The Hollow Queen

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “Oh, endlessly. As he was outfitting the Bolglands for the invasion we expect there, he was singing as I haven’t heard him in years. He averages two new songs a day, most of them grisly, all of them martial.”

  “Someone should be enjoying himself, I suppose,” said Gavin. “Are you ready? Sufficiently fed and rested? Your hands most recently washed in the moving water of a river or stream?”

  Rhapsody’s smile faded and she nodded solemnly.

  “Short of invasion from the air, we shall not be disturbed; I have seen to it,” Gavin said.

  “Good. If we are interrupted, the best we can hope for is to have to begin all over again. At worst, both your heart and my mind will suffer damage.”

  Gavin looked at her steadily. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  The Invoker stepped nearer to her and brought his palm to rest on her forehead as she closed her eyes. In turn, she brought her hand to rest on his chest over his heart.

  For a long moment they stood, silent, clearing their thoughts.

  Then, quietly and methodically, Gavin began speaking the names of each of the forest’s tree species and most plentiful plants, using the Old Cymrian words, the language of Rhapsody’s childhood. At each invocation, the forest floor seemed to grow warmer, the air vibrating in a clear wind.

  Amastiscas. Small-cone pine.

  When the vibration from his words quelled, the Lady Cymrian sang an incantation of protection in return.

  Vrith lei malinus mantre kohs—Fire shall not harm thee.

  Slowly, methodically, they sang the soft song of each major living entity’s name, the Invoker speaking each title, the Namer following with the protective chant. After a moment, the named species sang in return, its true name vibrating in the air when the protective song had successfully wrapped around it.

  With her eyes closed, Rhapsody’s mind was wreathed in memory. The song she was wrapping around the forest’s trees and plants was the same incantation she had used to protect the Great White Tree, at the previous Invoker’s request. Through a sapling of Sagia, the tree’s Root Twin that had grown in the enchanted forest of Yliessan in the old world, now in the courtyard of Highmeadow, she had blessed both trees with the melody she had heard the Root singing when she and her two Firbolg friends were passing along the Axis Mundi through the heart of the world itself.

  Over and over again she called to the meteorological elements and the characteristics of fire itself, the element from which she wished to protect each species.

  Green Earth below thy roots, guard thee

  Wide Sky above thy branches, shelter thee

  Cool Wind buffer thee

  Rain fall down upon thee

  Fire shall not harm thee.

  Light of early spring, illuminate thee

  Heat of summer sun, warm thee

  Leaves of flaming color, bejewel thee

  But fire shall not harm thee.

  With each new protection, the air of the world in which they were standing grew thinner, the heft of their bodies lighter, until, for all intents and purposes, they had become almost nothing but the sound they were generating, ancient and enduring as the Earth itself.

  Hours passed. The morning sun moved high into the vault of the sky beyond the thick and cool green leaves, then began to descend toward afternoon. No birds sang, no animals approached; the vibrations they were generating were sufficient to frighten off any creature that might have come within the sound.

  Finally, the Invoker named one last plant.

  Hymialacia. Highgrass.

  In spite of the exhaustion that was racking her body and spirit, Rhapsody smiled slightly.

  It was the name of the species of scrub that she had first Named in front of Achmed and Grunthor, a tall field grass that, in one of her first major acts of Naming, she had used to hide them from a field of Lirinved soldiers in the old world.

  Its namesong rang, clear and true, in return.

  The Lady Cymrian and the Invoker remained standing, touching each other, until the warmth of the ground had faded, the wind had grown thick with dust again, and the song of birds and the scurrying of forest animals could be heard once more.

  Finally they opened their eyes.

  The creases around Gavin’s eyes seemed deeper now; he looked down at Rhapsody intently.

  “Are you all right, m’lady?”

  “Yes. You?”

  The Invoker nodded slightly. “Come back with me to my house; you must rest.”

  “I must go. Thank you, however.”

  Gavin shook his head. “With respect, while you are my sovereign, I entreat you to yield to my wisdom in this matter. There is less of you—us—incarnate at the moment than you may believe, and unless you wish to be defenseless and weak on the journey to wherever it is you are going next, you would be well advised to heed me. One turn of the sun will make a great deal of difference in your strength and stamina, Rhapsody.”

  The Lady Cymrian nodded, suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion.

  “Well, since you have seen fit to name me properly at last, I will accept your kind offer of hospitality and rest within your walls this night. Thank you.”

  The Invoker offered her his arm, and she took it, shaking slightly.

  “At least whatever devastation Sorbold wreaks upon the forest, it will not burn.”

  “No, it will not burn,” Rhapsody agreed. “That may or may not be a blessing; in a forest fire, your citizens and mine are more likely to prevail than desert and mountain dwellers. But nonetheless, it will not burn.”

  “Where is it you are off to now? Back to Tyrian?” he asked as he led her toward the Circle.

  “No,” Rhapsody said. “I’m off to meet up with Anborn in Canderre. The troops Ashe has been recruiting and training are finally ready, and it is time to deploy them. As it is, with Talquist’s advantage of time, cover, and numbers, it’s well past time, very likely. The Lord Marshal plans to leave skeleton garrisons in the cities, emptying them of all save a few soldiers to guard the women and children, and send the rest to the front.”

  Gavin guided her carefully over a rut in the forest path.

  “So you will be at the front, helping to lead that assault on Sepulvarta?”

  Rhapsody shook her head.

  “I’m not certain, but I have a suspicion I am going to be left behind this time in one of the cities as well.”

  The Invoker swallowed, suddenly even more exhausted than he had been a moment before.

  16

  WEST OF THE PRIME MERIDIAN, WIDE CENTRAL SEA

  If that was Merithyn’s grave, then I’m closer to Gaematria than I thought, Ashe mused as he rose closer to the surface, allowing his ethereal form to pass through the soft sunlight shining in diffuse rays in the ceiling of the sea. Merithyn’s ship sundered at the Prime Meridian, so I have passed the centerpoint of the Wide Central Sea.

  He closed his eyes as the sun broke over his face and listened as he hung in the brightening drift. He had been following the lead of the elemental sword of water through the darkness and endlessly similar sea vistas since he had entered the Deep, but now it was humming in an entirely different way.

  Instead of singing a harmonic with the element from which it was born, there was a decided difference in its tone, a greeting or warning of a sort that indicated it was noting the presence of magic of another kind than its own.

  Ashe’s head broke the surface.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, for his body to thicken enough for his organs to begin to work again. He floated in the drift, in the rising swells of the open sea, and stared west, following the sun.

  It took a few moments, but then finally he saw it in the far distance.

  Clouds of what looked like steam rose from the sea in thin wisps, thickening as they ascended into low-hanging vapor that swirled in beautiful patterns, as if an entire sky of thunderheads had plummeted from above into the sea. Beyond that mist, the twisted shell-shaped spires of the
university that was the largest building on the island of the Sea Mages could be barely made out at the edge of his dragon sense, piercing the clouds at a distance of approximately five nautical miles.

  Ashe took a deep breath of the sea air, a sensation he had not experienced for some time. Bobbing now in corporeal form, he thought back to the one time his father had taken him to the Isle in his youth, on the first of only two voyages he had ever made to the place. It was a rare moment of fond remembrance in this time of war, when his mind and soul were tormented by the absence of his family and the looming death he could feel in the very air of the continent.

  The Sea Mages were refugees of the Second Fleet who had chosen to remain on the mist-wrapped island in the middle of the Wide Central Sea when their ships had been beset by the backlash from the storm that had sundered Merithyn the Explorer’s ship and many of those of the First Fleet that he was leading. The leader of the Second Fleet, another of Ashe’s ancestors on his mother’s side, MacQuieth Monodiere Nagall, who led the Second Fleet, offered the survivors a choice of staying on the uninhabited island, which had been called Gaematria by sailors for time uncounted, or continuing back west to the continental landmass that lay at the other side of the Wide Central Sea.

  The majority of those survivors chose to sail west with MacQuieth, eventually landing in Manosse, a well-developed nation where they found an easy existence and had blended into the culture, their Cymrian heritage of minimal notice until their ridiculous longevity began to entrench them in the peculiarity and introspective oddness that often accompanied a vastly extended life span bordering on immortality.

  The rest had chosen to remain on the all-but-hidden, utterly deserted island, turning their backs on the civilized world and immersing themselves in endless study and invention, which they sometimes shared with the outside world. More often, and increasingly more completely, they had chosen to eschew that outside world altogether, becoming a closed society of immortal but elderly adults, avoiding the contact and open borders that were necessary for subsequent generations to be recruited and propagated.

  There are worse things than death, Ashe thought as he sank back beneath the waves, preparing to embark on the last leg of his journey. It was a notion he had been well aware of for much of his life, but now even more so that he was a father himself.

  The concept of living forever without his family was too much to even consider without being driven mad.

  * * *

  If he had thought that sighting the Isle of the Sea Mages was the beginning of the end of his journey to their realm, Ashe could not have been more wrong.

  In sufficient time to have come to the beaches of the island repeatedly, he was still finding himself floating in currents leading out to sea, rather than to shore.

  After the third time that the sun had risen and he had still not landed, he began to realize that the magic of the Sea Mages had been entwined with the natural geography of the island in preventing strangers from being able to approach the shores. He was beginning to roil in frustration when he felt a song vibrating through his hands. After a moment he recognized the call; had he not been holding the elemental sword of water, he would never have been aware of the song at all.

  He had lived with Rhapsody long enough to understand that each living entity in the world sang a song of a sort, a vibrational signature known as a true name, but often the vibrations of those songs were heard only by Namers and were inaudible to the rest of the world. With Kirsdarke in his hand, however, he could hear the unmistakable song of the island before him, ringing through the sea air, shouting its name into the wind, where it was whipped around among the clouds of mist.

  Gaematria.

  His heart a little lighter than it had been within the darkness of the depths, Ashe sank once more into that darkness and went vaporous again, attuning the sword to the song of the island, pointing its tip away from him and closing his eyes.

  Then he allowed the current to carry him toward the Isle of the Sea Mages.

  * * *

  The louder the song of the island grew, the warmer the current ran. Ashe could feel the temperature change while he was still a good distance away; indeed, it seemed to him that the increase in both the heat and the strength of the churning waters that surrounded the base of the island in the depths was possibly artificial in nature, that the Sea Mages themselves may have taken action to disrupt the natural rhythm of the waves as a deterrent that would keep most ships from landing there.

  Something about the ferocity of the underwater churning made Ashe recall words that had been spoken to him about the place sometime before, when a First Generationer named Barney, a barkeeper who had known Rhapsody in the old world, revealed to him that the legendary hero from the Third Age, MacQuieth, was, contrary to popular belief and reasonable assumption, still alive. As he was battered about by the ferocious waves, the words came back to him.

  How do you think that Gaematria, the island of the Sea Mages, has remained unmolested all these centuries there, alone, in the middle of the Wide Central Sea? MacQuieth guards it from the depths. There is a whole world beneath the waves of the ocean, Majesties, a world of high mountains and deep chasms, of unimaginable wonders, of beings that rarely, if ever, are seen on the drylands. Do not assume because something is not within your senses that it is dead; there are many places in the world for a man to hide if he does not wish to be found.

  Inwardly Ashe sighed. While he had found Barney’s words to be true regarding the wonders of the Deep, he knew that the original revelation was no longer in fact the case. He and Achmed had witnessed the hero’s end as the great warrior wrestled Michael, the Wind of Death, and the F’dor demon that clung to him into a boiling sea.

  I am glad for him, he thought. The heartbeat that rang like a great bell is silent. He has finally found the peace he longed for. But such an incalculable loss for the world.

  Finally, when the raging water began to successfully bar his landing, he let go of all physical form and allowed the current to carry him where it willed. He imagined himself curled up like an infant in the womb, awaiting birth in the warm waves, and gave a mental command to the sword to bring him to the shore.

  Moments later, he felt a cessation of the heat, of the spinning and thrashing of the waves. Formless as he was, he sensed a solidity that indicated his presence on a beach or dry land of some sort. A cool wind whipped over him, tickling his solidifying body.

  Ashe opened his eyes.

  The sky above him was hidden by the formidable mist he had seen from the sea, but beyond that haze it appeared a different color blue than the ocean had been. Ashe inhaled deeply; the air still had the taste of the sea, but was cleaner, calmer. He lay still, allowing heft and weight to return to his bodily form.

  He was lying thus when his dizzy dragon sense picked up the thudding presence of steps coming nearer in the sand.

  Ashe lay still as two men approached. He had almost regained his solid form when they reached him. The tightly fitting clothing he had worn into the sea was all but dry when he felt the tip of the spear against his neck.

  “Who are you?” The words were spoken in a dialect of Old Cymrian, a dead language everywhere else in the world. Ashe smiled in spite of himself. “How did you come to land here? Where is your ship?”

  “I am Edwyn Griffyth’s nephew,” Ashe replied quietly in his best attempt at the dialect. “I respectfully request that you take me to see him.”

  The two men above him stared down at him as the first removed the spear from his neck. They looked at each other, then began to laugh.

  “Are you the Lady Cymrian, then?” the man without the spear said. “If so, your appearance does not live up to your reputation.” He chuckled at the confusion on Ashe’s face. “Zinkyn, not zemkyn. You just announced yourself as Edwyn Griffyth’s niece.”

  “My apologies for my poor knowledge of the grammar of long-dead languages,” Ashe said in the Orlandan tongue, irritation rising. “I am not the L
ady, but the Lord Cymrian. My business with my uncle is of an urgent nature. Again, I request that you take me to see him. Now.”

  The unintended ring of authority was in his voice, punctuated by the threatening multivoice tone of the dragon.

  The two men, who were attired in loose cassocks, knee-length trousers, and solid sandals, exchanged a glance. “Stay here, please, m’lord,” the one with the spear said. From the folds of his cassock he removed what looked like a long thin shell with the curvature of a conch and stepped away into the wind.

  He raised the shell to his lips and began to blow what sounded like a series of half-spoken, half-whistled pitches into it.

  Ashe closed his eyes again. He knew that the man was sending a message to the High Sea Mage on the wind, just as he had known that the spear the man had carried was the least of the weapons that man could have used against him, the rest of them magical, so he rested, allowing his body to become accustomed to being solid again.

  In what seemed like only a few moments, the man was back.

  “My apologies, m’lord,” he said, abashed. “Edwyn Griffyth awaits you in the Hall of Scholars.”

  “Your apology will be gratefully accepted if you’ll give me a hand up,” Ashe said. “The sand is beginning to seep into my trousers.”

  * * *

  As he followed the two men into the Citadel of Scholarship, Ashe could not help but look in wonder at the exotic architecture of the central building complex in Gaematria.

  At the very center of the shining building was a towering obelisk, twisted in much the same way as the shell the guard had used. Ashe recognized it immediately as the White Ivory tower, the only structure that had been present on the island when the members of the Second Fleet crawled upon the shores of the island after the sundering of some of their ships.

  The twisting spire had been formed from White Ivory, a type of stone found nowhere else in the Known World. Unlike its cousin, the substance known as Black Ivory, which was utterly dead and inert, and used to hide objects from those instrumentalities that could scry for them, White Ivory was as porous a stone as had ever been seen on land.