Elegy for a Lost Star (44 page)

The titan continued to observe her, unmoving. It watched her as she began to sob, then slowly knelt in front of her, oblivious of the arrow fire that was glancing off its back and sides.

One of the statue's enormous hands curled into a fist, eliciting a gasp of horror from Sally and every other freak who had been trapped on the wagon's porch or by fear.

Silence fell over the devastated ruin of the camp, save for the crackling of the remaining barrel fires and the soft moaning of the dying.

The titan reached out slowly and ran the back of its stone knuckles over the cheek of the terrified woman, brazing it slightly from the roughness of the stone, but wiping away the flood of tears that had cascaded down her face.

Exactly as she had always done for him.

No realization came into the terrified woman's eyes.

From his wagon across the campsite, the Ringmaster finally emerged,
tucking his nightshirt into his striped pants, the double-pursed woman behind him.

“What is going on here?” he shouted, his voice thick with rum, unspent arousal, and annoyance.

The shocked silence broken, the freaks and carnies, Duckfoot Sally among them, began to shriek again.

The statue's head snapped upright.

F
or a moment Faron had been feeling a sensation that had not been present since he had been encased in the body of Living Stone. It was the sensation of sadness.

She no remember me
, he was thinking.

There was something devastating to him about that; without Sally and her kindness, there would be no one now in the world who had known him as he was.

Had loved him as he was.

He put his free hand up to his ear, where the lucky shot had torn a chink in his flesh; there was no pain, just a sense that the damaged area was drying in a way that the rest of his earthen body was not, as if the stone was no longer alive.

Suddenly he could hear the sound ringing clearer, the song the scales emitted.

His head jerked up at the realization, but as it did, the garbage noise, the interference that deadened the song of the scales, rose to meet it, blocking its sound, hindering him from finding it.

He shook his head, trying to clear it of the noise, but that only made it grow louder.

Loudest of all seemed to be coming from immediately in front of him.

His balled fist opened, his fingers wrapped around Duckfoot Sally's neck, and squeezed until the noise she was making stopped.

I
n horror, the remains of the Monstrosity watched the titan rip Duckfoot Sally's head from her shoulders and drop it idly on the ground to its side, then straighten up and turn slowly in the direction of the Ringmaster.

The Ringmaster stumbled down the steps of his wagon, barefoot in the snow.

“Do something, you misbegotten idiots!” he squealed at the remaining guards, but the carnies were running, fleeing out into the darkness of the Krevensfield Plain along with whatever freaks could still move. The woman he had been attempting to fornicate a few moments prior gaped raggedly and ran back inside the Ringmaster's wagon, a miscalculation apparent a moment later when the titan grasped the rail of the porch and hurled it over the Ringmaster's head, blocking his exit as it smashed to the ground.

The Ringmaster froze. He glanced wildly around, looking for any exit he could find, but behind him his path was blocked by his shattered wagon, the bi-pursed woman's broken body sprawling from what had once been his window.

Before him was a giant angry shadow, formed of stone but moving now as a man.

A man with murderous rage in his eyes.

Quickly the owner of the Monstrosity dug his hands into his pockets, searching blindly for whatever valuables he might find, knowing there was little likelihood that anything so destructive might be bought off with gems or gold, but not knowing anything better to do.

His trembling hand caught hold of something sharp and rough at the edges; it was the tattered blue oval he had removed from the belly of the fish-boy a long while back. He kept it in his pocket for good luck, and because the vibration it emitted had a warm and sensuous effect on his nether region. He seized the scale and tossed it into the darkness at the approaching titan's feet.

F
aron stopped in his tracks on the snowy ground.

The scale gleamed before him, reflecting the fires and the crazy light of the moon. It was the scrying scale, the blue talisman etched with the picture of an eye surrounded by clouds on one side, the convex one, and obscured by them on the other, the concave one. It was the scale in which he had first found this place, had tracked the woman with the long hair over the sea at his father's insistence, had helped his father keep track of his fleet of pirate ships on the sea. It was possibly his greatest prize, and the loss of it had left him bereft.

Now it was lying, unobstructed, at his feet, singing its clear and bell-like song.

Reverently Faron bent down and scooped up the scale, then held it aloft in triumph to the light of the cloud-draped moon.

Then he turned away, lost in the joy of a treasure recovered.

Behind him, the Ringmaster let out his breath in a ragged sigh of relief.

Faron stopped in midstride.

For a moment he had almost forgotten, in the reverie of the scale's recovery, the torture that he had endured, the agony of the scale being torn from him, the teasing to force him to perform, the endless abuse and isolation in the darkness of a bumping circus wagon. He did not understand his torment then, nor did he understand it now.

But he remembered it.

He thought back to the image of Duckfoot Sally, swinging her nails like a sword in his defense; the Ringmaster had belted her into unconsciousness with the back of his hand. In his primitive mind Faron did not even remember
what he himself had done to Sally, but the rage of the memory returned, along with that of all the other torment he had suffered at the hands of the man in the striped trousers.

He turned and was on the Ringmaster in a heartbeat; the man didn't even have a chance to open his mouth to scream before Faron backhanded him into the broken wagon. Then, for the first time since gaining this new body of living earth, he attacked for the sheer, sweet pleasure of revenge, pummeling the man's lifeless body into jelly, then flinging it out into the night where even the carrion did not recognize it the next morning.

The song of the scales swelled in his ears now, drowning out the whine of the wind, the whimpering of the injured, the agonized howls of the dying. It was the only thing he could hear, and it sustained him.

He listened as, in the distance, the last of the tones sounded, calling to the others. Faron turned to follow it, heading south, away from the broken remains of the Monstrosity.

Toward Jierna'sid.

I
n the moments before the assault on the Bolglands began, Grunthor was experiencing a sense of foreboding that was unlike any other he had been granted in all his years of war. It was not the presence of some sort of fear, nor the queasiness in the stomach and dull thudding at the base of the brain that a commander of fighting men feels when something is not right. He certainly had known that sensation enough to recognize it. Rather, it was an artificial absence of any feeling of concern at all, as if some unknown entity had reached directly into his warrior's soul and ripped out every instinct, every trained alarm, that had been his from birth and developed over a lifetime of soldiering.

In short, he felt nothing.

Suddenly all the unconscious points of reference that a man whose life consists of perennial vigilance marks with each breath were gone, as if in all the world there was nothing to worry about. The sensation did not include a false sense of well-being, just a total numbness to the ever-present need to be on guard, at the ready.

Had he not been shocked by this sudden ripping of his soldier's wariness, he might have recognized it for what it was. It would have made no difference in the outcome of the events that followed, and perhaps would have only served to frighten him more.

Because what he felt in those moments, that utter sense of nothingness
that numbed his senses and left him blank, was the total subversion of his earth lore as the dragon subsumed it.

The elemental heartbeat that rang in his blood, the thudding pounding of the world's pulse, disappeared. Had his own heart suddenly ceased to beat it would not have been more shocking. His connection to the earth, deep and intrinsic as it was to him, vanished, leaving him frozen, dizzy, for a split second, before he took another breath, and his heartbeat returned to its regular tempo.

By the time his awareness returned, the ground was already beginning to sunder.

R
hapsody had given the underground grotto, with its tiny cottage and gardens in the middle of a dark, subterranean lake, the name Elysian, after the castle of the king who had ruled in her homeland of Serendair. The daughter of a human farmer and his Lirin wife, she had grown up in wide green fields beneath open skies, and had never seen anything so enchanting as the quiet solitude of the dark lake, dotted by tiny shafts of sunlight that shone through holes drilled in the rocky ground above it. She had never seen Elysian Castle either, but its name conjured magical images in her mind as a child, so she thought the name appropriate.

But the place had had other names long before she came. The Firbolg called the ring of rocky crags that towered above the grotto, hiding it from sight and the wind of the upworld, Kraldurge, which in their tongue was translated as the Realm of Ghosts. Whether this was because of the mournful howling of the wind as it whistled around the bowl formed in those towering rocks, or for a deeper reason, was lost to memory. In any case the name was apt, because both the dark underground lake and the grassy meadow above it held unholy secrets, unforgiven sins that could only have been remembered by one living being, the beast who until her awakening at summer's end had been forgotten as well.

It was to this place of dark secrets that the dragon went first, boring up through the earth quietly, drawing the lore of it into herself. Her innate sense led the way as unerringly as a beacon, guiding her from far away to this place she had once made a lair of a sort, a hiding place of privacy and seclusion within the mountains she had once ruled. Her hated husband had given her this place, had made it for her, in fact, but she did not remember those things, only that it had once been hers, and that she had been betrayed there.

And more—she could hear the echoes of her name in the underground grotto, could sense it whistling in the wind of the guardian rocks above, trapped in endless circles, repeated over and over in an eternal howl of despair.

Aaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnwwwwwyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

Now that she was finally here, in the place where the name had been
uttered, she could feel the hatred, the betrayal, and the grim memory of pleasure long ago tasted in revenge. Whatever she had done to inspire that scream had a sweet flavor; it must have been a delicious payback, though she did not recall what it was.

As she waited beneath the grotto, savoring her return to this place, another taste came into her mouth, bitter this time. It was akin to the smell of another woman's perfume on the bedsheets, or a foreign taste on a lover's lips. At first the dragon was repulsed, spat in a vain attempt to clear the lore from her mouth, but eventually her compromised understanding recognized it for what it was.

This place above her, the lake and the gardens, the island and the cottage, belonged, in every possible way, to someone else now.

At the precise moment that her mind grasped that concept, it realized another as well: the person who supplanted her in this place, who had torn the lore away from her, knowingly or otherwise, who had taken away her dominion, was the woman whose misty face and green eyes haunted her waking dreams.

As the fury rose, a calming reassurance took hold, staying the response.

Because the dragon knew in that place she could smell the scent of the woman she despised, could drink in her essence, absorb it into her skin, into herself.

And thereby track that woman until she found her.

The wyrm did not feel the need to know the reason for her hatred, had no urge to understand her desire for revenge. She was still barely cognizant of anything, had lost the planes and angles and strata of consciousness, still was not reasoning or making the connections between thought and action. She knew only two things beyond doubt—that she had an endless well of acidic anger within her soul, and that venting it in destruction eased the pain somewhat.

I seek relief
, she told herself as she slid along the underground spring that fed the lake, feeling the water recognize her and welcome her to this place again.
Surely there can be no reproach for that
.

Up from the bedrock at the lake bottom she emerged, swallowing the last of the earth's lore like a breath to be held beneath the water. Up she spiraled, from the endless darkness of the earth toward the muted light above the lake's surface, swimming with all the speed her anger could generate.

Past startled fish that dwelt in the depths, skittering away in terrified schools, by whisper-thin formations of crystal stalactites that rose up in great cathedral arches of brilliant color, unseen in the underground grotto, the dragon sped forward, finally bursting forth from the water onto the rocky shore of the tiny island in the center of the dark lake.

She lay for a moment, gathering her breath, then lifted her head and gazed at the place she had heard her name being called.

The long-ago scream actually had its genesis in the world above this place, this deep grotto; she could hear it wailing high up through the rock, dancing angrily on the wind that whipped through the circle rocks of Kraldurge. But there was enough memory latent here, below where it had happened, to warrant her notice.