“Makes me wish we had that one right now,” said Rhapsody.
“Hardly,” said Rath dryly. “The power that exists in those scales could cause even those who seek to save the Earth to bring about harm, intentionally or otherwise. History is littered with accounts of those of good intent and purpose who were dragged to stray by the power of those scales. “Finally, there was the violet scale. It was said to have been inscribed with the image of the throne, and it was the only scale that had but one side. Although the Progenitor Wyrm donated seven scales, for whatever reason that final note in the spectrum only had one tone, not a flat nor sharp. It was known as The New Beginning. I do not know for certain, but I suspect that any being who comes into power unexpectedly or inexplicably might have control of this scale, or at least had its power utilized on his behalf.”
The three exhaled simultaneously.
“Talquist, perhaps,” Achmed said.
“Let’s hope not,” Rath said.
“And the Given Deck?” Rhapsody asked. “Did you ever come upon any of those?”
The Dhracian shook his head. “I have seen some of them,” he said, “but that was before the Seren Reader defiled them. The sole silver one was the Fallen Moon, the one whose misdirection allowed Ave to desecrate them in the first place. I believe there was one scale for each of the five trees that grow at the birthplaces of Time: Sagia, the tree of the stars which now is gone from the world; Ashra, the tree of pure elemental fire; Eucos, known as the Cloud Catcher, the tree of living air; Frothta, the tree of water which grows beneath the sea; and, of course, the Great White Tree. There may even be one for Bloodthorn, the evil vinelike tree of thorns that has its roots in the Vault itself. There are others—I only know of a few: the Forgotten City, the Endless Mountains, the Golden Measure, the Molten River, the Broken Plate, the Thief Queen, the Infant, Breath, Missive, the Time Scissors. I only know of any of these because I once read pieces of The Book of All Human Knowledge, the tome written by that Nain historian. I believe it was lost at sea centuries ago, brought to the shores of this world by the Third Cymrian Fleet, where it drowned in their shipwreck. “This new entity, the one you call Michael,” Rath went on, “both man and demon, rose in worldly political power as the centuries progressed, finally becoming the Baron of Argault, one of the most powerful magnates in the shipping world on the other side of the Wide Central Sea. It was he whom I was following when I came to this place. He’d always managed to elude me by hiding near water, which any Dhracian will tell you is the bane of our existence when we are on the Hunt. His strategy was successful; while he operated in broad daylight, in the plain sight of the eyes of the world, his constant presence proximate to the sea kept him from my kirai.
“What is significant about this particular member of the Younger Pantheon was that his weakness was his need for control, coupled with his inability to maintain it over himself. Whether this was his human aspect or the demonic one is hard to say, because the man he chose as his host had a similar weakness.” Rhapsody shuddered, having been the recipient of that weakness.
“His shortcomings occasionally took the form of desires of the flesh, culminating in the worst of all of his conquests: a Seren woman, born of ancient blood, who had refugeed from the island to the shores of Argaut to avoid the Cataclysm. While most F’dor will never procreate, because it saps their power, breaks open their souls, or whatever passes for a soul, when they do, the host of this demon could not resist the opportunity to defile the woman, to impregnate her, which he did, gaining, I suppose, an ill-considered thrill at the tarnishing of the one lore, ether, that was older and more powerful than his own lore of black fire. The result was an unbelievable freak of nature, an entity known as a Faorina, a denatured F’dor. There are very few examples of them in the world, not only because the demons themselves are jealous of their own power, but because those that are actually born usually do not survive. Most worrisome, the woman who bore this child and died because of it was a Reader, one of the tribe of Seren priestesses that is charged with the protection of and the ability to read the scales. If she brought any of them with her from the old world, from the Lost Island before it sank into the waves, those scales fell into the hands of the man who ravaged her. And her child was thought to have inherited her ability to read them.
“I believe that man made use of a blue scale, perhaps even the blue scale of the Stolen Deck, to hide from the hunters of the wind. For a moment I tasted his signal, his vibration, coming from this place, as if he had lost the scale for a moment, but now it is gone again. One thing you should know, Bolg king, is that when I was making my way to this place in search of him, I had to slip between an armada of ships of all types, pirate vessels, merchant carriers, even warships, all massing in a great blockade far out of sight of the coastline off the western shore of your continent. I crossed the damnable sea in little more than a rowboat to escape their notice. But they gather; the Baron of Argaut had an impressive fleet of shipping vessels, which he maintained by being in league with a far-flung band of pirate ships.” He stopped, brought to silence by the look of horror on Rhapsody’s face. “So if in fact the one you called Michael, the Wind of Death, brought any of those scales with him to the shores of this land, and if they survived the wave that took him from the upworld and into the depths of the sea, and if by some freakish twist of fate they are in the hands of your enemies now, you are fighting not only the greed and lust for power that has been in existence since the dawn of Time in all men, but a far deeper, far more malicious, avaricious, and deadly hatred, a destructive primal power born at the beginning of Time for which there is no antidote, nothing to allay it.
“And if this is so, I would say you have your work cut out for you.”
39
Trug was the Archon known as the Voice.
The Bolg were an emergent race, demi-humans that were both primitive and instinctually resilient. In the time that Achmed had been king, they had gone from being scavengers and cannibals who scratched out whatever meager living they could from the rocky and jagged peaks that were their home to an up-and-coming nation of weapons builders, agriculturalists, carpenters, craftsmen, and weavers of tensile nautical ropes and fine women’s undergarments. It was a strange and comical medley of trade that sensibly exploited the resources of their kingdom of mountains, canyons, and forests of unique bluish wood and ancient vineyards planted in the Cymrian era that had been revitalized into producing fine grapes for wine. Achmed’s vision required more of a support network of leadership than could be provided by just him and Grunthor alone, especially now that Rhapsody had moved on, claiming a protective responsibility for the Bolg as well as for the sleeping Earthchild, but spending the majority of her time tending to the needs of the Lirin kingdom and her duties as the Lady Cymrian. To that end the Three had selected Bolg children who had been identified as especially intelligent or gifted, most of them orphans, to train in specified areas that would assist in the growing of the kingdom.