The Merchant Emperor (53 page)

She had retreated to this place to heal from the wounds of her battle, or to die, but in either case, she sought the blissful oblivion of solitude and sleep in a place that had long been forgotten by Time.

Only to be jarred from that sleep, in a way that suggested a loss of solitude as well.

For a moment, the only sound in the cavern was the distant dripping of water. The searing blue light that had gleamed madly from the dragon’s eyes had ebbed to a ghostly azure shadow. An even dimmer glow shone from the wounded one, tinged rosy with blood.

The great beast lay prone, her hide still smoking, charred over the great expanse of her body. Her copper scales were tarnished by black soot and the muddy clay through which she had crawled back to the ruined cave, in ages long past a renowned place of healing, now little more than a shattered relic, a realm of broken sluiceways and smiling statuary with arms or heads missing.

The silence in what had been one of the great public baths of Kurimah Milani echoed in her stinging skin. The beast breathed raggedly, trying to control the pain.

And then, somewhere within her awareness was another vibration, an unwelcome, hated one. It hovered in the very air of the place, waiting.

The dragon recognized it immediately.

“I can—feel you—
m’lady
,” Anwyn said aloud. Her scratched voice vibrated hollowly in the underground cavern, its bitterness flickering off the stone.

“Indeed,” came the voice of the Namer in return. It spoke quietly, clear as the wind, slicing through the heavy air beneath the ground. “I am here.”

The dragon shuddered involuntarily. She was not certain if her shivering was a result of the loss of blood or something deeper, more disturbing that she heard in Rhapsody’s words.

After a momentary reflection, she realized it was the latter.

What chilled her was actually something in the reviled woman’s voice that was
missing
, rather than present, a warmth that had always been nascent in the few words that the Namer had spoken directly to her, within the Great Moot of Canrif, or in the air of the fields around it, when she had the woman in her grasp, spinning in flight, raining fire down on the Cymrian people who had once revered Anwyn as their lady. Those words returned in flashes of memory now, in response to her own taunting ones.

A pretty sight, isn’t it, m’lady? Look well on your people—see where you have brought them. Child of the Sky! How do you like the view from up here?

Damn your soul, Anwyn!

She grimaced as she remembered her own reply.
Too late
.

The beast closed her eyes and flexed her tattered claw, scarred from where the talon had been torn from it, recalling the delicious feel of her rival struggling, trapped within her clutches.

End it. They were your people—serve them! Save them.

“They betrayed me,” the wyrm whispered, now as she had then.

The woman said nothing. Anwyn could not tell where she was within the cavern; only the slightest of vibrations even indicated she was there at all.

The dragon concentrated, trying to locate the source of that vibration. More words echoed in her mind, spoken in the warm voice she remembered with such loathing.

I rename you the Empty Past, the Forgotten Past. I consign your memory to those who have gone before you, you wretched beast.

Anwyn had felt it then, the Namer’s ancient power, older even than her own. It had reached down into her very blood and stripped every piece of her that had been able to exist within the Present, consigning her to irrelevance she could feel in her bones. Her anger at the time of being replaced as the Lady of the Cymrians by this woman had swelled to fill the holes and passageways left behind until it all but consumed her, packing her with hate.

Another fragment of memory rose up from the depths of her mind, an even more disturbing one, of the woman’s voice as she banished her from the Moot after singing her a song of tribute. The kindness with which the words had been spoken left her sick with nausea.

Give Anwyn her due; she is leaving. My tribute to you is ended. Go now, m’lady of the Past. Go and sort out your memories. We will be making grand new ones for you to count soon
.

By contrast, the few words that had been spoken a moment before in the resounding cavern of Kurimah Milani were cold, efficient, missing any tone of kindness, compassion, or humility.

Like Anwyn’s own.

“At least you have not tried to hide, coward that you are,” the dragon murmured. “How I hate you.”

“You have made that abundantly clear.” Within the dragon’s ears, frost seemed to form on the bones. “And while you are entitled to feel however you like, your insistence on venting that hatred has threatened too many innocents. This needs to end now.”

“So finally—I am—at your mercy,” the dragon muttered softly. “You have—come for retribution, to—torment me—in my last moments.”

“No.” Wherever she was in the echoing cave, the Lady Cymrian’s voice was steady. “I have come to kill you, to end your torment, not to prolong it.” In her tone there was no mercy, no forgiveness, just the simple statement of fact.

“How kind of you, as always,” the dragon sneered. “The beautiful Child of the Sky, the innocent heart with whom the Cymrian populace fell in love, then cast me out, replaced me. You hypocrite; you liar. They did not know of your treachery. You took over my—home in Canrif, polluted the places I once reigned undisputed. Drove—the anger out, the rage born of—righteous fury. Filled those shrines to Gwylliam’s betrayal, those hallowed sepulchers of hatred, with—banal music. You planted flowers of condolence where rightfully—there should have been perennial mourning. How dare you,
usurper
.”

Rhapsody said nothing.

“You sought to replace my dynastic line with your own,” the dragon whispered.

“No,” the Lady Cymrian’s distant voice said again. “Of all the things you have said, about this you are the most wrong. I extended your dynastic line.” Anwyn’s gaze grew momentarily sharper and brighter. “I married your grandson. I gave birth to his child. Your line and mine are now one and the same.”

“Lies,” the dragon hissed.

“You know otherwise,” Rhapsody said. “I do not lie; you know this.”

A fluttering of tattered eyelids sent blue shadows around the darkness of the broken baths.

“I have seen no such child. If it existed, I would have been aware of it, would have seen it in the Past.”

“He was born at the turn of the year, in the cave of the Lost Sea, from which your eyes have been banished. He was delivered by your own mother. You almost killed him when you attacked me in Gwynwood—and as a result, you destroyed Llauron, your own son, the member of your family whose allegiance to you was the greatest. Your son gave his life in his grandson’s protection. And you would have done so again; he was with me when you attacked a fortnight ago. I have shielded my child from your eyes, for his safety. He has his own ways of doing so as well; he is not bound to your dominion of the Past. It has no power over him.”

Silence echoed throughout what remained of Kurimah Milani. After a long moment, a draconic whisper echoed fragilely through the vault.

“The Child of Time.”

Rhapsody remained still in the silence of the broken cave.

After a long moment, the dragon exhaled, spitting drops of black blood from the depths of her torn lungs as she did.

“Now I see,” she said, more to herself than to Rhapsody. “Small wonder he is hidden from my sight; his conception, his beginning, predates my own.”

“Your mind is fading,” Rhapsody said. “That’s certainly untrue. His conception took place but last spring. You are forgetful—it seems death approaches. You might want to prepare your last words, and whatever passes for a soul in you, if there is one.”

The dragon’s broken maw twisted in a hideous grin. In it was the shadow of triumph.

“Ah,
m’lady
, it is
you
that forgets,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You consigned me to only the memories of what had gone before me—and yet I know of the Child of Time, and of the prophecy.” Her grin became even more sinister. “How do you suppose that came to pass, if those things are not from long ago?”

“I’ve no idea. And I don’t care.”

“Oh, but you should,” Anwyn murmured, an evil amusement in her voice. “I know something you will want to know. Something of the Forgotten Past, as you named me—something that, when I have gone, no other eye will see again. Something that is vastly important about the Child of Time.”

The Lady Cymrian said nothing. The dragon’s words reverberated in the empty cavern.

And they rang with the tone of truth.

When silence had hung heavily in the subterranean air, the dragon’s parley unanswered, the beast spoke again.

“You have named me the Empty Past, the Forgotten Past. You do not even know the irony of this. Because of what you chose to call me, there is but one place in Time that I can see clearly now.” The dragon’s voice grew stronger, even as her scales began to pale beneath the coating of creosote. “It is an imperfection in the Weaver’s Tapestry, a place where history,
Time itself
, was altered—and it changed the course of
your
life specifically. I alone know this—when I die, this lore will die with me.” She smiled weakly; the dimming eyes grew brighter for a moment. “But I will tell you this lore—for a price.”

There was no reply.

“Surely you, a Namer, especially the Namer for whom the world was altered, crave to know what no longer exists in Time,” the dragon said. Hearing nothing, she stretched, feeling the scorched skin beneath her shattered hide of scales tear as she did, barely noticing the pain.

Knowing she had a bartering chip.

“What do you mean, ‘for whom the world was altered’?”

The dragon smirked.

“Ah, that got your attention. Yes, m’lady, insignificant as you are, apparently something happened to change the course of your life, as well as the rest of the world, and not by coincidence. You should be grateful to know that lore, as the original Past, the Past that was changed, erased, held a much grimmer road for you. For your child’s father as well.”

For a long moment, the dripping of water was again the only sound in the ancient bath.

“I am listening.”

The beast chuckled weakly.

“As I said, for a price.”

“What is the price?”

Anwyn’s eyes gleamed with a new light.

“Something as significant to me as this unknown lore will be to you. Something I do not wish to die without knowing.”

“What is the price? I tire of this game.”

“I want to know of Gwylliam’s end,” Anwyn whispered. “I, the victor in the Great—War, was cast out of my own domain, refused reentry to my own lands. I did not see my hated husband’s corpse, did not hear his last words, do not have the story of his death behind my eyes as the life flees my body. You—the Three—took possession of—Canrif, raped the mountain where I once ruled, supplanting the remnants of the great Cymrian civilization by turning it into a midden for monsters. But I believe you know what happened to Gwylliam. Is that true?”

Silence reigned once more.

“Well?” the dragon demanded. “Do you know or do you not?”

“I do,” Rhapsody said. Her words echoed in the cavern.

“Tell me, then,” Anwyn whispered. “And I will tell you what only my eyes have seen.”

“You first.”

The beast, her mind fading until the possibility of what she wanted to know had come within her grasp, considered. Her awareness had come roaring back with the nearness of the lore she had craved for centuries, along with the knowledge that the Namer would not deny it to her if she gave her word.

“Do we have a bargain?”

“If I am satisfied with what you say,” Rhapsody said. “I will not promise to tell you something as sacred as a king’s last words if I determine you to be lying, or if what you tell me is insignificant.”

Anwyn felt her life ebbing.

“I—can only tell you what I see,” she said, her failing voice harsh. “I do not fully understand it.”

“Tell me, or prepare to speak your own last words. You are wasting my time; I am needed in battle.”

“Time in the Past sometimes manifests itself as a thread of a sort, the—same thread that is woven into the tapestry of history by the—Weaver,” the dragon said with great effort. “For a reason I know not, there is a place in that tapestry where an imperfection, an alteration can be seen.”

“I know this already. What does this have to do with me?”

The dragon struggled to speak.

“I saw that flaw when my—grandson came to me as a youth and begged me to—look into the Past to find someone. He said he had been—thrown back in Time, for less than the span of a day, to Serendair, a millennia and a half at least before his birth, and had met a girl in Merryfield—at a foreharvest dance.”

She smiled triumphantly at the intake of breath she could hear, even in the heavy silence of the cavern.

“At his insistence, I looked through my—father’s spyglass to the place in Time he asked about. I witnessed your meeting, your repulsive rutting in a pasture—”

“Peace,” the Namer commanded. “Speak not of this; I do not wish to hear the words from your mouth—or rather, from the air you manipulate. It does not surprise me that you do not recognize the birth of love; you will never understand what you are void of.”

“True,” the wyrm admitted. “But I recognize the beginning of
life
—your child was conceived that night, m’lady; at least his soul was.”

“Nonsense.”

The dragon’s maw twisted into a grim smile.

“On the night when you and my grandson met in the old world, after you let him tumble you in a field a few moments after you met, do you recall a sensation that caused you to stop walking, to need to sit for a moment—you, who could summit a hill in a dead run without breathing hard?” The beast chuckled at the silence that followed her words. “You were feeling the conception of the soul of the Child of Time. While it’s true that he may not have been incorporated in flesh until recently, his soul began that night—with that meeting. You carried that soul across two worlds—why else do you think you have seen the Future, a power none but my sister Manwyn should have had?”