“Rhapsody.” Achmed’s voice was quiet. “Come here.”
But the Lady Cymrian did not hear him. The sound of her heartbeat was pounding in her ears, threatening to burst; time had become suspended for her. She numbly crouched to the ground and felt around for something solid among the ashes, but there was nothing, just burnt strands of fabric and soot.
Finally she looked up.
“Achmed,” she said softly, “where is my baby?”
The Bolg king reached out his hand.
“Stand up,” he said gently.
Rhapsody shook her head, feeling around on the ground in the darkness once more. “No, no, he must be here somewhere—he—Achmed, help me find the baby.”
“Rhapsody—”
“Damn you, help me—he has to be here somewhere—I had him tightly, Achmed, please, help me find him—”
The Bolg king crouched down in front of her while the other two men looked on. He watched her in silence as she knelt on the ground, continuing to pat the earth helplessly in all directions, until she finally turned back to him. Then, before their eyes, she seemed to collapse; Achmed caught her as she fell forward into his arms. “No,” she whispered. “Please, no.”
Achmed said nothing, but ran his bony hand awkwardly over her shining hair. He held her as she began to shudder, then she abruptly stopped and slowly looked up into his face, her cheeks wet with tears, but her eyes wide again in shock.
Then she looked down at her abdomen.
Distended there, between them.
Rhapsody’s hand went to her belly, now expanded and swollen. Her expression became dazed. “It can’t be,” she murmured.
Achmed’s brows drew together. He stood, pulling her up with him. “Where’s the light?”
Grunthor jogged over and handed him the globe. “Ya dropped it just outside the sluice.” Achmed held the cold lantern up above her; there was no mistaking the bulge in her waist. A moment later, to his utter disgust, he thought he saw it move. Stunned relief came over Rhapsody’s face. “He’s kicking. I can feel him kicking.”
“I’m going to be ill,” said Achmed.
“Well, well, look at that,” Grunthor said, sounding immensely pleased, “the lit’le nipper found a safe place in all o’ that. ’Ow’d ’e do that?”
“ ‘Born free of the bonds of Time,’” Rhapsody said. “Perhaps that means he can be in whatever time he knows of—and this is the only other time he has ever known.”
Achmed exhaled, annoyance evident in the sharpness of his breath. “It’s to be expected, I suppose; history is riddled with many young men who could not resist staying inside Rhapsody as long as they could.”
“Well, that was ugly, sir,” Grunthor admonished reprovingly. “You’re talkin’ about a mother, after all. So what’s the plan?” He looked around for the Dhracian in the dark, but the man was not to be seen. “And where’s yer friend?”
He stands behind you, holding the door.
Why are you still here? Achmed demanded of the darkness in the silent speech of his race. I am sorry to disappoint you, but I cannot, and will not, join your endless quest for F’dor, though when I come across one, you can be comforted in knowing that I have been trained in the Thrall ritual, and will gladly do whatever I can to destroy it. There—are you satisfied?
No. There is much that you still do not know.
I expect that will be the case throughout time, Achmed answered. But for now, I have a kingdom to get back to, and preparations to make. We can waste no more time here; we’ve lost the horses, and we are ten days’ walk from the nearest outpost in the northern Teeth. So be on your way, and best of luck in your quest. I am sorry to have disappointed you after all this time.
I will come with you, the inaudible voice said. I will open the doors of the wind for you, that the journey will be swift. And I will tell you of the Gaol, and of the Vault. And of your mother. Achmed thought for a moment. I will not be beholden to you, the Bolg icing finally replied. I guard the Sleeping Child—and I will not be threatened, or wheedled, or coaxed into abandoning her, even for as worthy a quest as the Primal Hunt. We can travel together, and I will listen to what you have to say. But after that, you will go back to being an assassin. I will go back to being a king. If you agree, then we have a deal.
The wind whistled around him, raising sand to his eyes. The stars twinkled brightly above as he waited for his answer. Finally, it came.
Agreed. The Dhracian opened another door in the wind, behind which swirling currents of air could be seen. I am Rath; and so you may call me.
35
Wars of conquest all have the same father, went the saying among the desert-dwelling tribe known as the Bengard race. He is Hunger. He and his children—Lust, Greed, Rage, Vengeance—are all formed of the same sand.
If anyone knew the lineage of war, it was the Bengard. Tall, oily-skinned, warlike men and women of gargantuan height and mass, whose history of conquest was unparalleled in the Known World, they had a long and deeply held belief that war was not only unavoidable, it was necessary and valuable. There was something almost holy in the constant state of readiness, of willingness to fight for almost any reason, that in the minds of this culture of limited resources and harsh environment was to be cherished and admired above all else. It was not aggression for aggression’s sake, but rather the readiness for a war, whether of invasion or defense, that drove the race into the gladiatorial arena during outbreaks of peace. And the fact that they found mortal combat to be rather fun.
But one thing the Bengard never truly understood was that while the father of war might always be Hunger, occasionally the mother of it was Fear.
More than any fear that clung, when banished by his waking mind, to the depths of his unconscious soul, Beliac feared being eaten alive.
In a different situation, a different man, that fear might be considered more irrational than most. While fear itself was a hobgoblin of the black crevasses of the mind, requiring no basis in the bright sunlight of reality in order to exist, the dread of being consumed while still living was strange even among the more ordinary terrors humans harbored: the fear of darkness or enclosure, of reptiles or arachnids, of heights or being buried alive. If it were anyone other than Beliac, the fear that his flesh might be chewed off of him and swallowed before his eyes would have bordered on insanity.
But Beliac had more reason than most to fear such a possibility. Beliac was the king of Golgarn, the seaside nation to the southeast beyond the Manteids, the mountains known as the Teeth.
And his neighbors, to the north, were the Firbolg.
Beliac had been king of Golgarn for a long time by comparison to the other monarchs on the continent. He had assumed the throne of his peaceful nation more than a quarter century before, and his reign had been a pleasant one, his twenty-fifth jubilee marked by genuine celebration on the part of the populace. The mountains that were the bane of easy trade to the north were also his greatest protection, and given the legends of the population that inhabited the other side of those mountains, he was grateful for the barrier. Nonetheless, in the recesses of his mind were the tales of horror told to him in childhood by his nursemaids and the other children, tales of marauding and murderous monsters who scaled the mountains like goats, their hands and feet equally articulated, searching for prey in the form of human children. As he grew older and studied the history of the continent, he learned the genesis of those fishwives’ tales was real—that in fact the Firbolg truly were a cannibalistic race, hardened by the conquest of every land they had ever inhabited, a conglomeration of bastard strains of every culture they had ever touched. They were demihuman rats, and like rats, they did whatever they had to in order to survive. Including eating their enemies.