Elegy for a Lost Star (12 page)

“You are my Archons, keepers of our thousand and one secrets. Remember to count and hold them carefully.”

The young trainees turned to each other in puzzlement. None had ever heard him refer to anything by that name before. Achmed took notice of their confusion, and turned to Trug, who would one day be the Voice, and nodded his permission to speak. Trug cleared his throat.

“We hold many secrets, sire,” he said in a voice that had been trained to lose the harsh tones of the Bolgish tongue. “Which, my lord, are the thousand and one secrets?”

The king's mismatched eyes, one light, one dark, gleamed with intent. “Who can answer?”

The Archons looked at each other again, then returned their gaze to their leader.

“The secrets of the fortifications, the breastworks and trapped tunnels,” the Master of Tunnels, Dreekak, whispered nervously.

“The secrets of the spies,” said Trug.

“The secrets of the Lightcatcher,” added Omet. His voice always scratched on the Bolg ears when he spoke in his attempt at their tongue, but none of the Archons winced.

“Those are all worthy answers,” the king replied. “There are greater secrets, secrets I will impart to you in a moment, to keep locked in your hearts, guarding them with your very souls. But we are guardians of many smaller, sometimes more urgent secrets as well.” He turned to Vrith, the Quartermaster. “How long can we stand a siege of the mountains if we are totally beset and surrounded?”

“Two months and sixteen days during this season,” Vrith answered rotely, as he had done many times before in several different languages. The Archons were accustomed to being questioned in this manner, and had been since early childhood. “Two days less in winter.”

“How many of our traders and agents are now outside Ylorc?”

“One hundred twelve,” Kubila replied.

“How many of the invisible routes used by the doves of Roland has the master of hawks discovered?”

“Nine,” said Trug.

“What lies at the bottom of the passage opened by the recent explosion of the Lightcatcher?”

“We don't know yet, sire,” Dreekak said reluctantly. It was an answer that an Archon hated to give, but was best given quickly, lest the king believe that one was covering a weakness in his or her training.

The king nodded. “All these small secrets, and countless others, make up the thousand. But what is the one?” He watched them for a moment, then turned to Harran and called upon her wordlessly.

The young Loremistress thought for a moment, then answered. “The secret of why you have chosen us, what you are training us for.”

“That is it,” Achmed replied, pleased. “Your training is finished, at least that which was needed to bring you to the status of Archons. This is my last word to you as students: What is the secret of wisdom?”

Greel, responsible for mining, spoke. “Before acting, envision your act carried out a million times.”

“Before speaking also,” added Yen.

Achmed assented silently, then gestured for them to move closer.

“For all this time that I have taught you such secrets, I have kept one to myself, unshared, unrevealed to any but Grunthor.”
And Rhapsody
, he thought bitterly,
but she did not retain it
. “But if you are to fulfill my wishes for you as Archons, there can be no secrets between us. I share with you now the thousand-and-first secret. But you will need light in this lightless place in order to grasp it.”

Achmed took from his cloak an egg-sized stone that glowed clearly with light as bright as that of midday. The Archons shrank away from the radiance, but discovered a moment later that it was cold, and did not sting their night eyes, the eyes of cave dwellers who had lived in the belly of the mountains for centuries.

“The Nain discovered these stones a thousand kings before Faedryth, their present ruler. Their use was lost and found a hundred times between then and now. Let none of the lore you learn be ever lost in the same way.” He handed the glowing stone to Harran. “You will need this to see what must be seen before you can understand.”

As he spoke, he slowly lowered his hood and began to unwrap the cloths from his face. Between the mesmerizing effect of his words, and the vision in the bright light before them, only Grunthor, who had seen and heard it before, was breathing.

“To comprehend my purpose, my reasons for training you thus, you must understand something that you do not know about me as of yet. I was born from an unholy union to a terrible purpose: to find, hunt, and kill a spirit that no one could see. That purpose came to me as a racial imperative; I never knew my mother, but feel her blood in my veins still.”

The pale, purplish skin of his forehead, etched all over with veins, was no preparation for the sight of the whole of his eyes, mismatched in color, shape, and position, resting in skin so translucent and light that they might have been floating unsupported in his skull. The Archons swallowed in unison.

“While through my veils you may have recognized the traits of my Bolg father, one of a dozen soldiers that raped my Dhracian mother, who they chose to kidnap by a toss of the bones, what you now see is the bastardization of the race of which I was the first of a generation. The Dhracians are an old people, born of the wind, descended from the race of Kith, as you have studied, Harran. But the purpose of the Dhracians was singular—we were jailers, guardians. Eventually, when we failed in that task, we became hunters. But instead of being brought up with the training, the knowledge, and the understanding of the lot that was bequeathed to me by my Dhracian blood, I was instead raised by Bolg on the other side of the world, tortured and tormented and eventually imprisoned.” The voice held no trace of regret, no plea for sympathy, just a flat, toneless sound that indicated the import of the words.

“One day the urge in my blood became too great to deny; I knew I needed to find out what was driving me to murder. In order to escape from the Bolg, I was forced to kill he who had been made to guard me, my brother of sorts, really not much older than myself.”

The Archons stared at the newly revealed nose, its flaring nostrils almost like that of a horse, but made of delicate flower-petal filigree, underlaid all through with the vein lattice.

“In order to survive my flight, I was forced to consume him.”

The Archons nodded nonchalantly. Cannibalism had been common among their tribes before Achmed took the mountain. At Rhapsody's insistence, it had been outlawed; the king had acquiesced not because of any of her arguments against savagery or because of how the practice was viewed by the outside world, but because he needed as many of his subjects whole and intact, and therefore uneaten, as possible.

The king's virtually lipless mouth, made for tasting air for traces of fear, whispered in the darkness.

“Now that you have finally seen my face, you can understand. This is how I know what I know. How I feel you enter a room. How I hear you breathe any curse, smell your fatigue. It is in my skin. It is my blessing, and my bane. I can feel the rhythm of the world around me; I cannot hide from it. It is not flawless, but it is rarely wrong. And now I will tell you what you need to know in order to understand why we guard the thousand and one secrets.”

He turned to Harran and leveled his uneven gaze at her, as if he were
sighting down a weapon. The Loremistress maintained a stoic aspect, but her thin body was quavering like a leaf in the wind.

“I have allowed you to study the lore of Roland, and of other lands on the continent, but have often indicated to you that what you were learning was really folklore, tales that have been polluted because they were told by generations of idiots, rather than preserved by Lirin Namers and others skilled in the art and sworn to the truth. What do you remember about the lore of the F'dor?”

The young scholar swallowed, her dark face growing pale.

“F'dor were the children of Fire, the ancient culture that sprang from it,” she intoned, reciting from the texts she had studied. “It was the F'dor who tamed fire, and gave it to mankind for its use in protection, in the warming of homes in winter, in the forging of weapons. The F'dor, now long deceased, were the forefathers of steel, of hearths, and the givers of the gift of flame to man.”

Achmed nodded thoughtfully. “That is what texts say, indeed. That is what the imbeciles who tend the Fire Basilica in Bethany preach to the hapless numbskulls who attend services there. That is what the world believes. I tell you now, it is the greatest lie that has ever been told.” His eyes glistened and he motioned them closer, to keep his words so soft as to barely be audible.

“In the Before-Time, when the world was being formed, there were five races that sprang from the primordial elements. Four of these races—the Seren from ether, the material that makes up the stars, the Kith from air, the Mythlin from water, and dragons from earth—lived in a fairly harmonious state, it is said, in that era of prehistory. The F'dor, the secondborn of those Firstborn races, however, were not an ancient culture that gave the world the hearth and smithing—they were demons of unimaginable destructiveness, bent on consuming all the life on the Earth, and finally the Earth itself. They were formless, evanescent, without corporeal bodies, and were able to take possession of a human host—or one any other race, as long as its victim was lesser in power than it was. They did an impressive job of almost bringing the world to an end until the other races joined forces and thrust the lot of them into an impenetrable Vault of Living Stone, deep in the Underworld, the belly of the Earth near its fiery core. Each race played a part in the capture and imprisonment, but it was the responsibility of the Kith to act as jailers. And so a tribe of them, the Elder subrace of Dhracians, was given the onerous task of guarding the Vault, living deep within the earth, separated from the wind that is their mother, day into day into eternity.

“All went as it was prescribed for millennia, until one day a star fell from the sky into the sea, and its impact ruptured the Vault, allowing many of the
F'dor that had been imprisoned there, biding their time in futile dreams of destruction, to escape to the upworld, and take their place among the unsuspecting human population that had evolved from those Firstborn and Elder races. And so the destructive element was free.”

Achmed paused in his diatribe. The Archons were barely breathing, probably from the combined shock of seeing his face for the first time and hearing more words spoken together than he had uttered since coming to Ylorc four years before. He willed himself to be calmer, to make his voice less harsh.

“Those beings still live, some of them imprisoned in the remade Vault, others free, hiding in broad daylight, their poisonous, parasitic spirits clinging invisibly to a human host. They are almost impossible to discern from the rest of the mass of human flesh that walks the world. And those that are upworld want but one thing: to free their kin in the Vault from their imprisonment, so that together they can satisfy the primal longing that consumes their race—the hunger for destruction, for annihilation, for the obliteration of all life, not just in this world, but beyond it. They seek a return to utter Void, even at the cost of their own existence. And their presence is felt in the tides of the universe, in war, in conquest, in murder, in betrayal. In short, in the ways of men.

“And what they ultimately seek—that is the last secret. I tell it to you now. A prophecy long ago told of a Sleeping Child—three such children, actually. Do you know this prophecy, Harran?”

The Loremistress nodded, closed her eyes, and intoned the words in a soft, toneless voice.

The Sleeping Child, the youngest born

Lives on in dreams, though Death has come

To write her name within his tome

And no one yet has thought to mourn.

The middle child, who sleeping lies,

'Twixt watersky and shifting sands

Sits silent, holding patient hands

Until the day she can arise.

The eldest child rests deep within

The ever-silent vault of earth,

Unborn as yet, but with its birth

The end of Time Itself begins.

Achmed nodded as Harran fell silent. “The first child in the prophecy is sheltered within these very mountains,” he said gravely, watching the faces of the Archons, their eyes glittering in the darkness. “She is an Earthchild, a
being made of Living Stone, left over from when the world was born. For all I know she may even be the last of this race, which the dragons fashioned out of elemental earth. The ribs of her body are made of the same Living Stone that comprises the Vault—and would thereby act as a key to it were she to fall into the hands of the F'dor. And they know she is here.”

An audible shudder arose from the assemblage. Achmed glanced at Grunthor, whose face remained impassive. The Bolg king exhaled, then continued.

“The second Child mentioned in the prophecy is the star that fell millennia ago into the sea on the other side of the world, the same star that shattered the Vault. That burning star, which slept beneath the sea for thousands of years, rose and consumed the Island of Serendair in fiery cataclysm centuries ago. And for all the destruction that ensued, for all the lives that were taken, she brought about far less damage than the other two could.” The Bolg king fell silent, the noise in the tunnel disappearing with the sound of his voice.

Finally Omet spoke. “And the third, sire? The eldest?”

The Bolg king remained quiet for a long time. Finally he spoke, and when he did, his voice was soft.

“Long ago, at the beginning of Time, when there were none on the Earth but the five Firstborn races, the F'dor stole something from the dragons—from the Progenitor of the race, the eldest of all wyrms. It was an egg. They took this nascent dragon, this unborn wyrm, which had in its blood all the elements, and tainted it, made it impure, though it was kept in a state of stasis, allowed to grow until it was part of the very fabric of the world. Deeper even than the Vault, lies the last Sleeping Child; a beast of unimaginable size, slumbering in cold downworld caverns, waiting for its name to be called, to be summoned to life, as all dragons must be in order to hatch. It has grown thus, and remained asleep, because when the F'dor were imprisoned in the Vault, all the heat of their evil fire was taken with them. But should they be freed, they will immediately call it to life—and it will awaken.