The Bone Queen

by Alison Croggon

  Selmana’s answer to these anxieties was to throw herself into work. Despite Calis’s demanding schedules in the crafts of the Making and the other compulsory classes for Minor Bards, she still had some idle hours: she dealt with them by cornering one of the Bards in the library and requesting a list of every book or scroll to do with metalworking. The Bard had been slightly startled, but the next day gave her what he called a “preliminary list”. Selmana crossed out those in languages she couldn’t read, and resolved to work her way through the rest of the recommended writings. There were fifty-four titles in the list, and so far she had stubbornly worked her way through five of the shorter scrolls. At this rate, she thought, she would be chained to her work table for the next half-century.

  Still, a person couldn’t work all the time. She should go to bed: but for all her exhaustion, she felt strained and wakeful. Tonight she was sorely missing Ceredin. If her cousin were still alive, she could have visited her room, as she had done so often when she was troubled. She didn’t have to say a word: Ceredin always knew, with her quick, immediate sympathy, that something was wrong. She would have poured her a wine or a tiny glass of laradhel, a delicious golden liqueur brewed by Bards in the valley of Innail, and settled down to talk. It wasn’t so much that Ceredin gave her advice, although when she did it was always good; it was the comfort of her company. They talked about everything under the sun, from the latest family gossip to the mysteries of the Speech. Ceredin had always made her laugh.

  Selmana leaned over the windowsill, feeling the heaviness in her shoulders. It was a tiredness of the soul, she thought, deeper than physical weariness. That was harder to deal with. Her eyes were sticky and hot, and she rubbed them, thinking that even if she couldn’t sleep, she should lie down.

  When she looked out over Lirigon again, it had vanished. She blinked, and looked again. Where the School had been a moment before, a shadowy plain stretched before her, rising up to a black, cloudless sky studded with stars. For a moment she was utterly still: she thought her heart had stopped beating. She glanced back into her room: it was just as before, with the lamp casting its soft light over her work table, its image shining crookedly in the diamond panes of the window. The sill beneath her folded arms was solid and cold, and below her the wall ran unbroken down to the ground. And yet from the foot of the building nothing was the same at all.

  I must have fallen asleep without knowing it and am dreaming, she thought. She breathed in hard, trying to calm her mind, and realized she was trembling. It is a very vivid dream. But in a moment I will wake and all will be well. She rubbed her eyes again, hoping that might make Lirigon reappear, but the empty plains before her remained unchanged. She looked up at the sky and saw with a shock that she recognized none of the constellations. They shone with a different light from the stars she knew: they seemed further away, but their light was more intense, somehow colder, and their groupings were utterly strange. There wasn’t a whisper of wind, and the air struck with a dull chill, as if it had never been breathed. It was absolutely silent.

  Selmana didn’t know how long she stood there, staring out of her window, clutching the hard stone of the sill as if it were a spar that would save her from drowning. It was long enough for her body to stiffen so that when she moved, she gave an involuntary groan that startled her. She stepped back from the window, thinking that she should close the casement, bar the shutters and go to bed, locking out this unnerving reality that had suddenly appeared at her window. But what if it doesn’t go away, she thought. What if I wake up and everything is just like this? She glanced over at the door of her room, which was closed fast, and with a shudder it occurred to her that if she opened it, she might not find the ordinary corridor and stairs of the Bardhouse, but something else, some other place.

  She dug her nails into her palm until it hurt and then bit her finger hard, hoping the pain might shock her awake. It’s a dream or a vision, it’s not real, she told herself. But some deeper sense told her it was not a dream at all. It was impossible, but it was real. Reluctantly, taking deep, slow breaths, she turned back to the window, trying to control her mounting fear. The plains were still outside, a light grey under the black sky. There was no moon. For some reason she was sure there was never a moon in this sky, never any sun. And suddenly she knew what she was seeing: it was the Shadowplains the Bards spoke of, the second Circle, where the dead walked on their way to the Gates.

  The moment she found a name, she seemed to see more clearly, and she felt less afraid. Nelac, she reminded herself, had walked these plains and returned. She stared out curiously into the endless night. Slowly, she became aware that the landscape was not, as she had first thought, utterly desolate: she could see forms like shrubs or small bushes, and she thought something like grass grew on the ground. Were they living plants, she wondered, or just the shadows of things, without substance or life? Were there animals, too? Was that fleeting form in the corner of her eye the shape of a bird? The cold began to bite into her and she shivered, drawing her shawl closer around her, and then leaned forward over the sill. There was a soft illumination in the distance. Something, a form of light, was moving towards her.

  At first she wasn’t sure if her eyes were playing tricks, but as it grew closer, the light resolved into a human figure, a slender woman, lit with a pale radiance the same colour as the stars. Selmana was almost sure, from her gait, that it was Ceredin, but she couldn’t see her face clearly. Before she could decide for certain, the figure started and looked fearfully behind her. She lifted her arms in a sudden gesture of defiance or alarm, and vanished.

  The plains were empty again, but Selmana sensed that something had changed. She squinted into the darkness, straining to see through the shadows. She could feel a new presence, a weight that pressed on her awareness. Then, as if the darkness rearranged itself before her eyes, she saw it. She leaped back from the window with a cry, covering her face with her hands. When she looked again, the Shadowplains had gone: the night-time roofs of Lirigon again stretched below her window.

  Relief flooded her body with sudden warmth. Hastily, her hands trembling, she drew the shutters and closed the window. She stumbled to her bed and sat down, staring at the wall, trying to understand what she had seen. She didn’t know how to describe it to herself: it was like an image in a dream that wouldn’t translate into everyday life, and which therefore slipped out of memory, leaving only its feeling behind. The strongest sensation was of horror. The Shadowplains had frightened her because they were uncanny, but this thing she had seen had terrified her in a wholly different way.

  It had no form that she could fix her eye on. It shifted its shape, like smoke. But it wasn’t like smoke at all, because at the same time it seemed to be material, as if the darkness had become glutinous. It had appeared like a disease, like a toxin erupting out of the ground. It had seemed to be many things, many non-shapes, running in and out of each other like mercury, but she was sure it was a single consciousness. It had no face, no eyes, but she had felt it was searching for her, that soon it would discover her sitting at her window.

  Selmana shook her head. How could she describe this to anybody else? She couldn’t make sense of what she had seen even to herself. The only thing that was clear was the feeling: an almost tangible wave of malevolent intent. It was like (but not at all like) a suffocating stench, that made you dizzy. You breathed it in and it became part of you, whether you liked it or not. It was like…

  Selmana’s thoughts faltered. She wondered if she should write her impressions down while they were still vivid in her mind, but as her terror waned and her body stopped shaking, she realized that she was so tired she could barely stand. There was one thing that she was sure of, one thing that was clear: it was exactly the same feeling, as distinct and particular as an individual voice, as that she had experienced in her mother’s orchard a fortnight before. Exactly the same.

  When Selmana woke the following morning, she lay on her bed staring at the shuttered
window. She had to force herself to open it and let the morning in. Even though she could hear a chatter of morning birdsong and a cockerel crowing in the distance, she feared that she would see only the grey landscape: but there it was, the red-tiled roofs of Lirigon glowing in the early sun, the sky paling to the clear blue of what would be a beautiful autumn day. She drew in a shuddering breath of relief.

  She dressed hurriedly and ran to Nelac’s Bardhouse, but when she knocked on his door there was no answer. Biting her lip with impatience, she stood a while in indecision, and then made her way to her lessons for that day. She spent the morning trying to concentrate on the theory of the Speech, which was taught by Inghalt, one of her least favourite teachers. He seldom invited discussion and Selmana had twice fallen asleep in his classes out of sheer boredom.

  This morning she was particularly distracted. Her sleep had been full of uneasy dreams, none of which she now remembered, and ever since she awoke she had been fighting a sense that something was tracking her, growing ever closer. It was absurd: what could happen here in the heart of Lirigon? And yet the feeling grew on her during the morning: the hairs on her neck prickled at odd moments, and she would turn swiftly, as if she might catch a glimpse of something that sniffed at her footsteps. Her friends noticed she was behaving oddly, and teased her for her jumpiness. She thought it would not be surprising to imagine things after her strange experience the night before. But the sensation wouldn’t go away. She listened to Inghalt with half an ear, in case he surprised her with a question, fighting back her anxiety.

  What did it mean, Inghalt was asking, when Bards said that it was impossible to lie in the Speech? “It means,” he said, “that unlike other forms of language, the Speech has an indissoluble relationship to reality. This is why, in the mouth of a Bard, it can change reality. This is the core of the mystery of magery…”

  At this point, one of her fellow students interrupted. “If that’s really so, Bard Inghalt, then how is it that Hulls also used the Speech? Because we all know they did.”

  “Please don’t distract us with juvenile questions, Gest,” said Inghalt. “Hulls didn’t use the Speech as we use it. Neither do those who are not born with it in their tongue, but who learn it in the same way they learn other languages. In such usages, the Speech is not the Speech…”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” said Selmana, suddenly interested. “It’s the same words, isn’t it? How can the words have a – an indissoluble relationship to reality – when they can be used in other ways too?”

  Inghalt looked harassed. “The Black Speech is a mere side-alley to our subject today,” he said. “Sorcery has nothing to do with us. As I said…”

  “But the Hulls use the Speech to make charms, just as we do,” said Gest, glancing at Selmana. “The Black Speech changes reality, and so must be one with the Speech in that way.”

  “And we all know that Hulls can lie,” said another student. There was a rustling through the room: suddenly all the Minor Bards were paying attention.

  It was a common game among the younger Bards, to try to lie outright in the Speech: they all knew how the words wouldn’t form on the tongue or in the mind if you tried to say something that you knew was untrue. Sometimes the more talented among the Minor Bards could say things like “the sky is made of stone”, but only if they concentrated very hard. Yet you could recite poetry – or at least, most poetry – in the Speech, and poetry often described things that were not real. Bards said this was because poetry explored more complex truths than literal realities. The smarter Minor Bards worked out that they could say something that was untrue if they believed it was true. How different was that from a lie? How different was a poem from a lie? If a Hull could lie in the Speech, why not a Bard as well?

  “Perhaps the real question is not why it’s impossible to lie in the Speech, but why it is possible?” said Gest.

  Inghalt always sidestepped these questions, and today was no exception.

  “As I said,” replied Inghalt, his voice high with annoyance, “these are not uses of the Speech proper. Our subject today is the Speech proper, as used by Bards who do not stray from the path of the Light…”

  “But surely they must be connected, the powers of the Hulls and of Bards?” said Selmana.

  “It is a blasphemy to say so, young Bard, and I would thank you not to bring such ideas into my chamber,” said Inghalt. And that was the end of that.

  Nelac wouldn’t have told me not to ask that question, thought Selmana. He would have tried to answer it… As Inghalt droned on, her mind drifted. Kansabur had once been a Bard, like all Hulls. She had never really thought about what that meant. She had always been taught that sorcery had nothing to do with magery, but was that the case, really? The question disturbed her: it seemed to grow out of her vision from the previous night as much as it did from Gest’s needling of Inghalt.

  Was it Kansabur she had seen on the Shadowplains? She was absolutely sure that it was same … thing she had encountered when she had seen the boar. Her mind flinched from the memory; two weeks later, it still made her feel sick. With a Bard’s suspicion of certainty, Nelac refused to give the thing a name, but he clearly strongly suspected that was it was the Bone Queen, however diminished. Did it matter what anyone called it? Was it hunting her? The thought was paralysing, stupefying, and she pushed it away.

  When she returned to Nelac’s rooms at noon, he was still absent. She asked around, and found out that a messenger had arrived before sunrise, heavily cloaked, and that Nelac had left with him, riding east. He had left no word on where he was going, or when he might be expected back. Selmana was daunted by this news: he could be gone for days. She wondered for a moment whether it would be worth waiting for him in his rooms, but decided against it. After some hesitation, she found a piece of paper on the work table and wrote Nelac a note, which she left propped against some books.

  She was hungry, but her stomach was in such a knot that she thought that if she ate anything she might be sick. She made her way to the dining hall, but none of her friends was there. She remembered belatedly that they had planned to take a basket of breads and cheeses to a meadow a short distance outside the School, to enjoy the autumn sunshine. She thought of joining them, and then discarded the idea, and then changed her mind again. She wanted company more than food.

  Slowly she wandered through the streets of Lirigon to the North Gate. The streets were busy with people lured out by the warmth, going about their business or just talking idly, but she felt curiously alone. But you are not alone. The thought rose in her mind as if it were said by a voice not her own and she halted so suddenly that a Bard walking behind collided into her. She didn’t respond to his apology, she didn’t even hear him. She was suddenly cold with terror.

  She stood, completely still, staring about her. She was in the Street of Potters. There was Aldan’s workshop, with a pile of carefully stacked roof tiles dried for the kiln, and over there, throwing a lump of clay on the wheel, was Inkar. A black and white cat was curled up in an ecstasy of voluptuousness on Inkar’s step, exactly where any customer would step on their way in. Everything was absolutely ordinary. It was exactly as it always was.

  Except, Selmana realized with creeping horror, that there was no sound. A child was playing in the road, talking to a toy rabbit, but she opened and closed her mouth and Selmana could hear nothing. The potter’s wheel, which she could see straight in front of her, whirred silently, and when Inkar thumped the treadle with his foot, it was noiseless. When had the world lost its voice? Was it just at that moment, or did the sound ebb out bit by bit, and she hadn’t noticed until now? She stared wildly about her, feeling a pulse throbbing violently in her throat, and a woman took her elbow, mouthing something that Selmana couldn’t hear. Almost beside herself, Selmana snatched back her arm, staring at the woman.

  “Are you ill, child?”

  And suddenly she could hear the world again. Unable to speak, Selmana shook her head, and she ran to
the side of the road and retched. She brought up nothing but bile. The woman followed her, and patted her shoulder.

  “You look like you’ve had a nasty turn, little kitten,” she said.

  Selmana stood up straight, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Despite everything, she wanted to laugh. Little kitten? She was taller than this woman by at least two handspans. It was difficult to tell how old she was: her face was creased with many friendly wrinkles, and she was very stout. She had on a bright red dress and gold rings hung from her pierced ears.

  “I’m sorry,” Selmana said. “Yes, I suddenly felt very sick, I don’t know why.”

  “I’m Larla,” said the woman. “My house isn’t far, perhaps you should have a drink of tea and a rest… You might need a healer.”

  “Maybe it would be good just to sit down,” said Selmana, with a rush of gratitude. “I don’t know what happened then… But I feel all right now, really…”

  “Come along then,” said Larla, taking her arm and guiding her down a laneway to a house that was at the back of one of the potteries. The wall was covered by a vine that even now was turning to the vivid colours of autumn, and the door was painted blue. Larla sat her down in a kitchen that was full of bright objects – red and blue clay pots, polished copper pans – and swung a kettle onto the hob.