Red Queen

by Jolie Jaquinta

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Many hours later the sun shone against the thick curtains shielding the window of the Queen's personal chambers in the high city palace. The royal armor stood, battered, but not broken, in one corner, on and around its stand. A large tub of bath water was cooling in the center of the room, and damp towels lay on the floor between it and the large bed piled high with quilts.

  Jesca lay amongst the feathered comforters and down pillows. Her eyes had just closed, and her breathing had begun to slow when she became aware of some indefinable change in the quality of the environment. Her brow furrowed and she pushed the quilts back and sat up in her bed. Standing at the foot of her bed was the Grey Elf.

  “Swan”, she said, with certainty. He looked much like the Elves she knew, although of a slightly different caste. However something unspecific in the way he stood, or in his eyes, or the angle of his head made her think without doubt of an elegant waterfowl.

  He smiled, dipping his head, speaking volumes with his gestures, yet nothing clearly. “I apologize for disturbing your rest.”

  She snorted. “I guess I got your attention.”

  He raised his finger to his cheek, considering. “Your actions have precipitated events that definitely call for notice. A nostalgic affection for disturbing the bones of our arrival point. The hopeful signs of a stirring in the heart of the one that first acted when you were in extremis. And wondering how much such use of cataclysmic energies heralds for the future.” He shrugged apologetically. “A lot is certainly happening. But our models break down when it comes to individual motives and results. I think it may be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff for some time.”

  “But they tell me you are all about individual actions”, she said, a trace annoyed.

  He smiled modestly. “It is a theory of mine. That they matter more than we have reckoned. An explanation why our experiments have not been successful so far. The others have humored me, since they consider this run a write off anyway. They let me tinker.”

  “Written off? Our whole existence? Everything we've done? Everything we're to do? You've just... whoops! Let’s try again. This isn't important.”

  “Oh no”, said Swan, holding up a finger, and looking more serious for the first time. “This is very important. There is much at stake. Our whole existence.”

  “Ours or yours?” she shot back.

  “We don't distinguish”, he said. He moved his arms in a wide gesture. “There's a much bigger... experiment, if you will call it that, unfolding out there. It hasn't gone well. We upset a few people. That's why we're cooling our heels here. Our hope had been that we would gain some insight through your creation to redirect things out there more to our liking.”

  “To upset less people?” Jesca said, voice heavy with irony.

  Swan turned back to her, completely serious. “Not at all. We hope to upset a great deal of people. A great deal.”

  Jesca rubbed her head. “I'm not sure I've understood a word you've said. Do you always have to be so vague and mysterious?”

  “I don't know”, said Swan sadly. “Rose is coming around to my way of thinking and would rather speak more directly. But I think you would understand that even less. This is all very complicated and very far removed from what you do.” He straightened the corner of her quilt. “Ironic, though, that it is what you do that may have such a bearing on everything.”

  She sighed heavily. “Great. More responsibility.” She stared at Swan for a while, who seemed to be entranced by the patterns on her blankets. “What do I do with them?” she asked him.

  A smile played about his lips. “A very good question. What do you do with them?”

  Jesca swallowed hard. “Right now they're stuffed into our soul jars fit to burst while we debate the morality of resurrection versus reincarnation.” His expression did not change. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Remember”, he said, looking up. “I don't know how to solve the experiment. There is no point in asking me the answer to any of your dilemmas. Any path I might guide you on is just going to be something we've already thought of. And everything we've thought of hasn't worked. I'm rather hoping that you think of something we haven't thought of.”

  “That's kind of a tall order”, she said. “Especially when I don't even know what end result you are looking for.”

  “Very true”, he said. But he didn't say anything further.

  “So why are you here then?” she asked after a time.

  “A lot is happening”, he repeated. “I just wanted to see you. To understand how you felt. Here, in the middle of it all. If individuals are critical, this is an important data point.”

  “But you have no intention of guiding me. To tinker”, she said, challengingly.

  He grimaced. “Any contact, inevitably, changes things. So, yes, being here must be to some end, in spite of all I have said. Touché.”

  “So out with it. Tell me something. Anything.”

  Swan looked at her for a long time. “I already have” he said quietly. And before she opened her mouth to berate him, “but I will repeat. We wish to see you surpass us. When you become more than we are, then you will take our place, and things will really start to get interesting.”

  Jesca gave him a long suffering look, and then rubbed her eyes. “That's not exactly the clarity I was hoping for.” But when she looked up, he was gone.

  After a long sigh, she hit her pillow several times in frustration. Her shoulders sagged and her exhaustion returned. She fell back into the cushions and drew the blanket over her face.

  After a moment or two she pushed it back again with resignation. She pulled a bell cord and dragged her robe on. When the staff she had summoned entered she said “Call a council of the Mages. Tell them I've had a visit from a Grey Elf.”

   

  Afterword

  Thank you for reading “Red Queen”, the first book in the Six Books of Magic series.

  The second book, White Mage focuses on Bianca. She is the child of Goatha and Moss, and was raised studying the Six Books of Magic. She has adopted the harsh culture of her Mother and is stern and obsessively focused. Her time is consumed with what she feels is the only way the gods can be combated on equal terms: the Ævatar. This is a massive constructed being that, if working, would let someone wield great power. The problem is that it lacks a Soul, and seeks to devour the Soul of anyone controlling it. The opening chapter of White Mage is included here.

  Books in this series:

  Black Warrior (forthcoming)

  Green Princess (forthcoming)

  Blue Pawn (forthcoming)

  Do you have questions about this book, the series, want to know what went on off stage, or before the events chronicled? The characters in the book are available to answer anything you might ask. Please post your questions on the Facebook page below and they will reply, in persona.

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  White Mage, Chapter 1

  Relief

  Bianca shuddered and gasped and drew a ragged breath as the tremors subsided. She could feel them depart as she exerted her will against them. But they did not withdraw completely. They reflected and rebounded around the geography, the dissonant chords of their progress mocking her with echoes that sounded of laughter. She stilled herself, and took three deliberate deep breaths, holding them and willing her body calm. Pale hands pushed straw colored hair away from blue eyes. She then took stock of her situation.

  Off grey parapets and causeways, buttresses and ramps filled her sight in all directions. They intersected at all angles and paid no heed to any conventiona
l notion of up or down. They also shifted and changed. Slowly, when left to their own ends, but rapidly and reactionary when the crescendo of the Noise was upon them.

  Amongst the chaos there was structure. They grew thicker in some directions, and more branched in others. A certain section was more grey-green, another grey-pink. The faint color differentiation along with the thickness gave a radial clue. It was enough to navigate by.

  Her peripheral vision caught a stirring of changing branches further out. She pushed off and focused her will in that direction. Physical movement was almost as irrelevant as orientation here. She flew across the space in-between, somersaulting halfway over a balustrade and refocusing her will to stop. She landed in a small outbreak of Noise, crashed and rolled quickly to recover, gaining her feet right away. She ducked and dodged its shimmering sonic presence easily and keened her own response. Vocalization was not really necessary. In reality it was only a battle of Will. But the focus made it easier to actualize.

  The echo died. It was only a small outbreak. She looked around suspiciously and then saw it. Rolling in from opposite directions came two breakers of Noise. Archways twisted and writhed in their passage and they were moving too quickly for Bianca to evade the trap.

  They crashed on top of her and she screamed as the cacophony of non-sound invaded her consciousness and filled her head with visions of twitching crawling things that bent in all the wrong ways. Focus gone, she dove in one direction, whipping out her knife. Tendrils of Noise undulated towards her and she slashed at them. In her vision they took on the aspect of a nightmare form. But it gave her a base to react against. Instinctively, she darted at what appeared to be vulnerable points, ducked under its haphazard flailing, and dodged around it.

  Her mind cleared as the familiar actions gave her an anchor. Driving her knife tip into a joint and evading a set of dropping coils she forced a mental separation between herself and the Noise. She circled and jumped lightly from one parapet to another, then slashed at its “back”. That had been a close call. But now she had her focus back, and it only took a few more telling blows before the Noise dispersed once more.

  She did her breathing exercise again and sheathed her knife. On one level she knew that none of this was physically real. Her knife could no more hurt what she fought than harsh words. Reality was metaphysical. It really came down to her Will against the Will of the Noise. She had a lot of training, though, in expressing her Will through her knife against another's physical weak points. So bending the perception of the environment to that analog played to a strength of hers.

  She had no idea how the Noise saw things, or if it had any consciousness at all. From what she knew, it wasn't even a whole being. Just the merest fraction of the tiniest splinter of Will from an Ancient.  A being of such magnitude that the most brief and passing encounter with it had left this rippling Noise cascading around the psyche of the man whose mind she was lightly jogging through. Left unchecked, it drove him screaming and raving insane. Such was the fate of those who dealt with powers beyond mortal knowledge.

  However, dealing with powers beyond mortal knowledge was her job. Not usually the Ancients. She was, personally, more familiar with the Grey Elves. Although of the same order of being as the Ancients, there was more of a basis of understanding, as they had created the world as she knew it. At least one had interest in the affairs of the Empire she served, although exactly what interest was very hard to tell.

  Bianca preferred much more concrete problems. You couldn't stick your knife into the Noise unless you could see it as a physical target. Her dealing with the Grey Elves took the form of a book. The Book of Creation. Purportedly written by them in some impenetrable eldritch language. The written word was far too crude a mechanism for them to record their unfathomable thoughts in. So they used a Hydragyranium based ink. More commonly known as the poison 'fixated mercury'. This would produce death through madness if ingested. Proximity merely caused wild hallucinations. When employed as an art form, coupled with the pictures in the book, a greater meaning was conveyed in more than just words.

  So she was not a stranger to courting insanity. Especially as interpretation was difficult and the temptation was always there to spend more time with the book rather than pursuing the myriad avenues of research that it’s potential opened up. But the book was 8,000 years old, and she was not the first to plumb its depths. The previous owner had gone quite deep. He paid the price, but he left some of his work: the Ævatars.

  Twenty times the height of a man, these giant creations of stitched together flesh were done, apparently, at the direction of the sections of the book on anatomy. One had been found intact, one in the process of being built, and one in the process of being destroyed. Based on the notes, these creatures were expected to have powers proportional to their size. Enough to challenge the gods. This is exactly why her Empire needed them.

  However, they were not simply machines. They were genuinely like the humans they emulated, down to the metaphysical level. Every creature that moved had Animus. Biology differed from species to species, but it was always the spiritual Animus that imparted the directive to move a creature. This was the simplest of the three metaphysical qualities. In the case of the Ævatar, Animus was easily supplied via directed magical energies.

  Animus is just the directive to move. In and of itself it could do nothing. What was needed was a Will to impose why to move. A Will was an intellectual force, a desire, an intention. Animals are mostly creatures of Will. They seek and hunt according to this. The Ævatar possessed a latent Will. It was there, but undirected. That's where its rider came in. Built into the frame, in the abdomen, was a compartment for a rider. The design of the creature was such that its Will was linked to that of the rider. When a rider expressed their Will, it was reflected and amplified by the Ævatar.

  What the Ævatar lacked was a Soul. The essence and the function of a Soul was not yet well understood. All animals and even many species of humanoids that did not dwell on the surface lacked a Soul and seemed to get on just fine. But what they also lacked was the inherent ability to work magic. Something in the complex interaction between Soul, Will and Animus created mana; spiritual energy. In the religious, it was implicitly offered up to their gods, who collected it and maintained their majestic domains, and granted the occasional miracle. A mage was one who could use their own mana to work their own miracles; spells.

  An Ævatar did not have a soul. But it hungered for one. This was the biggest problem Bianca faced in her research. She, herself, had attempted to drive the Ævatar several times. However, as the bond strengthened the observers saw an increased pressure on her Soul, drawing it into the Ævatar, and aborted the attempts. Given the theoretical power of an Ævatar, she shuddered to think what one would do if it had its own soul and could operate undirected.

  It was just a technical problem. Unless she was forced to go back to basics and reinterpret The Book of Creation from scratch, it should be solvable. Given time. But time was not a luxury there was much of. The gods considered the Empire of Romitu an affront to them, having already meddled in divine affairs. It was only a matter of time before they overcame their natural dysfunctional nature and joined together to cleanse her Empire from the face of the earth. Unfortunately her Empire had plenty of dysfunctionality to overcome to mount a defense against this inevitability.

  And that is why she was here. The mage whose mind was being trampled by the Noise was considered important. No so much by Bianca, since he was doubtful of the Ævatar project. But the only person Bianca could count on for support felt this man not only important enough to marry, but also to spent the time she might otherwise be spending helping Bianca fighting up and down the highways and byways of his mind to keep the Noise at bay and secure his sanity.

  And there she was.

  In a contorted tangle of bridges of a greyish yellow she fought. The amplitude of Noise here was much greater than Bianca had seen so far. She steeled herself and felt the cold s
ettle inside as she realized that all she had fought so far was but misplaced trifles. The peaks of the standing waves of Noise converged here. She did not hesitate and, instead, flung herself across the space, rolling to a landing in the midst of it all.

  “Hello Mother”, she said.