The Dark Queen

by Michael Williams

  "We obviously did not win," Gormion concluded with a sneer. "For we have retreated, and our com shy;mander repents."

  The other bandits laughed and poked at one another.

  "You're a fair-weather warrior, Gormion," Storm-light remarked. "Fordus feeds you, arms you. He provides your water in this dry and desolate place. You came to him when you were all nearly dead from the drought. He took you in. And today he gave you a victory. What else do you ask of him?"

  "Gold," the bandit captain replied, flashing her bracelets in the firelight. "Gold and silver and the jewelry of Istar. I provide my followers, and he pro shy;vides the gold. Victory? There is no victory without spoil. We retreated today because Fordus lost heart!"

  "No fighter remembers all of the battle," Storm-light put forward. "How can we judge these things when we remember only in shards and slivers: the face of the man in front, a glint of light on a far hill, the brush of an arrow past our ear. Fragments. You can never claim full memory from them. So we must not speak of retreat, and who could know if or what Fordus repents? As for gold, other things are worth more. Every battle brings us closer to Istar. The last one will set my people free, and bring your gold as well. Be patient, Gormion."

  Gormion acted as though she had not heard him. Her eyes shifted across the circle to Larken. "Let us ask the bard about the battle. Perhaps she remem shy;bers it all, since she fought none of it."

  Larken returned the look with an icy stare. No mat shy;ter the fragment you remember, she signed, there was a full battle we won against the pride of Istar. This I will show you.

  She rattled the drumhammer across the stony head of the drum. Suddenly, Lucas fluttered awake on his perch, green-golden eyes wide and attentive. At a second drumroll, the hawk cried out in a long shriek that trailed away into a high, plaintive whistle.

  It was all the bard needed to hear. Compressed in the cry was Lucas's full account of the entire battle, seen from the high vantage of his flight above the bloody plains. In a matter of seconds, Larken absorbed a vision of what had come to pass on the battlefield that day, and though the vision was barely formed and scarcely definable, she began to pick up its rhythm, and to hum around it, knowing she would discover the truth as she sang it, that it would surprise her as much as it did those who crouched around the fire, listening to their deeds take wing into history.

  The hammer of Istar, the anvil of armies Failed in the forge ofFordus's desert, Failed on the plains when the sun passed over, And the smoke rose up from a smithy of blood While lost in the city the women lament,

  Ash their companion,

  Fire is their father

  And the long war falls

  As the ravens gather.

  Gormion laughed wickedly and dismissed the song with a flick of her hand.

  But Larken was only beginning. The drumbeat surged and galloped, and she found full voice.

  Aeleth of Ergoth, harper of arrows, Yours the first music the army remembers, The arrow a bolt to the battle's thunder, The string of the bow a song for Ilenus Spearman oflstar struck in the vanguard:

  The towers oflstar

  Mourn through the night,

  Bolt and harp

  And the arrow's flight.

  The drum beats faded to a long silence. Aeleth, somber and shaken, lifted his hands to the firelight. In the midst of Larken's singing, the entire experi shy;ence had returned to him: the feel of the sunlight burning through the cloth sleeve pinned up on his right shoulder as he stood atop the rise in the grass shy;lands, the army of Istar approaching, his arrow nocked and the bowstring taut. He remembered the thrum of the string, how it brushed against his cheek lightly, quivering as he brought down the bow …

  How the spearman fell to his knees, dropping his weapon, his hands groping stupidly over the half-buried shaft of the arrow.

  "Ilenus," Aeleth murmured. "The boy's name was Ilenus."

  Then silently, as though all this knowledge struggled for a place in his mind and heart, Aeleth frowned and flexed his long, callused fingers.

  Without prompting, Larken resumed the song. With crisp raps on the drum, she sang out other verses.

  Rann of Balifor, Sword of the Bandits, Rock of the army at Istar's coming, The scar on your shoulder a glyph of the moon As it shines on the dead in the damaged fields As the night passes over the nation oflstar:

  The long spear remembers

  The assembled flight

  The lodge of the arm

  In returning moonlight.

  This was obscure verse for a Baliforian thug. Rann shook his head in puzzlement, in disgust, but then, slowly, his attentions drifted to his shoulder, and a fresh wound throbbed with discovered pain. He remembered it all, now: sidestepping the charging mercenary, the sharp tug at his shoulder as he drove the hooked kala knife into a wide-eyed captain. He remembered wheeling about to face another assailant, a mist of blood encircling him.

  His shoulder throbbed as each blow and parry rushed back to his blossoming memory.

  "I remember it. . ." Rann breathed in wonder. "I remember it all."

  Gormion rose and stalked from the firelight.

  But the bard was not finished. As Larken contin shy;ued, into the Song of Passing that named and her shy;alded each of the fallen, the Plainsmen fell silent, remembering the battle in its swift and brutal entirety.

  Stormlight, listening, recalled the fluttering high grass, the Istarian infantry passing so closely that he could smell the sweaty leather, read the elaborate gold insignia of the Istarian Guard. He recollected his troops, their painted faces and robes swathed with browns, blacks, and yellows, lying still until the sunlight and shadow and grass seemed to swallow them …

  Northstar alone summoned to mind no earthly army, no array of spears or line of soldiers. Only the darkness of the sandstorm returned to him, abiding and deep, broken only by the unnatural movement of stars. Within that darkness dwelt the sound of inhuman voices, a clash of energy and movement he could not find the words to describe, and even the songs of Larken could not approach its menace and danger.

  When the last note of the Passing sounded and the dead receded into their long, forgetful rest, some shy;thing dark passed over and through the young scout.

  He thought he saw a constellation, high in the vault of heaven, scatter and tumble onto the dark shy;ened plain.

  The dark woman crouched in the valley of crystal bones. Overhead the red moon reeled crazily into the desert sky, but even that subdued light hurt her eyes.

  She must learn to master this body. Learn its heav shy;iness and inelegance in the short time before it dried and crumbled, in order to do the tasks she had set for herself. Already the blank, airless chaos of the Abyss seemed like a nightmare, like a harsh season in another age. Takhisis pushed that time to the back of her memory, breathing the night air, the faint smell of sage, the salt of the surrounding crystals.

  Chapter 4

  Now was the time to scheme and countermine. Now, while the rebels divided and scattered, uncer shy;tain.

  There is great power in knowledge, she told her shy;self again.

  Great freedom.

  She groaned and practiced again the casual lifting of her incongruously heavy arm, the blinking of her eyes at proper intervals. The red-lit landscape glit shy;tered eerily, as though she watched the world from the heart of a gem. These eyes of crystal reflected an angular moonlight. Nearby, the salt flats, the pillars, seemed massive, disproportionately large. The plateau and arroyo, not a league away, seemed diminished, mysterious, as though glimpsed at the end of a thousand-mile tunnel.

  The strange triad of Plainsman, bard, and elf seemed mysterious and distant as well, their thoughts and passions and motives still veiled to her.

  Takhisis glanced up at the riding moon. Red Luni-tari passed slowly over the eastern sky, over a gap in the heavens where the black moon rested, still unknown to the worldly astronomers.

  A mask for Nuitari. A bright veil over the dark moon.

  T
he girl would be the place to start, the goddess thought.

  Slowly, the crystals that housed her spirit began to change, to restructure. To a passerby it would appear that one of the columns of salt-a large one, out in the middle of the flats-was melting, dissolving, reforming at the same time.

  Takhisis's body hardened, became more angular. The shoulders broadened and the legs, once long and smooth and tapering, knotted as though an ancient wind had twisted and gnarled them.

  It was a man now who walked the cooling sands of the desert. A man handsome and muscular and cold.

  As he moved through the moonlight, his skin slowly grew translucent, then transparent. He was a ripple of darkness rising out of the desert night, no more visible than heat wavering over the cooling sands. Silently, he slipped by the outermost circle of Fordus's sentries.

  Safe behind rebel lines, the warrior paused and listened, sinking slowly back into view, his skin darker, more opaque. Now the distant sound of a lyre chimed over his brittle hand, as the crystals in his fingers vibrated to the soft sound.

  Good. The bard was playing. The music was uncomfortable, even disturbing, but it signaled her whereabouts.

  Somewhere in the dry gulch, Takhisis-or rather the dark man who called himself Tamex-would find Larken. And the winnowing would begin.

  * * * * *

  Larken, too, had spent a sleepless night.

  Alone in a weathered arroyo, at any time a place of danger, she waited for the inspiration of song and insight, she touched the three strings of the elven lyre, and she thought of Fordus.

  "To the north he went," she began, her low, mel shy;lifluous voice unsteady as she searched for the melody in the darkness.

  Lucas turned on his ring perch, head cocked alertly at the sound of the lyre.

  "To the north came Fordus in the face of Istar …"

  Larken fumbled with the lyre strings, striking a quiet but dissonant chord. Lucas shrieked, raising the feathers on his head into a menacing crest.

  "What? I know it was bad. Sorry," she replied to him, and his feathers smoothed over again. For an instant, a chill passed over her. Had she heard human words in the hawk's cry? Forgetting the moment, she dropped the lyre indifferently onto her lap.

  Larken was glad her bardic instructors could not see her grope for words and flounder with strings. It would confirm what they had told her all along, about Plainsmen and the bardic calling, about her especially.

  About this instrument they had hung upon her, useless and discordant in her hands.

  Lucas cocked his head and stood very still on the round perch. His green eyes flashed with unearthly fire.

  Larken looked at Lucas questioningly. "What?" she asked, this time wanting an answer.

  Suddenly, a coldness overwhelmed her, as though the dry riverbed breathed the memory of violent water, of ice. A shadow passed between her and the moonlight-a cloud, a night bird …

  The shadow paused above her.

  Lucas covered his head with his wing and made a low, painful cry.

  Slowly, Larken turned.

  The dark man smiled handsomely, his face framed in moonlight. His tight-lidded amber eyes moved over her, and the black silk tunic rose rhythmically on his shoulders and chest. His legs were long and powerful, and he wore black leather boots-an odd choice for the desert, Larken thought somewhere at the edge of her mind.

  He was a strange combination of beauty and eeriness, like a distorted reflection of the moon in water. Larken regarded him suspiciously, her hand drifting slowly and surely to the knife at her belt.

  The dark man held her gaze, nodded.

  "You are Larken the bard," he said, as though he named her for the first time with his words. With a movement lithe and graceful, he stepped toward her, wrested her hand from her knife . . . and kissed her fingers elegantly, his eyes never leaving hers.

  Lucas shrieked from his perch, swelled with cop shy;per light, and tried to fly at the man, but his jesses tangled.

  Larken swallowed hard and nodded, recovering her hand and soothing the hawk. "Hush, Lucas. It's all right."

  The bird fluttered and hopped, but obediently kept to the perch.

  "I am Tamex," the man said. "I come from the south, from the shining foothills."

  Larken composed her face into neutrality. The man's hand had been very cold and hard. She started to sign a greeting, but something baffled her hands.

  "While your army fought in the grasslands, I… crossed the desert. I searched for the Que-Nara camp, and awaited your return. Will you speak with me?"

  I speak to no one but Lucas. I only sing, she motioned.

  "I don't understand," said Tamex. "I know you can talk. I can hear what you say. Will you try?"

  "You can hear me speak?" Larken's voice was husky, uncertain.

  Tamex nodded. "I have come to serve your leader. I have come to undo the bondage of Istar. And I have come to listen to you."

  Larken shook her head, deflecting his last offer. " 'Tis a tall order, to undo that city. Istar is the heart of the world." And then, after a moment, "How is it you hear my speech? It has been cursed."

  "Does it matter?" Tamex dissembled, his reptilian eyes at last flickering away from hers. "Does any of that matter?"

  He let his eyes play lazily across Larken's kneeling form, over her blond hair, her bronzed shoulders, and her slim thighs, bared to the evening's coolness.

  His gaze flickered over the lyre and paused. The black diamonds in the heart of his eyes shuddered, narrowed, and vanished. Then, almost casually, his glance rested on the drum at Larken's side and the bone drumhammer.

  "I have heard you play," he said. "Not the lyre. The drum. Your songs and words are worthy of heroes."

  Flustered, the bard set down the lyre and reached for the drumhammer. It slipped from her hand and rattled noisily against the drum.

  Tamex continued. "You are the one who exalts the Lord of the Rebels."

  " 'Exalts'?"

  "You magnify him beyond his deeds."

  For a moment, brief as the gap between lightning and thunder, the bard's eyes widened. She felt exposed, uncovered by a sudden, surprising welling in her heart, as if she swirled in dark airlessness. Then the world tilted back into focus-the arroyo, the twining moonlight, the tall handsome warrior standing above her.

  "Tell me about him," the dark man whispered.

  She rose unsteadily and took a deep breath. Again she was Larken; the words stumbled back to her.

  "About his gifts? His prophecies?" She turned the drumhammer in her hand.

  "Tell me."

  "Twenty-five years ago," Larken began, "the Que-Nara found a child nestled against a dune.

  "We never knew who left him there, who had abandoned him to the harsh desert elements. It was great fortune, almost a miracle, that anyone noticed the baby. Fordus had not cried or called out, not even then, and the man who found him, a Plains shy;man chief named Kestrel, feared that the child was damaged, addled …

  " 'Touched by Sirrion,' the Namer had said, as Kestrel held the silent infant before him on the Nam shy;ing Night. 'The Firemaster is in his eyes.'

  "It was the call of the poet, the madman."

  "Then he was touched … by the gods?" Tamex asked, a brief, enigmatic smile passing over his pale face.

  "So the Namer said," Larken replied, her eyes downcast, looking at the lyre on the ground. "But none of the Plainsmen understood or even wanted to.

  "In each generation, only a few are touched by the fire god. Sirrion's mark comes double-edged: For each child who is blessed with inspiration, with insight and poetry, a thousand others become bab shy;blers, lunatics who dance at the red moon's rising, the responsibility for their complete care falling to their families, their people."

  " 'Tis a hard life for those bearing the gods' touch," Tamex observed dryly. "But how did the Plainsmen … receive him?"

  "The chief took the news … well, like a chieftain," Larken began. "After all, he had found the child and cho
sen to rescue it. Kestrel was a widower; no woman's hand graced his tents. He tended the child himself, awkwardly but well enough. He handed Fordus over to an attentive wet nurse, carried him in a pouch sewn into his shirt lining.

  "The blue-eyed baby was hale enough, and grew tough, thin, and sinewy-like any Plainsman child.

  But always the tribe watched for the sign of Sirrion's touch, for vision or madness. "It was fifteen years before they knew for sure." Tamex started to speak, to interrupt, to ask a ques shy;tion, but Larken had begun the first great story, the one she had sung a hundred times around the rebel campfires when morale was low, when faith in For-dus ebbed or wavered.

  It felt strange to say the words again. It felt strange not to sign or sing them.

  "To the eye of the warrior and the eye of the out shy;runner, young Fordus seemed normal enough- hunting with the other children, helping with the fire, and the catching of lizards for the cook pot. He sat watch when he was old enough to hold a spear and wait out the night.

  "Yet when he first began to speak, at the late age of five or six, his talk was veiled and bizarre, a pecu shy;liar poetry of riddle and paradox.

  "He spoke of moons and of black sand, of crystal and hawk, and sailing, ominous planets. Kestrel was afraid of no man, but the touch of the gods unnerved him. He continued to feed and shelter the boy, but he could not bring himself to love him.

  "The other boys welcomed Fordus on the hunt; after all, he was the chief's adopted son, fleetest of foot and stronger than any. His was the axe that felled boar and leopard, goblin and giant scorpion. But in the Telling Time, when the hunt was relived around fire and tent, when the smallest deed stag shy;gered beneath the largest boasts, he spoke not at all. Stormlight spoke for him, telling his stories to the listening tribe.

  "Fordus they called him on his naming night- when he took on his name and passed from boy shy;hood. Fordus. The old Kharolian word for the desert storm, the high wind racing out of nowhere and the blinding deluge of rain. The force that fills the arroyos, that drowns the entire world in its hour."

  "What about before the naming?" Tamex asked, leaning toward the girl intently, almost hungrily.