The Assassin King (29 page)

So now he had one of his own, albeit a much smaller one that was only assembled on extremely rare occasions, only a handful of times over the past four centuries. The only thing he feared more than using it was the thought of losing the power altogether.

The deep, melodic voice of the Earth itself hummed around him, rousing him from his musings. The circle was complete.

“Open the vent,” Faedryth commanded through gritted teeth.

The yeoman lowered the visor of his helm to shield his eyes.

Garson grasped the lever that was masked by the lower stalagmites of the crystal throne, and pulled it toward himself until it aligned with registrations of the blue arc. He then fell back, shielding his eyes, as a concealed slab of stone below the throne moved aside into the rock below, revealing the light of the flame-well over which the crystal had formed, a direct vent to the fire that burned, thousands of miles below, past the crust and mantle of the Earth, in the very heart of the world. Even with his hands before his eyes, the light was blinding.

The pulsing flames from deep within the Earth sent flashes of hot blue light spinning through the Great Hall, illuminating the distant ceiling, dancing off the stalactites, spitting and hissing in time with the fire below the giant crystal, making it glow like a star hidden in the darkness.

The radiance engulfed the crystal throne and the Nain king upon it, turning them both the color of a cloudless sky on a summer's day in the up-world, a color so pure and clear that it stung the back of Gar-son's eyes though the shield of his fingers.

Breathing shallowly and willing his racing heart to slow, Faedryth, translucent in the grip of the Lightforge's power, opened the black ivory box.

At first he saw nothing, and panic tickled the outer edge of his consciousness. The contents of the box had been brittle, almost vaporous when they were first discovered, and in the dazzling blue luminosity of the crystal throne, lit from below by the very fire of the Earth's core, they clung to the shadows, all but invisible.

Faedryth tilted the box until the contents caught the roaring light. As if it were a living entity, that light growled into the comers of the box, seeking its contents and catching them, illuminating them, giving them color and shape.

At first they emerged from hiding as little more than an evanescent glow, dusty and changing, second by second, like summer sunlight filtering through a window. The Nain king gingerly reached inside the box and lifted one of the scraps into the blue radiance that was pulsating around him.

Draped across his finger was a fragment of what looked like clear parchment, though it was filmy and inconstant and yellowed with age. It seemed to be a made thing, part translu-cence of gem, part gossamer. Faedryth had never seen its like, not in sixteen centuries of life, nor on either of two continents, nor had any of the advisors to whom he had apprehensively shown it.

The place where it had been found—the deepest reaches of the crystal mines, where the diamond-like formations believed to have been brought to the Earth from the stars in the form of meteorites lay beneath immeasurable tons of age-old granite—was in and of itself a miracle of recovery; it had taken thousands of years for the Nain to broach that mine. That anything had survived the pressure and cold of the crystal bed was improbable at the very best; but here, now, between his fingers was a scrap of delicate material, fragile and changing with each breath he drew. Faedryth disliked the concept of magic, distrusted most of those who used it, who manipulated words or songs or vibrations to alter the world, but even a skeptic and unbeliever as curmudgeonly as he could not help but be awed, and terrified, in its presence.

It was, as far as he could tell, like nothing that existed anywhere in the Known World.

And for that reason, he had to know what it was.

“All the way,” he muttered.

Garson, the blinding blue light leaking in behind his closed eyelids, felt for the lever again and pulled with all his might.

The double metal disk below the throne that Faedryth's smiths had sawed through the base of the immense crystal to install four hundred years before ground into place again, focusing all the light from the flame-well through the center of the blue arc, turning the crystal, the king, and the room beyond an even more intense, pure, and imperceptible hue of blue, a holy, elemental color at the very center of the spectrum.

The crystal formation sang with a primal vibration, the clearest of notes, inaudible to Garson or the yeoman, but Faedryth could hear it in his soul, felt it ring through his blood, opening his eyes, not only in the darkness of his throne room, but beyond it, to the world around him, across the plains to the horizons, to the very edge of the sea.

Faedryth gripped the throne, knowing what came next.

The yeoman, who knew what might, sighted his crossbow on the king's heart.

Suddenly Faedryth was engulfed with sight of a capacity beyond anything imaginable by a human; it was as if all the world, in every bit of its detail and magnitude, was apparent to him instantaneously. Like being swallowed by a tidal wave, he was suddenly drowning in information, exposed to every flock of sparrows' migration pattern, every racing front of every storm, the number of shafts of wheat bowing before the sun, the heartbeats of the world, assaulting him from every side.

His mind raced at the speed of a flashing sunbeam, shooting crazily skyward like an arrow off the string, then plummeting suddenly down into the earth, where the passageways sculpted by his own subjects scored the crust like tunnels in an anthill. It swept briskly over troves of treasure, of volcanic lava flowing in the Molten River, dark shafts of endless an-thracitic night, speeding beneath the roots of trees and the burrows of forest beasts, until it burst through the Earth's crust again, absorbing all there was to see, all there was to know.

Seeing everything. In that instant, the Nain king realized he was seeing as a dragon sees, with wyrmsight that transcends all physical limits. And it terrified him, as it always did.

With great effort Faedryth tore his mind's eye away from the racing vision by dragging his head down and staring at the piece of fragile parchment in his hand. He knew there was an image on it, an image he had only glimpsed when the brittle piece of solid-yet-ever-changing magical parchment was first brought to him. At that moment, he could sense that there were colored lights in some form of spectral arrangement, some source of power, light as bright as that from the flame-well beneath him, which he had assumed to be the rebuilt Lightforge of Gurgus Peak. In addition, he had felt something then, just a brief sensation of being aware of another person's thoughts, and it had seemed to him that the Bolg king was present in those thoughts. For a man who eschewed magic lore and vibrational study, whose joy was engineering, mining, the smelting of iron and the building of tunnels, the sensation of reading another's mind, especially when the thinker was unknown and most lilkely long dead, was particularly unsettling.

With immense difficulty he kept his vision fixed away from the avalanche of images swirling before him and held the fragment up in the clear blue light before his eyes.

The image he had seen once before, at the time nothing more than a hazy smudge, refined instantly into a crisp clarity that was painful in its sharpness. Despite being utterly clear, the picture still made almost no sense to Faedryth, whose eyes throbbed, threatening to burst.

It was as if he was standing himself in the place where the image had been captured, a familiar dark hall that could have been within his own mountain. Faedryth sensed, by the thinness and striations of the stone, that it was within a peak. At the end of the tunnel an arm's length away was an opening, past which there appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, within a large clear sphere suspended in the open darkness of the upworld sky. The colored illuminations he had seen and mistaken for the Bolg king's Lightforge were in fact gleaming lights inside the dome, set in uniform lines into panels that encircled the transparent room.

Beneath the panels was a table of sorts, with a doorway in the horizontal surface from behind which light as bright as the flame-well leaked.

Beyond the clear walls of the sphere he could see the world down below, burning at the horizon, as fire crept over the edges, spreading among the continents he recognized from maps of the Earth.

As bewildering and horrifying as these images were, they paled in comparison to what stood between him and the glass sphere.

Hovering in the air before him was a being, a man of sorts, with the characteristics of several different races and all the aspects of youth except for his eyes, blue eyes, deep as the sea, scored with vertical pupils. Those eyes held the wisdom of the ages, and pain that matched it.

His skin was translucent, motile, altering with each current of air that passed by or through it.

The man glowed with the same light as the crystal throne, especially his hair, curls of brilliant gold that seemed almost afire. And despite his knowing eyes, and the calmness of his expression, his clenched jaw betrayed a quiver of nervousness. He stared at Faedryth, as if looking at him for the last time. His mouth moved, and words formed; Faedryth did not hear them in his ears, but rather internally, as if they were resonating in his own throat.

Will I die?

Faedryth felt his burning eyes sting with tears be had no connection to, felt his throat and chest tighten in sorrow he did not understand. He heard his own voice then, speaking as if detached from him; he heard himself cough, then form words that rang with awkward comfort.

Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.

The translucent being in front of him nodded, then turned away. Faedryth was suddenly gripped with a sense of sadness and loss that shredded his soul; in his mind he felt himself reach for the lad, only to watch the image fade into darkness.

Then, as if underscoring that he was reliving someone else's memory, he was surrounded with another notion, the impression of the Bolg king he had picked up from the first sight of the parchment scraps, and was left with one last thought, which he heard in the voice of the translucent young man.

Forgive me. In my place, I think you would have done the same. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.

He did not know why, but Faedryth was certain that the strange youth was speaking to the Assassin King.

Overwhelmed and without even the slightest clue of the meaning in what he was perceiving, Faedryth's mind threatened to snap. And worse, deep beneath him, channeling up through

the living rock of the crystal throne, he felt a different vibration, atonal and physical and slight, almost imperceptible.

As if the very earth was shrugging, dormant parts of it stirring to life.

Terror consumed him as the speeding vision returned, because this time it was as if he was seeing in darkness into his own lands, his point of sight very far away but growing rapidly closer. Looking for him with the same clarity he just experienced.

In that moment, the Nain king understood what he had done.

He was seeing as a dragon sees because the sight he had called upon, had tapped with the elemental power of color, was dragon sight.

The inner sight of a blind wyrm long asleep in the very bowels of the Earth.

The eldest Sleeping Child, said to comprise a good deal of the Earth's mass. Witheragh, the dragon that had whispered the secret to him, had warned him of a prophecy that one day the Sleeping Child would wake.

And would be famished with hunger after its long sleep that commenced at the beginning of the world. And he, Faedryth, was nudging it from its slumber, directing its vision into his own kingdom. A hollow scream tore from Faedryth's throat, a war cry that had gone up from his lungs many times in his life. With the last of his strength he pitched himself from the crystal throne, feeling it strip years from his life as he broke through the column of elemental blue light, tumbling roughly to the floor, bruising himself against the crystal stalagmites. His falling body dislodged the pieces of colored glass, breaking the circle and extinguishing the blue light; leaving only the pulsating dance of the radiance from the flame-well spattering off the ceiling high above. As Garson pushed the lever with all his might, shutting the vent once more, and the yeoman lowered the crossbow sight, Gyllian hurried to her father. Faedryth was facedown on the stone floor; she turned him over gently and winced, seeing the new whiteness in his beard, the new wrinkles in his brow that had not been there a few moments before. It was as it always was, and yet the strong-willed princess never could become entirely accustomed to the sight of her father, so clear of eye and mind, staring wildly, blankly above him into the dancing fire shadows, panicked by the return of darkness when the vent was closed again.

“What did you see?” she asked gently, stroking his hair and sliding her age-crinkled hand into his. Faedryth continued to stare, agitated, his eyes glazed, breathing shallowly on the floor of his throne room. Finally, when his eyes finally met Gyllian's, they contained a desperation she had never seen before, not in the horrors of battle, or the nearness of defeat, not on the banks of the swollen river of fire that he had caused to return from its sleep, swallowing mining towns and miners with it. He clutched her hand, trying to form words, but only managing to resemble a fish gasping for the breath of water.

“The Assassin King,” he whispered when he finally could generate sound. “We have to stop him.”

Northeastern Yarim, at the foot of the mountains

No one living, nor anyone dead, had ever known, or at least recorded, the story of how the lost city of Kurimah Milani had come to be built.

Or by whom. Jutting proudly from the multicolored sands of the westernmost part of the borderlands between Yarim and the upper Bolglands, where the desert clay faded into steppes, then the piedmont, then mountains, Kurimah Milani was old when the oldest tales of history were written. Its minarets and heavy stone walls glistened with a sandy patina that was said to have turned iridescent in the sun, giving some of the merchants who first came upon it the impression that it was an illusion, a mirage at the edge of the vast, empty desert of red clay that stretched for miles at the base of the manganese mountains along the Erim Rus, the Blood River.