“That’s the idea.” He turned and stared at her as he shook the thick liquid from his sword and sheathed it again. “How else do you propose to kill the vine? You said yourself that fire cauterizes it. It’s already tapped into the power of the Axis Mundi, in case you couldn’t tell. If we don’t cut if off, burn it into oblivion here, now, that root will eventually reach all the way down to the other Sleeping Child.” He slammed the plug back into place and stared at her again. His mismatched eyes glittered ominously in the shadowlight. “Light it.”
“We can’t yet,” Rhapsody answered, feeling suddenly cold. “Grunthor and the Grandmother are still in there.”
Achmed nodded behind her, and she whirled around. The Sleeping Child’s body had become incongruously distended, swollen out of all proportion. An oblongated peninsula of earth-flesh grew large, stretching vertically, then horizontally. It surged upward in a smooth rolling motion, as if dividing itself, and rose to a monstrous height. The section made a final, twisting turn and then separated from the body of the child, now lying, significantly smaller and motionless, on the Living Stone slab.
The glowing light of the newly separated piece dimmed into the color of stone, then warmed before her eyes into gray-green skin, oily and hidelike. Instant by instant it took on a more delineated shape, taking on human lines where a moment before it had been a formless mass. Rhapsody’s eyes widened.
“Grunthor!”
The giant exhaled and stumbled forward, catching himself by clutching the altar of Living Stone. “Hrekin,” he muttered weakly.
Rhapsody started toward her friend, only to feel a viselike grip around her upper arm. She looked up into the eyes of the Firbolg king, burning with a fury hotter than the flames of the firewell. He pointed to the trail of lampfuel, a liquid fuse from the firewell into the darkened cavern of the Colony.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if he had been in there still. There’s no other choice anymore. Now light it.”
Rhapsody shuddered at the all-consuming anger in Achmed’s eyes, the hallmark of the unquenchable racial hatred his half-Dhracian nature held for the F’dor and all their minions. It was an animus that no love, no friendship, no rational thought could sway or defuse when it was in full rampage. “The Grandmother is still in there,” she said haltingly. “Would you leave her to die with it?”
Achmed stared down at her a moment longer, then closed his eyes and let the path lore he had gained in the belly of the Earth loose. His inner sight sped through the pale marble streets, following the flood of lampfuel through the hole in the earth-dam they had crawled under, over the broken walls and slabs of shattered stone that had once held the last colony of his kind. His mind flew over the crumbled archway and its scattered words, under the twisting vines and rootlets writhing with mounting strength. Even where he stood in the streets of the Loritorium he could smell the stench of the F’dor growing, see the clay of the Earth shuddering as it prepared to give way.
Within the ruins of the cavern of the Sleeping Child his second sight stopped. He could see the Grandmother there, surrounded by a veritable cage of hissing vines, poised to strike, one leg pinned beneath a fallen granite slab amid the buckled walls of the chamber. Her left hand was upraised, trembling with strain, her right one braced against the slab that held her captive. Rivers of poisonous lampfuel gushed over her, beginning to fill the cavern.
She seemed infinitesimal in size, dwarfed by the colossal vine that hovered menacingly above her, its massive offshoots swollen with rage, tangled within the remains of the chamber’s floor. Its roots were snarling now, coated with glistening lampfuel, lashing out at her, coming nearer to reaching her as she began to fail.
Then, just as his mind was absorbing the horror of the sight, the Grandmother turned toward him, and her eyes met his vision. A tiny smile, the only one he had ever seen her indulge in, came over the ancient face, wrinkled and lined with age and so many centuries of somber guardianship. She nodded to him, and with the last of her strength turned back to face the vine that was threatening to break the Thrall.
Achmed fought back the primordial rage that was singing through his blood in the presence of the race he hated with every fiber of his being. He choked back the bile that had risen to his constricted throat as the vision disappeared. Then he squeezed Rhapsody’s arm again.
“Light it,” he repeated in a low, deadly voice.
With a vicious tug Rhapsody pulled free from his grasp. “Let go,” she snarled.
Angrily Achmed grabbed for Daystar Clarion. “Damn you—” He pulled back in pain and shock as she drew the sword like lightning and raked it across his open palm, singeing the skin.
“Don’t ever attempt to wrest this sword from me unless you are prepared to draw your own,” Rhapsody shouted.
“Skychild?”
All three companions stopped, glancing around the Loritorium for the origin of the Grandmother’s voice. The fricative click, the sandy sound that Rhapsody had only heard in one other voice, was unmistakable. The single word came with great effort, spoken very softly.
It was Grunthor who found the source first. He gestured to Rhapsody.
“
“Ere, darlin’.” He was pointing to the Sleeping Child.
In a daze Rhapsody came to the altar of Living Stone where the child lay. She stared down at the smooth gray skin, the coarse brown hair so like high-grass in the heat of summer. Tenderly she ran her hand over the child’s forehead, brushing the clods of fallen dirt from her brow. She could feel a surge of power, a vibration issuing forth from the stone of the altar through the body of the Earthchild, tingling across the skin of her hand and speaking directly to her heart. She had to struggle to bring herself to answer.
“Yes, Grandmother?”
The Sleeping Child’s brow wrinkled with the effort of speech. Her eyes remained closed, grassy lashes wet with tears. Her lips formed the Grandmother’s last words.
“Light it.”
The ancient Dhracian’s voice had passed through the ground, as if the Earth itself had wished to serve as the stalwart guardian’s final messenger. It had traveled through the slab of Living Stone and through the Earth’s last living Child. The irony brought tears to Rhapsody’s eyes. The Grandmother would never hear the words of wisdom she had waited a lifetime for from the Earth-child’s lips. The only words the Sleeping Child would speak would be the Grandmother’s own.
Rhapsody looked up into the faces of her two friends. The men watched as her sorrowful expression hardened into a resolute one.
“All right,” she said. “I will. Get out of here.”
56
Without a word Grunthor gathered the Sleeping Child from the altar of Living Stone in his arms and nodded up the corridor that led back to Ylorc. He and Achmed ran a short distance up the tunnel.
When Grunthor was sure Rhapsody could still see him he turned toward the side wall, holding the body of the child in front of him, then stepped forward into the earth. The granite glowed for a moment as he passed through, then cooled into a rocky opening. Achmed followed Grunthor into the bunker the giant had made in the side of the corridor. He leaned back, signaled to Rhapsody, and when he saw her nod he stepped back inside. Grunthor gave the wall a strong shove, and the rock that had been cleared away to form the bunker slid liquidly back into position, sealing off their hiding place.
Slowly Rhapsody turned in a full circle, surveying for the last time the Loritorium as it had been. The pools of glistening silver memory shone, torch-bright, in the street, reflecting the flame from the firewell. She struggled not to be swallowed by the despair she felt at witnessing the end of what had once been such a noble dream, such a worthy undertaking. Scholarship and the search for knowledge, dying on the altar of greed and the lust for power.