by Alec Hutson
The guard in his flowing scarlet cloak set his hand on the head of the dragon beautifully carved into the wood and pushed. The great red door swung slowly open, and then he stepped into the royal audience chamber, holding it wide. He nodded at her to enter and struck the stone floor twice with the haft of his halberd, announcing her presence.
Willa swept inside, her head held high and her face a careful mask that betrayed nothing. Her jeweled slippers sank into a thick Keshian carpet patterned with red and white diamonds, which stretched the length of the long chamber to where a throne of burnished golden wood rose atop a three-tiered dais. The woman seated on the throne seemed older than Willa remembered, even though it had only been a few years since she had attended the queen’s coronation—Cein d’Kara had always cultivated an aura of strength and certitude, but before there had been an edge of youthful innocence that hadn’t been entirely obscured by the white cosmetic she layered on her skin and the imperious mien with which she held court.
Ruling had hardened her, Willa realized, as it did most who bore the heavy burden of a crown.
“The Lady Willa ri Numil, envoy of the archons of Lyr,” a liveried servant cried, and the Crimson Queen raised her slim white hand, beckoning for her to approach.
Trying to hide how much her hip was paining her, Willa stepped forward. The space between the door and the dais was filled with a fractured panoply of colored light from the great stained-glass windows high up on the walls. Stern-looking stone men brandishing swords in heroic poses watched her pass—Willa had known several of those kings when they had ruled here, hard men who had held these proud and fractious lands together through will and steel. Cein d’Kara was both very different from the harsh kings who had come before her, and very much the same.
Willa was surprised at the emptiness of the audience chamber. There were no nobles milling about, no courtiers or sycophants desperately trying to be noticed. Just a few more of the scarlet-cloaked guardsmen spaced throughout the hall, several servants wearing white tunics emblazoned with the serpentine dragon of Dymoria, and two men standing on the second-highest step of the dais, flanking the throne. Willa’s eyes flickered between them as she drew closer. One was a Shan, tall and straight-backed, wearing the same red cloak as the other warriors here, though this one was clasped by a golden brooch shaped like a coiling dragon. She knew him: Kwan Lo-Ren, the captain of the queen’s Scarlet Guard. His left arm hung in a sling, and much of the skin on the left side of his face had been scraped away, but he still looked more than capable of defending the throne. He had been wounded during the assassination attempt on the queen, she had heard, and some of the rumors that had reached Willa’s ears had even claimed he’d died. She had suspected, though, that he’d survived—he had always seemed like a hard man to kill.
The other man was dressed in the wine-colored robes of a senior magister. He looked young to be standing at the queen’s side, but a streak of white did blemish his black hair.
“Welcome to Herath, Lady Numil,” said the queen when Willa had nearly reached the base of the dais.
Willa bowed, gritting her teeth as pain shivered through her. “Queen d’Kara. It is an honor to come into your presence again. I wish to extend the warm regards of the Council of Black and White.”
The queen studied her for a long moment, her face impassive. Willa prepared herself for an exchange of flowery rhetoric, perhaps some subtle verbal swordplay that would establish the boundaries for this audience. That was the way of the Gilded Cities, even between the bitterest of enemies. There were rules to these kinds of exchanges. Traditions that must be observed.
The queen evidently did not care. She leaned forward, her fingers curling around the end of the throne’s upswept armrests. “Where are my rangers, Crone?” she asked, and though her voice was calm her eyes flashed with anger.
Willa fought back the urge to swallow, trying her best to keep her expression unruffled. “They are all safe, Your Majesty. They are being treated as honored guests in the archon’s palace.”
“You mean in the cells beneath the palace. You are holding them captive.”
Willa crushed her small trickle of apprehension, as the queen would surely sense any weakness. “It was necessary.”
Cein d’Kara leaned back in her throne; from her clenched jaw and the whiteness of her knuckles she was not even attempting to hide the signs of her anger now. “Has Lyr sided with my enemies? Do the archons dance at the end of strings held by Emperor Gerixes?”
“No, Your Majesty,” Willa said quickly. “We would not be so foolish as to align ourselves with Menekar against you.”
“Then where is the paladin they were pursuing, which they did by my command? Is he also a guest of the archons?”
This was quickly deteriorating. “No, he –”
“And there was a boy among the rangers, a student from my Scholia. If he has come to any harm in your city my wrath will be terrible, I promise you.”
“He was not harmed when in our city.”
The queen’s eyes widened. God’s blood, she’d caught that qualification.
“You mean he is no longer in Lyr? Where is he?”
Traveling east with the Pure who tried to kidnap him from Saltstone. Willa bit back on this admission, though. Perhaps it was not the time quite yet—Cein’s grandfather had been famous for personally wielding the greatsword that had cut off the heads of those who delivered bad news to him, and while the queen certainly seemed more enlightened than her predecessors, Willa still did not want to provoke the infamous d’Kara temper.
“Keilan is safe.” I hope, she added silently. “Please, Your Majesty, much of great import has happened that I believe you have not yet been informed about. Give me a moment to explain.”
Willa interpreted the queen’s stony silence as an invitation to proceed. “Thank you, Your Majesty. As I am sure you know, the rangers you dispatched south to capture the paladin finally caught up with him just outside Lyr, in sight of our own soldiers. The captain of the gate realized that the wisest decision would be to have the archons pass judgment on who should be favored in this situation, and so all were brought before the Council of Black and White.”
“And the Council’s session was interrupted,” the queen said. “By an emissary from the Oracle.”
“Yes.” For once, Willa was pleased for the existence of the Dymorian informants in the archon’s palace. “She summoned Keilan and the paladin Senacus to the House of Many Streams. I accompanied them as well.”
The young magister turned and whispered something to the queen. Cein d’Kara pursed her lips at his words, as if in annoyance, but then she nodded curtly.
“What about Keilan’s companion? A young woman once from Lyr?”
The ruffian girl. “She also came to the Oracle’s temple and shared in the vision we were given. She is still at his side, to my knowledge. She left the city with him.”
“Tell me about this vision.”
Willa twisted one of her jeweled rings, a nervous uncertainty rising up in her. She must convince the queen of the threat foreseen by the Oracle. If she failed, she would have made an enemy of the most powerful ruler in the west. Her city would suffer if she could not make Cein d’Kara understand.
“It was shared with all of us in the coral chamber. You’ve been there, I know.”
“Twice,” the queen said quietly. “Once when I was very young, only a girl. And then again of course when I visited Lyr soon after my ascension to the throne.”
Willa did her best to hide her surprise. Cein had come before the Oracle when she was still a princess? How did she not know this? Something to investigate later, she told herself. “This was no ordinary audience with the Oracle, Your Majesty. She did not make some vague pronouncement and send us on our way. No, she actually showed us her vision. We were in fact drawn into the future she had seen.”
The quee
n steepled her hands, her expression thoughtful. “Interesting. I have read about that happening before, many centuries ago. The Oracle died from the strain of doing this, I believe.”
Willa remembered the pale corpse dangling from the coral, and the young girl swimming across the pool to take up the sacred mantle. “It has not yet been widely shared, but when we returned from where she sent us we found that the Oracle had perished.”
“And what did she show you?”
“Doom. Destruction. We stood in the remnants of the Selthari Palace and saw Menekar spread below us in ruins. The sky had been torn open and was weeping blood. Some terrible sorcery had been unleashed on the world.”
“You saw only Menekar destroyed?”
“Yes, but the Oracle said all the lands were the same. And the ones who had brought about this tragedy were there. We saw them.”
The queen was silent, watching her intently.
“They came from Shan, the Oracle said. Twisted, monstrous children. They had summoned forth whatever had broken the sky and sundered the earth.”
Surprise shivered the faces of the two men standing below the queen, and they glanced back quickly at her. They each knew something about this. The Crimson Queen ignored them, though, her face guarded.
“As we watched, a sorceress arrived from the sky to challenge them. She brought the severed head of one of these child-demons and tossed it at their feet. They struck at her with sorcery and she responded in kind, but before we saw who the victor would be we found ourselves back in the Oracle’s temple.”
“This sorceress,” the queen said, her voice sword-sharp, “did she have dusky skin and raven hair?”
“No. She was pale and had shimmering silver hair unlike any I’ve seen before.”
The queen blinked, as if this was not what she was expecting. She laid a long finger to her lips, her gaze growing distant. “Silver hair…” Her eyes suddenly snapped back to Willa, and they were not friendly. “You sent the boy to find her.”
How did she piece it all together so quickly? “Y-yes. It must be why the Oracle wanted to show Keilan her vision. She knew he had seen the sorceress before. And that he might be able to find her before this doom came down on us all.”
“You dispatched an untrained sorcerer, barely more than a boy, along with a young woman who was once a thief, on a quest to find an immortal sorceress who was one of the wizards responsible for the cataclysms that destroyed the old world.”
And here was the admission that would get her drawn and quartered. “And the Pure.”
“What?”
“The paladin of Ama is with them as well. He saw the same vision we did, and he pledged to protect them on their journey.”
The queen shook her head in disbelief. “And how long ago did they depart Lyr?”
“More than a month. They must be in the Shattered Kingdoms by now.” If nothing has happened to them.
“Well, this explains why my messengers to your council were not received. And why my rangers were not released.”
“I was waiting to discover what I could about this threat from Shan. I thought you would be… understanding of what I had done if I could present a more complete picture of what was happening.”
Willa waited with growing dread for the queen to order her guardsmen to drag her down to the dungeons. What else could she expect, after such a strange and mad story?
The silence stretched as the queen appeared to consider what she had said. Then Cein suddenly rose, startling the two men standing below her.
“Come with me, Lady Numil,” she commanded as she started to descend the dais. “There are things you must know as well.”
The queen led her to a chamber deeper within the fortress, a small windowless room dominated by a great golden basin filled to the brim with water. No tapestries or sconces adorned the walls, and since there was no furniture other than the gilded basin Willa found herself unsure where she should stand. One of the legendary mistglobes that had been common before the breaking of the world hung from the ceiling on a delicate silver strand, the brightness coiling within its depths bathing the room in a pale light. Cein paced the edge of the basin, trailing her fingers in the water as Kwan Lo-Ren shut the door behind them.
“You’re ready to try it, then?” the young magister asked, his eyes fixed on the golden basin.
“I am,” the queen said, lifting her fingers from the water and flicking them dry. “But first, let us—how do chalice players say it?—flip all the cards we have on the table.” She turned to face Willa. “Lady Numil, beneath the surface of the world, great forces are moving. A month past, an alliance of ancient sorcerers and shadowblades tried to kill me and kidnap the boy Keilan. And their assault on Saltstone did not seem like the culmination of a long war, but rather the opening skirmish. That is why your description of what the Oracle showed you does not surprise me—there is much more to come, I am certain.”
“My queen, there is something you must know,” Kwan Lo-Ren said.
Cein looked at the captain of her Scarlet Guard in mild surprise. “You know something?”
Kwan Lo-Ren’s face was troubled. “I do, Your Majesty, though it is with a heavy heart that I must share my knowledge.”
With a gesture, the queen bade him continue.
“I have heard many things in your presence recently,” Kwan Lo-Ren began. “First, that it was a Shan who slipped into the fortress and freed the sorcerer –”
“A Shan did what?” Willa blurted, forgetting for a moment that she was in the company of a queen.
Cein held up her hand to show her indulgence with the interruption. “Yes. One of the ancient sorcerers involved in the attack—though I suspect, unless I am being naïve, he did so unwittingly—was captured and imprisoned here in Saltstone. Someone snuck inside and freed him and fled east; I sent hunters after them, but in the end the one in command allowed them to escape.” Willa could not miss the pointed glance she cast in the direction of the young magister.
“What was the name of the Shan girl?” Kwan Lo-Ren asked the magister, who had wilted under the queen’s glare.
“She said her name was Cho Lin,” replied the magister.
“Cho Lin,” Kwan Lo-Ren repeated softly.
“I don’t understand,” Willa said. “Why didn’t you capture him again?”
“Because it would have been bloody,” the magister said quickly, and from his tone it sounded like this was not the first time he’d had to defend his decision. “The girl claimed to be both a disciple of Red Fang and the daughter of a Shan lord, and the sorcerer said he would die before returning. I truly believed, Your Majesty,” he continued, his voice almost pleading, “that you would not have wanted either of them dead, which is what would have been risked if we had tried to take them by force.”
“As I said before,” Willa said, “the Oracle stated that the threat would come from Shan. And then a Red Fang monk penetrates Saltstone and frees one of these ancient sorcerers who attacked you? They must be allied together with the demon children.”
“I do not believe so,” Kwan Lo-Ren said slowly. “These twisted children you saw—what did they look like?”
Willa thought back to the vision, of those creatures emerging from their house of blackened corpses. “Skin so white they appeared to have been drowned. Tangled black hair and tattered clothes.”
The captain of the Scarlet Guard nodded, his face grim. “The Betrayers.”
Cein d’Kara’s eyes narrowed. “You know them?”
“I do. The true story of them has largely been effaced from my people’s histories, but every child of Shan is told of how they are responsible for the loss of our ancient homeland.”
“They ushered in the Raveling?” Cein asked.
Kwan Lo-Ren nodded. “Yes, my queen. And the thought that they will return to the world chills my blood. They are cr
eatures of hate and vengeance.”
Willa plucked at the hem of her sleeve, a coldness growing inside her at the Shan’s words. “How will they bring about the destruction I saw in the Oracle’s vision? What was the Raveling?”
“A scouring,” Kwan Lo-Ren said. “But more I do not know. Perhaps no one outside of the bone-shard towers in Tsai Yin has this knowledge.” His brow knitted, as if he was considering deeply what this all meant. He looked shaken, and to see that from such a formidable man worried Willa.
“Why did you want to know what the Shan girl’s name was?” asked the queen, and this seemed to return Kwan Lo-Ren to the chamber.
“Magister Vhelan said it was Cho Lin. The Cho are one of the great families of Shan, with a history that stretches back for thousands of years, well before the Thousand Sails fled the old lands. They are rich and powerful… but above all else, they are known as the foremost demon hunters of Shan. Cho Xin was the man who defeated the Betrayers in the final days of the Raveling. He slew their physical bodies and bound their spirits to a rosewood chest the warlocks had constructed. This Shan girl told Vhelan she was searching for something. I would wager she is searching for the Betrayers.”
“She said Jan knew where the thing she was searching for was,” the magister said.
“So these sorcerers are allied with the Betrayers,” the queen said with cold disdain. “They already brought down one cataclysm, and now they plot to do so again.” She stared into the basin’s water. “The threat has begun to emerge from the gloom. But what can we do?”
“There is something else, Your Majesty,” Willa said softly. “And it was the reason I came north. You see, after the Oracle pronounced that the doom she saw would come from Shan, I commanded the defenders of Lyr to investigate any travelers from the Empire of Swords and Flowers. A wild attempt to discover more about what was coming, but it bore fruit.” The creature that had haunted her nightmares rose up again, long black talons dripping blood as it stalked across the warehouse towards her…