Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

“Please,” she whispered, lost amid the ache of denied passion and the grip of uncertainty.

Say it.

“I will,” she snarled. The air in the room grew thin and static, a sign of her dragon blood rising, rampant. “But then the scales are balanced; agreed?”

Agreed.

The fire roared back, swallowing her in its jaws, tongues of flame darting, serpentine, in all the places that cried out for its touch. She lay back again, her mouth open, panting, as the flames consumed her, pleasuring her ancient blood, her lonely flesh. She cried out in fury mixed with rapture; thunder rolled through the pale mountains, shaking the snowcaps loose, sending avalanches tumbling down into the distant valleys.

Later, as she lay, spent, in the shadows of the flickering hearth, she listened absently to the words whispered in the fire. She nodded slightly, trying to recover her breath.

I need your memories.

“I understand.”

Achmed stood at the convergence of five tunnels, lost.

This was surely the place to which the Sleeping Child, through her hand shaped map on the stone wall of her chamber, had directed him. He had stood for hours over the device in Gwylliam’s hidden library that monitored the movement of the Bolg throughout the mountains, watching this place, but no one ever came. He had listened with unending patience at the apparatus that led to speaking tubes throughout all of Canrif, trying to discern what was happening beneath his nose. His efforts were not getting him far.

Now, as he waited, hidden, at this strange, handlike crossroads, he felt something he had never truly felt before, a kind of growing despair that perhaps what faced him was beyond his means to keep in check.

Getting control of this mountain was like trying to inhale all the smoke from a forest fire. No matter how hard he drew it in, tendrils escaped, wisped away to lost, unknown places, old Cymrian claims, or the hiding places of those long dead. And he couldn’t inhale forever.

Only one word whispered up through the ancient tube had caught his ear in all his long hours of wait. It was a simple word, at the same time a strange one, with no explanation attached to it, spoken between a midwife and a common foot soldier in passing.

finders.

Nonetheless, that single word was the key; he knew it deep within the parts of him that sensed the heartbeat of the Bolg kingdom, that gave him power over the land and its occupants. More and more since he had become the warlord in this abandoned ruin peopled by monsters of his own kind he was beginning to understand the concept of royalty, of kingly authority that ran in blood. Only it ran in more than blood—Achmed felt it in his nerves, in his teeth, in the hair of his head and his skin-web; these were his people, and they had a secret from him, a secret so well guarded that even Gwylliam’s endless library held not a single reference to it.

Now, as he waited at the place the Earthchild had suggested, he felt them, like mice in the dark, or the first stirrings of lice, and understood what Gwylliam must have felt trying to keep the mountain from exploding at the beginning of the end of it all.

He knew that though the Bolg were a mutable race, certain features held true: they valued strength, they prized children, they craved movement, they lived spare and traveled light. Even their language was all action and function, with few objects. So in that one word—Finders—he knew there was power, something deep and intrinsic to this place, something he should know about, but did not.

He carried no weapons but the cwellan and a concealed skinning knife that only Grunthor knew about. It had a dark, rainbow-black steel blade, and was a parting gift from the old world. In most circumstances he could rely on his path lore to find the way to what he sought, but he still was uncertain what he was looking for.

Slowly Achmed paced the centerpiece of the tunnels, listening at each one of the fingers, hearing nothing. Doubtless down one or more of them were the Finders that he sought, hiding at the edge of his awareness, taunting him, however inadvertently, like children playing a game of blindman’s buff. Whether they were the ones selling his weapons to Sorbold no longer mattered now. What did matter was that they had a secret from him, and he could not abide that.

But he would have to abide it a short while longer.

Perhaps, once Rhapsody returned with the blood of the demon, he himself would now be a Finder. He had often contemplated the ritual he would use once she delivered it to him; it would need to be done in a special place, a place secure from the wind, and from the eyes of the world.

He wondered, as he examined the openings in the Hand, if this were the place.

The proper site to have done it would have been beneath the great pendulum of the long-dead Dhracian colony, a place that allowed no essence to escape. He had trained with the Grandmother in the Thrall ritual there, learning the secrets of his Dhracian heritage, the primordial power granted them to hold both sides of F’dor, man and demon, in thrall, a skill bequeathed them as the jailors who once gave up life in the wind from which they originated to stand guard over the great Vault of the Underworld in which the F’dor had been imprisoned. But that place was sealed now; there was no way to get back in without risking the safety of the Sleeping Child. He spat on the sandy ground at the mere thought of it.

The five corners of the hand shared similar characteristics to the vast vertical chamber in which the pendulum swung. In a way it cycled the signals that fell to its center, like water in sea caves, washing away from the depth with the tide, but then falling back to level, unable to escape.

This was the place.

The last message she had sent with the bird had indicated she was successful in her undertaking, and would be home soon. The anticipation was painful.

Achmed listened once more, then hurried back up the corridor from which he had come.

In the distance, the Finders watched him go, wide eyes blinking in the dark.

The gambling complex of Sorbold was the largest group of buildings in the city-state of Jakar, and sprawled threateningly across the southern end of the borough of Nikkid’saar. On days when gladiatorial bouts were not scheduled it lay quiet and more or less undisturbed, except for the occasional delivery caravan and the entry and exit of the slaves and free workers whose efforts kept the complex running. On the days of the fights, however, this end of the borough writhed with humanity and animal life, as tens of thousands jammed the streets around the arena, teeming with the excitement and commerce of blood sport.

Rhapsody could see that Llauron was right about the schedule of events; this had been a day of contest, and an enormous stream of people, complete with its accompanying noise and smell, was flooding back into the roadway around the arena, filling the streets with the sounds of jostling and screaming, laughing and bickering. It was easy to get lost in the cacophony, and she happily did, blending in with the crowd until she found the entrance into the arena closest to the sprawling addition at the rear of the complex. This addition must hold the gladiators’ quarters, she reasoned, and she looked for a point of exit near to the southern gate of the borough, where she had left the horse and where Khaddyr and the reinforcements would meet up with her.

Rhapsody found a sheltered area to wait in as light snow began to fall, turning the streets to mud and the mood of the masses ugly. She watched carefully as she passed the time, noting that there were, in fact, a number of women dressed in clothes similar to those she was wearing under the woolen cloak. Their attire seemed drabber and more modest by comparison, but perhaps it was just a factor of her discomfort with the revealing nature of the disguise.