Elegy for a Lost Star (31 page)

She thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose not.”

“Good. Then perhaps when this folderol is finished, you can turn your attention to this. As I've explained, if it works the way the one I knew of in the old world worked, it might be precisely what we need to keep the Bolglands, and consequently the Alliance, free from subversion or attack. Your ward, the Sleeping Child, all your Bolg grandchildren, and the ‘people' of Ylorc are certainly worth
that
, aren't they?”

“Of course,” said Rhapsody uncertainly.

“Well, just in case you still think this is ill advised, know this: While I was off pulling your charming arse out of a sea cave, my kingdom was being infiltrated by the mistress of the assassin's guild of Yarim, the very same folks you talked me into helping by having the Bolg drill them a new
wellspring for Entudenin, for which we have not received payment in full, by the way. Consequently, said guildmistress not only destroyed Gurgus Peak, but also poisoned a good deal of the kingdom with picric acid.”

“Oh, gods!” Rhapsody exclaimed in horror.

Achmed considered. “No, I don't believe she got them, but it may have only been by accident if she didn't. Suffice to say that at least a thousand of the Bolg have died or been terribly ill with symptoms like dysentery, bleeding out the eyes, bleeding internally—”

“All right, that's enough,” Rhapsody said, fighting back nausea and losing. She ran to the nearest potted plant and retched.

Achmed waited smugly until she returned.

“So I trust I can count on your help in this matter?”

Rhapsody sighed, still pale and woozy.

“I will do what I can, Achmed, though I can't promise that I will be able to give you the information that you seek,” she said, leaning against the enclave wall. “But if it is of any encouragement, know that I expect to have some time to work on it very shortly.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I need to consult with Ashe and see if he agrees first, but it's my hope to leave and spend some time with Elynsynos shortly.”

Achmed's eyes widened. “You are going to a dragon's lair while pregnant?”

“Yes, actually. She is the only one I can think of who truly knows what it is like to be carrying a wyrmkin child. So I will make you an offer: If Ashe agrees I will take the manuscript with me and work on it when the nausea allows. I will do what I can with it, though again I make you no guarantees. You, in turn, will bring Krinsel to me at Thaw, so that I can keep her with me until my baby is delivered.”

She could tell that the Bolg king was smiling behind his veils.

“So you trust yourself to a Bolg midwife before all the vaunted healers of Roland?”

“In a heartbeat. Do we have an agreement?”

“We do,” Achmed said. “Just make certain you hold up your end of the bargain.”

F
aron stared down in silence at the merriment below him.

His awareness did not include the concept of holidays; having been kept in the dark basement of the Judiciary all of his life in Argaut, he was confused and upset by the noise and celebration taking place just beyond the hill on which he was standing.

“A
good solstice to ya, Brookins.”

The burly fisherman broke into a gap-toothed smile but did not pause from tying his lines.

“Glad to see you're feelin' better, and a good solstice to you as well, Quayle,” he said, watching the snow in the distance whip about in the wind that rippled the water below the docks. The warmth of the ocean kept the air clear here, on the point of the jetty south of town. He winched the last of the ropes, then pulled his hat down over his red ears. “You up to helping me and Stark haul the traps in?”

Quayle wiped the mucus from the tip of his red nose with the back of his worsted sleeve, then dried his similarly red eyes with it as well.

“Let the lobsters wait another day,” he muttered grumpily as Stark, another dockmate, approached, dragging the crates for the catch. “A storm's brewin'; you can tell by the sky it's gonna be a cracker.”

Stark spat into the ocean and shook his head.

“Been two days since baitin' already,” he said, his voice scratchy from the wind and disuse. Stark rarely spoke; when out in the harbor with both him and Quayle, Brookins occasionally forgot Stark was even in the boat. “An' a whole village waitin' to eat 'em tonight.”

“He's right,” Brookins said to Quayle. “You go home and get yourself a grog; we'll haul in.”

“You're daft to go out now; it's almost sunset.” Quayle jammed his hands inside his sleeves, as if they were a lady's muff. “Don't want to be spending the holidays consoling your widows.”

Stark scowled and climbed into the boat.

“Go back to bed,” he said. “Come on, Brookins. My supper's waiting.”

Brookins looked from Quayle to Stark, then back to Quayle again.

“He's right,” he said finally. “Get some rest. Stark and me will split the take from this catch with you; you baited, after all. We'll celebrate the holiday tomorrow, then have a whole lovely catch to pull in the next day. I'll drop you by a few for your pot on the way home.” Quayle nodded gloomily. Brookins lit the oil lantern that lighted their prow, then set out into the harbor with Stark.

For a long time Quayle stood, watching the bobbing light on the waves as his friends emptied the traps of their catch. The breeze whipped off the waves and stung, sending sand and salt spray into his eyes. Finally, when the
boat's light was too far out to see anymore he turned his attention north to the twinkling candles that shone in the windows of Jeremy's Landing, and the bonfires that were beginning to light the village square in anticipation of the solstice.

Merry music began to drift toward him on gusts of the icy wind. Quayle's bitterness at the thought of lost profit drifted away with it, and his humor began to rise in the anticipation of the celebration at hand. He was too far away to catch the aroma of the stewpots yet, but if he hurried, he could be there in time to sample each of the entries in the village's contest. And, as on every solstice night, there would be bread and ale and singing, with the promise of other pleasures of the flesh later, in warm brothels or cold stables. The season's excitement seeped into his nostrils along with the cold salty wind, chasing his malady away. He unhooded his lantern, turned away from the dock, and started across the salty marsh dunes at the edge of the bay, dark as pitch in the winter night.

The dunes seem higher tonight
, he thought; the tiny beams from the distant candles vanished as he stepped into a swale in the marsh. He pulled his hat brim lower to shield his eyes from the wind, then cupped his hand around the battered lantern, trying to keep the wind from snuffing it.

Before him in the blackness the frost-bleached ground seemed to heave, then rise until it towered into the sky.

Quayle stopped, night blind. His lungs seemed suddenly full and heavy, as if the chill he had caught a few days before had returned, stealing his breath. Shakily he held up the lantern.

In front of him the dune shifted again, sand and marsh grass raining from it as if it were a waterfall. The dim light of his lamp flashed on what appeared to be a giant statue, taller than himself by more than half, a primitivelooking man clad in armor, shedding sand in great wispy waves. Its blind eyes seemed to be fixed on him.

“God's drawers,” Quayle whispered. “What is this?”

The statue in the sand did not move.

Quayle swallowed hard, his throat sore and suddenly without spit. He tried to imagine, with a mind clouded by shock and illness and anticipation of frolic, how this statue could have come to wash up on the beach, and especially how it could have happened without his hearing of it. Jeremy's Landing was a tiny community, many generations of families who plied the sea for a living, selling their catch in nearby towns, all interdependent upon one another. Each event, no matter how insignificant, was reported breathlessly from hut to hut; how he could have missed this news was incomprehensible to him.

He shook his head, then turned northward, and took a step toward the village.

The statue's head moved in unison with his.

Quayle gasped, the lantern in his hand shaking violently.

He held the lantern up higher in the wind. There was something malevolent in the statue's stance, as if seething anger had been sculpted into it by the artisan who carved it. Quayle did not know how he knew this, but the tension, the fury was palpable. He leaned forward and stared at the figure's eyes.

Then reared back in horror as those eyes stared back, gleaming with hatred behind milky cataracts.

The lantern fell from his hand onto the sandy marsh and went out. Blackness swallowed Quayle.

In that blackness, he felt certain that the titanic figure before him was breathing.

Or moving.

Blind, Quayle turned and dashed to his left, running hell-bent for the lights of the village. He had gone a half-dozen steps before he was lifted from the slippery ground up into the air with a force that stripped the breath from him.

A sickening crack resonated in his ears; dully Quayle realized it was his pelvis shattering under the crushing weight that had clamped around him. He tried to scream, but no air would come into his lungs. All he would do was open and close his mouth silently in terror as he was dragged forward in the air, until he was a hairsbreadth away from the terrible eyes, black with a milky sheen, staring at him in the darkness.

Quayle's mind, never the keenest in the world, disconnected from his body. The unreality of what was happening was too much to comprehend; instead he decided that he must still be in the throes of the fever that had gripped him with the onset of his chill.
I'm still in bed, having nightmares
, he thought as the titan turned him onto his back, until the stone fingers gouged through his underbelly and began digging around in his viscera. Then the agony and the spinning lack of air hit him at once, and he began to shudder, the only bodily function he was capable of.

The statue ripped through his intestines, searching, then pulled its bloody fingers out of his abdomen and pushed aside the folds of his tunic. It seized the tattered scale that Quayle kept tucked inside his shirt, dropping the fisherman as it raised the object up to the light of the moon, the beams dancing off its ridges in rainbow ripples.

As the darkness started to close in, Quayle had only the momentary sight of the titanic being above him, an expression of almost piteous joy evident on its rough-featured face, before the statue turned and brought its foot down on his face, splitting his skull like the husk of a soft-shelled crab.

The pieces of him were found in the morning, first by the ptarmigans and gulls, then by Brookins, who stained the sand with all the liquid his body held at the sight.

F
or the first time in as long as his cloudy mind could remember, Faron felt joy.

No longer a formless creature trapped inside a statue, he felt the pieces of his divergent identity start to fall into place; he was a man now, a titan formed of living earth and fire, the son of a demon, blessed and cursed with the memories of ancient battles and conquests that he did not understand.

The green scale hummed in his hand, the light of the moon rippling off it like seawater flowing over the edge of the world. Reverently he pressed his treasure against his face, feeling once again the vibration that had resonated deep within him for so long. He had mourned its absence by becoming weaker, withering; now the strength of spirit came flowing back, sparking inside him. He slid it into place with the other three, forming a gleaming fan of color in his stone hand; the warmth they emitted coursed through him, filling him with something akin to bliss.

But he was still missing something.

Distantly he heard the roar of the sea; it was a sound that had struck great fear into Faron from the time his father had brought him forth from the quiet darkness of the cavernous tunnels in which he had lived to sail across the world to this place. His father had been chasing a woman, a woman whose hair he had saved and carried with him, tied with a moldering ribbon. Faron had scryed for her with the scales, and had found her. They had come to this new, frightening land, only to have his father die and their ship scuttled in the ocean.

He stared at that ocean now, shrinking from the might of it. Slowly he walked to the beach, where the foaming waves were chasing up on the sand. He stood, staring at the glittering green scale until those waves touched his bare stone feet; the sensation nauseated him, filling him with fear, and he shrank away, back to the dry land, where he could feel the warmth of the earth once more.

Then, his treasure returned to him, he turned slowly in the night and walked away from the pounding sea, leaving the noise of Jeremy's Landing and the solstice celebration behind him.