She is here, hiding from you, it jeered at him. The words had played in his mind, burning like acid, until the seneschal no longer knew whether they were portents of some sort of prophecy, the taunting of his infuriating guest, or his own self-doubts, which had always been vociferous, clanging at him, chewing on his confidence.
He watched the rocks for a long time, looking for a sign of life of any kind, and saw nothing but the endless crash of the waves, the boiling froth of salt water and foam.
Then, as if put into his mind by a less malevolent spirit than the one that actually lived there, a thought occurred to him.
Perhaps there is a cave behind all those rocks, behind that swelling tide, he thought, though his mind rejected the notion that she could have survived in such a thing. He and his men had certainly seen many such crevices in the towering rockwalls all along the coast, but they had been shallow enough that even at low tide they were submerged. Still, the cliffs here were taller than most, the wind more violent, so it seemed worth examining that such a thing could be so.
“Quinn!” he shouted to his appointed captain.
“Aye, sir?” Quinn answered, exhaustion in his voice. He had not had a decent night’s sleep since assuming the captaincy, and was now praying daily that the seneschal would give up and let them go home to Argaut.
“Take us back. I want to drop anchor tomorrow, and put in to shore the next morning.”
“Yes, m’lord,” said the sailor wearily.
The seneschal turned to his reeve. “Fergus, select two of the remaining crew and get a strong cordon of rope. I want them to rappel down those cliffs and see if she is hidden in back of the rocks.”
The reeve’s face remained placid. “As you command, m’lord.”
“You and they will accompany me in day after tomorrow. If we do not find her, there will be fiery repercussions for all involved.”
“Yes, m’lord.”
The seneschal moved closer and spoke softly into the reeve’s face.
“Even you, Fergus.”
The reeve sighed. “Yes, m’lord.” He had expected nothing less.
47
For two hours the men waited in the biting wind, wandering up and down the beach along the shoreline.
After an hour the sun had begun its descent; it was still high, given the length of the summer days, and the afternoon still bright, but the light had shifted into the hazy gold of later day, and with that shift came the huma pigeons.
Where the ragtag wanderers and beachcombers had been hiding during th brighter hours was a mystery. Ashe thought his dragon sense had discerned them in and among the rockwalls, in flat depressions and tidal caves where they could sleep away the day’s heat at low tide. Now that the current was flooding and the tide rising again, they came out of the rocky edifices, some making their way to the docks, others shambling out onto the sandbar, search ing the edges of the seawall for the remains of the day’s catch caught and tossed back.
Achmed was growing more surly with each passing moment. Water was a element he loathed in any form; it masked the vibrations of the world to which he was sensitive. Beside the sea, at its windiest, his irritation was at its high the conundrum of the crashing surf not only made it impossible to concentrate on any signal he might normally have felt on the air, but in fact added to th cacophony that already was assaulting his sensitive skin.
“I used to come down to the seacoast to practice adjusting for air current with my cwellan shots,” he remarked to Ashe near the fire they had laid afte a batch of raggedy women had assailed them, begging alms. “I am a little rusty. Perhaps I should take some target practice.”
Ashe said nothing, tossing a handful of coins to the women, who scurried after them in the sand, then ran off, gibbering, up the path to the remains of the village.
“Stop that,” Achmed said angrily. “They’ll only come back with their friend and whatever leprotic spawn they have waiting up there.”
“They’re sea widows,” Ashe replied mildly, his eyes beginning to burn from staring so long down the shoreline. “Women whose husbands plied the seas sailors, fisherman, who never returned. My whole family’s sorry history begar when Merithyn never made it back to Elynsynos. Alms for starving widows is the least I can do.”
Achmed rolled his eyes. “When are you ever going to understand that penance and penitence for the deeds of others who died long before you wen born, but happened to share the same blood, is ridiculous? You can’t make up for the sins of the past that your family committed; in truth, if you go bad far enough, you would be responsible for the misdeeds of everyone in the world. Get a hold of yourself.”
Ashe made an ugly masturbatory gesture in response. “You get a hold I yourself,” he said contemptuously. “Spare me your bile and worldweariness; my wife would not agree with you.” Then he returned to his vigil.
“Well, you are correct at least in that,” Achmed retorted, shielding his eyes. “Rhapsody thinks the world’s pain is her personal responsibility to heal. Fortunately, if she lives, she will have enough time to waste in the ultimate discovery that even if it is, she is not up to the task.”
“If she lives?” Ashe demanded, turning on the Bolg king in anger. “Did you really just say that to me?”
“Yes, that was not the cry of the wind echoing between your ears,” Achmed replied. “Have you not noticed that her presence is missing from the wind? I find no semblance of her heartbeat. I hope I am wrong, but you must prepare yourself to face the possibility that she is dead, that he killed her, certainly violated her, threw her in the sea, or took her away with him. Give in to the hatred that the possibility spawns in you; it will make you even more focused on what needs to be done—finding the F’dor.”
“Stop,” Ashe said, his face growing florid with effort to keep the dragon from rampaging. “Do not speak of such things to me—not yet. I do not need more reason than I already have to hate this man, to hunt this demon, to rend him when I come upon him until there is nothing but a shadow where he once occupied space in the wind. You are prodding powers within me that it is already a daily struggle to contain; don’t enflame my ire for your own purposes. Whether you think you are assuring my concentration on the task at hand, or merely tormenting me for taking her away from you, all you are doing is treading on the thin ice of disaster.”
Achmed opened his mouth to respond, then shut it quickly. He exhaled angrily.
Near their fire a ragged old man was wandering aimlessly, flicking a long stick of driftwood, drawing shapeless patterns in the wet beach. The pursuit of his artwork was tossing sand onto the fire, making it hiss and threaten to die.
“Move back from there,” he called out in annoyance, but the ragged man ignored him, continuing his lazy patterns amid the dunes and sand drumlins.
Achmed strode over to the fire and interposed himself between it and the elderly sand artist.
“Shoo,” he said. “Warm yourself if you wish, otherwise back away.”
The man turned in the general direction of his voice; Achmed could see that his eyes were cloudy with the cataracts of age, possibly of exposure to the sun; they seemed almost burned on the surface. The irises of those eyes, like his skin and long, unkempt hair, were the color of driftwood; in fact, the Bolg king noted, the old man had been sleeping in a sand drumlin near the water’s edge since they had been there, and he had mistaken him for a long pile of jetsam washed up on the shore.
After a moment, it seemed as if he had finally heard Achmed’s instruction. The man turned away and walked off purposefully into the sea.
“What—what did you say to him?” Ashe said in disbelief, watching the frail legs disappear in the waves. The breakers were growing in intensity; it seemed unlikely that so little body mass as this elderly man had could stand up to even the gentlest of them.