Elizabeth Haydon - Elegy for a Lost Star

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Symphony of Ages Books by Elizabeth Haydon

Rhapsody: Child of Blood

Prophecy: Child of Earth

Destiny: Child of the Sky

Requiem for the Sun

Elegy for a, Lost Star

Elegy for a

Lost Star

Book Five of

The Symphony of Ages

Elizabeth Haydon

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

New York

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either

fictitious or are used fictitiously.

form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Edited by James Minz

Maps by Ed Gazsi

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haydon, Elizabeth.

Elegy for a lost star / Elizabeth Haydon. - 1st ed. p. cm.

"A Tom Doherty Associates book."

ISBN 0-312-87883-4 (alk. paper)

EAN 978-0312-87883-2

1. Rhapsody (Fictitious character : Haydon)-Fiction. 2. Grunthor (Fictitious character :

Haydon)-Fiction. 3. Achmed (Fictitious character : Haydon)-Fiction. 4. Mothers and

sons-Fiction. 5. Dragons-Fiction. I. Tide.

PS3558.A82896E46 2004 813'.54-dc22

2004045961

First Edition: August 2004

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

For my adopted siblings Daughter of the Earthly Garden

Son of the Sea

for all they've done

to keep it going

with love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to three sets of innkeepers whose hospitality was

inspirational in the places I visited while researching this book:

The Taste of Alaska Lodge, Fairbanks, Alaska

Quagmire Manor, Homer, New York

King's Inn, Huntsville, Alabama

ODE

WE are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world's great cities,

And out of a fabulous story

We fashion an empire's glory:

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song's measure

Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o'erthrew them with prophesying

To the old of the new world's worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one diat is coming to birth.

-Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Seven Gifts of the Creator,

Seven colors of light

Seven seas in the wide world,

Seven days in a sennight,

Seven months of fallow

Seven continents trod, weave

Seven eras of history

In the eye of God.

SONG OF THE SKY LOOM

Oh, our Mother the Earth;

Oh, our Father the Sky,

Your children are we,

With tired backs. We bring you the gifts you love.

Then weave for us a garment of brightness. . . .

May the warp be the white light of morning,

May the weft be the red light of evening,

May the fringes be the fallen rain, May the border be the standing

rainbow.

Thus weave for us a garment of brightness

That we may walk fittingly where birds sing;

That we may walk fittingly where the grass is green.

Oh, Our Mother Earth;

Oh, Our Father Sky.

- Traditional, Tewa.

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 Awakening

YLORC

When the mountain peak of Gurgus exploded, the vibrations coursed

through the foundations of the earth.

Above ground, the debris field from the blast stretched for miles,

ranging from boulder-sized rubble at the base of the peak to fragments of

sand that littered the steppes more than a league away. In between, shards

of colored glass from windows that had once been inlaid in the

mountain's hollow summit lay like a broken rainbow, glittering in the sun

beneath an intermittent layer of sparkling dust.

Below ground, a small band of Firbolg soldiers felt the concussion

rumble beneath their feet, though they were some miles east of Gurgus. A

few moments of stillness passed as dust settled to the floor of the tunnel.

When Krarn finally released the breath he was holding, the rest of his

patrol shook off their torpor and resumed their duties. The

Sergeant-Major would flay them alive if they let something as small as a

tremor keep them from their appointed rounds.

A few days later, the soldiers reluctantly emerged under a cloudless sky,

having reached the farthest extent of this section of their tunnel system,

and the end of their patrol route.

Krarn stood on the rim of the craterlike ruins of the Moot, a meeting

place from ancient times, now dark with coal ash and considered haunted.

Nothing but the howl of the wind greeted him; no one lived in the rocky

foothills that stretched into steppes, then out to the vast Krevensfield Plain

beyond.

Having finished their sweep of the area, his men had quietly assembled

behind him. Krarn was about to order them back into the tunnels when the

hairs on his back-from his neck to his belt-stood on end.

It began as the faintest of rumblings in the ground. The tremors were

not enough to be noticed on their own, but Krarn noted the trembling of

vegetation, the slightest of changes in the incessantly dry landscape, little

more than the disturbance that a strong breeze might make. He knew that

it was no wind that caused this disturbance; it had come from the earth.

Silently ordering his men into a skirmish line, Krarn scanned the area,

looking for any more signs. After a few minutes, the feeling passed, and

the earth settled into stillness again. Nothing but wind sighed through the

tall grass.

"Aftershocks," he muttered to himself.

With a shake of his head, Krarn led his men back into the tunnels. And

in so doing, missed the chance to sound a warning of what was to come.

As the days passed, the tremors grew stronger.

The surface of the Moot, baked to a waterless shell by the summer sun,

began to split slightly, thin cracks spreading over the landscape like the

spidery pattern on a mirror that had broken but not shattered.

Then came steam, the slightest of puffs of rancid smoke rising up

ominously from the ground beneath the tiny cracks.

By day it was almost impossible to see, had eyes been in the locality to

see it. By night it mixed with the hot haze coming off the ground and,

caught by the wind, wafted aloft, blending with the low-hanging clouds.

Finally came the eruption.

Waves of shock rolled through the earth as if it were the sea, waves that

intensified, growing stronger. The earth began to move, to rise in some

places, shifting in its underground strata.

Then, with a terrifying lunge, it ripped apart.

The rumbling beneath the surface suddenly took on movement. It

started outside of Ylorc but traveled quickly. It was heading north.

Unerringly, determinedly north, toward the icy land of the Hintervold.

All along the eastern rim of the mountains, then westward across the

plains, a movement within the ground could be felt, a shifting so violent

that it sent aftershocks through the countryside, uprooting trees and

splitting crevasses into the sides of rolling hills, causing children miles

away to wake in the night, shaking with fear.

Their mothers held them close, soothing them. "It's nothing, little one,"

they said, or uttered some similar words in whatever language they were

accustomed to speaking. "The ground trembles from time to time, but it

will settle and go quiet again. See? It is gone already. There is nothing to

fear."

And then it was gone.

The children nestled their heads against their mother's shoulders, their

eyes bright in the darkness, knowing on some level that the shivering they

had felt was more than the ripples of movement in the crust of the world.

Someone listening closely enough might sense, beyond the trembling

passage, a deeper answer from below the ground.

Much deeper below.

As if the earth itself was listening.

Deep within her tomb of charred earth, the dragon had felt the aftershocks

of the explosion of the mountain peak.

Her awareness, dormant for years, hummed with slight static, just

enough to tickle the edges of her unconscious mind, which had hibernated

since her internment in the grave of melted stone and fire ash in the ancient

Moot.

At first the sensation nauseated her and she fought it off numbly,

struggling to sink back into the peaceful oblivion of deathlike sleep. Then,

when oblivion refused to return, she began to grow fearful, disoriented in

a body she didn't remember.

After a few moments the fear turned to dread, then deepened into

terror.

As the whispers of alarm rippled over her skin it unsettled the ground

around her grave, causing slight waves of shock to reverberate through

the earth around and above her. She distantly sensed the presence of the

coterie of Firbolg guards from Ylorc, the mountainous realm that

bordered the grave, who had come to investigate the tremors, but was too

disoriented to know what they were.

And then they were gone, leaving her mind even more confused.

The dragon roiled in her sepulcher of scorched earth, shifting from side

to side, infinitesimally. She did not have enough control of her conscious

thought to move more than she could inhale, and her breath, long stilled

into the tiniest of waves, was too shallow to mark.

The earth, the element from which her kind had sprung, pressed down

on her, squeezing the air from her, sending horrific scenes of suffocation

through her foggy mind.

And then, after what seemed to her endless time in the clutches of

horror, into this chaos of thought and confused sensation a beacon

shone, the clear, pure light of her innate dragon sense. Hidden deep in the

rivers of her ancient blood, old as she was old, the inner awareness that

had been her weapon and her bane all of her forgotten life began to rise,

clearing away the conundrum, settling the panic, cell by cell, nerve by

nerve, bringing clarity in tiny moments, like pieces of an enormous puzzle

coming together, or a picture that was slowly gaining focus.

And with the approaching clarity came a guarded calm.

The dragon willed herself to breathe easier, and in willing it, caused it to

happen.

She still did not comprehend her form. In her sleep-tangled mind she

was a woman still, of human flesh and shape, not wyrm, not beast, not

serpentine, and so she was baffled by her girth, her heft, the inability of

her arms and legs to function, to push against the ground as they once

had. Her confusion was compounded by this disconnection between

mind, body, and memory, a dark stage on which no players had yet come

to appear. All she could recall in her limited consciousness was the sense

of falling endlessly in fire that had struck her from above, and blazed

below her as she fell.

Hot, she thought hazily. Burning. I'm burning.

But of course she was not. The blast of flame that had taken her from

the sky had been quenched more than three years before, had sizzled into

smoky ash covering the thick coalbed that lined her tomb, baking it hard

and dry in its dying.

Fighting her disorientation, the dragon waited, letting her inner sense

sort through the jumble, inhaling a bit more deeply with each breath,

remaining motionless, letting the days pass, marking time only by the heat

she could feel through the earth when the sun was high above her tomb,

and the cooling of night, which lasted only a short while before the

warmth returned.

Must be summer's end, she mused, the only cognizant thought to take

hold.

Until another image made its way onto the dark stage.

It was a place of stark white, a frozen land of jagged peaks and all but

endless winter. In the tight containment of the tomb the memory of

ex-pansiveness returned; she recalled staring up at a night sky blanketed

with cold stars, the human form she had once inhabited, and still inhabited

in her mind, tiny and insignificant in the vastness of the snowy mountains

all around her.

A single word formed in her mind.

Home.

With the word came the will.

As the puzzle solidified, as the picture became clearer, her dragon sense

was able to ascertain direction, even beneath the ground. With each new

breath the dragon turned herself by inches until, after time uncounted, she

sensed she was pointed north-northwest. Across the miles she could feel

it calling, her lair, her stronghold, though the details of what it was were

still scattered.

It mattered not.

Once oriented in the correct direction, she set off, crawling through the

earth, still believing herself to be human, dragging a body that did not

respond the way she expected it to relentlessly forward, resolute in her

intent, slowly gaining speed and strength, until the ground around her

began to cool, signaling to her that home was near. Then, with a burst of

renewed resolve, she bore through the crust of the earth, up through the

blanket of permafrost, hurtling out of the ground in a shower of cracking

ice and flying snow, to fall heavily onto the white layer that covered the

earth like a frozen scab, breathing shallowly, rapidly, ignoring the sting of

the cold.

She lay motionless for a long while beneath that endless night sky

blanketed with stars, thought and reason returning with her connection to

this land, this place to which she had been exiled, in which she had made

her lair.

The dragon inhaled the frosty wind, allowing it to slowly cleanse her

blackened lungs as the dragon sense in her blood was cleansing her mind.

And along with thought and reason, something else returned as well,

burning hot at the edges of her memory, unclear, but unmistakable,

growing in clarity and intensity with each moment.

The fury of revenge.

The king of the mountainous realm was away when the peak exploded.

A man born as an accidental by-product of depravity and despair, of

mixed bloodlines that came from the earth and the wind, his skin was

almost magically sensitive, a network of traceries of exposed nerves and

surface veins. He was, as a result, innately aware of the vibrations in the

wind that others defined as Life, could oftentimes tell when things were

not as they should be, when something was disturbing the natural order of

the earth, especially the earth that was his domain. Had he been in his

kingdom when the wyrm awoke from her sleep, he would have known it.

But Achmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg and lord of the realm of

Ylorc, was half a continent away, traveling overland on his way home

when it came to pass.

So, like his subjects, the guards who walked the edge of the grave itself,

he missed the chance to intervene, to stop what was to come.

And, by chance, because of a weapon of his own design, the cwellan,

which he had adapted just for the purpose of penetrating the hide of a

dragon, he alone might have been able to do so while the wyrm lay in her

sepulcher, prone and disoriented. His weapon had drawn her blood

before.

By the time he returned home, the beast was long gone.

His mission in the west accomplished, he had chosen to return to his

kingdom in the eastern mountains alone, riding the same route as the

guarded mail caravans, but refusing to wait to travel with them in the

safety of numbers. In addition to his natural tendency of isolation, his

complete disdain for the majority of the human race, and his desire not to

be slowed down in his return by traveling with others, Achmed needed

time alone to think.

The heat of summer's end was waning as he traveled the trans-Orlandan

thoroughfare, the roadway built during the most prosperous days of the

previous empire. The thoroughfare bisected the land of Roland from the

sea-coast to the edge of the Manteids, the mountains known as the Teeth,

where he now reigned. The cooling of the season and the fresh wind that

came with it gave him a clear head, allowing him to sort through all he had

experienced.

The western seacoast he had left behind him was burning still, though

the fires had begun to be extinguished by the time he left. The ash from

the blackened forests had traveled east on the wind as well, and so for the

first few days of his journey his nostrils and sensitive sinuses were sore

from their exposure to the soot. But by the time he reached the province

of Bethany, -the midpoint of the realm of Roland, the wind had turned

clearer, and so had his head.

His mind, distracted by the disappearance of one of his two friends in

the world, was able to refocus on what had been his priority for the last

few months. Now that she was safe, his thoughts were locked obsessively

on the completion of his tower.

Many of the reasons for his obsession with rebuilding the

instrumentality that had once been housed in the mountain peak of Gurgus

were lodged in the past. But the most important one was the future.

The pounding of the horse's hooves was a tattoo that drove extraneous

thoughts away. The Panjeri glass artisan I hired in Sorbold has had a,

good deed of time to make progress on the Lightcatcher; the ceiling of

the tower must be complete by now, the king thought, ruminating on what

Gurgus would look like when restored. A full circle of colored glass

panes, seven in all, each precisely fired to the purest hues of the

spectrum, the mountain peak would soon hold a power that would aid

him in his life's mission.

Keeping the Sleeping Child safe from the F'dor, fire demons that

endlessly sought to find her.

From the time he had begun the undertaking of building the tower, the

Firbolg king's mind had known even less peace than usual. His obsession

was coupled with uncertainty; he was by training and former trade an

assassin, a murderer, an efficient killer who had for centuries plied his

trade alone, choosing only the contracts that interested him, or that he felt

warranted his attention. Life and circumstance had taken him from an old

land, his birthplace, now dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea, and

deposited him here, in this new and uncertain place, where he had put his

skills to good use, seizing control of the loose, warlike tribes of

mountain-dwelling mongrels, forging a ragged kingdom of demi-humans.

Under his hand, with the help of his two friends, he had built them into a

functioning nation, a realm of silent strength and resolute independence.

Now he was a king. And he was still a skilled killer.

What he was not was an engineer.

When he had discovered the plans for the Lightcatcher buried deep in

the vault of the kingdom he now ruled, once a great civilization fallen into

ruin by its own folly, he had broken into a gray sweat. He could not read

the writing on the ancient parchment; it was drafted in a tongue that had

been old when his long-dead homeland was still young. As a result, he

could not be certain of the specifications of the drawings, of the

directions to build the instrumentality, and, more important, of what its

powers were. He only knew he recognized in the detailed renderings

something he had known in the old world as an apparatus of unsurpassed

power, a device that had held an entire mountain range invulnerable from

the same evanescent demons that were now seeking the Earthchild he

guarded.

That device had apparently been duplicated here long ago.

From that moment on it had become a challenge to rebuild it. For the

first time in his life he'd had to rely on outside help, on expertise other

than his own, to fashion something that was part weapon, part scrying

device, part healing instrumentality. And it was being done in secret, in the

hope that he was not being betrayed or misled. Achmed did not really

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