The Assassin King (28 page)

Faedryth reached out his hand and brought it to rest on the side of her face for a moment; to touch one so aged and wise in such a fatherly way had always seemed strange to him in his eternal youth, but in the few moments of tenderness he allowed himself, the object was always Gyllian.

“The Lightforge has been made ready,” he said quietly, words he had spoken to her on several occasions before. “Are you, in the event you need be?”

His daughter nodded, still silent. Faedryth inhaled deeply. "Very well, then. Stand at the door.

Tell the yeoman to make ready." He nodded to Thotan; the minister of mines bowed quickly and left the chamber, followed by Therion and the corpsmen. The Nain king allowed his hand to linger on his daughter's age-withered cheek one moment longer, then let it fall to his side.

“All right,” he said brusquely to the ghosts and memories that lingered, invisible, in the air around him. “Let us do this.”

“Do you want to wait to speak with Garson one last time?” Gyllian asked, her mien calm and expressionless, as always. The Nain princess had forged her reputation in the battles of the Great Cymrian War, and had been cured in the smoke of those battles like leather, molded and shaped in their endless campfires into a woman with steel in her spine. That notwithstanding, she was measured and deliberate in her counsel, always seeking to exhaust other means before opening doors that, once opened, might not be able to be closed again.

A small, sarcastic bark escaped Faedryth's lips.

“You want to see me heave yet another Orb of State into the wall?” he asked, his eyes twinkling fondly above a darker expression. “There are still shards from the last one scattered on the far floor.”

Gyllian's expression did not change. “If that is the price of appropriate consideration, it is a small one,” she said evenly. “Before you resort to using the Lightforge, I would see you shatter a hundred Orbs, until you are certain of what you undertake.” The stoic expression in her eyes softened into one of concern. “The risks are far too grave not to. And besides, I know it feeds your ego to know that you can still heave and shatter a sphere of annealed glass the way a mere youth of a hundred winters can.”

Faedryth chuckled. “All right, then, Gyllian, if you wish it, summon Garson.” The princess nodded slightly and returned to the doorway, leaving the Nain king alone in the flickering darkness with his thoughts.

And the black ivory box.

Faedryth was afraid to hold it and, at the same time, afraid to set it down. He had been bedeviled by the contents ever since they had been unearthed from the deepest of the crystal mines almost half a year's time before, was nervous in their presence, fearful that this odd magic might be the final straw to tip the scales of his sanity. While the Lightforge might assist him in knowing, finally, what they were, expending its power was something Faedryth considered only under the rarest, and gravest, of circumstances, knowing the risk to himself, and the world, that came in the process.

The door of the Great Hall opened again, admitting Garson ben Sardonyx and the royal yeoman, wearing a miner's helm with a dark visor, bearing his enormous crossbow across his back and carrying a heavy stand. Faedryth swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and gestured impatiently to Garson, who doubled his pace until he was standing in front of the king. The blue-yellow tapetum in the back of his eyes, the physical attribute that allowed all Nain to see in the blackness of their underground dwellings, caught the torchlight and gleamed, making him appear like a feral animal approaching in the dark.

“Tell me again what the Bolg king said during your visit to him,” Faedryth demanded as Gyllian returned to his side. “Recount each detail—there may have been something we missed on the previous reports.”

Garson's broad shoulders and chest expanded as he inhaled deeply. He ran a hand over his magnificent beard, brown at the chin, tapering to a silver middle and curling into white at the tips; Garson was Faedryth's official upworld ambassador, the only Nain of the Deep Kingdom to speak in diplomacy with men of other races, and had been trained since childhood in perfection of memory. His brows furrowed, but patiently he began to recount the conversation he had already related on three other occasions since returning from his state visit to the Bolglands.

“King Achmed was annoyed from the beginning at my presence, of course,” Garson said. “I gave him your message—that you knew he was attempting to reconstruct the Lightforge of Gwylliam and Anwyn in the mountains of his realm, and that you had bade me to tell him that he must not.”

Faedryth nodded. “And?”

“He told me I was a brave man with too much time on my hands to have traveled all the way from our lands to dare to instruct him in such a manner.”

“Pompous fool,” muttered Faedryth. “Go on.”

“I told him you had commanded me thus, and he said that he was puzzled, then. He said he knew of no Lightforge, and yet you had risked his ire, which you knew to be considerable, by sending me to barge into his rooms in the middle of the night to issue him an order regarding it. He stated that even he, who places less stock in diplomacy and matters of etiquette than anyone he knew, found that offensive.”

“No doubt,” said Faedryth dryly. “And he then denied knowing of the Lightforge?”

“Yes. I suggested that perhaps he did not call it by the same name, but that I suspected he knew to what I was referring. I told him that the Lightforge was an instrumentality that the Nain built for Lord Gwylliam the Visionary eleven centuries ago, a machine formed of metal and colored glass embedded into a mountain peak, which manipulated light to various ends. It was destroyed in the Great War, as it should have been, because it tapped power that was unstable, unpredictable. I told him that it poses a great threat not only to his allies and enemies, but to his own kingdom as well. I told him that he was attempting to rebuild something that he did not fully understand, that his foolishness would lead to his destruction, and very possibly that of those around him. I reminded him that he had already seen the effects of this; the tainted glass from his first attempt still littered the countryside around Ylorc. I repeated that this is folly of unspeakable rashness, and that you, Your Majesty, commanded that he cease at once, for the good of the Alliance, and for his own as well.”

Gyllian sighed. “You expected a different answer than the one you got, Father? Did you really think the king of the Fir-bolg would listen sympathetically to a demand phrased thus?”

“I should have asked you to craft the missive,” muttered Faedryth, beginning to pace again.

“But the Bolg king has always been a plainspoken man. I thought that by speaking plainly I was sending him a message he would respect; obviously I was wrong. Then what did he say?”

“He asked me casually how I knew this, citing the distance of our kingdom and our isolation from the world of man. When I told him that you made it a point to monitor events that might have a dangerous impact on the world, he called me a liar, then said that he knew we had one of our own, and were using it to spy on his lands.”

Faedryth exhaled dismally.

“A reasonable guess,” Gyllian said. “He was half right.”

“He then demanded I leave his lands and deliver this message to you,” Garson went on. “He said, and I quote, 'Return to your king and tell him this from me: I once had respect for him and the way he conducts his reign; he has as low an opinion of the Cymrians as I do, and is a reticent member of the Alliance, just as I am. He keeps to himself within his mountains, as do I. But if he continues to spy into my lands, or send emissaries who tell me what to do, when my own version of your so-called Lightforge is operational, I will be testing out its offensive capabilities on distant targets. I will leave it to you to guess which ones.'”

The air seemed to go out of the vast cavern.

“When I said that I doubted very much he wished for me to convey that message to you, he said, 'Doubt it not, Garson. Now leave.'”

Faedryth wheeled and stared at Gyllian.

“Do you still believe that there is another option?” he demanded.

The princess came slowly to her father's side and gently kissed his cheek.

“No,” she said simply. Then she bowed slightly and left the room, casting a glance at the yeoman but not looking back at Faedryth.

“Prepare, and be quick about it,” Faedryth commanded the yeoman. The man nodded and quickly began to assemble the stand, setting the crossbow atop it, aimed at the crystal throne.

“Stand ready,” he said to Garson.

“I am, m'lord,” Garson replied stiffly. “We will be making use of the blue spectrum?”

Faedryth exhaled again. The blue power of the spectrum was the only one with which he was at all familiar; while he did not know the words in the ancient tongue that had been used by Gwylliam, he thought he recalled that they had translated to Cloud Caller or Cloud Chaser.

He did know that the strength of elemental blue was in scrying, seeing across vast distances, to hidden places or, when reversed, to hide from eyes that might be similarly seeking him.

He had only made use of one other color on one other occasion; when the Molten River of magma that perennially flowed on the border of his lands went dormant two centuries before, his sage advised him to use the orange power of the spectrum, Firestarter, to summon the lava back from beneath its dome of ash. Had the river not served as a protective wall between his kingdom and the lands of a neighboring wyrm, and had its liquid fire not been critical to the survival of the Deep Kingdom in winter, he would never have attempted it. The resulting explosion and destruction had convinced him never to do so again.

He nodded curtly at Garson, trying to block the image of that devastation from his mind.

Without another word he went to the gleaming crystal outcropping, stepping carefully through the opening in the otherwise fitted pieces of colored glass that formed a spectral circle at the base of his throne, and sat slowly down on the seat ledge. He stared at the box in his hands a moment longer, then looked up to see Garson, his official witness of state, watching the king unflinchingly behind the yeoman, whose crossbow sight was trained on his heart. “Close the circle,” Faedryth commanded. His voice was deep and resonant, containing none of the uncertainty it had held a moment before.

Garson moved quickly to the center of the vast, dark hall and knelt at the foot of the king.

Faedryth blessed him impatiently; Garson rose and stepped out of the circle of colored glass, then carefully took hold of the last piece, the one fired in the color of the purest of amethyst, and gently moved it into place, the final piece of the circular puzzle.

As the king watched his upworld ambassador adjusting the violet arc, he thought suddenly of Garson's great-grandfather, Gar ben Sardonyx, who had helped him fire that very piece in the annealing oven centuries ago. He tried to close his mind to the flood of memories, but it was impossible; the power of the throne, though still sleeping, was alive, opening long closed places in his mind, heedless of the wards or locks he might place in its way.

The memories it brought back were painful ones, pockets of acid in the recesses of his brain.

He had been the original builder of the first Lightforge, the one in the Bolg king's now-broken tower, had constructed it at the command of his lord and friend, Gwylliam the Visionary, only to see its power misused, its mission corrupted by that very lord and friend in the course of a long, bloody, and pointless war. Faedryth had turned his back on Gwylliam and those who had followed him then, had tossed his sword into the king's Moot in disgust and quit the place, returning to the Distant Mountains and his Deep Kingdom, and had remained there until recently summoned again by the Lady Cymrian, asking the Nain to rejoin the Alliance for the good of the continent. Against his better wishes he had agreed; now, as he sat within one of the wonders of the world above a source of its primeval power, he wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.

As Garson maneuvered the piece into place now, Faedryth thought dryly of how he had condemned Gwylliam's thirst for power, had left all the plans and glass color keys behind him, disavowing all that he had done in the building of the Visionary's great empire, only to find himself, deep within his cavernous realm, thinking endlessly about the rainbow of glass that channeled the very power of life.

The thoughts that had at first plagued him in those days long ago had come to haunt him; like demonic whispers in his ears, the memory of colored glass spoke to him in his dreams, reminding him mat their knowledge was fleeting, evanescent, that he would need to hurry if he was to re-form the instrumentality. Even he had needed a detailed schematic when building Gwylliam's original Lightforge, a set of drawings drafted by the greatest of Cymrian Namers that was impossible to commit to memory, which he had consulted every day in the course of the project, staring at them each morning as if he had never seen them before, he, the builder of one of the greatest mountain cities in the world, the man with a ferocious memory who had taken the Visionary's prescient ideas and brought them to reality.

Now he couldn't remember from day to day what was on the drawings.

Because he had left behind in the library of Canrif the fired bricks of colored glass keyed to the exact hue on the spectrum necessary to make the instrumentality work, he had no tool with which to compare any future firings. The only thing that saved him was the memory that each of the glass pieces in the dome of Gurgus Peak had been the same color of the light spectrum that was reflected in different gemstones in their purest state.

And his kingdom had no shortage of pure gemstones for reference.

So he had reproduced the glass spectrum in a simple circle, while the voices in his head had screamed cacophonously at each step of the way, with the pouring, the annealing, the cooling, the engineering of the crystal throne, urging him onward, only to fall into a complete, almost smug silence when the Lightforge was finally finished.