Rap-rap-rap.
This time, the noise brought him fully awake.
Like a child afraid of figments in the night, he held himself breathless and stock-still.
Rap-rap-rap!
The noise was hastier this time, almost nervous.
Pulse racing now, the Bard swung himself into a sitting position, put his bare feet on the cold stone floor. He rubbed his eyes, shoved his filthy mass of hair out of his face, and then got up and padded over to the door. He was stiff, his legs ached from lack of use.
He said, softly, “What?”
“Roderick! You’re awake!”
The voice was unknown to him.
Puzzled, he replied, “Yes. Who is it? What do you want?”
“Hang on.”
There was the sound of a drop-key being lifted. A moment later, a tiny crack of yellow rocklight touched his discarded black boot and then spread outwards in an arc across the floor.
Startled, he backed away. “Who are you? Who’s there?”
The crack opened wider, and the light blinded him after days in the gloom. Raising an arm to shield his eyes, he saw that the incoming figure was a soldier, a young woman, pale and furtive.
And the last, cold shock doused him.
They have come for me. No Ecko, no Rhan, no hope.
He found himself shrinking back against the wall, sudden fear robbing him of breath.
It was over.
The after-images of his dreaming broke loose, spilled free and made the hairs on his arms prickle. Faced by the soldier that had come to take him to his death, he was still shaking at fragments unnamed – something about a creature of crystal and fire?
The shattered-window image came again – through it, he could see the waters of the Ryll clearer than he had ever done, clearer than even the Guardians had ever witnessed. It was as though there was something in the way, some conduit or device, something that both enhanced and defended his flawed mortal vision –
A cold, hard object was being pressed into his hand.
Startled, he looked down.
The door had opened enough to let the soldier slide through and pull it almost-closed behind her. She was pressing a weapon into the Bard’s anxious grip, a long, narrow poignard, real white-metal, with a nasty-looking point. For a moment, Roderick blinked at it, baffled – was the city offering him another way out?
A way to end his own life with dignity?
Love of the Gods...
The first spark of rebellion ignited somewhere in his heart. He said, “No...”
But the soldier was speaking, low and urgent.
“They’re coming for you. Any minute now.” The woman looked back at the door and spoke quickly. “Everything’s changed. Demisarr is dead, Rhan has been cast down. Phylos closes his fist around the city, and around the Varchinde.” She was sweating. “I bear you a message, brought by bretir from the Lord Nivrotar in Amos. She says you must go to her. And she says to tell you, “The world’s fear comes.”
“What?”
Ice shivered through the Bard’s skin. Demisarr, Rhan, Nivrotar. The world’s fear. The Monument, blazing. Ecko. Death in the grass.
It was too much to take in.
But the soldier was panicking now.
“You have to get out of here! They’re coming!”
“How do you know this?” Roderick gripped the woman’s shoulder, striving for stability. “How do you...?”
“I don’t. I’m just a message bearer. The Wanderer’s still here. If you hurry...” The soldier glanced back again as other feet sounded further down the passageway.
“For the Gods’ sakes, get out of here.” The Bard gave her a shove. “I’ll work it out as I go.” His heart was really pounding now – fear and freedom and elation and questions and an almost-understanding that he would reach for as soon as he had a moment in which to think. “And – thank you!”
Thank you... for another chance.
The young woman nodded at him, slid out of the door, and was gone.
They’re coming.
In his mind, perhaps a part of the dream, perhaps just a sharp stab of his own conscience, Roderick heard Ecko’s voice. You’re a coward and a fucking liar!
The Bard left his boots where they were. They were clumsy and noisy, and he needed to be quiet.
But his hand tightened around the cold metal grip of the poignard.
* * *
The great cliff upon which Fhaveon stood sentinel was a warren of tunnels. Smugglers’ tunnels, miners’ tunnels, tunnels of stealth and opportunity.
Stinking of cold rock and rimed salt and drying wrack, the tunnels’ existence made the Lord city seem hollow, oddly unstable.
Roderick had been down here before, many returns ago, seeking rumours of Swathe – but, like the outcome of his hunt for Kas Vahl Zaxaar upon Rammouthe Island, he had found nothing.
If the legendary Swathe had ever existed, it had been obliterated utterly – down to the last seared and moulding fragments of its residents’ bones.
Demisarr is dead. Rhan has been cast down.
Phylos closes his fist around the city, and around the Varchinde...
Mother of the Gods, Roderick thought. What has happened to Fhaveon?
From ahead of him, he could hear voices, a burst of coarse laughter. On chilled but silent feet, he pulled back into a side passage and waited.
He was trembling – cold, dread and anticipation.
Images still haunted him. Fighting and fire. The Great Fayre, burning. Demisarr Valimbor, Lord of Fhaveon, plummeting, screaming into the gorge. Phylos on the clifftop, and an unholy heat that blazed from his skin...
Roderick knew that heat.
The voices were coming closer.
Pulling back as far as he could, the Bard stopped, striving to reach for the memory – to piece it together from the scatter of images that he’d seen, this time so clearly, in the Ryll.
Demisarr’s wife, Valicia, thrown down and struggling, that same heat savage and penetrating and unwelcome.
Dear Gods.
And the realisation was there – the understanding. Kas Vahl Zaxaar, once Dæl, cast down to the great halls of the Rhez below the world...
...and so, so like Rhan.
Vahl Zaxaar was stirring.
Even as the Bard was incorporating the thought, in the passageway outside, the voices were coming closer. They were soldiers’ voices, relaxed and bantering. One voice broke into ribald laughter, and one of the sets of boots broke away.
The laughing voice said, “Don’t get lost mate. We’ll never find you!”
Never find you...
Oh.
Dear.
Gods.
Never find you!
And the understanding of what he’d seen crystallised, shone brilliant, and shattered with spectacular force.
Of course!
That was what he’d been missing! All this time, all these many returns of searching! He could still hear the terrible, screaming deaths of his tan upon the grassy hills of Rammouthe, feel the rip and shred of his own wounds and scars, the taint of his hopelessness...
But Vahl Zaxaar was not there, he was not on Rammouthe!
He never had been.
Fhaveon was built to guard against a tale. A fiction, a saga, a legend so carefully spun to keep her attention from the real game...
To keep Rhan distracted, bored and inattentive...
While the real assault came in, slowly and stealthily, like soft boots in the night.