Elizabeth Haydon - The Assassin King

And any living being that would aid those evil entities, knowingly or unknowingly. Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken.

As usual, his kirai yielded nothing.

Rath tried again.

Ysk.

The salty taste returned to his mouth, an echo of common blood. Rath rose, shook the dust of the road from his garments, and followed the sound once again.

Achmed dragged his mount to a stop, twisting his face away from the back and shoulders of the woman who rode on the horse before him, swathed in a cloak of mist from which a foul stench was emanating. “Hrekin,” he said sourly. “Rhapsody, for the sake of everything that is holy, or unholy even, what is that repulsive smell?”

“Oi think ya got it right the first time, sir,” said Grunthor merrily. “Children is one of them things what tastes better than it smells.” Rhapsody chuckled. “If you even lick your lips within an arm’s length of him, I’ll cauterize your intestines with Daystar Clarion—don’t think I won’t, you child-eating lout,” she replied. Achmed exhaled loudly in annoyance. “When I offered to let you ride with me, it was because your husband was concerned you would fall off on your own in your weakened state,” he said, turning to keep his nose from the area of stench. “You did not warn me that your child would make a fine catapult shell—better than rotting garbage or dead fish.”

“Do you want to stop so that I can change him?” Rhapsody asked, opening the folds of her cloak, sending Achmed writhing away again, covering his sensitive sinuses. The tiny child was sleeping deeply, his black lashes a fringe on the rosy face barely visible in the light of the moon. “I know he smells bad, but it might be best if we just let sleeping children lie.” The Three fell silent and exchanged a glance. Rhapsody’s comment had inadvertently served to remind them of the dire-ness of their situation. Long ago a poem had proclaimed a prophecy of three sleeping children, each one known indiscriminately as the Sleeping Child.

The first child in the prophecy was sheltered within Achmed’s kingdom in the mountains, an Earthchild, a being made of Liv-ing Stone, left over from when the world was born. For all he knew she might even be the last of this race, which the dragons fashioned out of elemental earth, considering them their progeny. The ribs of her body were made of the same Living Stone that comprised the Vault of the Underworld, the prison that held the demons in check, and would thereby act as a key to it were she to fall into the hands of the F’dor. And they knew she was there. The second child mentioned in the prophecy was the star that fell into the sea on the other side of the world, the same star that shattered the Vault. That burning star, which slept beneath the ocean waves for thousands of years, rose and consumed the Island of Serendair in fiery cataclysm fourteen centuries before. And for all the destruction that ensued, for all the lives that were taken, the middle child brought about far less damage than the other two could. The third Sleeping Child of the poem, the eldest born, they had seen with their own eyes in their journey along the Axis Mundi, the root of the World Trees that tied them together along the center line of the Earth. It was a wyrm of immense proportion, comprising nearly one-sixth of the world’s mass, sleeping in the cold dark wastes below the Earth’s mantle. Waiting for the day the F’dor would call it by name and awaken it. Whereupon it would consume the earth. “You have to change him now,” Achmed said as the horses danced in place. “The odor is burning the skin off the inside of my eyelids.” In the distance a flicker of movement caught his eye. Had he not twisted to get away from the stench of the child, he never would have seen it, but there it was again, the subtle indication that they were being followed on horseback. Grunthor had seen it, too. He clicked to the other horses that he was leading, the two light riding serving as pack horses, and began to trot away again toward the east. With a speed born of years of experience, Achmed silently vaulted off his horse’s back, surprising Rhapsody and causing her to sway in the saddle. “Keep going,” he said softly to Grunthor. “I’ll take care of these.” He waited until the horses had gotten a slight head start, then found a low clump of leafless ramble off to the side a way where he took cover. After a few moments he could feel the sound and vibration of approaching hooves in the ground. A moment beyond that, the handful of soldiers in Ashe’s regalia appeared behind them, traveling quickly and quietly, following closely but making no effort to catch up. There was something about the way they sat in the saddle that caught Achmed’s notice. He had seen Anborn training the retinue of the Lord and Lady Cymrian, and knew that his trainees were prone to sit forward and up, the position that would best prevent them from getting quickly off, and most protect their viscera. But those coming down the road were sitting high in the saddle, in total contradiction to what he knew the Alliance soldiers’ training to be. And they were riding the gray mountain horses of Sorbold. The Bolg king crouched down and swore silently. There was a time when he would have felt them coming from a quarter mile away, and felt their very heartbeats in his skin, and could return fire accurately at that distance as well. But his blood gift, the ability granted him early in life as the first of his race born on the Island of Serendair, the first of Time’s birthplaces, had deserted him when he left the Island, disappearing through the root of Sagia, the tree of elemental starlight. When he arrived in this place, fourteen centuries later, his ability to unerringly follow the heartbeats of every living creature on the Island had vanished, leaving him, somewhat ironically, only able to do so still with those who themselves had come from there. Still, his skills were keen, his talents well honed. Achmed silently loaded three whisper-thin circular blades onto the arm of his cwellan, the weapon he had designed for himself a lifetime before. He set the recoil and waited. When the cohort had passed him without notice, he loosed the recoil arm into the backs and necks of the men on horseback, slicing through the seams of their armor. He reloaded and fired again and again, even before the first body hit the ground. In the distance he could hear the horses, now riderless, coming to a confused stop. Achmed trotted after them, stepping over the bodies, and quickly searched their supply packs. As he suspected, there was nothing to identify them as anything other than soldiers of Roland. He rifled their provisions, then turned the horses loose, finally checking the bodies also for marks of other identification. In the distance he saw Grunthor and Rhapsody reining to a halt and turning back. He started across the field to catch up with them again, bothered most by the fact that what alerted him to the presence of his stalkers had been an odious signal from a newborn, rather than his own sensitive network of nerves and blood vessels. “I’m getting too old for this hrekin,” he muttered. When they were encamped that night, the baby fed, changed, and asleep for the evening, along with the two Firbolg, Rhapsody pulled a small flute from her pack, a simple reed instrument that she always brought with her when traveling. While Meridion dozed in her lap, shielded as always by the cloak of mist, she began a simple melody she had often played for Ashe before the fire in their days together. The clouds of the inky black sky sailed quietly overhead on the night breeze, unhurried. She imagined she was tying the notes of the song to them, sending them like a missive of love across the sky, hoping that her husband was standing beneath the same firmament, watching the same stars.