There was something unnerving about this place to her, this open land ringed with dead red rocks and Yarimese guards; it was as if there were eyes somewhere, watching her, watching them, but hidden from sight in a place that had no natural cover.
She shook her head to clear it. “Very well. Show me.” She waved to the Yarimese guards, dismissing them. The guards looked at one another helplessly, then assumed parade rest.
Achmed reconnoitered for a moment, then took her elbow and led her to a sheltered place in the lee of a rocky formation, ten or so feet in height, where a small tent had been erected. He led her inside, then pulled off one of his outer veils that served as a cloak and tossed it on the ground at her feet.
“Sit.”
Rhapsody obeyed, heedless of the clay dust that crept into the drapes of the silken gown.
The Bolg king shrugged off the pack he wore across his back, removing from it a thin locked box fashioned of steel. Beeswax sealed the edges; Achmed ran his finger around them, melting the wax, then produced a tiny wire, with which he sprung the lock. With the greatest of care, he removed the contents of the box, wrapped in several layers of protective oilcloth. The cloth contained a few pages of brittle parchment, an ancient manuscript that Rhapsody surmised must have come from Gwylliam’s library in Canrif.
He handed the drawings to her with the greatest of care; she took them with similar gentleness. The schematics were detailed in the painstaking detail she had seen in other examples of Gwylliam’s work, meticulously rendered in a fine architect’s hand, for that had been the training of the ancient Cymrian king before he had led his people away from the doomed Island of Serendair.
The schematic was of a tower of sorts, supported by beams or pipes of some kind, its fan-shaped ceiling set in panes of colored glass, ordered as the colors of the rainbow. The key that indicated each of the colors was in Old Cymrian, the common tongue of the Island that she, Grunthor, and Achmed had each spoken when they lived there, now considered a dead language by the people of this land, who spoke Orlandan, the language of the provinces of Roland, or the vernacular of their individual homelands. A separate drawing detailed a wheel of some sort, also set with panels of glass, or something like it, though clear, not colored.
She pointed to a series of notations near the bottom of the page. “Gurgus,” she read. “Wasn’t that the mountain peak in the Central Corridor of the Teeth that had been smashed to bits by Anwyn’s forces early in the siege of Canrif?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm.” Rhapsody turned the sheaf of papers slightly to better catch the diffuse light shining through the fabric of the tents. “This is interesting, but why are you showing it to me? You can certainly read this yourself.”
“This part I can, yes,” Achmed agreed. He ran a perennially gloved finger along the edge of the top page. “It is the page below it that I cannot, and am hoping you can.”
“What is this apparatus? Do you know?” Before the Bolg king could speak, Rhapsody quickly handed him back the parchment and put a finger to her lips. “Tarry a moment, Achmed.”
She rose from the dirt floor of the tent, pulled the flap aside, and stepped out into the blinding light of noon again. The wind whipped warm across her face, slapping her hair into her eyes; she turned in to it, allowing it to blow the strands clear. Then she drew her sword.
Daystar Clarion, the elemental sword of fire and starlight forged millennia before, came forth from its sheath with a whispering ring, a note that sounded quietly, a muted call of a battle horn. Drawing it in peace, as she had, caused it only to ring softly, vibrating gently in the sandy wind, but when it was drawn in battle, the call of the sword could be heard across continents, could shake the foundations of mountains.
Rhapsody held the sword aloft in the hot breeze, focusing on the metaphysical tie that bound her to the weapon. She could feel it resonating within her, humming in the same note, pulsing in time with her heartbeat and the breath of the elemental fire within her. Quickly she drew a circle in the air around the tent, a thin ring of light that remained even after the sword had passed from it, hovering on the wind. It was a circle of protection, a musical tone that would divert the currents of air around it and keep what was said within it from escaping onto the wind.
The silver circle undulated on the air, expanding and contracting with the changes in the breeze, but continued to hover, steadfast, flexible but unbreakable. Satisfied, Rhapsody returned to the tent.
“I have an uneasy feeling lately that someone is watching me. I don’t know if it has to do with the work here in Yarim, but I think it’s best we take extra precautions. What we say now cannot be overheard,” she said as she sat back down beside her friend.
He was staring at the pages, his mind clearly far away from the windy plain of Yarim. She noted the absence of focus in his eyes, and thought to herself how much his other nature, the Dhracian bloodline, was showing at this moment. Rather than the heavy, rough-edged angularity of the Bolg features that were apparent when he was around Grunthor and his Firbolg subjects, she could see instead the thin, fine veins that scored the surface of his skin, the long, sinewy musculature and dark eyes of the race of his mother. He was very far away, she knew, lost in thoughts, most likely from the other side of Time, so she waited in silence until he was ready to speak again.
When his eyes finally cleared, he fixed them on Rhapsody for a moment, then turned back to the manuscript.
“I have seen something like this once before,” he said, his voice as sandy as the Yarim wind. “It was long ago, in another lifetime, long before we met in the streets of Easton in the old world.” He fell silent again.
Rhapsody pulled the green silken folds of her dusty skirt around her knees and waited.
“Someone I once served as guardian for—a rare and magical being—had an apparatus that looked very much like this. I only saw it once, but it would be impossible to forget such a thing. Like this, it was built into a tower in a clifftop monastery, though not in a mountain peak; Gwylliam had delusions of grandeur that made him feel he could mold the very Earth itself. In the language of its owner, the apparatus was called the Lightcatcher.”
“What did the apparatus do?”
Achmed shook his head, his eyes heavy with memory. “I am not certain. I do remember, however, that when the gravely injured were past the point of being healed by the monks or the priests there, they were taken to the Light-catcher. Many of them returned, whole. When knowledge was being sought, the priests often asked—” He caught himself, his olive skin turning darker for a moment. “The one who possessed the machine was frequently asked questions that required the ability to see into the future, or across great distances, or into hidden places, and those questions were answered. There were other things as well—things that defy explanation that the Lightcatcher brought about. It was an instrumentality of great power. How it worked, and what its exact capabilities were, I am not certain. I have tried to follow Gwylliam’s directions in the reconstruction of the one he built, but I cannot get the colored glass in the ceiling to the right thickness and porosity.”
“You are rebuilding this?” Rhapsody asked. “Why?”
The Bolg king studied the drawings before him. “If the scant records of the Cymrian War that were preserved in the library of Canrif are to be believed, part of the reason that Anwyn was not able to assail Gwylliam’s stronghold for more than five hundred years was this instrumentality, and whatever powers it had. When she finally broached the mountains, the destruction of the instrumentality was her first objective. Such a powerful tool would aid in making the mountains secure.”