Despite their obvious fear of their commander, a fear he cultivated continually, the Firbolg army was devoted to Grunthor in a way that Bolg had never been. It was a source of amusement to Achmed how in little more than four years’ time the primitive nomads they had discovered when he, Grunthor, and Rhapsody had first come to this place had learned to hold watch as well as any soldier in Roland, Sorbold, or Tyrian, and were better trained in tactics and weapons use. Such skills were only partially imparted by training. Most of them came from pure loyalty.
Grunthor’s impending arrival this day, however, seemed to be generating more than its usual consternation. Rather than snapping to attention, as the Firbolg soldiers generally did when word came down that the Sergeant was within range, the Bolg were scattering before the scouts that heralded his arrival.
This did not bode well as to whatever Grunthor had found on his border check.
A few moments later Achmed’s foreboding was borne out. Over the rim of the steppes that led up to the foothills of the Manteids, as the Teeth were officially called by cartographers, rode a party of eight horses, one enormous, heavy war horse in the lead. Achmed’s extraordinary vision could make out the Sergeant-Major, the many hilts of his weapons collection jutting from behind his back, urgently spurring Rockslide, cresting the battlements and riding through the gates in the recently erected walls of baked brick and bitumen.
The Bolg king jogged over to the quartermaster, who was standing ready to take the Sergeant’s mount, and waited.
The ground beneath his feet rumbled ominously with the party’s approach, the dust of the steps and rocky terrain rising like smoke from bursts of fire around them. There was a look in Grunthor’s eyes that Achmed could see even from a great distance and didn’t like; those amber eyes had seen more than their share of death and devastation, had faced foes of human and demonic nature, and always maintained a steady gaze. What he saw now was confusion, something Grunthor rarely exhibited.
“What’s happened?” he shouted into the mountain wind as the Sergeant brought his mare to a halt and tossed the reins to the quartermaster.
The giant Bolg stared down at the king, then shook his head. “Oi was about to ask you the same question, sir,” he said as he dismounted. “Oi ’alf expected to find the place in flames.” He dismounted with an earthshaking thud.
Achmed watched until the quartermaster led the war-mare away. “What has you so worried?”
Grunthor bent down and laid his hand reverently on the ground. The earth, the entity to which he was tied on an elemental level, no longer wailed in fear, but was quiet.
“Somethin’ was wrong at the pass, somethin’ terrible,” he muttered, running his thick fingers through the dust and pebbles on the ground.
The Bolg king watched silently as the Sergeant stood and turned around several times, then shrugged.
“Twas like there was a rip, a gouge of some sort,” he said, more to himself than aloud. “Can’t explain it past that. Like the Earth was bleeding to death.”
“Is it still there?”
The giant shook his head. “Naw. Everything’s quiet now.”
Achmed nodded. “Any guesses as to what it was?”
Grunthor inhaled and let his breath out slowly, feeling the heartbeat of the Earth pounding in his own blood. His union with the element had come to him during the trek he, Achmed, and Rhapsody had once made, refugees from their doomed homeland, crawling through the depths of the world along the roots of Sagia, the World Tree. In the course of that seemingly endless journey across time, he had absorbed its ancient rhythms, breathed in the secrets that lay dormant in its depths, had come to know it intimately, innately, though he could never give voice to what he had learned.
Grunthor, strong and reliable as the Earth itself, Rhapsody had Named him in the moments after walking through the purifying fire at the Earth’s heart. The name had come to embody his bond to the element. Being above ground now made him feel somehow bereft, away from the comforting warmth of the Earth.
So the wound the Earth had sustained, whatever had caused it to scream in fear, had reverberated in his soul, leaving him frightened, a feeling he had rarely experienced in his life.
He shook his head again. “Naw.”
Achmed glanced through the gate over the battlements to the steppes below. Dawn was coming, wrapping the world in cold light; the wind whipped across the desolate plain, making the grass bow low in supplication, unbroken waves of vegetation that covered the bulwark of hidden battlements, ditches, and tunnels that formed the Firbolg first line of defense. There was something ominous in its passage.
When he looked back his eyes met Grunthor’s, and an unspoken thought was passed between them.
Together they hurried into the Cauldron.
Achmed carefully checked the corridor outside his bedchamber before locking and bolting its door. He nodded to Grunthor, who carefully removed the intricate traps and opened the many locks on the heavy chest at the foot of the Bolg king’s bed, finally lifting the top to reveal a dark portal. He climbed inside, followed a moment later by Achmed, closing the lid of the chest behind him.
They traveled the dim corridor in silence, the rough-hewn walls of basalt swallowing all sound of their passage. The air of the upworld, clear with the relative freshness of morning, quickly flattened and became stolid, dank, as they traveled deeper into the mountain.
The farther in they went, the harder it became to breathe. The heavy odor of destruction, smoke-stained air that hung heavy with grit, still remained, three years later; the fire that had raged deep in the belly of the mountain had long since burned out, leaving behind acrid soot and bitter dust that stung the eyes and the lungs.
Neither Bolg spoke as they traversed the tunnel Grunthor had built to the Loritorium. There were ghosts in these passages; specters of people and dreams, both of which had died horribly. They concentrated instead on avoiding the traps Grunthor had set, which would seal the tunnel in the event it was broached by anyone other than the two of them or Rhapsody, who came once a year to tend to the Child.
Deep within the mountain, at the bottom of the tunnel, a hill of rubble rose, ominous, in the dark, a moraine of stones and broken basalt that served as a bulwark, a last barrier before the Loritorium. Achmed paused for a moment and hung back, waiting for Grunthor to open a passage in the mound of stony wreckage.
While he was waiting, he looked up at the ceiling above him, stretching into the darkness of the Loritorium’s dome. Seeing this place never ceased to cause him to reflect sadly on the overwhelming loss of it all, the ruin of what had once been a masterpiece, a deeply hidden city of scholarship, once a shining example of the genius of Gwylliam, the Cymrian king who had fashioned Canrif and the lands around it many centuries before. Now it was but a metaphor to the destruction that comes when vision gives way to ambition, and ambition to the avaricious hunger for power.
Bugger it, he thought, anger burning in the back of his throat. I can only rebuild so much of what that idiot destroyed.
Even as the thought formed, it dissipated. There was no end to what he could, and would, build and rebuild in these mountains, because ultimately it was not the outcome of the construction that was his purpose, but the process. The renovation of Canrif, and the additional projects he was fomenting, were all undertaken with one motive in mind: the building up of the Bolg, his unknown father’s race, from scattered tribes of primitive, demi-human, nomadic cave dwellers into a real society—a warlike, austere society to be certain, but nonetheless a culture with value, a contribution to be added to history.