Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Coward , she thought as her trembling grew stronger. The Iliachenva’ar, the bringer of light into darkness. Struggling to keep from curling up like a babe in the womb. Mama—my dreams are chasing me. Come to my bed; bring the light .

The words of the Liringlas aubade, the morning love song to the sky, found themselves in her mouth. Shakily she began to sing, softly chanting the words her mother had taught her, words she had sung for many days with Oelendra, her mentor, words born in a place deep in her soul that was old as the ages.

In that deep place she felt a flicker of warmth, a pulse of light, as if she had physically touched the bond she had to the sword. The thought gave her courage, and she began to sing a little more strongly, loud enough to hear the notes echo slightly off the black tunnel walls ahead of her.

Then, a moment later, she heard another echo, softer than the first, and in a different voice, a voice that was familiar but not recognizable. A high voice, a frightened voice.

A child’s voice.

Mimen?

The word rang in her ears; it had come forth, spoken haltingly in Ancient Lirin, the language of the Liringlas, her mother’s people. Its meaning was unmistakable.

Mama-?

Rhapsody raised her head up. In the tunnel ahead of her she could almost make out the silhouette of a head, shoulders—thin they seemed; scraggly. Or perhaps it was just her imagination; the darkness was so complete that her eyes could not focus. She felt a great exhalation of air come out of her, breath she had not known she had been holding.

“Nay,” she said softly. “Hamimen.” Grandmother .

“Hamimen?”

“Aye,” she replied, louder, a little more clearly, still in the ancient tongue of the Liringlas. “What be your name, child?”

“Aric.” The outline of the head vibrated in the dark.

“May I bring the light, Aric? Dimmer this time?”

A scuffling sound; the head retreated.

“Nay! Nay!”

Beyond him, in the tunnel ahead, a rustle of movement.

“Aric, wait! I’ve come to take you out of the darkness—all of you.”

Silence.

Desperation was beginning to claw at her throat. “Aric?”

There was no reply.

Rhapsody slid her hand over the hilt of the sword. She gripped it tightly, then gently pulled, loosing the blade from the scabbard just a little. She exhaled slowly, gathering control of herself; with the return of her calm, the sword burned evenly, and only the slightest of flickers issued forth from the scabbard.

The nightmares of the tunnel receded, leaving just the tiled aqueduct once more in dimmer light than before. Up ahead at the edge of the glow, two even smaller tunnels branched out, no doubt the area in which Achmed had said the children were sleeping.

She inched forward slowly, keeping the sword by her side, and peered into the branching tunnels. They ended in alcoves, where dirty scraps of cloth, perhaps used at one time for blankets, now floated in the filthy water. Rhapsody tried not to recoil from the overwhelming stench of sewage.

Huddled at the end of the alcove was a yellow-haired child, long of bone and translucent of skin, trembling in fear. Rhapsody’s throat went dry in memory; it was the same ethereal complexion, the same slender angles that had once graced her mother’s face. And yet there was something more, something almost feral, a hint of his inhuman father.

“Aric,” she said gently, “come to me.”

The child shook his head and turned his face toward the wall.

Rhapsody crept forward another few paces, then looked down at her arms. The water on the floor of the tunnel was now up to her elbows.

Impatience, spurred by fear, took over. “Aric, come now!” The child only quivered more violently.

A thought suddenly occurred to her. She pulled back out of the alcove and began to move backward on her hands and knees; once she was a short way away she began to sing a children’s song from Serendair, a tune with which she had once jokingly serenaded Grunthor.

She continued to back away, weaving her call into the lyrics and tones of the traditional song.

At the edge of the tiny sword flame’s glow, Rhapsody could hear movement, could see a few faces appear. She nodded slightly and kept backing away, still singing.

Deeper down the tunnel more faces appeared, haggard, like the wraiths that sometimes stalked her dreams, blinking in the weak light. She continued to crawl backward, singing her song of summoning.

By the time Rhapsody reached the well shaft, a small herd, perhaps a score in all, of ragged boys, all heights, all thin, had crawled along after her, filling the tunnel until she could not see anything past them, just more heads, more faces, sallow beneath their smeared masks of red dirt, bulging, cloudy eyes, all but naked—human rats, Achmed had called them. She had had no idea how apt the name was.

A ramp of a sort had been constructed in the well shaft to take the place of the hook—she wouldn’t find out until later that it hid the body of the journeyman who had fallen down the shaft headfirst—from broken pallets and other debris of the firing room. Achmed’s face glared down at her from above. He took one look at the seemingly endless line of filthy children, exhaled, picked up a nearby rope, and threw one end of it down the well shaft to her.

“What’s taken so long? Here, start passing the brats up; we have to get out of here.”

Rhapsody took hold of the dirty Liringlas child, who shrank from her touch but didn’t pull away, and grabbed the rope that Achmed had tossed down to her.

“Did you have any trouble with the demon-spawn?” she asked as she looped the rope around Ark’s waist and helped him onto the ramp, holding on to him until Achmed began to haul him out of the shaft. “Only a bit,” he said nonchalantly. “He’s in the kiln.” Rhapsody whirled around from sorting out the other slave boys and stared up the well shaft. “ In the kiln ?”

“Sit there,” Achmed directed the first child, pointing to Omet, still hog-tied but back on his cot. He leaned over the well shaft again. “Yes, in the kiln. Like you, and some other accursed minions of his demonic father, he appears to be impervious to the effects of fire; has quite a tolerance for pain as well. But he should be all right, as long as his air holds out.”

With a new urgency Rhapsody pulled the next youth forward and looped him with the rope. “How long has he been in there?” she asked nervously.

Achmed yanked on the rope, dragging the child rapidly up the ramp. “A while. I’d hurry if you want to get him out before he turns into a vase.”

One by one the children, utterly silent, ascended the ramp. Finally, when the last one was out, Achmed tossed the rope down one last time and hauled Rhapsody back up the shaft and into the alcove.

“What on Earth happened?” she said, looking around the firing room in dismay at the mountain of hardening slip and the neat stack of bodies by the outside wall of the alcove. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Couldn’t you at least have hidden those? Look at how frightened the children are.”