Prophecy: Child of Earth

6

Grunthor lumbered to a halt for the fourth time that afternoon, too ungainly to stop quickly as Achmed did, and sighed aloud.

“Is she still there, sir?”

“Yes.” The tone of irritation in Achmed’s voice had grown darker with each pause. The Firbolg king turned around in the tunnel and shouted back behind them.

“Damn you, Jo, go home or I’ll tie you to a stalagmite and leave you until we return.”

The air next to his head whistled, and a small, bronze-backed dirk imbedded itself into the cave wall next to his ear.

“You’re a fornicating pig,” Jo’s voice answered with an echoing snarl. “You can’t leave me alone with those little brats. I’m coming with you, you bastard, whether you like it or not.”

Achmed hid a smile and strode back up the tunnel, then reached behind an outcropping of rocks and dragged the teenager out of her hiding place.

“A word of advice about fornicating pigs,” he said almost pleasantly. “They bite. Don’t get in their way, or they’ll take a piece out of you.”

“Yeah, well, you’d know all about fornicating pigs, Achmed. I’m sure you do it all the time. Gods know nobody else would ever knob you, unless they were blind.”

“Go ’ome, lit’le miss,” said Grunthor severely. “You don’t want to see me lose my temper.”

“Come on, Grunthor,” Jo whined, making an attempt at wide-eyed, innocent pleading and failing utterly. “I hate those little bastards. I want to go with you. Please.”

“Now, is that any way to talk about your grand-nieces and nephews?” asked Achmed disingenuously. “Your sister would be very distressed to hear you referring to her grandbrats that way.”

“They’re little beasts. They try to trip me when we’re out on the crags,” Jo said. “Next time I might just accidentally boot one or two of them into the canyon by mistake. Please don’t leave me alone with them. I want to go wherever you’re going.”

“No. Now are you going to go back on your own, or will you need to be escorted?”

Jo crossed her arms, her face fixed in a furious expression. Achmed sighed.

“Look, Jo, here’s my final offer. If it turns out that we find what we’re looking for, and the danger is manageable, we’ll bring you back with us the next time. But if you follow us again, I’m going to bind you hand and foot and throw you into the nursery, and Rhapsody’s grandbrats can use you as a ball, or play Badger-in-the-Bag with you. Do you understand?” Jo nodded sullenly. “Good. Now get back to the Cauldron and stop following us.” Grunthor pulled the knife he had given her from the wall and held it out. Jo snatched it from his hand and stuck it back in her boot.

The two Bolg watched as the teenager whirled angrily and stalked back up the ascending tunnel. After a few moments of hearing nothing they returned to their descent, only to stop once more.

Achmed spun about in annoyance. The light from the world above was no longer within sight; they were deep within the tunnel now, too deep to go back without wasting the entire day. It had taken a number of weeks to put aside time when both he and Grunthor could go exploring, searching out the Loritorium, the hidden vault he had shown the maps of to Rhapsody. Unfortunately, the teenaged brat she had adopted as her sister had gotten wind of the expedition, and refused to heed his commands that she stay behind, both before they left the Cauldron, and all along the way. It was evident she still was not complying with his directive.

He could sense her, though her heartbeat was not audible to him as Grunthor’s and Rhapsody’s were, along with the few thousand others he sometimes heard drumming in the distance. The ability to discern those rhythms was the fragmented remains of his blood-gift from the old world; the only hearts he could hear were ones that had been born there.

Sensing Jo was different. This was his mountain, he was the king, and as a result he knew she was here again, defying his instructions, following behind them just out of sight. He turned to the giant Sergeant-Major.

“Grunthor, do you remember how you once told me you thought you could feel the movement of the earth?”

Grunthor scratched his head and grinned. “Goodness, sir, Oi don’t ever recall getting that personal with you. In fact, the only sweet talkin’ Oi ever remember doing was with old Brenda at Madame Parri’s Pleasure Palace all those years ago.”

Achmed chuckled and pointed at the ground beneath their feet. “Fire responds to Rhapsody, and the more she experiments with it, the more she is able to control it at will. Perhaps since you have a similar bond with earth, the same might be true for you.” He looked up the tunnel again. “And perhaps your first experiment in manipulating the earth might take a form that would grant us a respite from the recurring nightmare that won’t stop following us.”

Grunthor considered for a moment, then closed his eyes. All around him he could feel the heartbeat of the Earth, a subtle thrum whispering in the air he breathed, pulsing in the ground below his feet, bristling across his hidelike skin. It was a vibration that had hummed in his bones and blood since they had traveled through the Earth along the Root that connected the two great trees. It spoke to him now, giving him an insight into the layers of rock around him.

In his mind’s eye he could see the paths of the different strata as the Earth sang to him of the birth of this place, a lament recalling the horrific pressure that forced the great sheets of rock upwards, screaming in the pain of its delivery, erupting into the craggy peaks that now formed the Teeth. Through his bond to the Earth his soul whispered wordless consolation in return, gentling down the age-old memory.

He could see each pocket of frailty within the ground, each place where an obsidian river scored the basalt and shale, each crack where the Nain, other earthlovers tied to the lore as he was, had carefully sculpted out the endless passageways of Canrif, the tunnels like the one in which they now stood. He could sense Jo’s feet resting on the crust a stone’s throw away, and willed the earth to soften there for a moment, to swallow her ankles and solidify again.

Her scream of shock broke his reverie, and Grunthor opened his eyes to a stabbing pain pulsing behind them. A string of vile curses punctuated with screeches of fury reverberated around them, unsettling some of the loose rock and raising a minor storm of dust. Achmed chuckled.

“That ought to hold her, at least until we can make it to the entrance tunnel to the annex. Then you can release her. I doubt even Jo would want to risk having the ground grab her feet again.” His eyes narrowed as he noticed the paling of Grunthor’s skin in the half-light of the torch he was carrying, the beads of sweat on his friend’s massive brow. “Are you all right?”

Grunthor wiped his forehead with a neat linen handkerchief. “Not sure Oi like the way that felt,” he said. “Never ’urt before when I was just generally aware o’ things in the ground, or makin’ myself look like the rock.”

“It’s bound to be somewhat painful the first time,” said Achmed. “As you become more experienced, more proficient at using your gift, I think you will find the pain subsides.”

“Oi bet ya say that to all the girls,” Grunthor retorted, folding his hand kerchief and storing it away again. “Come to think of it, Oi think them’s the exact words I used on oP Brenda. Well, shall we be off, then?”

Achmed nodded and the two men walked off into the depths of the Earth, leaving Jo up to her ankles in solid rock, howling with rage behind them.

The deeper Achmed traveled into the lands he now ruled, the more the silence enveloped him. The ancient corridors, half-formed and crumbling, required frequent stopping and intervention from Grunthor, who cleared away the rubble and tore through the stone as if it were aqueous, almost liquid, much as he had once dug them out of the skin of the Earth at the end of their journey along the Root. The clamor of the falling debris was momentary, and each new threshold they crossed revealed an even deeper stillness, heavy air that had been undisturbed for centuries.

It had taken Achmed less than a day to determine where the Loritorium had been built, informed by his ferocious study of the manuscripts in Gwylliam’s vault, his own innate sense of the mountain and his path lore. Finding it had merely been a matter of a quiet moment’s meditation on his throne in the Great Hall, contemplating where he would have built the secret annex if he had been Gwylliam. And then, behind his closed eyes, his mind raced off, speeding along the twists and turns of the meticulously mined tunnels of the inner mountain. It followed the corridors out of the interior city of Canrif and roamed over the wide Heath, past Kraldurge, the Realm of Ghosts, the guardian rocks that formed the hidden barrier above Elysian, Rhapsody’s hidden lands.

He had found the entrance to the ancient ruin deep below the villages that had once been settled by the Cymrians, past a second canyon, and guarded by an ominous drop of several thousand feet onto jagged and rocky steppes below. Its entry passage was cleverly disguised as part of the mountain face, a man-made fissure that resembled little more than a mountain-goat trail, and now . was traveled only by animals, if at all.

Once he and Grunthor were inside the tunnel he knew they were headed in the right direction, and it had infuriated him that Jo had breached the security of the Loritorium by following them in. Most likely the teenager was only being an annoyance, but Achmed trusted no one, and it was just one more thing that convinced him of Rhapsody’s folly in adopting the street wench in the first place. Mark my words, he had told her through gritted teeth, we will regret this. As with all things she didn’t want to believe, Rhapsody had ignored those words.

Now, as Grunthor ripped through the detritus clogging the tunnel befo them, Achmed could feel the silence grow even deeper. The sensation was ak to the one he had experienced upon finding a Cymrian wine cellar filled wi barrels and glass bottles of ancient cider deep within the desolate ruin that ha once been the capital city of Canrif. Much of the liquid had dissipated centurie before, leaving a thick, oozing gel that had at one time been potable but now was almost solid, with a concentrated sweetness. The silence within the newly revealed section of tunnel was almost as palpable.

Grunthor, meanwhile, was not hearing a deafening silence, but a deepening song. With each new revelation, each new break in the strata, the earth music was growing purer, more vibrant, hanging heavy with old magic that carried with it a sense of dread. His fingers tingled, even through his goat-hide gloves, as he moved rocks and boulders to the sides of the tunnels. Finally he stopped and leaned against the rockwall before him, resting his head on his forearm. He breathed deeply, absorbing the music that now surrounded him, filling his ears, drowning out all other sound.

“You all right, Sergeant?”

Grunthor nodded, unable to speak. He ran his hand over the wall again, finally looking up.

“They blew the tunnel when they left, before they was overrun,” he said. “Didn’t crumble on its own. Brought down the ’hole mountain. Why ’ere, sir? Why not the ramparts, or the feeder tunnels to the Great Hall? They could’ve held the Bolg off a lot longer, probably cut ’em off in the Heath canyon and crushed the external attack, at least. Seems odd.”

Achmed handed him a waterskin, and the giant drank deeply. “There must have been something in there that Gwylliam was willing to sacrifice the mountain in order to keep from falling into the hands of the Bolg, or perhaps someone he feared would wrest it from the Bolg. You still game? We can go back, rest up a bit.”

Grunthor wiped the sweat from his brow and shook his head. “Naw. Dug this far; don’t make no sense givin’ up ’ere. There’s quite a bit more rock, though; Oi guess as much as we already dug through.” He rose and brushed off his greatcloak, then ran his hands over the rock again.

As he concentrated the makeup of the stone again became clear to him. In his mind’s eye he could see each fissure, each pocket of ancient air trapped within the solidified rubble. He closed his eyes, keeping the image in his mind, then passed his hand through the stone as if it were the air, and felt it give way to him. He held both arms out to his sides, pushed a little farther and felt the solid wall of rock liquefy, then slide away from him like cool molten glass, smooth and slippery.

Achmed watched in amazement as his giant friend’s skin grew pale, then ashen, then stone-gray in the waning light of the torch as he blended into the earth around him. A moment later he could no longer see Grunthor, only a moving shadow as the massive mound of granite and shalestone plowed before “is eyes into the mountain wall, opening a eight-foot-high tunnel ahead of him. He held the torch inside the hole. The rock at the edges of the new opening glowed red-gold, almost the color of lava for a moment, then cooled immediately into a smooth-hewn tunnel wall. Achmed smiled and stepped into the opening, following the Sergeant’s shadow.

“Always knew you were a quick study, Grunthor,” he said. “Perhaps it’s a good thing Rhapsody’s not here; this is a lot like being on the Root again. You know how much she enjoyed being underground.”

“Lirin ” Grunthor muttered, the word echoing up the length of the tunnel like the growl of a subterranean wolf. “Throw a couple ’undred feet of solid rock on top of ’em, and they get all nervy on ya. Pantywaists.”

The farther he burrowed within the Earth, the faster Grunthor moved. Achmed could no longer keep up with him, could no longer even make out his shadow in the inconstant light. It was as if the rocky flesh of the mountain was nothing more than air around the giant, where before it had been as was walking waist-deep in the sea.

Suddenly Achmed felt the force of a great rush of air from the belly c mountain billow over him, a rolling gust both stale and sweet heavy wit mask His sensitive skin stung with the power of it, thick and undisturbed by time and the wind of the world above. Grunthor must have broken tl to the Loritorium.

He lit a new torch from the remnant of the one he had been carrying an. tossed the dead one aside. The fire at the torch’s head roared with life, leaping to the top of the tunnel as if shouting aloud in celebration. “Grunthor?” he called. No sound answered him.

Achmed broke into a run. He hurried down the remaining length of the tunnel and through the dark maw at its end, an opening into a place ever darker than the tunnel had been, then stopped where he stood.

Above him, higher than even the roaring flames of the torch could 1 illuminate, stretched a carved vaulted ceiling, smoothly polished and engraved with intricate designs, fashioned from the most exquisite marble Achmed had ever seen. Each massive slab of the pale stone had been shaped to a precise dimension and fitted perfectly into the vast cavern in which he now stood, walls of the cavern were of marble as well, though some of them were unfinished, with large scaffolds, stone blocks, and tools lying abandoned at edges of the enormous underground cave.

Achmed turned to the tall bank of rock that had plowed out into the cavern in front of Grunthor as he had tunneled into this place. He swung the tor around looking for the Firbolg sergeant, but saw nothing save for great mounds of stone and earth heaped on the smooth cave floor, with mart fragments scattered around the base of them. “Grunthor!” he shouted again, shadows flashing over the newly made moraine and the ancient walls. In the dark His voice echoed for a moment, then was swallowed by silence.

A low pile of rubble at his feet stretched and shrugged. Moments later it took on a more distinct outline and shape. What appeared to be a large’s sculpture of a giant man flexed and began to breathe, each moment becoming a little more distinguishable from the rock.

As Achmed watched, color began to return to Grunthor’s face. The Sergeant-Major was sitting on the ground, propped against the great pil stone rubbish left from his burrowing, breathing shallowly as he returned to himself, separating himself from the earth as once he had at the end of their journey along the Root.

“Blimey,” he whispered as Achmed knelt beside him. He shook his head at the waterskin the king offered him, crossing his arms over his knees and lowering his head onto them.

Achmed stood and looked around again. The Loritorium was approximately the size of the town square in what had once been the capital city of Canrif, a city built within the crags and base of the guardian mountains at the western rim of the Teeth. When they had first come to Ylorc he had found the dead city in a desolate state of ruin. Now the Bolg were working feverishly to restore it to the magnificence it once had in the Cymrian heyday. Even in its decay, the genius of its design and the craftsmanship of its construction had been readily apparent.

The design and construction of the Loritorium was even more impressive. It would have stood as Gwylliam’s masterpiece, if he had had the chance to complete it. As with most of the structures Gwylliam designed, the Loritorium had been fashioned in the shape of an enormous hexagon, sculpted in precise proportion from within the mountain itself. The marble walls met the vault of the ceiling more than two hundred feet above the floor. The floor was smoothly polished marble inlaid in mosaic patterns whose colors glimmered in the flickering shadows. In the center of the ceiling was a dark hole which Achmed could just barely see in the blazing light of the torch.

The streets of the Loritorium were lined with beautifully sculpted stone benches and bordered with half-walls from which lampposts fashioned of brass and glass emerged every few yards. The capping stones of the half-walls were scored by shallow troughs that ran between each lamppost, channels blackened with ancient stains that appeared to be the residue of a thick oily substance.

Two large buildings loomed in the darkness at the far side of the Loritorium, identical in size and shape, with huge doors, intricately wrought and gilded with rysin, a rare metal, gleaming a metallic blue-green in the torchlight. Achmed recognized them instantly from the plans as the Library and the Prophesory, the repositories Gwylliam designed for the most valuable of his books and manuscripts. The Library was expected to house all forms of writing about ancient lore, while the Prophesory was to contain all records of prophecies and other predictions known to man. Warehouses of ancient knowledge.

Achmed turned back to his friend. “Are you all right? Are you coming around?” he asked the giant Sergeant.

Grunthor shook his head. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, Oi’ll just take a to’le rest right ’ere.”

Achmed nodded. “I’m going to have a look about, not far; I’ll be right back.” Grunthor waved a weak hand dismissively, then stretched out on the debris of the marble floor, groaning, and closed his eyes.

The Firbolg king watched his friend a moment longer until he had ascertained that Grunthor was fully separated from the earth and drawing breath without difficulty. Then he reassessed the torch; it had consumed almost none of its fuel, but still burned brightly in the darkness, as if eager to be shining in this place of ancient magic.

Achmed dropped his pack and equipment to the ground, saving out twin daggers Rhapsody had given him as a coronation gift, found on one of her exploratory sojourns within the mountain some months before. He examined them quickly; they were formed from an ancient metal that no one knew the name of, seemingly impervious to rust, that the Cymrians had used in the framework of buildings and to bard the hulls of ships. Achmed sheathed one of them at his wrist, keeping the other drawn, and quietly made his way through the empty city.

His footsteps echoed hollowly up the streets and reverberated to the vaulted ceiling as he walked, even though he was most often able to travel without sound in the world above. Achmed slowed his pace in the vain attempt to pass more quietly, but it did little good. The heavy air of the newly unsealed cavern seized upon each sound and amplified it. Achmed was filled with an unwelcome sense that the place had been without company too long and was now relishing it.

When he reached the center of the hexagonal cavern he stopped. In the Loritorium’s central area was what appeared to have been a small garden with an immense dry fountain, its large reflecting pond surrounded by a circle of marble benches. Around the fountain’s base in the dry pond was a small puddle of shining liquid, thick as quicksilver. The font from which water once undoubtedly sprayed was capped with a heavy block of volcanic rock.

This central spot afforded an excellent view of the whole Loritorium. Achmed cast a glance around. Here and there in the narrow streets were more pools of the viscous silver liquid, their iridescent surfaces glimmering in the torchlight. He brought his hand nearer to the pool in the fountain and pulled it quickly back, stung by the intense vibration issuing forth from it. It was signature of great power, one that he did not recognize, that made his fingers and skin hum with its concentrated purity. He broke his attention away from the luminous puddles and looked at the rest of the square.

Set at the directional angles north, south, east, and west around the Loritorium’s square were four displays, each roughly built in the shape of an altar. Achmed recalled the drawings of each of them from the manuscripts of Gwylliam’s plans. They appeared to be cases which were intended to house what Gwylliam had called the August Relics, items of surpassing importance from the old world tied to each of the five elements. Achmed cursed silently. He had not fully understood the manuscript that had recounted the descriptions of each of these relics, and Rhapsody had left before she could study the scroll and explain it to him.

Carefully he circumvented the fountain and approached the first of the cases. It was fashioned in the shape of a marble bowl on top of a pedestal, similar to a birdbath, encased in a great rectangular block of clear stone taller than Grunthor. Achmed’s skin prickled as he recognized the deadly shatter trap that had been set within the base of the clear stone block. The other altars also seemed to be similarly rigged with protective devices and other defenses to keep them from being removed.

Under normal circumstances Achmed was an aficionado of well-thought-out defenses. Now he was merely annoyed. Gwylliam’s paranoia toward the end of the Loritorium’s construction had led him to abandon some of the higher aspirations he had originally held for the complex. Instead of allowing it to be the seat of scholarship where broad, unfettered knowledge was enthusiastically pursued, as he had envisioned in the first records of his plans for the place, Gwylliam had seemed to become jealous of the power he planned to store there. He had ordered his artisans to set aside the craftsmanship that was beautifying the small city into a showplace of architecture and art in favor of building ingenious traps and defenses to protect it from attack. It made Achmed wonder what those cases must have once contained.

His consideration of that question was shattered by Grunthor’s bloodcurdling scream.