Destiny: Child Of Sky (28 page)

Particular interest existed in Sorbold, the arid realm of sun that had once been part of the Cymrian empire but now stood alone, an independent nation tied to Roland only through the common religious connection to the elderly Patriarch of Sepulvarta, the head of the religion of both lands. The Sorbolds craved access to the fine weapons being produced in the fires of the Firbolg forges. There were few natural resources in their land, and steel production there was expensive and difficult.

They pressed the issue through Syn Crote, their ambassador, who was noted for his persuasiveness. But Achmed, while signing trade treaties for other goods, withheld the sale of armaments to Sorbold, reasoning that it was singularly unwise to outfit a bordering nation, no matter how friendly its ambassador, with the weapons of his own arsenal. The Crown Prince of Sorbold bit his tongue and smiled painfully, but any fool could see that the resentment of this arrangement would sooner or later lead to, at bare minimum, renewed discussions, and probably worse. For the moment, however, peace reigned.

Once the trade agreements were set in place, King Achmed drafted a plan to protect those transactions and other correspondence from the random and inexplicable violence that had been a staple of this new land since he, Rhapsody, and Grunthor had crawled out of the Root into this place.

A series of guarded caravans, accompanied at weekly intervals by two score and ten of Tristan Steward's soldiers, made the rounds of all the interconnected lands of the middle continent—Ylorc to Bethe Corbair to Sorbold to Sepulvarta, across the Krevensfield Plain to Bethany and Navarne, then on to Tyrian to Avonderre to Gwynwood and Canderre, north to the frozen Hintervold, then east to the heat of Yarim and back, at last, to Ylorc. The route was a fairly easy one, though it traveled through varied terrain, making use of the old Cymrian road system that had been built in the empire's heyday.

With the return of relatively safe mail and selective travel came at last some relief from the sense of isolation the different realms of the continent had felt over the last twenty or so years, since the violence had escalated to its terrifying level.

Those traveling in carriages and merchant carts would schedule journeys, when possible, to coincide with the weekly caravans, grateful for the opportunity to benefit from their protection.

For one group, however, one unknown, secret group in a little known land, the mail caravans provided something completely different. To the Finders, it was an opportunity, the first in history, to seek something in a distant place that might help bring the Voice to them again at last.

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Even the Bolg populace that shared the same mountains, held the same watches, and had inhabited the same realm for five centuries knew nothing of the existence of the Finders who lived among them. It was a society that was secret, membership seeming to pass inconsistently through certain clans, its lineage unclear. The harsh reality of Firbolg existence coupled with a decided lack of sophistication when it came to genealogy tended to prevent a trend from being recognized. Even within families the secret was kept—it was not spoken of from father to son, or between mates. No one knew of the Finders except the Finders themselves, and even they did not seek to know the names of all who felt the calling.

And it was a calling in the strictest sense that brought them together. They had nothing else in common that they could discern—no physical attributes that they could see as similar. Part of the reason for this was the widespread pollution of the Bolg bloodline; they were a truly bastard race, adulterated with the blood traits of every other race they had contacted, and so no pure Bolg racial characteristics existed. Another reason, however, was that they met in the dark, and therefore could not see what others might have—that there was a unique aspect to most of them, a slightly more human, or perhaps just slightly more refined, appearance than the other Bolg.

Appearance, however, was not the main trait the Finders had in common. Had Bolg life been less treacherous, less prone to early demise, it might have been noted that the Finders had a tendency toward longevity, at least by Firbolg standards. But since the day-to-day reality of Ylorc was a harsh one, there was often such early mortality that this trait never grew into a trend, either. Even the new warlord's party of four, which had arrived and taken the mountain the previous winter, had been reduced by one; the Second Woman, the yellow-haired teenager called Jo that the Bolg believed to be King Ach-med's less favored courtesan, had died as the leaves had begun to fall, less than one turn of the seasons after they had come.

So, though the Finders did not recognize a common physical similarity among themselves, nor notice their disposition for a somewhat longer life span, they did observe one very specific ability to be unique among the members of their unspoken fellowship—they had a sense of the whereabouts of Willum objects, especially those marked with the Sign.

The Bolg as a race were not given to storytelling, and so the tales of their history were inconsistent as well as few and far between. But one piece of history was more or less common knowledge among all the clans of the Bolg: the Eyes, the mountaintop-dwelling spies; the Claws, those Bolg that inhabited the western areas of Ylorc that ended with the vast, dry canyon and the Blasted Heath above it; and the Guts, the fierce, war-prone clans of the Hidden Realm, the deep lands beyond the canyon.

Regardless of clan, all the Bolg knew the story of their taking of the mountain from the Willum king.

Before they inhabited Canrif, once one of the wonders of the world, ruined for centuries and now, slowly, undergoing reconstruction, the Bolg had been cave dwellers, a subhuman population barely more manlike than the cave bears and subterranean wolves that preyed upon them, and that they in turn preyed upon.

They had lived in endless darkness, and bred with whatever small enclaves of outsiders they could subdue. Firbolg as a race lived all over the world, but the individual members would never have known that, because their concept of the world was limited to the caverns and hillsides in which they scratched out a hard and sometimes brutal living.

At least, that is, until the Willums came. The Firbolg had made note of the Cymrians almost from the moment the wayfarers from Serendair arrived in the Teeth; the ragtag caravan of storm-tossed survivors of the Third Fleet's tumultuous crossing had at first looked like prime targets for attack—vulnerable, exhausted, utterly without hope, or so it seemed; Bolg could smell such a thing. When, however, their numbers became clear—there were more than fifty thousand of them—the Bolg slunk back to the shadow of their caves. They watched as the newcomers transformed the mountains into towering cities, sprawling farmlands, well-tended forests, and deep labyrinths, the empire Gwylliam named Canrif, the Cymrian word for century, because he had vowed that within a hundred years' time it would be the marvel of the world.

And so, as the Cymrian empire grew and expanded, the Bolg disappeared deeper and deeper into the earth, moved farther back into the wastelands to the east, until the War came.

Gwylliam's battle with his wife and queen, Anwyn, the half-dragon daughter of the wyrm Elynsynos, had started as the result of what the Cymrians called the Grievous Blow, a strike across her face resulting from a marital spat of unknown cause. The resulting war decimated both the continent and the Cymrian population, which had split in twain, some choosing to follow Anwyn, others remaining loyal to Gwylliam. It was a bloody conflict that tore families asunder, even pitting Anwyn and Gwylliam's own sons, Llauron and Anborn, against one another, and causing the eldest son, Edwyn Grifryth, to abandon the family altogether.

The Bolg knew none of the details. They did know, however, that the once impenetrable fortress in the Teeth was crumbling at the edges; the border patrols that had held an iron grip on the mountains were scarcely seen at all after the first two centuries of the seven-hundred-years-long war. Five hundred years into the conflict, the Bolg finally worked up the courage to begin to take advantage of the situation.

Slowly at first, and then, encouraged by their success, with a bolder outlook, a few clans began to establish small enclaves at the outskirts of Gwylliam's vast realm.

The Lord Cymrian had been too engaged to care that a ratty population of cave dwellers found its way across the eastern steppes and into some of the older sections of his vast labyrinth. Minor reports of lost Cymrian patrols or stores unaccounted for were hidden in the greater and bloodier balance sheets of the battles against Anwyn. His indifference proved to be his kingdom's undoing in the end.

As Anwyn's army was approaching, preparing to launch their last in a series of unsuccessful assaults on the mountain, the Bolg took the opportunity to overrun Canrif. Gwylliam had disappeared, and Anborn, Gwylliam's youngest son and his general, was faced with the grim decision to evacuate while he could, or try and fight the battle on two fronts, from within the mountain as well as from without.

He calculated wisely that he could not hold both, and that, in fact, the mountain was already lost to the Firbolg. Canrif, the crown jewel of the Cymrian empire, which had stretched from the mountains to the western seacoast, encompassed great provincial cities, built and maintained thousands of leagues of roadways and aqueducts, basilicas of visionary architecture, and harbors sheltering a thousand ships at a time, crumbled like sand and fell forever into the eagerly outstretched hands of a populace the humans considered to be monsters.

With the overrunning of Canrif came looting, of course, and all the treasures left behind—at least those things not hidden within the library's vaults, because the library had been fitted with a musical lock that the Bolg had never been able to open—were gathered, split, battled over, or destroyed. So much of what the Cymrians valued—writings, art, maps and artifacts of the old world, museum pieces and items of technological invention—were of little or no use to the Bolg, and ended up as spurned booty. An entire private library of ancient manuscripts became fuel for a celebratory bonfire.

What the Cymrians left behind that the Bolg did value was joyfully divided or viciously fought over, sometimes again and again. Livestock, textiles, weapons and armor, and food stores were seized and carried off. Jewelry was prized as well.

Even now, five centuries later, it was not uncommon to see the most ragged of Bolg women or even men, their bodies hard and leathery from lack of clothing and exposure to the elements, walking the corridors of Canrif wearing ornate necklaces on their heads like circlets or earrings clipped in their hair.

Gold coins, while initially interesting because of their shine, quickly were discarded by most of the Bolg. The culture had no concept of currency, though they did grasp the idea of barter, but only in that they knew how to trade useful goods for other useful goods. Shiny, heavy metal, while pretty, but too soft to make a reasonable weapon, had no real value, and thus was left, discarded, when the Bolg scavenged the abandoned hallways and chambers where the Cymrian populace had once lived.

But these coins did have value to the Finders, because they bore the Sign.

The sign was common in the Willum city. It was a symbol that meant nothing to the Bolg, and, in fact, contained pictures of things they had never seen before. In the foreground of the image was a star shining over the heads of a rampant lion and a griffin, beasts the Bolg had never seen nor even could have imagined. Behind those beasts was an image of the Earth, an oak tree growing on it, with roots that pierced through the bottom; again, nothing recognizable to such a primitive culture.

The Finders valued anything Willum they could find, but in order to have a place in this secret brotherhood, a man or woman had to prove himself or herself to be a true recipient of the call by finding something that bore the Sign.

In the early days after the Willums had been driven from the mountain this had been a relatively easy thing to do. But as the centuries wore on, anything that had been lost in the melee had most likely been found, or had fallen so deep into the ruin of the underground city that discovering it was sheer luck. Each new discovery was cause for great excitement, because perhaps it was the item the Voice had demanded be brought to it. Over the centuries a vast hoard of items had been found, but none had proven to be the right one. Eventually, it seemed that everything that could be found within the mountain, or across the Heath in the Hidden Realm, had been found.

Still, the late-generation Finders did feel the presence of a few trinkets here and there in distant places. Most were within the realm of Roland, and therefore

“finding" them would be out of the question. A few items, however, had been sensed by many generations to be in Sorbold, but until the trade agreements and the great caravans made it possible, there was no way to broach the mountains to get them.

Until now.

The coming of the Dark Man, one who called himself the Snake King, to the mountain had provided the means for the Finders to finally obtain their treasure.

And his leaving had provided the opportunity for them to do so.

agraith waited in the shadows of the barracks fire, the stew in his battered metal plate growing cold, untouched. As the soldiers of his regiment, selected from the heartier of Eye and Claw clans of the Inner Teeth, chortled and ate greedily in the flickering light, he was watching, listening for the sign only he knew was coming.

At first he almost didn't hear it. It was muffled by the clanging of metal plates, the grunting and scuffling. But deep and distinct, repeated twice, he heard the tones, five together, chanted twice. He lowered his eyes into his mug.

Tonight the meeting place would be at the Hand.

In the darkest corridors of the part of the labyrinth known as Sigreed, the Crypt, or more literally the Village of the Dead, four men met in secret. In the distance they could hear the ringing of the ancient forges pounding out new weapons, new armor, new steel for the Rebuilding, a hollow, clanging sound that was more than a little unnerving. If the Bolg had been literate they might also have found it unnerving to be hiding among row upon row of burial plaques that lined the walls of the corridors, marking the tombs of viceroys and chancellors, confessors and advisors of the Cymrian Age long gone, their wisdom now buried deep.