Elizabeth Haydon - The Assassin King

“ ‘Born free of the bonds of Time,’” Rhapsody said. “Perhaps that means he can be in whatever time he knows of—and this is the only other time he has ever known.”

Achmed exhaled, annoyance evident in the sharpness of his breath. “It’s to be expected, I suppose; history is riddled with many young men who could not resist staying inside Rhapsody as long as they could.”

“Well, that was ugly, sir,” Grunthor admonished reprovingly. “You’re talkin’ about a mother, after all. So what’s the plan?” He looked around for the Dhracian in the dark, but the man was not to be seen. “And where’s yer friend?”

He stands behind you, holding the door.

Why are you still here? Achmed demanded of the darkness in the silent speech of his race. I am sorry to disappoint you, but I cannot, and will not, join your endless quest for F’dor, though when I come across one, you can be comforted in knowing that I have been trained in the Thrall ritual, and will gladly do whatever I can to destroy it. There—are you satisfied?

No. There is much that you still do not know .

I expect that will be the case throughout time , Achmed answered. But for now, I have a kingdom to get back to, and preparations to make. We can waste no more time here; we’ve lost the horses, and we are ten days’ walk from the nearest outpost in the northern Teeth. So be on your way, and best of luck in your quest. I am sorry to have disappointed you after all this time .

I will come with you , the inaudible voice said. I will open the doors of the wind for you, that the journey will be swift. And I will tell you of the Gaol, and of the Vault. And of your mother . Achmed thought for a moment. I will not be beholden to you , the Bolg icing finally replied. I guard the Sleeping Child—and I will not be threatened, or wheedled, or coaxed into abandoning her, even for as worthy a quest as the Primal Hunt. We can travel together, and I will listen to what you have to say. But after that, you will go back to being an assassin. I will go back to being a king. If you agree, then we have a deal .

The wind whistled around him, raising sand to his eyes. The stars twinkled brightly above as he waited for his answer. Finally, it came.

Agreed . The Dhracian opened another door in the wind, behind which swirling currents of air could be seen. I am Rath; and so you may call me .

Wars of conquest all have the same father, went the saying among the desert-dwelling tribe known as the Bengard race. He is Hunger. He and his children—Lust, Greed, Rage, Vengeance—are all formed of the same sand.

If anyone knew the lineage of war, it was the Bengard. Tall, oily-skinned, warlike men and women of gargantuan height and mass, whose history of conquest was unparalleled in the Known World, they had a long and deeply held belief that war was not only unavoidable, it was necessary and valuable. There was something almost holy in the constant state of readiness, of willingness to fight for almost any reason, that in the minds of this culture of limited resources and harsh environment was to be cherished and admired above all else. It was not aggression for aggression’s sake, but rather the readiness for a war, whether of invasion or defense, that drove the race into the gladiatorial arena during outbreaks of peace. And the fact that they found mortal combat to be rather fun.

But one thing the Bengard never truly understood was that while the father of war might always be Hunger, occasionally the mother of it was Fear.

More than any fear that clung, when banished by his waking mind, to the depths of his unconscious soul, Beliac feared being eaten alive.

In a different situation, a different man, that fear might be considered more irrational than most. While fear itself was a hobgoblin of the black crevasses of the mind, requiring no basis in the bright sunlight of reality in order to exist, the dread of being consumed while still living was strange even among the more ordinary terrors humans harbored: the fear of darkness or enclosure, of reptiles or arachnids, of heights or being buried alive. If it were anyone other than Beliac, the fear that his flesh might be chewed off of him and swallowed before his eyes would have bordered on insanity.

But Beliac had more reason than most to fear such a possibility. Beliac was the king of Golgarn, the seaside nation to the southeast beyond the Manteids, the mountains known as the Teeth.

And his neighbors, to the north, were the Firbolg.

Beliac had been king of Golgarn for a long time by comparison to the other monarchs on the continent. He had assumed the throne of his peaceful nation more than a quarter century before, and his reign had been a pleasant one, his twenty-fifth jubilee marked by genuine celebration on the part of the populace. The mountains that were the bane of easy trade to the north were also his greatest protection, and given the legends of the population that inhabited the other side of those mountains, he was grateful for the barrier. Nonetheless, in the recesses of his mind were the tales of horror told to him in childhood by his nursemaids and the other children, tales of marauding and murderous monsters who scaled the mountains like goats, their hands and feet equally articulated, searching for prey in the form of human children. As he grew older and studied the history of the continent, he learned the genesis of those fishwives’ tales was real—that in fact the Firbolg truly were a cannibalistic race, hardened by the conquest of every land they had ever inhabited, a conglomeration of bastard strains of every culture they had ever touched. They were demihuman rats, and like rats, they did whatever they had to in order to survive. Including eating their enemies.

It did not matter that Beliac had never seen a Firbolg within five hundred miles of his lands. Nor did it matter that none of his counselors or allies had, either. The Firbolg had taken the mountain city of Canrif in the northern Manteids, mountains they called me Teeth, at the end of the Cymrian War three hundred years before Beliac’s father’s reign, and had lived there ever since, preying on itinerant mountain goats, wayward deer, and each other. No raids had ever been made, no violence ever perpetrated on the citizens of Golgarn. But it didn’t matter. Beliac, like every other young boy in his kingdom, had been told the tales in childhood of the nighttime stealth attacks, where Bolg crept in at children’s windows, stealing babies from their cradles and carrying them off into the night to the sound of crunching jaws and smacking lips. Children were gobbled up a piece at a time, the legends said; it was rumored the Bolg would cover their faces with pillows to ensure quiet while they devoured the Golgarn little ones from the feet up. Beliac, at the age of eight summers, had adopted the customs of his friends and had eschewed sleeping either with pillows or without shoes for that reason.

Upon attaining manhood, he had begun to realize that the tales were lies, legends of the same caliber as the ghost stories and tales of monsters that were imparted between children for the pleasure of frightening each other. Still, there was something planted deep enough in his mind, somewhere between irrationality and reason, down in the deepest spaces where, unlike other children, he was bred with an inborn responsibility to safeguard an entire kingdom, that he could just not shake loose. It was a meaningless terror he had never truly overcome, something he laughed nervously about, all the while attempting to banish it from his conscious mind.

It was also a personal flaw that he had made the mistake, years before, of mentioning in the course of a supper well lubricated with the fine spirits of Argaut, to a friend of his. A merchant named Talquist.