Only the wind answered him.
He cast a wider net, opening his mind until his head throbbed with the effort of it, combing each pocket, each gust, desperately striving to catch even the tiniest flicker, the smallest flavor of Rhapsody’s heartbeat, a rhythm that was as familiar to him as his own. He waited a long few moments, tasting the air, inhaling it deep to see if he could capture an infinitesimal particle of it within himself.
Nothing.
Rhapsody, he called silently, casting her name like a net into the wind, then pulling it back with his mind, hoping for a fragment, a nicker, anything.
Nothing.
Cold waves of fear began to rise and fall, radiating from his stomach out to his extremities.
He barely felt them.
Achmed shifted his focus and combed the wind, seeking Grunthor’s heartbeat. It thrummed in his skin-web immediately, pulsing in the familiar rhythm of his friend’s life signature. Distantly the buzz of the other thousand or so survivors from the Island were there as well.
Only Rhapsody’s was missing.
Breaking from his search, Achmed ran at breakneck speed to the livery where the quartermaster had saddled his horse, mounted, and rode off west toward Sepulvarta before almost any of the Bolg had even realized he had returned.
Omet returned to the work site in the tower a few minutes later, having completed his rounds of kiln-checks, to find a stranger in the inner sanctum, the Bolg king’s second-most-restricted area after his own chambers.
She was consulting with Shaene and Rhur, crouched over a pile of wood ash and glass shards when he came in. At first he didn’t even realize that she was a woman, because her build was so slight, her hair so short, and her stance so aggressive that immediately he assumed she was a man.
All misconception of that was shattered a moment later, when Shaene noticed him standing there.
“Ah, Sandy!” the oafish artisan called, waving Omet into the room. “You’re just in time to meet the king’s new hire, a sealed Panjeri master. Theophila, this is our fellow suffering glassmaker, Sandy.”
The woman crouching on the floor looked up and nodded, her face impassive, dark eyes lighting on Omet for a moment, then returning to her conversation with the two men.
“Say, Sandy, do you have the plans? The king wants Theophila to have them.”
At those words, both Theophila and Rhur looked up at him again.
As their eyes met, Omet went suddenly white. His jaw clenched into a firm grip, so tight that the tiny hairs in his beard vibrated.
“Well?” Shaene demanded impatiently after a moment. “Do you have them plans or not?”
“Er, no, not with me,” he lied, holding as still as possible and hoping the drawings would not be revealed in the canvas he carried. “I must have left them near the kilns. I’ll have to go to the forge and get them.”
“Well, for the gods’ sake, don’t lose them. The king will push you into the kilns himself if you do.”
“Where—where is the king?” Omet asked, running a hand through his sweaty hair.
Shaene looked up from the ash pile on the floor. “He just left the mountain on somethin’ urgent. Said he didn’t know when he would be back.” He took in the pale look on Omet’s face, noted where the boy was staring, and laughed.
“Slacken your trousers, lad. She’s too old for you.”
The woman rolled her eyes and turned back to the table. “No hurry on the plans today. I’ll want a tour of the forge and the ovens first, and an inventory of the materials and tools you have.”
“Very good, mum,” said Shaene.
“Excuse me,” Omet said quickly, then slipped out the door again.
Once around the corner, he leaned up against a wall for support, suddenly light-headed and sick.
He knew this woman, though her hair had been cropped short, and she was wearing clothes the like of which she never would have been seen in normally.
He prayed she did not know him beneath the head of hair and the full beard he had grown since last she had seen him.
In the foundry of Yarim.
All the world began to spin, and fear worse than any he had known roared forth, threatening to consume him.
The guildmistress had come to Ylorc.
34
On the heartbeat before she bolted for the edge of the cliff, Rhapsody remembered something.
The last time she had run from Michael, in the company of Achmed and Grunthor, they were in the Wide Meadows of Serendair. They had come across a cadre of nomadic Lirin, wanderers known as Lirinved, the In-Between, who traveled betwixt forest and field, making homes in neither place. She and the two Bolg, though meaning no harm to the Lirinved, were nonetheless strang ers in their lands, in bad days to be strangers. Achmed and Grunthor, hidden with her in the highgrass of the meadows, had drawn weapons silently in preparation for the confrontation that no one wanted, but was to come.
That was the first moment she had understood the true, deep and inexorable power of a Namer, the rank of Singer she had just achieved through her self-study and constant practice.
Because she knew the true name of the highgrass, Hymialacia, in which they were hiding, she had been able to whisper it, over and over, weaving into her chant the names of other distractions—the clouds above, the warm wind, hummocks and pits. In that way, just for a moment, she had altered the vibrational signatures of each of the companions, camouflaging them, blending them into the highgrass until they actually became the Hymialacia while she sang. For the time they were hidden, transformed thus, the wind had blown through them, the sun had beat down upon them, but cast shadows that looked like those belonging to blades of grass, not a Firbolg man, a giant, and a Lirin woman. The Lirinved had walked past, close enough to touch them, never knowing they were there.
That power, that Naming ability, was the only thing that had even the slightest chance of saving her now.
Even if it would not, there was no other recourse than but to try, she reasoned. Preferable to die in a fall from the precipice than to live in the fetid clutches of a human-demon who would defile her body, torture her soul, and worst, eventually become aware of her child.
Her mind refused to imagine what he would do then.
There was no other option.
But what word, what name, could possibly spare her from a fall from that height? Her mind raced furiously as she lay on the ground where Michael had thrown her, the cloth of her torn shirt rippling in the wind raging up the cliff face, spilling over onto the promontory, tangling her flying hair, as he conferred with his men.
Droplets of salt spray borne on the wind slapped her face, stinging her eyes with salt. Her mind registered them first as rain, making unconscious note of them a moment later, then shifting suddenly back to her first impulse.
Rain.
Typta, she whispered in her Namer’s voice, feeling the hum of the different vibration in her teeth. The tone was true.
She concentrated on her own note, ela, and prepared to alter it with the roundelay.
Within the next beat of her heart Rhapsody was on her feet, running with all her strength for the cliffs edge, chanting with the last of her breath.
Typta. Typta, Typta.
She felt the wind waft over her, lift her slightly, like raindrops on an updraft, caught the exhilaration of speed, hearing the shouts behind her, but blocking them, focusing with all her concentration on the edge of the precipice looming before her.
Typta. Ty—
She felt the reverberation of the bolt in her back and side before the pain, a thudding lurch that threw her balance off, shattering her concentration. Then an instant later the waves of shock radiated through her, a sickening jolt of opposing vibration that tore the breath from her.
The impact strained the muscles of her abdomen; Rhapsody bent over, trying to catch her breath, and as she did she saw Michael at the place where the land began to split into the promontory. A look of shock was frozen on his face, a face with eyes that burned red at the edges, whose ancient skin was drawn like a mummy’s over the sharp bones. It was a face far worse than the one that had haunted her dreams; seeing it made any other option unthinkable.