The Weaver's Lament (23 page)

The cavern of the Lightcatcher was the only part of the mountains to be spared from the effects of its indigo light.

He turned back to the instrumentality to see Rhapsody on her knees on the floor again, her head in her hands, with Fraax in the distance, appearing confused.

“Fraax?”

“Hmmmmm?” The Archon blinked. “Majesty?”

“Step into the hallway—I'm going to bar and lock the door. If you are able, keep away anyone who comes except for me and the Lady Cymrian. Do you understand?”

The Archon cocked his head and looked at him strangely. Then he wandered in the direction of the hallway, taking his time, looking around at the high ceilings above him, until he stood outside the doorway.

“Well, I suppose this is what we asked for,” the Bolg king grumbled. He strode to the table where Rhapsody sat and took her hand, dragging her gently to her feet.

“Let's go,” he said brusquely.

 

23

Achmed led her out of Gurgus Peak and back to the Cauldron in silence.

They traveled to the Inner Reaches, the place where the canyon separated the guardian mountains from the Blasted Heath and the Deep Kingdom beyond, dodging wandering Bolg that seemed to have been slowed to half or less of their reasoning, the anger that had rallied them to prepare for war doused, as with the coming on of night. The Bolg king and the Lady Cymrian returned numbly to the same tunnel where they had come to mourn earlier that day and sat in silence for longer than it felt comfortable. Finally Achmed ventured a joke.

“I just realized you burned Ashe,” he said. “Ashe—burn; ironic.”

Rhapsody's eyes filled with tears. “I'm glad this is funny to you.”

“It is absolutely not. I know this was difficult.”

“Difficult?”
Rhapsody's face, pale with sorrow and exhaustion, flushed red with rage, and she began to shake. “You're joking—
difficult?
Are you trying to torture me more, to punish
me
now for the heinous actions of men who used my husband's thoughtless annoyance at Grunthor's destructive boredom as an excuse to commit unconscionable evil?” Her voice began to rise in hysteria. “Do you blame me for his death as well?
Do you?
”

Achmed seized her shoulders and held her still.

“Of course not,” he said quietly.

“Well, you're more than welcome to—I blame myself, you may as well blame me, too. If you do, by all means, please throw me into the chasm now,” she said, still trembling. “You will be doing me a tremendous favor.”

“Stop, stop, now. You're in shock. Here, sit down.”

“Shock?” she said dully as he lowered her to the floor against the wall, then sat down in front of her. “Why would I be in shock? I've called starfire down upon my husband, blasting him into cinders. I've lost my son.” All sound of life had fled her voice. “Maybe all my children.”

Achmed exhaled slowly. “I doubt that.”

“Meridion told me I was dead to him.”

“He didn't mean it.”

“He's a Namer, Achmed,” Rhapsody said. She stared down at her trembling hands. “You have known one long enough to understand what their statements mean to them.”

“Even a Namer is entitled to a few un-thought-out words of rage after witnessing what he did,” the Bolg king said quietly. “Give him time. His status as the Child of it may mean that he can undergo a lifetime of healing in what would be a relatively short span of it for the rest of us.”

She thought about her husband's ragged voice in the ether, and the need to confess bubbled up inside her, tickling her Namer's sensibility.

“You may not believe me, but I gave Ashe what he wanted,” she said.

Achmed turned his mismatched gaze on her. “You may not believe
me,
but Ashe gave Grunthor what he wanted as well.”

Rhapsody looked at him blankly.

“Grunthor has been tired for a very long time, Rhapsody,” Achmed said. “A
very
long time. He never completely recovered from the injuries he sustained in the War of the Known World, in his battle with the titan. I have pondered on it for centuries, why he never came back to whole, to the point to which you and I have always recovered. I think there was something about the injuries that Grunthor, as a child of Earth, took at the hands of another child of elemental earth, and a demonic one, that never really healed completely.

“While we have all survived a thousand years, Grunthor aged in ways you and I have not yet. He had been bored with peace and exhausted with the routine of training men and women for battle that never came. Probably he inherited it from his mother's Bengard blood, the call of the arena that craved glorious death in youth over a decrepit old age. While I blame your husband for whatever foolish thing he said, I have never known him to intentionally wish Grunthor harm. And I certainly don't blame you for any of it. If there is an Afterlife beyond the Gate, I would like to believe Grunthor is at peace, at least.”

He looked around, then back at her, then stood.

“I need alcohol,” he said. “I think you do, too. Can I trust you to remain here and not throw yourself into the chasm while I'm gone?”

“I can honestly promise you nothing at this moment, Achmed.”

“Then I will forgo the alcohol and stay with you. I am unwilling to risk it—when a Namer talks of suicide, it's a terrifying thing.”

Rhapsody looked up at him. His face, normally shielded with veils, was uncovered, revealing dark circles under his already hollow eyes, the veins and nerve endings on his face even more pronounced.

“I'm sorry,” she said softly. “I'm being a brat. Go get us some wine. I will not do anything intentionally stupid.”

“I'll be right back.”

He returned a few moments later, having raided the same vintner's closet they had obtained bottles of wine from when first holding vigil for Grunthor. He gave a new one to her, then sat back down across from her and took a long drink from a bottle of brandy.

“It's strange, this state of called night,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I don't like the way it feels—the air is dead, thick with silence. The Bolg seem like they are in shock as well, waiting, confused. I hope they are able to recover from it.”

“I imagine they will. The power of the Lightcatcher is not perpetual; it has to be renewed either by exposure to sunlight, which will not happen as long as the artificial night from the indigo spectrum is in place, or until the memory of light that has been stored in the diamond runs out.”

“That could be a thousand years.”

“Or a thousand days. It may take that long for the rage to cool, for the Bolg to forget.”

“They will never forget,” Achmed said. “But they will lose the ability to remain primed for war. On balance, it was the only thing to do.”

“Agreed.”

“I regret that you were not outside the Lightcatcher, within Ylorc with the rest of them, when we called the night.”

Rhapsody paused in the midst of drinking from the bottle. “Why?”

“Perhaps it would have allowed you the same dull cooling of your pain. Perhaps by the time the morning finally comes, however long that takes, you would have finished grieving and be ready to live again. Instead, I suspect time will pass normally for us, and you will suffer at full strength for however long you choose to grieve.”

She looked down the dark tunnel behind them, lighted dimly by the pale remains of the stalk joints that the tunnel crew of Bolg had set on their last rotation through the corridors before the summoning of night. The torches glowed feebly, their fuel all but spent.

None of the routine movement of the inner mountain caught her eye, not even the skittering of rats she could hear in the distance or the flapping of tapestries in the wind off the canyon.

The voice within her called softly, thick in the intransient air.

Mimen. I am still waiting. Mimen, please.

Rhapsody choked on the bile that had risen in the back of her throat.

“I wish I could have had one last night with him,” she said dully. “Or even one final loveless knob in a darkened alley. Anything that would have given me his seed, as long as he had been willing to attach a piece of his soul to it.” She sighed dispiritedly. “It was the only thing he ever really refused me.”

Achmed closed his eyes as his forehead and nose wrinkled, his upper lip curling in disgust.

“What an utterly repulsive image,” he muttered, “though I have no doubt that Ashe's rotten soul would make an appropriate companion to semen expressed in a back-alley fuck. Please spare me any further musings of that ilk. Neither my stomach nor my mind can take it tonight.”

Rhapsody smiled slightly.

“I'm sorry,” she said, a tone of loss echoing in her words. She stared out over the all-but-bottomless canyon, where seemingly frozen Bolg soldiers stood endless, meaningless guard, buffeted by the whining wind. “Within me I hear a tone sounding, the song of a child waiting to come through into this life from the other side. I have heard such a tone each time Ashe and I conceived one of our children, unique unto itself as each of our children is unique. Now, it will be a namesong I carry until my death, unborn. It will haunt my dreams, and grow within what is left of my heart until it shatters.” She exhaled. “Now, at last, I can feel my life finally having corners, limits, as if I am approaching the wall at the end. Thank God, the One, the All. Immortality has worn out its welcome with me.”

Achmed put the bottle to his lips and imbibed, then wiped his mouth on the back of his arm.

“There's a multitude of cocks out there, primed and waiting for you, Rhapsody. Once the buildup to war winds down, any street in any city on the continent would present you with a thousand or more options. If you want to have another child, walk into any town square, take down your hood, or lift your skirts, and smile. You'll have endless choices of potential fathers within moments.”

He passed her the bottle, and she took it, examined the label, then drank deeply.

“I know you're drunk, or just being vile, or both, but I cannot explain to you how encompassing what I am describing to you is for me. I don't want to bring a child into this world anonymously. There must be love present. Children are conceived without it every day, in horrible ways, but I would fight to make certain that would never happen. I lived through enough of that in my life in the old world, thank you.”

“Are you willing for it to be a voluntary Bolg? They all love you,
First Woman.
”

“Shut up,” Rhapsody said, stinging bitterness in her tone. “I know you are celebrating this night, but my heart is broken.”

Achmed looked at her sharply, then took another drink.

“I'm not celebrating,” he said.

“
Hrekin
. You may not blame Ashe for Grunthor's death, but you've hated him for as long as you've known him.”

“I know you won't believe me, but I do not hate him, nor have I ever hated him. Even if I never understood what you saw in him, I know he loved you. I just don't understand why you have ruled an Alliance when all you wanted was to live simply and in peace, just because he had to rule; why you gave up so much of what you are to be his other half, and, more importantly, why he would allow you to; why you would risk your life to have his children. I guess I just don't understand why being yourself alone wasn't enough. I don't understand why you couldn't have him for protection, for amusement, for sex, for company or sharing parental chores, but still have maintained what is you without having to be half of someone else.”

Rhapsody's world was spinning violently in the throes of grief exacerbated by wine.

“What you actually don't understand is the concept of sharing a soul. It doesn't make you less of a person; I believe I was whole, before and after I married him. But in completing each other, you become another entity as well. Half of another whole.”

“You're drunk, and you never were particularly good at math.”

“As for children, they have never seemed an option for me—I can hear them before they are even undertaken, like this one that is calling to me, haunting me even now. I have shared a soul with Ashe for a thousand years; more, actually. I have been his other half for so long that I could impart to a child not only the lore of humankind and the Lirin, but that of the Seren and Wyrmril that was his legacy as well. But without his love, without the love of a father, willing to share a part of his soul, his life, to bring a child into being, I am forced to know that the soul of this child exists, but that its life was denied.”

“Fine,” Achmed said irritably. “If it really is bothering you that much,
I
will father your child, especially if it means we never have to have this inane conversation ever again.”

KREVENSFIELD PLAIN, BETHANY

Meridion ap Gwydion was sick at heart.

He had stopped to camp for the night, having ridden his horse as far as his conscience would let him without feeling he was abusing the animal, but as fast as he rode, and as far as he went, he could not outrun the guilt for convincing his father to appeal to his mother and the Bolg king.

His words had left his mother broken and his father dead.

He had taken shelter beneath an elm tree, struggling to fall asleep and failing, so he let his mind wander through Time to the last moments of his father's life.

He had not witnessed Ashe's death directly, having been on the stairs when Rhapsody summoned the starfire, so he stepped back to the moment just before it happened.

The passage of Time slowed, then paused, as he went back until he was standing on the field directly in front of his father, who was frozen in between moments, his eyes elevated, watching the one woman he had ever loved on the tower ledge.