The Merchant Emperor (8 page)

Between her hands a smooth, slender tree branch suddenly appeared, as if by magic. It tapped against her chest, then slid between her hands again. Foggy from lack of air, Melisande pushed it away, but it returned insistently, pressing against her chest. Finally she grasped it and was pulled, amid the sucking of mud, out of the devouring mire, coated with muck to her hairline, back into the air of the world again.

A strong, rough hand grasped her by the back of her vest and swung her away from the hole.

“Lady Melisande Navarne, were you running in a forest at night?” came the gruff, familiar voice of the Invoker. He set her down on the forest floor.

The little girl wiped the sludge from her eyes, opening two gleaming white spheres in an otherwise black shadow in the last rays of the setting sun.

Then she spat out the mud that had filled her mouth a moment before.

“Yes,” she said. “I was running from wolves.”

“No, you were not,” Gavin said solemnly. “There are no wolves in these woods, just coyotes. And you should never turn your back on either of them, nor should you run in a forest you don’t know, for fear of deadfall such as the one you have just escaped. Haven’t you learned
anything
in our time together?”

“Apparently not,” Melisande said. She made another pass with the back of her sleeve at her mouth, succeeding only in filling it with more mud.

For the first time since she had been with him, the Invoker laughed.

“Follow me to the lake,” he said, taking her by the shoulder. “It will be cold, but better than dragging around twice your weight in mire. Did you find the dragon’s lair?” The little girl nodded in the dark. “And what did you discover there?”

“I came upon the Bolg midwife Rhapsody asked your foresters to look for,” Melisande replied. She spat again into the underbrush as she walked beside the Invoker. “She is gravely injured—she needs help right away.”

Gavin nodded. “And the dragon?”

Melisande sighed sadly as the surface of Mirror Lake appeared beyond the bracken, gleaming with mist in the dusk. She went to the water’s edge and scooped what liquid was not in icy form into her hands, then splashed it onto her face. She did so again, but this time took some into her mouth, which she cleared, then spat out the liquid dirt.

The taste of the grave remained.

“Seal the cave,” she said.

THE FAR NORTHEASTERN WILDS OF THE KREVENSFIELD PLAIN

Deep within the earth in the cold northeastern desert wastelands, another dragon, the dragon Anwyn, daughter of Elynsynos, felt herself dying.

The beast had been lying within the relatively small comfort of the earth for as long as her tattered mind could remember. That she was in the broken ruins of a place of healing was only intermittently clear to her; her memory had been limited to only the things in the forgotten Past, a waste, given that she had once been the indisputably powerful Seer of that realm, into which only a few had sight.

Today she was mourning, though she was not certain why.

If her mind had been whole, it would have remembered that the event she was grieving was the relatively recent murder of her sister, the middle of the trio of triplets to which she belonged, born of an ancient mariner of a Firstborn race and the dragon who had fallen in love with him, taken a human form, and given birth to the three cursed and powerful offspring. Her sister Rhonwyn had been the one of the three that was mildest and gentlest, though her fragility of thought was maddening to most who knew her. She had been incapable of holding on to the Present beyond the moment that it had turned into the Past, a few seconds after it had occurred, and so she spent most of her life alone in an abbey in Sepulvarta, the holy City of Reason, sought after only by a few pilgrims looking for her fleeting guidance.

Until recently, when she had been thrown a thousand feet to her death from a tower into a chasm, an ignominious end to the most harmless of the Manteids, the Seers of the Past, Present, and Future.

Thrown by the hand of a man who was about to take hold of the royal scepter of state of a nation.

Anwyn, who when in the human form she was given at birth was the Seer of the Past, would have felt the emotions of the event but could not remember the details. She could also not have seen that the third sister, Manwyn, whose gift of sight looked into the Future, had once foretold of their fragile middle sister’s death, because Anwyn’s sight had faded both by the imminence of her own impending death and by the word of a woman with the power of Naming, who had retitled her the Forgotten Past.

It was a shame, the beast thought as she sensed the round blade of cold-fired rysin-steel, blue in color and jagged of edge, embedded in her body near her heart, that she only could remember the hate she felt for that woman.

A woman whose name, at least, she remembered.

Rhapsody.

PART TWO

Renaissance and Reunion

THE POEM OF SEVEN

Seven Gifts of the Creator

Seven colors of light

Seven seas in the wide world

Seven days in a sennight

Seven months of fallow

Seven continents trod, weave

Seven eras of history

In the eye of God

6

GURGUS PEAK, YLORC, THE BOLGLANDS

Rhapsody stood on a threshold, literally and figuratively, rubbing the nervous sweat from her hands. Behind her was the rubble of destruction, some of it cleared, much of it left as a reminder of the consequences of failure. Before her was uncertainty.

And the sound of agony.

The suffering of the man who awaited her ministrations in the vast room beyond the threshold would not be recognizable to most who heard it as expressions of pain. Indeed, the Firbolg guards who held watch outside the crumbled doorway seemed to take no notice of it whatsoever. But Rhapsody, attuned as she was to the vibrations of the world, knew that the soft whistling and scratching sounds foretold the imminent death of a being nearly as old as the world was old, and whose life force was slipping away with each passing second.

And with him, he would perhaps take the last hope of that world.

Behind her in the hallway was another sound, a wailing as intense as the dying gasps of the man beyond the door. No one else would have found it as compelling as Rhapsody, however, as she was attuned to this noise in a very similar, though more personal, way.

“First Woman?” The Bolg midwife’s voice was tentative.

Rhapsody smiled involuntarily. It was a name she had not heard in long time, a name the Bolg had given her when she and her two companions, one now their king and the other the commander of their military forces, had first come to the mountainous realm of Ylorc. She had been out of place here among the demi-human Firbolg clans, who had considered her a wasted source of food as long as she was still walking around, but she had gained acceptance here eventually. She had left them, gone on to her own life and lands.

Now that she had returned, three years later, the name was a sign that she was still seen as being under the king’s protection, as the Bolg presumed she was his favorite courtesan.

“Yes?”

“Your child is hungry.”

Rhapsody sighed, closing her eyes as she wished she could close her ears.

“I know, believe me,” she said, pressing her forearm against her breasts, which were filling at the sound of the baby’s cries. “Please, Yltha, try and soothe him if you can. I can’t feed him right now.”

The hirsute woman nodded and retreated down the stone tunnel with the squalling infant.

Rhapsody’s gaze followed them into the darkness. The sound of her baby’s wails vibrated on her skin, burning, until he was long out of earshot.

Another sound, almost as loud and less pleasant, drew her attention back to the doorway.

“Any time you would like to favor us with your presence, Rhapsody, we would be ever so grateful.” The sandy, fricative words dripped with sarcasm so poisonous that they stung her ears.

She exhaled deeply, then turned and made her way over the broken rubble and into the room beyond.

Oil lanterns gleamed in a circle at the very edges of the room, casting shadows that flitted and danced ominously on the smoothly hewn stone walls. Rhapsody looked up to the ceiling of the cylindrical tower above her. It was shrouded in protective canvas and wood, having been the focus of intensive reconstruction after the explosion that had shattered the stained-glass dome, leaving unfractured only the red and blue panels of what had once been a full spectrum in rainbow colors. The towering room in which she stood, in actuality a hollow mountain peak, tapered up to that ceiling, causing every footstep to echo loudly as the noise bounced up to the dome at the top of the cylinder.

In the center of the room around an altar of sorts made of black stone stood her two dearest friends in the world. Achmed the Snake, the Firbolg king, glared at her with an annoyance she could see even in the dark and the flickering shadows, his mismatched eyes staring her down as if she were prey. Looming beside him was his sergeant-major, Grunthor, seven and a half feet of musculature casting a shadow so large that it shaded the entire stone slab.

“Don’t let us call you away from anything important,” the Firbolg king said.

“I’m here,” Rhapsody replied steadily. “I have sung this man songs of sustaining all night, Achmed, but beyond ‘Rath,’ I do not know his True Name, and even if I did, I doubt I could pronounce it. I needed to clear my head before we attempt something that every ally you have has warned you against. Forgive me if I’m a little hesitant to delve into powers beyond my understanding that have consequences beyond my imagination should I misstep.”

“Are you sure your hesitancy doesn’t have more to do with your howling brat?” Achmed said, gesturing out the doorway to the hall. “His screams are still irritating my skin. I should leave him out on the peaks for the hawks.”

“Quite sure,” Rhapsody said acidly as she came deeper into the room. “I just sent him away, unfed. I believe I have my priorities straight, Achmed, but lest you forget, that howling brat is the reason I’m here, not your great glass instrumentality. I agreed to help you with this Lightcatcher, but that is not why I came back to the mountains with you.”

“I don’t care why you came back. Now that you’re here, I need to focus your attention on Rath.”

Rhapsody looked down at the suffering man on the stone slab. In the half-light he looked so different from the first time she had seen him. Like the rest of his race, this ancient Dhracian had translucent eyelids covering great black eyes that seemingly had no scleras, and skin traced with exposed veins from the crown of his bald head to the ends of his fingertips. Now, having returned a few hours before from tracking and unsuccessfully attempting to kill a demon even more ancient than himself, he was almost unrecognizable. Blood-red veins bulged in the paper-thin eyelids, ropey lines across his skull. His dusky skin was mottled and bruised, as if all of his blood had emptied beneath it, though no puncture wounds could be seen. Her songs of sustaining and healing had left him no worse off than he was when he returned, but not much better.

“How soon until First-light?” she asked the Firbolg men.

“Dawn’ll be breakin’ any moment now, Duchess,” Grunthor, the Sergeant-Major, said.

“And how long until it rises high enough to reach the windows?”

“The red panel, the panel of healing, is the closest to the horizon,” Achmed said. “Once the sun crests the peaks of the eastern Teeth, in the better part of two hours, we should have red light.”

“I’m not sure he’ll hold on that long.” Rhapsody laid her hand gently on the dying Dhracian’s head. His skin was cold, as cold as a corpse’s; she could barely feel the tides of his breath.
Live, Rath,
she willed silently, watching the strange-looking man struggle to comply.
Please live. I don’t know what I am doing
.

Achmed glanced up at the dark canvas, then turned to the depths of the room where a heavily bearded young human man lingered in the shadows.