The cataclysm t2-2

by Margaret Weis

  I had come this far, and for me there was still more to discover, more than thin music and mendicant rhymes. When summoned, I stepped to the light, and when the dulled eyes of the bandit king rested upon me, I threw back my hood.

  "Firebringer," he rasped, and "Orestes the Torch."

  As all the bandits hastened to be the one to slay me, to end the line and the curse before the approving eye of their leader, Finn raised his hand and stayed theirs.

  "No," he rumbled. The blood of the line of Pyrrhus should not stain the floors of this cavern. For remember the curse. Remember the harm it might visit."

  One shaman, seated by the stone foot of the throne, nodded in agreement, beads rattling as he fondled his bone necklace.

  I followed the bandit guards into the throat of the cave, to a confusing depth where all light had vanished except the glow of candles wedged in rocks and later only the torch that guided us. In a great rotunda hundreds of feet below the surface they left me, the last of the guards covering their tracks, candle by extinguished candle, and their footsteps echoed over each other until the cavern resounded of a passing, vanished army.

  I sat in a darkness most absolute. After only a moment, I heard a voice.

  The language was quiet, insinuating, weaving with the fabric of my thoughts until I could no longer tell, especially in this darkness, what words lay outside me and what within.

  Oh, to a wandering eye… it began, a fragment of song in the darkness.

  I scrambled to my feet and lurched toward, I hoped, the passageway. Bones clattered beneath my feet, rattled against rotting wood and rusted strings, striking a hollow music. Spinning blindly in the dark, I realized I had left father's harp behind, and knew at once that I could not find my way back to it.

  A second voice caught me standing stupidly in the same place, huddled in my cloak, expecting the fangs, the monster's fatal poisons. At the new sound, I jumped, flinging my pitiful knife away into the darkness, where it clattered much too loudly against the rock wall.

  "Est Sularis Oth Mithas…"

  And then, behind me, or what I thought was behind me, another.

  Build ye the westernmost wall in three parts…

  And, beyond that, another voice, and yet another, until I spun about dizzily, buffeted by voices, by echoes, by wandering sound from centuries before. For not only did the voices of Southlund and Coastlund mingle in the darkness with a chorus of High Solamnic, but the ancient ritual language seemed to change as I heard it, traveling from voice to voice, each time its pronouncements varying slightly until I realized that the last voices I had heard were another language entirely and that I had followed a passage of familiar words, familiar sounds, back to a voice that was entirely alien, speaking a tongue as remote as the Age of Might, as the distant and unattainable constellations.

  I would know why, said a young man's tortured voice.

  You can find the truth, another voice said — softer, more familiar.

  And the finding will make the past… unchangeable.

  I followed the familiar voice of the druidess L'Indasha Yman, my shoulder brushing against stone and a cool liquid draft of air rushing into my face, telling me I had found a passage… to somewhere else.

  The voices were ahead of me now, ahead and behind, contained, I suppose, by the narrow corridor. Some shouted at me, some whispered, some vexed me with accents curious and thoughts fragmentary…

  … Se The For Dryhtnes Naman Deathes Tholde…

  …here on the plains, where the wind erases thought…

  … our medsiyn is a ston that is no ston, and a thyng in kende and not diverse thynges, of whom all metalles beth made…

  … your one true love's a sailing ship…

  … down in the arm of Caergoth he rode…

  I stopped. In the last of the voices, somewhere behind me in the corridor, the old words had sounded. I forgot them all — the druidess, the erasing wind of the plains, the medicine and bawdy songs — and turned about.

  In the midst of a long recounting of herb lore I discovered that voice again… the bard's intonation masking the accents of Coastlund. I followed the northern vowels, the rhythmic sound of the verse…

  And I was in another chamber, for the echo swirled around me and over me, and I felt cold air from all quarters, and a warmth at a great distance to my left. The voice continued, louder and unbroken by noise and distraction, and it finished and repeated itself as an echo resounds upon echo.

  I held my breath, fumbled for pen and ink, then remembering the monster, sniffed the air for acid and heat.

  It was indeed Arion's "Song of the Rending," echoing over the years unto this cavern and unto my listening.

  So I waited. Through the old narrations of the sins of the Kingpriest, through the poet's account of the numerous decrees of perfection and the Edict of Thought Control. I waited as the song recounted the glittering domes and spires of Istar, the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence, and voices and thunderings and lightnings and earthquakes. I listened as hail and fire tumbled to earth in a downpour of blood, igniting the trees and the grass, and the mountains were burning, and the sea became blood, and above and below us the heavens were scattered, and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet…

  I waited as the voice echoed down the generations, from one century to the next to the third since the Cataclysm, awaiting those lines, not letting myself hope that they would be different from the ones in the leather book in my pack, so that when the lines came, they were like light itself.

  Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

  Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight of the night of betrayals

  Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,

  The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.

  Forever and ever the villages bum in his passage,

  And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies

  That harried him back to the keep of the castle

  Where Pyrrhus the Firebringer canceled the world

  Beneath the denial of battlements,

  Where he died amid stone with his covering armies.

  For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

  Has burned and burned with his effacing hand,

  A barren of shires and hamlets,

  And Firebringer history hangs on the path of his name.

  I sat on the cold stone floor and laughed and cried quietly, exultantly. I waited there an hour, perhaps two, as the "Song of the Rending" ended and began again. I wondered briefly if this were the echo of Arion himself, if I was hearing not only the words but the voice of the bard my father had killed a generation back.

  I decided it did not matter. All that mattered was the truth of the words and the truth of the telling. Arion's song had marked my grandfather as a traitor, but it had preserved the land, for what bandit or goblin would care to invade a fire-blasted country? Orestes's song had rescued Alecto's name, at the price of flame and ruin and his own life. So when Arion's song returned again, I was ready to hear it, to commit it to memory, to wander these caves until I recovered the light, the fresh air, the vellum or hide on which to write the lines that would save my father's line, my line.

  It did return, and I remembered each word, with a memory half trained in the listening, half inherited from a father with bardic gifts. For the first time in a long while, perhaps the first time ever, I was thankful for who he was, and I praised the gifts Orestes had passed on to me.

  And then, with a whisper that drowned out all other voices, at once the beast spoke. It was a dragon!

  So he has sent another from up in the light… o most welcome… the struggle is over is over… rest there rest… no continuing… no… no…

  Oh. And it seemed not at all strange now to fall to the monster without struggle or issue, to rid myself of the shifting past and the curse of these scars and their burning, and to rid all above me of the land's torture…

  So I stood there, ridiculously clutch
ing pen and ink, and though it was already darker than I could imagine darkness to be, I closed my eyes, and the alien heat engulfed me, and with it the evil smell of rust and offal and old blood. The jaws closed quickly around me as I heard a man's voice, saying,

  I have killed Arion, and the burning

  Will never stop. The land is cursed. I am

  Cursed. My line is cursed. I die.

  And then, like a last sudden gift, a woman's whisper:

  There is power in all words, and in yours especially.

  It was the hot fetor that awakened me. I gasped and coughed and closed my eyes immediately to the fierce and caustic fumes.

  I was sitting upright in very confined quarters.

  Slowly I tested my surroundings, my eyes clasped tightly against the foul biting mist. I stretched my arms, and to each side I felt slippery leather walls.

  It came to me slowly what had happened.

  I sat in the dragon's stomach, like a hapless sailor at the end of an ancient tale.

  I cried out in panic and kicked against the pulsing walls, flailing frantically, but it seemed that the great beast had settled and fallen asleep, assured by long experience that the dark corrosives of his stomach would do the rest.

  I felt my scars hiss and bubble. The tissue was old and thick as hide, and it would take hours for the acid to eat through. There was a fair amount of air, though it was foul and painful to breathe. What was left to me was the waiting.

  For a while, for the space, perhaps, of a dozen heartbeats, the absurdity of my quest rushed over me like a harsh, seething wave. Four years of wandering across two continents, hiding away in castles and marshes, under the abutments of bridges and in filthy, narrowing alleys, enduring searing pain in silence…

  Only to come ignobly to the filthiest, narrowest end of all, and with me the line of Pyrrhus Alecto, dissolved and digested miles beneath our beloved peninsula. I had gone down to the depths of the mountains, and the earth with her bars was about me forever.

  I cried out again, certain no one would hear me.

  Then it seemed almost foolishly simple. For after the weeping, the vain recollection of my hundred adventures, I recalled the last thing I had heard:

  "There is power in all words, and in yours especially."

  My first purpose, many seasons past and a hundred miles away, when I left my mother and home, had been to discover and make known the truth about Orestes and Grandfather.

  I had discovered. Now I must make it known. I would salvage the truth in the last dissolving hour. And though I assumed the words would never see light or catch a willing eye, I brought forth quill and inkhorn, and said aloud, canceling my father's words as he had canceled Arion's, "The fires are extinguished. The land is free. I am alive."

  Dipping the quill, I began to write blindly on the quivering stomach walls of the dragon.

  Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode…

  Some men are saved by water, some by fire. I have heard stories of happy rock slides releasing trapped miners, of a ship and its crew passing safely through hurricanes because the helmsman nestled the boat in the eye of the storm, in sheer good fortune.

  I am the rare one to be saved by nausea.

  Credit it to the ink, perhaps, or the incessant, swift scratching on the walls of the dragon's stomach. Whatever it was, the fishermen skirting the coast of Endaf, the good folk of Ergoth who drew me sputtering from the water, said that they had never seen the likes of it on sea or land.

  They said that the caverns of Finn of the Dark Hand had exploded, the rubble toppling down the cliff face and pouring into the circling waters of the cape, that they thought for certain it was an earthquake or some dwarven enchanter gone mad in the depths of the rock until they saw the black wings surge from the central cavern, bunched and muscled and webbed like the wings of a bat. And they told me how a huge creature pivoted gracefully, high above the coastal waters, plunged for the sea, and inelegantly disgorged above the Cape of Caergoth.

  It seemed a clear, sweet grace to me, lying on the deck of their boat as they poured hot mulled wine down me and wrapped me in blankets, their little boat turning west toward the Ergoth shore and the safety of Eastport, a haven in that ravaged and forbidding land.

  The fishermen's attentions seemed strange, though — as if, in some odd, indescribable way, I was one of their fellows. It was not until we reached the port itself and I looked into a barrel of still water that I noticed my scars had vanished.

  But the memory of the burning returns, dull and heavy in my hands, especially at night, here in this lighthouse room overlooking the bay of Eastport. Across the water I can see the coast of my homeland, the ruins of the bandit stronghold at Endaf. Finn, they tell me, dissolved with two dozen of his retainers when the dragon thundered through their chambers, shrieking and flailing and dripping the fatal acid that is the principal weapon of his kind.

  And the creature may as well have dissolved himself. He has not been seen since that day on the Caergoth coast. But the same fishermen who rescued me claim that, only the other night, a dark shadow passed across the face of the red moon. Looking up, they saw nothing but Lunitari and a cloudless sky.

  They saw an omen in this, and now carry talismans on board, but sailors always were a superstitious lot, fashioning monsters out of clouds and the wind on the waters.

  At night I sit by the window, by lamplight, and watch the constellations switch and wink and vanish in this uncertain time, and I set before me a fresh page of vellum, the lines of each day stored in my memory. For a moment I dwell on the edges of remembrance, recalling my mother, L'Indasha Yman, the reluctant knights, and the fortunate fishermen. But, foremost, I recall my father, come down to me in an inheritance of verse and conflicting stories. It is for him, and for Grandfather before him, and for all those who have vanished and been wronged by the lies of the past, that I dip the quill into the inkwell, and the pain in my hand subsides as I begin to write…

  On Solamnia's castles

  Ravens alight.

  Dark and unnumbered

  Like a year of deaths,

  And dreamt on the battlements,

  Fixed and holy,

  Are the signs of the order

  Kingfisher and rose

  THE BARGAIN DRIVER

  Mark Anthony

  I'll give you the two bronze knives, the string of elven beads, and the silver drinking horn, but that is my final offer."

  "Are you mad, Matya?" the grizzled old trader said in exasperation. He gestured to the bolt of fine cloth that lay between them on the counter, in the center of the trading post's one dingy, cluttered room. "Why, this was woven for a noble lord in the city of Palanthas itself. It's worth twice what you're offering me. Nay, thrice!"

  Matya watched the trader calculatingly with her bright brown eyes. She could always tell when she was about to best Belek in the driving of a bargain, for his nose invariably would begin to twitch.

  "If the doth is so fine, why did the noble lord for whom it was made not buy it?" Matya asked pointedly.

  Belek mumbled some excuse, but Matya waved it away with a ring-covered hand. "You may take my offer or leave it, Belek. You'll not get so much as a bent nail more."

  The trader sighed, a look of dismay on his haggard face. "You're determined to drive me out of business, aren't you, Matya?" His bulbous nose gave a violent twitch.

  Matya smiled inwardly, though she did not let the trader see her satisfaction. "It's simply business, Belek, that's all."

  The trader grunted. "Aye, so it is. But I'll warn you, Matya. One day you'll drive a bargain too cleverly for your own good. There are some bargains that aren't worth taking, no matter how profitable they seem."

  Matya laughed at that. "You always were a sore loser, Belek." She pushed the goods she had offered across the counter. Belek sighed — his nose twitching furiously — and pushed the bolt of cloth toward her. Matya spat on her palm. Belek did likewise, and the two shook hands. The bargain had been struc
k.

  Matya bade Belek farewell and loaded the bolt of cloth into her wagon outside the ramshackle trading post. The wagon was a colorful, if somewhat road-worn, affair — a wooden box on wheels, painted in countless bright but peeling hues. Hitched in front was a single dun-colored donkey with patient eyes and extraordinarily long ears.

  Matya's wagon was filled nearly to overflowing with all manner of wares, both mundane and curious: pots and pans, cloaks and boots, arrows and axes, flints, knives, and even a sword or two, plus countless other objects she had bought, haggled for, or — most of the time — scavenged. Traveling from town to town, trading and striking bargains, was how Matya made her living. And it was not a bad one at that.

  Like the wagon, Matya herself was a bit worn with the years. Her long hair, coiled in a thick braid atop her head, had been flaxen, but now was ash gray. Countless days of sun and wind had tanned and toughened her ruddy cheeks. Fine wrinkles touched the comers of her eyes and mouth, more from smiling than frowning, and so were attractive. And, like the wagon, Matya was clad in a motley collection of clothes representing all colors of the rainbow, from her ocean-blue skirt to her sunflower-yellow shirt and forestgreen vest speckled with tiny red flowers. Her willowy, figure had plumped out, but there was still an air of beauty about her, of the simplest and most comforting kind — when her nut-brown eyes weren't flashing fire, that is.

  "Let's be on our way, Rabbit," Matya told the donkey as she climbed onto the wagon's wooden bench. "If we hurry, we can reach Garnet by nightfall. There's a merchant there who's an even worse haggler than Belek." The donkey gave a snort that sounded uncannily like laughter.

  Matya tied a bright red kerchief over her graying hair and grasped the wagon's reins in her strong, thick fingers. She whistled sharply, and Rabbit started off at a trot down the dusty highway, pulling the gaudily colored wagon behind.