Rhapsody: Child of Blood

57

The Bolg medics were still bringing in the wounded when Rhapsody arrived with her medical bag, still in her dressing gown, her hair loose and wild around her shoulders. She ran to Grunthor, who was carrying one of his soldiers to a cot.

“Grunthor, are you all right? What happened?”

The Sergeant stripped off the leather breastplate, exposing a gruesome chest wound that bisected the man from his throat to his waist.

“Oi’m fine, darlin’, but ol’ Warty ’ere is in bad shape.” The Sergeant’s voice was anxious.

They switched places smoothly as Rhapsody opened her bag. This drill was becoming routine. There had never been such a tremendous number of casualties at once, however. Something must have gone terribly wrong.

“Clean compresses and pipsissewa, please,” she said to Krinsel, a midwife hovering nearby, who nodded and disappeared.

Grunthor’s face fell at her words. He recognized the herb she had asked for, used to ease the pain of the dying.

“’E’s a goner, then, Duchess?”

Rhapsody smiled at her friend sadly. “I’m afraid so, Grunthor, he’s taken damage to his heart.” She took the cloths the midwife handed her and tried to stanch the bleeding. “We’ll try to make him comfortable while we’re tending to the others.”

“First Woman?” the Bolg lieutenant whispered.

Rhapsody ran her hand gently down the side of his face. “Yes?”

“Fire-Eye and his clan it was.”

Rhapsody’s eyes filled with sympathy, though she didn’t comprehend what he meant. “Rest now,” she said gently.

The dying Bolg blinked rapidly, trying to focus on her face. “Fire-Eye—Bolg—call him, but—Saltar his—name is.”

She took the pipsissewa from the midwife. “I’ll tell the king.”

“First—Woman?”

She applied the herb. “Yes?” she said softly, watching the life begin to leave his face.

“Like—the sunrise—are you.” The lieutenant’s eyes went glassy.

Rhapsody’s throat tightened. She leaned forward and kissed the sweaty forehead, feeling the contorted wrinkles ease a little. In his ear she softly sang the beginning of the Lirin Song of Passage, the traditional dirge sung at a funeral pyre, meant to loose the bonds of Earth and ease the journey of a soul to the light.

A violent swell of noise and screaming broke off her song in mid-note. The hospital corridor burst into chaos as soldiers and medics swarmed in, dragging the wounded in a seemingly endless caravan, a ghastly parade of the dead and dying.

“Dear gods,” Rhapsody gasped. There were hundreds, their life’s blood gushing onto the floor, the hideous smell of burning flesh fouling the air. She leapt from the cot and ran into the center of the fray.

Achmed stood in the hallway, directing the still-ambulatory soldiers into the areas where the medics were caring for the worst injuries, checking each injured Bolg they carried to ascertain if he was still alive or not, and sending those with corpses out of the hospital area. The expression on his face was grim; he had not been at the scene of the battle.

Rhapsody took a badly injured Claw soldier out of the shaking grasp of another, also wounded, and pulled his arm around her neck. She dragged him to a clear area of the floor, out of the way of the roiling cacophony, signaling Grunthor to help his companion.

“What happened?” she asked the Sergeant again as she removed the Bolg’s armor, wincing at the sight of what remained beneath it.

“We was on peaceful maneuvers,” the giant Firbolg said, tying a tourniquet around his patient’s leg.

“So I see.”

“Oi’m serious, Duchess,” the Sergeant snapped. “Standard procedure: recruit first, sack second. We was deep in the Hidden Realm. Warty and Ringram took a party and went on ahead. You should o’ seen the ones we couldn’t get out o’ there; this is just a few by comparison.”

Rhapsody shuddered as she tied off the bandages.

“Rapzdee?”

She looked up to see Krinsel standing over her, trembling. The sight caused her to go numb; Krinsel was one of the most stern-faced and unflappable of the midwives. Rhapsody had never seen a flicker of emotion on her face before. Now she was struggling to keep from dissolving into panic.

“Krinsel?” she asked, standing quickly, and taking her arm.

“Come.”

Rhapsody and Grunthor followed her through the windstorm of casualties, stepping gingerly over the bodies of the wounded and the dead.

Krinsel led them to another group of bodies tucked away in a corner of the hospital. The reek of burning flesh was overpowering, and Rhapsody covered her face to shield her lungs from the stench.

Each victim had slashes, deep as sword wounds, scarring their torsos and abdomens, and occasionally their faces. Rhapsody eyes opened wide as she saw them.

“Achmed!” she shouted as she bent down, checking for heartbeats. Only one was alive, clinging to consciousness by a thread.

A moment later the king was beside her, watching as Grunthor turned the victims over, examining their injuries.

“Look at this,” Rhapsody said, pointing to a gruesome gash across the back of the last living victim. Gently she traced the wound with a healing solution of thyme and clarified water. It was deep and wide, but limited by bloodless edges, as if it had been cauterized with a sharp branding iron. The wound was still smoldering.

Achmed bent down beside her. “What do you think did this?”

“I don’t know, but this is what the wounds made by Daystar Clarion look like,” she said, applying pressure elsewhere as the man began to gasp.

“Only deeper, and not as narrow,” Achmed agreed.

“Looks like claws ta me,” said Grunthor.

Rhapsody glanced up at Krinsel, who looked as if she was about to faint.

“Krinsel, what did this? Do you recognize what made these wounds?”

The Bolg woman nodded, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

“Ghost it was. Fire-Eye’s Ghost.”

Rhapsody finally left the hospital at sunset the following day. By then the bodies had been removed and taken to the crypt near the great forges, beds found for the wounded, all their injuries treated and bound at last. The Firbolg medics and the midwives moved silently among the victims, tending to them as ably as the Filids in Khaddyr’s hospice at the Circle.

She had left Jo with Grunthor, who had lapsed into silence, refusing to leave his injured men. There was a look in the Sergeant’s eye that she had seen before, although never so intensely, an expression that crept over his face when he used to speak of his troops long ago in the old world. She had tried to comfort him to no avail; the giant Bolg had only grown more somber and distant beneath her ministrations. At last she determined what he needed most was to be allowed to sit vigil, and so she gave him his solitude after asking Jo to keep an eye on him.

Though what she longed for more than anything was an extended soak in Anwyn’s bathtub, she cinched the tie of her gore-soiled dressing gown tighter and headed for the tunnel that led to the Blasted Heath.

The night was coming. Darkness was encroaching on the pale sky, stained with fingers of red and crimson. The clouds swirled in a deepening spiral toward the horizon, mirroring the topsy-turvy angle that the world had assumed since she last slept. She sang her vespers woodenly, finding no solace in the ritual, trying to keep the anguish that she felt at bay. The Bolg had suffered so terribly.

Achmed was sitting exactly where she had expected to find him, at the mouth of the tunnel that overlooked the canyon and the heath beyond, the place he had first stood to face his subjects, where he had claimed dominion over them. His legs hung off the edge, dangling above the vast crevice a thousand feet below, his eyes fixed across the canyon and beyond the Blasted Heath.

Rhapsody sat down beside him and stared silently into the approaching darkness. They watched the sun as it slipped quickly over the edge of the world, as if ashamed to remain in the sky a moment longer than proscribed. With the onset of darkness came a chill wind, and it blew across their faces and through their hair as it shrieked and moaned through the canyon below.

Finally, when the shadows had reached completely across the vast Firbolg realm, Achmed spoke.

“Thank you for not trying to fill up the silence with well-meant words,” he said. Rhapsody smiled slightly but said nothing. The Warlord let loose a deep, painful sigh. “Has Grunthor said anything yet?”

“No, not yet.”

Achmed nodded distantly, his mind on the other side of Time. “He’s been through this before, and much worse. He’ll be all right.”

“No doubt,” Rhapsody agreed. She watched his face, reading plainly on it deep concern and sorrow. And possibly even fear, though she wouldn’t recognize it on him. “I was told something by one of his lieutenants before he died.”

Achmed turned to hear what she had to say. “What was it?”

She brushed back a strand of hair that the moaning wind had swept into her eyes. “He told me Fire-Eye’s name, his real name, I think.” Achmed’s glance became more piercing, but he said nothing. She coughed, and glanced around nervously. “He said his name is Saltar.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And does that sound in any way familiar to you, like any other name you’ve ever heard?”

“Yes. Tsoltan.”

Rhapsody exhaled, her nervous excitement deflated. “All right, I guess I’m not surprised you knew.”

“I didn’t, not really. I’ve just been expecting it. I’ve been waiting for this day since we crawled out of the Root.” He looked out over the heath, watching the distant meadow scrub bowing in the breeze. “The irony of the universe never fails to amaze me,” he said, almost to himself. There was none of his customary sarcasm in his voice. He picked up a pebble from the tunnel floor and ran it absently between his fingers.

“Tell me what you mean,” Rhapsody said gently.

Achmed looked into the distance again, as if trying to see into the Past.

“All my adult life I have been a predator, and a good one at that. I was raised as the answer to the relentless campaign of genocide the F’dor waged against my people, so I in turn by nature was relentless.”

“I was given a gift at birth, a tie to blood that allowed me to be the Brother to all men. I used that gift in the name of Death, to walk alone and let that blood, rather than tie myself to others with it, to seek and find any heartbeat in our land and follow it, unerringly, until I found my prey. I was as unstoppable as the passage of time, Rhapsody. Unless my victims chose to hide in the sea, there was nowhere I couldn’t find them. No one could run away from me forever.”

“And now, here I am, on the other side of Time. I gave all that up, everything, every natural weapon I had, and ran, futilely trying to escape the one pursuer that I had no chance against—myself. Because that was what I was trying to outrun. It had my name. I was his accomplice in the hunt for me.”

“Just as I never lost a quarry, the F’dor never loses, either. It will win the battle, or, in losing, take over the victor, making him its new host. So either way, it will win. The far better choice is to die at its hands than have it live on through you, but I’m not sure that I’m not already bound to it in either case. I should have known that this world was not a big enough place to hide from it, from myself. The avalanche is coming, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

Rhapsody said nothing, but gently ran her fingers up his forearm until her hand came to rest in his. Achmed stared down at their joined hands.

“And then, Rhapsody, you came along and changed everything, addled my brain with your incessant babble, distracted me into believing that the F’dor’s leash on me was broken, that I could somehow escape it, when I should have known better, having been myself the deliverer of the inescapable. It was only a matter of time before it found me again.” He tossed the pebble into the canyon below.

“You don’t know that it has,” Rhapsody said quietly. “And perhaps you have it backward. Maybe you’re still the predator, Achmed. Maybe you are destined to face it, and kill it. Perhaps it will be your final victim. But you’re right about one thing: you can’t run away anymore. If you do, it will find you sooner or later. If I were you I’d rather not have my back to it.”

“The sanctimonious words of someone who has no idea what the consequences are for me,” he scowled, snatching his hand away.

“Perhaps not. But I know what they are for me. I could lose the only family I have left in the world, in particular my irritating brother who is the opposite side of my coin.” She saw his glare temper into something deeper. “You cannot possibly understand how deeply I fear that happening again. But whatever those consequences are, I will be facing them with you, as Grunthor has. That’s what families do.” She smiled, and Achmed felt his heart rise against his best effort to remain morose.

“Have you heard the Bolg talking about Fire-Eye’s Ghost?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What do you suppose that is all about? If this is Tsoltan’s demon-spirit, if it escaped from the destruction of Serendair and came here, clinging to one of the Cymrians on the last ship out, could they see it?”

Achmed shook his head. “I doubt it, though perhaps the first step in our plan is to acknowledge that the rules have changed, and what we knew for certain in the old life may not apply anymore. F’dor are generally indistinguishable when they are bound to a human host, though once in a great while you can catch a whiff of their putrid odor. But not often. That’s what makes them so damned dangerous.”

“Then what do you think it is?”

Achmed stood and brushed the sand of the tunnel out of his robes. “I’ve no idea. Whatever it is, it wields dark fire like a weapon; that’s where those burn wounds came from. The Bolg think the Ghost is part of Saltar’s magic, a mysterious defense that makes him indestructible, that always gives him the upper hand.”

“Can we kill it, then? Are we fighting a man possessed by a demon?”

“I don’t know.” Achmed took her hand and helped her rise. “I don’t plan to take any chances. I need to face Fire-Eye myself, Rhapsody. There is an ancient Dhracian ritual called the Thrall that holds the demon-spirit in place, prevents it from leaving its human host. That way, if Fire-Eye is the host of the F’dor, both man and demon will die. The tricky part is not killing him unless he is in Thrall. But if he’s not the host of the F’dor, then obviously the ritual won’t work.”

“And can you find him?”

Achmed leaned against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes. His vision centered on the deep canyon below, and the wide space of air between the crag they sat within and the Heath on the other side. And then his second sight was off, racing over the crevice, speeding over the wide Heath, past the rock walls of Kraldurge and the wide fields, waiting the plantings of spring.

It was a journey he knew well, having traveled extensively with Grunthor on the campaigns to recruit and subdue the Bolg. These lands were his now, were under his domain and subject to his will.

The vision flew over the ancient vineyards, wide slanted hills with a river between them, lined on both sides with vines awaiting the warmth of spring, tended carefully by the Bolg Rhapsody had trained as farmers. Through forest lands and the openings in the hillsides that had once been the realm of the Nain and Gwadd, the Cymrian races that had chosen to live within the Earth, he followed the path at a sickening rate of speed, past the deep woods where the Lirin loyal to Gwylliam had once built their homes.

Then into the Hidden Realm, past the decaying remains of Cymrian villages and cities, outposts that were now no more than stains on the ground and stone wreckage. The land here was rich, dark and undisturbed, its populace hidden within the labyrinthine network of tunnels stretching out endlessly within the far mountains.

His path lore sped between the mountain passes and into the tunnels, following their twists and turns into a colossal cavern with a large cave at its far end. His distant sight came to an abrupt halt before a Bolg figure, sleeping on a wide stone bed, the mattress gone for centuries. In the dark, the Bolg shaman’s eyes opened and stared at him, rimmed in the color of blood. Then the vision faded and disappeared.

Achmed exhaled as the vision left and looked back at Rhapsody. He smiled involuntarily at the expression of anticipation on her face, her deep green eyes gleaming in the dark.

“I know exactly where he is,” he said. “And now he can say the same thing about me.”