The Dark Queen

by Michael Williams

  Together, the elf and the bard puzzled over the ancient text, Larken frowning at the complexities of the scattered, angular script, but Stormlight nod shy;ding, reading…

  Until he came to the lost passages. Gray dust eddied in the hands of the elf as he knelt at the campsite, spreading the opened book before him.

  Stormlight bowed over the page and inspected it for a long time. "Perhaps," he murmured, "it is in my language, and it is prophecy as well."

  "The Anlage …" he murmured. "The oldest see shy;ing."

  Long before the first migrations of the Lucanesti across the Istarian desert, before the first discoveries of glain opal, and perhaps even before the time when the elders of that dwindling people had dis shy;covered the powers of the lucerna, another deeper way of seeing had been encoded in their thoughts and memory.

  The Anlage. The great mine of elventhought. The shared memory of the race.

  In its depths lay the earliest recollections of the mining elves: their wanderings, their departure from Silvanesti. Some even said that, in the hands of a wise and anointed elf, the Anlage could reveal the earliest days-in the Age of Dreams, when the First shy;born of the world opened their eyes to moonlight upon a newly awakened planet.

  It was all there. All memory and all imagining.

  So the elders had told Stormlight in his childhood and youth, in the long years of wandering before the ambush, his wounding, and his adoption by the Plainsmen. The elders had told him how to draw upon that power as well, and of the danger therein- the risk that the visionary might not return to the waking world, but sleep and sleep until the opales-cence of age covered and swallowed him entirely.

  Yet without fear or misgiving, Stormlight sank into these meditations, tunneling deeper and deeper until he reached a level where he knew the thoughts and recollections were no longer his own, and he sank into a cloudy vein of mutual remembrance.

  Around him, his Plainsmen companions, Larken, and Vincus watched helplessly, expectantly, as though they stood on the shores of a great ocean, waiting for a distant sail.

  But Stormlight was calm, preternaturally alert. No fear, he told himself. No fear is very good.

  Mindfully, he explored the shadowy dream, a shifting landscape bedazzled with the light of both . . . no, of three moons. The five elements enfolded him: the fire of the stars, the water in the heart of the earth, the desert and stone, the parched and wander shy;ing air.

  And memory. The fifth oi the ancient elements.

  Dancing, as the elders said it did, as a gray absorbent light on the margins of vision. Stormlight directed his thought toward that grayness, and it parted before him.

  For a moment there were grasslands, the pale face of someone he neither remembered nor knew …

  Then forest.

  The book, he told himself. Keep your mind on the book.

  Briefly, a great darkness yawned to his left, full of flashing color and a strange, seductive beckoning. For a while he stood at the borders of that darkness, which seemed to call to him, promising sleep, an easeful rest.

  But that way was dangerous. He would be lost if he entered it.

  The book, he told himself. Nothing but the book.

  And then it appeared before him, its pages crisp and sharp and entirely intact. Eagerly, he opened the pages with his mind.

  He read and remembered.

  Finally, Stormlight looked up, and Vincus saw the transformation.

  For a moment the elf looked blind, his pale eyes milky and unfocused. Vincus started, believing the book had struck Stormlight sightless, but then the eyes of the elf changed again, a white shell or a pale film dropping out of his gaze and receding beneath his eyelids.

  "Come with me, Larken," Stormlight urged. He shot to his feet as though at a call for battle. Grab shy;bing the bard by the arm, he ushered her into the night, whispering a warning or strategy that reached Vincus only in snatches, in fragments.

  "Against us" he heard.

  "Incarnate. Opals."

  "Takhisis."

  And "opals" again, the last word swallowed by the rising night.

  * * * * *

  So the stones that protect us will enable her to enter the world? Larken asked.

  Stormlight nodded. "And if we deny her the stones, if we destroy them or hide them, we relin shy;quish our protection."

  Together they stood in the twilight not a hundred yards from the fire. Overhead, scarlet Lunitari reeled through the night sky, and the landscape, rock and rubble and distant tent, seemed bathed suddenly in dark blood.

  What shall we do, Stormlight?

  Her hands did not shake, Stormlight noticed. She was awaiting his command, and was not afraid.

  His face softened, and for a long time the elf stood silent. "I am not sure, Larken. Nor were the elves who wrote the manuscript. But the text is clear on one thing. Whatever it takes to stop a goddess will demand our utmost. Something perilous and alto shy;gether new.

  "Despite our quarrel, Fordus must know of it. I shall warn him this night." Without further word, the elf stalked off into the darkness, his destination the level plain to the east, the largest circle of camp-fires.

  Larken watched as Stormlight receded into the night.

  "Something perilous," he had said. "And alto shy;gether new."

  She was ready. She had changed. She felt it now, with a slow certainty. Danger and novelty no longer

  frightened her. Out of a strange solitude, she awaited the approaching change calmly and with a new eagerness.

  Stormlight came back at dawn, a great heaviness in his cold eyes.

  He had talked to Fordus, the rumors said. He had told the Prophet the news of the discovered text.

  But Fordus had stared beyond him, into the noth shy;ingness of desert and night. Had called Stormlight a dead man, said that his words no longer had life.

  Fordus had rejected him, and it was Stormlight now who stood at the edge of the sea, a powerless observer.

  By midmorning of the next day, Fordus's group had resumed the march, and by late afternoon, they had reached the foothills of the Istarian Mountains. Stormlight's troops still followed at a distance.

  Vincus leaned gratefully against an outcropping of rock, making certain that the ground around him was free of willow branches. It was the best of times to camp, he thought, before darkness fell in the midst of rough and treacherous terrain.

  A courier came back from the ranks to Fordus's rear guard, to where Vincus waited with Stormlight and two older Plainsmen, Breeze and Messenger.

  It was a man Vincus had never met-a young man named Northstar-who brought the word.

  "The Prophet Fordus," Northstar said, speaking the name in quiet and reverent tones, "had a dream in which a dead man visited him with a warning."

  Stormlight turned away at these words.

  "The dead man told him," Northstar continued, "that Takhisis herself-She of the Many Faces-has arrayed her dark powers against the rebellion, against the Prophet Fordus."

  "And what else did the . . . dead man say, North-star?" Stormlight asked bitterly, his back to the mes shy;senger.

  "All the rest was lies, says the Prophet Fordus. For Takhisis sends her minions to deceive, to waylay and destroy. Her army is the living and the dead, and none are to be believed. So says the Prophet For shy;dus.

  "But the goddess is afraid now. Her warnings and threats are the words of a beast in flight. For if she thought she could defeat the Prophet Fordus …

  "She would not let him know of her presence. She would wait, and hide, waylaying him when he least expected, when he stood at the edge of his greatest victory, rather than now, before the war has even begun."

  Stormlight shook his head.

  Vincus tried to follow the reasoning of the Water Prophet. Perhaps Northstar had not remembered it right, for it seemed cloudy and formless, a poor and shoddy logic.

  Yet Northstar was ardent, rapt, fresh from the presence of his hero, his lord.

  "We shall co
ntinue the assault on Istar," the mes shy;senger proclaimed. "Her threats are the banner of the Kingpriest's fear. So says the Prophet Fordus.

  "We shall march through the night, for speed and surprise are our allies, and the mountains will be ours by morning. Through the Central Pass we will go, and let those who dispute the word of the Prophet Fordus stay in their camps and cower.

  "We are bound for Istar, and to us will the city belong!"

  Having spoken, Northstar wheeled about and raced back up the column, his long strides eager and jubilant. Stormlight turned, an overwhelming sad shy;ness on his face, and stared at Vincus.

  " Tis the wrong pass, is it not?"

  Vincus nodded, started to gesture, to explain that it was the Western Pass that was free of the sterint, free of rockslide and shearing and the terrible destructive wind.

  But Stormlight rested his hands on Vincus's shoul shy;ders and regarded him openly, honestly.

  " 'Tis what I told him last night, when I spoke to him and warned him. Told him that I had a man in my camp who could guide him safely through the mountains if he chose to continue, but that it would be far wiser to return, to go back to the desert. And it was no dream. But he is no longer listening to me. He pulls phrases from the air, words out of their places, and distorts them into what he wants to hear-into what he says those damnable dreams and visions are telling him."

  Stormlight turned away. Far ahead, Fordus's ban shy;ners flew aloft in the dying air, red in the sunset light. Already his columns were starting to move again, and somewhere far up in Fordus's ranks, a solitary drum began a slow, stumbling cadence.

  The new drummer was no match for Larken.

  "He is completely, utterly mad," Stormlight said. "And I have no choice but to go behind him and to fight his enemies. For the time is coming when he will take my people into more than the weather, more than the death of a few in a narrow, storm-swept pass.

  "The walls of Istar are coming. And the Sixth Legion. And Takhisis herself. And before Fordus rides out to meet them, someone will have to stop him."

  Chapter 20

  The Cental Pass through the Istrian mountains was and moonlit, littered with fallen branches, with stones, with smaller, uprooted alder and fir.

  Despite Solinari and the clear sky, the rubble in the pass was an ominous prospect to Stormlight.

  Vincus had warned Stormlight, who, in turn, had tried to warn the War Prophet. Follow the Western Pass, they had urged. But Fordus had not listened, had stared through Stormlight as if he were water, all the while toying with the enormous golden circle that enclosed his neck. It bristled with spikes that seemed to grow daily with his madness.

  Now Fordus marched through the Central Pass at the head of his exhausted troops. Seven hundred had followed him before the Battle of the Plains, and scarcely five hundred survived it. Seventy had fallen to the Istarian ambush, and a dozen to the desert eruptions.

  What do you want, old friend, dear madman? Stormlight thought bitterly as Fordus's banner danced out of view. Your forces have been wrecked, and yet you march. You cannot arm a legion with promises.

  By sunrise they were midway through the Central Pass, climbing through boulders and downed pine and aeterna. Fordus's new drummer had struck up a song for courage and endurance.

  But the going grew slower and slower as dawn crept into midmorning, and by noon, their hands blistered and their limbs bruised and scratched, the trailblazers stopped to rest, and noticed to their astonishment that they had traveled only a hundred yards in the last two hours.

  There was no magic, as there had been in Larken's songs, to help.

  Aeleth, his leather armor soggy with sweat, wiped his brow and scrambled to the top of a stone out shy;cropping, glaring over the rubblestrewn wasteland.

  "What do you see, Aeleth?" Fordus called up to him.

  Aeleth thought before he answered. Suffering from shortness of breath, muttering at the thin mountainous air and the countless obstructions in the path, the War Prophet had become an impossible commander, short with his lieutenants and merciless

  in his quest to reach the other side of the pass by the evening.

  Two men had fallen over dead from exertion, and despite the urgings of the Namers, Fordus had left the bodies where they lay.

  "It's .. . it's downhill from here, sir!" Aeleth called down.

  Heartened, Fordus turned to face his followers.

  "Another vision has come to me!" he proclaimed, his bony hands clutching his golden collar, fingering the dark glain opals. "If we march through the night, we cover ourselves with the mantle of surprise. When we reach the shore of Lake Istar, there will be nothing the Kingpriest can do to stop our advances!"

  The storm charged upon them suddenly, rolling out of the south in a rumbling chaos like a herd of horses.

  For a moment the air was still, and the hardy mountain birds-raptor and thrush, the loud purple jays of northern Ansalon-fell quiet in anticipation of the rising wind.

  Then it surged through the pass behind them like a flash flood through a dry arroyo, the wind picking up velocity and force as it barreled over the felled trees, over the rocks and boulders, scattering sand and gravel and branches as it shrieked through the pass.

  Stormlight turned around in astonishment as the wind roared past and over him, knocking him to the ground and thundering through the back of his followers.

  Children were swept up and dashed against the rockface. Terrified, their mothers screamed for them, their words lost and useless. Stormlight covered his ears in the fierce, deafening wail, and a wave of sand broke over them, stinging and abrading.

  Up ahead, a felled vallenwood launched into the air and crashed into Gormion and a handful of her followers. The bandit captain shrieked and rolled from the path of the hurtling limbs, scattering ear shy;rings and bracelets as the wind took her up, buoyed her, and hurled her, alive, into a stand of aeterna.

  The rest of the bandits fared even less well. The vallenwood branches exploded with screams as the heavy tree crushed the hapless men against the rocks.

  Clinging to Stormlight and Breeze, Vincus rode out the storm with his head in his hood. The pass vanished in a whirl of sand, and from the murky cyclone ahead he could hear wail and outcry. Occa shy;sionally a dark, unrecognizable shape rocketed past, and from somewhere back up the pass came the skidding, too-human sound of frightened horses.

  Then, as suddenly as it had rushed over them, the storm was gone. The sand settled lazily over the mountain rocks-the desert transported by the fierce and merciless weather-and slowly, almost imperceptibly, a few moving shapes emerged from rock and sand and thicket.

  When they all had gathered, they were sixty less.

  A new wailing began, the ancient funerary call of the Que-Nara rising like another wind, echoing from the mountainsides. Plaintively, eerily, the cry spread through the Central Pass, until even'the returning birds began to sing in response-thrush and jay in full cry from the ravaged, wind-blasted trees.

  But Fordus scrambled up the rockface, clinging like a grotesque spider, and waved his hand for silence.

  It was a long time coming. The rebels were griev shy;ing, swept away by the dark river of their own sor shy;row.

  "It is the vengeance of Takhisis," Fordus rasped, his breath shallow and panting. But nobody was lis shy;tening.

  "Hear the word of the Prophet!" he cried. A hun shy;dred pairs of eyes looked up at him, new fear flicker shy;ing alongside their old devotion. The rest of the survivors milled aimlessly, combing the rubble for the injured and the dead.

  "There are a thousand roads to Istar," Fordus pro shy;claimed, his voice gaining power and authority as the words rushed from him. "Each of those roads is guarded, with torment and danger and hardship.

  "But we have passed through the first of these hardships, my people. And though there are some we must leave behind …"

  His gesture toward the gathered bodies of the dead was quick and casual, as though he brushed away a fly.
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  "Let them be remembered, and let their names be sung, at the time when we will remember all the fallen, commemorate all those who spilled their blood in my glorious cause."

  Still clinging to the rockface, Fordus pointed north, the collar at his neck afire in the reflected light of the sunset.

  "Their names will be sung around the throne of Istar, when I ascend to the lordship of the great Imperial City. We will sing them in glory when I am Kingpriest, set to the music of drum and passing bell. For the glyphs and the signs and my own dreams have told me that the rule of Istar is mine.

  "You have followed my dream through four hard seasons. We have sown seed in the bitter ground of the desert, in obscurity and distance and sand, where all ambition was water. We have watered the plains with our blood, and tilled in the storm-furrowed mountain passes. Now Istar stands open to bandit and Plainsmen. My worthy rival-the kin shy;dred warrior and prophet in the Kingpriest's Tower-has met his adversary in the southern fields! The season has come! Set your hand to the harvest!"

  For a moment the rebels fell into complete, aston shy;ished silence. All eyes were riveted on the Water Prophet, all ears turned to his feverish, wild pro shy;nouncements.

  "Hear the word of the Prophet!" Northstar shouted.

  A pathetic tap-tap, late and halfhearted, accompa shy;nied his cry.

  "The word of the Prophet King!" the young man continued, unfazed and triumphant, and to the sur shy;prise of the elders and the Namers, a voice deep in the milling rebels took up the call-a dark voice, nei shy;ther masculine nor feminine, but a voice that seemed to rise up within the hearts of all assembled. Another cried in response, and another, and soon the young men, chanting "The Prophet King! The Prophet King!" lifted Fordus atop their shoulders and bore him through the wreckage, through the wide path that the wind had cut over rock and rubble and undergrowth.

  At the mouth of the pass, Larken, Vincus, and a score of Que-Nara remained, as Fordus's compan shy;ions hastened toward the lakeside road and the plains and city beyond. Her dark eyes distant and mournful, Larken watched as the Prophet's banner was hoisted into the air, and the walls of the moun shy;tain pass resounded with this new and alien cheer.