Queen of Thorns

by Dave Gross

  "Can we cut through it?" said Oparal.

  "Better not," said Fimbulthicket.

  "Is now really the time to lecture us on forest preservation?" said Kemeili.

  "It's not that," he said, oblivious to her sarcasm. "There may be a portal, or at least a better place to enter. There is something ...familiar ..." He walked beside the dome, his fingers trailing across the massive vines at its base.

  "Familiar in what way?" I asked.

  The gnome did not answer. Instead, he pulled off his shoes and dug his bare toes into the earth. With his white hands against the barrier, he pressed his cheek against the wood and closed his eyes. His lips moved, but I could not hear his words. I glanced at Caladrel, who shook his head.

  We waited until Fimbulthicket had finished his silent communion. With a sigh, he stepped away from the wall and wiped the dirty soles of his feet upon the grass. Noticing a fallen rowan branch, he lifted it to peer at the tiny insects crawling over is fruit. "The eldest vines will not speak to me, but I sense a million voices all intertwined with them. Some are much younger. I sense that some of them have known Variel's hand."

  "Just how adept in the Green is he?"

  "Oh, nothing like whomever—or whatever—originally created this place. But even when we parted, he was far more powerful than I. Since then, I have grown very little in the Green, although since that night at Erithiel's Hall I feel it more keenly than I ever did before. I ...understand things better. We gnomes and elves and humans, we think we hold such a grand place in the world." He indicated the aphids on the rowan fruit. "But our lives are no more meaningful than those of these tiny things." After his uncharacteristically long speech, he seemed to forget the rest of us. He plucked an aphid from the rowan fruit and crushed it between his fingers, whispering to its remains, "Where are you, Variel?"

  The rest of us looked to each other, unwilling to speak until Radovan clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. "Well, let's have a look around."

  We began a sunwise circuit of the dome. After a quarter of an hour, Caladrel spied an arched opening in the dome wall.

  Caladrel scanned the ground before the gate, beckoning the rest of us over to see the fresh prints. "Cloven hooves."

  "The leucrottas?"

  "Without a doubt."

  "Did they go back in this way?" asked Radovan.

  "No, the tracks lead only out, and in some haste," said Caladrel. "Besides, if the outer barrier keeps out intelligent creatures, how would they return?"

  "A good point," I admitted. "Let us look inside."

  Radovan and Oparal bumped shoulders as each tried to be the first one through. Radovan stepped back and, with a surprisingly courtly bow, ceded the right of way. Oparal eyed him for any evidence of mockery before stepping through. Radovan passed her pack through the gate and began to follow, but Kemeili put a hand on his chest. "Do you reserve these Chelish courtesies for the Forlorn?"

  She pushed past him as he searched for the elusive correct response. When she was inside, he grinned, shook his head, and followed. A moment later, he called Arnisant through.

  Caladrel waited for me to go next. Fimbulthicket sighed, and I turned to see, for the first time since Erithiel's Hall, a broad smile materialized on his face.

  "You look pleased."

  "Aren't you?" he replied. "We're about to see something we've never seen before."

  Despite suffering the final throes of the Bleaching, some tiny flame of curiosity lingered in Fimbulthicket's heart. I would not be the one to dampen it. I stepped aside and duplicated Radovan's gallant gesture. "After you."

  Chapter Twelve

  The Second Sting

  Radovan

  We moved into the dome city. For a long time, nobody said a word.

  We could barely see the city for the trees. Here and there a few yards of sand-colored stone peeked out from the greenery. Carvings covered every inch of the stones, but before I could follow the lines far enough to make out a picture, the green took over again. Where there weren't weeds there were flowers, and where there weren't flowers there was moss. Trees sprouted up out of foundations and roofs through tower windows.

  The whole place was like an overgrown garden, but nothing grew like the vines. They crawled along the streets and up the walls. They choked alleys and smothered statues. They hung off the edges of roofs and wound around ruined towers.

  Every living thing beneath the dome was a giant. I saw ivy leaves big enough to make me a sun hat, blossoms I could have used for a chair. A distant buzzing reminded me of the pony-sized wasps I'd seen back in Iadara, and I hoped they stayed distant.

  I began to feel like an ant in a basket. That feeling got stronger when I saw a beetle twice Arni's size crossing the street ahead of us. It paused, sensing us. The boss signaled a halt. Caladrel drew an arrow from his magic quiver, but the big bug lumbered away before we had to get rough.

  A fat shaft of light slanted through the dome's open roof, shining on the eastern hills. Shadows from the woven dome mottled the rest of the city. With all those vines above us, it felt like we'd never left the woods.

  We climbed a giant mass of shelf fungus to reach the roof of a house. From there we could see across the whole city.

  Caladrel pointed at three hulking figures shambling down one of main roads. They could have been shaggy bears except for their dripping green coats dotted with mushrooms and flowers. We took turns pointing as we spotted more and more critters moving in the distance. Most looked to be plants, insects, or reptiles, but now and then we heard the faraway cry of a hunting cat or the grunt of a boar.

  The boss passed around his spyglass. On my turn, I saw a one-eyed giant pull a fish from a lake and dash its brains out on a rock. There were lots of other beasts moving around in the jungle, but Kemeili grabbed the spyglass away before I could get a good look.

  Even without the glass I could make out the four spires the boss had seen from the air. They rose as high as the towers in Iadara, but they looked more like monuments than homes. Just like he'd told us, there were two empty spots where a couple more should have stood.

  Between the spire and a clear central area, a couple of fountains sparkled in the evening light. A third pool completed the circle, but instead of water it was full of fuzzy green and yellow lumps. Long-plumed birds roosted on a nearby trellis. One flew over to pluck some crawling thing off the mound. The bird barely escaped a fat, wet tendril reaching after it.

  From the hub of spires and fountains, six main roads shot out like the spokes of a wagon wheel, dividing the city into pie-slice neighborhoods. The northeast and southwest sections gave in to jungle. I saw a few buildings in the overgrown areas, but I guessed they'd been gardens a long time ago. A reflecting pool wide enough to float a barge ran the length of the one to the south. The water escaped its original borders, filling half the district with a lake. Lily pads and patches of green scum covered the surface.

  From our building, we could still see more or less what the other districts had been. Ours had been a neighborhood of houses and shops, with a few towers here and there. A few overgrown strips of land might have been gardens a thousand years ago, but they'd been smothered in woods. In the corner closest to the central plaza stood a few rows of pillars that might have held up a roof when the world was young.

  To the north, the houses spread out on either side of a line of towers. Four rose as high as any I'd seen in Iadara, but three had fallen. One was a black stub, barely more than one story high. Nothing grew on the foundation, but gray and yellow oozes slid along the stones.

  To the southeast lay a temple district. A cloud of insects hovered over an onion-shaped dome, reminding me of the temple of Calistria in Iadara. A few streets down I saw what might have been a twin-goddess gate covered in grape vines. I drew the wings of Desna over my heart and prayed she'd smile on me in this weird place.

  Over to the east was where the rich elves must have lived—on the highest hills so they could look down on everybo
dy else. A big amphitheater sat right in the middle of the neighborhood. The sun reflected plenty of glitter under its crumbling shell of a roof. Any of the four or five surrounding mansions could have been a palace. There wasn't nearly as much overgrowth crawling over them as on the rest of the city. Maybe there was some magic on them that kept the weeds away.

  Or maybe somebody was home.

  We must have stood there an hour, taking turns pointing out each new sight crazier than the last. Big silky balls floated high above us. The boss and Fimbulthicket debated whether they were giant puff seeds or poisonous spores.

  Fimbulthicket and Caladrel pointed out places where they saw dangerous plants or animals. They and the boss took turns naming them. They sounded plenty nasty. The boss marked those spots on a map he sketched in his journal.

  "I've never seen such a high concentration of rare flora." The little guy's voice sounded like it came up out of a deep well before getting out of his mouth. He was panting, too. I couldn't tell whether he was just excited or having another attack.

  "Someone must be cultivating them," said the boss.

  "I'll have a look around," said Caladrel. I kind of wanted to go with him if the boss and Fimbulthicket were going to talk plant theory.

  "Wait," said the boss. "The city teems with dangerous wildlife."

  "That's exactly what I'm trained to handle."

  "Yet this is foreign territory, even to you. The flora and fauna of this bramble city might be the least of its dangers."

  "Consider the lesson of the leucrotta," said Oparal. She looked at me and said, "We mustn't allow anyone to be lured away."

  "Hey, you got lured first," I said. Kemeili smiled at that, but it was a stupid thing to mention. Oparal wouldn't have gone off on her own at the Wandering Spheres except I was trying to get rid of her. Come to think of it, I wouldn't have done that except for Kemeili's secret word spell. I wondered whether getting rid of Oparal was my idea or hers. I started to think Kemeili was playing me more often than I'd realized.

  "I take your point," said Caladrel. "I'll stay within shouting distance, but if we're to remain here, I must be sure the site is secure."

  "We'll scout together," said the boss. "What we lose in speed we'll gain in strength."

  "As you wish," said Caladrel. He didn't look happy about it. "The wasps will become more active as the air cools. We must find a secure site to make our camp."

  "In that case, let us find an unsealed building, or better yet an entrance to a subterranean level."

  "This is not a dwarven city," said Oparal. "I doubt you'll find more than a cellar."

  "On the contrary, I expect to find a substantial network of aqueducts. The city waterworks appear far too extensive to be supported by magic alone. The inoperative fountain in the plaza suggests a mechanical rather than arcane source of water. There must be springs or pressure wells feeding the system."

  "That makes sense," said Kemeili. "The temple baths in Iadara are fed by underground channels that also feed the nearby spires."

  The boss pointed to a fountain on the nearest road. "Let us search for an entrance. There must be maintenance access throughout the city."

  Caladrel led the way. He took us along a street of single-story houses. The boss paused at one of the ones wrapped up in vines. The vines wound around the building in regular patterns, like bandages. The boss put his hand on one, felt how hard it clung to the building, and moved on.

  Most of the unbound houses had lost their domes. Trees sprung up from inside to form a roof of leaves. I wondered why we didn't see any critters perched on the branches. Then I saw one of the branches open its insect eyes. As we got closer, it opened up like a blossom, growing ten times bigger and showing off bright colors under its bark-colored disguise.

  The sun sank lower. Shadows leaned east, and bobbing lights popped up above our half of the city. Way bigger than the lightning bugs we'd seen in the forest, they hovered around the big floating puffballs. They gathered in twos and threes before splitting up, searching for something on the ground. When one brightened or changed from blue to yellow, the others rushed to join it. They sank together toward the ground.

  "Will-o'-wisps," said Caladrel. "They are drawn to the fear of the hunted."

  "They're all over the place," said Kemeili.

  "This city teems with prey."

  "And predators," said the boss. "We must find our shelter soon."

  We paused a couple of times to test the strength of the vines binding the houses. Maybe with ten more guys and axes we could have gotten through.

  I wondered why these joints were shut tight. My curiosity heated up, and I began to understand how the boss felt all the time. We listened for any sound from inside the houses, but we couldn't hear anything over the birds and bugs outside. What was in there that somebody wanted hidden? Or what was in there that somebody didn't want getting out?

  Near the main road, the boss chose a small building that looked like a guard station with a slanting wall.

  "The shape suggests a stairwell." He pressed a hand against the wall at different heights. "It feels cooler near street level. It must lead to an underground passage."

  "If there's fresh water down there, it would make an excellent shelter," said Caladrel. Nobody else objected. The boss gave me the nod to check it out.

  First I got rid of the ivy hanging over the door. It wasn't nearly as thick as the vines of the closed houses, but I still needed the big knife. The door looked like the petrified wood of Kemeili's spire back in Iadara, only a sandy color instead of silvery white. Where there should have been a lock, I found a pair of three-spoked dials set into the door. I'd seen something like that before.

  "The Krupt vault," said the boss.

  I nodded. He'd never seen it, but the boss remembered what I'd told him about the weird lock I'd found in Baron Krupt's mansion. While he distracted the baron, I found the vault behind a phony bookcase. Then it was a matter of listening for the pins clicking into place over the sound of the weeping girl trapped inside. It took almost an hour, but by the time the baron shooed the boss out of his parlor, all he found in his secret torture chamber was a note telling him to expect a visit from the duxotar.

  I twisted these simpler dials and listened for the click of pins. "Should be no problem."

  "A lock-cracker," said Oparal. "I should have known."

  "You might be surprised at how he has employed that talent," said the boss.

  I shushed them both, straining to hear the difference between the catches on each dial.

  Kemeili leaned close, pretending get a better look at the latch—it was too simple to call a lock—but what she really wanted was to distract me with her breasts on my shoulder.

  "I'm doing this," I said, wriggling away.

  "I can help." She wriggled back into place.

  "Not now." I'd felt which pin snapped heaviest on either dial, but even when I triggered them at the same time, I couldn't budge the door in or out.

  "Try twisting them in opposite directions."

  "I know what I'm doing," I said. Still, it was worth a try. I turned one dial sunwise, the other widdershins, timing it so that the big pin dropped on each dial at the same time.

  The mechanism clicked into place.

  "See?" said Kemeili. "Good things come of listening to me."

  "I'll give you that—"

  A shiver ran through my body. It took a second to realize I was feeling a vibration in the air and through the ground. It took another second to realize that what I felt was really a sound so deep I could barely hear it.

  The birds stopped singing. I still heard the buzz of insects. Caladrel nocked an arrow. The boss and Oparal put their hands on their swords. Fimbulthicket hugged his arms close, and Kemeili touched her belly where the symbol of Calistria lay beneath her leathers.

  "What the hell was that?" I whispered.

  Oparal stepped away from the little building and looked up toward the center of the dome. Her voice was a
ragged whisper. "We shouldn't be here."

  A shadow moved across the dome, bigger than a storm cloud, but there was no wind to move it so fast across the sky. The shadow passed over the dome opening and disappeared.

  The dragon came into view.

  Even from a quarter-mile away, I felt the size of the thing. It could have held a fishing boat in either talon, wrapped its green wings around any tower in the city. Yellow plumes trailed from its nostrils as it turned its massive head from side to side, eyes seeking some unfortunate thing on the ground.

  Looking up at it, I suddenly felt the need to piss.

  The dragon spied its target and angled toward the northeast parkland. Something fell from the dragon's mouth. It looked like a couple of dead deer at first, but I recognized their striped pelts. The leucrottas crashed through the trees. An instant later, elven voices cried out in terror on the ground, and the sound of a stampede echoed across the city.

  "Look at the horn on that thing," Fimbulthicket peeped. For the first time since Erithiel's Hall, he sounded less scary than scared. "It must be ten centuries old!"

  "Calm yourself," said Caladrel. He pointed at a pair of glowing lights swooping down at us. "Your fear draws the wisps."

  "You calm yourself," snapped the gnome. The menace returned to his voice. "We have to get under cover."

  I pushed against the unlatched door, but it didn't budge. I gave it my shoulder, but it moved less than an inch.

  "Step aside," said Oparal.

  Before I could move, she slammed her shoulder into the door. Pulpy gunk crackled at the edges, but it opened a little more. A musty stink rolled out of the little building, and I heard a rustling.

  "Wait!" Too late to stop her.

  Oparal put all her weight and strength into it, smashing the door open and falling into a writhing mass of insect larvae. They crawled over the ruins of a papery gray mess we'd knocked off the door and onto a stair landing.

  "It's a nest!" shouted Kemeili.

  I stepped in and grabbed Oparal by the belt. She was already struggling to stand, gagging as fat white grubs swarmed over her. They were the size of my thumb, each one with a pair of dark red pincers wriggling around to catch hold of something soft.