And he had an immortal lifetime to spend on that undertaking. How else was he to spend forever?
But not this place, he thought. Never this place. This remains as it is, undisturbed.
He took stock of the hidden measures he had set in place to insure the sacrosanctity of the place in the event something happened to either of them, musing idly for a moment about the devices attuned to their heartbeats, their own innate vibrations, set to seal the tunnel in the presence of any intruder.
If Grunthor were to die, I would have to bring in a score of work crews to open and char the tunnel and then kill them afterward, he thought. Such an unfortunate loss of manpower.
An orange-red glimmer caught his eye; he turned to see the wall of shale and dust gleam like molten lava around Grunthor’s hands, which were outstretched, forming an entryway in the mound, leaving a tunnel with walls as slick as glass. Achmed blinked away his musings and followed the giant Bolg through the opening.
On the other side of the mound was what remained of the Loritorium, silent now. A haze of old smoke snaked heavily through the space beneath the overarching dome, disturbed perhaps by the vibrations of their movements and the introduction of the air from the world above.
In the center of what remained of the courtyard the altar of Living Stone appeared undisturbed; the Sleeping Child, formed of the same elemental earth, lying supine upon it.
Achmed and Grunthor approached the altar quietly, careful not to disturb the Earthchild. The chamber in which she had once rested before its destruction had borne a warning inscribed in towering letters:
LET THAT WHICH SLEEPS WITHIN THE EARTH REST UNDISTURBED; ITS AWAKENING HERALDS ETERNAL NIGHT
The two Bolg had long paid heed to that warning, having seen the threat to which it referred, a far more deadly Sleeping Child, with their own eyes during their travels through the center of the Earth.
The child still rested as she had when they had first found her, her eyes closed in eternal slumber. Like the altar on which she slept, her skin was a polished gray surface, translucent, beneath which veins of colored strands of clay in hues of purple and green, dark red, brown and vermilion could be seen. Her body, tall as that of an adult human, seemed at odds with the sweet young face atop it, a face with features that were at the same time coarse and smooth, roughly hewn but smoothly glossed; she was like a living statue of a human child sculpted by a being that had never really seen one in close proximity, without any sense of perspective.
The hair of the child was long and coarse, green as spring grass, matching the lashes of her eyelids. Those eyelids twitched intermittently but remained closed, as did her heavy lips.
Mutually the Bolg sighed, unspoken relief evident in the relaxation of their stances. They drew closer to the altar.
“Does she look—smaller to you, sir?” Grunthor asked after a long moment.
Achmed squinted, examining die outline of her form on the altar. There was no shadow, no visible indication that her body had lost any of its size; still, there was something different, a frailer air to her that he couldn’t place, and didn’t like.
Finally he shrugged. Grunthor crossed his arms, staring down at the Earth-child intently. Finally he shrugged also.
“Oi think she’s lost some of ’er, but it must be a very small amount,” he said, his heavy forehead wrinkling in worry. He tucked the eiderdown blanket beneath which she slept around her tightly, then gently caressed her hand.
“Don’t ya worry, darlin’,” he said softly. “We got yer back.”
“She doesn’t seem ill, or hurt?”
“Naw.”
Achmed exhaled. Grunthor’s description of the wound he had felt in the Earth had unnerved him, had made him fear that the Earthchild might have been compromised or injured, or worse. It was an unending worry anyway; she was, to his knowledge, the last living Child of Earth, a being formed long ago from the pure element and sparked into life by an unknown dragon.
The rib of her body was a Living Stone key that could open the Vault of the Underworld, where in the Before-Time the demons of elemental fire, the F’dor, had been imprisoned. It was the blood oath of the Dhracians, his mother’s race, to guard that vault, to keep the F’dor locked away for all time, to hunt down and destroy any that might have escaped. Likewise, it was the endless quest of upworld F’dor to find a way to free their brethren from the Vault, unleashing the chaos and destruction of the world that they, children of fire, craved incessantly. The Earthchild, therefore, was the fuse, the catalyst that could light a sequence of events that could not be undone. The fate of the Earth was dependent on her safety, and he, as a result, was sworn to an eternity of guardianship to see that she remained unharmed, hidden here, away, in the dark vault that once was to have been a shining city of scholarship and lore.
It was a small enough price to pay, though not an easy one.
“Sleep in peace,” he said quietly to the Earthchild, then nodded toward the passageway.
As they passed through the tunnel Grunthor had made in the moraine, Achmed looked up one last time at the firmament of the dome that towered into the blackness above the Loritorium and, finding that it appeared sound, glanced back at the altar of Living Stone.
The Earthchild slumbered on, oblivious, it seemed, of the world around her, and of whatever might have threatened it.
The Firbolg king watched her for a moment, then turned and walked back through the tunnel ahead of Grunthor, who closed the hole in the moraine behind them, his black robes whispering around him.
“What do ya think did that, then, caused the Earth to scream that way?” the Bolg Sergeant asked, glancing one last time over his shoulder before turning to follow the king up the corridor.
“I have no idea,” Achmed replied, his voice echoing strangely off the irregular walls of the ascending tunnel. “And there’s little more we can do, other than prepare, because sooner or later whatever it is will no doubt find me. Let’s make our way from one ruined landmark to another.” Grunthor nodded and caught up with him, traversing the rest of the corridor to the upworld in companionable silence.
They were on the other side of the moraine, halfway home, and so were unable to see the single muddy tear slip down the Earthchild’s face in the darkness of her sepulcher.
Grunthor stepped gingerly over the scattered shards of colored glass and looked up into the thin, towering dome hollowed into the mountain peak Gurgus, the Bolgish word for talon. The levels of scaffolding that ringed the interior of the structure were silent now, the artisans gone, leaving only the king and himself.
And an increasingly large pile of broken glass.
“Not going particularly well, I take it?” he said humorously, kicking aside the debris. He reached down and picked up a crumpled piece of parchment lying beneath the detritus that bore the markings of an architectural plan.
“Don’t open it,” Achmed advised sourly. “It’s full of spit. I encouraged everyone to take a turn at it after a particularly trying day early last week. You might want to stay away from any other wads, too; as the week wore on, the bodily fluids we applied to the plans reflected our progress, or lack thereof. You can imagine where we ended up.”
Grunthor grinned, his neatly polished tusks gleaming in the half-light, and tossed the wad of parchment back into the pile.
“Why ya driving yerself mad with this, sir?” he asked, his tone at once light and serious. “If you really feel the need to be irritated to the point o’ going insane, why don’t we just send for the Duchess? She generally ’as that same effect on you, and she costs less than rebuilding the dome of a mountain, at least if you pay by the hour.”
Achmed chuckled. “Now, now, let’s not reference our beloved Lady Cymrian’s sordid past. We’ll be seeing her soon enough. I heard from her last night by avian messenger; she wants us to meet her four weeks hence in Yarim.”