The Dark Queen

by Michael Williams

  But instead of the expected glyphs, the accus shy;tomed marks in the sand, the woman Tanila sat before him, her dark eyes glittering and wild.

  The words came to her readily, easily, like the words of Larken's songs. You have opened the rift of the world, she began, as he extended his glowing hands toward her. Let the new world arise from rift and confu shy;sion. Let it change in the flame of your hand.

  Then the light in his veins would extinguish, the blackness would surround him, and he would sleep heavily, darkly, until the voices returned, Larken's first, then the deep soft voice in pursuit. The dream would happen again and again. And each time, before complete and oblivious darkness, he would hear the other voice, melodious and solitary, blend shy;ing with his memories of Tanila's voice. And it would tell him the last thing, the thing his heart remembered as he slept.

  Your studies are over, Prophet. Now the world will shake. You no longer need glyphs to prophesy, nor the cus shy;tomary second tongue. You will speak to the multitudes on your own, needing neither interpreter nor bard.

  In the depths of his sleep Fordus tried to argue, tried to say no, I have not done this before, have not prophesied and interpreted as well. It is not permit shy;ted. The ancient way of prophecy is twofold.

  But the voice was insistent.

  You are a city unto yourself, a wondrous city, Fordus Firesoul. Istar will pay you tribute, will be subject to your command. The rival you have longed for awaits you in Istar: the Kingpriest, your match in valor and worthiness. But you will triumph.

  And this I promise: In the heart of Istar you will find out who you are.

  Who I am? he asked, with the same insistent yearning he had felt upon first learning of his strange adoption.

  Hurry. You must hurry to know. You must storm Istar now.

  Do not delay.

  But we are too few.

  Do not delay.

  On the plateau the rebels held hopeless vigil over their wounded leader. Northstar knelt at his feet and Stormlight at his head, praying the deep prayers to Mishakal. Larken stood above the three of them, beating the drum slowly and singing the Three Songs of Healing, over and over. They stopped only for an hour's fitful sleep.

  On the second night, Gormion took her followers back to the red tents of the bandits. It was enough, she concluded. The man was dead, and all that remained was to name Stormlight as his successor.

  The Que-Nara were more faithful. Many of them stayed through four, five nights, but on the sixth day the number of watchers began to dwindle. Women led the children to their tents, and some of the older warriors and the shamans returned to camp on the seventh day.

  The grumbling began. Stormlight heard it first from Gormion, when he returned after the seventh night's vigil, headed for his tent and three hours' sleep before sunrise.

  All responsibility had fallen on Stormlight. In the seven days that Fordus had lain silent atop the Red Plateau, he had come to see how unwieldy the sole command of this irregular army could be.

  It was sleep, however, that he thought of now, and when he heard the rattle and ring of jewelry approaching from behind, for a moment Stormlight envied Fordus his coma. He turned to face the dark-haired bandit, his expression level and impassive.

  "It is time to decide, Stormlight," the bandit cap shy;tain declared, her eyes flashing with impatience and anger.

  "What would you have me decide, Gormion?" His voice remained calm, he believed-no hint of the rising irritation he felt as the woman drew near him and raised a solitary, thin finger, pointing and jabbing at him like she wielded a dagger.

  "The fate of the rebellion, Stormlight. I would have you decide what is next. Instead of waiting for the … visionary to die."

  Stormlight remained impassive.

  "While we crouch on our haunches," the bandit continued, "and await the passing, Istar is moving troops to the north."

  "You know this for a fact, Gormion?"

  He knew that she didn't.

  "What would you do if you were Kingpriest, Stormlight?"

  "I am not Kingpriest, Gormion."

  "You could be. You are resourceful and brave."

  Stormlight laughed wearily. Seven days had worn thin his patience, but this was the most ridiculous of Gormion's proddings. Was she foolish enough to believe that an elf whose greatest enemy sat on the Istarian throne .. .

  "And you command these armies."

  Tanila had spoken the same words a week ago when he first met her at the fireside.

  Astonished, Stormlight stared at the bandit leader. Gormion's face, once beautiful, had wrinkled and lined over the years with scheming and anger. Not yet thirty, she looked twice her age.

  "What did you say, Gormion?"

  With a sniff of disgust, the woman backed away from Stormlight, who continued to stare at her, his dark eyes intent and wide. "I said what I said, elf," she decreed, the menace in her voice brittle and thin.

  She wheeled about in a chiming of bracelets and a rattle of beads. "I said what I said," she repeated, calling the words over her shoulder as she fled to the darkness of her tent, to safety and concealment.

  "And you, Stormlight of the Lucanesti, had better listen. Or be lost like the rest of your people!"

  Back in the Abyss, her female crystalline body abandoned in the fires and eruptions, Takhisis banked in the windless air and laughed exultantly.

  Gormion would be easy, when the time came. Hers was a spirit primed for hatred and strife.

  Takhisis beat her wings, her laughter settling to a low, contented rumble.

  For wherever strife and hatred abounded … there was confusion . . . and confusion was an inroad for her every evil work.

  Her defeat was only a temporary one, and not without some satisfaction. For Sargonnas's glowing condor also had crumbled in the air, the bard's song changing the vaunting god into a harmless shower of sparks.

  It had been rather beautiful. A bright show of fire shy;works in the desert sun. It had given Takhisis an image as well… an idea how to punish her insolent consort.

  When they returned to the abyss, she had set upon him like a hawk on a sparrow, swooping through the bottomless darkness, folding her wings in a sear shy;ing dive through the nothingness, sensing him somewhere below her.

  Her thoughts called out to Sargonnas in the black shy;ness, and he answered. Penitently. Fearfully.

  He told her of Fordus's weakness-of the man's great desire to discover his origins, his parentage.

  Then suddenly she found herself above him, and dove, and he was there, turning his ruddy face, his lidless eyes wide in astonishment and terror as she crashed into him like a merciless black comet.

  He exploded from the power of her assault, shat shy;tering into a hundred thousand shards and frag shy;ments, which squeaked and twittered as they scattered in aimless flight through the void.

  It would take him a century to reassemble.

  Now, as she remembered the moment, her rage subsided. Or rather, it turned back to the world, to the Plainsmen who ranged the fringes of the desert in clear defiance of her Istar, her Kingpriest, her plans for the Cataclysm.

  This Fordus had shown himself well nigh indestructible. Neither the desert nor its creatures, the Istarians nor Sargonnas's fire and clumsiness had had enough power to bring down this man.

  Yet, he was suggestible. His ancestry weakened him. Which was why Takhisis had come to the man in his dreams, breathing lies and nonsense about his great and far-reaching destiny.

  He was ambitious enough to believe anything.

  Takhisis purred contentedly.

  She had lingered awhile in the Plainsman's dreams, burrowing deeper and deeper into the recesses of his memory, past the layers of adoles shy;cence, of childhood, past the time he was brought to the desert's edge, in secrecy and in night.

  His mother was a slave girl, an attendant in the Kingpriest's Tower. She learned that, easily.

  Now, more importantly, Takhisis knew his father. And there is great p
ower in knowledge, great free shy;dom. She would use that knowledge to destroy him.

  Now the Prophet was rising from sleep. Fordus lay in a pool of sweat, his breathing easy and his fever broken. But his spiked golden tore tightened ever so slightly upon his wasted neck. The ends then welded in a silent, seamless joining, symbol of a new alliance that could never be broken.

  Fordus would waken with an altered heart.

  She would leave the final, brutal work to her earthly minions, when time and opportunity con shy;verged.

  When the moment came, the Prophet would beg for oblivion.

  In the evening of the tenth day, when the Water Prophet opened his eyes, only a handful of the faithful were left on the plateau. Kneeling beside him, Northstar offered him water.

  "I have dreamt strangely," Fordus announced after a long drink, a new sound in his voice. His eyes were bright and sunk deeply into their sockets from the ten-day fast of his sleep.

  Northstar and Stormlight bent over him, and Larken, jubilant, ceased her drumming.

  "And I have seen signs and wonders in my dream," he concluded, sitting up painfully. "Assemble the people for a new word."

  Larken sounded the gathering call on her drum. Its message echoed from the heights of the Red Plateau, borne on the shouts and calls of the sentries, passed from encampment to encampment, from the white tents of the Que-Nara to the red of Gormion's bandits. They came in throngs, from the battle lead shy;ers and shamans and Namers down to the youngest child, for Larken's drum was a powerful summons.

  When the gathering drum sounded, the gods were ready to speak.

  Stormlight waited with the rest of the company as Fordus stood weakly in the midst of the jostling crowd. Fathers lifted children onto their shoulders to better see the Prophet, and the rumor circulated among the awestruck Que-Nara that Fordus had passed through the land of the dead and come back with the deepest prophecy of all. Leaning on North-star's shoulder, the blood on his mending side caked and dried as though he might brush away the wound, Fordus trained his sea-blue eyes toward the horizon.

  "My dream has spoken to me," the Prophet pro shy;claimed. "Istar is burning. The fire has come, and the world has opened."

  A murmur spread through the crowd, and a thousand eyes turned to Stormlight, who stepped aside, waiting for the lightning to strike as it always struck, for Fordus's obscure poetry to become clear.

  Quickly, with the confidence born of long experi shy;ence, he isolated the symbols from the Prophet's speech.

  Fire. A burning city. The crack in the world.

  As he felt the words stirring, felt them rise from that mysterious source in the depths of his spirit, suddenly he heard an excited rumble from the crowd.

  Stormlight's unspoken words froze in his throat.

  "Hear the word of the Prophet!" Fordus pro shy;claimed, blue eyes scanning the encircling faces. "The meaning of my dream has come to me, and to me alone. No longer do I need interpreter!"

  Stormlight shivered with a sharp intake of breath. His power, his position, had been usurped.

  "For I ljiave passed through the fire and the fever," Fordus continued, his hands raised aloft, "and I have walked on the margins of shadows and looked over into the places from which no man returns."

  Uncertainly, with a sidelong glance at Stormlight, Larken beat the drum once, twice.

  "My dream has told me that Istar is burning. The fire that will destroy the city has not yet been kindled, but we are the ones who will light it."

  Slowly, the circle of people surrounding Storm shy;light widened and dispersed, as the Plainsmen turned in rapt attention toward Fordus. Dumb shy;struck, the elf watched in befuddlement as Larken, too, turned toward the Water Prophet, storing his words for a song.

  "Rest tonight," Fordus said softly, his eyes turned north, to where the red moon and the white sat low on the horizon. The Namers and shamans who circled

  him strained to hear his words, caught them, and passed them to the Plainsmen and bandits who waited behind them, so that the message spread like brushfire over the listening crowd. "Rest tonight, for tomorrow we march. We march on Istar, and there will not be peace until the city is mine."

  Chapter 15

  Stormlight decided to speak against Fordus's prophecy. Standing before the assembled camps, his voice rang loud and true and assured, as it had on a hundred occasions before, when he had helped to guide the Que-Nara through long, waterless stretches of the desert in search of oases, of underground pools, of arroyos suddenly and strangely filled by an outburst of subterranean springs.

  In the years of drought his voice had been rain, so the people were inclined to listen.

  "I have heard the prophecy of Fordus Firesoul," he began, "and I believe his dream has misguided him. Where before have we found the water, and looked in the sand for the approach of Istar, for other dangers and for enemies? Speak, if you know."

  The sea of faces was still and quiet. They knew, of course, of the kanaji pit-that there was a magic within the crumbling, sand-swallowed walls that had lasted an age or more. They knew that Fordus entered the pit to seek visions and wisdom. They knew something of the glyphs, and all believed that the gods sent messages through them to the Prophet. But they did not know how. "In all those times," Stormlight continued, "I have stood beside the Water Prophet. I have seen the birth of the visions, and when he has spoken, I have spo shy;ken after him. His words were cloudy, but I have made them plain so that you may understand them. Always we have worked together-the Storm of Prophecy and the Stormlight. We have found water, and when we needed to elude the slavers, they went home with their collars empty. In these wars of liber shy;ation, we have found Istar and the unprotected flanks of the Kingpriest's army."

  "Why did the wars start, Stormlight?" Fordus asked softly, and all eyes turned to the Prophet, all ears awaited his answer. "Was it in the kanaji that the gods told me to move against Istar? No, I tell you. This vision came to me in a dream. I alone was its Prophet and interpreter. The Namers and the shamans all know that I speak the truth."

  A dozen gray heads in the first circle of watch shy;ers-heads covered in beads and oils, locks caked with penitential and meditative mud-nodded in fierce agreement.

  The Prophet was a dreamer. And Stormlight? Per shy;haps he was jealous. Perhaps the gods had moved him aside.

  Stormlight himself wavered with a moment's doubt. Was he jealous, as no doubt they must believe? Had the words of Tanila and Gormion struck him so because they were the same words, spoken on the same day, or because they had touched the secret desires of his own heart?

  Yet he knew it was foolish-these doubts, these suspicions-because most foolish of all was For-dus's reckless haste. If they moved in accordance with Fordus this time, all of them, Plainsman and bandit alike, would surely fall in the grasslands north of the desert, where Istar's might was ready. There were fifty thousand of them, to the rebels' five hundred.

  He could not let that happen.

  Stormlight gathered himself for an answer. "It was your dream that began this war, Fordus. I cannot deny that. But did you dream the thousands of slaves, both Plainsman and elf, who wear the Istar-ian collars, laboring in their households and markets on their swarming docks and in their lampless mines? Did you dream the legion after legion that Istar has set before us, and did you dream the great mountains south of the city, and the lake we need to encircle, and then more plains, and, finally, the great Istarian walls, twenty feet thick, of solid stone?

  "There will be a time for great victory, a time to march through the streets of Istar in celebration, with thousands more following us, thousands more at our side. And we will set them free, and forever break the bondage Istar has put upon our people. We will leave the desert and have warm homes and restored families. But it is too soon. Istar will crush us like shells."

  He looked out over the armies. Some of the lead shy;ers-Breeze and Messenger among the Plainsmen, Gormion and Rann among the bandits-nodded in agreement with his wor
ds.

  They were war leaders, skilled soldiers all.

  A fleeting cloud of distaste moved over Fordus's face, but almost at once he converted it to a limpid sweetness. He lifted his hands-the Prophet's ges shy;ture of inspiration and blessing-and he turned with a smile toward Larken.

  "In the time of glyphs and of defense," he said, "Three of us guided you, not two. I call on Larken in this new age. I call on her song to lift us out of ques shy;tioning and debate."

  Stormlight's hopes sank as the girl stood and walked slowly to her drum. Larken was Fordus's bard; he was her true love. She had followed him for years, exalting him, adoring him.

  There was no question whose story she would tell. How could it be otherwise?

  "Let her sing," Stormlight proclaimed quietly. "She will surely sing for you. Once before you led us out of the desert's fastness, and the Kingpriest's army followed us back. There are orphans and wid shy;ows who remember that day sadly, and there are grieving ancient ones who did not expect to outlive their sons.

  "And now you lead us forth once again, and again we will follow. I will come behind you-not follow, but come behind-because the Que-Nara are my people as well, and will need someone to defend them from your great foolhardiness. Still, I cannot blame those who choose to stay behind.

  "But know this: If your ambitions outstrip your love for your people, if you venture into country that promises death like the death that swept down on us beneath the Red Plateau … why, I shall be the first to turn against you. I will kill you myself"

  With a silent prayer that his words had found lis shy;teners, Stormlight stalked from the council. The crowd parted like high grass in his passage, but he did not look back until he reached the steep, inclin shy;ing trail that led down from the plateau.

  Northstar had stayed.

  And Larken … immoveable in her uncertainty.

  Nonetheless, ninety warriors came behind him. Gormion and Rann and their henchmen, Messenger and Breeze and their followers and families descended the trail in a long, uncertain line.

  He looked toward the camp, where the muted fires, left untended, had lapsed into darkness.