The Weaver's Lament (31 page)

“That is the end of my tale, with illustrations, my song, a symphony of Ages spanning from before the Seren War in the Third Age to the end of this one, the Sixth Age, which in what little I can see of the Future will be known as Twilight. The paradox is complete. You deserved to be the one to hear the lore, Uncle, to be made aware of how Time had been altered, what you gained by it—and what you lost in it. It is the Weaver's Lament—when the threads of Time are undone, the song of the Past is resung with new words and new music. It becomes a matter of opinion which iteration is better for the world—nothing more, at least in the eyes of Time.”

Achmed continued to watch his sleeping son, deep in thought. Finally he did not look up, but he spoke.

“Your mother's pyre is probably still warm. Do you wish to sing her dirge?”

Meridion closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment, then shook his head.

“It appears to have already been sung,” he said.

At last the Bolg king looked up. “I assure you it was not, or at least not done properly,” he said. “No one was here other than your mother, your brother, and me. She was dead at the time, he is an infant and very quiet.”

“Did you sing?”

The Bolg king went back to looking at his son.

Meridion smiled sadly. “The wind is satisfied. Thank you, as I said before, for attending to her. I will make my own remembrance in other places, at other times. I appreciate you hearing me out.”

He caressed the baby's head, then rose from the tunnel floor.

Achmed looked up again. “Where is your father's sword?”

“It rests on the altar stone beyond the Water Basilica in Avonderre, the place dedicated to MacQuieth Monodiere Nagall. My mother instructed me to attempt to pick it up, which I did, but I was refused. It was my parents' intent to surrender it to whomever the weapon chose.”

Achmed nodded wordlessly.

“Goodbye, then, Uncle,” Meridion said as he put away the Black Ivory box and straightened his belt and his gear. “I wish you consolation, and hope one day I will see you again.”

“Wait. Here.” Achmed rose as well and went down the hall to the opening of the tunnel where the remains of the ash bed were still taking to the wind. He crouched down and touched the cinders with his thumb, then pressed them onto the baby's chest above his heart.

“You are only the second person I have ever said these words to, Graal—my—son,” he whispered in the Bolgish tongue. “It would be easier for me to wring the blood from my own throat than to say them to anyone else; I could barely bring myself to say them to your mother. But I do love you. Odd and fragmentary as that love might be, it is indeed yours. I hope whatever magic you have inherited from Rhapsody allows you to know, even though it is unlikely you will ever see me again, that you have my love, and that of your mother, for all of Time, cursed entity that Time may be.”

He pressed his lips to Graal's forehead, receiving a series of soft sounds in return.

Then he returned to where Meridion was still standing.

“Take your mother's sword and come with me,” he said.

THE CAULDRON, AT THE LIGHTCATCHER

The Bolg king led Meridion to the Cauldron, the center of most of the royal activity from the very founding of Canrif in this place almost three millennia before, and had the Child of Time follow him through the great hall of thrones to the chamber beyond it, where the glass funicular and the tower staircase stood.

He brought him, past whole cohorts of soldiers who were still wandering aimlessly, into Gurgus Peak where the Lightcatcher was churning, spending the memory of light that had been stored in its diamond power source.

Achmed stunned Meridion by striding into the center of the instrumentality where the altar-like table stood and, after kissing his head, put Graal down on the table.

He turned to Rhapsody's horrified eldest son.

“This is the seventh of your mother's children, the New Beginning. I think you should utilize the Lightcatcher's violet spectrum of the same name to bless him with whatever the powers are of being so named.”

Meridion exhaled slowly. Then a small smile came over his face.

“At your will, Your Majesty.”

Achmed slipped his sensitive, vein-scored fingertip into his son's grasp. The baby seized it and kicked wildly.

“If you wish to make up for your father's debt, care for this child as your mother would have,” he continued. “Ask Analise o Serendair if you need her help; she will know what a magical child needs. You may not have been summoned into existence as he was on this strand of Time, but you were a magical infant with special powers and needs nonetheless. Analise was invaluable in taking care of you in Rhapsody's absence during the War of the Known World.”

“Absence?”

The Bolg king nodded distantly.

“Your mother decided, once a coterie of assassins from the Raven's Guild in Yarim and the Spider's Clutch in Golgarn infiltrated these mountains, that you were no longer safe here, so she took you to the Distant Mountains of the Deep Kingdom and begged Faedryth to give you sanctuary, as you undoubtedly know,” he said. “She did that because she felt the world you had been born into was not safe for you—and she was certainly correct about that. She knew it was her duty, her honor, to try and rectify that situation, mostly for you, but also for the rest of the world. The sacrifices she made to do it, on top of the separation, which tore her heart out, were numerous and terrible, but in the end, the world prevailed.”

He looked back down at Graal and smiled at him.

“The world today is no different. Your father managed to keep a reliable peace and most often order, but there are ancient threats that have not been eradicated that still threaten your mother's children—and mine. It's my duty, and my honor, to try and rectify those situations as well.”

“It would be my honor to take care of Graal until you return,” Meridion said, watching Achmed and his son communicate silently. “And appropriate—I have reason to believe that he would have done the same for me by the old Time-strand.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, as I told you, when Graal made his passage in Gwylliam's exodus, he sailed with the Second Fleet, and made the decision to stay on the Island of Gaematria, nearby to where the fleet sundered. He became the greatest of all the Sea Mages, and I know it was my mother's wish that I be allowed to study with them should things have worked out. So it is the least I can do to assist in his care.”

Achmed winced and rolled his eyes. “The Sea Mages are on my list of Most Hated Entities, right up there with priests and academicians—well, I suppose they are a little of both, come to think of it.”

Meridion nodded, too encompassingly sad to appreciate the humor.

“With your permission, I believe I will make use of your suggestion and will take him first to Analise,” he said, thinking back to one of the few Liringlas he knew, his mother's oldest friend from the Island, for whom Rhapsody had sacrificed much in those bad days. “She is a midwife of consummate ability, and has been like an aunt to me all my life. She will be able to assess him in Manosse to best determine his needs as a summoned child, and give him a peaceful place to spend his earliest days—I fear I need to help my siblings cool the preparations for war which were enacted a short time ago. When peace has returned to both sides of the Middle Continent, I will plan to take him and keep him in my care, until you return.”

“Whatever you decide, I'm certain you will take good care of Graal. Having seen how you dealt with your younger brothers and sisters, I know you will do well by him.”

Achmed reached into his pocket and pulled out the golden locket that he had taken from Rhapsody's neck.

“This was your mother's. I don't really ever remember seeing her without it.”

Meridion's eyes filled with tears. “Aye.”

“I thought you might want it. Do with it what you will. Now, let us get to blessing Graal with the violet spectrum of light, and I will provision your journey personally, as my soldiers are still affected by the indigo light.”

Meridion nodded. He turned to the Lightcatcher, sang the note for the violet part of the spectrum,
Grei-ti,
and set about bathing his baby brother in the light of the New Beginning, feeling both guilty and relieved.

He had spared Achmed the last detail of the story of the time-threads and the change in the Weaver's tapestry.

It was a piece of information that would haunt his own father, should it ever become known to him.

That in the first iteration of Time, once his own birth had been accomplished, and Rhapsody had succumbed to her gruesome death, he himself had eventually been found by the guards, by his grandfather Llauron, by Oelendra and Faedryth and the other refugees in the Distant Mountains, cradled gently in his father's arms.

He was covered in his mother's blood—blood that was dripping from his father's mouth, the remains of her flesh in his teeth.

Just as Ashe had dreamt about in his nightmares on this side of Time.

It was the cost of seeing the Weaver's tapestry that would ruin his own sleep for the rest of his life.

He had not chosen to give the Bolg king the satisfaction or the grief in the knowledge that, while Achmed had been partially responsible for her death by aiding her in a decision she had made herself on this side of Time, Ashe had, in his last remaining moment of clarity, tried to put her out of her agony in the only way the dragon within him knew how on the first strand of it.

If for no other reason, the fact that my alteration of Time prevented that from happening was well worth it,
he thought.

 

PROPHECY OF THE LAST GUARDIAN

Within a Circle of Four

Will stand a Circle of Three

Children of the Wind all, and yet none

The hunter, the sustainer, the healer

Brought together by fear, held together by love,

To find that which hides from the Wind

 

Hear, oh guardian,

And look upon your destiny:

The one who hunts will also stand guard

The one who sustains will also abandon

The one who heals will also kill

To find that which hides from the Wind

 

Listen, oh Last One, to the wind:

The wind of the Past to beckon her home

The wind of the Earth to carry her to safety

The wind of the Stars to sing the mother's song most known to her soul

To hide the Child from the Wind.

 

From the lips of the Sleeping Child will come the words of ultimate wisdom:

Beware the Sleepwalker

For blood will be the means

To find that which hides from the Wind.

 

31

CLAPPERCLAW MOUNTAIN, YLORC

There should have been light.

Achmed had been sitting at the top of the peak of Clapperclaw Mountain, the tallest of all the fanglike peaks of the Teeth, waiting for hours for the morning to come.

And it had come, he supposed, after a disturbingly long time waiting for it. The black night had faded somewhat to a duller gray-blue, the color left over in the sky when the sun has finally taken all the ribbons of colored clouds with it beyond the horizon, but sunlight did not come with morning.

He looked down from his lofty perch at the world below, a world that had changed after a thousand years of being the same to something he could not fathom, let alone recognize.

Even now, the Firbolg soldiers were wandering the mountain paths, or the steppes, or the breastwork tunnels beyond Grivven Post, lost, it seemed, in the lands they had traveled all their lives. The night had been called, and it had come, refusing to leave. All the thrill of the buildup, the excitement of the camaraderie of brothers-in-arms, ramping up to ride off and wreak havoc in the act of avenging a beloved leader, was dissipating as they stood, waiting to be summoned by the bugle call of reveille that wasn't coming.

Once he had stood in this very place, seeking the heartbeat of a F'dor spirit that had used its host's blood to form a tainted construct called a Rakshas, a creature, by ironic coincidence, that had looked exactly like Ashe. He had stood at the summit of the mountain, silently calling for the heartbeat to lock itself on to his own, while Rhapsody and Grunthor had accompanied him in silence, waiting to follow him once his prey was snared.

And when at last he had found it, had located its trail, they had followed him down the mountain blindly, had run as he ran, until at last the Three had come upon the first of their great quarries and had worked as a team to destroy it.

He breathed in the cool, thin air of the mountaintop, and closed his eyes, trying to hang on to the memory for just a moment longer.

They were gone now, he knew, the only two people he was certain he had ever loved. Dear as Rhapsody's children were to him, the esteem in which he had held her was not in the same realm as his affection for any of them.

She had referred many times to Ashe as being the other half of her soul; now Achmed wondered if, in fact, the other half of his had been Grunthor. There was something comforting about the friendship that Achmed imagined would have been impossible to expect from a woman, a silent acceptance and fit that had always felt easy on his shoulders.

Achmed wondered if the darkness he had called would ever give way again.

“I am here, Bolg king.”

Achmed opened his eyes.

Standing before him on the summit of the mountain was a face he had known only on this side of Time, but which had taught him more about his own beginnings, his roots—the mother he had never known—than any other.

Rath.

The Dhracian was looking down at him with what he grudgingly assumed was sympathy within the ancient man's liquid black eyes without scleras, and it irritated him.