The Merchant Emperor (18 page)

The tunnel that was revealed when the chest was untrapped, unlocked and open had been carefully shaped from the stone of the mountain by Grunthor four years before after a particularly vicious battle with a demonic vine, a root of one of the five World Trees that had been tainted by the blood of innocent children and guilty men by the F’dor that the Three had vanquished three years back. The Sergeant-Major, tied as deeply and inexorably to the element of earth as Achmed was to blood and Rhapsody to fire, had saved the rare and beautiful creature known as the Earthchild, a child carved from Living Stone and imbued with the soul of a dragon, that had been sleeping eternally since long before the Cymrians had landed on this continent, and had built her as safe and secure a place to rest peacefully as he was capable of. He and Achmed served as the Earthchild’s protectors and guardians, while Rhapsody had inherited the title of
amelystik
, the name meaning
she who tends eternally
that the child’s original guardian, a Dhracian woman known as the Grandmother, had conferred upon her.

You must be her
amelystik
now. I will soon be too aged to do it.

I don’t understand,
Rhapsody had replied haltingly.
You are going too quickly.

No,
the ancient Dhracian woman had spat,
you are going too slowly. You are late, all of you. You should have been here long ago, when I was still strong, before Time broke me. But that did not occur. Nonetheless I have waited, waited alone these many years, these centuries, watching as the pendulum clock counted each hour, each day, each passing year. I have waited for you to come and relieve my watch; now you are here. But even now, it is not as simple as the mere passing of guardianship from my hand to yours. The child has begun to dream, is tormented by nightmares. I cannot hear them; I do not know what bedevils her mind. Only you can free that knowledge, Skychild. Only you can sing her back to a peaceful slumber. It was written in the wind. It is so
.

As they traveled the tunnel now in silence, the Three thought back to the battle they had fought together, to the loss of the Grandmother, the Earthchild’s stalwart guardian, and to the future. They all knew a day would come when the demon spirits who sought her would make an attempt to broach the mountain. It was Achmed’s first priority in life, by his own decision, to take over her guardianship when the Grandmother died. Rhapsody had never ceased to be amazed how gentle and caring he was with her, given how little he seemed to like children.

But perhaps that was because she was always asleep.

Meridion remained asleep as well through the long walk to the Loritorium. Just before they approached the wall of rubble that had been shaped into a barrier between the tunnel and the depository where the Earthchild slept, Rhapsody clicked softly to the two Bolg.

“I should feed him now,” she said quietly. “He will go back to sleep if I do; otherwise, we risk him waking and disturbing her.”

Achmed sighed in annoyance.

“I had never imagined I would encounter a creature who is more of a nuisance than you are, Rhapsody, but once again you have proven me wrong.”

“Oi’m gonna go check on ’er while you do, Duchess,” Grunthor said.

Rhapsody nodded, ignoring Achmed’s slight, and slid down the stone wall, bracing her back against it. She draped her cape around herself and positioned Meridion, then looked at the Bolg king, a sharp look in her eye.

“Would you care to tell me what I’ve done that has made you so nasty of late?”

Achmed’s mismatched eyes came to rest on her, then looked away again.

“I dispute that I have been any nastier than I normally am.”

“Yes, you have been,” Rhapsody said flatly. “I know you were nervous about Rath, but he’s healed now. And I know you are worried about the Earthchild, but we are here to tend to her now. Why are you being so harsh?”

“Your baby irritates me.”

“How? He hasn’t cried in your presence all day.”

“He doesn’t have to cry to bother me. He smells bad; he makes you strange and distracted. He’s one more thing to have to take into consideration every time we make a move. Forgive me if I’m irritated.”

“Well, get beyond it, for gods’ sake. If you didn’t want us here, you should have refused Ashe’s request to bring us back to the Bolglands with you.”

Grunthor’s head appeared above the moraine.

“Duchess, sir, Oi think you should see this.”

*   *   *

The Earthchild slept on her catafalque of Living Stone in the center of the Loritorium. Her body was as tall as that of a full-grown human, her face was that of a child, her skin cold and polished gray, as if she were sculpted from stone. She would have, in fact, appeared to be a statue but for the measured tides of her breath. Below the surface of filmy skin her flesh was darker, in muted hues of brown and green, purple and dark red, twisted together like thin strands of colored clay.

Her features were at once coarse and smooth, as if her face had been carved with blunt tools, then polished carefully over a lifetime. Beneath her indelicate forehead were eyebrows and lashes that appeared formed from blades of dry grass, matching her long, grainy hair. In the dim light the tresses resembled wheat or bleached highgrass cut to even lengths and bound in delicate sheaves. At her scalp the roots of her hair grew green like the grass of early spring.

Muddy tears were rolling down her cheeks.

Rhapsody touched her hand.

“There, there, now,” she whispered. “What has you so frightened, child?” She began to hum the earthsong that the Child seemed to like in the Past. She expanded the song into words.

White light

Draw back the night

And wake to the call of spring,

Come and see, come and see,

What the warm winds bring

The butterfly’s wing

The meadowbirds sing

A new year in its birth

Welcomes the Child of the Earth

Cool green

In forests unseen

The summer sun’s high in the sky

Come and dance, come and dance,

On the verdant ground

In merry round

Where joy is found

The season of mirth

Laughs with the Child of the Earth

Red gold

The leaves grow old

And fall on the breath of the wind

Stay and dream, stay and dream

At summer’s flight

In colors bright

Autumn’s fight

To hold fast for all she is worth

Comforts the Child of the Earth

White light

Yon comes the night

Snow drapes the frozen world,

Watch and wait, watch and wait

Prepare for sleep

In ice castles deep

A promise to keep

A year whose days left are dearth

Remembers the Child of the Earth

The Earthchild’s breathing eased somewhat, and the tears rolled more slowly, but her distress remained evident to each of them.

“Constantin said that Talquist was despoiling Terreanfor, the basilica of Earth,” Rhapsody said as she stroked the Sleeping Child’s arm with one hand, while cradling Meridion in her other one. “But the benison of the basilica gave his life in the sealing of it, and with the sealing of Terreanfor, I would have thought that her fear might stop.”

“She’s worried,” Grunthor said. The other two fell silent; Grunthor had a connection with the Earthchild that was innate. “She’s dreamin’ about being taken.”

“Perhaps we should consider a more permanent barrier,” Achmed said, his gloved hand coming to rest on her hair. “If the F’dor has taken up host in a titan of Living Stone, we should probably seal the tunnel. You can always open it each time we come down here.”

“Yeah, sir, but what if somethin’ ’appens to me?” the Sergeant-Major said. “You’ll never be able to get to ’er.”

The tears began to roll again.

15

AT THE EDGE OF THE TEETH, YLORC

The morning wind was sweet and high, the bellwether of a fine day.

Anborn’s mood was similarly fine. The arming, training, and provisioning of the enhanced farming settlements and villages east-west along the Krevensfield Plain was going far better than he had expected; to his surprise and delight, all of his grousing and complaining to his nephew, the Lord Cymrian, had been heeded, and the army he had hurriedly gathered and commandeered to ride to the holy city’s defense had turned out to be well-trained and highly loyal. He was not unaware that at least some part of that loyalty was directly or indirectly pledged to him personally in addition to the Alliance and its sovereigns. Rather than responding to that staunch allegiance with wry condescension or dismissive apathy, as he might have just a few years before, the Lord Marshal was secretly touched by it. Given the deserved reputation he had earned over seven hundred years of war as an intransigent, merciless killer, he was humbled to find that anyone outside of his immediate circle was willing to follow or serve with him at all.

Now his Threshold of Death, as he had named it when rallying his troops the morning after their retreat, was almost complete, a defensible line of former farming settlements and villages that had been converted into makeshift garrisons with the aid of the conscripts he had commandeered while awaiting reinforcements from the standing army of the Alliance, which was being redirected by the Lord Cymrian and the dukes of Roland with an eye toward making certain that the northern border was not left vulnerable. The occasional skirmishes that arose with Sorbold scouting parties were quickly and effectively rebuffed;
too easily,
Anborn was musing as he rode east in the company of Constantin, the exiled Patriarch of Sepulvarta, and his longtime men-at-arms, Solarrs and Knapp, companions who had served with him all his life. Solarrs and Knapp were both First Generation Cymrians, some of the few remaining immortals that had once trod the earth of the Lost Island of Serendair, gone now beneath the waves.

His own father, the high king Gwylliam ap Rendlar, had foreseen the Island’s destruction and had engineered an exodus that was truly one of the epic accomplishments of history. Gwylliam had been responsible for the salvation of a great portion of the population of Serendair, had sent them forth from the doomed land in three great waves of more than eight hundred ships, had guided one of those fleets itself through a horrific landing at the crest of a massive storm and the tidal wave that followed it, to eventually come to live, and reign, in this beautiful land of sprawling plains and towering mountains, verdant forests and frozen tundra, seacoasts and cities that sheltered many different races, building a civilization that was the envy of history.

Then he had seen it destroyed by his own vanity, and his own shortcomings.

And Anborn had helped him.

The Lord Marshal shook the repugnant memories from his head; he opened his mouth slightly and let the clean, clear wind fill it, cleansing the bitter taste from his tongue and invigorating him once again.

He had only one more outpost to activate for the Threshold to be complete. That last garrison was one of the most critical of the string of fortresses, the easternmost outpost at the edge of the mountains known officially as the Manteids, in honor of the three Seers of the Past, Present, and Future, by sheer coincidence his mother and two aunts, but more commonly called the Teeth, due to their fanglike appearance and threatening history. Within those mountains stood the massive and mighty stronghold that his father had named Canrif when he reigned there; it was the Cymrian word for
century
, but that name had fallen out of use by all but the staunchest holdouts from the First and other early generations who had known it in its time as one of the great wonders of the world in architecture, engineering, invention, commerce, agriculture, art, and science.

That stronghold now was the home of the Firbolg and their king, an interesting man with a temper and attitude not dissimilar to Anborn’s own, with the unlikely name of Achmed the Snake. The Bolg was a bastard race of demi-human monsters, or so Anborn had been trained to believe as a young soldier. He had come to understand otherwise through his cautious camaraderie with the Bolg king and his dear friendship with the Lady Cymrian, a woman who exasperated and amused him almost as much as she fascinated him. He had practically run her down on the road upon first meeting her from atop a beautiful black stallion very much like the one he was riding now; he had come to like her immensely and eventually admit a surface fondness that covered the deeper love of friends and allies who had once even discussed the possibility of an entertaining but loveless alliance marriage.

For all that his upcoming visit was primarily targeted at the Bolg king, it was really Rhapsody that Anborn was looking forward most to seeing.

Given that her husband, with whom she shared an unmistakable and soul-deep love, was his nephew, Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, Anborn’s feelings for Rhapsody had, over the past few years, resolved from amused, if intense, attraction and affection into an almost avuncular outlook. He had sworn himself to her as her knight, a pledge of fealty that had surprised him more than anyone else when he made it, and so had taken on the happy task of being her protector and guardian, although as Iliachenva’ar, the formidable bearer of the ancient sword of fire and starlight known as Daystar Clarion, she hardly needed his help. Her marriage to his nephew and the birth of their child had only served to deepen that uncle-like role, providing to the Lord Marshal the first happy sense of family he had ever experienced, given the horror of the one into which he had been born.