneath the sand, but absent of the debris that he had seen in the open seabed near the shoreline.

  Finally, when he had fallen on his arse far enough down to have descended a small mountain, he found himself at the base of a sheer cliff, staring up at a solid wall of rock.

  The wind howled and shrieked above him, but stayed at the level of the sea, only venturing down into the canyon long enough to whip sand into his eyes.

  Achmed sought the path again. A closer image of a trail filled his mind.

  He slowly made his way over the scattered rock of the seafloor, following the secondary path lore until it came to an abrupt halt.

  Above him towered what appeared to be two massive slabs of solid earth, smooth as granite and white as the rest of the sea sand. There was a slash of thin darkness between them; otherwise they appeared no different than the rest of the rocky undersea hills. Achmed’s blood ran cold in the memory of the last time he had been here.

  Along with the water that was shedding down the sides of the canyon, sand was falling in rivers off of the enormous slabs of earth.

  Towering doors of titanic size bound in brass were revealed, with massive handles jutting from plates of the same metal, a strange keyhole in the rightmost one. The gigantic doors were inscribed with ancient glyphs and wards, countersigns and runes.

  Attached to the door, interlaced through the brass handles, was what looked like a pair of bony human arms, wrapped through one another, calcified, barely recognizable for all the petrified ash that had hardened around them.

  In the seabed behind them, a stick of driftwood, or something like it, jutted at a strange angle.

  Achmed went up to the door.

  For a notoriously unsentimental man, he felt a powerful twinge as he stared at the skeletal arms. Even as detached as they were, it would have been impossible to miss the stalwart strength that had put them there in the first place, a desperate grip and desire to prevent the doors from opening at obvious mortal expense.

  What in the world is this? Achmed wondered, studying the arms. They were not here when last I was led to this place.

  He looked at them from different angles, confused.

  I wonder if this was once Hector, he mused. I am almost certain this must have been him, given how MacQuieth had described him.

  They had built seawalls, levies, in the last days, in the vain attempt to hold back the inevitable, the great hero had said sadly. That must have been Hector. My son would have been filling bags of sand to the last.

  The thought that, in addition to having to hold the abandoned Island together in the last days before the eruption of the Sleeping Child, Hector might have had to hold the Vault of the Underworld closed with his arms was more than Achmed could bring himself to think about.

  He carefully removed the arms, which broke apart easily in his hands, and placed them in a hole within the rocks beside the enormous doors, then found another, larger stone to seal the hole as if it were a grave or a columbarium.

  He turned away from the doors, remembering the time he had been escorted here, with an invisible chain around his neck, or, more precisely, his name, the true name that was being held prisoner inside the stone altar from which he had recently retrieved Kirsdarke.

  He had been shown these very doors, and allowed to look inside through the keyhole long enough to meet the creature that was waiting to exit through them.

  Get the key, the beast had whispered in a voice that scratched his brain. Get it. Bring it here. You alone, Child of Blood. The key will be alive when it is pulled from the rib cage of the Child of Earth, but will die before it reaches this place unless it is in your hand. You must be the one to bring it to me.

  And then you will be the one to free us all. Our liberator.

  Achmed turned to his right and looked behind him.

  Then he bent down and plucked the sand-and-ash-covered piece of driftwood from the barely dry ocean f
loor. He brushed it off, scratching the ash from it.

  He was not particularly surprised to discover that it was an ancient key, dark of shaft, resembling a rib bone of a Child of Earth.

  Because it was.

  He had never fully explained to Rhapsody the reason for his stalwart vigil of the Earthchild, because he tried whenever possible not to recall the time he had been brought here previously. The thought of a conjured child of Living Earth being harvested for a single bone made his gorge rise at the sheer depravity and cruelty of it, like the planned eating of Meridion’s heart had seemed to him when Talquist, the long-dead Merchant Emperor of Sorbold, had planned to do so.

  Carefully he held it next to the keyhole, trying to ascertain the angle at which it would fit.

  Achmed cast a glance at the sky, so seemingly far above him. He thought of Grunthor, and Rhapsody, and wondered where they were, if they could see him or at least know what he was about to do.

  He decided they couldn’t.

  He hoped they couldn’t.

  He remembered how sick and nervous Rhapsody had been within the depths of the Earth, particularly when they were crawling along the Root of Sagia that wrapped around the Axis Mundi, the centerline of power that bisected the Earth. He recalled how relieved she had always been to be out beneath the sheltering sky once more whenever she left the Bolglands, or any other underground place that he and Grunthor had found comforting, the dark, warm tunnels of the Earth.

  He held the key in his hand, contemplating where it would take him, knowing that he would very likely never see the sky again.

  Then, taking a breath, he fit the key into the hole in the massive door.

  37

  The glyphs on the doors glowed with life.

  The calcified ash began to fall from the bone key, sliding off in white chunks.

  Achmed drew Tysterisk, then pushed the key into the lock and slowly turned it counterclockwise.

  Beneath his hand he more felt than heard an echoing thunk.

  Ever-so-slightly, the crack between the stone doors widened.