Elizabeth Heydon - Elegy for a Lost Star

And in the heat of the skirmish, as one by one she cornered the hunters and slaughtered them, the beast laughed aloud with delight, a harsh, ugly sound that rang with soulless malice. Destruction eases the pain , she thought as she seized the last of them, crushing him slowly, taking pleasure watching the life being squeezed from him inch by inch, while the dogs, who had ceased to bark, whined in terror. And I have so much pain to ease .

Then the feast began.

It was deep in the night of the Bolg king’s return when Trug was summoned.

He felt as if he had been called to rise even before he had finished exhaling his first breath of sleep, yet he did not complain. Complaints were useless, and something about the quiet nervousness of the guard who had come for him told him he was being observed. Trug rose silently and dressed quickly in the manner of all of Achmed’s Archons. He had experienced many such midnight summonses in the seven years of his schooling.

He followed the guard past his training ring, noticing by smell that the two horses he had quartered there for the night had been taken, and replaced with two others of similar size and markings. His brows knit together in puzzlement; such a test of his notice had been undertaken less than a year into his training, when it might still have been possible that he did not yet know every one of the three hundred fifty head that he was responsible for stabling. But that trick had not even worked at the time; why anyone was attempting it now was perplexing to him.

Trug, like most of his race, did not give voice to his inner thoughts but rarely, and so he kept his silence as he walked behind the guard. He listened for signs of conversation or movement, but heard nothing except his own breath and the footsteps of the man leading him out of the mountain tunnels.

Unlike most of his fellow subjects, it was part of Trug’s training to be able to speak; what he was speaking, however, were the thoughts of the Bolg king, both within the mountain and outside it. It was his path to be trained as the Voice, the Archon that King Achmed expected to handle all of the communications, both official and secret, on behalf of the Bolglands, including the management of the miles of speaking tubes that ran throughout the mountains, left over from the Cymrian Age. In that capacity he had been trained from childhood for the last seven years, selected at an early age by Rhapsody as having the potential for the task at hand, and systematically familiarized with language, cryptography, anatomy, and a thousand other studies of communications, verbal and otherwise. A year ago he had been deemed worthy to supervise the aviary, with its extensive fleet of messenger birds, as well as the mounted messengers who rode with the mail caravans. Eventually it was planned for him to assume responsibility for King Achmed’s network of ambassadors as well as his spies.

But even though he would one day be the master of all the communications within Ylorc and from the Teeth to the outside world, Trug had not been told why he was being summoned. Nor did he expect to be.

An hour’s walk, up out of the mountain to a small softened peak, like a cavity in the Teeth, brought him to a listening post, a way station in the system where the Eyes, Achmed’s elite spies, made daily reports on what they had observed in the mountain passes. The guard stopped inside the hollow peak, lit and hung a lamp, and motioned for him to take a seat at the table that became visible in the light.

On the table was a tube made of bone, sealed with the king’s imprimatur. Trug said nothing, but beads of sweat broke out on his dusky forehead. The guard motioned to the tube, then stepped away from the wind cave.

Trug stared at the tube for a moment, knowing that what it contained would mark a turning point in his destiny. He, as well as all his fellow students, had long been told about the eventual arrival of this sealed message, and he knew what it foretold. It would hold either the order of his banishment, as it had for at least one other Archon-in-training, or his elevation to full status, along with all the others. Either way, at least one part of his life would end that night.

With clammy hands he broke the seal and opened the tube.

He stared at the page, trying to absorb its import. It contained nothing more than the imprint of a hand.

Trug stood up, held the edge of the parchment in the flame of the lamp until it ignited, waited for it to burn completely, then cast the ashes into the wind atop the hollow mountain peak.

When the very last black cinder had caught the updraft and was carried away, Trug doused the lantern and hurried down the mountainside, making his way in the darkness for a passageway into the depths he knew all too well.

Deep within the mountain, at the convocation of five tunnels known as the Hand, they gathered, each summoned in the same manner.

Upon arriving, the Archons nodded to one another but did not speak. It was not only customary to remain silent until the king or his representative spoke, it was mandatory. Achmed wanted to be certain that when his Archons were called to assemble, the words that their ears heard were as pure and unpolluted by secondary noise as possible.

The future Archons were, in a way, Achmed’s children, though none of them had ever seen his face. Taken from their clans when he first became king, as hostages some thought, they had been kept apart as a new clan, with the Bolg king and Grunthor, and Rhapsody for a time, as masters and parents, along with such tutors and models as he could hire and trick and persuade from the outside. Grunthor was known as the Chief Archon, lending a credit to the title that instantly made it coveted.

They were raised as Achmed had been raised, in study and to an unrevealed purpose, given knowledge as a religion, fed, threatened, and cajoled into the belief that they must grow into their potential or their people would be doomed.

None of them had seen more than eighteen summers.

They came from an assortment of tribes that before Achmed’s arrival had roamed the Teeth, preying on each other and whatever unfortunate creatures, human or otherwise, they could catch. Some were the spawn of the Claw clans, the warlike marauders that had lived in the borderlands, the lower foothills and rocky steppes that abutted the human realm of Roland. Others had been culled from the Guts clans, those living deeper in the realm of what they called Ylorc, past the guardian ridge of the Teeth into the deep forest glades and decimated cities that had once been the inner lands of the Cymrian stronghold. Possibly the most valuable of them had come from the Eyes, those demi-humans most adapted to thinner air, who crawled the ledges and peaks of the Teeth, watching the world from above, wrapped in clouds.

And some had come from the Finders. The Finders were not a clan in and of themselves, but rather were the descendants of those unfortunate Cymrians who had remained or been left behind a thousand years before when the Bolg overran Canrif. Their blood still contained some of the odd, magical elements of longevity and elemental power that their unknown and hapless ancestors had bequeathed them, but until Achmed came, they had no idea how to put that power to use.

Achmed saw them regularly but rarely, coming in to test them and redirect them. They were uncertain about his motives, as if it were not clear to this small grove whether the forester measured them in anticipation of cutting, or to be confident they could bear his weight on a climb to the clouds. There were ten of them that remained in this, the fifth year of training; some of the original children sent to him had been redirected to other lessons, one had perished, one had been banished. Those who had been released no longer studied the history of the Cymrians and of Roland, world geography and currency, and were no longer subject to the rigors of the king’s direct attention.