The Assassin King (7 page)

the Patriarch continued gravely. “Each day the man would come to the abbey with two acolytes, climb the courtyard stairs, and pose a single question. Then he left, returning at the same time the next day.” “Did the abbess conveniently overhear the question?” Achmed asked. “After a few of the daily visits, she made it a point to be working in the outer garden beneath Rhonwyn's tower at the time the clergy arrived,” said Constantin. “She tells me that the same question was asked on two occasions—the last two days before the Seer disappeared.” “And what was it?” Anborn demanded. The Patriarch glanced at Rhapsody.

“The question the priest asked was this—'Where is the Child of Time?' On the two occasions that she overheard, the Seer was silent, then said only that there was no Child of Time. It would seem that on the last day the priest received a different answer. By my estimate, that would have been on Yule, the Turmng Day of the new year.” His voice became softer. “When was your son born, m'lady?” The Lady Cymrian's face went white; Achmed and Ashe exchanged a glance. “New Year's Day,” Ashe said finally, “as the night passed from one day to the next, from one year to the next. But why was a priest of Sorbold seeking this child—our child, if he be this so-called Child of Time?” “Because his emperor has been searching for that child ceaselessly,” said the Patriarch darkly. “I have heard it in his prayers, and in those of the remaining priests of Sorbold.” He eyed Gwydion Navarne, the only adherent of his religion in the council. “In our faith, unlike that of the Filidic order of Gwynwood, prayers are not offered directly to the Creator, but through channels, to the pastor of each congregant's local temple, who offers up those prayers and the others of the locality to central abbots, who pass them along to the benison of their area, who present them, in prayer, to me. I offer them to the All-God in supplication through the great spire of Lianta'ar. At each step the worship becomes more powerful, more pure, because it is joined by so many other offerings of praise and thanksgiving. I do not normally discern what is being asked for—it is only my responsibility to add my own entreaties for the All-God's grace and make the offering. ”But, as I told you, Nielash Mousa, the benison of Sorbold, is dead, or dying. And Talquist has killed many of the order, especially those who lived within the manse at Jierna Tal.“ ”Why?“ Ashe asked incredulously. Constantin's brow blackened. ”We'll get to that in a moment," he said darkly.

“As a result of this carnage, the prayers of the faithful in Sorbold are now scattered, misdirected. So they come to me directly, and as a result I hear them—and it distracts me from my station. Of late I have heard the same entreaty made over and over to the All-God on behalf of the emperor—and that is to find the Child of Time.” “Again, I ask you, why?” Ashe said, his tone darker. The air grew noticeably drier as the dragon in his blood grew more agitated. The elderly cleric returned his stare, then sighed, his lined face showing his age for a moment. “If you are asking me for Talquist's reason, I cannot give you an answer. I hear his prayers, but I cannot see into his heart, black and twisted as I know it to be. But I can surmise a possible motivation—though I pray to the All-God I am wrong.” “Tell us,” Anborn commanded impatiently, but Ashe held up a hand to his uncle. He had seen the clouds form in the Patriarch's searing blue eyes, and knew whatever realm he was looking back into was a terrifying one. He glanced at Rhapsody, who was as white as the blanket she cradled.

“Please, Your Grace,” he said quietly. “Explain, in whatever way you need to do so.”

Constantin remained silent; as he waited in thought, it seemed to Gwydion that the last of the moving air in the room was inhaled and gone. When finally he spoke, his words were soft.

“Over time there have been those who can see beyond the realm of sight, beyond the places where the eye has dominion,” he said. “Sometimes that special sight is due to a gift granted at birth, or because of a special heritage. It is an ability that can, under extraordinarily rare circumstances, be learned, if taught by one of great knowledge. Or sometimes it is not an ability to see, but rather the opportunity to transcend the limits of normal sight with an instrumentality that has the power to do so. I do not know which of these methods Talquist might have made use of, but I suspect he has done so, at least once, probably more often. And the place I believe he may have gained an unwarranted glimpse into is that place between the doors of life and death, the Veil of Hoen, of which we were speaking a moment ago. ”The Veil of Hoen, for those of you who have not ventured there, is a place of dreams, the realm of the Lord and Lady Rowan. The Lady is the Keeper of Dreams, the Guardian of Sleep, Yl Breudiwyr. The Lord is the Hand of Mortality, the Peaceful Death, Yl Angaulor. In that place of transition there are many things that are not known in this, the material world. One of those entities is known as the Weaver. Do you know of this being?“ ”You mentioned this once to me before, but it is not an entity I have any knowledge of outside of your words," said Ashe.

“The Weaver is one of the manifestations of the element of Time,” the Patriarch said seriously. "Those who know the lore of the Gifts of the Creator generally only count five, the worldly elements, fire, water, air, earth, and ether. But there are other elements that exist outside the world. One of them is the element of Time, and Time in pure form manifests itself in many ways. The World Trees—Sagia, the Great White Tree, and the three others that grow at the birthplaces of the elements—are manifestations of Time. As is the Weaver.

“The Weaver appears as a woman, or so it seems, though you can never recall what her face looks like after you see her, no matter how much you study it at the time. She sits in that drowsy, timeless place, before a vast loom, on which the story of Time is woven in colored threads, in patterns, the warp, the weft, the lee. ”The Weaver is the manifestation of Time in history,“ he continued. ”She does not intervene in the course of events, merely records them for posterity. It is a fascinating tapestry that she plaits, intricate in its connectivity. All things, all beings, are threads in the fabric; it is their interconnectivity that weaves what we know as life. Without those ties that the threads have to one another, there is merely void; absence of life.“ Ashe nodded. ”When you told me of this before, you said that in those ties, there is power—that those ties bind soul to soul, on Earth and in the Afterlife. It is the connection that is made in this life that allows one soul to find another in the next. This is the means by which love lasts throughout Time." His hand covered Rhapsody's, and they exchanged a glance that brought smiles to their faces, in spite of the coming threat.

“I did,” said the Patriarch. “But what I did not tell you was what I noticed in the tapestry she was weaving. In this massive record of history there are millions of threads, woven together into the perfect depiction of the tale of Time. ”In one place, however, there is a flaw—a discrepancy that in a tapestry on this side of the Veil would scarcely be noticed, if it was seen at all, an imperfection in thread or technique. But an imperfection in history that has already occurred should not be possible in the Weaver's tapestry; it is only a record of what has gone before, without variability or equivocation. It is almost as if the threads of Time had been taken apart and rewoven there—as if Time itself had been altered in this one place in the Past." The only sound for a long moment was the crackling of the lantern flame.

“Time—rewoven?” Ashe asked at last. “How can that be? I thought you said the Weaver does not interdict in history, but just records it.” “Aye,” said the Patriarch. “And as far as I know, she does not. But the split threads, the imperfections in history, appear only once in all of the tapestry, at least from what I could see—and it seems to have happened in the Third Age of history, at the very beginning of the Seren War—centuries before Gwylliam's coronation, or the Cymrian exodus from Serendair.” Gwydion saw the blood leave the faces around the room, most especially that of his guardians. “Be there any clues as to how Time was altered?”

Rial asked. Constantin shook his head. “Only a prophecy woven into the threads above the flaw, a riddle of sorts that seemed to precede whatever event would have left history marred.” “Do you remember it?” Anborn asked tersely. “Indeed,” replied the Patriarch. "It was a primary object of my studies while I was beyond the Veil, but I never was able to connect it

to anything else in history. It appears to be the last prophecy uttered in pure Time, before whatever change occurred took place.“ ”Tell us, man, and be quick about it!“ Anborn ordered harshly. The Patriarch shot him a look of displeasure, then turned to the Lady Cymrian, whose face was now pale as milk. ”I speak these words to you as a Lirin Namer, m'lady, in the fervent hope that you might be able to decipher them,“ he said softly, ”To my knowledge they have never been uttered in this world, as they took place in Time before it was changed." He cleared his throat and intoned the words carefully.

"THE PROPHECY OF THE CHILD OF TIME:

Brought forth in blood from fire and air

Sired of earth

A child of two worlds

Born free of the bonds of Time.

Eyes will watch him from upon the earth and within it

And the earth itself will burn beneath him

To the song of screams and the wails of the dying

He shall undo the inevitable

And in so doing

Even he himself shall be undone.

This unnatural child born of an unnatural act

The mother shall die, but the child shall live

Until all that has gone before is wiped away

Like a tear from the eye of Time."

Rhapsody's back went rigid. Her shoulders stiffened and her arms began to shake. Then she looked down at the sleeping child in her arms. Her lips, until that moment firmly pressed together, responding to neither taunt nor tenderness, fell open as the words spilled out of her mouth. “Dear One-God,” she whispered.

At the border of the Hintervold and Canderre

The wyrm paused at the bitter river, silver with glacial ice, that separated the southeastern edge of her lands from the northern tip of Roland. Her body was trembling from exhaustion and the cold that clung to the Hintervold long into spring. She had fought to drag herself this far, had battled the wind, the loss of blood, and the confusion that continually took her mind whenever she tried to concentrate for more than a few moments on anything other than the woman she wanted to kill. It seemed to her, poised on the brink of the flowing glacial melt, that she was losing the battle. The river, for all its rushing rapids, was shallow, the dragon knew. The inner sense that she had been gifted with from birth had allowed her the same ability to assess the world around her in intimate detail that all wyrms possessed, even when she had been in human form, though she did not remember that time. Apparent to her in minute specificity was the temperature of the rumbling water—a hairsbreadth above that of solid ice—the speed at which it was traveling—two and a quarter times as fast as an unsaddled stallion could run—the number of fingerling cetrinfish that slept in the mud of the riverbed— seven hundred thirty-six thousand four hundred eighty-eight—and myriad other pieces of information about the height of the clouds above her, the degree of snowmelt on the riverbank, its width, the trees that surrounded it, all the elements of life that were taking place around her. The number of facts to process was clouding her mind. The dragon struggled to clear it, focusing all her attention on the river. The form she had been trapped in, seemingly for the rest of her life, was a cold-blooded one, and so exposure to a great degree of cold might serve to slow her heart to the point of death, she knew. Conversely, the hated thing that was expanding within her, tearing her flesh, causing her agony, was growing from the heat that her body generated, the firegems within her stomach that allowed her to vent her anger in caustic flame were feeding the steel, allowing it to grow. Anwyn quickly calculated that the river's chill might make it stop, though she knew that the three-chambered heart that beat within her serpentine chest might choose to follow suit. She decided she had no choice but to take the plunge. Steeling herself as she had against the pain of her wound, the beast slowly slid into the frigid waters. Her gnarled feet slipped almost immediately against the slimy rocks at the bottom of the riverbed, causing her bleeding chest to slap the crest of the rapids. The wyrm gasped from the shock, struggling to keep from falling, face first, into the river and being swept away by it. There was something both old and young in the translucent water, the knowledge that it was simultaneously forty thousand years and forty minutes old at the same time, having been glacial ice less than an hour before. In spite of the pain and cold, the beast liked the sense of Past that raced along with the current, like time slipping over her the way water runs down a hole in the ground, returning to where it belongs. / will live, she thought angrily to herself. No matter how much they seek to destroy me, I will always prevail, because my hatred is stronger. The wyrm came to a stop midstream; the water was barely up to the joints in her legs. Once she adjusted to the temperature, she found that the dissolved solids speeding along around her gave her a sense of strength, a tie to the Past, a prehistoric time that only she could see. Even without the spyglass it was coming into focus, a land, far off, of dry desert sands and healing springs, of rocks for basking beneath the moon and temples that lay buried in two millennia of clay beneath the skittering wind. Kurimah Milani, she thought. It was a place lost to the desert long before her birth, a land that had been beyond Elynsynos's dominion, and thereby she knew almost nothing of it, save for its reputation as a place of almost divine healing that had been swallowed in sand and howling wind five hundred years before her father had set foot on the soil of the Wyrmlands. A place of the past, truly, she mused, struggling for purchase, finally abandoning the struggle and allowing her feet to sink into the muddy earth below the riverbed. As I am a thing of the Past, perhaps it will welcome me. The dragon, her feet anchored in the frozen silt of the riverbed, slowly began to make her way east, fighting the current each step of the way.