They finally came to a large basin for what had once been an immense bath lined with seats of fired tile, through which a trickling stream was slowly running, meandering around obstacles of broken statuary and the wreckage of walls. The robed man stopped beside the stream and pointed to it.
“Drink,” he said to Achmed and Grunthor. “It will restore you.”
“Oi’ll pass, thank you,” muttered the giant Bolg. “Oi feel just ducky.”
The Dhracian snorted, and eyed the Bolg king. “And you?”
Achmed said nothing.
The Dhracian watched him a moment longer, then crouched down by the spring and cupped a hand into it, then drank from his palm. “As you wish,” he said. He turned away and walked over to a sheltered alcove with blue marble walls that had most likely been a place where bathers had disrobed before taking part in the medicinal baths. The Bolg followed him, but Rhapsody stayed beside the stream, listening to it as it trickled through the cavern floor; it was a musical sound, similar in tone to the song she had heard when they were above. She crouched down, still clutching her mist cloak close to her, and removed her pack, fumbled around in it, and finally brought forth an empty water flask, which she quickly filled one-handed, then capped again and returned to the pack. She joined the men inside the alcove, one of the few places in the entirety of the massive vault that the bees had not chosen to colonize, probably because of the slippery finish of the blue marble walls. Between the shelter of the spot, the breeze whistling through, and the hum of the bees, all noise seemed to be swallowed, occluded, she noticed.
Achmed turned to the Dhracian. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
The ancient man stared at him without rancor, as if assessing him for market. Finally he spoke, and when he did his voice was toneless in the wind of the cavern. “I have a task for you.”
The Bolg king chuckled wryly. “You have come to assign me a task? Why would you think such a thing possible? And do you really believe that strangling me is the way to assure my cooperation?” The dark eyes narrowed. “You are of the blood, yet you do not feel the call of the Primal Hunt?” Achmed’s eyes narrowed similarly. “I feel it,” he said sullenly. “I have answered that call more than once, and have sent more than one putrid F’dor spirit back to the Vault of the Underworld, or into the ether. But I still do not understand why you feel you can attack me and my man-at-arms, nearly choke the life from us, and then expect me to accept a task from you, as if I am your errand boy. I actually have my own thoughts about how I might spend my time, not to mention my own responsibilities—and neither of them involve accepting a task from anyone, let alone you!” His voice rang with rancor, and the last word echoed in the alcove around them.
The ancient Dhracian said nothing, just stood in silence, watching Achmed carefully. Finally he pointed to the place in the vault where the wall and the hive around it was shattered. “Beyond that wall is a Wyrmril, a beast that came here a short time ago seeking healing from a place that was nothing but a memory. She sleeps now—her fire is cooled in a surfeit of honey and sweet water—but any sound, any distraction, could stir her awareness.”
“Oh, goody,” Grunthor said under his breath. “Anwyn. Oi wondered where that bitch had fled to.”
“You may feel competent to take her on—but what of your child, lady? Can he survive a dragon’s breath?” The Dhracian looked up at the expansive hive that had consumed the entire ceiling of the vast place. “That being said, you are in far greater danger from the bees, even though it is their noise that is keeping you alive, the movement of their wings allowing you to hide within the wind from the dragon,” he noted, almost idly. “When Kurimah Milani stood as a haven of healing, the ancestors of those bees were captive, raised by a follower of the man who built this city for their honey, which was used in medicines and soothing emollients. They were the only creatures to survive the destruction of the city.” His reflective gaze returned to the three. “Whatever their harmless-ness was then, they could now kill us all with but a thought—and, like our kind, they are of a single mind, able to communicate silently among the entire hive as if it were one entity. Should they swarm and attack, our dead bodies will swell like figs soaked in wine before they burst, and the bees feed upon our carcasses.”
“Please forbear from further description,” Rhapsody interjected. “I think we understand.” The Dhracian smiled coldly, still addressing Achmed.
“This is the only place in all the world that bees of this species live; they were brought from the old world, a place that no longer exists, and have grown and changed over the centuries to be unlike any other. If someone were to come into this vault, with flame perhaps, he could eradicate all of the bees of this type from the face of the earth.” His voice grew even more toneless and soft. “It is just so with another Vault.”
“You are talking in riddles,” Achmed said darkly. “I probably neglected to mention how much I hate riddles. What is it you want?”
The Dhracian met his gaze with a piercing one in return. “I have come to bring you into the Hunt, as you should have been all along. You are needed, Ysk. Time is growing short.” A sarcastic smile crawled over the Bolg king’s face. “And here again you address me by the name that was bestowed on me in spittle, as reviled and disgusting a title as has ever been conferred. Why should I help you? I have my own responsibilities, my own burdens to bear. A kingdom that requires my attention.”
“Yes,” said the angular man, “the Assassin King; so I have heard. I called you by the only name I had for you, though you had cast it off long ago, because the one you were given after that, the Brother, made you all but impossible to find on the wind.”
“That was the point.”
“I have been looking for you all your life,” said the Dhracian. “I knew of you before you were born; so it is with all the Brethren.” His voice grew less harsh, as if the wind was softening the effects of the sand in it. “The Zherenditck, those who have joined the Hunt and walk the upworld in search of the F’dor, share a link, a communication, that transcends time and space; they are of one mind, and so what happens to each of them is known to all. But you are not Zherenditck, you are Dhisrik, one of the Uncounted, a Dhracian of the blood who is not tied to a Colony, and therefore outside the common mind. You do not understand the bond between us; ironic, for someone who was renamed to be Brother to all, but akin to none. You have kin, Ysk—or whatever you choose to be called now—kin that have been combing the wind for you since your birth. Your mother was one of us, one of the Gaol. We witnessed your conception, experienced it, suffered through it as she did, though not as much as she did.
“We searched in vain, across the years, across the wide world. You were not to be found. Then, when one of the other Dhisrik, Halphasion, sent us word that you had been taken in and renamed, trained, made aware of your Dhracian heritage and the blood pact that it commands, we waited for you to come to us, to join in the Primal Hunt. But you have not been compelled by the deepest calling in your blood, though you may have heard it, may have used its power to make a name for yourself. Instead you have listened to a lighter voice, an upworld call, that has wheedled you to the concerns of earthly men—power, comfort, friendship, security—who knows what pleasure, what commitment, could have swayed you from that which is primordial in you, allowing you to deny the undeniable? It nauseates me to know that such a thing is even possible in one of our order. I took the air from you to see if the ultimate obscenity were possible—that one of the Brethren had become the host of a F’dor. I am glad to see it was not so, that a tainted spirit feeding off of you did not beg or wheedle, or try to run to another host as your body was dying. But I confess that had it happened, it would not have surprised me, given how you have been able to deny the undeniable, to undo the inevitable, and ignore what runs in your own veins. Perhaps you were aptly named by the Firbolg. There is something inherently odious about one of the Brethren who feels the needles in his veins, knows the burning of the skin, the blood rage that is our shared burden, but does not join in the Hunt.