The Assassin King (40 page)

Burgett exhaled. “And for you?”

A tight smile finally cracked Dranth's features.

“The Raven's Guild will obtain what it most dearly desires—vengeance on the one whose actions put me in charge.”

The owlish eyes glistened with interest. “Very well,” the red-haired man said after a moment, his deep voice smooth and resonant. “I will accept your proposition, Dranth from the Raven's Guild. Go back to the wharf— follow the man you came here with—and proceed on alone by night to an inn just to the lee of the north gate of the city. You'll know the place by its firebrands outside, and the white straw of its roof. Go in the side door and ask the woman at the bar to send out her husband to speak to you. Tell him you are looking to buy a dray mare, and give him your papers. You can be assured they will be found as you hoped.”

“And what is the name of the man I am seeking?” Dranth asked, rising from the table and steadying himself on his feet. “Just in case there is more than one woman in the bar in the inn with a husband.”

The pearly teeth gleamed white in the darkness of the boat's hold. “Why, his name's John Burgett, of course.”

When the raid on the inn was accomplished, the papers took almost no time in making their way to Beliac's table.

The king was in the middle of his breakfast at the time, sweetening the whey in his porringer with molasses, when the messenger arrived from the very efficient commander of the city's police brigade.

Upon opening the commander's packet and reading the contents, the king spat his breakfast the entire length of the table. The Queen of Golgarn, seated across from him, rose from her chair in disgust, even as his adult children choked back laughter.

Scouts were dispatched forthwith, as Dranth had predicted. Upon entering the mountain passes to the northwest of the prefecture of Longsworth, they came upon a sight that had been relegated to the stuff of nightmares a thousand or more years old.

From the bases of the first mountain pass to the summit of the hills that led up into the mountainous reaches, a pathway of human bones had been carefully bordered with a series of fencelike posts.

Each crowned with a human head in varying stages of decay.

The stench of the encampment, issuing forth from a variety of repulsive sources, was so overwhelming that two of the four scouts immediately turned from the scene and retched. The more intrepid two, possessing somewhat stronger stomachs, ventured up alongside the path in tree cover until they were in position to observe through a spyglass the encampment itself.

A series of caves, hidden from view from below, were being loosely guarded by tall, broad manlike creatures, hirsute and covered in filth, who sat sharpening cruel-looking weapons and setting up catapults with arms that could easily lift burdens of two hundred stone or more. They appeared to be training their weapons defensively on the mountain passes, but had shown evidence of positioning similar encampments farther up the hillside, from which the town would be not only visibie, but within range.

Dranth and Yabrith remained in Golgarn, taking rooms at the beautiful Sea Duchess inn in the heart of the Jeweled Streets and enjoying the fine cuisine of the port city, including the new experience of seafood, which Dranth found to be quite to his liking. Yabrith, still suffering queasiness from the smell of the sea, was unable to stomach anything more gastronomi-cally challenging than fish stew.

It was only a matter of days before the word came back to the palace. While neither of the men were privy to the conversations of the king and his scouts, there was no mistaking the outcome.

They were sitting out on the terrace of the Sea Duchess one fine morning when a royal mail coach came clattering through the finely cobbled streets, the driver urging the horses mercilessly in order to meet the outgoing tide.

“What do you suppose the message he's carrying says?” asked Yabrith idly, picking the sausage out of his teeth with an ivory shard as they watched the carriage driver delivering a package under seal to the yeoman at the docks.

“Can't imagine,” said Dranth, folding his napkin. “But something tells me it may be time for us to head home—I have had as much as I can tolerate of the hospitality of John Burgett.”

Kraldurge, Ylorc, the Bolglands

Deep within the old Cymrian lands, past the wide heath beyond the canyon and sheltered by a high inner ring of rock formations was Kraldurge, the Realm of Ghosts. It was the only place the Bolg, without exception, did not go, a desolate, forbidding place from the look of its exterior structures.

What heinous tragedy had occurred here was unclear in the legends, but it had been devastating enough to permanently scar the psyche of the Firbolg who lived in the mountains.

They spoke in reluctant whispers of fields of bones and wandering demons that consumed any creature unfortunate enough to cross their paths, of blood that seeped up from the ground and winds that ignited anyone caught on the plain.

It also was the place that marked the beginning of the lands of their king's First Woman, as the Firbolg called Rhapsody. For them this was an even better reason not to go anywhere near the place. Within a range of guardian rocks that reached high into the peaks around them stood an uncovered meadow, overgrown in meadow flowers that Rhapsody planted upon coming to this place, now untended in her absence. A hill-like mound rose in the center of the meadow, a place she had paid special attention at the time, due to the unsettling nature of the vibration she found there. There was something innately sad and overwhelmingly unsettling all throughout the hidden canyon-dell, but most especially at this place on top of the mound.

For that reason she covered it in heartsease, flowers that in the old world the Lirin planted in cemeteries and on battlefields as a sign of mourning and reconciliation, and most particularly of condolence. She did not know at the time, nor did she know now, what she was trying to apologize for, what had happened deep within the history of the sad, windswept place that caused the very ground to cry out in pain, but she knew that whatever it had been was so traumatic, so ultimately wrong, that nothing could be done save for the gentle offering of flowers and a song of comfort in the hope of reclaiming the earth at least a little there.

Some of the reputation Kraldurge had as a playground for demons and other harbingers of evil came from its geology. Anyone walking through the circle of guardian rocks found themselves in a hollow canyon, surrounded by a circle of towering cliff sides. It was impossible to walk there without one's footfalls sounding up the canyon walls, echoing at an enormous amplification, so that anything that might have been waiting would have had ample warning, something always dangerous in the Bolglands, which for years had been roved by hungry demi-humans in search of any prey they could find.

The canyon that hid the grassy field was so tall that the wind rarely reached down into it; it howled around the top of the surrounding crags, creating a mournful wail. Even the bravest Bolg or most educated human could mistake the noise for demonic shrieking. Despite the natural explanation for the sound, there was still the sense of an innate sadness to the place, a feeling of overwhelming grief and anger. In her time as putative duchess of these lands, Rhapsody had begun to wonder if Kraldurge was a forgotten burial ground from the earliest conflicts of the Cymrian War. There was no mention of it in the manuscripts of Gwylliam's vast and spectacular library, a collection of manuscripts and scrolls containing much of the wisdom of the world that they had located upon discovering this place four years before. The offering of peace flowers had seemed to work; now, though the wind continued to shriek and howl around the top of the rocks, filling the canyon with the same eerie, unsettling noise, the ground seemed to sleep, peacefully if not really in peace.

Or at least it had before the dragon came. The wind moaned high above the canyon, still laden with the last ice crystals of winter, as the final door of their journey opened. Rath stepped out into the dell, then moved aside to allow the other three travelers to come off the breeze.

Rhapsody was the last to come forth. The return of the baby to her womb had caused many of the symptoms she had experienced in the course of her pregnancy to return; the nausea and light-headedness and, more particularly, the blurring of vision made her feel more unsteady than the the two Firbolg in the course of traveling the wind. As a result, she sensed a sudden silence from the three men, a silence unusual in that none of them was given to talk much in the first place. But she could not see why.

“What's the matter?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

“That would depend upon how you define 'all right,'” Achmed replied, turning slowly around and surveying the damage before him.

The towering walls of rock were scorched in places rising up almost to the summit. The ground that at one time Rhapsody had believed might contain the bones of soldiers who fought and died in the Cymrian War or, perhaps even before mat, the bodies of those souls, starving or sickly, who had not survived very long after the stragglers of the Third Fleet had arrived in Canrif was sundered from one side of the meadow to the other.

“Don't look quite the way it did when you were 'ere, Duchess,” Grunthor said. “The new tenant is a bit less tidy than you were.”

“New tenant?” Rhapsody said humorously, straggling to focus her eyes. "What new tenant?

Who did you rent my lands out to, Achmed? I thought you were going to keep them for me in perpetuity; I earned them, after all."

“Well, this is more a squatter than a tenant I would say,” Achmed answered, searching for the passage down to the hidden grotto known as Elysian. He found it a moment later in a pile of overturned rocks and sod that had been riven by the wyrm's passage. Originally the passage had been hidden in an alcove that always seemed touched by shadow, so carefully obscured that it had taken Achmed quite some time to find it the first time. “I don't know if you're going to be able to go down to the grotto or not, Rhapsody. Perhaps it would be best if you just come into the city itself, and take rooms inside the mountain.”

Rhapsody recognized the tone in his voice. “What are you not telling me, Achmed?” she asked sharply, turning again and struggling to see.

“As always, you are listening for what I am not telling you, rather than to what I am.”

“That's because you always say much more in what you are not saying. Tell me; what has happened here?”

The Bolg king sighed. “Before she came to find us in the forest at her mother's lair, Anwyn came here looking for you,” he said. “Whether she remembered this place from the battle at the Moot, or whether there was something about it that called to her from the Past, Grunthor and I have no idea. I did not know until after we had set forth on our journey that she had come to the Bolglands first. Apparently she did not like the fact that your scent now was clinging to her cottage, or maybe she hated the way you redecorated it. In any event, it's my understanding that she's destroyed the grotto, or at least the house on the island in the middle of the lake. There's no sense in going down there now, Rhapsody; the firmament that holds up the cave is probably unstable. It's not safe, and I promised your infernal husband that I would do everything in my power to keep you safe, so while this was a good choice of destination because of the strength of the wind here, there's really no reason to stay.”

The men watched as the Lady Cymrian turned around again, still struggling to see the place they first came when they arrived in the Bolglands. She extended her arms out in front of her and made her way to where the passage had been, then felt about on the rock wall. She turned back to them, her face contorted with grief.

“The opening is still here, Achmed,” she said. “Please; I want to see the grotto. I need to know what has happened to my house.”

“Oi don' think that's a good idea, Duchess,” said Grunthor gently.

“Are you telling me that the structure of the cave is unsafe?”

“No,” said the Sergeant-Major, unwilling to lie to her. “Nuthin' but an earthquake will take down that dome. That cave's right solid, and the lake is there still. But there's nothing left of your house; nothing worth mentioning, anyway.”

“Are you certain?” Rhapsody pressed, numbly feeling the wall face again. “My instruments, my clothing? Did nothing survive?”

“Nothing Oi saw,” said the giant Bolg. “I didn't row out to the island itself, o' course, but that was partly because Oi could see pieces o' the house floating all about the lake. If ya want to come back at some point and see if there's anything we can salvage, Oi'd be glad to come with you. But for right now Oi think we should get you settled inside the complex. It'll be good to have you in there again, miss.”

“What are you looking for specifically?” Achmed asked impatiently. “Whatever need you have, it can be met within the walls of Canrif.”

Rhapsody sighed and began to walk back to them, her hand on her swollen belly.

“I doubt it,” she said. “But we can go if you wish. There was a Naming garment there, one that no doubt had been worn by the three brothers, Meridion's grandfather and great-uncles. It was a family heirloom, and I thought perhaps it would've been nice for him to be able to wear it when we have time for a proper Naming ceremony.”

Achmed snorted and started out of the meadow.

“Perhaps you ought to wait and see when and if he decides to be born again,” he said, following the pathway out of Kral-durge. “If I heard the prophecy correctly, he's not subject to the whim of Time. For all you know you could be carting him around in there until his eighteenth birthday or beyond.”

“All right,” Rhapsody said briskly, ignoring him. “Let's get to Canrif; now that I'm pregnant again, I'm in desperate need of a privy.” Rath had not expected to find what he did in Canrif.

He had not had occasion to walk within the mountain for centuries, a reasonably long period of time, even for one of his advanced age. At that time he had been tracking the demon known as Vrrinax, a F'dor with an inordinate amount of patience that had taken refuge on the last of the ships of the Cymrian Third Fleet, too weak to subsume any host but a sickly cabin boy. The demon had bided its time, slowly growing stronger, passing to more and more powerful hosts as it could, until it had learned to hide so successfully that Rath had been asked to take it on.