Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Rhapsody closed her eyes. She was tied to the call, and her mind followed it as it spread through the earth and the air, ringing across the Orlandan Plateau and into the hilly steppes and deserts of Sorbold. It sang through the current of the Tar’afel and into the forests of Gwynwood and Tyrian, washing over the sea and crashing with the ocean waves on the shores of Manosse, a thousand leagues away.

It spread like the touch of the king, back toward every soul that had made promise on that horn in the old land, before terrible voyages, before wandering in the wilderness, before the new empire, before death and war. The great horn sounded only at first on its own glory in the air; then it seemed to fade, as any blast will. But Rhapsody was carried at the beginning of its wave, and she heard it take new shapes, possess what the ancient magic must have deemed its own.

It moved from hand to hand in the spark of coins, in the drum of ax against tree, in the mule driver’s call and snap of the whip. It rumbled through messengers’ hoofbeats and whispered in hunters’ arrows. It inhabited the creak of saddle and mast and axle, the grunt of livestock, the wheedle of merchants, the ring of smithies and whistle of sails, and carried the call of the builder king back to each drop of blood sworn in fealty to his exodus and venture more than a thousand years before. The call rolled and flew, reached over the entire conquered continent to drag and beckon fulfillment of the oath.

Every brick laid in his service, every nail driven, every artifact and monument echoed and hummed the call, so that when night fell, the imperative silence would make everything still, wolves, water, wind. The summons of Gwylliam’s horn drove away the exhaustion of age-frozen survivors of those early voyages. Tired eyes suddenly shone their way out of dementia; breath of purpose entered the breasts of resigned patriarchs; ancient, stiffened fingers flexed for the feel of ancient swords.

Those who had made the vow originally felt rather than heard it, the king’s presence. They stood first, interrupted their meals, their counsels, their baths. As if his scent and genius had entered, the sensation passed from father to son like a gesture, in a moment of silence to recall, reclaim the lost memory. It took the huge quietude to determine that they had been called to a pilgrimage.

Those who had no blood ties to the Cymrians were at a loss, wondering what had transpired to make the Earth, for one brief moment, stop in its path…

While Rhapsody’s vision traveled at the front of the wave of sound, singing from goat bells, rasping in the purl of hoe pulling earth, Achmed was being driven mad feeling the air reconstructed around him. The thready curtains of wind he routinely saw and passed through thickened into ethereal kelp, entangling, pulling, adhering, leaving him short of breath, swimming where he should have been walking. The sound was not just a ripple, but a palpability, drawing in, as if the Moot had become a huge maw, a wyrm anglerfish draw ing every particle in. Rhapsody was the luminescent center, the bait, and he reeled, unsteady, plankton-sized and drifting beneath the call of the Great Seal that reached perhaps beyond where the daylight touched.

Grunthor too felt rather than heard the sound, but he did not react to the airborne pulse of the call. He followed the echo through the earth. Like a tremor clawing its way from a wrenching fault, it crawled and twisted across the plains, a concentric serpent buried and on fire. It raged and pounded, blaring through the mountain behind them, stentorian and shrieking, as if every voice, every utterance had been peeled from the cave walls and released into the air again, but still with nowhere to go.

Rhapsody looked lost and distant; Achmed crouched, leaning against the stone of the platform, and Grunthor stood with his palms over his ears, his eyes shut tight, when the silence arrived. As disturbing and insistent as the shout of the horn had been, its wait for response pinched harder. It turned Achmed’s vision of water to ice.

Across the sea at the farthest twilight soundrise of the call, Rhapsody felt the few hundreds of remaining Cymrians who had actually laid hands and oaths on the Great Seal stop breathing, stop living, as though they had been moving into the everyday futures of their lives when an invisible leash from their past had pulled them up short. Some few actually perished, from fear, or relief. The rest took up breathing again, but the conversations that had been interrupted would never resume. Each of the First Generation turned as a body to acknowledge the call and their debt. In a thousand years, this was only the second time they had heard it.

Those original Cymrians received the call first, but sons listening to fathers, daughters tending to mothers, felt their answer to the elders’ moment of pause only momentarily later, in the time of a short intake of breath. Each of fifty generations felt it in their turn, as insistent as the need to slake thirst, satisfy hunger, make water, sleep, or yield to death. The straighter, purer family lines tasted the journey to come, moved in unison to prepare, and knew what might lie at the end. Some had even been told that the call might come, of how it had come to terror and ruin before, but how they were destined to answer it regardless, since what they had been offered for the ancient pledge was the only chance at life.

Bastard lines, deeply mixed genealogies, individuals with no lore and less concern about their heritage were compelled no less deeply. The first embers in the blood itched and scored vessel walls, struck like cloud-soft lightning, chewed delay and resolve so that a matter of hours or days perhaps stood between the unknowing descendant and his journey. All across the continent, men, women and children began the pilgrimage, thralls to a dead tyrant.

The youngest of all the Cymrian lines heard the call last. Being short-lived, most of them were a full fifty generations removed, but they possessed two advantages. The first was culture; nomads and scavengers by nature, they felt little resistance to the impulse to follow the call. The second was proximity; they already inhabited the catacombs beneath the Teeth.

Cymrian heritage was the dire and wonderful secret of the Finders. They had descended from those captured by the Bolg in the last days of Gwylliam’s reign, their longevity, their blue eyes all historic traces of the blood of the unfortunate victims who could not get out of Canrif in time when the Bolg overran the mountain.

Deep within the tunnels near the Hand, or at the forges, the hospice, the caves in which they dwelt, the Finders felt the call like silver lightning shock through their bones. To a one the bastard children of the Cymrian line put away tools or food, turned away from tasks, and headed out into the sunlight of the foothills, blind fish, squinting and shading their eyes.

Hours after she had sounded the clarion, had opened the Great Seal, Rhapsody was still in the trance of following the call. Achmed had recovered his breath and bearings. He was free from the pull of the horn, but sensitive enough to its power that the vacuum it created to summon and guide the Cymrians made his ears pop.

Grunthor had been surprised by the volume and breadth of the instrument, but felt little disturbance until the summoned Cymrians began to answer. So deep was the debt, so overweening the oath, that even the faithful dead wished to comply. All around him, across and within the plain, throughout the mountain, scratched the hum and shiver of bones shifting in the earth. In the tremendous, immobile, windless hush, the giant’s sense of the earth around him stretched like the view of a vast silent sea, where a single fin stands like a mast above the surface. Grunthor’s awareness was teeming, crawling with myriad tiny ripples of the scrape of marrowless bones against the rags of their death shrouds and interments in mass graves, or picked driftwood-clean under dustings of sand and sod. For the first time he understood the scope of the slaughter that had ensured the Cymrian legacy. As his sense gave way to his real vision of stillness over the earth, resurrection seemingly beyond the power of this artifact, he did catch some movement on the crags out of the corner of his eye. He stared east into the blinding morning light.