Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Grunthor nodded. “Am Oi still under the banner of ‘permission to speak freely,’ sir?”

Achmed glanced over his shoulder at the throne of Gwylliam, sideways on its arm. “Yes.”

“Then Oi say if we’re going to be in for this, let’s be ready.”

“Details, please.”

Grunthor began to pace, concentrating. “If we’re going to war, let’s go to war. Conscript every able-bodied adult and youth. Suspend the school, and train the brats to carry water, roll bandages, sling rations. Muster out every village, every enclave, women, men, everyone .” He stopped long enough to meet Achmed’s eye. “The Duchess isn’t gonna like it.”

“Does that concern you?”

“Not in the least, sir.”

“Good. What else?”

“Put the smithy on triple shift. Put the mountain guard on patrol there, mindin’ the inventory and the cull pile. Belay the specialty stuff—concentrate on long-range missile weapons and heavy armaments for the crag catapults. Tap the anthracite veins more deep; mine the coal shale in all-day, all-night shifts. Boil down an ocean o’ pitch. Take off the mantle of 'men’ and let’s go back ta bein’ monsters. If we’re going to be in for this, let’s make a stand that’ll ’ave ’em writin’ dirges for centuries to come. Oi want my name ta be set to mournful music and sung sadly by widows all the way to Avonderre.”

A small smile came to Achmed’s face. “Now, won’t that be a beautiful thing. All right, Sergeant; gear up. Make the mountain impenetrable. We’ve known from the start this day would come. Whoever this damned demon is, if he wants Ylorc, if he wants the Sleeping Child, I want him to have to come through me to get them. But before he gets to me, let us make the mountains fall on everyone else who came with him.”

Grunthor nodded, saluted, then strode out of the room, his rage converted to an even more deadly form—purposeful vengeance.

The voice of the Grandmother echoed in his ear.

You must be both hunter and guardian. It is foretold.

He pulled the pillow over his head and spoke the words of reply he had spoken then.

Bugger foretold.

A voice even older, Father Halphasion’s voice, the mentor of his youth on the other side of the world, in a place that slept now beneath the waves of a restless sea.

The one who hunts will also stand guard.

Achmed blinked in the darkness.

Were you the one who spoke the prophecy into the wind ? he asked hazily in his mind. All those years before — was it you, Father ?

Nothing but the darkness answered.

Achmed had resolved centuries ago to avoid caretakership. Over the course of his long, strange existence he had found that love, life, and loyalty were ephemeral. Therefore, choosing to protect or preserve anything, an eternally sleeping child, even a mountain, was a guarantee of failure, ruin.

He lay now on his silk-draped bed, the one true luxury he had allowed himself. The slippery softness of the bedsheets soothed the eternal itch, the irritating burn of his skin; that, coupled with the solid basalt walls, kept the vibrations of the world around him at bay, or at least they had once. Now, with the forges already ringing in frenetically accelerated rhythm, with the constant sound of running bootsteps passing by his doorway, there was no peace to be had in the advent of war.

Achmed rose slowly and slid into his clothes. He waited in the doorway of his bedchamber until the heavy footfalls died away, listening in the near-distance to the noise of martial buildup awakening in his orderly mountain. He did not have to hear the sound of the Sergeant-Major’s voice bellowing commands to feel their results; the smooth ripples of air that routinely caressed the sensitive nerves in his skin-web had been replaced already by bristling shocks, frenetic energy that signaled the coming of war. He sighed deeply, feeling the work of Time upon his body and spirit for the first time since he had come to this dark and all-but-silent place.

He pushed open the sides of the the plainly fashioned cedar chest at the end of his bed and stepped into the hidden passageway, leaving the edges of the sheets to trail in the dirt at the edges of the tunnel beneath the bed for a moment. Then he closed the portal behind him.

He allowed himself a sigh as he crept through the secret bedchamber passageway, ruminating on the mysteries of guardianship. Grunthor had no need of his protection, or his scolding. Rhapsody was refreshingly, if maddeningly, independent and had absolutely no expectation of him being her protector.

Half his life had been spent in training to be the perfect guardian, and the other half spent on proving that nothing anywhere was safe. The king shook his head as he made the early turns toward what remained of the Loritorium; he was not at all certain which half had been wasted.

The people of these mountains, and the secrets, which once he thought to be his armor against an old nemesis, were weighing now upon him like armor, armor that sometimes protects but can be a hindrance or even a danger. He had fallen into a river from horseback once wearing such armor; the current had pulled him under, the armor dragging him down into the water that he so despised. His responsibility to the Bolg weighed on him similarly now. It was taking every speck of his resolve to stay here and build a battlement around those for whom he felt responsible. If his way were to be had, he would be out, alone, cwellan in hand, until it was over.

Achmed picked his way through the ashes and rubble to the remains of Gwylliam’s great crypt. Little of value remained, some melted metal sconces, a few small shards of tile from the never-finished mosaics—all else had been destroyed in the conflagration that Rhapsody had lighted to destroy the demon-vine, the bastardized root of the Great White Tree that the F’dor had utilized to violate, to broach the mountain in its attempt to snatch the Sleeping Child from the colony of long-dead Dhracians who had sought to protect her.

He jumped down from a high pile of debris to find himself standing beneath the great dome of the Loritorium, the smoothly ascending arch where a case had once been built to house the fire from the star of the old world, Seren, itself. In the wide circle of what had once been planned to be the central courtyard he could see the altar of Living Stone and the large, reclining shadow atop it.

The child’s body was as tall as his own, yet still there was a frailty about it, despite being formed from the living earth itself. She lay, supine, slumbering beneath Grunthor’s greatcloak, which he had covered her with when last they were in this place. From the side she looked like a death statue on a catafalque. The sweet contours of her face were that of a child, and her skin shone with the cold luster of polished gray stone. Below the surface of filmy skin her flesh was darker, in muted hues of brown and green, purple and dark red, twisted together like thin strands of colored clay. Her features were at once coarse and smooth, as if her face had been carved with blunt tools, then polished carefully over a lifetime.

Achmed approached the altar slowly, careful not to disturb the child. Let that which sleeps within the Earth rest undisturbed , the Grandmother, the last survivor of the Dhracian settlement and the child’s guardian had warned. Its awakening heralds eternal night .

He came alongside her and stopped. As he looked down at her from above he noted she was trembling beneath the greatcoat.

There were tears on the lashes that appeared formed from blades of dry grass, matching the texture of her long, grainy hair. Since he had last seen her that hair had gone from the gold of frost-bleached wheat to white, even at the roots which had once hinted at the grass of spring, mirroring the blanket of snow that now enveloped the earth.