The Weaver's Lament (35 page)

“What can you tell me about MacQuieth? Other than what you told me a thousand years ago.”

The old barkeeper blinked. “Majesty—”

“I saw him die,” Achmed said, dipping his bread in the soup, which was a hearty beef stock with carrots and potatoes, a great improvement over the thin cabbage water he had been served the last time he had been here. “I heard his heartbeat wink out in the sea; it used to toll like a great bell, and I heard it fall silent.”

He chewed on the bread and swallowed, then leaned forward.

“But then, I had always assumed he was dead until you told me otherwise that night,” he said, his mismatched eyes gleaming intensely. “The legends say that after he landed with what was left of the Second Fleet in Manosse, he went to the end of the peninsula of Sithgraid, waded into the water to his waist or knees, and stood vigil for his son, Hector, who had been left behind in the place of guardianship MacQuieth felt he should have had.”

“All that is true.”

The Bolg king tore off another piece of bread. “And then, supposedly, when the Island was destroyed, he went into the sea and was never heard from again. But you knew otherwise, Barney. You knew. ‘There are many places in the world for a man to hide if he does not wish to be found,' you said. And now I am about to do something very similar—though it is very much not to be told to any random kings, Firbolg or otherwise, that may come passing through your tavern.”

Barney's face, which had gone gray at the news about the sovereigns, brightened a little.

“Understood,” he said.

“Hateful as the water is to me—and believe me, it's hateful—I have found myself in need of traveling
through
it, rather than upon it. I also will be taking this with me.”

He swallowed his most recent hunk of bread and reached over his head, quickly drawing Kirsdarke.

Barney backed up in his chair.

“As you can see, it does not run like elemental water in my hand, as it did when MacQuieth held it, or even Ashe,” Achmed went on, sheathing the sword and going back to his soup.

“It is always interesting when you come by, Majesty,” Barney said, only half humorously.

“No doubt. So if there is anything you can tell me about MacQuieth, or anything else you might think would be helpful, now's the time.”

Barney exhaled sadly. “Forgive me, Majesty. I am still stunned and heartsick.”

“I understand. So am I. More than you know. But in only the slightest of roundabout ways, what I am doing is something that would honor her, and advance the safety of her children and their children and so on, so if there is anything you can tell me, please do.”

The old man nodded. “Well, I can say that I have not seen him since he went into the sea with the demon,” he said, taking a draught himself. “But it's safe to say that, after almost two thousand years of guarding the depths, as he did after the exodus, there is still a great part of his soul in it.”

“Can you elaborate?” Achmed put his tankard down and listened intently.

Barney shrugged. “Sometimes things wash up on the beach that seem, well, unlikely to do so,” he said nervously. “Things that are often, well, opportune, if you know what I mean.”

“Interesting.”

“Did you ever see him draw the strange designs that he used to in the sand?”

“Yes.” Achmed took another drink. “When we asked him what he was drawing, he said ‘whatever the sea tells me.'”

“At the same time of day that the, er, opportune objects or information tends to show up, there is occasionally a drawing when the tide goes out, in the sand,” Barney said. “I cannot make head nor tail of them most of the time, and I have sat watch to see if any human being is doing it, but no one has ever come. The sea pulls back, and there is a drawing in the sand. That's all.”

“What time of the day is that?”

“Usually just before dawn—earlier than even the fishermen are out. And occasionally late at night, on my way home, I see something. But it's a rarity, especially these days. It is more wishful thinking than sensible thought to believe that MacQuieth is still guarding the depths. But they say he has always intervened with the tides around Gaematria, and I am not certain, but it was also said that once he returned to Tartechor, the domed city of the Mythlin, the Firstborn race of water, that vanished in the heat from the Sleeping Child when it rose, and took the Island to the depths with it.”

Achmed nodded silently. He had heard MacQuieth tell the tale himself, in the context of explaining how he had gone in search of his son's body after the Cataclysm, and had found only undersea mountains of desolation and destruction where Serendair had been, and nothing at all of Tartechor.

“Rhapsody used to blither about the lore of the soul,” he said finally, finishing the bread, the soup, and his ale. “She believed that it was a far more flexible, widespread entity than most races that believe in the soul tend to define it. Perhaps that is true of the sea and MacQuieth.”

“It's pretty to think so,” said Barney.

Achmed pushed his chair back. “I don't suppose you have a room to let?”

“For you, Majesty? Of course, though it's poor lodging.”

“If it has a bed and peace and quiet, it will be like being in a palace. Thank you.”

Barney inclined an ear to the rest of the tavern.

“It seems a quiet night, so if you would like to turn in now, you should be availed of mostly peace and quiet,” he said. “And tomorrow, if you wish me to wake you early, I can show you the beach where I have on rare occasions thought that I have seen evidence that MacQuieth's heart is not still; that great bell you spoke of just tolls in a much wider bell tower than we can usually hear.”

Achmed nodded and followed the tavernkeeper to bed.

 

34

The next morning, true to his word, Barney woke the Bolg king in the hazy hour ahead of foredawn, and together they took a lantern down to the beach between the guardian rocks of Traeg.

The wind had been even higher that night than Achmed remembered, and so his dreams were full of demonic screaming, making his repose minimal. He had barely slept since Rhapsody's death anyway; their last night together, close to the musical vibration that had emanated from her, had spoiled him, ruining any expectation of good sleep for him, but this night was especially haunting.

He had dreamt of the Vault, which he had actually once approached and had stood at the entry of, peering through the keyhole. The nightmares that had resulted were not so much a product of what he had seen in the dark, devouring space but more because of what he had heard while standing on the threshold of that lifeless realm; the sounds were beyond anything he had ever been able to describe to anyone, even Rhapsody. Now, with what he had witnessed in the mountains and what he was planning to do, the dreams returned, the noise that still haunted him screaming in his ears.

The airless place was full of sounds of the absurd, the profane, screams and cursing, pleading and whining, the begging voices suffering in agony, voices of judges pronouncing death sentences and the cries of the condemned, ridiculous, shrill commentary and palpably angry words so acid that the inside of his ears burned, set to the ominous pounding noise that all but drowned out desperate gasping and wailing, whispering in fear and threat, spinning like a dust devil tearing up the floor of a waterless desert, rattling his brain in just the split second of time in which he had gazed into the place.

He could not even bring himself to imagine how awful it would be to go inside.

As a result, in the morning he was exhausted, his skin even paler and more sallow than it usually was. The dark hollows around his eyes had caused the gentle barkeep to gasp upon viewing him in the light of the lantern.

The shouting sea wind and the crash of the waves below buffeted his sensitive skin, and Achmed was still nervous about the descent, so he stayed close to Barney and did not look around, but kept his sight drilled on the path.

There was no one on the beach. There was never anyone on this beach, Barney had explained as they made their way down to it, which was precisely why the ancient warrior had chosen, in his advanced age and morning blindness, to dwell here in a shack so small and unassuming that any who would have been fool enough to brave the wind of the beach would not have noticed it anyway.

The hut was now gone, a thousand years after Achmed had seen it, swallowed by the sea and the wind.

“This is where I sometimes find the sand pictures,” Barney whispered in the almost-dark, looking east behind him where Foredawn still had not made any appearance. “I'm not certain what it was about this place, but, for whatever reason, it had a sense of home to him, just as the wind seems to want to make its home in Traeg.”

The Bolg king took in a deep breath, finding the air of the place light of salt and pungent, but otherwise unremarkable.

“Will you hold the light to the water's edge?” he asked Barney.

“Aye, Majesty. Whatever you command.”

Achmed shook his head, his hair blasting around him in the sea breeze.

“I command you to do nothing—I merely ask it of you. I am no longer a king,” he said, his voice competing with the whine of the wind. “I've gone back to being an assassin.”

“I am sick to hear that, Majesty.”

“Don't be, Barney,” Achmed said, examining the sand beach. “If I have any use to the world now, it's in that role.”

The waves were rolling to the sand, rumbling as they came with the strength of the morning tide. The Bolg king analyzed the pattern, finally settling on a place where the surf ended without exceeding its reach too frequently, then gathered his robes and veils and sat down in the sand.

Before he descended completely to it, he pulled forth Kirsdarke and Tysterisk from the bandolier and stabbed each of them, point down, into the sand, Tysterisk away from the grasp of the water, Kirsdarke directly in its path.

Tysterisk was a weapon he occasionally had difficulty with because it, like Kirsdarke, had little more than its hilt visible to ordinary sight when in its element. While that meant that Kirsdarke was fully visible in the air of the regular world, and only became fluid in water, Tysterisk in the element of air was little more than its hilt, with the occasional sign of spinning air currents where the blade actually was.

He pulled off his boots and tossed them out of the way of the waves, then rolled up the trousers he wore beneath his robes and stretched out his feet, allowing the cold froth of the sea to surround them.

He kept his hand on the hilt of the sword of elemental water, trying to allow the gentle undulation of its waves to soothe his battered soul, but he was still too damaged by the loss of two-thirds of the Three to gain any comfort in it.

He bade Barney goodbye and continue to sit vigil, his sensitive skin tormented by the buffeting of the wind and the surf. Achmed closed his eyes and thought back to the day that Rath had finally found him.

The Dhracian had been seeking him since his conception, because those of the Common Mind had been linked with his unfortunate mother, had witnessed her mass rape, something that he knew might have contributed to his snapping when he heard what Rhapsody had endured. Upon finding him, Rath had tested both him and Grunthor, had taken the air out of a broken, antiquated vault where he had found them, had allowed them to collapse for lack of it, and thus determined them to be free of the F'dor's influence, because neither of them had attempted to wheedle or bargain as a F'dor would have.

Then he and Achmed had spoken for the longest time in the open air that either of them remembered doing.

In the ruins of Kurimah Milani, you said something about the bees, how a man could destroy every living specimen of their kind, should he come into their vault with flame,
he had said to the Dhracian, of whom he had still been uncertain.
Then you alluded that it was such with another vault as well. I told you, I abhor riddles. Speak to me plainly—tell me what you want of me
.

Rath had chosen his answer carefully.

It is a great irony that to the Bolg you were polluted, unclean, a half-breed among mongrels that somehow made you less in their sight,
he had said.
Somewhere deep in the scars of your past you have assumed that the blood of your unknown father somehow tainted you in the estimation of the Kin as well—but I tell you, with the wind as my witness, that nothing is further from the truth. To the Gaol, and all the Brethren who have been seeking you since your conception, you are a special entity, a rare gift to our race, one who might finally tip the scales in our favor. We have not been searching for you to torture or abuse you, to cleanse the race of your blood—but because we need you. You, in a very real way, are our last hope.

He thought of Graal, of how the baby's eyes were like his own, his newborn skin scored with the patterns and traceries of surface veins and nerves, but how those things had made him beautiful, unique, rather than ugly and despised.

Then he realized for the first time that, to the Dhracian brotherhood, he himself never had been.

You alone among us are born of wind and earth, Bolg king. While we tread the tunnels and canyons of the Underworld in our endless guardianship, we are strangers there—and the demons know it. They understand how deeply our sacrifice costs us, how much the wind in our blood resents being trapped within the ground, away from the element of air for all time. And even within their prison they laugh at us, because in every way that matters, we are as much prisoners as they. But the earth is in your blood as much as the wind is. You have a primordial tie to it that neither the Kin nor the Unspoken have. You have power there, a corporeal form that would be protected by the element of earth bequeathed to you by your father, protected by the very Living Stone of the Vault, should you choose to walk within it.