The Weaver's Lament (40 page)

The all-but-mummified creature held up the pole of brandy and gazed at it intently.

“This is not beer—but it was not bad, either.”

“Who were you?” Achmed asked, thinking of past times when he had commerce with strange creatures in strange places, though none could even begin to compare to where he was and what he was beholding.

What he thought might be the living remains of a man turned and looked at him intently, his dark eyes gleaming.

“I am honored that you thought I was Hector,” he said quietly. “Hector was a great man. It was an honor to serve with him.”

Achmed thought back to what Aurelia had told him in Gaematria, trying to remember names.

“Were you one of the men who stayed behind with him? Anaias, perhaps?”

The skeletal man chuckled again, another hissing sound that scratched Achmed's ears. “Yes. And no. Anaias stayed behind on the Island. I imagine he died in the arms of the Tree—he was Liringlas. Hector sent him home before he and I rode north.” He struggled to sit up again, to little avail, exhausted from his words. He took another drink.

“No,” he said when his throat was a little less dry. “I was Jarmon, an ordinary soldier in His Majesty's army. Came up through the ranks.” His eyes broke with Achmed's and he sighed, a rattling sound. “Hector died in the water; I died in the dust.”

From behind his veils, Achmed inhaled, but just nodded.

“Now go up there,” the skeletal form whispered, and tipped its head toward a gently sloping passage. “When you return, tell me what you see. I shall stay here and finish my libation, and dispose of my arm.”

The Bolg king absorbed the words, then turned and made his way up the slope that the dried man called Jarmon had indicated.

First he walked as far as he could go and still be certain there was nothing hovering or hiding around him. A hum was brewing from the space beyond which he could see, so he lay on his belly as he climbed.

The watery armor left a thin, dark trail in the dust.

The farther he ascended, the more certain he was that he had come into the Vault almost at the very top, at what would have been similar to the highest floor of the tower of Gurgus Peak that held the Lightcatcher, and that the rest of it existed lower, deeper, wedged in the depths of the Earth. He was more convinced of it when he reached the top of the passage, which opened up before him, like the highest balcony in a concert hall.

He peered down over the edge.

A bottomless darkness lay below him, like an enormous stomach cavity. Spun around it were buttresses that appeared to be longbones or ribs, reaching down into the devouring darkness, with glowing, crackling flames crouched along the edges.

The pit seemed to go on forever, twisting into blackness.

The noise he had remembered from the last time he had been here echoed against his eardrums distantly, the sounds of pain and twisted laughter, the pounding of the drums of war and the wailing of children whose parents had been taken in front of their eyes. Armored as he felt by the Mythlin hauberk, coif, and mantle, it did not seem to spare him from the overwhelming wheedling, the taunting and the weeping, sounds of a sick world that thrummed against his skin and eardrums.

It was almost impossible to hear the noise of the Vault and not succumb to utter despair, a physical compulsion as well as a mental one.

Achmed shook his head and thought of the song in the darkness of his bedchamber that had wrapped around him while he slept some time before. It did little to ease the pain now, but it did coat his senses a bit, senses that were growing heightened with each beat of his heart.

He stared at the closest of the flames, high atop the descending stone longbones, gripping the hilt of the air sword as he lay there.

The creatures seemed to be hanging like bats at the top of the passage he had just ascended, asleep perhaps, or biding their time, buzzing with ugly noise.

It was almost as if they were snoring.

As his sight sharpened, he began to see each creature not as an indistinct flame, but rather like a moving shape within a screen of pure vibration, buzzing inconstantly, incorporeal. The fire it seemed to profess was actually very unlike real fires he had encountered over his very long life; it was more as if in seeing what looked like flames he was actually seeing vibrations of hate, of lust, or avarice, the dark, evil thoughts of dark and evil beings, rather than the natural element from which they came.

Suddenly, from around him was a swirling of flames that swelled like a flock of subterranean bats, screeching and snarling as their high-pitched voices, each a different tone of hatred, struck him, dashing against him and sliding off against the water armor.

Rolling fully onto his back, Achmed did a quick reconnaissance.

There appeared to be three or four; it was difficult to be sure, as they dashed, flashing like fire-colored lightning, strafing him, snapping like feral dogs but without form.

He drew the hilt of the air sword again and held it close to his leg.

Hooting, sneering, and howling, the fireless flames charged him from all sides as one.

Just as they attacked, Achmed struck with the air sword.

His speed was such that he was able to slash the first one on him before he swung back and slapped another as it flew past, shrieking in rage. He caught the second one on the now-visible blade of the sword and, using all his strength, held it still, above him, for a moment.

The flame-like creature screamed, flapping and fluttering on the blade of the air sword, seeming to spread apart the longer it was in contact with the weapon.

Then it blew into pieces with a horrifying shuddering sound, exploding as a small candle would be melted by a torch or as the sound of a bell might be erased by the wind.

Achmed waited, still on his back, but nothing else attacked him.

He remained a good while, listening to the noise over the edge of the opening, but the seething and jeering, the hooting, spitting, and whispering, had gone silent.

He rolled onto his front again and, like a spider, crawled back down the slope, noting that it went higher beyond where he'd been attacked.

*   *   *

When Achmed returned, Jarmon was standing erect, his skeletal back to him, engaged in what appeared to be a slow, ominous dance.

He was spinning painfully, stiffly raising one leg, planting his heel, deliberately and heavily pivoting, and then doing the same with the other foot. Achmed could not determine the meaning of the dance, nor whether Jarmon was conscious of him or his surroundings. The remaining arm limply held the empty flask that had contained the brandy.
Gesturing with the arms is apparently not part of this ritual,
he thought, still wondering what was going on.

Finally, Jarmon turned his head slowly toward Achmed and hissed in either greeting or amusement, it was impossible to tell. Then he fell to his knees, and began to use the round flask as a pestle to complete his purpose, pounding the floor repeatedly with it.

Achmed came closer to observe what was going on.

He was crushing the amputated bones of his arm into dust.

“What are you doing?”

Jarmon looked up at him and gave him a grisly smile. He did not stop in his task.

“When they return, I have no intention of digging again, especially—” He gave the Bolg king a knowing look and turned back to the tiny fragments of his arm bone as they yielded with whispers to his insistence, dissolving into dust as he rocked the flask over them as if he were rolling out dough. “I'm surprised they didn't think of using my bones before. I'll be damned if they'll force me to dig with what's left of my arm as a tool.” The hissing laugh returned. “Well, I suppose I'll be damned in any case.”

As he watched the mummified man grinding his bones into dust, every loneliness or stubborn determination Achmed could ever recall making seemed crushed with those bones. The academic and theoretical opposition he held for the race of F'dor stole away, and he discovered in its place, at last, comprehension of Rath's passion and urgency to see the race extinguished.

“My apologies,” he said to the ragged being.

Jarmon shook his head. “Seven. Seven dead when you arrived,” he said, almost happily. “If I had seven hundred arms, I'd give them each again. This is a good day. How many did you find? Tell me what you learned.”

“Tell me why they made you dig.”

“'Tis better if you see for yourself,” Jarmon said, blowing the dust off the rock and starting on the shoulder joint. “What did you find up the slope?”

“Three attacked me. They burn well when mixed with wind. Then I came back.”

“Go back and climb all the way up the neck to the head, to the eyes. Pay attention to how many are there, then come back and tell me what you've seen.”

“What does that mean, neck, head, eyes? Whose neck, head, and eyes?”

Jarmon looked up from his task, seemingly annoyed.

“Did you study nothing about this place before you came here, King Ysk?”

Achmed's mouth dropped open in shock.

“What did you call me?”

The skeletal man grinned broadly. “I called you by your name, did I not?”

“No,” said Achmed. “That has not been my name for a very long time, nor is it the most recent name before the one I now bear.”

“Ah, a shame,” said Jarmon. “You might want to rethink that. But we can talk more about this when it's safer—when I am done with my task, and you have seen more of the slope. This is a very big vault, and it is full of very evil things. I imagine you would like to know what you're up against, would you not?”

“Of course,” said Achmed sullenly. “Whose head, neck, and eyes?”

Jarmon finally stopped working to crush the shoulder and came over to Achmed, holding the bone like a club or a gavel.

“When this place was built, there were many more of the folks that live here inside,” he said, waving his shoulder bone for emphasis. “And their sheer number strained the facility, shall we say? The Wyrmril, the race normal people call dragons, gave their cache of Living Stone to make the place, and as you can see, they've only had one escape since the beginning of Time. But when that threat of rupture seemed possible of coming to pass, the Progenitor Wyrm, the originator of the race, saw the place bursting at the seams and wrapped him or herself around it, consuming it and, I believe, Ending.”

“I know this tale.”

The animated pile of rags threw its one remaining hand up into the air.

“Well, why didn't you say so?” Jarmon inquired. “If you know the tale, then you should be able to figure out whose head, neck, and eyes I'm talking about.”

Achmed blinked. “Oh.”

“Go.”

The Bolg king watched as the dried-out man went back to work grinding his own shoulder into dust.

He returned to the place where the three F'dor spirits had swept down on him, silent now except for the endless drone of maniacal noise in the distance. He traveled up the slope, through a number of peaks and corners that he realized after climbing along them were the shoulders and neck of the enormous beast, a creature for which there was nothing he had ever seen to match for scale.

At one joint of the neck, another ambush occurred.

As he was turning through what appeared to be a series of hiding places, a circle of flames sprang up around him, chanting, cursing, insulting him, trying to overwhelm him with flashes of black fire pitched at his eyes.

The Bolg king responded by taking out Kirsdarke and drenching both himself and the corridor, raining water down upon the beasts and snuffing many of them. As each of them winked out, a puff of smoke was left behind, leaving the slope hazy with it.

The rest of the screaming fires fled to distant corners, sending up wails of agony that made his skin throb.

Finally he came to the end of the tunnel, an enormous cavern that was filled with wheedling sounds being emitted by disembodied voices, all trying to encourage him into foolish tasks or suicidal undertakings in the dark, spoken sensually or maliciously combative, voices calling mournfully or begging plaintively, a cavern full of lies and manipulations.

At the bottom of which, set into the enormous oval floor, were two reflective pools of silver mirrors that flashed with the movement of anything coming down from the slope above.

Achmed paused here.

He was uncertain at this point what to make of this place, because, unlike the endless pain and frustration, terror and threat of the rest of the Vault he had seen so far, he had come into what passed for a hopeful place.

A place of promise, where he could feel the palpable potential of escape. Demonic flames were chasing each other around the circular floor, entreating each other, and him, to help them out.

Many of the bristling fires were repeatedly slamming themselves into the mirrored pools, flashing and flaring and occasionally winking out.

See?
the tempting voices were saying.
There is a world beyond here—the legends are true. Look out through the eyes; they are the windows of the soul.

You have no souls, you monsters,
Achmed thought disdainfully. But the entreaties were so powerful, so compelling, that he had the irresistible urge to do as they said, to look out through the ancient dragon's eyes, to see what lay beyond the Vault, as they did.

He did so, only to discover an image reflected back at him, an image of himself, twisted and rotten, thick where he knew himself to be thin, weak where he knew he was strong, the internal mirrors causing him, for the slightest of moments, to cease to believe in his own resolve as another squadron of flame grew nearer, whispering promises of power, of escape.

Then, as one, they all came roaring at him at once, only to be snuffed out by a sweep of the air sword that expanded their flame to the point of not being able to be sustained.

A series of explosions that looked for all the world like fireworks lit the interior of what had been part of the Progenitor Wyrm's skull, leading to a swelling chorus of screaming and acidic hatred once again.