The Weaver's Lament

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  To my family

  into which I was born,

  married,

  or invited,

  you who have given me all the music I ever needed

  to be able to sing this rhapsody

  with abiding love and thanks

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To

  Tom Doherty, Impresario

  James Minz, Midwife

  Susan Chang, Shepherd

  Jynne Dilling and Kathleen Fogarty, Beacons

  for making this series happen

  with gratitude and fond appreciation

  THE WEAVER’S LAMENT

  Time, it is a tapestry

  Threads that weave it number three

  These be known, from first to last,

  Future, Present, and the Past

  Present, Future, weft-thread be

  Fleeting in inconstancy

  Yet the colors they do add

  Serve to make the heart be glad

  Past, the warp-thread that it be

  Sets the path of history

  Every moment ’neath the sun

  Every battle, lost or won

  Finds its place within the lee

  Of Time’s enduring memory

  Fate, the weaver of the bands

  Holds these threads within Her hands

  Plaits a rope that in its use

  Can be a lifeline, net—or noose.

  THE AMULET OF TSOLTAN, SYMBOL OF THE F’DOR

  Prologue

  THE YEAR 1008, SIXTH AGE THE CITY-STATE OF HACKET

  In the inconstant torchlight flickering around the dark glade, it seemed that the grave would never be deep enough.

  The soldiers, exhausted after the hauling of the thickset body from where it had been found in the hut, the stench of rot and decay, and the shifts of digging, were sweating profusely in the warm night air. They glanced every now and then over their shoulders, keeping their reconnaissance brief, then turned back to the task at hand.

  Their leader alone stood watch, lending no aid.

  “Make quick work of it, boys,” he muttered, refusing to observe their undertaking.

  Finally, after far longer than any of them wanted, the task was considered complete enough.

  The exhausted Firbolg soldiers paused, awaiting approval.

  Their leader finally looked back at the massive mound of displaced earth, then down into the hole in the rocky ground, and nodded reluctantly.

  The unit scrambled. While the Sergeant-Major looked away again, they hurried into the trees of the glade and dragged forth the large body, carefully wrapped in strips of cloth that had been soaked in brine and pungent herbs to help combat the odiferous state to which it had devolved.

  Then, with newfound energy, they hoisted it high enough to carry as a group to the grave and, using the ropes that had been attached to haul it, lowered it carefully into the hole, slipping only once before righting it again.

  After a few moments, the most senior of the Bolg soldiers cleared his throat politely.

  “Sir?”

  The broad-shouldered Sergeant, an even more massive man than the one they were burying, did not seem to hear him.

  The soldiers exchanged a glance in the dimming torchlight.

  After another long moment, the senior soldier tried again.

  “Sir?”

  This time, the Sergeant turned and looked over his shoulder. “Eh?”

  “Orders, sir?”

  The Sergeant finally came around. “One moment, please,” he instructed, his voice stronger than it had been earlier in the night.

  He reached into his weapons bandolier and pulled out a sword, a jagged weapon smelted with points up the blade, known affectionately as the Old Bitch, named after a hairy-legged harlot he had known long ago in the old world. It was actually a replica of several such swords that had seen combat with him over the centuries, but its age hardly mattered.

  He crouched down at the grave’s edge, near the corpse’s feet, and held the sword, point down, in front of him for a moment, thinking.

  “’Bye, then, Trom,” he said quietly. “Sleep well, an’ Oi’ll see you on the other side o’ the Gate.”

  He rose and tossed the weapon into the open grave, then signaled to the troops.

  “Fill ’er in,” he said.

  When the task was accomplished, he pressed his foot into the new mound of earth in a few places, then looked at his bone-weary troops again.

  “Know you lads’re tired, but it seems like a good time to go out an’ have a lit’le fun,” he said. “Just to deliver our respecks to the ones what put ’im in the ground. Whaddaya say, boys?”

  At first there was no answer.

  Then, one by one, the soldiers shook off their exhaustion and let loose a war cry, from deep in the throat, aimed at the stars.

  The Sergeant smiled for the first time in a week.

  “Well, then,” he said, making his way back to his horse, “let’s ’ave at it.”

  THE PROPHECY OF THE THREE

  The Three shall come, leaving early, arriving late

  The lifestages of all men:

  Child of Blood, Child of Earth, Child of the Sky

  Each man, formed in blood and born in it,

  Walks the Earth and sustained by it,

  Reaching the sky and sheltered beneath it,

  He ascends there only in his ending, becoming part of the stars.

  Blood gives new beginning

  Earth gives sustenance

  The Sky gives dreams in life—eternity in death

  Thus shall the Three be, one to the other.

  1

  EASTERN BORDER OF THE FOREST OF TYRIAN

  At the crossing of the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare and the eastern forest road, Achmed the Snake thought he had caught the faintest trace of woodsmoke in the air.

  He reined his horse to a stop and inclined his head to the west, seeking to confirm what his nose had hinted at, but sensed nothing further.

  The Bolg king wearily loosed the reins and rubbed his face vigorously, then ran his thin-gloved fingers through his hair, damp with sweat. He took another breath, only to be greeted with the warmth and heavy perfume of late summer, wafting over him on a brittle wind. Nothing more.

  Achmed glanced around for a place to water his mount and located a nearby quick-running stream winding its way out of the forest in the distance. He nudged the horse toward it and dismounted, allowing the animal some rest with its refreshment and himself the whimsy of memory.

  It had been just short of a thousand years since he had been in this place, owing largely to its status as a backdoor route into the eastern edge of the fo
rest of Tyrian. There had been no reason to brave the hidden defenders that were invisibly guarding this part of the Lirin kingdom when he could just as easily enter Tyrian via any of its public entrances, as he had done whenever the spirit had moved him to do so in the past. There had been relatively few times that the spirit had so moved him; Achmed disliked forests in general and the Great Forest of the western part of the continent in particular. He preferred to do his visiting with the other two people in the world who, with him, made up what had been known long ago as the Three in the quiet solidity of his mountainous kingdom of Ylorc, where the ancient stone hallways and cavernous rooms were immune to prying eyes and free of the tattletale wind.

  But since one of those two people was not cooperating, and the other would be arriving from the south shortly, he had decided to undertake a journey to check on his Wings, the network of carefully bred and selected horseflesh that he kept in secret stables across the continent for his personal use, which allowed him to traverse substantial distances in minimal time.

  It was as good an excuse to leave the mountains without a guard regiment as any.

  Achmed pushed his cloak back over his shoulders and crossed his arms, then turned around, taking in the sight of the forest to the west, the Krevensfield Plain behind him, and, in the distance, the jagged mountains to the south known as the Teeth, the cousins to the mountains of his own kingdom.

  His eyes narrowed as the memory he sought returned.

  The last time he had been here had been in the throes of the War of the Known World, the last intercontinental conflict the Cymrian Alliance, to which his kingdom was a signatory member, had suffered. A millennium had passed since those days, a largely peaceful time in which great advances in architecture, mechanics, medicine, and machinery had been made in Roland, the central nation in the breadbasket of the continent; political strife and diplomacy had been undertaken in the former empire of Sorbold, where now seventeen city-states, most of them members of the Alliance as well, had sorted themselves out of the destruction of that broken empire into independence; and his own kingdom had continued to rebuild and grow its military might. A substantial amount of progress had been made on all of those fronts—the center, southern, and eastern lands of the Middle Continent.

  But here at the outskirts of Tyrian, the western coastal region covered mostly in thick, primeval forest, the view could easily have passed for that time long ago when last he had stood in this place.

  It also could have reasonably been mistaken for a moment even longer ago when he had first stood there, upon coming to this continent.

  Achmed knew that the primitive appearance of the forest was in many ways an illusion. Tyrian had undergone great progress in the last thousand years as well; healing centers and repositories of lore had been erected within the arms of the great wood, along with improved defenses and cooperatives for agriculture from which the Lirin fed much of the northern lands that could not grow their own food. But all of that millennial progress had been undertaken with an eye toward preserving the innocence of the forest, the natural antiquity of the land, and so it was not surprising that he was seeing now what his eyes had seen a thousand years before.

  In the near distance to the south, he caught a trace of a familiar heartbeat approaching.

  The Bolg king smiled slightly.

  When counted in real time, his familiarity with that heartbeat had a history of almost three thousand years. He had walked, hidden, fought, and slept beside it on two sides of Time, and of the world as well—as well as in the world’s belly.

  It thudded mightily on the wind, but less so than it had in the Past.

  He walked back to the horse and stood beside it, waiting.

  A few moments later, a mount of almost twice his horse’s size appeared over the edge of a swale in the forest road coming from the south. Atop it was his oldest friend in the world, the massive Sergeant-Major whose actual title was Supreme Commander of the forces of the mountainous realm of Ylorc, far to the other side of the continent, at its eastern edge, but who chose to be called Sergeant by his troops.

  Grunthor by his friends.

  From a distance, the giant grinned in greeting, but maintained his steady canter.

  Jutting from the bandolier he wore, the hilts and handles of an impressive collection of bladed weapons still stood at the ready, as they had on both sides of Time, making him appear to have a sinister sun rising behind him, or as if he were the center of a monstrous daisy. His seat on the specially bred horse was as natural as it had ever been, his seven-and-a-half-foot frame sitting erect, without a nod to age or the damage he had sustained over his lifetime, more through sheer force of will than anything else.

  Achmed, arms still crossed, assessed his friend’s health and stamina as the giant rode closer, displeased with what he witnessed. While he had noticed no signs of aging or decline in his own status for the last millennium or so, nor had he seen a wrinkle or graying of hair on Rhapsody the last time he had been in her presence, the third member of the Three was not faring as well. His shaggy hair and beard, once an impressive shade of burnt orange and the thick consistency of a horse’s mane, were sparser and gray; his skin, the color of old bruises, seemed more sallow than the last time Achmed had beheld him, which had not been that long ago.

  But the grin was still bright, the eyes twinkling in the aging face.

  Given the two races from which he was descended, Achmed thought, it was impressive that Grunthor was still moving autonomously at all. His father had been Firbolg, the race of demi-human hybrids that careful medical attention and a thousand years of peace had managed to bring to an average life span of forty years. Grunthor’s mother was Bengard, one of the long-dead race of enormous desert dwellers who were impossible to gauge years for, owing to their love of bloodsport and arena fighting. The Bengard had put a premium on living bravely and dying young gloriously.

  The fact that both of the only friends he’d ever had were still living was a miracle.

  Achmed exhaled, lost in memory.

  The new world had not been new for a long time, he mused; the places that he and the other two of the Three had discovered upon coming through the Root of the great world tree Sagia from their island homeland of Serendair were no longer fresh or alien, but dull in their familiarity. He and Grunthor had together completely restored, reoutfitted, and reenvisioned the massive, mountainous city-state of Ylorc, carved into the eastern Teeth almost three millennia before by Gwylliam the Visionary and left in ruins by the Cymrian War a thousand years later. The secrets in those endless, broken tunnels had all been found, the mysteries had all been solved; now the Bolg army, half a million strong, was the best-outfitted and best-trained fighting force on the continent, perhaps in the Known World, but it had seen nothing but military exercises and war games, with no live battle, for many centuries.

  All that peace was aging Grunthor, a child of the arena and the battlefield, Achmed knew, even more than some of the cost of war he was paying from ten centuries before.

  “Well met,” he said to the Sergeant as he drew his enormous horse to a halt.

  The giant pulled off his helm, ran a hand through his sweaty hair, and nodded.

  “Well, ’allo, sir,” he said cheerfully. “Glad ta see you, too. Where’s the Duchess?”

  “Late. Are you surprised?”

  “Not a bit. All well in Ylorc?”

  Achmed watched as Grunthor dismounted slowly, shaking the ground as he alighted. “Indeed. The vineyards are beginning the first round of harvest. Looks to be a fine one this year—if the weather holds as the Invoker predicts, we should even get a late third, an ice wine that they’ll love in Marincaer, the simpletons. How were your travels?”

  The Sergeant-Major’s smile dissolved into a solemn expression. “Buried Trom.”

  The Bolg king exhaled. “I’m sorry.” Grunthor’s success as the sire of a multitude of Bolgish children with superior genes for war, originally propagated as a side effect o
f one of his favorite appetites, had so far produced thirty-seven generations, the first round of which had been gone for nine centuries—except for Trom.

  While all of the mothers of his other children in the first generation, Bolg women of various levels of stature, were long deceased, Trom’s mother had been Lelik, a Finder, spawned of the rape of a First Generation Cymrian, probably a woman, and one of the first ranks of Firbolg who overran Canrif, as Ylorc was known at the time, in the days following Gwylliam’s death and the evacuation of the mountains by Anborn, Gwylliam’s son and general, a millennium and a half before the Three had come to the continent.

  Her Cymrian ancestry meant that she was exceptionally long-lived.

  Lelik had become one of Achmed’s second round of Archons, the select caste of Bolg who had been determined to be of leadership ability, and the mother of one of Grunthor’s first children. The extraordinary longevity Trom inherited from his Cymrian/Firbolg mother, in concert with the apparent immortality of his father, had allowed Grunthor the pleasure of keeping a child over the centuries, when all of his other progeny had come and gone in what seemed the wink of an eye. It had also allowed for at least some duration of an individual woman’s company, the only example of it Achmed knew of in Grunthor’s life on either side of Time.

  Trom’s demise was the end of an era, even if that era only had one successful example of procreation and female companionship.

  Grunthor made a gesture brushing off the sympathy.

  “Well, thank ya, sir, but it was time. Long past, rather—’e’d lost the use of ’is legs and other functions long ago; no soldier wants to live like that.”

  “I suppose not. How many did you get out of that line, do you suppose?”

  “Dunno,” said the giant cheerfully. “Twen’y or more generations. Think Oi still see new litters of Trom’s ‘Greats’ every now an’ then. Lookin’ forward to gettin’ back to Ylorc an’ knockin’ out a few more brand-new ones o’ my own.”