Rhapsody, Child of Blood (28 page)

Listening carefully to the sounds above the noise of the flames, she matched her voice as best she could to Grunthor's. After several tries she could feel a hum in return emanating from in front of her. When she opened her eyes again, Rhapsody could see a halo of light gleaming around the Sergeant.

'And you're Bengard as well?" Grunthor nodded. Child of sand and of en sky, son of the caves and lands of darkness, she sang. Bengard, Firbolg. The Sergeant Major. My trainer, my protector. The Lord of Deadly Weapons. The Ultimate Authority, to Be Obeyed at All Costs. The electric hum grew louder.

Grunthor broke into a toothy grin. "That's it, miss. Oi feel positively a-tingle. Now let's get to 'im, eh?"

Rhapsody smiled in return. "Grunthor, you're such a faithful friend, strong and reliable as the Earth itself. Here, hold my hands."

She led the towering Bolg through the flames, chanting his name and the characteristics she had ascribed to him, singing the namesong over and over, until the shadows that were dancing off the walls of fire swallowed them.

She blinked and looked around. They were on the other side, out of the flames, surrounded by darkness. Rhapsody buried her face in Grunthor's chest, trying to absorb the sudden, stinging absence of the fire's warmth without bursting into tears of loss.

Che giant watched in the dark as Rhapsody began to remove the bandages. They were deep in the tunnel now, the light of the fire still reflecting off them from a distance. She had dressed Achmed's eyes with some of her healing herbs, over the Dhracian's sustained protests.

Achmed lay with his head in her lap, muttering impatiently as she unwound the linen strips.

'I told you this was unnecessary. I can see."

'Well, why didn't you say so before I wrapped you up?"

'I was unconscious," he said indignantly.

Rhapsody chuckled. "Oh, yes, that's it; I thought you seemed unnaturally cooperative." She pulled the second of the layers off. "Now, this was just a palliative treatment to ease the pain 'I'm not in pain," he interrupted angrily.

'—and we'll need to treat the wound once we get to a safe—Rhapsody stopped her thought again, staring blankly at the Dhracian's face. Achmed's wound had vanished.

'Gods," she whispered.

Achmed ripped the remaining bandage off his head. "I told you I was healed."

Grunthor was staring at him as well. "Uh, sir, you're a lit'le more 'eajed than you think."

'What's that supposed to mean?"

Grunthor drew his poleax forward, a long spearlike weapon with a hatchet head on one side that he called Salutations, or Sal for short. "Have a look. That wound you got in that knife fight in Kingston a few years back?"

'Yes?"

'Gone, sir. See for yourself."

Achmed seized the blade with both hands and stared into it deeply. A moment later he grasped the waist of his shirt and examined his abdomen.

'My scars are gone."

'Mine too," Grunthor added, looking over to Rhapsody, who was looking at her wrist.

She met his gaze, then nodded.

'All our wounds are gone, and our scars have vanished. Why would that be?"

Rhapsody smiled. "Think about what I told you all that time ago."

Achmed sat up and thought back to their first fight with the vermin, the time when she sang her first healing song and mended the wound on his forearm.

Go ahead, scoff if you want to. But music of one form or another will probably be what gets us out of this place.

Only if you annoy me so much with your singing that I use your body as an auger and drill us out of here.

It's part of what a Namer can do; there is no thing, no concept, no law as strong as the power of a given thing's name. Our identities are bound to it. It is the essence of what we are, and sometimes it can even make us what we are again, no matter how much we have been altered.

'Are you saying that we have been remade?" Rhapsody shrugged. "I don't know, I think so. I was sure the first time I walked through the fire I could feel my body burn away, almost like I was being immolated. Because I sang each of our true names through it all, I think whatever damage life or circumstance inflicted on our bodies was not mirrored on our new ones. Are there any other manifestations that we might be able to check?"

Achmed slowly ran his hand around the base of his throat. The invisible chain that the demon had once controlled him with had snapped when she renamed him in the alleys of Easton, and had been gone for so long that it was impossible to tell. Bones that had once been broken felt as strong and healthy as if they never had sustained injury, but he was not certain they had shown any indication of it before the fire, either.

'I don't know; is your virginity restored?"

Rhapsody turned away as if stung. Normally she ignored jokes of that sort, but the cleansing, horrifying, ecstatic experience of passing through the fire had exhausted her ability to absorb the jest. Grunthor saw the look on her face and glared at Achmed angrily. The giant looked back over at her again, then found his mouth open in amazement.

'Darlin', turn around a minute 'ere."

'Leave me alone," Rhapsody answered. "I'm not in the mood for any more teasing."

'No, miss, please," Grunthor insisted. "Oi want to 'ave a look at your face."

Slowly Rhapsody turned back toward him, though her eyes remained averted.

'Criton," Grunthor murmured. Achmed looked up and felt his jaw go slack as well.

Rhapsody had been a beautiful woman before her walk through the fire, though time and soil had diminished her appearance somewhat in their endless trek along the Root. That had changed considerably; the walk through the core had burned away any imperfection, leaving a creature they hardly recognized in front of them.

The long golden hair was sparkling in the light of the distant fire, gleaming like liquid gold. Her complexion had been purged of any flaw, leaving skin the color and consistency of a rose petal, glistening in the darkness. When, a moment later, she turned to look at them in annoyance, her emerald eyes flashed, clearer than gemstones, and caught the rays of illumination in the tunnel around them. She had been comely; now she was more than magnificent. Even to Firbolg eyes the aura of unnatural beauty was evident.

'What?" she asked, irritation evident in her voice. It took Grunthor a moment to find his voice. "Gods, Yer Ladyship, you're beau'iful."

Rhapsody's newly gorgeous face softened, and the expression that crossed it caused both men to flush warm and experience a sudden swelling below the belt. "You're more than welcome, Grunthorl I was happy to help," she said gently. "It was the least I could do to pay you both back for the times you've helped me."

'That's not what Oi meant," Grunthor said. "You're different."

Rhapsody's brows drew together. "What do you mean?" "He means," came Achmed's thin voice, "that if you were back in your old line of work you could ask any price and get it, just for the opportunity for a man to look at you."

Rhapsody shook her head in annoyance. "I wish you'd stop going on about my old profession," she said. "I don't torment you about your past sins. And believe me, no one pays just to look."

Achmed sighed. They would now. "Rhapsody, you look better than you did. You're stunning."

Rhapsody looked over at his face in the light of the distant fire of the Earth's core.

Achmed had always made a point of remaining cloaked and hooded whenever possible, behaving in many subtle ways like a man who felt his appearance to be unpleasant to behold, even freakish. Now, seeing his countenance unguarded in the light, she couldn't understand why he had. He wasn't ugly, at least in her estimation. There was a strange beauty to his face, in fact; instead of a face that reflected atrocity, she saw a distracted god's unfinished work.

It was easy to imagine the rendering that had created him, the unfinished head of a sculpture placed on its body, all full of kneadings and excess clay, unrefined, with just a small crimp to approximate a nose, some uneven thumb marks where the eyes might one day be, another swipe of the thumb to make a half-smiling, half-grimacing, lipless mouth.

The mismatched eyes, the fine scoring of vessels beneath the surface of the skin, had come together to form a work of art, not attractive in the classical sense, but fascinating and rare. Perhaps he was seeing something much the same in her.

'You know, you're not so bad yourself," she said, smiling slightly.

Achmed looked at Grunthor, and they both shook their heads and looked away. She didn't understand. It was becoming obvious that was she wasn't going to.

Che exhilaration of passing through the fire diminished quickly as the three travelers repeated the steps they had made, trudging and crawling over the Root that seemed to stretch into Time itself, endless and unyielding. The journey was only slightly less arduous because of the knowledge that they had passed through the center, and now were at least more than halfway to the potential end.

Perhaps the despair, bordering on insanity, from the first part of the journey had been a factor of the pulling away from the old life. Now, though the trek was every bit as endless, though time passed with same agonizing lethargy, there was hope at the end of the tunnel, at least most of the time. As the wall of fire receded into distant memory the light had gone with it, and now they walked in darkness again, talking occasionally if only to stave off madness.

Their clothes and leather goods were ragged and worn, their boots gone, the knees of their trousers nothing but holes in tattered fabric. Grunthor had sacrificed the caplet of his cloak and Rhapsody the spare strings for her harp to make new footwear for them. They tied the cloth around their feet and legs to protect them from the jagged stone of the basalt tunnel, buttressing the soles with strips of leather cut from what had once been their boots. Even with the improvised footgear, by the end of a traveling session their feet were often bloody and bruised.

Rhapsody had taken to singing her devotions to the stars again, though day and night had lost their meaning, and she was as far away from the sunrise and the night sky as it was possible to be.

She began to interpret dawn as the time of their rising from sleep, and sang the aubade, the morning love song, as she dressed and attempted to comb the snarls out of her gleaming tresses. When they stopped, worn out, and made camp, she would sing her nightly vespers, sometimes falling asleep from exhaustion in the middle of the song.

Grunthor and Achmed had taken to listening to her, silent in the dark, never speaking until she had finished. Often they would pass a few more moments in dismal conversation, making plans they knew might upset her were she awake.

Strangely enough, time had exhibited no physical manifestation on any of them. The fire had taken away their scars, and some of tr^e wrinkles and lines the men had achieved as hallmarks of battle and a difficult life. If anything, the three of them looked younger than they had when entering Sagia an eternity before.

Rhapsody seemed to glow more as each day passed. An aura of attraction, almost like a magnetic field, was evident around her even in the darkness, though generally her face was not visible. The perpetuity of their mutual youth seemed to belie the endlessness of their journey. The thick coating of mud that covered them made their actual appearances hard to discern, anyway.

Eventually it became clear that they were traveling closer to the surface of the Earth. They had climbed and crawled through consistently uphill passageways, scaling another towering taproot like the one they had first ascended.

The tunnel had become horrendously wet and slippery again. The chill had returned to Rhapsody's bones, along with the aches in her joints. It became a matter of routine for them to struggle through waist-deep patches of water or mud. On more than one occasion they had been besieged by a flash flood that almost drowned them all.

Finally they entered a horizontal cavern, drier than the previous tunnels had been.

The ceiling was higher here, and they could walk erect amid the dripping stalactites that hung ominously from the ceiling above them. Stalagmites had formed as well, jutting up from the tunnel floor like the lower jaw of a great beast within whose grisly mouth they were traveling.

They walked with great care beneath the rocky outcroppings. Grunthor had sustained several wounds from bumping into them, rubbing against them, or having the vibration of their footsteps occasionally jar one loose.

They entered one section of cavern where a long, thin stalactite hung at an odd angle, jutting down from the side of the passageway wall near the ceiling. Owing to its precarious position, Achmed had walked by it cautiously, taking pains not to disturb it.

As Rhapsody passed beneath it a sudden brightness filled the tunnel. The glow was muted by the earth that surrounded the stalactite; nonetheless, the three travelers squinted in unison. Their eyes, used to an eternity of darkness, were unaccustomed to the brightness that even the dim glow produced. Grunthor muttered curses in the language of the Bolg—his head had been closest to the rock outcropping when it began to shine.

Rhapsody reached up and touched the glowing formation. It was just barely within her reach, hanging at a slanted angle from the wall, unlike the millions of other stalactites they had passed. As she did, some of the rock crumbled from the point and fell to the bottom of the tunnel. A blazing beam of light and flame broke forth from the rock, causing all three travelers to cry out in pain and shield their eyes.

'What is that?" snarled the harsh voice in the lead. Rhapsody peered through her fingers. The tip of the stalactite was burning, tiny flames licking up the shaft of the formation. She stared at it in wonder, then put her hand out to it again. As her fingers neared the flames they intensified and the light grew radiant. When she pulled back, the fire returned to its former state, burning quietly inside the rock.

With the same certainty that led her through the fiery core, she carefully began brushing away the crumbling outside of the stalactite. The rocky matter fell away easily in one piece that tumbled to the ground, leaving a gleaming shaft of burning —light, flames traveling up it while the base glowed ethereally. Rhapsody caught her breath.