The Merchant Emperor (54 page)

“I don’t believe you,” Rhapsody said. “You may have witnessed our meeting, but you could not have seen a soul being created. But, regardless, it matters not.”

“In a way, you are right,” the dragon said, grinning even as her scales began to pale again. “What matters is that it should never have been able to happen—because, on the thread of Time as it had originally occurred, you were not a child of teenaged years when you conceived him, but an aged hag, in Tyrian, not Serendair. And Gwydion was a madman, broken by life and his battle with the demon.”

“What are you babbling about? What do you mean, ‘as it had originally occurred’?”

The dragon grinned wider with delight. “I have told you, history was altered for you. Though I do not know by what hand it occurred, Time’s threads were cut and replaced, so that your child’s conception and birth was changed. In the first occurrence of Time, that conception and birth was unnatural—and led to your rather gruesome death immediately thereafter, as was prophesied. You fared much better in the second iteration of Time, sadly for me. You are, after all, still here. So, no matter what the cost was to the rest of the world, your life was saved—and improved—by the manipulation of Time. Disgusting and outrageous and reeking of hubris, but true nonetheless.”

“How? And why?”

The dragon wheezed; the breath escaping her nostrils was staggered and shot with blood.

“I’ve already told you that I do not know this,” she said weakly. “I can only tell you that the Tapestry was altered, a thread removed that affected all of the rest of history. You have seen evidence of this yourself with your own eyes, but you were not able to make sense of it. The Nain king entrusted the only record of it to you.”

Utter silence took up residence again within the cave.

“I only know one last piece of lore, something heard and not seen as the time-thread of the—original Past melted into oblivion. A name that connected—you to another in your life, earlier than you came to know him or her in the second iteration of Time. The name of—someone you both cared for, and whose death brought you together. That name is
Werinatha
.”

“I know no such name.”

“Of course you—do not,” said the dragon impatiently. “It is from the Forgotten Past, which no—eye shall ever see again. But I have been able to regale you with stories in your own memory, a Past you yourself have forgotten until this moment. Now, I have—upheld my end of our—bargain,” Anwyn said with great effort. “Your turn—tell me what I—crave to know. Did you find Gwylliam’s body within the mountain?”

“Yes,” Rhapsody said. “Sprawled on his back on a table in the library.”

“Tell me what you were able—to divine about his ending.”

“I don’t know how he died, though I assume it was how you arranged it with the demon. I saw a vision of his last moments, through his eyes. He called repeatedly for the horn, to Anborn and someone named Bareth. He called to you, to his ‘good people,’ begging to be brought the Great Seal, and water.”

“And did you hear his last words?” the beast demanded.

“I did.” The Lady Cymrian’s voice spoke softly, respectfully in the darkness.

“Tell me,” Anwyn whispered.

An exhalation of breath echoed through the cave.

“I will speak them to you, in his voice, as I heard them,” the Namer said finally. “And then our bargain will be complete.”

The beast listened raptly. A moment later another voice filled the air of the shattered bath, a voice with deep timbre, filled with pain and fear. A man’s voice.

A voice she recognized immediately.

Ah, Anwyn, so at last you have vanquished me. What irony your sisters, the Fates, employ, that I die here, beneath the cruel visage of the great copper wyrm I had gilt in this place to honor your mother. Even in my last I am forced to see you—to leave this life with the image of you in my eyes. All for naught—all my great works, my great dreams, for naught. Hague, you were right. You were right. I stare into the Vault of the Underworld, but it is a vault of my own making. The Great Seal. Anwyn, forgive me. Forgive me, my people. The Great Seal—

The voice broke for a moment. Then, in a barely audible tone, it whispered Gwylliam’s great aphorism, the words he directed Merithyn the Explorer to greet any inhabitant of the continent that he met with.

The origin of the Cymrian name.

Come—we in peace, from the grip of—death to life in this fair—land.

Silence reigned for a moment.

“Gwylliam—asked my forgiveness?” the dragon hissed. “You lie.”

“You have heard his last words, in his voice,” said the Namer, her voice her own again. “You will hear no more words from me to convince you of what you already know to be true.”

The beast’s fragmented mind was racing. “You must—heal me,” she said, beginning to gasp. “There is so—much I can teach my great-grandson. And so much I can—learn from him.”

Finally, the darkness shifted, and the Lady Cymrian stepped out of the shadows near the dragon’s head.

“No,” she said simply. “That will never happen. It is time.”

“How disappointing,” the dragon spat. “You are so famous for your acts of mercy, for your forgiveness; you absolved the entire Cymrian Council of its misdeeds, rinsed the blood from their hands, by telling them they needed to—forgive each other and themselves, to let the Past go. How convenient. Where is that mercy now, m’lady? Why do you—deny it to the great-grandmother of your own child?”

“It is you that has brought me to this point,” Rhapsody said quietly. “There is nothing left of mercy in me; that part of me is gone. If I were to spare your life now, it would only be because it would serve my purposes to do so. That concept is not within my makeup. I don’t know how to manipulate a situation to my own ends. Therefore, at least just putting an end to the threat you bring is logical and sensible. Perhaps one day I will regret it, but if it keeps my son safe, I will have to find comfort in that knowledge and live with the guilt. Right now, I feel nothing but the desire to be rid of you and your vicious, random chaos.”

The wyrm sighed, hearing the truth in the Namer’s words and too weak to do anything to change her mind.

“Ah, well. Your loss. I know enough—of—the Future—to know that you—will burn with your—hatred of me. That gives me comfort.”

Rhapsody inhaled, then let her breath out slowly. When she spoke again, the Namer’s tone of True-Speaking was in her words.

“I harbor no hatred toward you, Anwyn—but your death at my hands will bring peace to more than just my mind. In the name of my sworn knight, I end your life. I know it will bring consolation of some degree to him.”

With great effort, the dragon’s lip curled slightly.

“And who—is this—knight, that my death—will console him? That bastard, the Bolg king? Your slobbering friend, the—giant freak? The—mudfilth—that crawled through—the Earth with you, like the vermin you are—?”

Rhapsody’s face darkened at the insults, but no wrath was evident as she drew her sword. The flames bellowed forth from her scabbard, burning with righteous anger. She stepped onto the wyrm’s neck, holding the draconic skeleton steady, and sought the pulsing vein near her feet.

“Hold still, and it will be quick,” she said shortly.

“Answer—my—question,” the wyrm commanded in a strained whisper. “Tell—me. I deserve the knowledge as I die.”

The Lady Cymrian, the Iliachenva’ar, pressed her blade to the beast’s hide above the vein. She bent at the waist, so that she could speak quietly into the dragon’s ear.

“You deserve nothing, but I will tell you anyway. My sworn knight, my champion—my friend—is your youngest son, Anborn ap Gwylliam,” she said softly. “And, for whatever you did that turned him from a valiant young soldier to a merciless killer, for his suffering, for him, in his name, I take your life.”

She heard the voice of her first sword instructor sounding clearly in her memory.

’At’s right, miss. Make it a good, clean blow, now
.

Then she struck. Cleanly, deeply.

At her words, just before she drove the blade of the sword into Anwyn’s neck, the beast’s eyes opened in shock, blazing blue fire in the darkness of the cavern. She wrenched her body to the side, slashing at Rhapsody with her undamaged claw. The Lady Cymrian stumbled off the wyrm’s neck, but the blade had bit deep, and she dragged it with her as she fell back, slicing the dragon’s throat open.

Anwyn’s larynxless voice, a manipulation of the lore of the air around her, snarled angrily even as acidic blood spurted from her neck, showering Rhapsody in black-red gore.

“
Anborn
? That—miscreant? That
coward
, that—”

“That hero,” Rhapsody interrupted, slapping the beast’s cheek stingingly with the blunt of her sword, driving her onto her back. “That guardian, that protector,” she continued as she drove the blade into the hollow below Anwyn’s throat, eliciting a shattering roar. “That leader of men, that defender, that
Kinsman
—isn’t that really what you meant to say?”

Panting with her own exertion now, she dragged the blade down toward the beast’s heart, as she had once done in Anwyn’s grasp in the air above the Great Moot, dodging the flailing claw and the geyser of bitter blood.

A gargling gasp was all that she heard in response.

“Your last breath is upon you,” Rhapsody said as the beast’s chest tore open, the flames of Daystar Clarion licking the three-chambered heart that was beating erratically below her feet. “Surely you don’t want your epic last words to be a hateful lie? Even Gwylliam knew to ask forgiveness in his final moments. Remember, though I am a Namer, I owe you nothing. I will herald what you say only if I consider it to be worthy of history. Otherwise, your words will be lost to it. I know that such an ignominious end, a consignment to a truly forgotten past, would be your own eternal damnation.” She let the blade of the sword of the stars and elemental fire hover in the dragon’s chest, the flames licking her ribs.

“Well?” she asked politely. “Last chance.”

The beast’s eyelids fluttered weakly. Her claws still clutched at the air, trying to find Rhapsody, who stood now on her abdomen, bent over with exertion and in the attempt to hear what the dragon might say. The waning voice of air gurgled horribly, then spat out a curse Rhapsody recognized, having once heard it spoken by her own husband in livid anger in the language of dragons, an obscenity of mammoth proportions.

Rhapsody exhaled deeply.

“Bad answer,” she said. “A waste of breath. Oh well.” She leaned close one last time.

“In the name of Anborn ap Gwylliam,” she said.

With a savage twist, she pierced the beast’s beating heart with her sword and tore it from her sundered chest, closing her eyes against the cyclone of acidic blood that sprayed her face and upper body. With her eyes still closed, she saw that heart through her connection with the sword, no longer beating, but quivering menacingly. She set it ablaze, watching it burn to ashes, which she then tossed into the broken bed of the ancient bath where it hissed, then burned out dully.

When she opened her eyes, she beheld those of the dragon, open and staring lifelessly at the broken vault of Kurimah Milani above them.

The beast’s great maw was open, her gleaming teeth spotted with drops of her own blood. Rhapsody stood silently, breathing heavily, waiting, but there was no movement, no sign of life, just the hideous sound of rancid air escaping the dragon’s tattered lungs.

Rhapsody waited in the ebbing light, standing a vigil of sorts, emotionless. Finally she set about harvesting a few pieces of evidence, dipping her last clean handkerchiefs in the beast’s blood, draining in a quiet river from her now-still chest cavity, removing her claws, especially the enormous thumb talon, the mate of the one Achmed had shot off with his cwellan when she was in Anwyn’s grasp at the battle of the Fallen.

She wrapped the coup in burlap from her pack, then raised Daystar Clarion. The elemental blade of starlight and fire, pulsing in time with her heartbeat, filled the cavern with oscillating light.

She thought about offering a prayer of some sort, but her soul was void of any words that would be holy. So instead she spoke the word for ignition as she touched the dragon’s body with the sword one final time, and then sang a word in the tongue of the ancient Lirin Namers.

Ethnegl.
Consume.

As if racing, the flames leapt from the elemental blade and roared over the surface of the dragon’s body. They burned intensely, filling the cavern with black smoke mingled with the occasional glimpse of copper.

As the fire consumed the beast, crackling the skin from the skeleton, Rhapsody stood, numb, pained by no regret, nor comforted with satisfaction. As the carcass’s head ripped into flame, she noted that she could not even summon up the energy to make careful note for history of the death of one of the Manteids, the Seers, sometimes known as the Fates, the triplet daughters of Elynsynos, the matriarchal wyrm that had long held the continent as her own lands, and Merithyn the Explorer, her Seren lover. In the back of her mind, the significance of the moment was not lost on her.

In her heart, she could not find the strength to care.

When the fire was finally done, having burned the massive body to ash, Rhapsody sheathed her sword, gathered her pack, and left the ruins of the ancient place of healing without a backward glance.

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