The Born Queen

by Greg Keyes

  “I didn’t think I would hear much pleasing today,” Anne said. “I was wrong. I accept your loyalty.”

  She shot her gaze back at the other two men. “It is a thing in short supply these days.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALONG THE DEEP RIVER

  WITCHLIGHTS LED the way as Stephen, Zemlé, Adhrekh, and twenty Aitivar descended into the roots of the mountain. The ethereal globes of iridescence flitted about, casting the otherwise bleak gray walls in shades of gold, silver, ruby, emerald, and sapphire. Stephen had never seen witchlights before entering the Witchhorn, but Aspar had spoken of them as a fixture of Sefry rewns.

  Oddly enough, the Aitivar didn’t seem to know anything about them other than what anyone could observe. Were they alive? Creations of shinecraft or some natural product of the tenebres?

  No one knew, and no book Stephen could find answered the question. But they were useful, and they were pretty, which was more than could be said about most things.

  They were particularly useful just now, as the path they walked was barely a kingsyard wide, bounded on the right hand by the stone of the great central subterrain of the caverns and on the left by the crevasse through which the underground river Nemeneth sought its way through stone and earth to feed deeper streams and eventually, perhaps, the Welph, which flowed in turn to the Warlock and thence to the Lier Sea at Eslen. He could hear the rushing of the Nemeneth, but it was too far below him for the witchlights to reveal.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” Zemlé asked him.

  “I’m sure I’m not,” he replied. “I wasn’t ready to walk the first faneway I walked. Then I nearly died—maybe did die—just setting foot on another sedos. But Virgenya Dare wasn’t ready, either. She just did it. And I’m not going to wait until the Vhelny or whatever it is that’s stalking me has its chance.”

  “Then the journal talks about the faneway?”

  “Yes. I was reading an early part, when she was a girl, and the Skasloi took her into the mountains. This mountain. She felt the faneway below her. Years later she came back and walked it.”

  “So she tells where it is.”

  “Yes. I know where I’m going, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Is it much farther?”

  He smiled. “That’s what we used to ask my father on long trips. Have you aged backward to five?”

  “No. I don’t care how far it is. I’m just curious.”

  “I reckon it at about half a league. It’s in another part of the mountain. Adhrekh, have you ever been this way before?”

  “The cavern ends ahead, pathikh.”

  “You really believe that, or is this just something else you neglected to tell me? Another test to see if I’m really Kauron’s heir?”

  “It’s not a test, pathikh. We’ve never known where the faneway is.”

  Stephen stopped. “It’s going to stay that way, then. Give me a pack of food and water and return to your rewn.”

  “Pathikh—”

  “Do it. If I even suspect you’re following me, I won’t go anywhere near the faneway. Do you understand?”

  “Pathikh, this place you are going—it is old, very old, and it has been abandoned for a long time. There’s no knowing what might lurk there in the dark.”

  “Stephen, he’s right,” Zemlé said. “Going alone would be foolish.”

  “They’ve just admitted they need me to find the faneway. Maybe that’s all they ever needed from me. Maybe once I find it, I’m of no use to them.”

  “Stephen, Sefry can’t walk faneways. Any faneways. Why would they want to know where this one is?”

  That drew him to a stop. “What? I’ve never heard that.”

  “It’s true,” Adhrekh said.

  Stephen frowned and leafed quickly through his saint-blessed memory. No Sefry had ever joined the Church and walked a faneway; that much was true. But there was something…

  “As soon have a Sefry walk a faneway as give shiveroot for the gout,” he cited.

  “What?” Zemlé asked.

  “From the Herbal of Phelam Haert. It’s the only thing I can think of that supports your claim. Anyway, maybe they have someone in mind to walk it other than me.”

  “Who? Not Fend, obviously. Hespero? Then why did they fight him?”

  You can trust the Aitivar.

  Stephen blinked. Everyone was looking at him strangely.

  “What did you say?” Zemlé asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were just babbling in some other tongue.”

  Stephen sighed and massaged his forehead. “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. All right, Adhrekh. You can come.”

  Adhrekh acknowledged that by bowing, and they continued the descent. As the Sefry had predicted, the roof of the cave came sloping down to meet them even as the angle of the trail sharpened and finally became stairs. The churning of the river grew louder, and eventually the stairs ended on a bed of gravel and sand at its banks.

  Stephen had been trying not to think about this part, but now he was there, and he felt his breath shorten. It wasn’t how he had imagined it; it was much worse.

  Upstream, where the Aitivar dwelt, the Nemeneth was a relatively placid stream. Here, she came crashing down from a series of shoals and waterfalls to form a great vortex. The cave roof was only two kingsyards above that, and across the river was only stone.

  “No,” Zemlé said. “Oh, saints, no.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Stephen said. He was trying to sound brave and nonchalant, but his voice quavered. He hoped they couldn’t hear that over the steady thrumming of the river-size drain.

  “This can’t be right,” she said, and turned to Adhrekh. “Haven’t any of you ever tried this?”

  Adhrekh actually coughed out a little laugh, something Stephen had never heard the man do before.

  “Why?” he said. “Why would anyone do that? I could live seven hundred years if I’m careful.”

  Stephen sat on the shingle and tried to take deep, slow breaths. The witchlights seemed slower now, calmer.

  “Stephen?”

  “I have to,” he said. He took a few more breaths, levered himself up, and walked toward the rushing whirlpool. He knew he couldn’t pause, and so he leapt in, aiming his feet toward the center of it.

  It took him with incredible violence. The power of the water was absolute, and nothing his limbs could do had any effect. All he could do was try to hold on to his air, not scream and let it all out, and he suddenly knew with absolute certainty that he somehow had been tricked. He was a dead man, and knowing that, he lost the power of thought entirely.

  When it came back, he remembered being ground against sand and stone and then expulsion and the grip of the flood easing. Now he lay on gravel in utter darkness, coughing out the water that had forced its way into his lungs.

  A golden glow rose up in front of him, and then a deep red one. A few heartbeats later the witchlights were all around him again.

  He lay on a strand not very different from the one he had just left, but here there was no high-vaulted chamber, only a tunnel two kingsyards higher than the river flowing through it. Water crashed through the roof in a great column on his right, and on his left the passage went on much farther than his luminescent companions could reveal.

  He heard violent coughing and saw the silhouette of a head and shoulders rise from the pool: Adhrekh.

  “Zemlé!” he gasped. Had she tried to follow him, too?

  More Aitivar appeared, but he didn’t see her.

  “Zemlé!” he repeated, this time at the top of his lungs.

  “I have her,” someone said. In the stir he couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from exactly.

  “Who is that?”

  Then he made out one of the Aitivar cradling a limp figure. He waded up onto the beach.

  “Saints curse me,” Stephen snarled. “Is she—”

  The fellow shrugged and lay her down. Her head was smeared with black
, which Stephen realized was blood rendered dark by the colored lights. For a moment he felt paralyzed, but then she coughed, and water bubbled out of her mouth.

  “Bandages,” he told Adhrekh. “Get me bandages and whatever unction you might have.”

  Adhrekh nodded.

  “Zemlé,” Stephen said, stroking her cheek. “Can you hear me?”

  He took the sleeve of his shirt and pressed it to her wound, trying to see how deep it was. Her eyes opened, and she shrieked.

  “Sorry,” Stephen said. “Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Because I hate you.” She felt toward her brow. “Am I bleeding to death?”

  “I think it’s a shallow cut,” he replied. “There’s a lot of blood, but I don’t think your skull broke.”

  Adhrekh returned with linen cloths and some sort of paste with a sul-fury smell and set about bandaging Zemlé’s head. He seemed to know what he was doing, so Stephen didn’t interfere. His pulse finally began slowing down, and he felt unexpected exhilaration flood through him.

  Who was he to brave such things? Not the Stephen Darige who had left Ralegh for the monastery d’Ef, what, not even two years ago?

  Even Aspar might be proud of him.

  “Did we lose anyone?” Stephen asked Adhrekh.

  “No, pathikh,” the Sefry replied. “All accounted for.”

  “It’s colder down here,” Stephen noticed. “You brought the change of clothes I asked for?”

  “Yes. And now I understand why you asked for them. But if you had told me more concerning what we were to do, I might have made more effort to keep them dry. I can better serve you, pathikh, if you talk to me more.”

  “The extra clothes are wet? What about the coats?”

  “Drier than what we’re wearing, pathikh.”

  “It’ll have to do. When Zemlé can walk, we’ll move on. Moving will warm us.”

  “Stephen,” Zemlé said. “A small question. Tiny, really.”

  “Yes?”

  “There is another way back, yes?”

  Stephen glanced at the waterfall. “Right. I guess we can’t swim back up that.”

  “Stephen—”

  “Virgenya Dare made it out.”

  “But you don’t know how?”

  “She neglected to write about that, I’m afraid. But there must be a way out.”

  “And we only need find it before we run out of food or freeze to death.”

  “Don’t be a pessimist,” Stephen said, his elation starting to fade. “We’ll be fine.”

  “How much farther to the start of the faneway?”

  “I’m not sure. Virgenya wasn’t sure; it’s hard to measure time and distance underground. She reckoned it at several bells but admitted it could have been days.”

  “What if we get lost?”

  “Not much chance of that right now,” he said. “We’ve only one direction to go. Anyway, I can feel the faneway. It’s close.” He gripped her shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little dizzy, but I can walk.”

  Adhrekh had dug out the coats from their packs, sturdy elkhide paiden with fur lining. They were hardly wet at all, and once clothed in one, Stephen felt a great deal better even though he was still wet.

  Once everything was gathered again, they started out.

  The passage bent and turned like the bed of any river and its roof went higher and lower, but it stayed simple in terms of choices. More streams joined it, but they came from above, from fissures too small to accommodate a person. The floor dropped roughly down in places, forcing them to use rope to descend, but was never as dramatic or dangerous as what they already had been through. Not, that is, until they reached the place Virgenya Dare called simply “the valley.” Stephen knew they were approaching it because the close echoes of the tunnel began opening up, becoming vastly more hollow, along with the sound of rushing water.

  They came to the lip where the river churned and fell far from sight, and a vast black space yawned before them.

  “And now?” Zemlé asked.

  “There should be stairs here,” Stephen said, searching along the ledge. The river must have flooded at times and eaten at the sides of the mouth, creating a shallow, low-roofed cave that went off to the left of the opening. After a moment he found what the Born Queen must have been talking about, and he groaned in dismay.

  “What’s wrong?” Zemlé asked, trying to see around him.

  “Two thousand years,” Stephen sighed.

  There were indeed stairs cut into the stone of the wall, but the first four yards of them were gone, doubtless eroded by the floods he had just been considering. After that, the steps that remained looked glassy and worn. To reach them meant leaping three yards and falling two and then avoiding slipping upon landing. Or breaking a leg. And once there, he had no assurance there wasn’t a similar gap farther on.

  Behind him, he heard Adhrekh in a hushed conversation.

  “Any ideas?” Stephen asked.

  He heard the quick thump of footsteps and air brushed at his locks. Then he saw one of the Aitivar hurl himself into space toward the eroded stairs.

  “Saints!” Stephen gasped. He didn’t have time to say anything else before the fellow hit the stair, flailed for balance, teetered—and fell. Then he could only stare.

  “Who—who was that?” he finally managed.

  “Unvhel,” Adhrekh said.

  “Why—” But then another one was running past him.

  “Wait—”

  But of course it was too late. The jumper hit the step, and his foot slipped, so that he fell like a tomfool at a traveling show, landing on his prat and sliding. Stephen held his breath, sure the Aitivar would go over, but he somehow caught himself and managed to slip down the water-worn steps to stable footing.

  Stephen turned to Adhrekh. “What is wrong with you people?” he asked, trying to contain his anger. “You were just on about how long you could live if you didn’t do anything stupid.”

  “You shamed us at the waterfall, pathikh. If I had known your plan, one of us would have gone in first. We were determined not to let you risk yourself so foolishly again.”

  “What good would it have done to go into the water before me? I wouldn’t have known if you made it or not.”

  “Begging your pardon, pathikh, but you might have been able to hear us below. You’ve walked the faneway of Saint Decmanus.”

  Stephen reluctantly acknowledged that with a tilt of his head. “So you sent them to jump before I could try it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I wouldn’t have jumped.”

  Adhrekh shrugged. “Very well. But someone had to, unless you know some other way down.”

  “I don’t.”

  A sharp ringing commenced, and Stephen realized that the Aitivar on the steps was working at the stone with a hammer and chisel, probably trying to create some purchase to tie a rope to. Another Sefry began the same work on their side. After perhaps half a bell, a rope was fixed across the gulf, and Adhrekh went across, hanging upside down, hooking his legs over the cord and using his hands to pull himself along.

  Before Stephen went, they tied a second rope around his waist. An Aitivar held it at either end so that if he fell, they had a chance of stopping him. That safeguard made Stephen feel a bit condescended to but infinitely safer, and he insisted that Zemlé be brought across in the same fashion.

  Finally, with the exception of a man Stephen hadn’t known the name of, they were all on the stairs.

  The footing improved after ten or so kingsyards, the steps becoming more defined and the way wider. The witchlights occasionally showed the other side of the crevasse but not the bottom, or the roof, for that matter.

  “It’s colder still,” Zemlé noticed.

  “Yes,” Stephen agreed. “There is much debate about the nature of the world beneath. Some mountains spew fire and molten rock, so
one would imagine there is great heat below. And yet caves tend to be cold.”

  “Rather that than molten rock,” she replied.

  “Yes. What was that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Up above, at the waterfall: a sort of scraping sound, like something big coming through.”

  “Something big?”

  “Archers,” Adhrekh said quietly.

  Stephen tried to focus in the direction of the sound, but beyond their luminous companions there was only darkness.

  “Is there any way to dampen the witchlights?” Stephen asked. “They make us easy to see.”

  And then he smelled it, a hot, animal, resiny smell, just like the trace of scent in the aerie.

  “He’s here,” Stephen said, trying to keep his voice from showing his building panic.

  A warm breeze blew across them, and Stephen heard the sharp hum of a bowstring.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE GEOS

  THE BEAST saw Aspar coming and whipped its snake-necked head around, lifting its great batlike wings in challenge.

  Aspar rushed to meet it, trying in the few instants he had to see where he should strike.

  As on a bat, its wings were its forelimbs. It was crouched down on its hind legs, so he couldn’t see much of them. The head was vaguely canine, like some mixture of wolf and snake, and sat atop a kingsyard of sinuous neck.

  That long throat seemed the safest bet. The feyknife ought to cut right through it.

  But then it beat its wings and jumped, and as its long, sinewy rear legs unfolded, he realized that despite a few details, the thing was grown more like a fighting cock than a bat, as it was suddenly above him, kicking down with wicked claws and dirklong heel spurs. It was fast.

  Aspar had too much momentum to stop, so he pivoted to his right, but not quickly enough. The spur of one foot struck his chest.

  To Aspar’s surprise and relief, the thing wasn’t as heavy as it looked. Although the claw probably would have laid open his chest if he hadn’t been warded, it didn’t have the force to cut through the boiled leather cuirass he wore beneath his shirt.