Achmed rose shakily. “Perhaps I can’t feel her heartbeat for the same reason Grunthor’s eyes glinted with fear. “We’ll give her a moment more, and if si doesn’t come, we’ll go after her.” He leaned against the stone, trying to mal out any sound he could on the other side of the rockwall. He heard nothin
“Rhapsody!” he shouted, the sound bouncing futilely back at him, to be swallowed a moment later by the earthen bunker. He turned to Grunthor, 1: dark eyes glittering.
“Open it,” he ordered tersely, pointing at the rocky barrier.
Grunthor carefully shifted the Earthchild in his arms and reached one hai into the wall. A sizable piece of it fell away before him. As if in reply, he heard Rhapsody’s voice calling to them from the other side of the stone wall.
“Grunthor! Achmed! Are you all right in there?”
The giant Bolg stood up and reached the rest of the way into the stone the wall, tearing it away from the opening. When he broke through to ’t other side his face lit up with a tired grin.
“Well, well, Yer Ladyship, you certainly took your time, now, didn’t you? ’Ad us worried, you did.”
Rhapsody smiled and offered Achmed her hand, giving him a tug out the bunker. “You’re a fine one to talk,” she said to Grunthor. “For the long time I thought you were still in the Colony, buried under a mountain of rock.” Her smile faded as he stepped out of the hole in the rockwall, carrying the Sleeping Child. “I have to admit, when I saw her walking, I thought it was over. What did you do, meld with her the way you do with stone?”
“Yep. What do you think she is, if not stone?” Grunthor answered simj “Didn’t think Oi could carry ’er safely out through all that mess. ’Twas the easiest way.”
Achmed gestured toward the Colony entrance. “Come on.” enormous tunnel was deathly silent save for the occasional pop hiss from the ash that blackened the entirety of the walls and floor. Aroi and above them, where the vine had broken violently through the cave nothing remained except for scorched fragments of root and the twisting n. of the tunnel it had carved in the earth.
Achmed bent down at what had once been the arch over the Sleep Child’s catafalque and ran his sensitive fingers over the scattered letters of words that had been carved there. Once they had warned a world that never saw them about the dangers of disturbing that which slept within it. Now they littered the floor of the cavern, broken into pieces of senseless babble.
Rhapsody’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Achmed nodded distantly. Somewhere here were the Grandmother’s ashes, mingled inexorably with those of the demon-vine, inseparable as the intertwined fate of Dhracian and F’dor. It saddened him to think that the end of Time would find them that way. He stood and brushed the dirt from his hands. He stared down the twisting tunnel from where the vine had come.
“This goes all the way back to the House of Remembrance, two hundred leagues or more,” he said, squinting into the darkness. “Not good. It will be a vulnerability, a passageway into the mountain for the F’dor.”
“Not for long,” Grunthor said cheerfully. He drew the Sleeping Child closer to his chest and closed his eyes, feeling the nearness of the Earth’s life’s blood to his heart. He reached out and laid a hand on the wall.
Rhapsody and Achmed leapt back as the tunnel swelled and collapsed, filling in the monstrous rip the vine had torn in the Earth. The Earth itself shrugged, reapportioning its mass, closing the doorway through which the F’dor had reached into the mountain.
Rhapsody looked above her. Despite the shifting of enormous amounts of earth, nothing rained down on their heads except for a little dust. She looked at Grunthor again. He was translucent, radiating the same glow that she had seen within the Earth when they were crawling along the Axis Mundi. The Child of Earth, she thought fondly.
When the glow diminished, Grunthor pulled his hand away from the wall, then turned and smiled.
“All closed.”
“All the way back to Navarne?” Achmed asked incredulously.
“Yep.”
“How’d you manage that?”
The Bolg Sergeant grinned down at the child in his arms. “With ’elp, sir.”
The cavern sealed, the three turned back toward the Loritorium. Rhapsody smiled at Grunthor and ran her fingers gently over the Sleeping Child’s forehead. The Earthchild sighed in her sleep.
“What are you going to do with her now, Achmed?”
“Guard her,” he said flatly.
“Of course. I was just wondering where.”
Achmed looked around what remained of the Loritorium, its artistic carvings cracked and scarred, the beautiful frescoes and mosaics blackened with soot, the pools of silver memory gone. “Here,” he said. “At first I considered bringing her back to the Cauldron so that it would be easy to keep an eye on her, but it would be too disruptive to her.
“This really is the ideal place for her. It’s buried deep enough that she won’t be disturbed by the Bolg. She can sleep on the altar of Living Stone; she seemed peaceful there.”
Rhapsody nodded. “Perhaps it will bring her solace.”
“Perhaps. We’ll need, to reseal the tunnel we made coming down here and retrap the place. There’s enough lampfuel in that well to build our own volcano if we have to. Then, when he’s gotten his strength back, Grunthor can open a single passageway from the Loritorium to my chambers. If the F’dor is going to make another attempt at her, I want it to have to come through me personally. It will be an engineering nightmare, but I think we can pull it off.”
Rhapsody nodded as Grunthor gently laid the child on the altar. “It will try again, you know.”
“Of course. But I don’t think it will try again like this. It’s gathering an army to assault the Bolglands; I’m not exactly clear on how it plans to do it, but I’m certain of it. That’s why Ashe was its target to begin with—he was the convergence of the royal Cymrian lines, as well as the Invoker’s son. He could easily have assumed the throne of Roland, and most likely brought Manosse with him, as well as any nonaligned Cymrians from the early generations loyal to either side that might happen to still be, around, like Anborn.”
“And possibly Tyrian as well,” Rhapsody added. “His mother was Lirin.” Oelendra’s words in front of the roaring fire came back to her. If the F’dor had been Me to bind him, to command the dragon, I shudder to imagine how it would have used that power to control the elements themselves. “The whole world is fortunate that he was strong enough to get away.”
Achmed stared at the ruin around him. “The army Ashe could have raised might actually have been able to do what Anwyn could not—take the mountain. He would have been the perfect host for the F’dor, but he managed to get away and stay hidden from it these past two decades. Now that it knows he’s alive, it will undoubtedly be looking for him again.”
“That’s his problem to deal with,” Rhapsody said resolutely. “We’ve given him the tools he needs to survive. His soul is his own again, he’s whole once more and out of pain. He can go into hiding for a while if he needs to. He did it for twenty years. He’ll be all right.”
A wry smile crawled into the corner of Achmed’s mouth. “I can’t tell you how much good it does me to hear you talking like that,” he said. “Does this mean your assignation with him is over?”
Rhapsody looked away. “Yes.”
“What do you plan to do now?”
She stood a little straighter, and Achmed was struck by the warriorlike aspect that came over her face and posture. “First, I want to make sure Ylorc is taken care of, and give you and Grunthor any help you need in dismantling the Loritorium and getting the Earthchild settled. After that I need a day to mourn, to sing dirges and laments for all whom we have lost.” Achmed nodded, noting that the steady look in her eyes didn’t waver when she referred to her sister and the Grandmother. “Then, if you think you can be spared from the Bolglands for a bit, I could use your assistance in locating the various children of the F’dor.”