Rhapsody, Child of Blood (24 page)

'Oh."

'I'm so sorry."

'No need to be, darlin'. 'Ere, put that away. Oi'm all right. Come and lie back down, and perhaps we can get a lit'le more rest." Rhapsody obeyed sheepishly.

When they woke they gathered their gear and moved into the endless low tunnel before them.

cXhapsody had become so accustomed to crawling through cold, wet rock, had been chilled for so long, that she had forgotten what it was like to be dry, not to shiver.

The musty smell of the earth and the stale water that pooled within it permeated everything.

Her clothes were constantly damp, and had been for as long as she could remember. At times it seemed as if there had been no other life but this, that her memories of the Past had only been dreams. This was the reality, this never-ending trek along the Axis Mundi.

They had been climbing, walking, and crawling on their hands and knees for so long now that they knew nothing else. Time had passed endlessly, and still they woke after each session of uncomfortable sleep to the same nightmarish reality.

Unlike the two Bolg, who seemed to have no fear of the depths of the Earth or enclosed spaces, Rhapsody still spent a good part of her waking hours silently battling her thoughts of suffocation and enclosure. Part of her routine consisted of driving out the realization of how far below the surface of the Earth they were, how precarious their air and space was, especially during the frequent cave-ins.

She was grateful that they avoided too much hands -and-knees crawling. Most of the time they were able to stand erect, or occasionally walk stooped over, which was barely better than crawling. Every part of her body, and especially her back and knees, ached with each step, each moment they moved along the sandy, rocky floor of the endless tunnel. There was little respite from the torture, even in sleep.

She still failed to understand how Grunthor was able to force his enormous body through the tiny crevasses by which she felt crushed. When Achmed finally declared they were stopping, usually once they had made it out of a tight, wet enclosure, she would sink gratefully into exhausted sleep, only to be wakened by her nightmares.

They grew in intensity the farther they traveled within the Earth, causing Achmed once to threaten to push her off the Root. When room allowed, she slept on Grunthor, finding some comfort in the strength of the massive arms, although waking to the grinning greenish face had taken some getting used to at first.

Achmed's demeanor had changed. Once they had reached the Axis Mundi itself he became more reserved than usual, distracted even, as if he was listening for something just outside the range of sound. His voice had dropped to a near-whisper, though he had not opposed speaking or being spoken to, at least any more than he had before.

His preoccupation was apparent to Rhapsody, so she tried not to disturb him, and instead directed most of her conversation to Grunthor.

When space allowed enough air to converse while traveling, the two men taught Rhapsody the Firbolg language, known as Bolgish, more to be polite than anything else.

It was their common tongue, and to converse in it made it seem as if they were trying to exclude her. In return, in the rare moments when light permitted, she taught Grunthor to read. The lessons never lasted long.

Rhapsody had awakened from her sleep to find Achmed himself pale and clammy, muttering under his breath, much as she routinely did. The tunnel had been narrow for some time, through several stretches of travel, without respite, and several cave-ins had recently occurred.

Grunthor, who had cleared a large blockage of rock from their path a few hours before, slept through his friend's nightmare undisturbed. She raised her head off the giant Bolg's chest and watched for a moment, then rose slowly, and carefully climbed over her sleeping partner to the lookout spot where Achmed generally made camp for himself.

When she reached him she felt her own pulse quicken in concern. His eyelids were twitching rapidly; he was breathing shallowly and moaning intermittently. Gently she stroked his forehead and whispered to him.

'Achmed?"

The Dhracian struggled a moment more, and then his eyes snapped open, cleared from sleep.

'Yes?" His voice had an even drier edge than usual to it.

'Are you all right?"

'Yes."

She caressed the side of his cheek as she would that of a child in the night. "You seemed to be having a nightmare."

The mismatched eyes glared at her. "You think you have an exclusive right to bad dreams?"

Rhapsody fell back as if slapped. His eyes had shot sparks at her the same way his cwellan flung forth its disklike missiles.

'No, of course not," she stammered. "I'm sorry, I was just—never mind." She crawled back over Grunthor, now awake, and settled back down against the absurdly muscular chest. She had planned to ask what he was dreaming about, but realized upon seeing his reaction that she did not want to imagine something that could frighten Achmed.

Beneath her, Grunthor closed his eyes and drove the thoughts from his mind. He already knew.

Q) inally Achmed seemed to find what he was looking for. They had followed the Root into a voluminous cavern, with walls so distant as to be indiscernible in the dark.

The robed figure had slowed, then come to a stop.

'Wait here, and try to be quiet," he said softly. "If I'm not back by the time you wake, go on without me." Before Rhapsody could question him, he was gone.

When she turned around and looked to Grunthor for an explanation, she shuddered.

The expression on the broad face was grimmer than she had ever seen.

'What's he doing?" she whispered nervously.

The giant reached out a hand to her, pulling her silently down to the floor. The air was chillier than usual, and he opened his coat, offering her his shoulder for a pillow.

Rhapsody lay down and he drew the great mantle around her. Slowly he let out a deep sigh, his eyes staring into the darkness at the distant ceiling overhead.

'Rest now, miss." cAchmed cast a final look around the immense cavern before he began his climb across the Root to the passage he had finally seen. Unlike the other tunnels, it carried no branch of the Root but lay empty and silent, undisturbed in the darkness.

He had been following the low, flickering heartbeat for a long time. He had caught the first whispers of it just after they had climbed off the taproot onto the Axis Mundi.

Swelling intermittently through the loud hum of the Tree, it was the echo of a low and distant thudding in the earth beneath his feet.

It had been his intention, when he and Grunthor first laid their plans of escape from Serendair, to avoid this place at all costs. What lay within the tunnel, coiled within the belly of the Earth itself, was the horrific destiny of the Island. The knowledge of its existence, and the plans for its awakening, had been part of the reason he had sought to leave, though he knew that something even more cataclysmic was waiting for its time to come forth as well. Something he had seen with his own eyes in the desert beyond the failed land bridge.

That he had been able to find its pulse at all was still of some surprise to him. His blood-gift, his tie to men's heartbeats, was a legacy granted to him as the first of his elder race to be born on the Island. This thing preceded him; it was from the Before-Time. And it was not a man. Perhaps the inadvertent choice of names that Rhapsody made that afternoon in the streets of Easton had something to do with it, had given him entry into its blood, access he would not normally have had.

The pulse was almost imperceptible, slow in the frozen depths below, but it was definitely there. By the volume of the blood that ran through its veins, there could be no mistaking that this was what he sought.

He stopped. For the first time that he could remember, Achmed felt paralyzing fear.

His own death was not a concern to him now, nor had it ever been. Death was his partner, something he had dispensed as the consummate master of his trade. The incessant vibrations of the world that irritated his physiology on a daily basis, that which others defined as life, was not something to be cherished, but often just endured.

Occasionally upon dispatching victims he had seen a kind of peace come over their faces, a sense of imminent rest that intrigued him. Certainly he knew that many deaths he delivered came as a relief to those who hired him.

Part of his birthright had been his judgment, his discretion. He was not a ravager, like a pestilence or a war. The death sentences he bestowed were, in fact, often the only sense, the only justice in the tangled strife of the world. He was not afraid to meet death himself. It owed him.

What frightened him was the breathtaking, mindless, incomprehensible scope with which that grim entity was looming. The devastation that would be visited upon the land was absolute; once the wyrm had extricated itself from the earth in which it hibernated it would devour everything it could find. It would eclipse him a million times over as the master of dispensing death. It would be worse than an eclipse, a dark sun of ultimate ruin, not making death the shadow, but bathing the world in itself.

He and Grunthor would buy time by leaving now, escaping to another part of the world. They could probably live out the remainder of their lives and die in bed before it came for them. It had been their original plan.

And yet here he was, on the doorstep of its sanctuary, trying to find the antidote to a poison far more virulent than he could ever negate, something older than the Earth itself.

There was something ironic in the need he felt, heartless killer that he was, to try and preserve the lives of those innocents left behind, the unwitting populace of the Island, and eventually, the Earth. He was now physically unable to pass this chance by, not to intervene.

He stood at the edge of the chamber, breathing the bitter chill. Something about having been the intended agent of the wyrm's release, or the bait, or his loathing of the demon who had tried to command him, or all of these things, made him plan against all better instincts to keep this monstrous force asleep, hidden.

Try as he might to shrug it off, the need to act had clutched at him mercilessly, refusing to let go. He didn't understand its genesis, but he knew it had something to do with Rhapsody.

Somehow she was bound to this as well. He would need her if he was going to make the attempt, would have to convince her that she was capable of this immense undertaking. She would benefit from the confidence he displayed in her, even if, in the depths of his heart, that faith was uncertain. The consequences of a misstep were dire.

The consequences of not making the attempt were more so.

cXhapsody was dreaming of darkness. The light of the can-dleflame had flickered as the door of her bedroom creaked open. The rustle of the bedclothes as her father sat down beside her.

Are you all right, child?

In her sleep Rhapsody shifted to move away from the root now beneath her ear.

She nodded.

Dark, she whispered now, as she had then. I'm afraid, Father.

He had wrapped her in the bedclothes as he lifted her from her bed and carried her outdoors, under the star-sprinkled sky.

I used to do this with your mother when she first came here, when she was afraid.

Mama was afraid of the dark, too?

The scratchy roughness of her father's beard against her cheek as his arms encircled her, forming a wall of protection that would keep her safe.

Of course not. She's Lirin, a child of the sky. Much of the time the sky is dark. She was afraid of being away from it, of being enclosed. And of the darkness within.

In her sleep Rhapsody folded her cold hands and buried them between her knees.

I? that why you made the window in the roof?

Tes. Now, look into the sky, child. Can you see the stars?

Tes, Father. They're beautiful.

She could still see his smile gleam in the blackness around them.

And would you be able to see them but for the dark?

No.

Tou cannot see the beauty without facing the darkness. Remember this.

She thought she knew what he meant. Like when you first
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brought Ma-ma, to live here, and the people of the village were unkind to her?

The smile had disappeared, along with its light.

Tes, like that.

How did the village come to change its mind about our family, Father? If they despised Mama so when you first married, why did you stay?

She could see his face in her memory, wrinkles pocketing around his eyes as he smiled at her again.

We needed to face that darkness. And we did, together. I will tell you something that I want you to remember. If you forget all my other words, remember these: when you find the one thing in your life you believe in above anything else, you owe it to yourself to stand by it—it will never come again, child. And if you believe in it unwaveringly, the world has no other choice but to see it as you do, eventually. For who knows it better than you? Don't be afraid to take a difficult stand, darling, find the one thing that matters—everything else will resolve itself.

Tears fell onto the glowing Root below her. She had listened, had remembered, had taken his words to heart. And, in doing what he said, she had lost everything. Even him.

c^hapsody?"

The word was spoken so softly she thought she was only hearing it in her mind.

Rhapsody opened her eyes and found herself staring up into the darkness of Achmed's hood, the gleam of his gaze fixed on her. She nodded silently.

'I have a story for you. Its ending isn't written yet. Do you wish to hear it?"

Slowly she sat up and took the hand he offered her. As on the day she had first accepted it, the grasp was firm and clawlike, but now his hands were bare, the leather gloves gone.

She thought for a moment that this was still a dream, but the clarity and openness of his gaze and words was something she knew she could never have imagined. He pulled her carefully to a stand and led her from the sleeping giant to a sheltered spot some distance away. He pointed into the darkness.