“Too much feldspar,” Omet said.
The Bolg king blinked but didn’t say anything.
Shaene, a big, brawny ceramicist from Canderre, leaned forward, picking fretfully at his leather apron.
“Gold smalti?” he asked apprehensively.
The Bolg king’s head did not move, but the mismatched eyes shifted to Omet. Omet shook his head.
Shaene snorted impatiently. “Vitreous glass then. What do you say, Sandy?”
Omet exhaled deeply. “Not strong enough.”
“Peh!” Shaene growled, tossing his acid-stained leather glove down on the enormous table. The muscles of King Achmed’s back tensed.
The room went suddenly still.
Rhur, a Firbolg mason, the only other man in the room besides Omet whose brow was still dry, met his glance. “What then?” he said, his voice marred by the harsh whistle that characterized the language of his people.
Omet’s dark eyes went from Shaene to Rhur, then finally to the Firbolg king.
“We can no longer experiment like this,” he said simply. “We need a stained-glass artisan. A sealed master.”
King Achmed kept his back to the ceramicist long enough for Omet to count ten beats of his own heart. Then, without a word, he rose from his chair and left the room, making not even a whisper of sound, or disturbing a current of air in his passing.
When Omet guessed that the Firbolg king was well out of earshot, he turned to Shaene.
“Master Shaene, my family was originally from Canderre, so our mothers may have been friends in childhood,” he said evenly, using the tone in which a lad of not-yet-eighteen summers could address an older man without requiring confrontation. “In honor of that possible friendship, perhaps you could refrain from striking the flint of the king’s patience with the steel of your foolhardiness when I am the one standing closest to him.” he traversed the dark hallways hollowed into the mountain, soon to be brightened by torchlight, Achmed suddenly felt the need for air.
Following the main causeway of the Cauldron, his seat of power within the mountains, past clusters of Bolg soldiers and workers who nodded deferentially as he passed, he stopped long enough to step into one of the viewing stands that looked out over the cavernous capital city of Canrif, now in its fourth year of renovation.
A warm updraft carrying a cacophony of noise and vibration from the rebuilding that was taking place below slapped against his hands and forehead, and swept over his eyes, the only places on his body not shielded by veiling. His skin-web, the network of sensitive veins and exposed nerve endings bequeathed to him by his mother’s Dhracian blood, could feel the disturbance anyway, even swathed as it was in cloth, muted. It was an irritation, a constant stream of stimulation that the Bolg king had learned to live with a lifetime before.
-
When he had first come to this place, four years ago, the vast cavern below his feet and towering above his head was the sepulcher of a dead city, silently rotting in the stale air long trapped within the mountain. Within its broken hallways, along its desolate streets roved clans of Firbolg, demi-humans who had overrun Canrif at the end of the Cymrian War and now walked its crumbling tunnels, oblivious of the glory that had once been.
A thousand years before it had been a masterpiece of architecture and a paean to ingenuity, carved into the belly of the Teeth by the design and sheer will of Gwylliam the Visionary, the only other man ever to claim the title of king within this forbidding range of jagged mountains.
It was well on its way to becoming that masterpiece again. Four years of focused attention from thousands of Firbolg workers, as well as the costly and limited guidance of expert artisans from outside Ylorc, as the Bolg called this land, had reclaimed almost half of the city, restoring it to the model of art and efficiency it once had been. The ancient culture that had built the place, naming it Canrif, might not have understood the priorities die Bolg king had employed in the restoration; though Gwylliam would have agreed with Achmed’s emphasis on reinforcing the defenses and infrastructure, he might have found the king’s penchant for adding tusks and other Firbolg features to ancient Cymrian statues more than a bit perplexing.
The tumult below him dimmed slightly; Achmed looked down to see a section of die massive city below the viewing stand motionless in the midst of all the movement. The workers who were hauling loads of stone, tiling roofs, laying bricks, and a thousand other tasks in the reconstruction of Canrif stood stock-still, staring up at him from below. The paralysis was spreading in waves as more and more of die Bolg saw him up in die reviewing stand, halting in their tracks.
Quickly he withdrew from the stand and hurried down the corridor, feeling the waves of motion resume a moment later, dissipating in long ripples of vibration.
A cleaner wind caught his nostrils as he neared the opening of the tunnel. As he stepped out onto the rocky ledge, the cool air of the open world whisked around him, tugging at the edges of his veils and robes, carrying with it different vibrational patterns, scents of campfires burning, sounds of distant troop movement in the canyon beyond.
Achmed walked to the end of the ledge and stared down. A thousand feet below in the dry river canyon the watch was changing, the troops doubling with the coming of night. Torchfires flickered in thin streams of light, twisting on the canyon floor like fiery serpents as the lines of soldiers ran their evening drills. He could hear snippets of the cadence being called when the wind favored it.
Satisfied, he turned his gaze skyward. The firmament holding the heavens in place had blackened patchily, with blue clouds smudging die panorama of stars that winked in the night wind.
He stared beyond the darkened rim where the canyon turned southeast; then he took down die veil and closed his eyes, letting the wind rush freely over his face and neck, brisding against the veins of his skin-web. He opened his mouth, and let the breeze fill it.
In his mind he sought a heartbeat, a distant rhythm on the wind. It was his blood-gift to be able to match his own to those ancient rhythms born in die same land as he had been born, die lost Island of Serendair, silent beneath the waves of the sea a thousand years again by half. A gift now shared only with a few thousand other living souls, all ancient beyond years, caught at whatever age they had been when they left the Island, frozen forever in time.
He quickly caught the heartbeat he was seeking, felt his pulse slow slightly and beat in the great, voluminous tympani of his oldest friend. Achmed exhaled; the nightly ritual brought him something akin to relief.
Grunthor lives, he thought, satisfied as always. Good.
He turned and sought another rhythm on the wind, a lighter, quicker one, more difficult to find, yet still unconsciously familiar. He knew it as well as his own; he was bound to its owner, bound by history, by friendship, by prophecy, by oath. By Time.
He caught this one quickly as well, far away, past the Teeth and the seemingly endless Krevensfield Plain that lay beyond, over the rolling hills of Roland, almost to the sea. It was there, flickering in the distance, like a comforting song, the ticking of a clock, the ripples in a stream.
Achmed exhaled again. Good night, Rhapsody, he thought.
He sensed Omet’s presence even before his polite cough sounded, and waited until the tile artisan had come up to his side, continuing to stare down into the canyon.
Omet stared down into it as well.
“Quiet night,” he observed.
Achmed nodded. “Are the last deliveries in yet?”
“Yes.” Omet handed the king a leather pouch, then shook his head as the wind caught his hair, blowing it into his eyes. It had finally gained the length to do so again, after he had shaved it off while apprenticed to the tile ovens of Yarim, and their dark mistress. The thought made him shudder involuntarily. He stood quietly as the Bolg king leafed through the messages from the aviary. Achmed’s system of messenger birds was as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun.