Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Anborn fell silent for a moment as he dabbed the cool cloth on the wounded man’s gray face.

“No,” he finally admitted, reluctance in his voice.

“Get it, then.”

Anborn rose wearily and strode to the corner where Shrike’s belongings had been hastily tossed. He searched quickly and found the battered cutlass; he held it for a moment before bringing it back to the bedside.

“This can wait until you’re stronger,” he said to Shrike, who scowled again.

“Void take you. Look into the lantern.”

Anborn reached out a hand that trembled visibly, and plucked the tarnished lantern from the bedside table. He held it up before his eyes.

Shrike watched as those azure eyes, the hallmark of Cymrian royalty, began to shine. He lay back against the hay pillow and closed his own, breathing raggedly.

From the very oldest of days, in the very darkest corners of Firbolg history, there had been Finders.

The Bolg of Canrif had no recorded legends, no traditions immortalized in a permanent fashion; they were as a race illiterate, or at least had been until Achmed, himself of their bloodline by half, appeared as if by magic from the other side of the world and took the mountain almost by the mere demand of it.

Subduing the mountain had been a simple undertaking, really. One of the first places that the Three had found in the abandoned ruin which had once been Gwylliam’s seat of power was the royal library, the heart of Canrif. It contained an endless collection of maps, plans, and manuscripts, some brought from the Lost Island of Serendair, all carefully catalogued and preserved in scroll tubes of marble and ancient ivory, stored under the watchful eyes of the enormous red-gold dragon fresco sprawling across the domed ceiling, its silver-gilt claws poised in mute threat.

The library also guarded the entranceways to the deeper treasure vaults and reliquaries in which items of great value to the long-dead king had been kept. It had even contained the body of the long-dead king himself; they had discovered Gwylliam’s mummified corpse sprawled on its back amid the rotting fabric of his robes of state, his shriveled chest cruelly sundered. His simple crown of purest gold lay on its side next to him, testament to exactly how the mighty had fallen.

But the items in the library of most value to Achmed’s conquest of Ylorc were the apparatuses the Cymrian king had built to track movement within the labyrinth, and the series of listening and speaking tubes that ran throughout the mountains, some visible, some hidden, most of them still operational, all of them useful. It had only been a matter of manipulating these inventions, along with the ventilation system that brought heat and fresh air into Canrif, to convince the current inhabitants that they were outmatched in their own land.

The Bolg surrendered more or less willingly to their new warlord, someone who could return the mountainous cities of the “Willums,” as they called the Cymrians, to their former glory, this time under the hand of a leader who was half-Firbolg. They knew nothing of his other nature, the Dhracian side, which sought above all things to find any of the F’dor demon-spirits that might have escaped the great Vault of Living Stone which the dragons had built to imprison them in the Before-Time. It was a blood vow far more ancient than any he swore to them as their new king, but the Firbolg were utterly ignorant of it.

Once Achmed’s reign had begun in Ylorc, Rhapsody had insisted that educating the Bolg in lessons other than warfare was necessary if they were to be able to stand on their own and not only hold the mountain against the bloodthirsty men of Roland, but build a culture that would hold currency outside the mountain. Until this year those men had participated in an annual genocide known as Spring Cleaning, a ritual of butchery in which the Bolg had offered up their old, weak, and ill in exchange for being left alone for the rest of the year.

This past spring, however, a new wind was blowing through the peaks of the Teeth. The soldiers of Roland had come as usual, this time two thousand strong at the insistence of Tristan Steward. They had discovered, much to their woe, that the monsters they were used to dispatching with indifference had been learning the lessons of slaughter that they themselves had inadvertently taught. Achmed had delivered the news of the Orlandan brigade’s massacre at the hands of the Bolg to the Lord Roland personally, waking him from his sleep in his own bedchamber with the ultimatum that would lead to a reluctant peace treaty ten days later.

I’m the Eye, the Claw, the Heel and the Stomach of the Mountain. I have come to tell you that your army is gone.

The Lord Roland had risen shakily from his slumber, trembling as he listened to the sandy voice that seemed to be part of the darkness itself.

You have ten days to draft a trade agreement and to sue for peace. My emissary will be waiting at the present border of my realm and Bethe Corbair on the tenth day. On the eleventh day the border will begin to move closer, so as to facilitate our meeting. If the inclement weather discourages you from traveling, you can wait a fortnight and hold the meeting right here at the new border.

Tristan Steward, his cousin, Stephen Navarne, duke of the province that bore his family name, and Tristan’s brother Ian Steward, the benison of Canderre-Yarim, had indeed appeared at the border, the first two prepared to pursue political ends, the benison religious ones. They had all been easily bested in their negotiations by Rhapsody, who had charmed them into trade agreements generous to the Bolg and peace accords restrictive to Roland with little more than an unconscious blink of her green eyes. Tristan Steward had returned home to his central province and his unpleasant fiancee with the disturbing sense that he had handed over both his birthright and his soul to Ylorc.

What Tristan Steward could not have known was the nature of the fuse his misguided decision to send a full brigade against Achmed’s troops had lighted.

The natural process of establishing diplomatic ties with a new regime is traditionally a long one for good reason. It takes time for a freshly crowned monarch to learn everything he needs to know about his kingdom from his newly ascended throne, to sort out the positive and negative aspects of having a relationship of any kind with neighbors, allies, and enemies.

The destruction of Tristan’s army had hastened that legitimizing process. The horror of it rippled like wildfire through the provinces of Roland and the outlying continental lands of Sorbold to the south, Gwynwood to the west, the Hintervold to the north, and even the nations beyond the Teeth to the east. Only the Lirin realm of Tyrian, the vast forest that abutted the southwestern seacoast, sent no ambassador to Ylorc, gave no indication that the ascension of a Firbolg warlord to Gwylliam’s throne had made any impression upon them at all.

With that exception, all the neighboring realms of Ylorc were eager to press for whatever accords they could to ensure the continuation of peace with the Bolg and to perhaps engender a little bit of commerce on the side.

Particular interest existed in Sorbold, the arid realm of sun that had once been part of the Cymrian empire but now stood alone, an independent nation tied to Roland only through the common religious connection to the elderly Patriarch of Sepulvarta, the head of the religion of both lands. The Sorbolds craved access to the fine weapons being produced in the fires of the Firbolg forges. There were few natural resources in their land, and steel production there was expensive and difficult.