The Born Queen

by Greg Keyes

  “Answer my question,” the darkness snarled.

  “Yes,” Stephen replied through his gasping. “I’ve wondered.” He wanted desperately to ask who he was speaking to but found he couldn’t.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  I won’t tell you anything, he thought. “I won’t tell you that I think it’s the ghost of Kauron.”

  He suddenly realized that he’d said what he was thinking out loud, and he groaned. What sort of shinecraft was this?

  “Kauron?” it said. “That’s a name. That doesn’t mean anything. Do you know who he is?”

  “That’s all I know,” Stephen said, feeling the words rush out of him. “He helped me find the mountain and the faneway.”

  “Of course he did. No one wants you to walk that path more than he.”

  Stephen didn’t bother trying to ask why.

  “Well, walk it you will,” the voice purred. “I have no objection.”

  Stephen felt the beat of wings and a rush of air. He uncoiled like a spring and then went loose, the shaking finally easing out of him.

  Stephen lay there for a while, sick at heart, wondering how he ever could have imagined himself brave. It was the same old story: Every time he was close to feeling in command of himself and his world, the saints showed him something to shatter him again.

  He opened his eyes and found that the witchlights were back with him. He was still somewhere beneath the earth but no longer in the vast open canyon where he had been abducted; nor was the river anywhere within sight, although he could hear it somewhere, far away.

  He couldn’t hear anything that might be his companions either, even with his sedos-touched ears. He called experimentally, not expecting a response and not receiving one.

  He tried not to think about the very plausible explanation that they were all dead. They couldn’t be, because that would mean Zemlé was dead, and she wasn’t.

  So where was he?

  The cavern was very low-roofed, so much so that he couldn’t stand, but it went on farther than the witchlights revealed in every direction.

  Anne Dare had described a place like this; she had called it the “stooping room.” Had his kidnapper actually brought him to the start of the faneway?

  Kauron, where are you now?

  But there was no answer.

  He didn’t feel like moving. He didn’t feel like doing anything. But after a moment he did, coming up to his hands and knees. He picked the direction where he seemed to feel the faneway most strongly and started toward it.

  He didn’t have to go far. A column of stone appeared ahead, about as big around as a large oak tree. Scratched into it was the old Virgenyan symbol for “one.”

  He paused. He had never encountered a sedos underground before. Above ground they usually appeared as small hills, though sometime they were rock outcroppings or depressions. What saint had left his footprint here, and how was he supposed to approach it properly? The faneways of the Church had shrines with depictions of the appropriate saint to help prepare the mind and body to receive his power. Here there was no such clue unless the number was some sort of cipher. But it probably just meant that this was the first place he was supposed to visit.

  How had she known the order? Her journal didn’t say.

  Feeling weary, he crawled toward the sedos.

  When he reached it, he stayed on his knees and reached toward the stone.

  “I don’t know what saint you are,” he murmured. “Else I would come to you properly.”

  Maybe it didn’t matter. The Revesturi—those renegade clergy who had helped Stephen find this place—claimed that there were no saints, that only the power was real.

  He touched the stone.

  Something pushed through his fingertips and ran down his arm. He gasped as it clamped around his heart and squeezed. He braced himself for the agony, but although everything in him warned him that pain was coming, it didn’t.

  He rocked back on his haunches as the sensation faded. His skin tingled lightly. An incredible sense of well-being seemed to wash down from his head to his toes.

  All his pains—small and large—were gone, and although he remembered that a few moments before he had been on the verge of absolute hopelessness, now he couldn’t even imagine feeling like that.

  He touched the stone again, but the experience didn’t repeat itself.

  Neither did it fade. He felt a smile tickle his face.

  Why had he put this off? If this was any indication, walking this faneway was going to be a lot better than walking the last one.

  He started off for the next station, which he now could sense as clearly as a voice calling him.

  The roof dropped lower and lower as he progressed so that eventually he was crawling on his belly, his nose almost on the stone. A distant part of him felt claustrophobic, but it never became overwhelming. He felt too good, too confident that things were going his way now. Besides, at least two people had done this before and survived.

  Soon enough his certainty was justified as the floor began dropping away. The walls came in, and soon he was back in a tunnel, albeit one moving downhill in a series of broken steps.

  How long since a river had flowed through here? How long had it taken to cut the rock? An unimaginable period of time, surely.

  How old was the world?

  It wasn’t a question he’d thought much about. To be sure, there were scholars who had, and he had read the basic texts in his essentials at the college. There was plenty of speculation, but it fell into essentially two major schemes of thought: The world was created pretty much as it was a few thousand years ago, or it was very, very old.

  Then as now, Stephen’s love for languages and ancient texts had been his central preoccupation, and the oldest texts in the world were only about two thousand years old. That was when Mannish history had begun. But there had been a Skasloi history before that, one that no one knew much of anything about. How long had the Skasloi kept slaves? How long had the Skasloi civilization existed? What was here before them, if anything?

  These suddenly seemed to be very important questions, because it seemed to Stephen that the world had to have been around for a long time for water to dig channels through stone, abandon them, dig new ones, and so on. The saints certainly could have made caverns when they made dry land, but why make them appear as if they had been formed by natural processes that ought to take many thousands of years? They could do so, of course, but why?

  And if there were no saints, if the power was just something that was, how long had it been here? Where had it come from?

  How many times since the beginning of the world had someone—or something—walked this faneway, and what had happened?

  The thought literally arrested him. So far as he knew, only Virgenya Dare and Kauron had walked this path. Virgenya Dare used the power to conquer and eradicate the Skasloi. Kauron didn’t seem to have survived to use his power. If he had, he surely would have stopped the rise of the Damned Saints, the Warlock Wars, and the unholy reign of the Black Jester.

  Virgenya Dare had saved the Mannish and Sefry races from slavery. Kauron had died and failed to prevent what was in many ways a rebirth of the Skasloi evil. Now it seemed chaos and night were coming again, and it was his task to walk the fanes, wield the power, and set things right.

  Could it really be that simple? Was he really the one? Would he succeed—or fail as Kauron had?

  He shook his head. Why hadn’t the Skasloi walked the fanes? They must have known about them. How could they not?

  “Because the saints love us,” Stephen said aloud. “They love what is right and good.”

  But that sounded so silly that he suddenly knew for certain that he didn’t believe it anymore.

  The next fane was a pool of very cold water. He approached it without hesitation and thrust his hands in, and in an instant he heard a voice. The language was a very ancient form of Thiuda, but before he could cipher it out, it was joined suddenly by ten
more voices, then fifty, a thousand, a hundred thousand. He felt his jaw working and then didn’t feel much at all as his mind shouted to be heard, to stay different, to not be swept away in the ocean of weeping, pleading, screaming, cajoling. Now it was all one sound, a single voice saying everything and thus nothing, thinning, rising in pitch, gone.

  He blinked and yanked his hands from the pool, but he knew it was too late because he could still hear that final tone, itching far in the back of his mind, waiting.

  Waiting to swallow him.

  And even as he tried to force the voices out, they were starting to emerge again, not from the pool this time but from his own head. And he knew that when they did come back, his mind would be swept away.

  All fanes have a limit. All fanes have a demand. They take and they give. If I don’t finish this in time, the voices will make me one of them. My body will starve. I’ll never see Aspar or Winna or Zemlé again.

  He pushed himself up, trying to keep his panic down as the susurrus slowly waxed.

  I finish, then. I finish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ZO BUSO BRATO

  THE GUARDS took Cazio down several halls and through the kitchens, where red-faced women in tan aprons and white head scarves labored about a hearth big enough to walk into without ducking. He wondered briefly if they meant to cook him or at least threaten to, but they pushed him on through the kitchen just as the scent of boiled beef and green vinegar sauce began to waken him to how very hungry he was.

  He glanced at a large knife on a cutting table, still red from butchering. If he could get his hands on that—

  The guard behind him jabbed him with his sword.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t think about it. They want you alive, but they didn’t say anything about hamstringing you.”

  Cazio half turned. “There are six of you, and you’re still scared of me. Come on. Let me have the knife and you can keep your swords. I’ll show the ladies what a man really is. If they ever knew, you fellows have made them forget, I’m sure.”

  He raised his voice a bit more. “What about it, ladies? Would you care to see a little sport?”

  “I would at that,” one of the women replied. Her face was a little wrinkled, but in the right places.

  “Shut that, you,” another of the guards said.

  “Why?” the woman asked. “What will you do?”

  “You’d best not find out.”

  “Threatening women,” Cazio said. “Very, very brave.”

  “Listen, you Vito scum—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” a third guard said. “He’s just trying to goad you. Just keep your head and mind your orders. This is a simple job. Do it.”

  “Right,” the fellow just behind Cazio said, and gave him another push.

  “Sorry, ladies, another time,” Cazio said.

  “Promises, always promises,” one of the women shot back as he was forced out of the kitchen and into a cellar, where once more his mouth watered as they moved among amphorae of olive oil, kegs of grain and rock sugar, sausages and hams hanging from the rafters.

  “All right,” Cazio said. “Lock me in here, then.”

  “Not quite,” the big fellow behind him said. “Dunmrogh doesn’t have a proper dungeon, but this will do. Stop.”

  They were standing in front of a large circular iron plate set in the floor. It had a handhold cut in it, which one of the guards used to lift it up, revealing a dark hole a little less then a pareci wide. Another of the guards then uncoiled a rope and tossed one end into the pit.

  “Now be good and climb on down,” the fellow said.

  “Just let me take a few sausages with me.”

  “I don’t think so. And don’t imagine the women from the kitchen will help you. We’ll be chaining the lid down. I don’t reckon any of them are lock picks.”

  Cazio already had noticed the six heavy iron eyes protruding from the stone around the trapdoor.

  Not seeing any alternative, Cazio took the rope and let himself down into the darkness.

  He went slowly, trying to use the light while he had it to see what he was being held in. That didn’t take long. The shaft was narrow enough that he could touch opposite walls by stretching out his arms—if he could do that without falling. More interesting were the hundreds of stoneware niches set into the sides of the shaft.

  “I hope you left me some wine,” he called up.

  “Weren’t any when we got here,” the guard called down. “Worse the luck.”

  The rope suddenly went slack, and Cazio was falling. He yelped, but before he could do much else, his boots struck stone. His feet stung and his knees buckled a bit, but otherwise he was fine.

  The shaft opened into a dome-shaped chamber about ten paces wide, the entire surface of which was riddled with the bottle-sized niches. He turned, trying to scan every inch of it before they took his light, but he didn’t see any way out or any wine.

  Why would someone have such a nice cellar and no wine?

  The iron lid slammed down, clanging so loudly in the small space that it hurt his ears, and he was in utter darkness. After a moment he heard chains dragging and settling and then nothing.

  He stood there for a moment, then sighed and dropped down to sit cross-legged, trying to sort out his options.

  The shaft was too high for him to reach, but with some effort he probably could use the wine niches to climb up the dome and get purchase enough to scale it and reach the trapdoor. But what then? He could wait there, hoping to surprise whoever came next, but how long would he have to wait? And would they really be surprised? Only if they were idiots.

  Still, he marked that down as a possibility and moved on.

  But there wasn’t much to move on to. He felt his way around the chamber in the vague hope of finding some hidden exit and rapped on the floor searching for evidence of a hollow but found no sign of either. He hadn’t really thought he would.

  He searched the niches again, one at a time, on the chance that something useful had been left in one: a bottle of wine, a knife, anything to use as a weapon. Again he found nothing, and an attempt to break one of the ceramic niches to get an edge only hurt first his hand and then his foot.

  His stomach was starting to complain, and he hurt all over. With an acquiescent sigh he made himself as comfortable as he could on the floor. Maybe something would present itself tomorrow.

  He awoke from a dream of another wine cellar visited under happier circumstances, unsure whether he had been asleep for an hour or a day. He was distantly aware that something had wakened him but couldn’t recall what it was.

  He sat up and was wondering whether it was worth his while to stand when he heard a muffled thump.

  His first thought was that the trapdoor was being opened, but then the thump repeated itself, and he felt the floor vibrate. His nose itched, and he suddenly found himself sneezing. The air was full of dust.

  The sound seemed to be coming from the wall, so he went to it and placed his hands against it. This time, when the impact came, he felt it through the clay and made out a thin shattering sound.

  The next was louder still, and the one after that was suddenly sharp and unmuffled, as if he had been underwater listening and suddenly had surfaced. He felt air move against his face and smelled sour wine.

  Whatever it was hit again, and he felt clay shards pepper him. He shifted to put himself beside the rapidly growing hole.

  Suddenly light came pouring through, so bright that at first he thought it must be the sun, until a lantern poked through the hole and he realized it was just his light-starved eyes playing tricks on him.

  “Cazio?”

  Oddly, for the first heartbeat he didn’t recognize the voice, although in the entire world it was the one most familiar to him.

  “Z’Acatto?”

  A grizzled face pushed through the opening behind the lantern.

  “You’re an idiot,” the old man said.

  “How—”

  �
�Just get through here,” the swordmaster snapped. “With your luck, they’re on their way to get you now.”

  “Right,” Cazio said. He got down on his hands and knees and pushed the rubble aside until he could crawl through.

  What he entered was another underground chamber, and from what he could see of it in the light of z’Acatto’s lantern, it was really enormous. A sledgehammer leaning against the wall testified to the method the older man had used to rescue him, and to make matters even odder, on this side of the wall there was a door frame that had been withed and plastered over.

  “So there was a secret exit,” he murmured as he stood.

  “Sealed up a long time ago.”

  Cazio studied his mentor for an instant, then threw his arms around him. He smelled of wine and many days of sweat, and for a moment Cazio thought he was going to cry. He felt z’Acatto stiffen, then soften and return the embrace, albeit tentatively.

  “I should have known,” Cazio said.

  “All right, enough of that,” z’Acatto said. “We don’t have time to go all weepy. Here, take this.”

  He handed Cazio Acredo.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Some soldiers were fooling around with it and left it in the hall near the kitchen. It wasn’t Caspator, but I figured it was probably yours.”

  “Thanks,” Cazio said. Then he smiled. “You stayed.”

  Z’Acatto’s brows collapsed in a frown. “Not on your account,” he said, wagging his finger. “I told you I was going back to Vitellio, and that’s still my plan.”

  “You must be healed by now. You could have left months ago. Or has the Church been here this whole time?”

  Z’Acatto’s eyes lit up with familiar mischief. “No, they only arrived a nineday ago. I found another reason to stay. Do you know who built this place?”

  “I don’t know. The Dunmroghs?”

  “The Dunmroghs? They’re the last crows to land here. This castle was built two hundred years ago. Back then the land was carved up into petty kingdoms by the knights of Anterstatai. Does that give you a clue?”

  “Should it?” Cazio said. “The only thing I remember about the knights of Anterstatai—oh, no. You’ve got to be joking.”