The First Stone

by Mark Anthony

  Travis drew closer to the TV. “I’ve seen writing like that before.”

  “It is the ancient writing of Amún,” Vani said. “Few know it now. Even I cannot read what it says, though there are some among my clan who could. And there are others . . .”

  “You mean sorcerers,” Travis said. “There was writing sort of like that on the stone box that one Scirathi created to hold the gate artifact.”

  “Not sort of,” Vani said. “The writing is identical.”

  All of them seemed to understand at once, as if a jolt of electricity had passed between them, carrying the knowledge.

  “A gate,” Deirdre said. “That arch is a gate, isn’t it?”

  Or part of one, anyway. She didn’t need to wait for the archaeologists to uncover the entire thing to know that they wouldn’t find the arch’s keystone—that it was missing.

  Only it wasn’t missing. Deirdre knew exactly where it was: in the vaults of the Seekers. The Seekers had discovered it in the tavern that sat on the same spot that centuries later would house Surrender Dorothy. It was in researching Glinda’s ring that Deirdre had discovered the existence of the keystone, for the writing on the ring and the keystone were identical.

  Travis pressed his hand against the television screen. “Maybe there is a way back,” he murmured.

  Vani’s eyes shone, and Beltan gave her a dark look. However, before the blond man could speak, the sound of small feet broke the silence. Deirdre tore her gaze from the TV. A girl stood at the end of the sofa. Her hair was dark, but her skin was moon-pale.

  “You must be Deirdre,” the girl said, her words articulate, though must came out as muth.

  “Nim,” Vani said, kneeling beside the girl. “What are you doing out here? You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  Nim. Deirdre didn’t recognize the name. However, she knew who this girl was. It was Vani and Beltan’s daughter.

  “I can’t sleep,” Nim said.

  Vani brushed her hair from her face. “And why is that, beshala?”

  “Because there’s a gold face outside my window,” the girl said yawning. “It keeps watching me.”

  Vani held the girl tight. “It was a bad dream, dearest one. That was all.”

  However, there was doubt in the T’gol’s eyes, and a terrible certainty that the girl hadn’t been dreaming came over Deirdre. Fear cleared her mind, and at last she understood what it was that had been troubling her all evening, what it was she had forgotten.

  “Vani,” Deirdre said, her mouth dry. “You came to Earth to escape the Scirathi, right?”

  “Yes,” the T’gol said, clutching Nim to her. “Why do you ask?”

  Sickness rose in Deirdre’s throat as she recalled the picture he had sent her during their final conversation three years ago: an image of two figures in black robes slinking down an alley in a modern Earth city, their faces concealed behind masks. Gold masks.

  Deirdre drew in a breath. “Because I think they’re already—”

  Her voice was drowned out by the sudden sound of shattering glass.

  8.

  The bones would always be there.

  Over the last three years, the grass of the vale had grown up around them, lush and dense, and had crept up the sides of the larger mounds, shrouding them in green. Just that spring, on the sides of those mounds, a tiny flower of the palest blue had begun to bloom in profusion. No one—not even the eldest of the witches, and the wisest in herb lore—had ever seen a flower like it before. And while no one was certain who had first used the name, soon everyone called the little flower arynesseth.

  In the old language, the name meant Aryn’s Tears. Almost as soon as the name came into use, a story sprang up around it, growing as quickly as the grass in the vale. It was said, in the days after the Second War of the Stones, brave Queen Aryn of Calavan stood upon the wall of Gravenfist Keep, and there she let fly the ashes of the knight Sir Durge, who had been noble and true above all other men. The wind carried the ashes out into the vale of Shadowsdeep, and one could always know where they came to rest, for in those places the arynesseth bloomed the thickest.

  In places like this.

  Grace Beckett—Queen of Malachor, Lady of the Winter Wood, and Mistress of the Seven Dominions—stood at the foot of the mound she had ridden to that morning. It was one of the highest in the vale, rising up no more than a furlong from the Rune Gate, whose gigantic iron doors hung open, steadily rusting away.

  As her honey-colored mare Shandis grazed nearby, Grace knelt and parted the grass with her hands, revealing a skull bleached white by sun and rain and snow. The skull was elongated, the eye sockets large and jewel-shaped. There was no mouth. She let the grass fall back and stood, holding her right arm against her chest. The wraithlings had perished. So had the feydrim , and their master the Pale King. All the same, the pain in her right arm lingered on, just like the bones beneath the grass. Just like the memories.

  Grace started up the side of the mound. It was Lirdath, and even this far north in the world the morning was already growing fine and hot. Soon she was mopping the sweat from her brow with a hand and wishing she had chosen something lighter than a riding gown of green wool.

  After several minutes of steady work, she reached the top of the mound. She panted for breath and pushed her blond hair from her face; it was getting too long again. Others might have thought it beautiful, a gilded frame to her regal visage, but to Grace it was simply a nuisance. She would take a knife to it as soon as she got back to the keep.

  Hands on hips, she gazed around. She could see the whole vale from up there. Sharp mountains soared against blue sky, and in the distance Gravenfist Keep rose like a mountain of gray stone itself. Summer had come, and the vale was a verdant emerald. Still, here and there white patches gleamed like snow.

  She half closed her eyes, and through the veil of her lashes she could see it again, pouring out of the mouth of the Rune Gate like a foul exhalation of hatred: the army of the Pale King. Its ranks of feydrim and wraithlings and trolls, heartless wizards and witches, was without number, and they had come for one purpose—to cast the world into shadow forever.

  Only they had failed, thanks to the bravery and sacrifice of countless men and women. And of one man more than any other. Grace knelt, letting her fingers brush across the arynesseth that bloomed atop the grass-covered mound. She plucked one of the small white-blue flowers. Its scent was faint and clean, like snow.

  “I miss you, Durge,” she murmured. “I could use your help. There’s still so much more to do.”

  She stayed that way for a time, content to listen to the wind and the far-off cries of a hawk. At last she stood, and as she looked back toward the keep she saw a horseman coming. His need must have been great for him to make no effort to conceal himself.

  By the time the horseman reached the foot of the mound, she had descended to meet him.

  “I thought I might find you out here, Your Majesty,” Aldeth said as he climbed down from a horse as gray as his mistcloak.

  Grace raised an eyebrow. “All I told Sir Tarus was that I was going for a ride in the vale. How did you know to find me here?”

  “I serve you with all my heart, Your Majesty,” the Spider said with a rotten-toothed grin. “But that doesn’t mean I have to tell you the secrets of my craft.”

  She folded her arms and waited patiently.

  Aldeth threw his hands in the air. “Well, fine, if you’re going to torture me like that. He can’t blame me for not being able to resist your spells.”

  “I’m not casting a spell, Aldeth,” she said, but the spy seemed not to hear, and he rattled on for several minutes about how it wasn’t his idea to go to Master Larad, how he had been dead set against it, knowing how offended she would be, but how Sir Tarus had insisted that they ask the Runelord to speak the rune of vision, and how he—Aldeth—would never have dreamed of compromising his queen’s privacy in such a manner.

  “No, you’d simply sneak after me.”
/>   “Exactly!” the Spider said, snapping his fingers. “That way, you’d never even know I was—”

  He bit his tongue, and he looked as if he was going to be sick. Grace couldn’t help a smile. He really was getting better; a year ago he would have dug himself a far deeper hole before having the sense to shut up.

  “Oh, Aldeth,” she said, patting his cheek. Then she climbed into Shandis’s saddle and whirled the mare around. As she did, she cast one last glance at the Rune Gate.

  Last summer, at Sir Tarus’s urging, Grace had finally ordered an exploratory mission into Imbrifale. Tarus himself had led the small company of knights through the gate, with the Spiders Aldeth and Samatha serving as scouts. Master Larad and the young witch Lursa had gone as well, for there was no telling what fell magics might remain in the Pale King’s Dominion.

  For an entire month, Grace had paced the outer wall of Gravenfist Keep, gazing out across the vale, waiting for them to return. She had hoped to be able to speak across the Weirding to Lursa. However, the moment the troop passed through the Rune Gate, all contact with them ceased, as if their threads had been cut by a knife. The Ironfang Mountains, woven with enchantments to imprison the Pale King, proved a barrier that could not be pierced by thought or magic.

  At last, on the first day of Revendath, they returned to Gravenfist Keep. The company had not lost a single member on the journey; however, all of them suffered in spirit. None seemed able to speak of what they had found except for Master Larad, and even he spoke in halting words, so that it took many days before Grace finally learned all they had discovered.

  Imbrifale was dead. Nothing lived in that Dominion—not men or monsters or animals, or even trees or plants. Every living thing that had dwelled there had been infused with and twisted by the Pale King’s magic over the centuries. Nothing had not been bound to him, and when he and his master Mohg had perished, so did all else.

  What had happened in the thousand years the Rune Gate was shut would never truly be known, for no written records had been found, but some things could be gleaned from what the company saw. They came upon terrible cities, built like the hives of some insect species. There the feydrim and other inhuman slaves of the Pale King were bred and born, fed through holes in tiny chambers, where they either perished or grew strong enough to break their way out.

  Other cities were more like the castles and keeps of the Dominions, though sharper, harsher, made only for function, with no consideration for beauty or comfort. There the human subjects of the Pale King had dwelled, and beneath one such keep they had found a labyrinth of chambers that contained stone tables large and small, and racks filled with knives and curved hooks. In one such chamber they discovered a cabinet containing iron lumps, some the size of a man’s fist, some tiny, no larger than a robin’s egg. In the next chamber was a pit filled with bones, many of grown men and women, but others the birdlike bones of infants—the remains of those who had not withstood the transformation.

  Elsewhere the company came upon mines: immense wounds gouged in the land, oozing fetid liquids and emitting noxious fumes. Near each mine stood a foundry, many of them still filled with half-finished machines of war. At last they had reached Fal Imbri, the Pale King’s palace, and they had looked upon his throne: a chair of iron forged for a giant, carved with runes of dread, its edges sharp as razors.

  The throne was empty. The company had turned around to begin the long journey home.

  “Do you want us to go back there, Your Majesty?”

  Grace turned in the saddle. Aldeth was gazing at the open Rune Gate, his expression grim, his gray eyes distant. He seemed not to notice the way his hand crept up his chest.

  “No,” Grace said softly. “There’s nothing for us there.” She forced her voice to brighten. “Now come, let’s go see what Sir Tarus wants with me.”

  9.

  Half an hour later, they rode through an arch into the courtyard between the main tower of the keep and Gravenfist’s outer wall. Once this place had thronged with warriors, rune-speakers, and witches desperately battling to hold back the army of the Pale King. It was crowded today as well, though there were far more farmers, weavers, tanners, potters, merchants, and blacksmiths than there were men-at-arms.

  Over the last three years, Gravenfist Keep had become less of a military fortress and more of a working castle. Most of the men who had marched here with Grace had stayed, and their families had come north to join them. There were now a number of villages in the valley, and farms were springing up in the fertile lands between the mountains and the Winter Wood—lands that had lain fallow for centuries.

  There had been a brief time when Grace had considered relocating her court to the old capital of Tir-Anon, some thirty leagues to the south; that was where the kings and queen of Malachor had dwelled of old. She had journeyed there the autumn after the war, along with Falken and Melia, but they had found little. Tir-Anon had been utterly destroyed in the fall of Malachor seven hundred years ago. There was nothing save heaps of rubble overgrown with groves of valsindar and sintaren. They had returned to Gravenfist sober, and determined to make it their home.

  “There you are, Your Majesty,” Sir Tarus said, rushing up as Grace brought Shandis to a halt before the main keep. His face was nearly as red as his beard.

  “So it appears,” she said. “Thanks to a little help from Master Larad, Aldeth here was able to ferret me out.”

  She glanced to her left, but where the spy had ridden a moment ago there was now only empty air. A sigh escaped her. “I wish I could disappear like that.”

  Tarus clucked his tongue. “Queens don’t get to disappear, Your Majesty.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because they must be ever available to their counselors, vassals, and subjects, of course.”

  She allowed him to help her down from her horse. “That’s exactly why I wish I could vanish sometimes.”

  “None of that now, Your Majesty,” Tarus said, giving her a stern look. “There’s work to be done.”

  Grace sighed. This was part of an ongoing battle with Sir Tarus. She had made him her seneschal three years ago (after Melia gently pointed out that Grace didn’t have to try to run the kingdom all by herself), and in the time since Tarus had taken the job seriously. Too seriously, she sometimes thought. He worked at all hours of the day and night, and he hardly seemed to smile anymore. Where was the dashing young knight with the ready grin she had first met in the forests of western Calavan?

  He’s still in there, Grace. Just older, like each of us.

  A groom came to take Shandis to the stables, and Tarus walked with Grace to the main keep.

  “Well,” she said as they approached the doors of the great hall, “were you going to tell me what was so urgent it couldn’t wait? Or are you simply going to spring it on me and see if I faint from shock?”

  “Now that you mention it, I was sort of favoring the latter option,” Tarus said. “Only then I reconsidered,” the seneschal hastily added when she gave him a piercing glance.

  However, even after he told her what had transpired, Grace still felt a keen jolt of surprise as she stepped into the great hall and saw the two men standing before the dais. One she did not recognize at all. He was a younger man, short but well built, dark-haired, and clad in a gray tunic. His face was squarely handsome, but softened by a sensuous mouth. He held a staff carved with runes.

  The other man she did recognize, but only after careful consideration. When she first met him, at the Council of Kings in Calavere, he had been a corpulent man dressed in ostentatious clothes, his gaze haughty, his thick fingers laden with rings.

  The years had aged him greatly. He was rail-thin now, and wore a simple black tunic and no jewelry. His bulbous nose was still ruddy—a testament to a past penchant for too much wine— but his close-set eyes were clear and sober. He and his companion knelt as she entered.

  “Rise, Lord Olstin of Brelegond, please,” she said when she managed to find the b
reath to speak. “You are welcome in Malachor.”

  A sardonic smile played across his lip, though the expression was self-deprecating now rather than arrogant as it once had been. “You are kind, Your Majesty. Kinder than you have either right or reason to be. Though it has been nearly five years, I have not forgotten how uncivilly I treated you at the Council of Kings, and I warrant you have not forgotten either.”

  Grace winced, for it was true. She remembered well how Olstin had wheedled and cajoled, attempting to play her against King Boreas, and then—after she ordered him to step away from a serving maid he had slapped—had threatened her.

  “You didn’t know at the time I was a queen, Lord Olstin.” She couldn’t help a small laugh. “Of course, I didn’t know I was a queen, either. So let’s call it even, shall we?”

  “I don’t think so, Your Majesty,” Olstin said, approaching her. “You see, we are not even at all.”

  Tarus cast Grace a sharp look, but she gave her head a small shake. “And why is that, Lord Olstin?”

  “Because Brelegond owes you something, Your Majesty. It owes you its gratitude, and its allegiance.”

  Grace was too astonished by these words to reply, but Sir Tarus took her arm, led her to the chair atop the dais (she refused to call it a throne), and sat her down. Additional chairs were placed for the guests on the step below Grace, and Tarus found a servant to bring them all wine, though Olstin chose water instead. Gradually, Grace’s shock was replaced by fascination as she listened to Olstin speak. Little news had come from the Dominion of Brelegond these last three years. It was farthest of all the seven Dominions from Malachor, and during the war it had been sorely damaged by the Onyx Knights.

  The rebuilding had been slow, according to Olstin, but over time much had been accomplished. King Lysandir, who had been chained in the dungeon beneath Borelga after Brelegond fell to the Onyx Knights, had never truly recovered from his ordeal, and had passed away last winter. His niece, Eselde, had been crowned queen, and under her rule Brelegond had regained its former strength; indeed, it was stronger than it had been before the war.