“Agreed. But I have to do one more thing before I can go—I have to close the tunnel. Otherwise they’re just going to round up a new group of slaves, and send them down again, until they break through, if they haven’t already. I don’t want them to get away with drowning a bunch of boys for their own selfish purposes.”
Achmed walked over to the demon-spawn, bent down, and gauged his body temperature. He roughly bound him hand and foot, ignoring the dangling wrist and uneven shoulder, then picked him up and slung him over his shoulder.
“And exactly how do you propose to do that? Grunthor’s not here.”
“I know. Give me exactly five minutes—I promise that’s the longest I will take.”
Achmed shook his head as he beckoned to the slave children, who leapt from the cot and lined up next to him.
“We may not have that long.”
“Then go—I’ll catch up to you. Go.”
She ignored the hard look he gave her, then ran to the door and spoke the word of silence again. The door opened without a sound. The passage of the slave boys through it was equally silent, but that was due to the terror that the look on Achmed’s face was apparently inspiring in them.
Once they were all out into the antechamber of the foundry, Rhapsody went back into the firing room. She stared for a moment at the carnage before her, then strode to the first of the four remaining vats and upended it, dumping the contents onto the floor, where it ran like a muddy river into the alcove. She then went to the next vat, and the next, pulling the chains grimly, staying clear of the landslide of burning mud.
When enough had swelled into the alcove to fill the well shaft to the brim and more, she drew her sword. The flames of Daystar Clarion danced in the shadowy darkness, shining with a firm authority, burning a million times brighter than the fires that had now reduced to sleepy coals beneath the great vats in the firing ovens.
Rhapsody closed her eyes amid the lakes of slip, searching her soul for her bond to the sword, for her tie to elemental fire, now the core of her being as it had been ever since she passed through the wall of fire at the heart of the Earth. She concentrated on the well shaft, now gurgling with its burden of slip, and raised the sword slowly until it pointed where she knew the alcove was.
“Luten,” she said with a ringing authority. Bake.
An arc of flame shot forth from the sword, blasting the alcove with a heat far more intense than the kilns, hotter and brighter than the light of the sun. Rhapsody felt a thrill run through her as the fire soared into the alcove, firing the clay solid in a matter of seconds, filling the shaft with an unyielding plug as hard as the ceramic columns of Manwyn’s temple. The top of the well shaft glowed red, then settled into the dull color of fired clay.
That’s the most I can do, she thought as she sheathed her sword, hurrying to catch up with Achmed and the boys. For the boys, and for Entudenin.
When they slipped out of Yarim Paar that night, past the Yarimese guards in their horned helmets, through the alleys of a city that slept like a drunken wastrel or a hibernating bear, she took a moment in their flight and cast a glance back at the dry fountain, the dead wellspring obelisk. May you return to life one day, she thought, and make Tarim bloom again.
Though she was many street corners away, she was certain she saw, in the dull red clay, a momentary shimmer, like a wink from a star.
9
The holy man stood with his face to the sun, on the edge of winter and the Krevensfield Plain. The mountains of Sorbold had receded into the southeastern distance like a grim nightmare. Now an endless vista of low, frosty plateau lay at his feet, the sky stretching out to the blue edge of the horizon all around, no longer broken by fanglike mounds of earth.
Night was coming earlier with the advent of the season of the moon; a red sun burned at the world’s rim, bathing the edge of the meadows in bloody light that spread slowly eastward as it set. He smiled. How prophetic.
His retinue of guards was encamped around a small fire in the frozen grass some distance away, preparing their supper. He had begged their indulgence and walked slowly to the edge of a deep swale, presumably to take the air, and now stood alone, undisturbed, watching the western horizon grow ever more crimson in the grip of coming night.
For almost three hundred years these lands lay fallow, a wide, fertile stretch of pastureland dotted in later centuries by the occasional farming community. These intrepid homesteaders came in groups consisting of four to six families, braving the bitter winds of winter, the brushfires of high summer, to live beneath the endless sky. Without exception those homesteaders were new-landers, immigrants from the south or west that did not share a drop of Cymrian blood between them. For if they had, they would never have even thought to put the first stake into the ground here, let alone build their homes and rear their children on this haunted soil.
Time had erased most of the visible scars of the Cymrian War. In Tyrian and Sorbold, great battles had devolved into heinous slaughter and reckless carnage, streaking the earth red beneath the bodies of the innumerable fallen. With the passage of the centuries, however, the forest had reclaimed in Tyrian the places no Lirin soul would have thought to rest his head in sleep. The song of the wind in the new trees’ leaves had drowned out the whispers of battlefield ghosts, except on nights when the breeze was high. Then Lirin fathers drew their progeny around the warm hearths of their longhouses and told them stories of war hags, spirits of widows long dead who walked the slaughtering grounds still, eternally mourning their soldier spouses, even longer dead.
In Sorbold to the south, the mountains had taken back the battlefield passes as well. It was said that in the north the blood of the dead had stained Yarim’s clay its rubeous hue, had made its river run scarlet with gore. Anyone surviving from the First Generation knew this to be a myth. Yarim’s soil and river had always been red in the memory of men, colored by the runoff from great deposits of manganese and copper in the foothills of the northern Teeth. In all the lands that ringed Roland, it was neither Anwyn nor Gwylliam but Time that had been victorious. Time had at last covered the memory of grim pandemic death, even if other scars, the wounds of souls and memory, remained.
But here, in the bowl of the continent, the center lands betwixt the sea and the mountains, the blood of the multitudes who had died in that glorious war had pooled, had sunk into the ground, making the soil fertile and the pall of death heavy in the air, so heavy that even the strongest wind, the most driving rain, could not wash it away. This truly was the realm of ghosts, irrespective of the fact that the Bolg had purloined that name for Kraldurge, their own place of restless spirits within the mountains.
It was almost time. A few more sunsets, a few more days, a season, maybe two, and it would finally be at hand. After all the centuries he had waited, his patience was about to be rewarded.
Soon he would have the army. Then he would take the mountain. Then he would have the Child. Once he possessed her, the ultimate goal was assured. The rib of her body, formed as she was from Living Stone, would open the vault deep within the Earth, the prison in which his kind had been held since the Before-Time. The thoughts of destruction that raced through his mind had to be reined back, or he would give himself away in his excitement.
The day was coming soon. All in good time.
He glanced over his shoulder casually at the guards, who were laughing and passing a flask between them, then turned westward again with a smile.