He struggled to turn a deaf ear to the demon’s impatient, wordless mutterings that followed, and looked instead to the men who were off-loading, dragging the longboats out of the surf.
“Signal the others to prepare to come ashore. When the men and the supplies have all landed, secret the boats up the beach, where the sand ends, in one of those rocky enclaves,” he ordered, signaling to Fergus. “Make haste; we have a trap to lay.”
From inside a cave in the volcanic cliffs farther north, black eyes clouded with the film of age watched as the ship unloaded its crew, observing the back-and-forth of the longboats, until at last they were stowed away in the rocks at shoreline. The ship retreated to deeper waters on the south side of the cove, out of plain sight. The soldiers combed the area around the beach, then slowly set forth east to the forest.
Had any of them been watching in return, they might have seen an elderly man with skin the color of driftwood, who stared in their direction for a moment, then shook his head in the throes of dementia and returned to drawing meaningless patterns in the sand.
20
Achmed had long despised cards and other games of chance.
Part of the reason might have been that long ago, in the old world, that other life, his true name had been won in a game of cards from the Bolg of Serendair and given by the winner, under duress, to the demon that was his enemy.
Part of the reason might also have been that his Dhracian mother was selected for capture by the Bolg with a toss of the bones.
But whatever the reason, what he detested most about gamesplaying was the uncertainty of it.
The thrill of the gamble that others so often relished never came to him; he hated risk, and spent the better part of his existence minimizing it whenever possible. And while on those occasions in his life when he had succumbed to the need to gamble, to risk, in order to achieve what he wanted, he had more oftentimes been successful than not, he still endeavored to minimize that uncertainty, that surrender of control.
He ruminated on how much he loathed those ambiguous, helpless feelings as he stood on the reviewing stand, the lone representative of Ylorc amid a sea of other dignitaries and their retinues.
From his place in the crowd of heads of state he was learning a good deal about both the actual capacities of his fellow sovereigns, and the perceptions they hoped to convey, by studying the retinues they had brought with them to the state funeral of Sorbold.
The Sorbold army had turned out in force, doubtless to underscore to the visiting dignitaries the unwavering power they still had. Achmed counted twenty divisions in the square that surrounded the palace of Jierna Tal alone, with that many again lining the streets from the Place of Weight where the mammoth Scales stood to the mountains on the outskirts of Jierna’sid, where Terreanfor, the hidden Basilica of the Earth, was concealed in a place of endless darkness. It was an imposing display of manpower, well managed and obviously well trained. Grunthor would have been impressed. Achmed settled for merely being concerned.
Many of the other heads of state, including Tristan Steward, the regent of Roland, Miraz, the Diviner of the Hintervold, Viedekam, one of the chieftains of the Nonaligned States, and Beliac, the King of Golgarn, whose borders backed up to his own on the far eastern side of the Teeth, had brought enormous retinues with them as well. It was this genital-waggling posturing that flooded Achmed with the sensation of being at a game of cards; the silent bluffing, the position-staking, the puffery that irritated him beyond measure.
The Lirin realm, Tyrian, of which Rhapsody was titular queen, had sent a modest delegation headed up by her viceroy, Rial, a calm man with a sensible head on his shoulders. He had come with the Lirin ambassador to Sorbold and a handful of guards, as had Ashe, whose solitary presence caused Achmed to raise an eyebrow. Rhapsody’s absence was rather disturbing; he knew that very little would have been able to keep her from attending such a landmark service as this funeral in Terreanfor, a place she had never been privileged to see, student of ancient lore that she was.
Achmed stepped out of the crowd as much as he could, though the dais was so full that he could barely separate himself at all. He concentrated, trying to locate Rhapsody’s heartbeat; it was there somewhere in the distance, but jumbled, whether from the conflicting rhythms all around him, or for another reason he could not fathom. He resolved to make certain to catch up with Ashe when the opportunity presented itself.
As he stepped forward, what little space there was around him widened. The other nobles and heads of state had taken the implication, as he expected they would, of his solitude: he did not need guards, soldiers, or a retinue around him.
He was deadly enough all by himself.
Achmed glanced around the central square of the city, flooded to overflowing with onlookers. The Sorbolds were a stern-faced people, dour and stoic in their aspects, so different from the exuberant idiots in Yarim who had crowded the Bolg work site a few weeks prior, hooting and cheering as if they were at a carnival. He had no doubt that such an occasion of state would have been even more celebratory in Roland, where emotions ran high and increased proportionally with attendance.
Here, however, the all-but-silent crowd was much more intimidating. While it did not have the volatile nature of a gathering in Roland, which might go from excited merriment to angry destruction with very little warning, there was a threatening air to them, these silent desert dwellers who stood, staring down from city walls and parapets, ramparts, window ledges and rocky crags, watching the rites that marked the passage of their empire from an age of steel-fisted autocracy into one of uncertainty.
Achmed knew exactly how they felt.
He noted silently how grateful he was at times like these that he was no longer subject to the heartbeats of each person who shared the land with him, as he had been in Serendair. His blood gift, the maddening pulses of millions of strangers beating in his mind, vibrating against his skin, had been horrific to endure, even if it had made him a handsome living as an unerring assassin. Now that was gone, left behind beneath the waves of the sea in the Island’s watery grave; all that remained were the few distant pulses of those who had once lived there, now ageless, who still remained in the new world.
Like Rhapsody.
And Grunthor.
His attention was drawn to the steps of Jierna Tal by the clanging of the brass bells from the palace’s towers. Harsh and dissonant, the ugly clamor rang out over the land, silencing whatever noise had been present among the swell of troops and onlookers.
The funeral rite was beginning.
From the front palace doors a procession emerged, a double line of priests and acolytes dressed in robes in the colors of Sorbold—vermilion and green, brown and purple, twisting slashes of color that interwove like threads. Achmed recognized the pattern; it was the same colors that could be seen beneath the Sleeping Child’s stone-gray skin, and in the altar of Living Stone on which she lay. They carried before them tall poles topped with the symbols of the dynasty, the golden sun bisected by a sword.
Following the line of clergy was the benison of the region, the Blesser of Sorbold, Nielash Mousa. Achmed recognized him by the rounded miter he wore on his head, and the amulet of the earth that hung around his neck, but otherwise would not have; in the intervening three years since the investiture of the Patriarch, Constantin, Mousa had aged at least a decade. He still carried himself with dignity, even as his shoulders were hunching under whatever weight was burdening him.
Behind Mousa came a pair of catafalques, each borne by six soldiers in the livery of the royal house, the bodies atop wrapped in simple white linen embroidered in gold. From the size of them there was no doubt that the empress was in the lead, consigning the Crown Prince to wait his turn unendingly, in death as she had done in life. A single line of mourners draped in black brought up the rear, silent and stoic.