Destiny: Child Of Sky (101 page)

His mind went to Rhapsody, as it often did when he was not concentrating on anything in particular. Anborn wondered what she was doing at that moment, then squelched the thought. He had caught the look between her and Gwydion. Unless his nephew was an utter fool, he had a fairly good idea what she was probably in the process of undertaking, and it would not be gentlemanly to speculate about it further.

He laughed aloud, delighted in the turn of events and the promise of a new beginning. Good cheer broke over him like a wave, racing through his hair like the wind that flapped his cloak behind him. His spirits were high as the starry sky above him, around him, all the way to the endless horizon just beginning to lighten at the approach of morning.

Anwyn brought the horn to her lips and sounded it.

The blast that issued forth was not heard in this time, nor by any living soul. It echoed instead through the realm of the Past, as it had so many centuries before, swelling from the silvery horn and hovering on the heavy air of ancient memory.

Then, after a long reverberation, it rained slowly down from the air and settled into the earth.

Anwyn smiled and closed her eyes. In a voice hollow with memory she began the chant.

The raid on Farrow's Down. .

The siege of Bethe Corbair.

The Death March of the Cymrian Nain.

The burning of the western villages.

Kesel Tai.

Tomingorllo.

Lin en Swale.

The slaughter at Wynnarth Keep.

The rape of the Tarimese water camp.

The assault on the southeastern Face.

The evisceration of the fourth column.

The mass execution of the First Fleet farming settlements.

The Battle of Canderian Fields.

One by one, ever so patiently, she recounted each grim history, each bloody event in the Great War, a conflict ignited by the F'dor but brought about by simpler factors—rage, betrayal, jealousy, lust for power. Hatred, even older than the Before-Time.

When she had recited all the great losses of the war she moved on, to each conflict since, each place where men fell at the manipulation of the demon-spirit.

Finally, when the litany was complete, she raised the horn to her lips again and sounded it.

Anwyn opened her eyes. She smiled.

As Anborn crested the rise of a great swale his stallion reared in fright. Anborn brought him to heel, gentling the animal down, then cast a glance over his shoulder to see what had spooked the horse.

For a moment, he could see nothing in the dark. Then, as his vision sharpened, the blood of the dragon within his veins roared like fire with panic.

'Sweet Creator," he murmured. The words caught in the back of his throat.

The darkness at his feet was shifting.

The wide expanse of the Krevensfield Plain was moving.

Without taking a second breath Anborn dragged his horse back from the brim of the swale and bolted, galloping back toward the Moot, as the ground beneath him split asunder.

haze hung over the Moot; it was not merely the vaporous mist that collected in the Bowl each morning, owing to its low-lying topography, but a cloud of thickheadedness enhanced by the excessive intake and absorption of alcohol. The Great Cymrian Fog, as it was later jokingly known, lifted, as Ashe had predicted, around the same time as the sun came into position directly overhead, forcing even the most resilient of day-sleepers to squint and rise, to make ready for the second session of the Council.

'What a waste,“ Rhapsody whispered to Gwydion as they surveyed the human wreckage stumbling and groaning below them in the Bowl as the attendant Cymrians set about becoming functional again. "I can think of a much nicer form of debauchery than drinking oneself into a stupor.“ "Hold that thought,“ Gwydion replied, patting her "muffins." Rhapsody had sought out Oelendra and privately told her the upcoming news. The Lirin champion's eyes filled with tears and she hugged her queen with an embrace more maternal than any Rhapsody had experienced since she left home. The new Lady Cymrian's throat tightened for a moment, and when she pulled away, her eyes glimmered like those of her ancient friend.

She had dressed for the occasion in a gown of azure silk, fitted at the waist and sleeves before flaring into a full skirt, on which she had belted Daystar Clarion in a waist scabbard. Gwydion's eyes had twinkled when beholding her in it, and he had brushed a kiss on her cheek. “What a beautiful dress; very royal."

Rhapsody shook her head. "It's camouflage. I'm hoping to blend in with the sky.

Maybe they won't see me and will leave me alone."

The ovation that greeted the new Lord and Lady was more subdued than it had been the night before upon their selection, owing mostly to the headaches that excessive applause and whistling might cause the assemblage. The atmosphere seemed to clear up quickly, however, when Ashe took to the Rise and presented his Lady, then asked for a moment of attention for a portentous announcement.

'It is with great joy and consummate humility that I proclaim to you the wonderful news that the Lady Cymrian has graciously consented to be my wife."

The Cymrian multitude was silent for a moment; then a wave of excitement swept through the Bowl, swelling into a roar of approval. Applause and acclamations in myriad languages rang out. The Mountain Knives, the contingent of Nain that Ashe had described on Midsummer's Night the previous year, sent up a war whoop that rocked the Moot, causing the heads of many of their fellow Cymrians to feel as if they had split. Rhapsody smiled at the cheering crowd, the sun glinting off their armor and banners, gleaming with a radiance that bespoke hope for the new age.

A voice, recognizable to her from the day before as a heckler from the House of McLeod, shouted above the gleeful din.

'Gwydion ap Llauron, grandson of Gwylliam the Abuser and Anwyn the Manipulator; how did you gain this Lady? She is unlike your line, which is why she was so well affirmed. Can you assure this assemblage that no violence or coercion was used to reach this agreement?"

The roaring throng fell silent. Gwydion's face turned white and his hands began to shake with a mounting fury. The joy that had been in his eyes a moment before disappeared in the wake of the insult, replaced by a dark, reptilian aspect. He had endured many affronts and slurs the day before on behalf of his family and his House, and had taken them all with goodwill, but the suggestion that he would raise a hand to his bride was more than he could endure. Before he could speak, Rhapsody took his hand.

'Well, I can,“ she said, and her words bore the stamp of true speaking, as well as a hint of humor. "I'm happy to say that no, I didn't have to resort to anything like that—he agreed pretty willingly, actually. So I guess I brought the sword and the thumbscrews for nothing."

The crowd absorbed her words, then burst forth into gales of laughter and applause that rocked the sides of the Moot and echoed off the Teeth. It washed over Gwydion, sweeping his wrath away with it. He blinked as his anger passed, and looked down at Rhapsody; she was smiling up at him with a look of pure trust and confidence making her beautiful countenance ethereal. A grin crept back over his face, and Rhapsody took it in her hands, reaching up to kiss him before the eyes of the Council.

He drew her into his arms, and the cheering rabble faded into obscurity; it was as if they were the only two people there. Their lips met softly, then with more warmth, and as his body began to tremble Gwydion was aware again of the thunderous clamor from the assemblage; the tumult was shaking the ground beneath them. At least he thought it was the noise of the multitude; he knew it would have felt the same kissing her alone on the heath above Elysian.

The sweet scent of Rhapsody's skin, the joy that permeated him in having her finally back in his arms, was perhaps responsible for the obscurement of his senses, the happy haze the shielded him from the growing rumble within the earth, counterbalanced by the eerie silence that had swept over the crowd and swallowed the cheering.

By the time he realized what was happening it was too late.

The first to feel the change was Grunthor.

Like the sensation that occurred within the ear while climbing a high mountain, the pressure in his head expanded, then popped as the earth beneath his feet turned ill.

Achmed looked to his friend questioningly. There was no mistaking the change that had come over the Sergeant-Major; the amber eyes were wide and growing glassy; his bruise-colored skin was flushing, his enormous nostrils flaring as his heart pumped great volumes of blood. He stared off to the west '

for a moment, and then his muscles coiled as he vaulted off the rim of the Moot and down toward the tentative gathering below.

'Down from the rise!“ he roared to Rhapsody, then bolted down the face of Bowl into the crowd of confused Cymrians, who only a moment before had been in the throes of joyous celebration. "Move! Move!" His voice rumbled through the air and over the bewildered populace, frozen in fright as he charged them; then he was shoving them in any direction away from the sloping rise at the center of the Moot which no one but the giant Bolg had felt shaking.

Rhapsody had broken from Gwydion's embrace at Grunthor's shout, and turned to look down into the blank faces of the throng of Cymrians. The crowd was quickly parting in Grunthor's path, scattering out of his way, though the noise of fear had not come forth yet; everything was eerily silent. Her eyes went back to the pulpit, then widened in horror.

'The horn is gone,“ she said to Gwydion, then turned and shouted to Achmed. "The horn is gone!"

Achmed nodded, not turning; he at that moment heard an alarm go up from his lookouts and Tristan's forces on the western face of the Moot. He spun quickly and shielded his eyes from the bright light of noon.

A rider was galloping across the Krevensfield Plain, spurring his horse mercilessly.

Even as far away as he was the Bolg king could hear him shouting hoarsely, sounding an alarm. The Orlandan army, encamped now, began rising unsteadily, cautiously gathering arms and armaments, when another shout went up.

'It's Anborn! Open the gate!"

Behind him the sky was rolling black, clouds of smoke billowing as though a volcano in the sky had erupted. As Anborn approached, the- black smoke roared closer; it had the breadth of a grass fire of continental proportions driving ahead of a purposeful wind, but as it approached it became clear that there was no flame, but rather the earth itself, ripping violently from the wide plain, dust and grit vaulted skyward by the sheer force that disturbed it.

In the shadow of the darkness came an army. For a moment it appeared to be legions of beasts, as much of it did not walk erect, but rather moved across the land as if being dragged by some unseen force. Rhapsody gasped and clutched Gwydion's arm, recalling the vision from the observatory tower. “It's the Cymrian dead, the Fallen, slaughtered in the Great War." Her words came out in a half-whisper. “Anwyn has summoned them from the Past."

The sea of walking bodies crested the horizon, staining the rim of the world black with their number. The shell of every corpse that had perished on the plain or in the mountain, any body that had not been immolated or otherwise fully consumed, had been reanimated by the sheer force of memory and had crawled or staggered or slid toward the Moot; now they stood, amid a sea of the dead, of decay and disease and human fragments magnetized to Anwyn's wrath.

From the peaks of the Teeth came a roar like captured thunder moving through the mountains. Avalanches of rock and soil rolled from the crags, starting at Griwen and then rumbling through Canrif and all of the peaks that rimmed the foothills, until the shale began to rain down on the Moot, a pelting hail of sharp dust. From those hillsides rose more soldiers in Anwyn's force, animated bodies of Nain and Lirin, human and demi-human, adults and children, all the victims of Anwyn and Gwylliam's great folly, crawling forth from the vaults of the dead to answer the call of the horn as they once had long ago.

Outside the Moot, the army of Roland, one hundred thousand strong, began massing into legions and columns. Rhapsody shuddered at the sight. Where before they had seemed a numerous force, one that by its sheer number threatened to challenge Achmed's hold on the mountain, now they were suddenly and overwhelmingly dwarfed, outnumbered perhaps a hundred to one, perhaps more.

She didn't have time to count.

From the belly of the Moot a thundering rumble issued forth. The ground bubbled and broke open an instant later, crushing, overwhelming, swallowing Cymrians from every fleet who had been unable to move out of the way. Amid screams of terror more soldiers of the dead crawled forth, from ancient and forgotten mass graves, swords and rotting spears in their hands wrapped in burial cloths or shroud-rags. Their sightless eyes turned to the scattering masses that fled before them like crows before a storm.

Grunthor and a small band he had conscripted and armed from his personal arsenal had managed to interpose themselves between the crush of fleeing pilgrims and the grisly approach of what seemed thousands of the disinterred. He was simultaneously screaming orders to the ramparts to mobilize the hiding army of the Bolg.

In the panic of the earthen tremors Rhapsody felt a sense of calm settle on her, muting the anger that was burning behind her eyes. Quickly she cast her gaze around the Moot, erupting now beneath the sea of the living, foaming and cresting like an earthen sea, filling it with waves of the dead.

A group of children, mostly human, had been separated in the initial cataclysm, torn from their family groups when the ground sundered. Their cries of panic were only slightly louder than those of the adults struggling to get to them. From her place on the rim above, Rhapsody could see a river of as-yet-undisturbed earth that might serve as a bridge between them.

Gwydion squeezed her hand, then loosed it as they exchanged a nod. “Open the gate!" he shouted to the swirling mass of panicking people nearest the Moot's great earthen doors. He darted down the side of the Bowl toward the entrance gates while Rhapsody hurried in the opposite direction, to the chasm between the children and adults, where the ground was rumbling in the advent of another schism.