But they did not grasp the nuances of what they were witnessing. They only knew that Omet, who a moment before had appeared more dead than alive, now lay in the rosy light that had been caught from the sky above, attuned to a precise color and pitch; he was breathing in time with the music of the tone, as if it had filled him, adjusted his heartbeat, his tides of breath, all the vibration that was his living essence, to itself.
And in doing so it was healing him.
Shaene lost his composure. He bent over the young man, still in the clutches of fear that was now abating to relief, and wept. He felt Rhur squeeze his shoulder from behind and looked up to find the dour-faced Bolg smiling. It was the first time Shaene remembered seeing it happen.
They watched, transfixed, as the slowly moving wheel continued to hum, the tone deepening as it lost speed, the red light waning, warming to a brighter, darker orange.
As the shadow of the healing red light passed from his face, they could see that Omet’s skin was hale again, filled with a natural, healthy color. His eyelids flickered, and his head moved from side to side, as if shaking off sleep.
The men listened, rapt, as the tone changed in time with the movement across the rails. The light on the floor shifted completely then, from the red of the first section of domed ceiling to a full shaft of the next color, orange.
Frith-re.
Firestarter.
Shaene exhaled deeply as the room took on a sudden warmth. He looked up into the glass rainbow arching above him, minus its violet end piece, to the clear sky beyond.
“What a magnificent day this looks to be,” he said to Rhur.
Which were the last words anyone in the room heard before the world exploded.
Once he had found the Earthchild to be sleeping still, resting undisturbed, Grunthor sealed the tunnel and hurried back to the Cauldron, making his way to Gurgus.
He could not get to within three corridors of it.
All around the section of the Cauldron beneath that peak the tunnels had collapsed, turning passageways into impenetrable walls of shale and rubble. Bolg soldiers were scurrying through the surrounding tunnels, evacuating the rooms that had not fallen in upon themselves, carrying out the injured and the dead, coughing violently in the encompassing cloud of dust.
“Criton!” Grunthor whispered, staring at the devastation. “What ’appened?”
No one around him answered.
Desperate now, Grunthor ran to the thick wall of detritus that filled the corridor to the top. He concentrated, reaching deep within himself to touch the elemental bond he had to earth, channeling it out through his hands and into the crumbled rock around him.
Summoning his earth lore, he tunneled into the wall of debris, feeling the shale and rock slip away from him as if it were melting at his touch. He dug in deeper, pushing his body through, making a passageway.
In the rubble he could see the wreckage of bodies, though at the outer edges at least there were none. He found two buried in the deeper in, recognizing them as he passed as Rhur and Shaene, both of whom had been crushed beneath tons of broken shale and enormous pieces of basalt, the remains of a large piece of the peak of Gurgus.
“Aw, no,” he muttered upon finding Shaene, who was compressed upright. “Dammit.”
He continued to press forward through the broken fragments of the mountain peak until he broke through, his eyes stinging from the dust, which was also collecting in his throat and nose, to an opening beyond the wall of rubble.
There, on the floor of the tower, in a sparkling rainbow of colored glass shards, Omet lay, his eyes closed, flecked with blood from the rain of glass, but otherwise spared. Grunthor was dumbfounded, judging by the pile of broken bits of glass, that the young man had not been sliced to ribbons.
He crawled carefully over the confetti that was all that remained of the beautiful domed ceiling, past the shattered workman’s tables, and lifted Omet out of the pile of shards, hoisting him over his shoulder.
Omet moaned as his upper body hung down Grunthor’s back.
“Grunthor?” he whispered, his long, straight hair inverted over the floor.
The Sergeant turned and headed back out through the wall of debris.
“What?”
Omet struggled to speak clearly, even though he was being jostled madly, and hanging upside down.
“Theophila—is really—the guildmistress of the—assassins and thieves’ guilds of—Yarim.”
“Oi’m a head of ya on that one,” Grunthor replied, ducking to keep from scraping Omet’s back on the ceiling above him.
The young artisan gestured with his arm.
“Rhur and Shaene; they’re around here somewhere, I think. I heard them talking just before—
Grunthor patted the small of Omet’s back, his face impassive but his eyes raging.
“ ’Ush now,” he said firmly. “There will be plenty o’ time for talking after Oi’ve gotten ya out of ’ere and you’ve ’ad a chance to rest.”
Eight days later, the scion of the Raven’s Guild received a package by way of the mail caravan from Ylorc.
Dranth broke the seals and tore off the parchment in which it was wrapped carefully; Esten had thus far only sent nonfragile articles and papers, but he wanted to take no risk of damaging the contents. By the odor issuing forth from it, the package might have already suffered some damage and spoilage from the heat of the mail carriages.
Upon pulling off the last piece of the carton, Dranth, the guild scion of the most soulless, deadly coterie of thieves and assassins in Roland, took a step back from the table, slapped his hand over his mouth, and then vomited all over the floor of the guildhall.
Grunthor had not even bothered to shut her festering eyes before shipping her head back to them.
Epilogue
Tying the Threads
The rolling backswell from the wave from the explosion beneath the surface of the sea unceremoniously disgorged the Kirsdarkenvar and the two who clung to him onto the black, unforgiving sand of the rocky beach.
The purchase of ground, even sandy ground that slipped and whispered into the sea as the breakers rolled over it, felt like a lifeline to Ashe. He let go of the sword and rolled quickly over onto his belly, checking to see that Rhapsody was breathing and, finding that she was, turned to the Bolg king, who was coughing his lungs up onto the sand.
The next wave that foamed up the beach was shallower, tracing echoes in the outline of the last, but not reaching where it had left them. As the water rolled back, it littered the shore with splinters of wood and rope, the detritus of the ruined ship. None of the pieces were more than the size of driftwood.
Ashe drew his wife into his arms and pressed her body up against his to impart to her what warmth he could. The dragon in his blood assessed her frantically, finding some of her body weight to be missing; her skin was sunken and pale from the salt and the endless exposure to the water during her time in the cave, her hair matted and dark, ragged in varying lengths from where she had sawed it off. He choked back tears at the thinness of her hands, her neck.
But she was home, returned to him from the sea.
And within her their child still grew, strong; he could feel its presence, vibrant.
He pulled her closer, speechless with relief, matching his breathing to her own, reveling in the ragged sound of life coming from her, and let his head fall back on the sand, his eyes blind in the sun above.
Beside him he felt the Bolg king rise, still clearing the sea from within himself, and wander down to the shoreline.
Achmed stared down the windswept beach to the black, jagged bed of boulders over which the sea crashed, where MacQuieth had taken the beast into the sea. Where once there had been boiling steam and turgid froth was now peace; the sea had returned to its ever-violent pounding against the shore, the waves rushing in a great swell of white water, to hurry back out again, dragging the undertow with them.