The Bone Queen

by Alison Croggon

  “Yes,” said Milana. “But the Abyss isn’t as the Shadowplains. It is of a different nature, and closes in upon itself with a great weight. When the Shika are summoned forth, they may only remain for a short time before they are drawn back inside it. Kansabur could emerge from the Abyss only because she is also of the World.”

  Nelac was frowning. “That is true, but what if the force of the Abyss were reversed? What if the weight that spins it closed should suddenly force it open? Isn’t that what sorcery itself does, in a very small way?” He glanced enquiringly at Cadvan.

  “I suppose that would be possible,” Cadvan answered. “It is indeed the basic principle of sorcery. But I can’t imagine how the forces of the Abyss could be wholly reversed. And if it should happen, it would rip apart everything we know, both Light and Dark, down to the smallest particle, and send us all howling into emptiness. Even the Dark couldn’t desire that.”

  “But perhaps a powerful Hull, say, Likod, could pull on those forces sufficiently to step bodily in and out of the Abyss, without destroying himself?”

  Cadvan’s gaze turned inward. “Perhaps,” he said at last. “I can’t say it would be impossible. But I know of no spell that would do such a thing. Admittedly, my knowledge is limited.”

  “Then we can’t dismiss the chance. And how would we guard against it?”

  “I don’t know.” Cadvan raised his hands in a gesture of frustration. “I feel like Enkir. There is too much that is imponderable.”

  “We must work with what we do know,” said Milana calmly. “If we can’t have any warning of Likod appearing among us, even if we watch the Shadowplains, we must be prepared for the chance that he will. That is all. And perhaps we can make a trap for him, as you trapped the Bone Queen.”

  Cadvan flinched. “I have no desire to use more sorcery,” he said.

  “The Light can make traps as ingenious as any of the Dark. We are dangerous too.” Milana rose to leave, smoothing down her robes. She now seemed brisk and decided. “I’ll take my leave of you. I’ve called the Circle of Pellinor to meet in the hour before noon, and we’ll speak of all these things. I wish to consult with my colleagues before we speak again.”

  Nelac rose and bowed. “We are, of course, at your disposal,” he said. “And we are deeply grateful for your help.”

  “It isn’t only my decision. Pellinor has been behind me in every choice I have made, and especially in revoking your outlawing and the ban of Lirigon on Cadvan,” said Milana. “It is no small thing for a School to undo the ruling of another, but that is the measure of our disquiet. And we don’t seek only to help Lirigon. I fear for Pellinor.”

  Dernhil looked searchingly at the First Bard. “If you fear for this School, then I am sure there is good reason,” he said.

  Milana hesitated, and then met Dernhil’s gaze, her anxiety open. “Dorn has had foredreams,” she said. “It is not generally known, although I have told Nelac. I believe that we will be struck soon, and hard. But I trust our wisdom and strength. If Pellinor cannot challenge the might of the Dark, no one can. And even if Pellinor should fall, it is better to fight than to cower and meanly crumble.”

  She nodded and left the room. Cadvan turned to Nelac, smiling wryly. “Milana of Pellinor is one of the most redoubtable Bards I have ever met,” he said.

  “If the measure of courage is how much fear you must overcome, then hers is great indeed,” said Dernhil.

  “That is the measure,” said Nelac soberly. “I hope I can match it. I will not hide from you two that I am very afraid.”

  Cadvan walked to the window and gazed out over the Inner Circle. The shower had now passed, violent but swift, and a vagrant sunshine briefly gleamed silver on the wet stone before the sun slid again behind cloud. The sky was steel-grey, with more rain sweeping in from the north. Then his vision seemed to slip: for the blink of an eye, it seemed that he looked out on a ruin, the paving stones blackened as if with flame, weeds creeping across their broken faces, Ilborc’s great statue shattered and abandoned, strangled with wild ivy. He had barely registered what he saw, when everything was as it had been before. Cadvan clutched the curtain, dizzy and afraid, and looked again. The sunlight was fragile and unreal, a veil over an uncertain world. Pellinor seemed like one of its own paintings seen in some dark future, its colours leached by age, which might at any moment crumble into dust.

  XXXIV

  SNUG in the blankets of sleep, Selmana thought she was in her mother’s house. She had slept for hours and hours, and it felt late. It must be a rest day because no one had woken her, and she had been left to lie abed, warm as a rabbit in its burrow, listening to the friendly sound of rain hammering on the roof. She curled up under the coverlet, enjoying her laziness. Perhaps there would be pancakes for breakfast, hot off the griddle and served with fresh butter and honey. The thought made her realize that she was very hungry and she blinked open her eyes. For an instant she thought she must have dozed off in a meadow, for all she could see were butterflies, clouds of them circling above her in an azure sky that paled to pink at its edges. But, no, they didn’t move, they weren’t real butterflies. She wasn’t in a meadow nor in her mother’s house. She was in Pellinor.

  She sat up, rubbing her eyes, and snapped on a magelight: her body told her that it must be near noon, but the shutters were still closed and the room was dark. If no one had called her, she reasoned, then she was not needed. And she was glad of the long sleep. She washed briefly, using the jug and basin that waited for her use, and dressed in the warm woollen robes that were folded in a chest by her bed, admiring their fineness. Then she wandered idly over to her window and pulled open the shutters to see the colour of the day.

  There was no day outside. There was no night. She knew at once that she was overlooking the endless twilight of the Shadowplains. She went cold, as if the blood had stilled in her body, and then she slammed the shutters and latched them tight and turned around, leaning against them, breathing hard. Not this, please not this…

  She looked around her bedchamber, fighting down her panic. Every other Bard could decide when they wished to step through the Circles. They willed it, and it was so. Why wasn’t it so with her? Was there some hidden part of her that worked beyond her conscious thought, or was she at the whim of some other mind, which pulled her this way and that?

  She stared blankly at the wall, attempting to think. Whenever she had found herself in the Shadowplains, one thing was constant: it meant that Kansabur was close. Maybe it was some kind of unconscious reflex, like putting out her hands to break a fall. Or maybe someone was protecting her, pulling her through the Circles so that Kansabur couldn’t reach her. Was this how Anghar kept her hidden from the Bone Queen? The thought made her less afraid. But even so, being subject to something so utterly beyond her control and will was horrible.

  She undid the latch again, her hands trembling, and slowly opened the shutters. The Shadowplains were gone: ordinary daylight streamed through the window. Below her was a courtyard, its paving dark with rain. A stray beam of sunshine slipped through the heavy clouds and fell on the branches of an almond tree, striking the raindrops suspended from its naked fingers so they shone like a string of precious gems. She stared, caught by its beauty, wanting to cry with relief.

  She was afraid to turn her back on the window: what if Pellinor vanished again? But she knew she had to find Nelac. She was no longer frightened for herself: instead, she felt a terrible fear mounting inside her for everyone else, for Pellinor, for her friends. At last she braced her shoulders and tore herself away from the window and ran downstairs to the entrance hall, calling for Nelac. To her relief he burst into the corridor almost at once, followed by Cadvan and Dernhil. When he saw her face, he ran up to her and took her hands.

  “Kansabur,” she said breathlessly. “She’s here. She’s in Pellinor.”

  Cadvan was unsettled and wary. He wondered if there was any significance in the strange vision he had seen from the window: it had vanish
ed so swiftly that he thought he must have imagined it. But when he told Nelac and Dernhil, they looked grave.

  “Perhaps it begins already,” said Nelac.

  “But what begins?” said Dernhil impatiently. “What?”

  “Something is poised on the lip of disaster,” said Cadvan. He shivered. “The past, the future, this world… Maybe we see our end here.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps a beginning,” said Nelac.

  “I can’t tell.” Cadvan sat down morosely, his arms crossed, and stared at the wall as if he suspected that it might dissolve into mist before his eyes. “Everything seems very thin, as if we walk on a knife edge, blindly…”

  “Milana meets with her Bards,” said Nelac. “I wonder how long she will take.”

  “We just have to wait.” Dernhil was pacing the room restlessly. “I don’t like waiting.”

  But they waited, having nothing else to do, until they heard Selmana calling on the stairs. Cadvan felt his pulse thumping in his throat. It begins… He ran out after Nelac, who moved even more swiftly than he did. Selmana was standing in the hallway, her face white, her words tumbling over each other as she told Nelac what she had seen from the window of her chamber.

  “It must mean that Kansabur is here,” she said. “That’s what it meant last time, she’s there every time it happens, and then I just step into the Shadowplains. It’s like the first time, when I saw the Shadowplains in Lirigon, and I’m so frightened Nelac, I don’t want that to happen…”

  “Hush now,” said Nelac. “We are all four here.”

  “I wish Anghar were here too,” said Selmana. “Where is she? She could make it all go away.”

  “You mean the Elidhu?” said Dernhil, looking at her oddly.

  Selmana realized she had said Anghar’s name, and bit her lip. She had hardly known what she was saying. All the fear that had been staved off since Jouan seemed to have rushed back at once, doubled and tripled. “Something has slipped,” she said.

  The front door opened and all the Bards jumped and turned, each half expecting to see that the Inner Circle had vanished: perhaps the dim slopes of the Shadowplains, or a glimpse of ruins, or a blaze of unseeable light from another dimension beyond imagining. But it was a red-headed Bard, who introduced herself as Kenran, her hand still resting lightly on the door handle, the darkening sky behind her.

  “Milana says you had better come now,” she said. “It has begun.”

  As they hurried after Kenran to the Singing Hall, a thin, vicious sleet tore at their cloaks. The weather was coming in fast, and the light retreated in every moment: although it was just past noon, it was already so dark that lamps were lit in the Singing Hall. Its high arched windows blazed ruby and emerald and gold, still and calm in the midst of the rising wind. Cadvan cocked his head; on the edge of his hearing he thought he heard a cry or a wail from some evil throat. He had no sense of Likod at all, or of Kansabur, but all around was the presence of the Dark. There was no focus point: it was a miasma that seemed to be in the very air they breathed, a pressure like despair.

  The domed Singing Hall seemed full of people. There were tables set inside, as if for a feast, but they were scattered with scrolls and different kinds of equipment, jugs of water and medhyl. Cadvan blinked: the Hall blazed with the light of magery, which dimmed even the Bard lamps. He saw a ring of forty or so Bards, their faces still with concentration. He almost staggered back with the force of the charm they were weaving: it was a gigantic ward. He realized with astonishment, as he felt around its edges, that it was intended to be set not only about the walls of the School, but the whole valley.

  Milana stepped out of a knot of Bards to greet them. “They strike, even as I expected,” she said. “But sooner than I hoped. I thought perhaps we had until sunset.”

  Nelac nodded. “There is a stormbringer among them,” he said. “In Lirigon, we wondered if it was brought by an Elemental. But what is the news?”

  “A band of wers has attacked the Fesse. I am told by three of the Bards I sent across the valley. But that’s not the worst…”

  “Wers?” said Cadvan. “Surely they have no real power in daylight?”

  “Do you think it will be daylight for long?” Milana gestured towards the windows. “That is no natural storm. There are twenty Bards in the Fesse and they each report to me by mindtouch. In the north it is already dark as midnight, and there are deaths. A woman in Pilan, a child in Labranem…”

  Even as she spoke, the keyword of the ward was sung into place, and the pressure of darkness on Cadvan’s mind lifted. He breathed out with relief, although the strange sense that Pellinor wasn’t quite solid now flooded back, as if the weight of the Dark had concealed its fragility. Ilean, Milana’s housemaster, stepped up to her, the light of magery still flickering about him.

  “It is done, my lady,” he said, in the Speech.

  “Good.” Her face went blank, as if she were listening to some inner conversation, and her eyes flew to Ilean. “Ranstum at Pilan tells me the ward has driven back the wers. But he says the darkness is increasing every moment, and there is hail as big as goose eggs.”

  Ilean nodded soberly. “What should we do next?” he asked.

  “We cannot give more help to those out in the Fesse,” said Milana. “I pray they are prepared as I told them. Now I wish you all to be vigilant, and to protect the ward. If I am right, the real battle will be fought here.” She turned to Nelac. “The storm is on our heads,” she said. “But as you see, we are not unprepared. Come.”

  “Wards may keep back wers,” said Cadvan, as they walked quickly towards the Bards gathered in the centre of the hall. “But they will be little protection against what assails us.”

  “But still, I must give thought to Pellinor,” said Milana. “I will not have these people slaughtered by the base servants of the Dark.”

  “Selmana said something had slipped,” said Nelac. “She thinks Kansabur is close.”

  Milana turned, her face pale. “That’s what Dorn said, before he…” Her voice faltered. “Not all of us felt it, but Enkir did,” she said. “I do not know what has happened to Dorn. I am hoping you can tell me.”

  Dorn was with Enkir and some other Bards. He was seated straight and rigid, and Cadvan saw that his eyes were turned up so only the whites showed under his half-closed lids. Then he realized that Dorn’s lips were moving, and he was speaking or chanting, his voice barely audible.

  “I cannot bring him back,” said Enkir, looking up as the others joined the group. He looked pale and shaken. “He is not in the Shadowplains, as far as I can see. And I can’t make out what he is saying.”

  Nelac touched Dorn. His skin was cold and slick, like clay. “This looks like some kind of haunting,” he said. “Did it occur in the Shadowplains?”

  “Aye. Though we stayed on the threshold, looking both in and out, as Milana asked us. And then there was a great quake, or so it seemed to me, and a crack opened beneath our feet, and I was thrust out, back into the World, despite all my striving.” He met Nelac’s eyes. “I do not know what force could treat me with such violence, without any warning,” he said.

  “And Dorn?” said Cadvan.

  “I do not know what happened to him. By the time I recalled myself, he was as you see.”

  Cadvan leant close to Dorn, putting his ear to his lips. He was muttering fast, in a thin, keening whisper, what sounded like nonsense words, with a strange singsong rhythm. His lips seemed somehow independent of the rest of his face, and the more Cadvan listened, the more he was filled with dread.

  “It’s some kind of spell, I’m certain,” he said, straightening. He put his hands over Dorn’s mouth, trying to cease his speaking, but Dorn’s lips kept moving against his hand. “We have to stop him.”

  “I’ve been trying for some time,” said Enkir. “Perhaps, with your superior knowledge of the Dark, you understand how to do this without actually killing him?”

  Cadvan took no notice of the edge to Enkir�
�s voice. “I might,” he said, “if I knew the spell. But I don’t. It’s not even in the Black Speech.”

  “Perhaps it’s some Pilanel nonsense,” said Enkir.

  Cadvan shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “It’s not Pilanel. I don’t recognize the language, but it is a language. Should we gag him, perhaps?”

  “We tried that,” said another Bard, a thickset blond man called Malgorn. “He kept speaking even though he couldn’t move his mouth.” He paused. “It was too strange and we took it off.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t a spell,” said another. “No magery moves in him.”

  It was true: if Dorn was weaving a spell, there was no sense of its power. And yet Cadvan felt sure that these were words of power. “Perhaps his magery moves elsewhere,” said Cadvan uncertainly. “Not here…”

  Selmana was staring at Dorn, her eyes wide. “I don’t like it,” she said, her voice high. “It’s not right. He’s not here properly. He’s not there, either. He’s stuck somewhere between.”

  Dorn’s head snapped round to face Selmana, as if his sightless eyes could see her, and she jumped. His lips still moved, the hoarse whisper tumbling from his mouth. Cadvan heard strange repetitions that wound back on themselves and tangled and then began again. He now was speaking faster.

  “Stop him,” said Selmana. She couldn’t take her eyes from his face, as if something compelled her. “You have to stop him.”

  Milana had been watching them, her expression veiled. Then her head went up as if she were listening, and Cadvan’s eyes turned to her. “Elbaran speaks from Hess,” she said, loudly so all the in the Hall could hear her. “She says…” She frowned, listening. “She says the ward is broken there. No, not broken…” She listened again. “Frayed, she says. The ward … dissolves. She says there are many wers, hundreds. They are not attacking the villages. They are running towards Pellinor under the stormcover. They are shaped like lizards, with wings.”