Rhapsody, Child of Blood (29 page)

'It's a sword," she said softly.

The Firbolg looked at each other. She was right; emerging from the slime-covered wall was a flaming sword blade, its shaft beneath the flickering fire glowing intensely blue-white and engraved in intricate patterns.

'Can you pul it out, miss?" Grunthor urged.

'Do you think she should?" asked Achmed.

'I don't think I can reach it," Rhapsody replied, looking at the ground for some sort of natural elevation. Grunthor bent down on one knee and patted his thigh.

'Up ya go," he said, grinning at her.

Rhapsody returned his grin. She rested one hand on the enormous shoulder and climbed up onto the ledge he had made with his leg.

The top part of the stalactite was now in reach. She grabbed it where it met the rockwall and gave it a wrenching pull. The sword came loose with no more resistance than if it had been hanging by a thread. Rhapsody would have lost her balance and fallen on her back had Grunthor's massive hand not shot out and steadied her.

She cljmbed off his knee and sat down on it instead, holding the swoifd by the blade despite the flames that ran up and down it, so her companions could see it. It was made of something that resembled silver, though its sheen was different. Beneath the glowing light and the flickering flames the blade was slender and lightweight, with intricate runes adorning it.

The hilt was made of the same white-silver metal, beautifully fashioned, with a crosspiece that, along with the pommel at the base, was made to look like a star.

Within the hilt was a setting from which a gem, or something like it, had been pried; it was empty now, the prongs bent outward uniformly. It rested in her hands, burning brightly, without harming her at all. Achmed removed a glove and held his own finger near it, withdrawing it quickly.

'Oi think it likes 'er, sir," Grunthor said. "No accounting for taste," muttered Achmed.

Rhapsody laughed. There was a look on his face that almost resembled a smile.

'Kinda makes you wish we'd slapped a few o' these pointy things down, don't it, just to see what's inside. Oh well, looks —like you got yourself a fine sword, Yer Ladyship.

Oi hope can use it with some credit to your instructor."

'I'll practice next time the tunnel widens," Rhapsody promised, handing Grunthor back the sword he had loaned her. "Thanks for letting me borrow Lucy."

'It may be unwise to say so, but I believe we're coming to the end of the Root,"

Achmed said quietly. "What do you think, Grunthor?"

'Well, we're nearer the surface than we 'ave been since we started down this stinkin'

'ole," the giant replied, looking around. " 'Oo knows, we might be only a few miles away from the air."

'That's comforting," said Rhapsody. She was still staring at the sword. Fragments of distant images tugged at the outskirts of her consciousness, but nothing she understood. She blinked, and the fragments vanished.

Achmed bent down and picked up the black piece of the rock cylinder in which the sword had been encased.

'This might do for a scabbard until you find something else. I don't think leather or anything like it would work." He took a small broken piece of the rock and dropped it in the top of the makeshift scabbard, plugging the hole that she had made in the bottom.

Rhapsody resheathed the sword, plunging the tunnel into darklight again. "Did you want me to keep it out for light?"

'Not until we have a need of something brighter than we have," said Achmed. "Let's press on. I want to see where this trunk root goes."

Rhapsody and Grunthor brushed off the sediment from the stalactite. Once their eyes had adjusted, they followed him into the never-ending passageway yet again.

>ve're very near the surface; I know it."

They had been crawling for an agonizingly long time, the fissures in the rock growing smaller and smaller, leaving them nothing more than a burrow tunnel sized for a large animal to squeeze through. Grunthor had gotten stuck several times, requiring him to be dug out.

Rhapsody felt her heart leap at Achmed's words. She had been fighting the feeling of suffocation for so long that she feared she might lose what slight grip she still had on reality.

She came to a halt behind Achmed, who had stopped in his 202—tracks, rolled over onto his back, and pulled off one of his thin gloves. He ran his hand over the rockwall above and around him in the silence of an ancient memory.

The fabric of the Earth is worn thin there.

He craned his neck and turned back to Rhapsody. "Draw that thing; I need some light."

She complied, lying on her back as well and pulling the sword out of its makeshift scabbard. Carefully she handed it to him by the hilt.

Achmed held the sword above his head and up to the wall like a blazing torch, feeling his way, using his heels to move himself along. Suddenly he pulled the weapon back in front of his face. In the flickering firelight he examined the handle, his eyes glittering as he turned the weapon over in his hands.

'Gods," he whispered.

'What's the matter?" Rhapsody asked in alarm. She felt Grunthor squeeze forward and press his head up to above her knee, balancing on his palms, which he had positioned on the ground to either side of her thigh.

'Daystar Clarion," Achmed said, his voice a little louder. Grunthor made a sound of disbelief.

'What?" Rhapsody asked, panic beginning to set in. "What does that rnean?"

'Are you sure, sir?" asked Grunthor.

'No question."

'What are you talking about?" Rhapsody shrieked. The sound of her own voice frightened her; it was past the edge of rationality.

Achmed tossed the sword onto the tunnel floor past him and clutched his head with his hands, muttering obscenities in Bolgish. Grunthor exhaled in resignation and moved away a little. He patted her leg awkwardly.

'It's a famous sword from the Island, Duchess," the Sergeant said despondently.

'From the Island? From Serendair? Are you sure?"

'Yes," Achmed snarled. "It's unmistakable, though I don't know why it's on fire. The gleam of the starlight is still there, as are the runes on the hilt. It's definitely Daystar Clarion."

'So that means—"

'We're back where we started. We may as well have never left."

Rhapsody tried to absorb the sense of despair that filled the tunnel. Unlike her Bolg companions, her heart leapt in joy. They were home. It hardly seemed to make sense, but, nonetheless, they had managed to take a wrong turn somewhere and end up where they had begun. The excitement that was welling up within her beat down the fury she felt at having spent so much time in agony, separated from her loved ones, only to wind up here again. She was home.

'We have to get out of here," she said. "Keep going."

Achmed sighed. "This is the end of the tunnel. The trunk root's tunnel is too small to go any further."

Rhapsody's heart froze. "How are we going to get out?"

'With the key, I guess."

Cold waves of panic washed over her. "We don't have the key, remember? It vanished when the door in Sagia closed."

'You know, you really are gullible." Achmed pulled his hand out from behind his back and gesticulated; in it appeared a black bone key, no longer glowing as it had.

Rhapsody's face went blank with shock.

'You bastard."

Grunthor's hands shot out and grabbed her by the shoulders, correctly anticipating her furious lunge at Achmed. She struggled violently, fUtilely, to break free of the giant's grip, clawing at the air between them.

'You bastard. You lying, scum-sucking, manipulative bastard!"

'Technically true, but there's no real need to insult my mother." Achmed ran his hand over the ceiling again, ignoring the heat that was beginning to radiate from the white-hot rage building in the tunnel behind him. His fingers sensed the rip in the fabric of the universe, a thin metaphysical opening, directly above him.

He inserted the key, or tried to. Nothing happened. A resounding
clink
echoed through the tunnel as he met with solid rock. He tried once more and still met with no success. In disgust he threw it to the ground, lay back, and cursed again.

Rhapsody's anger vanished. "What's wrong?"

'It doesn't work."

'Excuse me?"

'It doesn't work," he repeated softly. "I guess we weren't the only things remade by the fire."

His hand returned to the ceiling, and as he did a vision formed in his mind. It was related to the sense of direction he had had all along, a rapid soaring through the rock, through layers of earth and clay and dry grass and snow until his mind's sight burst into the sunlight. He gasped aloud and closed his eyes in pain.

Rhapsody reached for him. "Are you all right?" Achmed shrugged her away. "Leave me alone. I'm fine, except that I'm back where I started and trapped at the only place we can get out. The gods must be laughing themselves sick right now."

'

'Ow far to the surface, sir?" "I don't know. Several hundred feet." Grunthor stretched his massive frame along the floor of the tunnel, sighing as his cramped muscles uncoiled. "Is that all, then? 'Ave out o' there, if you please, sir, and Oi'll start dig-gin'."

Rhapsody tucked her knees under her and twisted to look at him. "Grunthor, didn't you hear him? He said we're still several hundred feet underground."

'Then we better get to it, eh? You got somethin' better to do, Yer Ladyship? 'Ere, move out o' there." Rhapsody stared at him as he pulled out a small retrenching tool, known unimpressively as Digga. She picked up her sword and did as he asked, followed a moment later by Achmed.

't>o you know what you're doing, Grunthor?" she asked nervously as she crouched in an indentation in the tunnel. "Nope."

She blinked, then looked to Achmed, who shrugged. "All right," she said finally, "I suppose there's something to be said for winging it."

Grunthor lay down at the head of the tunnel. Taking the small shovel in both hands, he coiled and then thrust it into the wall with all his weight and might. There were sparks, but no visible impact on the stone. He repeated the motion, and a few chips of stone flew. Then again. And again.

Soon he slipped into a rhythm, smashing the tiny tool into the rock over and over.

The iron began to bend, but he continued relentlessly. Rhapsody and Achmed set up in the tunnel behind him, passing back the debris from his digging, shoving it behind them to avoid blocking the passageway.

'Isn't this an excellent way to bring the ceiling down on our heads?" she asked the Dhracian as he handed her a good-sized rock. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of Grunthor's strikes.

'Not really," he replied, turning away to gather more stone shards. "If you want him to accomplish that, I'll ask him to dig straight up."

'No, thanks," she replied hurriedly. Achmed had a look of quiet anger in his eyes; she wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or sincere. The latter was far more frightening.

<_As the hours passed, several things became clear to the two companions who crawled behind Grunthor as he chiseled his way out of the earth. The first, and most obvious, was that there was no longer any way to stop him; the giant Bolg was unresponsive to their calls to slow down, to rest. It was as if he had taken on a life-and-death struggle with the Earth itself, refusing to give in, even if it would mean his demise.

That prospect seemed somehow unlikely. Another conclusion the two others had come to was that Grunthor was more than a man possessed, he was becoming part of the Earth as he worked.

He now aimed unerringly for the tiny fissures and faults in the granite, sending large chips flying off the rockface. Each crack, each weakness made itself apparent to him in a way that filled the tunnel with the sound of ringing metal and crumbing stone.

Rhapsody watched him work with a smile of wonder on her face. Grunthor, strong and reliable as the Earth itself , she had called him in his namesong, among other descriptions. She was seeing the truth in her words before her.

The last revelation they had mutually come to was that, for better or worse, they would either succeed here or die now. The tunnel behind them was filling with the rubble from Grunthor's efforts, blocking any escape back down the way they had come.

The understanding of this had been exchanged wordlessly. Rhapsody had looked back at the wreckage to find Achmed staring in the same direction. Their eyes had met, and both had smiled with the look of shipmates clinging to the last piece of a storm-ruined ship.

Grunthor stopped only once, long enough to turn Digga at a different angle. Then he began shearing sheets of rock off the wall before them, his trajectory changing slightly. 206 He was as a gemcutter, seeing intrinsically the perfect place to strike the stone. The more he dug, the more refined became whatever gift of sight into itself the Earth had given him. He seemed to see not only the cracks in the wall but how those cracks stretched into the surrounding bedrock, and where the bedrock eroded away into the soil far above it. He now had to break the debris he was passing back to Rhapsody and Achmed into smaller pieces, as it was growing too large for them to move.

His sense of conscious thought receded; he fell deeper and deeper into himself.

Whatever awareness of the world around him that remained vanished, along with dreams of the Future and the memory of the Past. There was only Grunthor and the Earth, and then just the Earth. He could feel the element as if it were his own body. It was all that remained of the universe, and he was part of it, just the soil, and the clay, and the rock. And then there was no more rock.

^runthor stumbled out into the air in shock. The wind around him stung his eyes and nose with its freshness, making him feel strangely morose. The blood that had been pumping in great volume from his racing heart slowed suddenly, leaving him faint.

He staggered into the new darkness and pitched forward on his face. The earth that a moment ago was entwined around him with a lover's warmth bit painfully, coldly into his eyes.

Immediately behind him Rhapsody and Achmed emerged into the freezing night air.