The Gathering of the Lost

by Helen Lowe

  “Your help would be appreciated,” she said to Nhenir, and was almost surprised when the helm shielded them at once. Malian took a deep breath in and felt the quick shift of Tarathan’s attention toward her—so she told him about Nhenir. To her surprise, he laughed softly when she explained how the helm pursued its own path. “I suppose it is amusing,” she conceded reluctantly.

  “I feel like I’ve just walked into a story I loved when I was very young,” he explained, “the tale of the priestess-queen, Zharaan, and her First, Kiyan, in the early years after the Cataclysm. The world had stilled, but demons were slaying every priestess elected to the nine places left empty by the great rite. Zharaan was the third queen within a year in her temple, her Seven all just children like herself. But she was strong, and when the demons came, she tore open a portal and fled with Kiyan. They found themselves in a misterious cavern filled with sleeping warriors, one whom bore a sword on his breast that was possessed by a ghost. And the ghost told Kiyan how to use the weapon to defeat the demons. The sword had a will of its own, too,” he added, when Malian remained silent, staring toward him through the darkness that concealed both their faces. “Without the ghost it would never have answered to Kiyan’s need, because it was sworn to another path.”

  Malian’s heart was hammering in slow painful thuds. She remembered standing in the same cave in her Winter Country dreaming five years ago, her hand stretching toward the sword on the sleeping captain’s breast. Nhenir had not given any sign of recognizing the sword—and the presence had told her that it was not yet time for the Awakening. She had assumed it meant the sleepers, but even by speaking, she realized now, it had distracted her from the sword. She tried to keep her mindvoice easy. “Does your story say why the ghost helped them?”

  “According to the legend,” Tarathan replied quietly, “she said that she had done a great deal that she regretted, but had never condoned the murder of children.” He paused. “The story has upset you.”

  ‘She’, Malian thought. “Not the story,” she said, keenly aware of the depth of Nhenir’s silence, even though the helm continued to shield them both. With an effort, she pulled herself together. “And we need to deal with whatever’s happening down here.”

  Creating a false impression, she thought, unhappy with herself—but felt his silent agreement and the flow of his power, searching the tunnels more aggressively. She let her seeker’s sense remain linked to his, concealing the fact that they were two and not one. He was silent, his concentration fierce, and then she felt him pause. “The one being hunted is Zhineve-An.”

  She was unsure whether to ask how he recognized her so easily.

  “She is a queen of Jhaine,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “One without her Seven, which leaves her particularly vulnerable.”

  Malian nodded, because walking the path of earth and moon had given her a better understanding of the bond between a queen and her Seven. “Even on her own, she still has power.”

  “She is inexperienced—and not strong for a priestess-queen, in any case.” He hesitated, frowning. “She may already be hurt in some way as well.”

  Wounded, perhaps, and lost somewhere in the dark—as Malian herself had been once, in the Old Keep of Winds, until Kalan found her. “I thought I told you to watch over them?” she said to Nhenir. She thought the helm might not answer, knowing there was a reckoning coming because of the sword, but eventually it spoke, the silver voice distant.

  “You told me to watch over the countess—in part because you did not trust the queen. I did all that you asked and more: I kept the countess’s enemies from her. Besides, only her life need be preserved to secure the information you require about the Lost.”

  Can I blame the helm, Malian asked herself, for being what it is? She pushed aside her exasperation and concentrated on tracking down the hunter. Swarm, she thought, as the dark familiar taint assailed her senses. The quality of the hunter’s power, coiled behind it, was seamless: she could almost see the sorcery’s midnight sheen through her seeking. She could detect more of the sheen emotions as well, the pleasure taken from both the slow hunt and the prey’s rising fear.

  “Cat and mouse,” Tarathan agreed. “He believes he has her beneath his paw. But she is still trying to seek out a path to safety. It’s bringing her to us,” he added, steel whispering as he drew the swallowtail swords.

  We need to move toward her, Malian thought, and intercept the hunter—except I’m blind in this blackness. “I know,” she said tartly, before Nhenir could make the observation again. “I need to eat the dark.”

  “Or,” Tarathan said mildly, “you could draw on a little of the light that burns in you, the way you did in the Old Keep.”

  Malian remained quite still, because she had been concealing the light that was part of her inheritance for so long, both in her first flight from the Swarm—which had used it to track her—and then to preserve the secret of her identity within the Shadow Band. Slowly, she lifted her arm, letting the sleeve fall back from Yorindesarinen’s armring as she summoned light into her mind. She visualized a candle burning with a clear, steady flame, then mentally touched it to the surface of the armring. The fire bound into the metal danced into silver life, which Malian instantly muted to a glimmer. Just enough, she thought, to light a way for their feet while their minds were seeking ahead—and to reveal the shadow mask of Tarathan’s face.

  “She’s very close now,” he said, and Malian nodded as they moved forward, each pressed close to either side of the tunnel. She, too, could sense the young queen, still doggedly deflecting her pursuer’s tracking sorcery—and tell that she was flagging. The hunter would sense it, too, she knew, and the gap between pursuer and prey was closing. “You get her away,” Tarathan said. “I’ll stand as rearguard.”

  For a priestess-queen of Jhaine who believes you to be an abomination, Malian thought, but she did not argue. The shimmer from the armring showed the tunnel ahead of them widening. A few footsteps more and they were in what looked like a small underground courtyard, with several passages opening off it. A mosaic of malachite and black marble paved the ground, while the columns holding up the vaulted roof were carved into robed and cowled priestesses, their hands raised in various forms of salutation or invocation. “A place for troubled times,” Tarathan observed, “most likely where the high priestesses met the dukes.”

  Malian did not need Kalan’s acute hearing to pick up the gasp of approaching breath. She let her sleeve fall over the armring so only a faint gray relieved the gloom as she and Tarathan moved into the deeper shadows of the cowled pillars. The hunter’s step had quickened but was still a short distance off. We just might, she thought, be able to get Zhineve-An clear.

  The young queen appeared in the doorway, staggering as though it were an effort for her to stay on her feet. Her full robe was kilted to her knees for freer movement, but she kept her hand on the wall. Nearly done, Malian thought, and stepped forward with Tarathan behind her. As she moved, she let a little more of the silver light gleam from beneath her cuff. “Queen Zhineve-An—” she began, her tone reassuring.

  Zhineve-An screamed, her face a white mask of terror. She whirled to run, but stumbled, half falling before she clutched at the wall. “The slayer,” she panted, shaking her head from side to side as she pushed herself upright again. “No, no, no.”

  Tarathan rammed his swords back into their sheaths and sprang across the room, closing one hand across her mouth while his other arm clamped both hers tight to her body. Zhineve-An struggled wildly to be free, her eyes desperate, despairing, as Tarathan, impervious to the last ebb of power that she was hurling at him, hauled her bodily back across the chamber.

  She’s petrified of us, Malian thought. And then, fitting pieces from her visions and their conversation afterward together—no, of Tarathan. The other queens had called him the slayer, too: not just for killing a Seven, but because the queen they were bound to had also died. And the priestess-queens of Jhaine were con
joined, so Zhineve-An would recognize his face and the signature of his power through that link.

  She shook her head, at a loss how best to calm the young queen and convince her she was safe after all.

  “She won’t hear you.” Tarathan’s expression was grim. “Some of her Seven have died tonight. This close, I can feel their loss through her; each death is a wound to her psychic body. In the absence of her own Seven, I need to help her close them off—if she will let me. But you will have to deal with the Swarm hunter.”

  “Gladly,” Malian said, and turned to meet Zhineve-An’s pursuer, the twist of her mouth half a smile, because this was straightforward, something she knew how to fight.

  “What have we here?” Arcolin stepped from the same tunnel where Zhineve-An had appeared a few moments before. “The little River maister. We did wonder about you, after that business with the cup. And now here you are again.”

  The Darksworn had abandoned his formal robes for a sleeveless black tunic and close-fitting hose, his long hair woven into a braid that altered the angles of his face. He looks more like Rhike now, Malian thought, rather than Nherenor—or would, if his face weren’t painted in runes. The same intricate shapes swirled blackly down Arcolin’s arms and onto the backs of his hands. The brushstrokes flickered with power, and when he moved she saw the same magics dance across his palms. Armored in sorcery, she thought, and let her lip curl, just a little.

  He smiled in answer. “So what are you, then? Not a River maister, I think. And not Nindorith’s Derai spy either.”

  So the rite has worked, Malian thought. Clearly, Arcolin had not recognized the armring as a Derai artifact either—because of the rite, she wondered, or Nhenir’s shielding influence?

  “I gather,” she said, matching his tone, “that your deep affection for Emer and Jhaine has just run out?”

  The Darksworn laughed. “Were you there? I was willing enough to go along with the alliance scheme while Nherenor and his allies were in the mix, but with the boy dead—” He shrugged. “War within and without will suit our purpose just as well.” His smile deepened. “A dead queen of Jhaine will help immeasurably in achieving that. I take it,” he added conversationally, “that you have no intention of standing aside?”

  He likes talking, Malian thought, so she simply smiled back, keeping her muscles and breathing relaxed, alert for every subtle shift in his stance or across the scrawl of power on his skin.

  “No,” Arcolin said softly. “I didn’t think so.” He traced a sigil on the air and a knife materialized in his right hand. A blade made for throwing as well as cutting—and Malian’s stomach tightened as she saw more black runes writhe along the tempered steel. The marks vanished in the instant she perceived them, but she was remembering both the poison cup and the night she had spied on Nherenor entering the Darksworn town house. Arcolin had come to the terrace door with a calligraphy brush in his hand—and Nherenor had turned away from him with an expression of distaste.

  So is it lurker poison, Malian wondered, as Arcolin adopted a blade fighter’s crouch, or something worse on the blade? The first of her own hideout knives flashed to intercept his strike—and she saw his disbelief surface when she blocked him. He was strong, but so was she, and she smiled again as she called shadows, the Band stock-in-trade, to smother the first flick of his sorcery.

  “Who are you? What?” His lips smiled, too, as he came at her, but the words were at least half a snarl. They reminded her of the Malisande facestealer in the hill fort, and that Arcolin might well be linked to other Swarm—and she would not betray the Shadow Band through a careless word, anymore than she would own to being Derai.

  The Darksworn shrugged, feinting, when she did not reply. Malian countered the slash that followed, leaping back as the tip twisted to catch her sleeve and tear the flesh beneath. Arcolin’s expression darkened, his smile vanishing as voices shouted in the distance. She caught the flare in his eyes a second ahead of the sudden withdrawal and flick of the wrist that sent the knife hurtling past her toward Zhineve-An.

  “It’s poisoned!” she shouted, but dared not look away from Arcolin to see whether Tarathan had pulled the young queen clear. She followed the shout with her own strike as metal clattered against stone behind her, but Arcolin had already sprung back and pulled another weapon from the air. The sword’s blade was incised with the same runes that had glistened on the knife, and the point described a gentle arc, keeping her at bay. She heard another shout as boots pounded in one of the tunnels.

  A sorcerous penumbra rose from the runes painted onto Arcolin’s skin, and Malian reached for the core of her own power as his eyes turned completely black. “Beware!” she shouted, releasing the last of her gathered shadows into his face. Just for an instant, she thought something moved in the tunnel behind him, the swirl of a cloak and a glint of color—but the sorcery around Arcolin was intensifying. She hurled herself back, anticipating a battery of power.

  The assault never came. The concentration of sorcery was still present, but instead of exploding out, it began to spiral inward around the Darksworn. Malian frowned as the spiral revolved faster and Arcolin’s eyes met hers, pits in which a reflected sorcery spun, and this time his smile promised revenge. She whispered to the dagger in her hand and threw—in the same instant as the spiral of power imploded, the figure within it vanished, and the resulting shock wave threw her off her feet.

  Chapter 49

  Healing

  By the time Malian got to her feet the underground courtyard was pandemonium. Rastem and the remaining four members of Zhineve-An’s Seven had dragged her away from Tarathan and appeared to be doing their best to come at the herald with swords, while Raven and Ser Alric were keeping them at bay with the blunt end of a pair of ladyspikes. Girvase and Raher hovered as she dusted herself off, and ducal guards, all carrying torches, were moving into the other tunnels in a purposeful way. A blue-robed priestess, whom Malian assumed had been the newcomers’ guide to this point, stood by a knight in ducal green and black. His expression, as he surveyed the scene with the Jhainarians, was an almost equal mix of grimness, exhaustion, and bemusement. “Will someone tell me,” he demanded, “what in Imuln’s name is going on?”

  Her dagger had vanished with the portal, Malian noticed—but she was more interested in the way everyone stopped at the unmistakable ring of command in the new knight’s voice, even the Jhainarians. All four of the remaining seven were white-faced and looked almost wild, while Zhineve-An was leaning against the wall with her arms hugged around her chest and her eyes closed. Without the regalia of priestess and queen, and with her hair straggling down her back, she seemed absurdly young. And she had, Malian thought grimly, lost three of her Seven and been hunted through the dark by a Darksworn sorcerer, only to come face-to-face with one she knew only as the slayer of queens.

  “I’m going over there,” she said to Girvase and Raher, and they nodded, but she noted that they kept well back themselves. Where is Kalan, Malian wondered, and Jehane Mor? Her eyes met Tarathan’s and she felt the brief touch of his mind, acknowledging her, although outwardly he remained impassive. Rastem was speaking rapidly, partly in Emerian but more often lapsing into Jhainarian, his fist clenched white around the hilt of his sword. She caught the words “Forsaken” and “Abjured” and something about a sacred rite.

  “A rite’s been profaned?” The newcomer looked at the priestess. “Does he mean the First Night vigil?” The woman shook her head, indicating incomprehension, and he looked around, as if for help. “I take it this is Queen Zhineve-An?” he said to Ser Alric, low voiced. He took off his helmet and tucked it under his arm, his brow furrowed. “It would help if someone else here spoke Jhainarian.”

  The young queen straightened, smoothing her hands over her hair and shaking out her kilted robe, and the remaining Seven grew calmer immediately, even before she spoke. “I am Queen Zhineve-An,” she said, lifting her golden head as she turned to face the newcomer. “Who are you?”

 
; He bowed, with a grace, Malian thought, that matched Audin at his courtier’s best. “I am Hirluin Sondargent,” he said, “the heir to Emer. My father, Duke Caril, sent me to find you and ensure your safety.”

  “And hunt down the traitor,” Raher muttered behind Malian. He and Girvase had moved closer, and she did not think anyone else heard the comment.

  Zhineve-An was still very pale, but she bowed in reply to Lord Hirluin’s courtesy. “What happened?” he asked her. He glanced from Rastem and his companions, strung taut as bowstrings, to Tarathan’s impassive face, then around at Malian. “We had barely finished clearing the courtyard when the priestesses told us that the tunnels had been broken into from the temple precinct. They were showing us the entrance that had been used when we heard someone scream. Your First says that was you?”

  The young queen eased her hands over her robe, and Malian wondered what she was going to say. “I screamed because I saw something that frightened me,” she said slowly, as though searching for the correct Emerian words. “But I was already afraid, and what I saw . . . was not what I first thought.” Rastem opened his mouth as though to speak, but stopped when her eyes held his. “Armed men had entered the chapel from these tunnels, and brought a demon out of the dark years with them. I fled and the demon pursued me. Maister Carick and the . . . herald . . . came to my aid.”

  “I see.” Lord Hirluin looked toward the spot where Arcolin had disappeared, his expression thoughtful. Even if he had not actually seen the envoy vanish, Malian thought, he and the others would certainly have felt the shock wave when the portal imploded. She braced herself for his next, logical demand—to know what she and Tarathan had been doing in the tunnels in the first place—but the Duke’s son looked back at Zhineve-An. “Did you recognize any of those who attacked you?”