The Hollow Queen

by Elizabeth Haydon

The king stared at his wife and son as if they had lost their minds.

  “I—I am at a loss as to what to say to the two of you,” he said at last, putting his fork down beside his untouched plate.

  The queen rose in her place at the table.

  “Well, my dear, perhaps that is so, but believe me, I am at no such loss. The palace soldiers went, at your instructions, on a regular guard route to make certain that the encampment of Bolg did not grow larger, or begin to come nearer to the border. Each week there seemed to be less and less movement, fewer heads appearing on posts and the like. Finally the sortie of soldiers screwed up their collective courage and approached the lair of the Bolg, only to find it empty.”

  “Empty?”

  “Perhaps that is incorrect. It was uninhabited by anything living, and apparently had been so uninhabited for several weeks. What was left behind, besides the realistic-looking human heads—some of those actually were real, in fact—was nothing more than litter, dice, a few decks of playing cards, and a pig’s head atop a scarecrow of a body dressed in furs and armor. Other than that, there was no sign of anyone, human or Bolg.”

  “It’s true, Father,” Prince Hariton said quickly as a look of dismay beyond measure took up residence on the king’s face. “I went to the encampment myself—under heavy guard, of course—and toured the place. It was exactly as Mother has described it.”

  “So while you have been away these last seven months, playing court fool to the new emperor of Sorbold, our kingdom has been beggared, our citizens are living in fear, and our trade has fallen to almost nonexistent—”

  “There is a war on, dearest!” the king all but shouted. “The entire Known World is at war! The Patriarch of Sepulvarta was an apostate, a purveyor of atrocities you cannot begin to imagine. The Lord and Lady Cymrian, while fair of face, are apparently rotten and evil at heart, were starving and poisoning the citizenry of the Hintervold! And the Bolg have been massing all along, waiting to overrun—”

  Queen Eunice pushed in her chair impatiently.

  “Excuse us, please, Hariton,” she said.

  The crown prince’s glance went from his mother to his father, then back to the queen again. Quickly he rose and pushed his chair in, then left the room in all due haste.

  The queen walked around until she was standing beside Beliac.

  “Your childish obession with being eaten alive by Firbolg has cost all of us dearly, Majesty,” she said curtly. “I have spared the children the truth, but I know it; I endured your flailing about in your sleep during the years we occupied the same marriage bed as you groaned and whimpered and wept about it. Apparently you must have confided it at some time or another to an untrustworthy friend or ally outside the family, or perhaps a palace servant overheard you when you were tossing in your sleep after we began to maintain separate chambers. Who knows? All I can surmise is that you were manipulated because of it, led to believe that the monsters you fear were stalking you, when in reality, it was all a lie.

  “But it doesn’t matter now. Even if you wished to wreak vengeance on whomever has had such amusement at your expense, you are in no position to do so. Our treasury is empty, our reputation as a world power is soiled, denatured, our military might belongs to Sorbold now, and you are the laughingstock of your own people. Welcome home. I hope your journey west was worth it.”

  She bowed slightly and stormed out of the dining room, leaving Beliac staring at his untouched supper.

  The Battles of the Citadels

  31

  BETHANY

  The Sorbold commander to whom the challenge of sacking Bethany, the capital seat of Roland, fell was an infantryman by the name of Georgis Dantre, a man who, though well schooled in military practice and capable of great logistical planning, had a reputation for brilliant leadership tempered with occasional rashness.

  Gwydion of Manosse, the Lord Cymrian, had been known throughout the duration of his reign for his remarkable patience and careful approach to diplomacy as well as military strategy; it had never ceased to impress the First Generation Cymrians in his service that the grandson of two of the most mercurial rulers ever known on the continent and even on the Island of Serendair was able to be so thoughtful and considered in his undertakings.

  He had shown great wisdom by giving his uncle, Anborn ap Gwylliam, a wide berth in helping to reestablish the armies of the Alliance, had followed Anborn’s somewhat paranoid warnings about the need for a buildup of armaments. As a result, when the Lord Marshal of the Cymrian War had been proven correct about Talquist’s secret buildup and the Merchant Emperor’s plans for domination of the Known World through its shipping routes, Ashe had been ready.

  Or, at least, almost ready.

  In the months leading up to Talquist’s coronation, it would have been completely possible for any leader of nations over which he was only the titular head to miss the increase in the hidden slave trade, the destruction of small seaside cities and taking of their citizens captive. Talquist had, quite brilliantly, insisted on remaining as regent of the empire of Sorbold rather than taking the throne immediately, as he could have, making the rest of the world see him as a humble leader, one who understood trade and manufacture, but who needed a year’s time to become familiar with the more violent and harsh realities of running a nation.

  It was a strategy that caught his dearest allies, Hjorst, the Diviner of the Hintervold, and Beliac, the king of Golgarn, completely off guard and enabled Talquist to draw them into his war without them understanding how grievously they had been manipulated.

  But, thanks to the paranoia of his uncle, Gwydion of Manosse had been ready to defend against Talquist’s aggression nonetheless.

  He was just several months behind Talquist’s plan.

  As a result, his wife had an army of only one-third the size of Georgis Dantre’s to defend the citadel she had chosen to hold.

  And Anborn had taken all but a few of its men to follow him in the First Wave, which was marching to free the occupied city of Sepulvarta.

  Leaving those few behind to guard a population of women, children, the old, and the infirm.

  The spies had passed this information quickly to their commander, who had thrown his head back and laughed upon hearing it.

  * * *

  Georgis Dantre had been a friendly rival to the supreme commander of the Empress Leitha’s forces, Fhremus Alo’hari, and so upon being assigned the command of the unit that was ordered to commence the occupation of Bethany, he had been happy to discover that one of the young lieutenants assigned to his command was Kymel Alo’hari, Fhremus’s gifted young nephew.

  The Alo’hari family possessed the most impressive name of any military dynasty in the land. Fhremus had served the Empress Leitha bravely, as had his father and grandfather before him, and Kymel was said to be carrying on the tradition admirably when Dantre had come by ship with his battalion to the outpost outside Avonderre Harbor.

  The harbor had once been the pride of the Known World, an immense commercial facility capable of off-loading over a thousand ships in a single day, as well as being a military base for the Cymrian Alliance.

  It had only taken one strike to bring it to its knees, admittedly, a strike making use of almost magically modified creatures known as iacxsis, great hybrid beasts with the wings of bats and the serpentine bodies of dragon-like lizards possessing the jaws of the plague locust, as well as the fragility and enormous, unquenchable appetite of those insects. The sailors and merchants plying Avonderre Harbor on that bloody day had been incapable of a response, being outnumbered, outweaponed, and unable to take on the iacxsis, whose stonelike hide and fierce jaws had burned the coastline and rendered the fleet useless before even a single retaliatory weapon returned fire.

  Thus it fell to Dantre to train and lead the invasion force that would be expected to take the capital.

  And he decided his right hand in that task would be the nephew of his great rival and hero, Fhremus Alo’hari.

 
The first thing Dantre undertook to do was to make certain the whispers about Kymel were unfounded.

  “Are you all right, Alo’hari?” he had demanded in a private meeting with the young lieutenant in the barracks at Mvekgurn, the hidden cavern in a snowy world in the northern province of the Hintervold. “I have heard rumors that you are slow to recover from your last deployment.”

  “I am well,” the young lieutenant whispered. “Thank you for your concern, however, sir.”

  “They say you were slow to participate in whatever was assigned in your mission in Windswere.”

  Kymel had shaken his head; Dantre had noted that his objection was not listless, but neither was it vigorous.

  “I believe the emperor would say that I accomplished my task to his satisfaction,” he said. “No one but I was assigned the task that the emperor gave me. It is reasonable, if petty, of my comrades to be critical of my undertaking due to jealousy.”

  “Hmmm.” Dantre examined the scroll that had been given to him upon taking the supreme commander’s nephew into his command. “We are likely to encounter women and children, as well as civilian men, in the course of our duty. Does that disturb you in any way?”

  Alo’hari had shaken his head, though Dantre was uncertain as to whether there was resistance in his doing so.

  “I assume we will use the traditional rules of engagement when encountering them, will we not, sir?” he had asked.

  Dantre had exhaled.

  “We will,” he said gravely. “But I must remind you, Alo’hari, we are at intercontinental war at this point. The depravity and criminality with which the Lord and Lady Cymrian are conducting this conflict is well known. The depth of their wickedness is legendary; the Lord is a man born of the line of dragons, the Lady a sorceress of primal beauty and even more fundamental perversion. Lord Gwydion has not been seen since the beginning of the war; it is said that he is dead or in hiding. The Lady Cymrian’s whereabouts were largely unknown until recently, when she rained dark fire from the sky down upon the liberators of Sepulvarta.

  “Of the two of them, the far more dangerous is the Lady,” he continued, noting Kymel’s mien remaining stoic while his coloring sallowed considerably. “So, therefore, we must take no chances. If she is encountered, she needs to be contained and dealt with using the harshest terms of military justice; it is highly likely she will be executed even before standing trial because of the power of her wiles.”

  “But—that would merely be the rules of engagement concerning the Lady Cymrian, would it not, sir?” Kymel asked quietly. “The—other women, the children—”

  “By standard R.O.E., they will not be harmed,” Dantre said reassuringly. “The law of comfort will be observed, of course—the battles of the citadels are to result in occupation, not sacking or destruction, so that undoubtedly will be necessary for everyone’s sake. But no harm will come to anyone, Alo’hari.”

  Kymel had gone even more ashen, but merely nodded, Dantre had noted.

  The practice of Comfort Law was a long-held system of occupation. Under Comfort Law, the civilian men captured in a citadel or province under occupation were taken into work camps, almost always in another occupied area, to prevent their knowledge of the region and its hiding places or secret stores of weapons from being used against the occupiers. The children were impressed into similar work camps, though generally in the occupied area they had been born in, so that their own mothers were present in the place they were working, often overseeing their behavior and to keep them compliant.

  And the women of the occupied area, save for the crones and the hags, were subject to the law of comfort, which required them to provide sexual services and other amenities to the occupying forces to prevent what was known in military terms as “deprivation rage.”

  It was systematic and legalized rape, something the military minds of Sorbold had long ago deemed necessary for the welfare of their troops. The scrolls on which the Comfort Law had been codified and recorded noted the value of the “contribution to the war effort” such women provided, and as such, it was expected they were to be treated humanely and only beaten or injured if they refused to participate willingly in the service of the troops.

  Dantre had continued to observe Kymel throughout their interview, and at the end he determined that, while the young man seemed to have been traumatized by whatever had occurred in the conduct of his previous mission, he was nonetheless fit to serve, and decided to elevate him to battlefield commander status.

  It was a decision that led to a moment of agony that could not have been anticipated.

  * * *

  The eleventh division, the Sorbold contingent that had been assigned to overtake and occupy the citadel of Bethany, had been comprised of three smaller units, each the size of the invasion force of those for the other Orlandan provinces.

  Bethany was the capital, and the intelligence in Georgis Dantre’s possession had indicated that the circular walls that protected the citadel were of prohibitive height and depth to be taken by anything but a simultaneous four-front assault. Additionally, the elemental basilica of Fire was known to be in the center of the capital city, and while the Lady Cymrian’s whereabouts had not been determined by reliable intelligence, it was assumed that her presence might be highly possible in a place where such power existed, given that she was the bearer of the ancient sword dedicated to that element.

  For that reason, he had appealed to the supreme commander for additional troops and matériel. Under normal circumstances, that commander would have been Fhremus Alo’hari, whose military wisdom was beyond question.

  But Fhremus Alo’hari had been temporarily relieved of command, it was said, to serve as the personal guardian of the emperor, and his temporary replacement was a young man named Titactyk. Dantre had been unimpressed in his interactions with Titactyk, but the emperor’s sudden elevation of him to a post that was generally earned in decades of faithful service and a reputation for extraordinary military wisdom and unquestioned character made Dantre, and all the other division commanders, assume that they had misjudged the young soldier and, in most cases, seek to gain his good favor.

  So Dantre had sought his counsel prior to being deployed with the eleventh, asking for additional troops and supplies so that, in his words, “a devastating blow can be struck from the outset, an unquestioned occupation of Bethany can be swiftly undertaken, and, given the citadel’s geographic placement in between the currently occupied city-state of Sepulvarta and the other targeted northern provinces, an occupied Bethany could allow that former capital seat to serve as a source of supply and support for all the other occupation undertakings.”

  Titactyk had contemplated his words and seen wisdom in them.

  He had granted Dantre a force of sixty thousand men, a little less than half of his entire army.

  But, he had noted, given that the intelligence provided by the spies from the area of Bethany indicated that most of the trained men had accompanied Anborn on his misguided journey to liberate Sepulvarta, Titactyk felt comfortable that he could assign the lesser-trained regiments and those soldiers who were considered to be, as he told Dantre, “in the second half of the rankings.” Dantre had protested, reminding Titactyk again of the importance of the objective in question, but the newly appointed supreme commander would not be moved in his decision.

  So Dantre had exhaled angrily but quietly retrenched, returning to the sixty thousand soldiers he had been assigned, many of whom were reasonably trained and in good standing.

  While many of them were also thugs, brigands, bullies, and abusers of anyone weaker than they were.

  “It can’t be helped,” he had told a horrified Kymel, who had protested even more vehemently than Dantre had to Titactyk. “The supreme commander is unmoved by our words. We will have to try and make the best of this. There is nothing more to be done.”

  And thus Kymel set forth on the road to Bethany, riding with Georgis Dantre in the same ranks as many of the coarse ruf
fians who had accompanied Titactyk on his drunken revels the day before he had deployed as the new supreme commander.

  32

  The citadel of Bethany had first been sighted by a lookout with sharp vision, but it was only a momentary accomplishment; seconds afterward, all the forces in Dantre’s regiment had seen the thin wisp of steam that signaled the presence of the flamewell in the center of the elemental basilica of Fire, said to be a direct vent to the fire at the heart of the Earth.

  The division had traveled by means of the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare, the great road that bisected the continent, built in the ancient times known as the Illuminaria, the era of Gwylliam’s greatest architectural undertakings. It was often overlooked as one of his most important such undertakings, traveled a millennium later by most of the foot and commercial traffic that crossed the continent.

  Now, Dantre had determined, it was necessary for the division to divide itself even more and approach each of the four gates, each built at one of the cardinal direction points, all set on major roadways, rather than approaching the citadel in one solid force of sixty thousand.

  “It might lose some of the effect to divide so,” Dantre said to Kymel. “Admittedly, I have never been in the position either to approach or be approached by an enemy numbering even close to sixty thousand, but I cannot even begin to imagine what the enemy will do when they realize they are so surrounded.”

  Kymel merely nodded. He sat atop his warhorse as he heard the orders pass up and down the travel line, closing his eyes at the vulgar commentary and the hideous undertone to the reactions the news engendered in the “second half of the rankings.”

  “You take the far side of the thoroughfare,” Dantre said as the division began to split as ordered. “Approach the city from the east; I will take the western side of the thoroughfare. Levis and Skraw will lead the northern and southern attacks.”

  Kymel swallowed. Both of the men named as division leaders were among the most repugnant of the enlisted soldiers.