The Four Forges (80 page)

“It is written there is a dome,” Lariel had told her. “Of natural rock, perhaps quartz or agate, cut so finely that it is translucent and the sun can beat down upon it, and shine through, as though the Gods made a window to look upon the Andredia. When you see light at the tunnel’s end, you’ll know you have found it.”

And she saw light. Faint as a wavering breath, a turquoise blue upon the black of no light at all, awaiting her.

Between her and it, a shadow loomed, piercing the blue halo. Pebbles crunched under its boots as it drew near her, and she it.

“Give me the sword.”

Like a wind hissing through the tunnels, words carried to her. Cerat answered in her hand, tip going up, pointing at the speaker, carrying her toward him.

Cyclone wings of shadow wrapped about him. He stood in a maelstrom of dark and storm, and she saw a blade gleam in his hand, a throwing dagger, his face obscured by the slow-turning shades enveloping him. He wrapped himself in oblivion.

“You will die here.”

Then she’d be that much closer to Sevryn. The sound of water bubbling up could be heard clearly under his words, over them, through them. “We both may,” she told him.

“Give me the sword, and all is forgotten.”

Forgotten? That was all she had, her memories. They filled her up. Created to be a vessel, she held so much more than her creators had ever intended. She overflowed with all her yesterdays, so that nothing should ever be forgotten.

“No,” Rivergrace answered flatly. She charged at him, giving Cerat its wish and will.

The being darted aside. She fell underneath the dome, seeing an agate-blue sky overhead as she rolled, and kicked out, and caught the attacker in the knee. He fell, swathed in black and shadow, even his face, tumbling head forward and coming back up on his feet. He swung, cuffing her in the side of the head, and she reeled back, biting her lip. Her vision blurred, then steadied.

“The sword,” said the Kobrir a third time.

“No.” Anger welled up in her, fused her, and she welcomed it. She twirled the blade about, then straightened her wrist, and put her other hand upon it, for its weight made it a two-handed sword for her. She fought for her balance and waited for him. “Come and get it, if you dare.”

With a hiss of anger, the Kobrir jumped, but not at her. He jumped at the cave wall to the side, and rebounded, somersaulting in the air above her. It happened so quickly that she readied for him out of instinct rather than planning. Perhaps it was Cerat, eager.

Perhaps it was that silvery fire that raged in her.

Perhaps it was the Kobrir’s destiny.

She dropped a shoulder and went to her right knee, jabbing her arms to the left, elbows straight and braced. He leaped on her with a scream as the blade impaled him, ran through him raggedly, and Cerat sucked at his soul. She couldn’t hold him. He fell off the sword when she dropped it down, and lay in a rapidly growing pool of blood bathing him and the blade.

He looked up at her in sheer amazement. His clothing lay in blood-sodden wings about him, its life ebbing as his did. Cerat jerked, straining to reach the crimson puddle. She would not let it.

“Narskap...did not...tell me...this.” The Kobrir threw his hand up in one last convulsion of life, arched his back, and died.

Rivergrace looked down at her chest, where the Kobrir’s silver thorn blossomed as it pierced her, below her left breast, and she did not feel the pain till the next breath. She would pull it free, but now her life pulsed in her ears, beats of time, and she knew she hadn’t much left.

She stepped into the blue twilight. She had come down one passage, but another lay before her, blasted into the mountain crudely, hacked into the heart of this sacred place. Rails led out, an overturned cart rusting away on its side. A well of stone and mortar stood around the wellspring, damming it from where it flowed up and over a streambed, forcing it down another. She saw the great blackened wall where wood piles had burned, and bellows heaved to bring air, and two anvils stood anchored into the cave, stained with the rust of blood as well as metals beaten upon them. The Andredia ran sluggishly into vats and man-made bowls to cool and temper the steel, and the water smelled of the souls sacrificed therein to call down the Gods in this sacred place, before it slowed down an unnatural riverbed, carrying its poisoning with it. This must have been a forge long before the other, and fouler, and darker.

Her soul quailed at the enormity of it. She ached to cleanse it and hardly knew where to begin, or if she would live long enough to complete the task. She hesitated.

As if sensing her weakness and testing it, under the agate sky, a thing erupted from the stone. It unwound with a hiss, and unfurled its wings of marble-veined quartz. Eyes of fire opened to stare down at her. A drake of stone, of quartz and marble and mica-limned granite, hunched over her, alive yet not alive, with blue agate tracings upon its figure, and it blocked her way to the wellspring.

She was not enough. Even with Sevryn here by her side, and Lariel, and Jeredon, and Garner and Nutmeg, she doubted they could take this stone dragon down. Born of tales from the toback shops, it rumbled a growl, the sound a tumbling of rock over dirt and stone, that came boiling out with white steam that stank of the tainted river. Meshed of earth and water and fire, this impossible creature snaked its neck back and forth, sharp-paned head with hooked beak of a mouth opened to show teeth of hardened gemstone. It lifted a taloned foot, and flailed its long tail about it, end spiked with granite-laced quartz. Rivergrace stepped back.

Her thoughts spun away. How had the Kobrir gotten past this? How had those who mined and smithed here not awakened it? Or had the pain of the Andredia created it, too late to save itself. Four forges dire; earth, water, air, and fire . . .

It coiled and followed her movement. Its wings lifted and moved, and a wind rushed from them that pushed at her, tearing at the ragged ends of her journey-worn clothing before whistling away through the caverns. She put her face into it, blinking into a gritty veil of sand that stung her eyes. Pounding her sword upon the stone drake would be no more useful than slamming Cerat against the anvil.

Breath lanced through her with fiery, aching pain, the dagger buried deeply in her, a silvery thorn she dared not pluck away. No time to think. Only remember.

She turned on one heel, slowly, to face the wellspring and the dam that plagued it. The drake’s head rose as it gathered itself to strike. The water called to her and she answered back. She began to sing, in a thin, halting voice, the song she sang to the Silverwing and to the well she’d opened in Calcort, and to every drop of water she’d ever touched. A song that came to her anchored in her past, almost regained, never quite understood. She wrapped both hands about Cerat, the sword with her love’s soul entrapped in it, and whispered to him to lend her strength from within the steel. She had but one strike, possibly two. No more.

She wheeled about and hammered the blade down on the rock wall about the Andredia, putting her back to the dragon. Steel clanged and belled upon stone. The cavern reverberated with it, and the drake let out a screech that made her ears bleed, and still she sang. Rock gave. The wall cupping the font cracked away, and the Andredia trickled down, moistening the gravel at her feet. Hot breath and steam scalded the back of her neck, her shoulders, her hair singed away. She struck again, crying in agony. Cerat tolled its blow as if a massive instrument, ringing, and it held the note as she felt the river answer. It geysered up, freed, erupting in cold spray and foam, flooding. Her voice broke. Cerat splintered. As it gave way, she did too, half turning, collapsing, her eyes on the thing made of crystal and gold and granite and jade and copper and all else the earth could hold, the fire in its eyes extinguished. The drake collapsed upon itself, returned to unmoving stone.

She felt herself unravel, unmade, the vessel shattered. Her life whirlpooled in the waters of the Andredia as it rushed around her. Rivergrace fell to her hands and knees in the cascading spray. With every drop that touched her, she melted, washed away.

 
As she spins into nothingness, scenes flit before her eyes. From small hands that hid food and gave crumbs and strings of meat to Rufus when he came down to visit, to being thrown on a raft in high flood, to watching her mother and father swept away from her, to the raft tossing and turning and being caught up in the hand of a Goddess. Called to the sword Cerat by its maker as well as the Demon intended to be called, the Goddess struggles to deny the summons. She anchors herself in the small, half-starved body of a girl child who welcomes her in fear and loneliness and mourning and love aching to be shared. The Goddess is summoned, both into the child and into the sword, sundered, corrupted by the Demon that shares the sword, its element of riverwater befouled, Her very existence tenuous and yet . . . caged in mortal flesh, a hold that She cannot deny and must use. The other mortals are torn away, the raft is but a small pause in a moment of infinity, and She spins it away, trying to win her battle against Her enslavement.

 
Rivergrace tilted her face upward, seeing a reflection in the mists above her, a face looking kindly down at her, as her flesh melted into the debris of the font, her existence washing away into the sacred waters of the Andredia. Nearly twenty years the Goddess had held her in her palm, trying to stay the power of the sword which slowly sucked Her being into it save for that which She pushed into the child. The day came when the two of them as one could not hold the raft from its journey any longer and it rushed downstream in spring’s flood tide bearing her into the mortal world. Now her cage, the sword Cerat, had been broken on the very font that the Goddess gave life to, and received life from, freeing her trapped essence.

A vessel for two mortals and one immortal and now all were freed, and the purpose finished. Gently but undeniably, the Goddess reclaimed Herself from the child who had grown to a woman. Rivergrace put her hand up. She had been so much more than a vessel. Sevryn had told her truly. She held all that she had been meant for, and much, much more, beyond Vaelinars and Gods, she held herself and a love for those around her. Fulfilled, she relinquished herself as Rivergrace in surrender, and her song fell quiet.

The river roared about the cavern, then subsided into its natural bed, flowing down through the mountain as it had been meant to do, its color deepened by the agate dome overhead, the forge battered and washed away by the power of the water unleashed, and the hand of a Goddess. It swept away all in its path inexorably, carrying the debris down the mountain, cascading out into the air and daylight, falling in veils to the riverbeds below awaiting it and filling them with life.

 
A form washes ashore.

A splintery shard is grasped in her hand. The blood is washed from her clothing and her body, and the wounds upon her flesh are healed, thin white lines marking their path upon her. She does not breathe till a misty aura surrounds her, and a Voice that cannot be heard by ordinary ears whispers, “The pact with House Arsmyth holds, and this I give to you alone. A life for a life, a memory for those I took from you. Remember love. Arise with your true name, Vahlinora, and seek that which you loved most.” The aura fades as a rainbow does in the rain, fleeting and visible for only a moment and then the wonder is gone.

She takes a deep breath and coughs. She breathes again. The sword in her hand, what is left of it, falls into ruins. It releases a wraith which gazes down at her, touches her forehead and murmurs, “Aderro,” before it flees upon the air. Her third breath is a sob as she gathers herself, rising, riverwater falling off her in droplets to the parched ground.

She feels heat in her body, substance to her flesh, pain remembered as a dim ache. A bird flashes overhead on wing, and she looks up. It could be the same day, or another, or a new day two decades from the one she remembers last.

She has been told to search, and so she does, tracing her steps haltingly down the mountain.

 
Lariel sat, bowed over her weapons and armor. The sun slanted down on her, bringing the gold out fiercely in her hair, her face translucent and pale. Her shirt rode indecently high on her ribs, the hem torn away to wrap her left forearm from elbow to wrist. She looked up the mountain, her gaze fixed, waiting. She sat watch by the pool of blood Grace had left, to help sate the Demon dog.

Unheard, Rivergrace came up the trail from below. She stood a long moment, looking at the queen, at last understanding a little bit about why Lariel wore the title she did.

“I’m not there,” she said.

Lariel swung about, crying, “Grace!”

“The Andredia is freed.” Her chestnut hair stirred on her shoulders as the sun and a gentle wind dried it. She swayed with it. Lariel put her arm out to catch her by the shoulder.

“And you?”

Rivergrace smiled. “I have memories.”

Lariel hesitated with her mouth curved half-open, as if holding back. A curl of smoke reached them, smelling of roasting meat and bitter herbs. “I built a pyre,” she told Grace. “I didn’t want the Demon eating our horses.”

“Good.” She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Black Ribbon’s ravaged body. She reached up and held Lariel’s hand on her shoulder, a half embrace. “At least the walk is downhill.”

 
The moon rose early in the daytime sky as it sometimes does, golden as a crown piece although not quite full, and they walked the rest of the day and all of the night under its glow. They spoke sparingly, their path taking them down the mountain trail, the water pouring from the mountain pacing them. The river filled slowly as the hungry land drank it down and they watched it first grow damp, then trickle, then become a freshet, a brook. By the dawn, when they reached the bottom of the mountain, it had gone ahead of them, and they walked by a river that would join the others, its current carrying it into Larandaril.