Elegy for a Lost Star (11 page)

Then the feast began.

I
t was deep in the night of the Bolg king's return when Trug was summoned.

He felt as if he had been called to rise even before he had finished exhaling his first breath of sleep, yet he did not complain. Complaints were useless, and something about the quiet nervousness of the guard who had come for him told him he was being observed. Trug rose silently and dressed quickly in the manner of all of Achmed's Archons. He had experienced many such midnight summonses in the seven years of his schooling.

He followed the guard past his training ring, noticing by smell that the two horses he had quartered there for the night had been taken, and replaced with two others of similar size and markings. His brows knit together in puzzlement; such a test of his notice had been undertaken less than a year into his training, when it might still have been possible that he did not yet know every one of the three hundred fifty head that he was responsible for stabling. But that trick had not even worked at the time; why anyone was attempting it now was perplexing to him.

Trug, like most of his race, did not give voice to his inner thoughts but rarely, and so he kept his silence as he walked behind the guard. He listened for signs of conversation or movement, but heard nothing except his own breath and the footsteps of the man leading him out of the mountain tunnels.

Unlike most of his fellow subjects, it was part of Trug's training to be able to speak; what he was speaking, however, were the thoughts of the Bolg king, both within the mountain and outside it. It was his path to be trained as the Voice, the Archon that King Achmed expected to handle all of the communications, both official and secret, on behalf of the Bolglands, including the management of the miles of speaking tubes that ran throughout the mountains, left over from the Cymrian Age. In that capacity he had been trained from childhood for the last seven years, selected at an early age by Rhapsody as having the potential for the task at hand, and systematically familiarized with language, cryptography, anatomy, and a thousand other studies of communications, verbal and otherwise. A year ago he had been deemed worthy to supervise the aviary, with its extensive fleet of messenger birds, as well as the mounted messengers who rode with the mail caravans. Eventually it was planned for him to assume responsibility for King Achmed's network of ambassadors as well as his spies.

But even though he would one day be the master of all the communications within Ylorc and from the Teeth to the outside world, Trug had not been told why he was being summoned. Nor did he expect to be.

An hour's walk, up out of the mountain to a small softened peak, like a cavity in the Teeth, brought him to a listening post, a way station in the system where the Eyes, Achmed's elite spies, made daily reports on what they had observed in the mountain passes. The guard stopped inside the hollow peak, lit and hung a lamp, and motioned for him to take a seat at the table that became visible in the light.

On the table was a tube made of bone, sealed with the king's imprimatur. Trug said nothing, but beads of sweat broke out on his dusky forehead. The guard motioned to the tube, then stepped away from the wind cave.

Trug stared at the tube for a moment, knowing that what it contained would mark a turning point in his destiny. He, as well as all his fellow students, had long been told about the eventual arrival of this sealed message, and he knew what it foretold. It would hold either the order of his banishment, as it had for at least one other Archon-in-training, or his elevation to full status, along with all the others. Either way, at least one part of his life would end that night.

With clammy hands he broke the seal and opened the tube.

He stared at the page, trying to absorb its import. It contained nothing more than the imprint of a hand.

Trug stood up, held the edge of the parchment in the flame of the lamp until it ignited, waited for it to burn completely, then cast the ashes into the wind atop the hollow mountain peak.

When the very last black cinder had caught the updraft and was carried away, Trug doused the lantern and hurried down the mountainside, making his way in the darkness for a passageway into the depths he knew all too well.

D
eep within the mountain, at the convocation of five tunnels known as the Hand, they gathered, each summoned in the same manner.

Upon arriving, the Archons nodded to one another but did not speak. It was not only customary to remain silent until the king or his representative spoke, it was mandatory. Achmed wanted to be certain that when his Archons were called to assemble, the words that their ears heard were as pure and unpolluted by secondary noise as possible.

The future Archons were, in a way, Achmed's children, though none of them had ever seen his face. Taken from their clans when he first became king, as hostages some thought, they had been kept apart as a new clan, with the Bolg king and Grunthor, and Rhapsody for a time, as masters and parents, along with such tutors and models as he could hire and trick and persuade from the outside. Grunthor was known as the Chief Archon, lending a credit to the title that instantly made it coveted.

They were raised as Achmed had been raised, in study and to an unrevealed purpose, given knowledge as a religion, fed, threatened, and cajoled into the belief that they must grow into their potential or their people would be doomed.

None of them had seen more than eighteen summers.

They came from an assortment of tribes that before Achmed's arrival had roamed the Teeth, preying on each other and whatever unfortunate creatures, human or otherwise, they could catch. Some were the spawn of the Claw clans, the warlike marauders that had lived in the borderlands, the lower foothills and rocky steppes that abutted the human realm of Roland. Others had been culled from the Guts clans, those living deeper in the realm of what they called Ylorc, past the guardian ridge of the Teeth into the deep forest glades and decimated cities that had once been the inner lands of the Cymrian stronghold. Possibly the most valuable of them had come from the Eyes, those demi-humans most adapted to thinner air, who crawled the ledges and peaks of the Teeth, watching the world from above, wrapped in clouds.

And some had come from the Finders. The Finders were not a clan in and of themselves, but rather were the descendants of those unfortunate Cymrians who had remained or been left behind a thousand years before when the Bolg overran Canrif. Their blood still contained some of the odd, magical elements of longevity and elemental power that their unknown and hapless ancestors had bequeathed them, but until Achmed came, they had no idea how to put that power to use.

Achmed saw them regularly but rarely, coming in to test them and redirect them. They were uncertain about his motives, as if it were not clear to this small grove whether the forester measured them in anticipation of cutting, or to be confident they could bear his weight on a climb to the clouds. There were ten of them that remained in this, the fifth year of training; some of the original children sent to him had been redirected to other lessons, one had perished, one had been banished. Those who had been released no longer studied the history of the Cymrians and of Roland, world geography and currency, and were no longer subject to the rigors of the king's direct attention.

It was a sweet relief to them, and a horrific dishonor to their clans.

Those Archons that had survived the training came now, one by one, to the black tunnels of the Hand, where no light entered or escaped.

The first to arrive was Harran, the Loremistress, a Finder who had been selected by Rhapsody and trained by her personally until she had left Ylorc to rule the Lirin realm of Tyrian. Harran was thin, even by wiry Bolg standards, and her shadowy form barely disturbed the darkness at the bottom of the tunnel in which she hovered, waiting.

A few moments later came Kubila. His long shanks made him a superior
runner, and generally guaranteed that he would arrive before most who had to travel to the Hand, even though his abode was the farthest away. He nodded to Harran in the dark, then came over to the finger in which she lingered and sat down before her to wait.

One by one they came, Yen the broadsmith, training to hold the position of Armorer, whose responsibility for building the unique weapons that armed Ylorc and were sold for trade already had made him one of the most powerful men in the kingdom; Krinsel the midwife, who came from a long line of respected clan mothers that managed all the medical needs of the realm; and Dreekak, Master of Tunnels, the brilliant young engineer who was in the process of inspecting and renovating the hundreds of miles of passageways and underground complexes that the Cymrians had built a thousand years before. Additionally, he had restored a number of the systems that Gwylliam had designed to make life within the cavernous mountains more civilized; the Cauldron, the great inner city of the guardian mountains, now had working ventilation, sanitation, and irrigation systems that circulated heat and air, provided rainwater for drinking and cooking, and channeled waste into vast central cisterns at the base of an unoccupied mountain crag, where once it had been ubiquitous and uncontrolled. In these matters, the demi-human Bolg were considerably more advanced, more civilized, than their neighbors in the human nation of Roland, who had long considered them monsters beneath contempt.

Until the arrival of King Achmed, the Earth Swallower, the Glowering Eye, the Night Man, Warlord of the entire deep realm, that had in fact been true. But he had changed all that, had forged the Bolg as he had Trug, into something greater, for a greater, if unknown, purpose.

A whisper of sound was heard at the arrival of Vrith, the Quartermaster, whose duties included the inventory and supplying of the entire kingdom, in particular the Bolg army. Vrith had been born with a clubfoot, a deformity that had resulted in him being left out on top of Kurmen crag to die on his tenth birthday. Rhapsody had rescued him and, seeing in him a fastidiousness for detail and an impressive head for numbers in his early lessons, had trained him to keep track of all the kingdom's stores as Ylorc was evolving from a wasteland of loose marauders into a realm whose army was feared, its leadership respected, and its goods coveted.

Greel, the mining Archon known as the Face of the Mountain, arrived in the company of Ralbux, who had been trained as a scholar to oversee the education of the Bolg populace. They took their places on the ground at the index-finger tunnel.

Finally, the only Archon who was not Bolg arrived. Omet had been rescued from slavery in Yarim by Achmed and Rhapsody three years earlier. A human child whose mother had given him over to the mistress of
the Raven's Guild to broil in indentured servitude in the tile factories of that desert city, he had adopted Ylorc happily as his home.
Somewhere in those mountains greatness is taking hold
, Rhapsody had said upon setting him free.
You can be a part of it. Go carve your name into the ageless rock for history to see
. They were words that had echoed in his heart, and in his own words now, and led him to his post, the most secret of all the Archonic responsibilities.

Omet was the builder of the Lightcatcher.

After a few moments' silence, the ten Archons became simultaneously aware of the presence of the king among them. Each knew that had Achmed not wished to be observed he would not have been, but the static hum of the tunnels indicated silently to them that their attention was being commanded. If any of them had been deaf to that hum, they might have also been made aware by the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall shadow that lurked behind the shade of the king in the darkness.

They crowded into the Hand, and the king motioned for them to sit. Grunthor stood in the Thumb, with Krinsel the midwife seated on the stone floor in front of him. Kubila and Harran sat at the opening of the next passage, the index finger, he with his lanky legs stretched out and his hands spread behind him, she crouched, knees drawn up as if she felt cold this deep in the mountain. Omet and the broadsmith Yen chose the next passage, while the others grouped into the last of the fingers. When they were in, silent and motionless, Achmed took his place in the large central passage, the palm of the Hand, on a stool that had apparently been waiting for this ceremony. He looked at them for a dozen breaths. “My children,” he said, his sandy voice as flat as any of them had ever heard it, “your trials are nearly over.”

Half a score of exhalations echoed through the chamber, and the Archons sought each other's eyes in the blackness.

For Harran, the Loremistress, who was barely fifteen, this was especially welcome news. She had been commanded to recite a hundred genealogies, Cymrian, Nain, Lirin, and Bolg; read and memorize pages she was never allowed to see more than once in seven languages, a few of them long dead; commit to memory the names and leaders of every Bolg clan, as well as each soldier of the army; and manage a score of resources scattered or buried in the Great Library of Canrif, where the librarians and lore students under her direction researched meticulously in shifts that never ceased.

Seeing the relief in her eyes, Achmed smiled slightly. “That does not mean the tests are over, Harran,” he said dryly. “That is not the way of things. The tests of your knowledge are to come soon, and for the rest of your lives. The sword is tested when it leaves the forge, before it is finished
and cooled in water—but that is not the real test of the sword. That comes later, in clashing and blood. But for now I am satisfied.”

He stared at the broadsmith.

“Yen. I know the metal from which you were made, drew the hammer across your edges myself, but have not yet cast you to the stones to see if you sing or shatter.” The smith swallowed visibly, but said nothing.

The king then turned to the Archon he was training in diplomacy and the ways of trade. “Kubila. I know your stock, taught you speed for the great mountain race, yet you will still need to show whether you or the coming storm shall prevail. But enough of tests for now.