The Hollow Queen

by Elizabeth Haydon

  The emperor shook his head violently.

  “No—no. I can assure you, the source of my information is irrefutable.” He took out a handkerchief of fine Sorbold linen and wiped his perspiring brow. “I am glad you are here, Fhremus. If I recall, Hjorst has just been told to deploy from the Hintervold, and you are about to return to Sepulvarta for the next stage of the assault?”

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  “Well, belay that order. Who was the young man who led the raid on the Abbey of Nikkid’sar?”

  Fhremus tried to keep his lip from curling in disgust. “That would be Titactyk, m’lord.”

  “Well, elevate him in your absence for the time being. I need you here, beside me, in the palace, until these assassins have been captured. They know ways into Jierna Tal that may prevent them from being picked up by your security forces.”

  The supreme commander blinked in surprise.

  “They—they do? How in the world would assassins have that sort of information?”

  Talquist swallowed the answer that was about to fall out of his mouth—because they have been here before, because I summoned them, because they have been in my hire on more than one occasion—because I am in league with them, and worse—and coughed.

  “I don’t know, but as I have previously stated, the caliber of this intelligence is extreme. You are to remain with me, Fhremus, at all times, day and night, until they are apprehended. I am the emperor now; I deserve the best soldier in the realm as my guard.”

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  “Good.” Talquist exhaled, letting loose of some of the panic that had gripped him. “So, set about making my defenses impenetrable. They may get in, but I obviously want to make certain that when they are here, they are unable to harm me.”

  “Of course, m’lord,” Fhremus said. “No one would want that.”

  For the first time in his career as a soldier, he did not speak the truth to his superior.

  9

  THE CAULDRON, YLORC

  Grunthor had walked through the entirety of the armory, the hallways of each of the forty levels of barracks, and the breastworks that lined the fields below the steppes of Ylorc, his Dhracian shadow in tow, and still had not managed to lose him. His intent had been to ensure that all of the new blunt weapons he had ordered had been manufactured and distributed, and had noted only five instances where the proper armaments were not in place. The offending parties who were not up to code were upbraided with threats so caustic that one of them, a Firbolg soldier of impressive accomplishment who had been commended for valor in a number of intense battles, had lost control of his water and urinated at the Sergeant-Major’s feet.

  Grunthor was delighted.

  “Glad to know Oi still got it,” he said to Rath as he left the barracks.

  “Why have you taken their knives, the axes?” the Dhracian asked. “Their bolts?”

  “Because what’s comin’ can’t be taken out by anythin’ sharp,” Grunthor said, kicking his boots against a nearby wall to clear them of piss.

  “No, but what is coming with him can be,” Rath said, sidestepping the urine pool and following the Sergeant-Major up the passageway to the Great Hall.

  “Pshtt,” Grunthor scoffed. “Any army that comes is a diversion or a suicide mission, whether they knows it or not. My forces got that ’andled. They’s just as competent with blunt objects and weapons as with slashers, some o’ them, like the Guts clans, even more so. Whatever Talquist’s armies get ’it with, they’ll bleed, poor bastards. Sad thing is they prolly think they’re dyin’ fer king and country. Oh well.”

  He opened the recently repaired golden door that had been crushed in the explosion that had taken down Gurgus, the mountaintop that hovered in the peaks above the Great Hall, in a rain of boulders and picric acid, the final gift of the mistress of the Raven’s Guild in Yarim when she had infiltrated Ylorc. Grunthor strode inside, Rath behind him.

  They crossed the vast hall in silence except for the thudding echoes of Grunthor’s boots on the polished floors, beautifully inlaid with mosaic tiles, passing the thrones of Canrif where Gwylliam and Anwyn, the first Lord and Lady Cymrian, had held court eleven centuries before, until finally they came to a small room behind the dais on which the thrones stood.

  That room contained a glass funicular of a sort which transported passengers between floors by means of a system of ropes, next to which a redundant staircase stood, connecting the floors by more traditional means.

  “Oi ’ope bein’ in the Lightcatcher ain’t gonna bring back any bad mem’ries fer you,” Grunthor said as they ascended the stairs. “You was in pretty bad shape when we carried you in there last.”

  “Indeed, thank you for your efforts on my behalf,” said the Dhracian, as if the effort to speak was painful.

  “Oh, our pleasure, indeed,” Grunthor said smugly, with a wide grin. He led Rath through the massive room that housed the instrumentality to the far side, where a long, broad window looked out onto the breastworks of the steppes and the Krevensfield Plain beyond.

  “Omet,” he called. “You ’round?”

  From the shadows of the round tower’s exterior, a young human man emerged, wearing a full beard and a weary expression. Omet was the Archon of the Lightcatcher, the only one of Achmed’s elite council that was not Firbolg.

  He had been a slave child working in the forges of the tile foundry run by the Raven’s Guild in Yarim when Rhapsody and Achmed had rescued him, destroying an important tunnel the guildmistress was building under the streets of the city, looking to commandeer water from the obelisk of Entudenin. The thwarting of Esten’s plot had given the Bolglands a master tilemaker and grateful worker, who had followed Rhapsody’s advice to him to the letter.

  Go carve your name into the unforgiving mountains for the world to see.

  It had also provided the province of Yarim with life-giving water that was, even now, rejuvenating the drought-stricken region.

  “Here, sir,” Omet said. He nodded to the Dhracian, who was the only other person to be healed as he had been, with the aid of the Lightcatcher in its new incarnation through the red light of the color spectrum.

  “Good. Oi came to check in before we deploy.”

  “Deploy?” Omet looked suddenly nervous. “Where are you going, sir?”

  The tusked smile of the Bolg sergeant grew wider. “Well, that all depends on what you tell me, Oi suppose.”

  He walked back to the instrumentality and looked up to the dome above, set in the peak of Gurgus, the highest of the mountain peaks within the Teeth, surmounted in height only by Grivven Peak, the towering mountain at the tip of the range that stretched out in a peninsula-like configuration at the very edge of the steppes leading down to the Krevensfield Plain. Grivven served as a watchtower to the west, and an oversight post for the breastworks, a series of inground tunnels that scored the Krevensfield Plain itself, where the Bolg routinely ran incursions at the border of their lands.

  The dome in Gurgus Peak was a perfect circle, divided meticulously into seven sections, each of which was inlaid in heavy glass, each in one of the seven colors in the light spectrum. The dome was perched above a table, an altar of a sort, above which an enormous, multifaceted diamond had been suspended.

  Encircling the table at a distance of approximately thirty feet was a circular track on which a large metal wheel stood on its side, scored with holes that, when the wheel was moving, emitted different pitches of sound. It was an instrumentality Achmed had named the Lightcatcher, redesigned and rebuilt from drawings of a similar instrumentality that Gwylliam the Visionary had installed in Gurgus Peak more than a thousand years before, powered by a flamewell vent to the fire at the heart of the Earth. Achmed had objected to the use of that power source, knowing the risks it posed, and instead redesigned the instrumentality by making use of the sun as the source of its energy instead, either timed to shine through individual glass panes as it made its way across the sky, or storing its light in the diamo
nd.

  Grunthor had been privy to the use of the Lightcatcher on several occasions. The first was the use of the red section of the spectrum to heal Rath’s horrific injuries sustained in a Thrall ritual gone wrong.

  The ancient demon hunter had trapped a F’dor in the complex web of tonal attack when he had been assaulted by a stone titan that had rescued the demon at the very last moment. The attack had injured Rath to the point of death on a physical and metaphysical level; only the Dhracian’s ability to navigate favorable gusts of wind, which returned him to Ylorc and the Lightcatcher’s power of healing, had spared his life.

  Grunthor had also stood at the table beneath the diamond at night and watched as Rhapsody used the stored light within the stone through the blue spectrum to scry into Lianta’ar, the basilica dedicated to the element of ether in the currently occupied, formerly holy city-state of Sepulvarta to the southwest of the Bolglands, on the northern border of the nation of Sorbold.

  He, along with Achmed, Rhapsody, and Constantin, the exiled Patriarch of Sepulvarta, had witnessed acts of defilement taking place on the basilica’s high altar, including the human sacrifice of the basilica’s own sexton to obtain an augury that told Talquist what he needed to know to gain the immortality he was seeking above all other goals on his ambitious and bloody agenda. The answer to his question had caused the Lady Cymrian to quake with fear.

  It involved the eating of her infant son’s beating heart.

  Grunthor had never been fond of the concept of magic in any configuration. His truest confidence was placed in the ring of steel against bone, of strength, planning, and skill against that of a foe, toe-to-toe, in glorious, bloody battle, something the race of his mother, the Bengard, a gigantic breed of oily-skinned desert dwellers who celebrated the preparation for war in gladiatorial arenas, had engendered in him. But having seen the Lightcatcher in use, and having been forewarned of plans that they would otherwise never have had an inkling of until they were in the fray, he was beginning to see it as useful, to understand Achmed’s obsession with this ancient machine that had kept the armies of Anwyn, Gwylliam the Visionary’s hated spouse, at bay from the mountains for almost five hundred of the seven hundred years’ war.

  Being a fond godfather to Rhapsody’s son, Meridion, he was particularly happy to have advance notice of anything nefarious planned against the baby.

  “Do you know ’ow to use this thing to look into places, see what’s goin’ on in ’em?” he asked Omet.

  The Archon shook his head.

  “I can set it up, calibrate it,” he said. “I have the calculations as to when the sun will be in the right place to use individual elements of the spectrum. I can even deploy the wheel to make use of the musical tone that is needed to blend with the light in order to make the Lightcatcher function. But I have no knowledge of true names or an understanding of how to scry.

  “A Namer, or someone with the Right of Command, like a king or a benison, usually is needed for something like that. I imagine Gwylliam used it himself when he was defending these mountains against Anwyn; he certainly knew her true name, as did the rest of the world. So scrying is something above my pay grade, sir. Anyone can use the red spectrum for healing, if they time it right, however.

  “When I was healed after the mistress of the Raven’s Guild poisoned me, all Shaene and Rhur had to do was put me on the table in the light from the red section of the spectrum.” The young man’s voice caught in his throat; Grunthor was silent for a moment in the knowledge that those two glass artisans had been crushed to death a moment afterward, when the glass dome had exploded, having been trapped with picric acid by the guildmistress.

  Whom he had already beheaded at the time.

  “Is there anythin’ else you know ’ow to make it do?”

  Omet considered.

  “His Majesty has banned the use of the yellow and orange spectra, which affect fire, heat, and light, in all but dire emergencies, because their use is still experimental. He has ruled out the use of the Indigo section, known as Night Stayer, and the violet, the New Beginning, altogether, because there is no information in the literature about how they were applied except to warn of the wide-ranging and potentially dangerous risks of their misapplication.”

  Grunthor was counting.

  “What about the green? Constantin made use o’ that when the Duchess, the king, an’ Oi were ambushed by assassins in the meadow at Kraldurge. They was ’idden in ways we neva’ would o’ seen ’em, except that the green light appeared and ’Is Majesty took ’em out as if they was standin’ right in front o’ us.”

  Omet exhaled.

  “I’m not sure how to scry in grass, which is the negative aspect, the flat of the green note, through the Lightcatcher,” he said, somewhat nervously. “I did, however, see the Patriarch apply the positive, the sharp, which is translated as Grass Hider. He used it to shield Rhapsody and the women she traveled with to the Deep Kingdom of the Nain, as much as possible. That I might be able to do; it’s not an exact application. I could set it to green sharp, Kurh-fa, and put it on a continuous cycle. I’m not sure if that will help confuse or misdirect any attack that’s coming, but it’s the only other thing I can think to do.”

  “Unnerstood. If Oi’m not mistaken, that was ’ow Gwylliam kept Anwyn out—and if that’s the case, Oi see no reason not to give it a try. We’re gonna need every bit of ’elp we can muster.”

  “So, now that I’ve answered, where do you plan to deploy?” Omet asked nervously.

  The Sergeant-Major looked at him seriously, his large amber eyes solemn beneath the grassy brown hair on his head.

  “Every single soldier will be on full guard across the kingdom, and we’re gonna need every bloody one o’ them,” he said, his face a mask. “If, as we think, Talquist is sendin’ the titan you saw in the forest of Navarne, Rath, to find the Earthchild, he can strike anywhere—’e’s not bringin’ the army for that. It’s a distraction, to keep us engaged, while ’e finds a way in.”

  The Dhracian nodded.

  “But ’ere,” the Sergeant said cheerfully, digging something out of his pocket. “Maybe this’ll ’elp.”

  Rath looked at the object in Grunthor’s hand.

  It was a pick hammer in the same configuration as the one the Sergeant had been forging earlier, only a tiny fraction of the size.

  “What is this for?”

  “It’s a weapon,” Grunthor said indignantly.

  “Hardly. I don’t need this.”

  “Whaddaya mean, ‘’ardly’? It’s a perfeckly nice pick ’ammer, an’ Oi imagine you know ’ow to to use it—well, anyone know’s ’ow, ya smack whatever ya can. Aim for ’is rocks, if you can forgive the play on words.”

  “Actually, that was fairly unforgivable.” The words were spokenly flatly, without humor.

  Grunthor looked solemnly at the Dhracian.

  “Ya got a dagger. You may as well ’ave a weapon o’ last resort. You an’ me, Rath—we are gonna be right in the doorway to ’er chambers, right in the eye o’ the storm, shall we say—’cause we don’t got no other choice. You an’ me—we are the last resort, the final fallback. Which means it’s all up ta us in the end. Half a million Bolg may ’old the line—but we will be in the teeth of it, whenever it comes. An’ if we fail, that’s all she wrote. The game’s over, and there won’t be nothin’ left. Nothin’ in this world, and the next.”

  The Dhracian nodded again. He had already known that as well.

  10

  ON THE MVEKGURN FJORD, SOUTHERN BORDER, THE HINTERVOLD

  The moon had risen at last. Wrapped in fog and brittle clouds that raced across the cold sky, breaking apart in their passage, it floated at the horizon, hovering over a night that seemed to grow bright as day within moments of its rising.

  The Icemen of the Hintervold had gathered at the edge of the fjord in response to the call of the gyldenhorn, a long and deep-bowled instrument known for its deep, resounding voice and capability of piercing even
the thickest night wind. When the horn sounded, it took less than the time it had taken for the sun to descend one hand of sky for them to assemble, clad in the heavy furs and leather armor that provided warmth as well as dark cladding, shielding them from ordinary sight.

  The Icemen were quiet warriors. In their realm of endless winter nights and unnaturally long summer days that left outsiders feeling itchy and unnerved, they remained year-round, living silently off what the land could provide them in winter, harvesting the bounty of the forests and towering mountains in summer.

  The residents of the Hintervold that inhabited cities were cousins to these men. They shared the same ancestors, the same empty history, the same love of the cold. The sparse city dwellers, unlike their self-sufficient cousins, had come to rely on other parts of the Known World to provide them with food to span the short growing seasons, bad weather, and years when the animal herds were elusive. Their reliance had proved to be their undoing now.

  A leader in a nation south of the Riverlands had violated his trust, had interrupted their shipments of grain and foodstuffs, poisoned them with rat droppings, mold, and toxic substances that caused many of the women of the Hintervold to lose their babies in the womb, children to starve, and men to grow sick and die. The righteous wrath of the survivors had built into a growing storm that was completely natural.

  It was just aimed at the wrong leader.

  The gyldenhorn sounded again. In answer, glaciers calved in the distance, raining hillsides of snow and ice down into the dark valleys below.

  As if of one mind, the Icemen turned in the direction of its call.

  Standing at the rise of the tallest swale on the fjord stood a man clad in a robe of heavy polar-bear fur, a leather hat with a carved matching representation of the ursine beast crowning his head. His magnificent beard, gray and curling at the ends, hung down almost to his waist, and his black eyes were crowned with equally dark brows. In his hand was a staff with a horizontal crossbeam of blackthorn sharpened to points at the ends.