The Titan of Twilight (8 page)

“Av… ner!”

Avner looked back to the queen, who had managed to prop herself on one elbow. Her other hand was rummaging for something inside the satchel where she kept her spell components.

“Yes, Majesty?”

“Do you… still have… Simon’s healing…”

The queen did not have to finish her question. Avner took one hand away from her belly and reached into his cloak. He withdrew the small purple flask and offered it to her.

Brianna shook her head. “Not yet.” She pulled her dagger from her satchel and turned the hilt toward Avner. “Baby might… need it.”

The young scout stared at the weapon, uncomprehending.

‘You can see… the baby,” Brianna said. “It’s the only… way.”

Avner was too terrified to reply. He could only shake his head and stare at the knife’s gleaming blade.

‘Take it!” Brianna thrust the weapon toward him, then collapsed onto her back. “Cut my child free… I command it!”

Since dawn has my eagle battled the cold boreal wind, that I might witness the debacle below. Through his eyes have I watched the Sons of Masud fall like trees to the axes of men, and through his nostrils have I smelled their acrid blood heavy in the air. I have heard dying fire giants call my name, adjuring me to guide their spirits safely to Surtr’s fiery palace, and I have seen their warm corpses sinking into the ice. I have tasted the sour savor of defeat, and it has filled my throat with the burning bile of despair.

My plan, of course, was not perfect—I am no god— but it was sound. The fire giants were too slow to implement it; too slow, and too faint of heart.

Cowards? Perhaps. They faltered. They faltered, and so the firbolgs will carry the day.

I am watching them now, the firbolgs clambering toward Brianna’s dank hiding place. In grim silence they climb, thirty warriors no larger than bears, weary of gait and pale with their barbarous intent. Their compassion makes softlings of them all; worse, it makes them liars. What honest warrior would shirk at murder to save his people? Not I; I killed, and willingly.

My eagle beats its wings, rising high above their heads and flying straight on toward the tunnel where Brianna hides. By the flickering torchlight inside, I see the queen’s guards pinning her to the floor, one with a knife poised above her womb. Foolish woman. If she had come to me, I would have removed the infant with my magic. Now, she must trust the child’s life to an unwieldy dagger and a trembling boy.

My pet reaches the tunnel mouth and wheels along the mountainside. He dives deep into the canyon, down half the length of the slope, and swoops low over the first firbolg. Talons as sharp as needles rake his quarry’s face. The warrior screams and falls, his hands reaching for an empty eye socket. My eagle banks away, a volley of shouts chasing him over the dusky gorge.

This small reprieve is all I have to offer the unborn emperor. It is little enough, I know, but Annam’s children have fallen farther than I thought. In Ostoria’s absence, the giants have grown as weak and stupid as all the races of Toril.

“…and we know who did that, Charles.”

“…now you must leave, my darling…”

“Don’t be afraid. One foot after the other…”

Be silent, I pray you!

I know what the gods demand of me, yet I would tarry here a while longer. Even I cannot reach the mine ahead of the firbolgs, and I am loathe to leave the Vale before I must. For a mortal to relinquish himself is no great sacrifice; his life is a fleeting and uncertain thing, and it will end soon enough.

I surrender eternity itself.

From the queen’s hiding place erupts a shriek as piercing and shrill as a wyvern song. The voice, of course, is Brianna’s, and in her scream there is more hope than anguish. The eagle raises his head toward the mine, his predator’s mouth watering at the sound of her distress, but I command him to fold his wings and dive. The emperor is coming, and I must find a better way to guard the child than scratching at firbolgs’ eyes.

Into the Darkness

The scream caught Tavis as a rope catches a hung man, at the end of a long, lonely fall. The high scout found himself dangling in cold, bleak darkness, numb and queasy and thick-headed, with no idea of how long he had been plummeting through the icy murk. The flesh on one side of his body felt soft and pulpy where the fire giant’s boot had caught him, and a huge goose egg had risen where his skull had slammed into a boulder, but these injuries did not actually hurt. He was merely aware of them, as he was aware of the black, frozen emptiness into which he had sunk, and the anguished cry that had rent its desolate tranquility.

Tavis would have heard that scream anywhere. Had he been at home in Castle Hartwick, he would have heard it ringing inside the keep’s thick granite walls; had he been fighting frost giants in the bleak northern plains, he would have heard it rolling across the white wastes of the Endless Ice Sea; and even in this lonely dark place, the cry had cleaved the frozen gloom like the almighty axe of Annam the All Father. Brianna was hurt.

The first defender opened his eyes, and his mind turned inside out. The blackness through which he had been falling was suddenly inside his head, and Brianna’s voice yielded to the wailing wind. A crooked chasm of purple twilight took shape before the high scout’s eyes. He came to realize that he was lying head-down on a steep slope, staring up into the dusk sky. Save for the icy throbbing deep in his battered bones, his body had gone numb from cold, and the gorge felt as empty and deserted as the dark place from which he had come.

Tavis dug his boot heels into the frozen hillside and slowly pushed his feet around, so that he would no longer be lying upside-down. The effort sent swells of frigid agony sloshing through his body, and he began to form an idea of his injuries. His right flank hurt from his hip to his armpit. Each breath filled him with anguish, a sure sign that some of his ribs had snapped beneath the giant’s kick. One shoulder seemed strangely weak, as though the blow had momentarily popped it out of joint. His head hurt most of all. A swirling brown fog had seeped up from some rank place to fill it with caustic fetor and raw, aching pain.

The high scout was injured, and badly. With each breath, the sharp point of a broken rib might be slashing his vital organs to shreds—the possibility seemed more likely every time he inhaled. He had certainly suffered a skull concussion, perhaps even a fracture. It would be some time before his thoughts came rapidly and clearly; more importantly, his reflexes would be slow, his judgment suspect. There was also the danger that his pummeled brain would let him slip away in a blissful sleep.

Groaning, Tavis propped himself up. A short distance away stood a black spire eagle, no doubt here to feast on the battle carrion. The high scout brandished an aching arm, but the bird merely hissed and continued to watch.

Fifty paces below Tavis, a belt of purple-shadowed ice ran alongside Wyrm River the road. The surface was strewn with dark boulders and frozen, contorted bodies, both human and giant. Other than the high scout himself, there were no wounded. Unlike firbolgs, neither humans nor fire giants could tolerate bitter cold; their wounded were doomed to quick, frigid deaths.

Farther up the canyon, the courtiers’ sleighs lay shoved and shattered to the side of the road, many with the twisted carcasses of draft horses still in the harnesses. Down the canyon, Tavis could barely make out a mangled heap of debris that had once been the royal sleigh. Nearby lay a few dark blotches, the corpses of men and horses that had died in the queen’s defense. Beyond the sleigh, the landslide’s jumbled slope was distant and dark. In the purple shadows near the crest lay the huge silhouettes of several fire giants. Save for a single pennon flag snapping in the wind, nothing moved, and no one cried for help.

Tavis grew cold and queasy. His arms began to tremble, and such a wave of weariness washed over him that he nearly collapsed. Brianna was gone. He had heard her scream with his heart, not with his ears. The fire giants had carried her into their cavern—how long ago he could only guess—and her voice had traveled to him not through frigid air or dense granite, but through the mystical bond between husband and wife. To reach him across such a medium, the cry must have been as much spiritual as it was physical, and only one thing could cause his wife such grief the giants had murdered their child.

A croak of despair, all the sound he could voice, tumbled from Tavis’s mouth. His arms folded beneath his weight, and he felt the cold ground beneath his back. Above the gorge’s opposite rim hung a blue star with a blurry white aura. The silvery halo began to dance like the boreal lights, and a female voice sang in a high, lilting pitch. A cold numbness fell over Tavis’s body. His eyelids began to close. He fought to keep his eyes open, but his grief, deeper than any pain tormenting his body, kept pulling them closed. He had failed his queen and his child. Something frightened and weak inside him wanted nothing more than to die and forget.

The throb of fluttering wings sounded over Tavis’s head, then a hard beak pecked his brow. The high scout’s eyes opened to find the eagle standing over him, its head cocked to one side.

“Wait till I die,” Tavis muttered. He raised his hands to push the bird away.

The eagle hopped aside, then opened its beak and screeched. The sound was deafening, as sharp and piercing as the shriek that had awakened him. Brianna’s scream. Whether Tavis had heard her with his ears or his heart, the queen had screamed. She needed him, perhaps now more than ever.

Tavis slipped a frostbitten hand into his cloak, his numb fingers searching for one of Simon’s healing potions.

Avner’s hands were slick and warm with blood, and the baby’s skull was so large that he could barely hold it in both palms. When he tried to pull the infant through the incision in Brianna’s womb, the head slipped from his grasp and dropped back into the slick red pocket from which it had come. Although the queen’s belly was no longer transparent—the spell had faded when he began to cut—one of the front riders had lit a makeshift torch, and the young scout could now see the child’s profile. Even from the side, the infant looked as ugly as a troll, with a round heavy face, pug nose, and a wild mane of matted black hair.

“Get that baby out of me—now!” Brianna shrieked. She lay in front of Avner on her outspread cloak, her arms, legs, and head pinned to the floor by front riders. Although she was doing her best to hold still, she had been unable to keep from jerking and twisting as Avner opened her womb, and the struggle to restrain her had left the five front riders almost as exhausted as she. ‘Take it out, you clumsy oaf!”

An angry whinny sounded from deeper in the tunnel, where Blizzard had been tied to a rough-hewn mining timber. The mare’s hooves scraped a warning across the stone floor. Avner ignored the beast and pushed his hands back into the warmth of the queen’s stomach. He slipped his fingers under the baby’s jawline, then pulled slowly and steadily. The head and shoulders came out of the womb with a loud sucking sound. The child smelled coppery and sour, like a concoction of blood and curdled milk. It was wet with its mother’s blood, and covered by a thin coating of something that felt like wax. The infant was so large that Avner had to move his hands beneath the armpits before he could extract the hips and feet.

“By Stronmaus!” gasped Gryffitt, who was holding his belt over the queen’s forehead. “That boy’s as big as my two-year-old!”

‘Tavis… was right? A boy?” Brianna croaked. Without awaiting an answer, she ordered, “Avner, clear… clear his—”

“I remember,” Avner replied. The queen had given him explicit instructions about every phase of the birth. “This is the one part I couldn’t forget.”

Avner turned the infant around and placed his mouth over the child’s nose and lips, then sucked the mucus plugs from the airways and spat the membranes onto the tunnel floor. They left a coating of sour-tasting slime in his mouth, but the young scout hardly noticed. The baby was as blue as a robin’s egg and just as still. His dull russet eyes were open, and he was staring at Avner with a vacuous, unblinking gaze.

“He’s not breathing,” Avner said. He looked to Brianna. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Make sure his passages are clear,” she replied. “Then wait a moment.”

Before the queen finished speaking, the child snuffled, then yawned, blinked, and glanced around the tunnel. When his gaze returned to Avner, the young scout could not help gasping. The newborn’s eyes had changed to a blue as pale and sparkling as glacier ice. With each breath the baby took, his complexion darkened and became more ruddy. His double chin vanished, his jowls tightened into a firm jawline, and his face grew thinner and more handsome. The infant’s stubby nose lengthened into a straight, bladelike appendage, and even his black hair seemed to be lightening to bronze.

“Iallanis save us!” cried the torch holder. “That child’s—”

“Breathing, you fool.” Avner cast a reproving glance at the man, who was the only other person who could have seen the transformation. “His color’s changing, that’s all.”

“Let… me see.” Brianna tried to raise her head, but even without Gryffitt’s belt holding it in place, she would have been too feeble to manage.

“Of course, Majesty.” Avner held the child up, deliberately keeping the face turned away from the queen. Although the incision across her abdomen wasn’t as gruesome as some belly wounds he had seen, Brianna had already lost enough blood to weaken even a Hartwick. The young scout feared the shock of seeing her child’s appearance change before her eyes would kill her. “He’s a handsome boy.”

“Give me,” Brianna commanded.

Although her eyes remained glazed, the queen’s smile was radiant, and Avner knew the worst of her pain was past. He held the child a moment longer, until he was certain the boy’s face had undergone the last of its mysterious changes, then nodded to Thatcher. The front rider released the queen’s arm, then took the infant and passed him to Brianna. She laid the baby on her chest, and he began to suckle immediately, clinging to her with a grasp as secure as a yearling’s.