Destiny: Child Of Sky (34 page)

Achmed stood at the convergence of five tunnels, lost.

This was surely the place to which the Sleeping Child, through her hand shaped map on the stone wall of her chamber, had directed him. He had stood for hours over the device in Gwylliam's hidden library that monitored the movement of the Bolg throughout the mountains, watching this place, but no one ever came. He had listened with unending patience at the apparatus that led to speaking tubes throughout all of Canrif, trying to discern what was happening beneath his nose.

His efforts were not getting him far.

Now, as he waited, hidden, at this strange, handlike crossroads, he felt something he had never truly felt before, a kind of growing despair that perhaps what faced him was beyond his means to keep in check.

Getting control of this mountain was like trying to inhale all the smoke from a forest fire. No matter how hard he drew it in, tendrils escaped, wisped away to lost, unknown places, old Cymrian claims, or the hiding places of those long dead. And he couldn't inhale forever.

Only one word whispered up through the ancient tube had caught his ear in all his long hours of wait. It was a simple word, at the same time a strange one, with no explanation attached to it, spoken between a midwife and a common foot soldier in passing.

finders.

Nonetheless, that single word was the key; he knew it deep within the parts of him that sensed the heartbeat of the Bolg kingdom, that gave him power over the land and its occupants. More and more since he had become the warlord in this abandoned ruin peopled by monsters of his own kind he was beginning to understand the concept of royalty, of kingly authority that ran in blood. Only it ran in more than blood—Achmed felt it in his nerves, in his teeth, in the hair of his head and his skin-web; these were his people, and they had a secret from him, a secret so well guarded that even Gwylliam's endless library held not a single reference to it.

Now, as he waited at the place the Earthchild had suggested, he felt them, like mice in the dark, or the first stirrings of lice, and understood what Gwyl-liam must have felt trying to keep the mountain from exploding at the beginning of the end of it all.

He knew that though the Bolg were a mutable race, certain features held true: they valued strength, they prized children, they craved movement, they lived spare and traveled light. Even their language was all action and function, with few objects.

So in that one word—Finders—he knew there was power, something deep and intrinsic to this place, something he should know about, but did not.

He carried no weapons but the cwellan and a concealed skinning knife that only Grunthor knew about. It had a dark, rainbow-black steel blade, and was a parting gift from the old world. In most circumstances he could rely on his path lore to find the way to what he sought, but he still was uncertain what he was looking for.

Slowly Achmed paced the centerpiece of the tunnels, listening at each one of the fingers, hearing nothing. Doubtless down one or more of them were the Finders that he sought, hiding at the edge of his awareness, taunting him, however inadvertently, like children playing a game of blindman's buff. Whether they were the ones selling his weapons to Sorbold no longer mat tered now. What did matter was that they had a secret from him, and he could not abide that.

But he would have to abide it a short while longer.

Perhaps, once Rhapsody returned with the blood of the demon, he himself would now be a Finder. He had often contemplated the ritual he would use once she delivered it to him; it would need to be done in a special place, a place secure from the wind, and from the eyes of the world.

He wondered, as he examined the openings in the Hand, if this were the place.

The proper site to have done it would have been beneath the great pendulum of the long-dead Dhracian colony, a place that allowed no essence to escape. He had trained with the Grandmother in the Thrall ritual there, learning the secrets of his Dhracian heritage, the primordial power granted them to hold both sides of F'dor, man and demon, in thrall, a skill bequeathed them as the jailors who once gave up life in the wind from which they originated to stand guard over the great Vault of the Underworld in which the F'dor had been imprisoned. But that place was sealed now; there was no way to get back in without risking the safety of the Sleeping Child. He spat on the sandy ground at the mere thought of it.

The five corners of the hand shared similar characteristics to the vast vertical chamber in which the pendulum swung. In a way it cycled the signals that fell to its center, like water in sea caves, washing away from the depth with the tide, but then falling back to level, unable to escape.

This was the place.

The last message she had sent with the bird had indicated she was successful in her undertaking, and would be home soon. The anticipation was painful.

Achmed listened once more, then hurried back up the corridor from which he had come.

In the distance, the Finders watched him go, wide eyes blinking in the dark.

The gambling complex of Sorbold was the largest group of buildings in the city-state of Jakar, and sprawled threateningly across the southern end of the borough of Nikkid'saar. On days when gladiatorial bouts were not scheduled it lay quiet and more or less undisturbed, except for the occasional delivery caravan and the entry and exit of the slaves and free workers whose efforts kept the complex running. On the days of the fights, however, this end of the borough writhed with humanity and animal life, as tens of thousands jammed the streets around the arena, teeming with the excitement and commerce of blood sport.

Rhapsody could see that Llauron was right about the schedule of events; this had been a day of contest, and an enormous stream of people, complete with its accompanying noise and smell, was flooding back into the roadway around the arena, filling the streets with the sounds of jostling and screaming, laughing and bickering. It was easy to get lost in the cacophony, and she happily did, blending in with the crowd until she found the entrance into the arena closest to the sprawling addition at the rear of the complex. This addition must hold the gladiators' quarters, she reasoned, and she looked for a point of exit near to the southern gate of the borough, where she had left the horse and where Khaddyr and the reinforcements would meet up with her.

Rhapsody found a sheltered area to wait in as light snow began to fall, turning the streets to mud and the mood of the masses ugly. She watched carefully as she passed the time, noting that there were, in fact, a number of women dressed in clothes similar to those she was wearing under the woolen cloak. Their attire seemed drabber and more modest by comparison, but perhaps it was just a factor of her discomfort with the revealing nature of the disguise.

In addition, the women dressed as she was were often being roughly herded in and out of the complex, occasionally with the sting of a whip. Rhapsody's blood boiled, and she could feel the fire within her rise to the surface of her skin, but she swallowed her anger at the sight and steadied her resolve. She was here to save the gladiator, not change the culture of Sorbold, however much she may have wanted to.

The streets surrounding the arena contained feeder alleys that led into small courtyards. In each of these central areas that she had passed, Rhapsody saw minor bouts of fighting taking place amid a smaller, loose crowd of observers, peasants and merchants who broke into hooting cheers as particularly bloody hits were landed.

The combatants in these street bouts often appeared to be barely out of childhood, boys and occasionally girls as young as perhaps nine summers, attacking each other with such zealous ferocity that the victor often had to be restrained from gutting his fallen opponent. Rhapsody shuddered as a great cry of delight rose, along with an arching spray of blood, from a contest between two young boys no older than her adopted grandson, Gwydion Na-varne.

The closer courtyards to the arena held the semi-professionals, gladiators in training who were not yet deemed worthy to fight in the arena, but who had already garnered, in most cases, a large and devoted following among the street audience. Gambling was widely evident, with oddsmakers working the crowd furiously, trying to coax from them some of the Sorboldian gold-stones they had brought to wager in the arena itself.

In the last of these courtyards immediately outside the gladiatorial arena stood a large wooden scale, bound in rickety metal and balancing two large disks, scale plates large enough to hold an ox for weighing. Rhapsody recognized this instrument as a cruder version of the ones that stood inside the various fighting pits within the complex. Llauron had explained their use to her as part of their planning.

At the decision point of each major bout, and apparently a few of the street matches as well, a fighter who had been disarmed or injured to the point of not being able to continue was deemed, by the sound of the arena-master's gong, to be Towrik, or compromised. It was at this point that the crowd turned to an enormous set of scales to decide the warrior's fate.

The country of Sorbold was situated, for the most part, on the leeward side of the Teeth, making it a dry and arid place, a realm of almost endless sun and desert. The religion of Sorbold, while a See loyal to the Patriarch in Sepulvarta, carried with it a hint of the old pagan days, a devotion to the balance of the natural world. In a land where one overirrigation of a field might mean the permanent loss of a village's drinking-waterwells, nature's balance was a matter of life and death.

So it was in the gladiatorial arena as well. With the sound of the gong, a crowd would take up the chant: Towrik, Towrik, Towrik. The reverberation of the word would echo in the arena, increasing in momentum, gaining fury, until the seats began to tremble, or so Llauron said.

While the victor in the bout strode to the Winner's Rise to await the acclaim and adulation of the masses and the nobility, the unfortunate loser was carried, amid growing pandemonium, to the scales, which had been wheeled to the middle of the arena floor like a great god-of sacrifice, where he or she was unceremoniously dumped onto one of the weighing plates. Two pairs of dray horses with wheeled carts affixed to their hitchings stood, one at either side of the mechanism, each of the scale plates resting atop a cart.

Now the bargaining began. If the fighter was a slave, and valuable to his owner, ofttimes the owner would hold up a slate with a life offering inscribed on it. At the arenamaster's signal, large, multicolored weights corresponding in poundage to the amount of the owner's offering would be carried to the opposing scale plate and set in it. Other members of the nobility and, ultimately, the crowd, were allowed to cast their life offerings into the opposing plate as well. Sometimes even other slaves, both women and men, were offered up, particularly when the fighter had established a reputation for skill and profitability.

If the fighter was a freeman, the task of making life offerings was left to the crowd or his admirers among the nobility, proving in a time-honored way the high cost of freedom. As a result, even when they had accumulated a great deal of personal wealth and more than enough bout credits to purchase their freedom, many of the best gladiators chose to remain in slavery, improving their chances that someone would bid to save them when in Towrik. Constantin was not one of them.

When all the life offerings had been made, the arenamaster's gong rang again, and the two horses were led, slowly, away from the scales. The arena would grow absolutely silent as the crowd waited for the enormous apparatus to weigh the results. Then, if the scales balanced, or weighed in the fighter's favor, he or she was taken from the massive scale plate by the complex physician's healers and led or carried away amid a ferocious chorus of mixed applause and hissing sneers. Half the life offerings were whisked away to fill the coffers of the regent whose city-

state owned the arena, while the other half was presented, amid tumultuous cheering, to the victor.

If, however, the scales decided against the one in Towrik, an even greater roar went up from the crowd. While the content of the entire plate of life offerings was presented to the victor, the event that was more central to the interest of the crowd was prepared. A large, saw-bladed sword was placed in front of the scales, in the direct line of sight of the regent's box, while long straps of leather were bound rapidly to the loser's ankles. The loser was then dumped from the scale plate. The arenamaster waited long enough for the scale plates to balance, a matter of a very few seconds, before ringing the gong one last time.

If the unfortunate fighter could scramble to the sword in the intervening time, he or she could take the opportunity offered, and quickly bring life to an end in a somewhat honorable manner by falling on the weapon. Such feats of speed while compromised were almost always greeted with a chorus of furious hissing, as they denied the eager crowd the true spectacle. For if the fighter did not reach the sword before the gong rang again, the horses were loosed, tearing forth ahead of a sharp spurring and the deafening sound.

The crowd would burst forth in orgiastic screaming, thundering the stands while the unfortunate was dragged to a gruesome and ignominious death, ofttimes the horses being caught and brought to a halt only after the corpse's head had come off and rolled to a stop. Rhapsody shook off the thought and steeled her resolve, waiting for the right moment to enter the arena.

As night began to fall the streets cleared of their traffic, and Rhapsody crossed the thoroughfare carefully, slipping into the entrance she had marked as most likely to take her where she needed to be. Once inside she clung to the dark wall, moving silently down the fetid corridors until she heard noise echoing before her that she recognized as a convocation of human beings.

She quickly pulled off the woolen cloak and her boots, as she had not seen shoes on the feet of the slaves whom she had observed outside the arena. She looked around for a moment, finally coming in sight of a small alcove, where she hid her cloak and boots, hoping to recover them once she was outside again. Then she put the small bag with the bottle of liquid that Llauron had given her to render the gladiator unconscious into the waistband of her outfit. She noted the clothes of the women slaves; some were revealing, like the ones she wore, but more were simple sets of tunics and knee pants. The women who wore clothes such as those seemed to be of a higher level of training, and often carried bandages or shrouds. Rhapsody wished that she had known about the option, but Llauron knew this culture well, and she trusted his judgment.