Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

The sweet scent of Rhapsody’s skin, the joy that permeated him in having her finally back in his arms, was perhaps responsible for the obscurement of his senses, the happy haze the shielded him from the growing rumble within the earth, counterbalanced by the eerie silence that had swept over the crowd and swallowed the cheering.

By the time he realized what was happening it was too late.

The first to feel the change was Grunthor.

Like the sensation that occurred within the ear while climbing a high mountain, the pressure in his head expanded, then popped as the earth beneath his feet turned ill.

Achmed looked to his friend questioningly. There was no mistaking the change that had come over the Sergeant-Major; the amber eyes were wide and growing glassy; his bruise-colored skin was flushing, his enormous nostrils flaring as his heart pumped great volumes of blood. He stared off to the west for a moment, and then his muscles coiled as he vaulted off the rim of the Moot and down toward the tentative gathering below.

“Down from the rise!” he roared to Rhapsody, then bolted down the face of Bowl into the crowd of confused Cymrians, who only a moment before had been in the throes of joyous celebration. “Move! Move!” His voice rumbled through the air and over the bewildered populace, frozen in fright as he charged them; then he was shoving them in any direction away from the sloping rise at the center of the Moot which no one but the giant Bolg had felt shaking.

Rhapsody had broken from Gwydion’s embrace at Grunthor’s shout, and turned to look down into the blank faces of the throng of Cymrians. The crowd was quickly parting in Grunthor’s path, scattering out of his way, though the noise of fear had not come forth yet; everything was eerily silent. Her eyes went back to the pulpit, then widened in horror.

“The horn is gone,” she said to Gwydion, then turned and shouted to Achmed. “The horn is gone!”

Achmed nodded, not turning; he at that moment heard an alarm go up from his lookouts and Tristan’s forces on the western face of the Moot. He spun quickly and shielded his eyes from the bright light of noon.

A rider was galloping across the Krevensfield Plain, spurring his horse mercilessly. Even as far away as he was the Bolg king could hear him shouting hoarsely, sounding an alarm. The Orlandan army, encamped now, began rising unsteadily, cautiously gathering arms and armaments, when another shout went up.

“It’s Anborn! Open the gate!”

Behind him the sky was rolling black, clouds of smoke billowing as though a volcano in the sky had erupted. As Anborn approached, the- black smoke roared closer; it had the breadth of a grass fire of continental proportions driving ahead of a purposeful wind, but as it approached it became clear that there was no flame, but rather the earth itself, ripping violently from the wide plain, dust and grit vaulted skyward by the sheer force that disturbed it.

In the shadow of the darkness came an army. For a moment it appeared to be legions of beasts, as much of it did not walk erect, but rather moved across the land as if being dragged by some unseen force. Rhapsody gasped and clutched Gwydion’s arm, recalling the vision from the observatory tower. “It’s the Cymrian dead, the Fallen, slaughtered in the Great War.” Her words came out in a half-whisper. “Anwyn has summoned them from the Past.”

The sea of walking bodies crested the horizon, staining the rim of the world black with their number. The shell of every corpse that had perished on the plain or in the mountain, any body that had not been immolated or otherwise fully consumed, had been reanimated by the sheer force of memory and had crawled or staggered or slid toward the Moot; now they stood, amid a sea of the dead, of decay and disease and human fragments magnetized to Anwyn’s wrath.

From the peaks of the Teeth came a roar like captured thunder moving through the mountains. Avalanches of rock and soil rolled from the crags, starting at Griwen and then rumbling through Canrif and all of the peaks that rimmed the foothills, until the shale began to rain down on the Moot, a pelting hail of sharp dust. From those hillsides rose more soldiers in Anwyn’s force, animated bodies of Nain and Lirin, human and demi-human, adults and children, all the victims of Anwyn and Gwylliam’s great folly, crawling forth from the vaults of the dead to answer the call of the horn as they once had long ago.

Outside the Moot, the army of Roland, one hundred thousand strong, began massing into legions and columns. Rhapsody shuddered at the sight. Where before they had seemed a numerous force, one that by its sheer number threatened to challenge Achmed’s hold on the mountain, now they were suddenly and overwhelmingly dwarfed, outnumbered perhaps a hundred to one, perhaps more. She didn’t have time to count.

From the belly of the Moot a thundering rumble issued forth. The ground bubbled and broke open an instant later, crushing, overwhelming, swallowing Cymrians from every fleet who had been unable to move out of the way. Amid screams of terror more soldiers of the dead crawled forth, from ancient and forgotten mass graves, swords and rotting spears in their hands wrapped in burial cloths or shroud-rags. Their sightless eyes turned to the scattering masses that fled before them like crows before a storm.

Grunthor and a small band he had conscripted and armed from his personal arsenal had managed to interpose themselves between the crush of fleeing pilgrims and the grisly approach of what seemed thousands of the disinterred. He was simultaneously screaming orders to the ramparts to mobilize the hiding army of the Bolg.

In the panic of the earthen tremors Rhapsody felt a sense of calm settle on her, muting the anger that was burning behind her eyes. Quickly she cast her gaze around the Moot, erupting now beneath the sea of the living, foaming and cresting like an earthen sea, filling it with waves of the dead.

A group of children, mostly human, had been separated in the initial cataclysm, torn from their family groups when the ground sundered. Their cries of panic were only slightly louder than those of the adults struggling to get to them. From her place on the rim above, Rhapsody could see a river of as-yet-undisturbed earth that might serve as a bridge between them.

Gwydion squeezed her hand, then loosed it as they exchanged a nod. “Open the gate!” he shouted to the swirling mass of panicking people nearest the Moot’s great earthen doors. He darted down the side of the Bowl toward the entrance gates while Rhapsody hurried in the opposite direction, to the chasm between the children and adults, where the ground was rumbling in the advent of another schism.

“Here! Here! Follow the unbroken ground!” she called. Her voice, clear with royal timbre and full of a Namer’s authority, rang over the cacophony below, cutting through the noise like a diamond through glass. The children turned immediately and sighted on her. “Come—come to me.” Rhapsody held out her arms, beckoning the panicking children over the rise of earth.

Across the Bowl Gwydion’s eyes had sighted on an answer as well.

“Stephen!” he shouted from one of the Moot’s lower rims. The Duke of Navarne spun amid the maelstrom of Cymrians, living and dead, hearing his friend’s call. “Stephen—open the gates! Clear the Moot!” Gwydion could see understanding take root in his eyes; Stephen nodded that understanding, then passed his screaming daughter to the outstretched arms of a nearby guardsman and broke through the crowd, heading toward the earthen gates.

Gwydion turned to see the masses of panicking people raining down the sides of the Moot into its floor, toppling and smashing into one another in their fright. The rocky causeways and rims of earthen seats shuddered, both from the disturbance below the ground and from the flood of evacuees crawling and tumbling from the higher sides of the Bowl. He grabbed the arm of a half-Lirin woman as she fell, then interposed himself in the stream of evacuees.