Meridion glanced at the endless wall of glass next to him and down at the surface of the Earth miles below. Black molten fire was crawling slowly across the darkened face of the world, withering the continents in its path, burning without smoke in the lifeless atmosphere. At the rim of the horizon another glow was beginning; soon the fire sources would meet and consume what little was left. It took all of Meridion’s strength to keep from succumbing to the urge to scream. In his darkest dreams he could never have imagined this. In his darkest dreams. Meridion sat upright with the thought. The Namer was prescient, she could see the Past and Future in her dreams, or sometimes just by reading the vibrations that events had left behind, hovering in the air or clinging to an object. Dreams gave off vibrational energy; if he could find a trace of one of them, like the dust that hovered in afternoon light, he could follow it back to her, anchor himself behind her eyes again, in the Past. Meridion eyed the spool which had held the brittle lore-strand he had spliced together, hanging listlessly on the Editor’s main pinion.
He seized the ancient reel and spun out the film, carefully drawing the edge where it had broken cleanly back under the Time Editor’s lens. He adjusted the eyepiece and looked. The film in frame was dark, and at first it was hard to make out anything within the image. Then after a few moments his eyes adjusted, and he caught a flash of gold as the Namer sighed in the darkness of her chamber and rolled over in her sleep. Meridion smiled.
He had found the record of the night before she and Ashe had left on their journey. Meridion had no doubt she had been in the throes of dreaming then.
After a moment’s consideration he selected two silver instruments, a gathering tool with a hair-thin point and a tiny sieve basket soldered onto a long slender handle. The mesh of the thumbnail-sized basket was fine enough to hold even the slightest particle of dust. With the greatest of care Meridion blew on the frame of film, and watched under the lens for a reaction. He saw nothing. He blew again, and this time a tiny white spark rose from the strand, too small to be seen without magnification even by his extraordinarily sensitive eyes.
Skillfully Meridion caught the speck with the gathering tool and transferred it to the basket. Then, watching intently, he waited until the lamp of the Time Editor illuminated the whisper-thin thread that connected it to the film. He turned his head and exhaled. He had caught a dream-thread.
Working carefully he drew it out more until it was long enough to position under the most powerful lens. He never averted his eyes as he gestured to one of the cabinets floating in the air above the Editor. The doors opened, and a tiny bottle of oily liquid skittered to the front of the shelf, then leapt into the air, wafting gently down until it came to rest on the gleaming prismatic disc hovering in the air beside the him. Keeping his eyes fixed on the thread lest he lose sight of it, Meridion uncorked the bottle with one hand and carefully removed the dropper. Then he held it over the thread and squeezed.
The glass below the lens swirled in a pink-yellow haze, then cleared. Meridion reached over and turned the viewing screen onto the wall. It would take a moment for him to get his bearings, but it was always that way when one was watching from inside someone else’s dreams.
<Nightmares>
Rhapsody did not sleep well the night before she handed herself over to a man she barely knew, a man whose face she had never seen. Having been girted with prescience, the ability to see visions of the Future and the Past, she was accustomed to restless nights and terrifying dreams, but this was different somehow.
She was awake for much of the long, torturous night, fighting nagging doubts that were very likely the warnings, not of some special foresight, but of ordinary common sense. By morning she was completely unsure as to the wisdom of her decision to go overland with him, beyond the stalwart protection of her strange, formidable friends.
The firecoals in the small, poorly ventilated grate burned silently while she tossed and muttered, neither awake nor really asleep. The mute flames cast bright sheets of pulsing light on the walls and ceiling of her tiny windowless bedchamber deep within the mountain. Upon becoming king of the Firbolg in Ylorc, Achmed had named his seat of power the Cauldron, but tonight the place more closely approximated the Underworld.
Achmed had made no secret of his disapproval at her leaving the mountain with Ashe. From the moment they had met on the streets of Bethe Corbair the two men had exuded a mutual mistrust that was impossible not to notice; the tension in the air made her scalp hum with negative static. But trust was not Achmed’s common state. Aside from herself and Grunthor, his giant sergeant-major and long-time friend, as far as she knew he had extended it to no one.
Ashe seemed pleasant enough, and harmless. He had been willing to visit Rhapsody and her companions in Ylorc, their forbidding, mountainous home. He had not appeared uncomfortable with the fact that Ylorc was the lair of the Firbolg, primitive, sometimes brutish people that most humans feared as monsters.
Ashe had exhibited no such prejudices. He had dined agreeably at the same table with the glowering Bolg chieftains, taking no notice of their crude table manners and ignoring their propensity to spit bone fragments onto the floor. And he had taken up arms willingly in defense of the Firbolg realm against an attack by the Hill-Eye, the last holdout clan to swear fealty to Achmed, whose reign as Warlord was still new and sorting itself out. If he was amused or displeased in any way by Rhapsody’s obnoxious companion’s ascent to monstrous royalty, Ashe did not show it.
But there was little, in fact, that Ashe did show. His face was always carefully covered by the hood of his cloak, a strange garment that seemed to wrap him in mist, making him even harder to discern than he already was.
Rhapsody rolled over bed and let out a painful sigh. She accepted his right to concealment, understood that the great Cymrian War had left many of its survivors disfigured and maimed, but still could not escape the nagging thought that he might be hiding more than a hideous scar. Men with hidden faces had plagued many different areas of her life.
Rhapsody opened her emerald eyes in the darkness of her cavelike chamber. In response, the coals on the fire glowed more intensely for a moment. The remnants of charred wood, reducing in the heat to white-hot cinders, sent forth wisps of smoke that rose above the coalbed and up the chimney that had been hewn into her chamber centuries before, when Ylorc was still Canrif, the old Cvmrian seat of power. She drew a deep breath and watched as more smoke billowed up, forming a thin cloud above the ashes.
She shuddered; the smoke had seeped into her memory, bringing back an unwelcome picture. It was not one of the lingering images from her old life on streets of Serendair, her island homeland, gone now beneath the waves of the sea on the other side of the world. Those days of abuse and prostitution that had haunted her for so long rarely plagued her sleep anymore.
Now she dreamt mostly of the terrors of this new land. Almost every night brought the hideous memories of the House of Remembrance, an ancient library in this new world, and of a curtain of fire that formed a hazy tunnel. At the end of the column of smoke a man had stood, a man in a gray mantled-cloak, much like the one Ashe wore. A man whom the documents they had found identified only as the Rakshas. A man who had stolen children, sacrificing them for their blood. A man whose face she had also not seen. The coincidence was unnerving.
The coals were doing little to dispel the dampness of the room, she thought hazily. Her skin was clammy, causing the blankets to cling to her and scratch. Beads of sweat tangled the hairs at the back of her neck in the chain of the locket she never took off, pulling painfully as she writhed again, struggling to break free of the clutching bedding.