Lords of the Seventh Swarm, Book 3 of the Golden Queen Series

by David Farland

  By then, the storm had come in full upon them; the towering thunderheads turned morning into a mockery of night. Rain pounded the ground, and thunder shook the skies. Raging winds whipped across the battlefield, blowing the crimson pavilions down.

  And in the driving storm, the Qualeewoohs took flight with Lord Kintiniklintit. Across the fields, the Dronon jeered the ungainly Qualeewoohs, who were so much smaller than a Dronon Lord, so much more slender and less powerful.

  Yet when the Qualeewoohs took to the sky, they were a marvel! They swooped and soared through the pounding rain, and while Kintiniklintit began to circle in an effort to get up to battle speed, the Qualeewoohs swooped in from behind, began pecking out his rear eye cluster.

  The great Vanquisher redoubled his speed, seeking to escape. The labored sound of his buzzing wings came as a weary drone, and on the fields below, the Dronon hosts fell silent, their cheers forgotten.

  It was apparent from the opening seconds of battle that Kintiniklintit could not win.

  He tried to turn, and maneuvers that had seemed sleek and deadly before now looked ungainly beside the Qualeewoohs. They stooped in behind him, began attacking his wings, ripping off the back edges so that they fell away like scales.

  Those wings had been deadly to a human. The reinforced cartilage along their leading edge could chop a man in half. But the Qualeewoohs were attacking from behind, ripping the wings apart at their weakest point.

  Kintiniklintit fought madly, trying to slap his wings backward, strike a blow in flight. Twice he smashed Aaw in the face, knocking the little Qualeewooh backward, nearly felling her from the sky. Gallen's heart went out to her.

  But the Vanquisher's tactics only enraged Cooharah, so that he fought more vehemently.

  In a last effort to dodge his opponents, Kintiniklintit veered upward, as if trying to escape in the clouds. Climbing toward a wisp of fog, Gallen thought he'd almost make it. He imagined that 'the Dronon could then swoop down, playing hunt and hide in the mist.

  Till lightning struck, a blinding flash that blew the Dronon lord from the air, so that he tumbled in flaming ruin.

  This astonished Gallen. For the manner of Kintiniklintit's death was nothing like the story told by Maggie. But then Gallen had to remind himself, Maggie wasn't really there to witness the battle. She bore false memories.

  Afterward, Cooharah and Aaw had swooped low, clawing Cintkin so that she lost her right to rule as Golden Queen.

  Then, with some coaching from Hera, the birds realized that they had to perform the same feat over and over again.

  Five times they challenged the Dronon Lords, and Gallen watched as the Lord Escort of the First Swarm crashed to the ground, just as Maggie had described.

  He watched the magnificent Qualeewoohs battle, saw Cooharah get struck down, wounded in his third skirmish, so that Aaw had to fight on alone.

  Not all their victories were convincing. Not all the battles pretty. With each victory, the surviving Swarm Lords were forced to fight with greater desperation, greater cunning.

  The final Lord Escort did not even leave the ground; he instead opted to fight on land, his great battle arms poised, batting almost blindly at Aaw as she swooped time and again, too fast, too fast for him to react, till she left him blind and crippled. She could not finish him. She didn't have the strength to pierce his thick chitin. So he lived, in shame, as she went after his Golden Queen.

  It was, perhaps, an unprecedented move. Gallen knew from his mantle that Lord Escorts were never spared in battle. If a Lord Escort chose only to wound a Golden Queen, leaving her alive, then he would become her mate. But a living Lord Escort, one horribly wounded and disfigured, could serve no purpose in Dronon society. It would only be killed by workers, used to fertilize the fields.

  So for Aaw to leave this useless Vanquisher alive was the ultimate insult.

  When at last Aaw struck the final Golden Queen, the Dronon Swarms fell silent. Indeed, they were more than silent. They were unmoving, statuesque. Gallen wondered if they had died. He'd never seen a Dronon in shock.

  But now the entire Dronon worlds stood astonished, as Cooharah and Aaw landed in the midst of the field, growing muddy from the pounding rain, and sat panting, preening their feathers.

  Through all this, Orick did not arrive.

  And when Maggie's body had grown cold, and at last the Dronon swarms had begun to recover from their shock enough to prostrate themselves and offer obeisance to the Qualeewoohs, then Orick's shuttle came, through the pounding rains, and the poor bear rushed out onto the battlefield, checked Maggie's body, sorrowed over Gallen, then bore a canteen of water to the two bedraggled birds.

  Gallen took readings from the clock in his mantle. Two hours. Orick had come to the rescue two hours too late.

  When Gallen removed his mantle, he sat for a long moment and rubbed his eyes.

  So, there was truth to Orick's tale. The Dronon were defeated. Perhaps forever.

  Gallen talked with Orick for a long while, until clouds blew in and it began to rain anew. In the shelter of the hawthorns, Orick related much of what had happened 'd gone into the tangle, retrieved the Waters of Strength, and escaped back into the tangle with Thomas, fleeing to the ship that Karthenor had loaned Felph.

  Cooharah had at first rejected the Waters. "This life is not given to us for our own use," he had said. "We exist to serve one another, nothing more. You cannot purchase my life. I give it freely."

  Yet in the end, he had agreed to accept immortality, commune more deeply with his ancestors.

  "But why didn't you drink the Waters yourself?" Gallen asked. "It could have been you fighting the Dronon."

  "Och, man, after what happened to Zeus?" Orick said.

  "You couldn't have paid me! Besides, I'm not one to spend eternity lording it over a bunch of Dronon. I've got better things to do, thank you."

  Gallen asked, "What of the canteen, the one filled with the Waters? Surely the birds did not drink it all?"

  "No," Orick said. "They didn't. I sold it to Feiph. He didn't have a recording of what had happened when Zeus drank, so he wanted to try it himself. I sold it to him cheap. I just asked him to give you and Maggie the rebirth, pretend that nothing had ever happened."

  "And what happened to Felph when he drank?" Gallen asked.

  "He hasn't, yet," Onck answered. "He's just held on to it."For seven weeks?" Gallen said.

  "l think he's debating." Orick grumbled. "If he drinks it, he won't have a sample left to analyze, see if we can duplicate it. But if he keeps testing the stuff, he soon won't have anything left to drink…”

  "I see," Gallen said, satisfied. He got up from under thetree, stood thinking for a long time. "Orick, you once told me that l should not fight, that I should cease to struggle.

  You said I could run from the Dronon, or hide. In effect, you said that if I quit fighting, God would fight my battles.The world would go on without me."

  “I did?"

  "You did," Gallen' said, grateful that he remembered anything at all from the past. "Maybe your god didn't fight for me, but the Qualeewoohs fought in his place. Maybe you, were right."

  "Are you certain it wasn't God who fought for you?"Orick asked.

  “I’ve been thinking on it. Maybe the Qualeewoohs were just His tools, in the same way that David and Joshua were His tools."

  "You think?" Gallen asked.

  "And if that's true, maybe you were right to fight, Gallen. Maybe God needs people like you."

  Gallen shook his head, uncertain. He affected his old brogue accent, putting it on now as if it were an old, favorite cloak. “Orick--right now, I don’t think I ever want to fight again. It’s a long rest I’m wanting. Certain I am, I don’t want to expose Maggie to more dangers.”

  “Och.” Orick sighed. “Well, If anyone ever deserved a rest it’s you.”

  "But I doubt I'll rest easy," Gallen said. "In a few months, maybe a year, I'll hear of some outrage, and I'll want to go right to it. The Lor
ds of Tremonthin made me that way. It's in my blood. We are our bodies. I can't be any different. I'm afraid that sometime in the future, you'll just be burying me again."

  "Maybe," Orick said, "maybe not. You say you are your body, but I've a feeling there's more to you than the Lords of Tremonthin know. I'd say that you're also your body. You're a being of spirit, too.

  "Gallen, you and Maggie are good friends. I managed to win you back from the, grave once, but I don't want to see you there again. I want you to live forever. If not here, then in the Kingdom of God.

  "And if it's a fight you're craving, then fight the pull of your flesh, Gallen. You'll find a sweeter victory than you'll ever win out here in the killing fields?"

  Gallen gazed down to the circle below, where the grass lay untrampled, where his body had finally succumbed, and felt that perhaps Orick was right.

  He whispered, "Damn, you'll make a handy priest someday, Orick."

  "Not a priest," Orick said. "Just a missionary."

  They went home then, walking to Felph's palace in a miserable, pouring rain. Gallen leaned his head back, caught droplets in his mouth, while Orick sermonized to him.

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Over the next eight weeks, everyone took their ease. Gallen found that Orick was serious about his missionary work. Tallea kept her snout in the Scriptures for days on end, sitting at Maggie's side. But Tallea wasn't his only convert.

  Orick baptized Athena in the fountains outside the palace, and even Lord Felph seemed to listen to the bear with something of an open mind, though he made no formal declarations of conversion.

  And Orick began traveling about Ruin, preaching to all who would listen--poachers, scientists, madmen. It didn't seem to matter. He made a few converts in his first two weeks, and chief among them was Felph's personal body servant, Dooring, who came in tears and begged Gallen and Maggie for forgiveness. He admitted to being the one who'd notified the authorities as to their location. The Dronon had found them because of him.

  Gallen frankly forgave the man, and after that, Dooring accompanied Orick on all his trips, flying him about by florafeem. With Felph’s beautiful daughter Athena in his retinue, and Thomas to lead in singing the hymns, Orick "the baptizing bear" got a reputation for putting on quite a show, and he endeared himself to many, though he made few converts.

  In his preparations to leave Ruin, he ordained Dooring to the office of High Priest, setting him in charge of all the spiritual affairs on Ruin. There was one woman Orick despaired of converting: Hera.

  He spoke to her passionately and often, yet Hera remained distant. She'd asked about the manner of Zeus's death, had heard the sad tale, and then thanked him, coldly. After that, it was as if she never really listened to a word he spoke.

  Hera dared not tell Orick what so disturbed her: it was that she loved Zeus still. Despite his infidelities, despite his greed, she had loved him as a wife for many years. Would always love him.

  Orick swore that Zeus had been killed by his own wickedness. And yet, and yet--how could that be? Hera wondered. Zeus was a created being. He was what Lord Felph had made. If Zeus had faults, they were not of his own creation.

  It was unfair of the Qualeewooh ancestors to have judged him so harshly.

  And there was another secret that Hera dared not speak: the belief that the bear was lying to her. If Orick and his friends were to be believed, then her husband had killed Arachne, had confessed to the deed just before his death.

  She couldn't imagine that. Arachne had been her closest friend, her closest advisor. Zeus had never trusted the woman, thought she was too wise, yet he'd never hated her, either.

  No, Hera imagined that someone else had killed Arachne. Gallen, perhaps, or even Orick. She could think of no good reason that they would commit such a murder. She could hardly admit to herself that she harbored such notions. Yet the uneasy feeling would not go away.

  So Hera became distant, seldom speaking to the others.

  She cleaned out her room, removing all reminders of Zeus, disconsolate. She folded his clothes, pressing her nose into them to catch a trace of his scent, before tossing them into a garbage chute. She got rid of his combs and brush, his razor and lotions. She kept only a sheaf of love poems that he'd written to her, and these she placed in the bottom of her dresser.

  And when she'd finished removing all traces of him, she decided to do the same for Herm and Arachne.

  Herm's room was not much of a room-an aerie high in the palace with a door that had been permanently locked from the inside. He'd always entered the room from an ancient cloo hole. He'd even installed a perch outside his room.

  It took a service droid nearly half an hour to gain entry, and once Hera opened the room, she wished that she hadn't. Herm's room was such a filthy mess, she could never have imagined it. In every comer were twigs and leaves and tufts of grass, a pile of hay to sleep on, loose feathers in everything.

  The twigs were often nailed to the wall--as if, as if Herm had been fascinated by their shapes. Indeed, Hera looked at one slender twig on the wall, and it reminded her very much of the stream that flowed beneath the palace, the silver stream with its tributaries running through it. She wondered if this was what had mesmerized Herm, the way the branches must look like rivers from the air.

  But no, many of the twigs were just scattered on the floor, thrown into piles, as if, over time, Herm had become careless with his prizes. Here and there among the twigs were other things--bits of a broken blue pot, pieces of shiny metal.

  Herm had little in the way of possessions. There were several odd combs--some for hair, some for his feathers. He had a long woodwind flute sitting on pegs on one wall. Hera remembered that years ago, sometimes, in the evenings, he would play that flute, and the eerie music would drift over the palace.

  But he'd never learned to play human songs. His woodwind only echoed the breeze as it sang through rocks and glens, or sighed over a field. Never a tune, just a mournful howling.

  And everywhere in the room were the small white-and-brown feathers from his wings. It looked as if Herm had preened in here for years and never cleaned the place. Bits of himself were everywhere.

  As Hera surveyed the place she realized that it did not look like a human room at all. It looked like a nest.

  The sight of it nearly broke Hera's heart.

  She'd never known that Herm had so much of the bird in him. Never known how truly alien he was. He was not human at all, she considered, looking at the room.

  He was my brother, and I never knew him. He must have been so lonely. So lonely.

  Yet he'd seemed so normal.

  It was the Guide, she realized. He'd never been free to become anything but what his Guide had made of him. if he'd been free, perhaps he would have flown away, made a life for himself in some mountain aerie.

  Hera left the room, taking only the woodwind, and ordered the droids to dispose of the remaining junk.

  Afterward she hurried down to Arachne's room. Arachne, her dearest friend and counselor.

  The room was much as she'd remembered. A huge wall filled with bobbins of bright thread made from silk and wool, the vast loom filling most of the room, the small bed in a corner, where Arachne hardly ever slept--for she'd worked night and day at the loom.

  It was just as Hera recalled from nearly four months ago, on the day of the invasion, when she'd come searching for Arachne at Lord Felph's request.

  Except that on that day, she’d only been looking for Arachne. She hadn’t really studied the room.

  Now, Hera gazed down at the loom, at the images that Arachne had been weaving before her death. There, on the last portion of the tapestry, in a lower corner where it was plain to see, Arachne had woven a picture of herself. In her right hand, she held Gallen and Maggie, and a horde of Dronon Vanquishers were appearing on the horizon behind. Arachne knelt, hunched, as if shielding Maggie with her body.

  Standing over Arachne was Zeus, a bloody knife in hand, making a stabbing
motion. On Arachne's chest was a small, bloody puncture wound.

  So it's true, Hera realized. Zeus murdered her, just as she knew he would.

  Hera bit her lower lip. And I was too blind to see it.

  Hera spent the rest of the day in her rooms, weeping.

  That night, shortly after dinner had passed, Lord Felph came to Hera's bedroom.

  He stood just inside the door, under the cluster of purple lights. The mellow scene of cypresses outside the evening pools went well with his dark green tunic.

  "I don't mean to disturb you, but we missed you at dinner," Felph said. "I do hope you've ordered the droids to bring you something."

  "I'm not hungry, Father," Hera said, rising from her bed. She turned her back to him, went and looked out the window. It was early evening, and the day, had been mostly clear. But she could see more golden clouds, waiting on the horizon, out above the fields.

  Felph's vineyards and fields looked lush and green. Inviting.

  Hera had an odd memory, from when she was a child. She'd often longed to run in those fields outside the palace, to explore the stream, or play hide-and-seek in the hawthorn groves. But in those days, there had been giants in the land: purple giants that each carried a huge club. She remembered them clearly, the rotting furs they wore, the single huge horn in their foreheads.

  "Father, whatever happened to the giants?" Hera mused. "Giants?" Felph asked.

  "The ones outside my window, in the fields. I used to see them hunting."

  Felph laughed softly. "Ah, those. They were only images programmed into your Guide. I didn't want you straying from the palace, you see, so the Guide showed you the giants from time to time, to keep you here."

  "I see," Hera said. "When I was a child, you used to say that I wore a Guide because I was a princess. You said all princesses wore crowns."

  Felph laughed. "I'd forgotten."

  "Am I still a princess?" Hera asked.

  "Of course you are," Felph said. "You'll always be my little princess."