Prophecy, Child of Earth (26 page)

"Because you vowed not to love again until the end of the world?"

'Yes."

'Well, guess what, Rhapsody? Your world did end; it's been gone more than a thousand years. You're free of him, and any promises to him."

Tears welled up in Rhapsody's eyes for more reasons than she could count.

Ashe reached out and took her hands comfortingly, anticipating her allowing the tears to fall. But, as required, she choked them back, struggling with intense effort against giving herself over to her sorrow and the relief that his words had stirred inside her. Ashe stared at the contortions of her face in its battle against the tears, and he reached up to touch the corner of her eye, only to be pushed away.

'Don't," she whispered. She looked away. "I'll be all right in a moment."

'You don't have to be," Ashe said gently. "It's all right, Rhapsody; you can let it down now. You're safe here. Have a good cry. You look like you need one desperately."

'I can't," she said quietly. "I'm not allowed to."

'Allowed by whom?"

'Achmed. He forbade it."

Ashe laughed unpleasantly. "You're joking." She shook her head. "You're not joking? What a lovely person he is. Look, Rhapsody, crying is not a sign of weakness."

'I know," she said, blinking to drive the moisture from her eyes. "It's annoying."

'Annoying to Achmed? Tempest take him, he's not here. If you need to cry, cry.

It will not annoy me in the least."

Rhapsody smiled. "Thank you, but I don't need to. I'm fine."

Ashe shook his head. "No, you're not. I'm a minor expert on salt water, be it sea water or tears; an effect of the sword, you know. I can assure you that the body and the soul both need the cleansing that comes with tears. The blood is far cleaner and healthier afterward. I would think Achmed would know that if anyone would."

Rhapsody's eyes narrowed slightly at the comment, and Ashe hurried on. "If you have been withholding the natural action of weeping all these centuries, given the amount of grief you have undoubtedly experienced in that time, you are not just doing yourself a disservice, you are doing yourself harm. Please, Rhapsody, I can hold you if it would help."

Her eyes went to the monstrous wound beneath his shirt, and she flinched at the memory of the pain she had inadvertently caused him with the embrace she had given him in the forest. "No, thank you. I appreciate the offer, however."

'Or I could leave for a while, take a walk, if you like."

'No, thank you," she repeated, firmly this time. "I really am fine, and you don't need to be soaked to the skin. What you could do for me is to pass me the lute Elynsynos gave me. Would you like to hear it?"

Ashe rose and went to the closet where she had stored her gear. "I would love to. Are you sure you—"

'Yes," Rhapsody said, taking the instrument when he held it out to her. "What would you like to hear?"

He sighed, and decided to let the matter drop. "Do you know any songs of the sea from the old world?"

'A few," she said, smiling, thinking of Elynsynos. "Some of my family were seafarers too A minarello really is a better instrument for that, but I'll do the best I can." She tuned the lute and began to play. The strings were am but the dragon's magic had held them in perfect condition, and'tmellowed since its carving into a sweet, rich sound that resonated in the i

Ashe stretched out on the bed, listening to her play, enraptured. She no idea of the depth of his feelings, even without the protection his f; longer had from his hood. He let the music creep into his head and win way through his heart, soothing the constantly throbbing pain a b the headache that had been brewing since the discussion of Achmed. was so beautiful, airy and ethereal, like the singing of the wind, and him drowsy. He would have given the remainder of his soul at that if she would only stay for a few more days, singing to him alone, opei heart she said she didn't have.

After a few sea chanteys she stopped singing and let the music ( through the lute alone, a haunting melody that made him feel immensely * He felt on the verge of tears himself when a discordant note rang out, ja him out of his reverie.

Rhapsody blinked, then played the passage continuing on until the next wrong note. Then she stopped altoget)

Ashe sat up and looked across the room at her. She was asleep in tl her fingers still on the lute strings. He thought about carrying her to tl but the scene at the Tar'afel rose quickly up in his mind, and he discarded'tthought immediately.

Instead he got up and slid the lute out of her hands, setting it on the table, and then covered her with one of the blankets. S sighed in her sleep and turned over on her side in the chair.

Ashe looked at the black velvet ribbon. He longed to unbind her hair, b decided that would be intrusive as well. So he put another log on the f burning quietly and steadily, then went back to the chair where Rhapsody He stared down at her for a long while, enjoying the picture of her, asleep i the firelight. After almost an hour he felt exhaustion overtake him. 1 her a soft kiss on the head and slipped in between the covers of the 1 knowing it would not be long before she woke in the night, sobbing u

When she did, he went to her in the dark and whispered words of comfort until she grew quiet again. The pounding storm had given way to a steady, insistent rain.

Reluctantly he returned to bed and left her to her i dreams.

he rain continued, unabated, for most of the following day. By the time it began to let up the sun had gone down again, leaving the darkness silent except for the dripping of water from the leaves onto the pool and 1 relentlessness of the downpour had left Rhapsody strangely tired, so they stavec one more night in the hut to allow the ground the opportunity to dry out somewhat.

They had passed the day in pleasant enough conversation, mostly in regard to plants and trees, wars that Ashe had fought in, tales of the subdual of the Firbolg, and things he had heard from companions about training with Oelen-dra. A formidable warrior and a legendary hero, she had a reputation as a stern and humorless teacher, an occasionally brutal taskmaster, but was regarded as the best in sword instruction, he had said. He himself had not trained with her, had only met her once and they had not spoken.

Rhapsody was beginning to feel a creeping sadness that she could not fully place taking root in her soul. She felt it each time Ashe smiled at her, or passed in front of her, so she knew it had something to do with him, but why her heart tugged at her she did not know.

That she had grown somewhat fond of him was no secret, either to her, or, she assumed, to him; they were at a comfortable place. He reminded her a great deal of her brother Robin, the second oldest, of whom she had also been very fond but with whom she was not particularly close. She did not understand Robin, nor did she understand Ashe. Perhaps one day she would, but the comparison to Robin made the sadness deepen. She had run away from home just as they were finally getting to know one another, much the way she and Ashe were parting now. She never saw Robin again. She wondered if it would be that way with Ashe as well.

He had been kind to her, for the most part, and had done a great deal for her, extending himself more than any other had in this new land. Unfortunately, she knew there was something beneath the surface of his generosity, something calculating that pressed for personal information but refused to share any, that sought her trust but did not offer his own. He was using her in some way, she knew. She just hoped that it would not be fatal, or worse.

They stayed in the hut that night, waiting for the rain to clear and the night wind to dry the ground. He had insisted that she take the bed, and, upon finding resistance futile, she thanked him and slipped into it, tired suddenly from the lack of the exercise she was accustomed to and the prospect of what was to come.

Her dreams were haunted by images of demons and destruction, of a blind Seer with no irises in her eyes that reflected the image of her own face. She felt a chilling cold, a cold that reached down into her blood and drank it, like the root of a poisonous willow, stripping her of her heat and her music, leaving her without a voice with which to even cry out for help. She woke gasping in Ashe's arms and clung to him, holding on as if he were the only person in the world who could hear her now that her music was gone.

He stretched out beside her on the bed, staying on top of the covers, and held her until she stopped trembling. It took more than an hour, but eventually she quieted and slept dreamlessly. When he was sure she was truly asleep he wistfully removed her arm from his waist; she had placed it there to avoid the wound, he knew. With great difficulty he stood up and looked down at her, curled around the hay pillow like a dragonling around its treasure; perhaps her visit to Elynsynos had left some residual effect. He stood over her a long while, at last returning to his chair, wondering if anything in his life had been as difficult as leaving her in that bed alone.

C,'he passageway down which the Grandmother led them opened up into a vast vertically cylindrical cavern almost the size of Canrif City that stretched out of sight above and below them. Circular ledges ran around the interior perimeter of the cavern, forming stone rings the size of wide streets. The rings encircled the inside of the cavern at various heights above and below the ledge on which they stood, punctuated with hundreds of dark openings that appeared to be tunnels like the one they had come down. There was something about the cavern's size and shape that vaguely reminded Achmed of the tunnels that sheathed the Root of Sagia that ran along the Axis Mundi, the centerline of the Earth. It reached up into the darkness, a mute memorial to the civilization that had once pulsed through its tunnels.

A crumbling stone bridge stretched out before them across the enormous open space of the cavern. In the center of the great cylindrical space stood a giant rock formation that resembled a pedestal; its flat surface was roughly the size of the Great Hall in Ylorc. The drop on either side of the bridge caused Grunthor to shudder involuntarily. From the depths of the colossal cave a dank wind rose, stale and heavy with the odor of wet earth and desolation.

The Grandmother said nothing, but stepped out onto the bridge and crossed, never looking down into the giant circular ravine that it spanned. The dead wind rippled her dark robe, causing it to snap ominously. The two Firbolg followed her across the ravine toward the great flat formation in the center of the vertical tunnel.

As they came closer to the central rock formation they could see something suspended above it from an immensely long strand of what appeared to be spidersilk, anchored to the ceiling above out of sight. The object at the thread's terminus swung slowly back and forth across the rock plateau in a measured gait, like the slow rippling of lake tides or a sleeper's heartbeat. It glinted in the dark.

Once they stepped onto the flat surface the wind from the belly of the cavern increased; the sound of it was as heavy as the dust that hung thickly on its currents.

Involuntarily Achmed drew his veils about his face; there was something within the gusts and eddies of that lifeless wind that whispered of death. The Grandmother pointed to the floor on which they stood.

Carved into the canter of the stone floor was a circle of runes in the same language that formed the words over the arch of the Earth Child's chamber. Within the circle was a large faded inlay, once beautifully rendered in exquisite detail, now stained with soot and marred by time. The symbols on the floor depicted the four winds, the hours of the day, and the seasons. Achmed closed his eyes, remembering his upbringing in a monastery in the foothills of the High Reaches of Serendair. Those symbols had been carved into the floor there as well.

He looked up to the long thread and its slowly moving weight and recognized the device as a pendulum clock; the swinging weight was silently marking the moments, the hours, the seasons of a long-dead realm, each pass of the pendulum counting another fragment of endlessly passing time. "This is where the Thrall ritual was taught, where training took place, where dedications were consecrated,"

the Grandmother said. The multiple voices had reduced to one, the thin hiss with which she had been addressing Achmed. Apparently she determined it was not necessary to impart the information to Grunthor. "In the old days, this was a place of much traffic, great noise and distraction, of myriad vibrations to sort through. It made for a good environment in which to teach the discerning of the right heartbeat, the exclusion of the world's other sounds in the hunt for the F'dor."

Achmed nodded.

The Grandmother dark eyes ran over the giant Sergeant-Major. When she spoke again her voice was duotoned as it had been before. "Once these mountains housed our great cities, our council chambers. The tunnels were the veins of the Colony through which its lifeblood flowed. We were that lifeblood, the
Zhereditck;
the Brethren. This place was our Colony's heart."

'How did the fire start?" Achmed asked.

'There was no fire."

The two Bolg stared at the Grandmother, then looked at each other. Grun-thor's vision had been frighteningly clear, and the hallmarks of smoke and soot lingered still, the odor of smelting fumes still hanging, rancid, in the air around them.

The Grandmother's face remained unchanged, but her eyes glittered as if in amusement. "There was no fire," she repeated, looking pointedly at Achmed. "You are Dhracian, but you are not
Zhereditck
, not Brethren. You were never part of a Colony."

'No." Bile rose in Achmed's throat. The Past was entombed in his memory; he had no desire to exhume it. He steeled himself for more probing about his history, but the Grandmother merely nodded.

'None of the Brethren would have used fire, even in the smallest of ways. Fire is the element of our enemy. There was sufficient heat in the pools from the wellspring." The spoken vibrations against their skin caused an image in the minds of the two men of sulfurous ponds and hot springs bubbling in muted hues of green and lavender, of pockets of steam rising from streams that ran off from the ground beneath the Loritorium on the other side of the wall of rock. It was the same source as the darklight, the underground glow that illuminated the cavernous passageways with an mute ambient radiance. It had been the same in the tunnel along the Root.