“Nothing from Canderre yet,” the king said, turning the small slips of vellum over one by one, holding on to one in particular.
Omet nodded. “Francis Pratt, their ambassador, has been in ill health, I hear.”
“From Shaene?”
Omet chuckled. “Yes.”
“Then Prarfs probably in a brothel bedding half of Canderre. Shaene is more consistently wrong than any form of life I have ever encountered.” He kicked a pebble into the canyon, knowing he would never hear its impact. “Pratt’s probably had trouble finding an artisan in the western provinces.”
“Probably.” The word came out lightly, but the night wind caught it and held on to it, adding weight, leaving it hanging in the air above the ledge.
The Bolg king turned the remaining piece of paper over in his hand. “If Pratt can’t find us one in Canderre who can be trusted, perhaps there is one in Sorbold. Or we can send across the sea for one from Manosse.”
Omet let his breath out as lightly as he could. “We could take our chances in Yarim. The best are there.”
Finally the Bolg king turned, leveling his mismatched gaze at Omet, and smiled slightly.
“Well, it’s interesting you should mention Yarim,” he said, “because there is a message here from Rhapsody. She wants Grunthor, you, and me to meet her there two fortnights from today.” He chuckled at the look of shock on the young man’s face.
“I’ll be happy to stay behind and look after the works while you and the Sergeant are gone,” he said hastily when he recovered the use of his tongue.
“I thought you might see it that way,” Achmed said. “So if you’d rather, you can stay here with Rhur and the Bolg artisans, and that idiot Shaene, listening to him call you Sandy.”
Omet sighed. “I can endure that, I suppose. Better than the alternative.”
Achmed nodded. “If you say so. Me, I would take any chance I could to spare myself from Shaene.” He pulled the veiling back over his lower face, made one more check of the mountain walls, the canyon, and the Blasted Heath beyond, then turned and strode back down the causeway into the depths of the Cauldron again.
On his way to his bedchamber, he stopped in the smithy, where Gwylliam’s ancient forges, refitted now with his own accoutrements, blazed through the night, turning out steel for weapons and tools, armor and architecture. Three thousand Bolg toiled through each shift in the blinding light and heat, adding to the strength of the mountain with every pull of the bellows, every clang of the hammer.
The Bolg Master of the Forge nodded to him, as he did every night at this time while Grunthor was away. The Firbolg king completed the Sergeant-Major’s tasks quickly, checking to make certain the cull pile was not being pilfered, the smiths were not using excessive amounts of iron ore in the mix as they had a few seasons back, and that the balance of the svarda, the circular, triple-bladed throwing knives that the Bolg exported to Roland, was being attended to.
Finally, assured that the smithy was functioning properly, he bade the forge-master good night and headed for his chambers, stopping to finger the newly minted supply of disks for his cwellan, the primary weapon he used. It was of his own design, similar to an asymmetrical crossbow, curved to employ greater recoil on the spring. Instead of firing bolts, however, it made use of thin metal disks as the ammunition, razor-sharp, three at a time, staggered, each disk forcing the previous one deeper into the wound made by the first.
He held one up for a moment to the blazing light of the forge fires burning below, smelting steel into fiery near-liquid to be beaten into an endless number of shapes. The fireshadows danced across the cwellan disk, sending waves of rippling light over the blue-black rysin-steel surface.
Suddenly weary, the Firbolg king hastened to bed.
3rd Thread
The Lee
The realm of Sorbold was a place of relentless sun. Mountainous and arid, it stretched like the fingers of a grasping hand southward from the rim of the Manteids, the mountain range known more commonly as the Teeth, arthritic phalanges of spiny hills reaching across the barren desert and into the rocky steppes of the Lower Continent, to the ghostly inland seacoast, where the skeletons of ships lost centuries before still littered the black sand, shrouded in mist coming off the warm sea.
In winter the icy winds swept across the land, scattering crystals of snow, howling through the bleak dunes, shifting the desolate landscape like a child playing in a box of dirt. At night those winds carried sprays of golden sand aloft into the sky, where they drifted for a moment among the stars, mirroring the silent streaks of blazing light above, shooting stars that fell into the edges of endless blackness encompassing the vast, echoing desert.
In spite of the harsh reality of the land, the occasional sense that the Creator had forsaken the place and its people, Sorbold was a realm of deep magic.
The harsh climate did not engender a hospitable nature in the people of this rocky land. Sorbolds were known for the shortness of their attention, of their tempers, of their alliances. The only thing that seemed to be long in the national personality was memory. Sorbold held its history tightly; every battle loss, every betrayal, every perceived injustice counted and recounted silently but consistently as the years turned into centuries and eventually millennia. Ages and dynasties came and went with the shifting sands of the desert, but the memories remained, hidden, brooding, deep within the vaults of Time.
For three-quarters of a century Sorbold had been under the rule of Her Serenity, Leitha, the Dowager Empress, a humorless woman whose cold attitude stood in marked contrast to the climate of the realm she held locked in her tiny but iron grip. The empress was short of stature but long of will. When she was coronated she was almost a perfect globe in shape; as the years of her reign passed she desiccated slowly, like a drying apple, as if the heat of Sorbold were sucking the water, fat, and muscle tissue bit by bit from her body, leaving her withered, hard, and leathery well into old age. The process made her stronger, like steel that was tempered in fire, or leather cured in smoke. For all that the bordering nations of the continent had quietly distrusted her father, the Fourth Emperor of the Dark Earth, they openly feared his daughter, who seemed bound and determined to live forever, and was doing a fair job of accomplishing that goal.
The bravest of her subjects and adversaries on occasion referred to the empress (well out of her earshot, of course) as the Gray Assassin, after a poisonous spider commonly found in dark, cool hiding places in the mountainous clime. Like the arachnid, the empress was rumored to have mated only once. Her consort, a pasty-faced noble from the Hintervold, was found the morning after their wedding, his rigid body carefully dressed and lying on top of the neatly folded sheets in the royal bedchamber, a hideous grimace sealed forever into his features by the richtus of death, while the empress was out for her morning ride.
The momentary union produced the empress’s only progeny, the Crown Prince Vyshla. The Crown Prince favored his father; his skin was sallow and pale, even in a clime that produced swarthy complexions in everyone else who lived there; his hands and body were soft as a woman’s, some soldiers of the Columns were known to have joked once, though in doing so they learned quickly that the mountains, and even the desert sand, had ears. Their eyeless remains, dried and mummified by the harsh winds and waterless air, swung for more than a year from a parapet outside the palace of Jierna Tal before the prince was finally prevailed upon to have them removed so that they did not clash with the street decorations celebrating the rites of spring.