“Careful, you oxen,” the king muttered under his breath; he clutched the black ivory box more tightly as the second and third pieces were simultaneously unwrapped, revealing similar pieces of glass the colors of orange fire opal and yellow citrine. A moment later an emerald piece emerged from its bindings, deep and green as the ocean most Nam would pass their lives without seeing. As it was carefully fitted into place, a large gleaming piece of sky-blue, like a topaz of clearest coloration, and a deep indigo arc emerged, not as wide as the others, for its place in the spectrum was smaller than the six core colors. Until the dim torchlight fell upon it, the smaller piece seemed almost black, but in the flicker of illumination the rich sapphire hue glowed quietly, unobtrusively, becoming part of the darkness when the light moved on.
Finally, with the greatest of care, the last piece was removed from its linen wrappings. The violet arc was perhaps the most beautiful of all; there was something achingly clear about the amethyst hue, something fresh, like the beginning of a new day after a dark night, the clearing of a smoke-filled sky when battle was done. As it came forth, the scent of the room changed, the thick staleness of stagnant mountain air giving way to a fresh breeze that stung the king’s eyes, making them water at the edges in melancholy memory. The corpsmen, affected similarly, sat back on their heels, almost reverently. The last piece remained, out of place for the moment, awaiting Faedryth’s order.
The Nain king looked down at the box in his hands again. The tip of his beard, resplendent gold that curled into platinum at the ends like the hair of his head, brushed the black ivory lid. There was irony there, in the contact of dead hair with the box; black ivory was the rarest of all stones, harvested from the deadest parts of the earth, not from living animals as traditional ivory was. The places from which it was mined were spots of utter desolation, where magic had died, or the earth had been scorched beyond repair, devoid of its unique power to heal itself, unlike after wildfire or flood, where new life sprang up from the ashes or mud. Black ivory was the physical embodiment of an emptiness beyond death—of Void, the utter absence of life—and therefore anything that was hidden within a box fashioned of it was surrounded by total vibrational darkness, invisible to every form of sight, even the most powerful of scrying.
Even holding such a box made Faedryth’s soul itch.
Knowing what was inside it, or rather, not knowing, made it burn. “Is my daughter here?” he demanded tersely.
“Verily,” Thotan replied. “And each surviving generation of your line as well.”
Faedryth snorted. “Send in my daughter,” he said, beginning to pace me dark floor. “The rest are too old.” Thotan nodded; like Faedryth, he was a First Generation Cymrian, one of the more than one hundred thousand original refugees from the Lost Island of Serendair, and thereby seemingly immortal as well. Also like Faedryth, he had seen that immortality eke slowly from his own family, so that while he himself maintained the same vigor of youth he had possessed on the day fourteen hundred years before when he set foot on the ship that bore him away to safety, his children had aged as if they were of his parents’ generation, his grandchildren more so, until his more distant progeny had grown old and died, while he continued on, as if frozen in Time.
The gilded door opened again, and Gyllian entered the room. Like her father she had wheat-colored hair, but whereas his was tipped with the beginnings of silver, all of hers save the faintest of golden strands had been given over to the metallic color. She bore her age well in spite of it, and strode directly to her father’s side, the lines of her face deepened into creases of silent concern.
Faedryth reached out his hand and brought it to rest on the side of her face for a moment; to touch one so aged and wise in such a fatherly way had always seemed strange to him in his eternal youth, but in the few moments of tenderness he allowed himself, the object was always Gyllian.
“The Lightforge has been made ready,” he said quietly, words he had spoken to her on several occasions before. “Are you, in the event you need be?”
His daughter nodded, still silent. Faedryth inhaled deeply. “Very well, then. Stand at the door. Tell the yeoman to make ready.” He nodded to Thotan; the minister of mines bowed quickly and left the chamber, followed by Therion and the corpsmen. The Nain king allowed his hand to linger on his daughter’s age-withered cheek one moment longer, then let it fall to his side. “All right,” he said brusquely to the ghosts and memories that lingered, invisible, in the air around him. “Let us do this.”
“Do you want to wait to speak with Garson one last time?” Gyllian asked, her mien calm and expressionless, as always. The Nain princess had forged her reputation in the battles of the Great Cymrian War, and had been cured in the smoke of those battles like leather, molded and shaped in their endless campfires into a woman with steel in her spine. That notwithstanding, she was measured and deliberate in her counsel, always seeking to exhaust other means before opening doors that, once opened, might not be able to be closed again.
A small, sarcastic bark escaped Faedryth’s lips.
“You want to see me heave yet another Orb of State into the wall?” he asked, his eyes twinkling fondly above a darker expression. “There are still shards from the last one scattered on the far floor.”
Gyllian’s expression did not change. “If that is the price of appropriate consideration, it is a small one,” she said evenly. “Before you resort to using the Lightforge, I would see you shatter a hundred Orbs, until you are certain of what you undertake.” The stoic expression in her eyes softened into one of concern. “The risks are far too grave not to. And besides, I know it feeds your ego to know that you can still heave and shatter a sphere of annealed glass the way a mere youth of a hundred winters can.”
Faedryth chuckled. “All right, then, Gyllian, if you wish it, summon Garson.” The princess nodded slightly and returned to the doorway, leaving the Nain king alone in the flickering darkness with his thoughts.
And the black ivory box.
Faedryth was afraid to hold it and, at the same time, afraid to set it down. He had been bedeviled by the contents ever since they had been unearthed from the deepest of the crystal mines almost half a year’s time before, was nervous in their presence, fearful that this odd magic might be the final straw to tip the scales of his sanity. While the Lightforge might assist him in knowing, finally, what they were, expending its power was something Faedryth considered only under the rarest, and gravest, of circumstances, knowing the risk to himself, and the world, that came in the process.
The door of the Great Hall opened again, admitting Garson ben Sardonyx and the royal yeoman, wearing a miner’s helm with a dark visor, bearing his enormous crossbow across his back and carrying a heavy stand. Faedryth swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and gestured impatiently to Garson, who doubled his pace until he was standing in front of the king. The blue-yellow tapetum in the back of his eyes, the physical attribute that allowed all Nain to see in the blackness of their underground dwellings, caught the torchlight and gleamed, making him appear like a feral animal approaching in the dark.
“Tell me again what the Bolg king said during your visit to him,” Faedryth demanded as Gyllian returned to his side. “Recount each detail—there may have been something we missed on the previous reports.”