The Hollow Queen

by Elizabeth Haydon

  Melisande’s tenth year of life so far had therefore consisted of missions into forests, over mountainous terrain, witnessing yet another dragon battle between Rhapsody and Anwyn in the steppes that led up to the Nain kingdom, and observing an impressive negotiation with Witheragh, a wyrm with a sour attitude who guarded the entrance to the Nain kingdom on the other side of the Molten River. In the presence of four of the most impressive women she had known in her life, Melisande had loved her travels, had loved being of aid to her adoptive grandmother and her little cousin, who, in spite of being very young, was already fun to play with.

  And being allowed to explore the kingdom of the Nain with its very own princess was an opportunity that no one she had ever heard of had been granted.

  It therefore seemed petty and selfish to be missing the excitement of the outside world after settling into a routine of tending to the baby, attending to her studies, and listening to tales of the three women in her company. Melisande had been raised by an extraordinary father, a cheerful and selfless man named Stephen Navarne who had taught her to be grateful and appreciative of all she had, so in her own mind she was quite possibly the luckiest child in the world.

  But that didn’t keep her from feeling bored.

  “Busy?”

  Melisande jumped.

  Smiling down at her was one of her fellow caretakers of Meridion, Analise o Serendair. Like Krinsel, Analise was a midwife, and had a fondness for children, so of the three women who were sharing quarters with her, she was the easiest to be with.

  “No, not at all,” she said quickly, putting her unread book aside. “Can I help with something?”

  “Hmmm. Indeed I think you can. Come with me.”

  Melisande stood and smoothed out her skirts before following Analise up the corridor.

  The ancient Liringlas woman led the little girl out of their section of tunneled hallways, where guards stood watch constantly, out of the palace, and into the streets of the capital city within the mountains.

  At the north end of the town, a tributary of the watercourse of fiery lava known as the Molten River ran through the rocky interior walls, at the edge of the granite streets. A huge natural stone bridge crossed the river, and today it was packed with children, giggling and pointing into the molten liquid that was moving quickly along the riverbed, shining so brightly that it cast shadows all the way to the towering ceiling of rock above them.

  “What’s going on?” Melisande asked Analise in alarm.

  Analise smiled. “To the north of here, there apparently be a waterfall—or, more accurately, a firefall that is calving.”

  “Calving?”

  “Breaking apart, splitting the rocks with its extra force today. And I believe many of the rocks that have spilled into the river have been causing some amusement to the children of the kingdom.”

  “Why? Why would that be funny?”

  The elderly woman smiled.

  “Well, I still be struggling with the pronunciation of their language, but if I be translating it correctly, I believe that quite a number of the floating rocks resemble buttocks.”

  “Buttocks? You mean like—”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?” Melisande suppressed a giggle.

  “Aye, big fat ones, if I’m translating correctly. Sticking up in the river, waggling themselves at the palace. Occasionally making some fairly horrifying noises, probably from the release of gas from the calving. Would you like to go see?”

  “Well—I suppose so. Are you coming too?”

  “I think not,” said Analise, smiling broadly. “I think my presence would cause the Nain children to scatter, and that would be a shame. But I think that you would be welcome.”

  “You do?”

  “I think so. There be nothing like sharing a good joke to aid in making friends quickly. And what be a better joke than a river full of rocky butts and fat fannies bobbing in liquid fire and farting?”

  Melisande burst into laughter. “I can’t imagine one.”

  “Nor can I,” said Analise. “I will wait here for you. Go to the bridge, and see if you can catch sight of a few hindquarters in the river. Perhaps you can make a few new friends as well.” She winked. “Hopefully those things will be easy to tell apart.”

  Melisande gave the woman a quick hug and hurried off to the bridge, where, after a few moments of initial surprise, the Nain children rapidly made room for her. She spent almost an hour among them, giggling madly and pointing to particularly plump posteriors as they floated by in the Molten River.

  When finally the parade of posteriors appeared to be over, she returned to Analise, who, as promised, was waiting where Melisande had left her.

  “I take it the calving be over? Did you see many passing posteriors going under the bridge?”

  Melisande nodded, grinning. “There was an enormous one with dimples that was making strange and grotesque sounds as it passed under the bridge. If I understood him, and I’m not sure that I did, but one little boy seemed to think it looked a lot like his father’s. Apparently it sounded like his as well.”

  “Was that the best?”

  “Undeniably.”

  “Well, I be sorry to have missed it. Why don’t you tell me all about it on the way back to our rooms? It be almost time for my shift, and once we be back, you can regale Princess Gyllian and Krinsel with tales of your exploits.”

  Melisande slipped her hand inside the crook of her elderly friend’s arm.

  “I think not. They have been on diapering duty for the last several hours. They may have seen all the buttocks they wish to already today.”

  BENEATH THE WAVES OF THE WIDE CENTRAL SEA

  And then, on one afternoon just like every other afternoon since he entered the ocean, Ashe heard a sound.

  In the ever-present noise of the sea, the sound was faint; had Kirsdarke itself not made note of it, he never would have been aware of it. But there was something ancient and devastating in its call, a sadness that could not be measured, a pain that reached down into his heart and broke it.

  He willed himself to take on more form, more heft than his vaporous body had held since entering the waves, and, with renewed strength and muscle, kicked down to the ocean floor below him.

  The diffuse light of the sun hovered in the water and lit the undersea for a hundred fathoms or so. Below that bright realm was a realm of twilight, dark water in which visibility was all but impossible, even for the Kirsdarkenvar.

  Ashe closed his eyes, following the call he felt through the hilt of the sword down into the darkness.

  The ocean floor was not too far below the end of the realm of light. The rippling blade of the elemental sword of water glowed blue in the gloom as Ashe crossed the threshold into the twilight. He held Kirsdarke aloft and searched the sandy bottom of the sea, ghostly in the sword’s light.

  At first there was little of note; pale fish darted away from the glow, scattering into the shadows, leaving nothing but the emptiness of the open sea. Ashe’s eyes scanned the sandy ocean floor, scored with deep ridges and dotted with seaweed waving in the drift.

  The mournful noise hung in the water, echoing weakly.

  Ashe followed it.

  There was a familiarity to the tone, which seemed almost impossible in the vast breadth of the ocean through which he was walking. And yet it called to a memory deep in his brain, something long before his own birth that existed in the blood of those like him, cursed by Fate to be born into families of immense power and ridiculous longevity.

  He cast a net of thought back into the past to see if he could find a connection to that sound.

  And, after a moment, thought he might have.

  Then went utterly cold at the possibility.

  Gods, he thought. Oh gods.

  For a moment he hesitated speaking the name, fearful that to do so would make the being even more vulnerable than it appeared in the depths of its rocky shelter. Then he shook his head to fend off the shock that was dulling
his senses; any word he could thrum down in the depths as he was, away from the light of the sunwater, would drown in the weight of the ocean.

  And, if he was right in his assessment, there was little more that could be done to destroy it than had already been done.

  The occluded light glowed dully in the darkness of the Twilight Realm.

  Ashe hovered in the heavy drift, the rippling blue waves of light from Kirsdarke splashing over what lay at the bottom of the sea. Finally, words came to the forefront of his mind.

  Great-Grandmother? he whispered in thought. Elynsynos?

  Only the echo of the all-but-infinite water answered him.

  12

  ON THE ROAD EAST TOWARD CANRIF, WESTERN SORBOLD

  As the titan’s chariot rolled along the road, followed by the mounted fifth, eighth, and twelfth regiments of the army of Sorbold, an inner conversation was taking place within the enormous body of Living Stone, inaudible to anyone around it.

  Even if the words and thoughts that were being exchanged within the body of the titan were spoken aloud, in the free wind, they still could not reasonably be expected to be heard over the clatter of the horses’ hooves, the shouted orders, the creak of the wagon wheels, and the lumbering of the wagons themselves along the primitive road. Even on the smoother, more sophisticated trans-Orlandan thoroughfare which bisected the continent farther to the north across the lands of the Middle Continent, noise was unavoidable in the passing of a caravan of that size.

  But the conversation had no chance of being overheard primarily because the entities undertaking it were formless beings, traveling together in the stone body.

  The secondary traveler was a far more ancient and powerful being than the first. A F’dor spirit named Hrarfa, a member of the Older Pantheon of demons born in the Before-Time of the world, by rights was the senior of the two residents of the body, but circumstance did not allow for the dominance of her intent. She had lost her host body a number of months before when she had been so unfortunate as to have come across a Dhracian; she had been caught in the Thrall ritual that was the death knell for her kind, and as her host body expired, leaving her spirit formless and on the brink of dissipation, the titan had come into her presence.

  Seeking another of its kind.

  The spirit who actually occupied the body was an entity called a Faorina, one of the rarest forms of being in history. It was the child of a F’dor demon who had willingly allowed the breaking open of his spirit in order to procreate during the brutal rape of an Ancient Seren woman centuries before. The offspring, which its father had called Faron, had been a freak of epic proportions, a gelatinous monster with a humanoid head and a body comprised of soft bones and proto-limbs that had barely been able to support life out of the comforting pool of water its father had provided for it to live in.

  Faron had, within the last several years’ time, endured a long and painful ocean voyage, the death of his father and the sundering of his ship, and imprisonment in a carnival of freaks, finally falling into the hands of the newly nominated emperor of Sorbold, who was humbly serving a regency year before being crowned.

  The emperor had placed the battered body of what the freak carnival had called the Fish Boy onto one plate of the Scales, a massive instrumentality brought to the new world from the Island of Serendair, on which all major decisions of state in Sorbold were made. By balancing the dying monster-child against a primitive stone statue of an ancient warrior formed of Living Stone, the element of earth still alive from the dawn of Creation, the statue was animated with a life force whose significance and power the emperor could not possibly have understood.

  The desperate plea from a dying F’dor, accepted by the simple mind of the Faorina, had led to two beings occupying a body that at one time had been that of an ancient indigenous man, a soldier in the era before the Cymrian exodus, who had died in battle and had been buried in the temple of Living Earth, Terreanfor.

  In the dark mountains of Sorbold.

  Hrarfa, the being with higher-level abilities of reason, had been worrying since the statue’s exit from Jierna Tal. All of the conversation with Talquist had been in her voice, and at her instigation. Faron was the owner of the titan body, but his thought processes and abilities to act on his intentions were still in development. Hrarfa was frequently frustrated, having to accommodate the slow thoughts and actions of her Faorina living partner, but she swallowed that frustration in the face of two thoughts.

  The first being that, without Faron’s agreement to take her on as a host of a sort, she would have been snuffed out on the wind.

  The second thought was a far more exciting one.

  Hrarfa, like all demons of her race, had one overarching goal, one single-minded need.

  To let her fellow fire demons out of the Vault of the Underworld, where they had been trapped since the Before-Time.

  In spite of many carefully planned escape attempts, there had only been two ways discovered of opening the Vault over the course of history. The first happened by accident, when a star known as the Sleeping Child fell from the heavens into the depths of the sea and shattered the Vault, itself made, like the titan’s body, of Living Stone. When that had occurred in the First Age of history, a number of F’dor, Hrarfa among them, had been ejected or been able to escape, while the rest remained trapped when the Vault was resealed.

  The second way of opening the Vault had been discovered later in history. A race of beings known as Children of the Earth, entities that were magically conjured by dragons seeking to extend their progeny by sacrificing some of their life force, or soul, and housing it in a body also formed of Living Stone, like the statue that had eventually become the titan.

  Unlike the primitive statue, however, Earthchildren were living beings, though most of them had passed from the world in long-ago ages. They had souls, and features, and even earthen bones and internal organs. One of those bones, the rib, was the perfect size and shape to serve as a key of Living Stone.

  A key that would open the Vault of the Underworld.

  And, as luck would have it, the one last known living Child of Earth was here, on the Middle Continent.

  Deep within the Firbolg mountains.

  And Hrarfa, like the rest of her race, knew it.

  The F’dor had been biding their time for ages, waiting to find such an opportunity. Hrarfa herself had passed from host to host, searching for a chance to take the rib from the Earthchild’s body.

  But the challenges and barriers to finding that child and doing so had been mammoth.

  Now, however, that two distinct beings, each with a similar goal, resided in a titanic body of Living Stone, the challenges had been minimized.

  Perhaps, even, eliminated.

  * * *

  As the caravan set out for the Bolglands, Hrarfa sought her living partner in the darkness of the earthen body.

  Are you angry with me for leaving him, Faron?

  At first, and for the longest time, there was nothing but silence.

  Finally an answer, sensed, unspoken.

  No.

  Hrarfa was relieved. Good, she whispered. He was unworthy of us. Wasting our time.

  For a long while there was silence. Then, at last, a thought conveyed in the darkness of their stone residence.

  I want it to be over. I want to be with my father again.

  I know, Hrarfa thought soothingly, desperately hoping to impart comfort to the childlike entity she shared the statue with. I know, Faron. Do not despair.

  We are on our way now.

  Silence answered her.

  13

  SOUTHWESTERN BORDER OF ROLAND AND SORBOLD

  Yabrith raised his eyes to the sun.

  The morning was late in coming, it seemed to him, heavy clouds hanging low enough in the sky to delay any real light. Dranth would return from his morning scouting soon, he knew, and was no doubt appreciating the shade.

  The sweet richness of spring in the Middle Continent was fading int
o summer’s dry heat as they approached the southern ring of the Teeth. Yabrith was secretly pleased; moisture in the air, wet grass, and color were foreign notions to him, and while the desert clime of Sorbold was much sandier and drier than the cold clay of Yarim he was used to, he was more comfortable approaching it. But that was the only reason he was more comfortable.

  He had not been with Dranth when the guild scion had secured the order to enter the Bolglands and capture the Child of Time, as well as the information of how to do so. Dranth had returned to the guildhall in what, for the acerbic master assassin, could rightly have been deemed a good mood, something Yabrith did not recall seeing in the several decades of acquaintance he had shared with the man. Dranth had been so excited, so certain about their mission and the intelligence he had received, that Yabrith had been almost sad not to have qualified for the unit assigned to carry out the mission.

  Now, of course, he was secretly relieved to have been overlooked. But at the time, when Dranth had summoned the top echelon of assassins to select the participants, and had included him in the meeting only so that he would know his stewardship of the guild and hall were required, it had stung. He had always known that Dranth did not consider him a true assassin, but more on the order of Paddy the barkeep, Janil the weaponsmaker, and Leopold the poisoner, all critical to their operation but never actually a part of it.

  Having been made in his youth, with the stabbing out of the eyes of one of Yarim’s town guards in a back alley while he slept off his drink, Yabrith had always thought he was at least considered an assassin, if a non-practitioner. He had taken part in mass stabbings and ritual torture that led to killings whenever the opportunity presented itself, just to subtly remind his mates in the guild that he was one of them. He had even been chosen by Dranth to accompany him to Golgarn, another mission undertaken for the new emperor of Sorbold, to meet with the Spider’s Clutch, that seaside kingdom’s guild, to undertake the setup that had frightened Beliac, Golgarn’s king, into handing over every warship Talquist requested without resistance. At the time, Yabrith had taken the assignment as a sign of Dranth’s faith in him, a show of respect.