The Dark Queen

by Michael Williams

  Who knew what civilizations now lay chilled and silent, abandoned by warmth and light and life?

  Indeed, who cared? What was important was that she could do it-could leave the world desolate with a breath, a thought. Oh, her powers were mighty, and though Krynn was held against her, safe for now in the shelter of a bright wing, she would gov shy;ern it soon. She knew it.

  It was a matter of months-of a few years at the most-and this was the place to begin.

  Takhisis knew how the salt flats had received their name. Profane ground, where healing failed and revelation faded.

  No wonder Mishakal wept.

  But the goddess who now passed through the lat shy;ticework of crystal thought little of healing, less of revelation. On her mind were the rebel leaders, the close-knit triad of bard, elf, and …

  She had no word for Fordus. Not yet. She knew him only through repute and legend, through his victories and through the song of his bard.

  The bard was easy. Larken did not know her own power-the hidden magic of the lyre she resented and discarded, the awesome potential of her voice if she could free it of her own fear and anger.

  Takhisis smiled. Fear and anger were her favorite lieutenants.

  Fear and anger followed the elf as well.

  Neither of them knew themselves, much less their commander.

  The sand stirred, marking the wake of the goddess, a sinuous, twisting path like the trail left by a snake.

  The next time she would come to them as Tanila, and the elf would be probed and sounded. He was Lucanesti, friend to the opals.

  And oh, the opals would be important soon.

  But first, there was small business to attend to at the edge of the grasslands.

  The grasslands rose out of sleep to embrace him, the long grain swaying in the windless fields.

  Fordus knew he was dreaming because what he saw did not match what he felt.

  He did not like unexpected dreams. But so be it.

  Would the battle come, or the light? One or the other always appeared in his dreams, and he learned from them both, from what the battle showed him or the light told him to say.

  A purple rise, dotted with fir trees and blasted vallenwoods, rushed to meet him. Above them, a dozen birds wheeled slowly.

  Hawks? Was Larken's hawk Lucas among them? He called to the birds in his mind; they approached, descended.

  Not hawks. Scavengers.

  Then it is a battle dream, he thought. I shall feel my dreaming in the morning run, in new soreness and stretching. But I shall win this battle as I win them all. Larken will finally sing of how I defeated Istar in desert, in grasslands …

  Even in dreams.

  He had no time to savor the prospects. Suddenly the rise fell away, as though the earth itself had col shy;lapsed beneath him. Fordus leapt over a spinning, white-hot void and landed stiffly and unsteadily at the crumbling edge of a bluff. A solitary Istarian

  warrior instantly appeared before him-a golden man, hooded and helmed, his shield adorned with seven alabaster spires, his broad shoulders draped with a black tunic.

  Well, then, Fordus thought. He reached for the axe at his belt.

  It was not there.

  For a moment, fear surged through him, dream shy;like and obscure, then he brushed it aside with a laugh.

  After all, it is a dream. What is the worst that can happen?

  Across the arid, level ground, in the wail of a hot wind, the warrior beckoned slowly, trumpeting a challenge in an inhuman tongue. His seven-spired shield glittered ever more brightly until the dream was swallowed by its light. Then shadow returned, and the man stood closer, alone and unarmed, as though he had cast aside his weaponry out of con shy;tempt. Now he assumed a wrestler's stance: a low, feline crouch, fingers spread like claws.

  With long strides, moving so slowly it seemed that he waded through waist-high sand, Fordus closed with the warrior.

  They collided to the sound of distant thunder. The arms of the enemy were cold and metallic, hard and heavy as bronze. The Istarian warrior spun about with a roar, hurling Fordus over his head. Whooping in delight, Fordus released his grip at the height of the violent arc, and somersaulting through the air, landed lightly on the sun-scorched ledge some dis shy;tance away. Behind him, rocks and dust toppled into a bottomless crevasse.

  It is my dream. I can master it.

  The warrior now bristled with six waving arms like an angry burnished insect, like a living statue of some barbarian harvest god. The sunlight danced like flame on his helmet.

  It is my dream …

  Fordus hurtled toward the warrior, who cried out and braced himself for the impact.

  This collision was totally silent, as though all sound had fled at the force of the impact. The golden warrior rocked on his heels but kept his balance, lift shy;ing the struggling Fordus off the ground, four of the arms drawing him closer . ..

  Fordus heard the hissing, smelled the fetid breath of his adversary. Fascinated, distracted, he gazed into the warrior's eyes.

  Lidless and lifeless. Reptilian, the vertical slits in the heart of the eyes opening like a parted curtain, to reveal a dark nothingness, a deep and abiding void …

  Fordus shook his head, wrestled the enemy's mul shy;tiple grasp, his own sudden drowsiness and lack of resistance, the growing trust that it Would not be so bad, this defeat, that it would all go for the better if he gave up the struggling … if he gave in … and looked into the curtained eyes that opened to per shy;petual blackness.

  Fordus bolted upright, stifling a cry. His head rang with pain, and his skin felt raw and tender. His arms ached, the muscles cramping like they'd been gripped in the jaws of some monstrous, relentless creature.

  But he was safe atop the Red Plateau. Not twenty yards away, the young sentry still snored at his post. Fordus leapt to his feet, intent on throttling the lad, but his legs shook with the dream's exertion, and a cold sweat rushed over him like a desert downpour.

  Leave the lad alone. No sentry could protect him from his dreams.

  Angrily, he looked up into the spacious desert sky, where the starry horns of Kiri-Jolith menaced the Dark Queen's constellation.

  "Where were you in all of this, old bison? Old grandfather?" Fordus asked sullenly. He stood up slowly. The heavy gold tore at his neck felt tight. With a last look at the sleeping sentry, Fordus began to run.

  Since his early childhood, running had carried him away from deceptions, from confinement and com shy;plexities. When he sprinted over desert or plain, when the wind took him up and carried him over dune and moon-dappled rise, when in the power of his stride he seemed to become the wind-only then could Fordus think clearly. He could cleanse his mind of the mys shy;tery of glyph and sand, of the prophecies that passed through him. When he ran, his blood pounding in his ears, he was purely, completely free.

  Tonight Fordus outran the wind itself. Suddenly, with a dreamlike swiftness, he found himself cross shy;ing the dunes. The Red Plateau appeared on the far horizon, and from the rebel camp arose a faint array of lights.

  He crowed with delight and ran even harder toward the widest expanse of the desert. The red moonlight bathed the landscape ahead, and soon he passed altogether from sight of the plateau, to a point in the desert where the hard red ground stretched in all directions, uninterrupted to the edge of the horizon.

  All the while, Fordus had the strangest sense that something was running beside him. From the corner of his eye, he saw it, a black spot coursing over the moonlit desert floor. It stayed at the margins of his vision like a specter, like the dark moon rumored by astronomers and mages.

  No matter how quickly he moved, the darkness kept precise pace.

  Something in Fordus's fears told him that it was his , dream in pursuit, that somehow the golden warrior on the sunbaked ledge had ridden his thoughts into the waking world to follow him, to run him down.

  He would not have that. His strides lengthened.

  Across the desert they rang
ed, runner and shadow, their swift path turning toward the sunrise. Suddenly, as the full sun breasted the horizon, the shadow lurched toward Fordus. With a cry, he wheeled to meet it, throwing axe ready in his hand. The shadow loomed above him, transparent and faintly faceted, no more visible than heat wavering over the cooling sands. He saw, in its swirling depths, a pair of amber eyes.

  Lidless and lifeless. Reptilian.

  Never breaking stride, Fordus charged at the enemy. The shadow closed around him, blinding him, then suddenly it was sunlight and sand again, he was sailing in midair over a dune, the shadow was gone, and the ground had fallen away beneath him, just like in his dream.

  Softer sand cushioned his fall, but it began to swirl beneath him as he tried to scramble to his feet. Clumsily, helplessly, he spiraled lower and lower into a funnel of slick sand, a whirlpool delivering him into a dark hole, a central pit.

  In the heart of that pit, the morning sunlight glinted on a bulbous green eye, several sets of click shy;ing antennae, and a huge set of widely opened mandibles.

  Springjaw! Fordus thought frantically, groping for another axe as the creature scuttled toward him hun shy;grily.

  Chapter 6

  From his vantage point in the lofty tower, the Kingpriest watched a meteor plummet through the distant sky above the Tower of High Sorcery, dropping out over Lake Istar, where it crumbled and collapsed into the water like dust sprinkled from the heavens.

  Like dust.

  The ruler of Istar turned from the window.

  His private chambers were as spare as a novice monk's. So he insisted, despite the flattery of the attendant clergy and the growing temptation to sur shy;round himself with beautiful things. A single cot and a threadbare rug lay in the center of a vast and

  vaulted room.

  By day, the chamber was austere, but lovely in the subtle light that shone through the opalescent win shy;dows.

  But it was night now in Istar, and by night the Kingpriest saw shadows. At night, if he gazed too long into the graceful garden below the tower win shy;dow, he saw the trees as things with daggers, and the streams and fountains blackened and thickened under the silent moons.

  No. He would not look into darkness, would not think on his … transgressions. Better to sit here by a cheery fire, to sift the dust-the opal dust-that would eventually bring his joy.

  The windows had told him about the opals long ago as he walked in private meditation along the outer passageway, the huge, encircling hall of the tower.

  Alone, his white hood raised above immaculate white robes, the Kingpriest had been praying, but the prayer passed into a curious reverie in which he remembered his early days of priesthood, a candlelit chamber in the novices' quarters . . .

  A girl. An auburn-haired chambermaid.

  His hands trembled at the memory. So lost was he in a dream of ancient lust that he did not hear the win shy;dows speak at first. But the words intruded at last on his thoughts, and, startled, he looked toward the sun-struck clerestory, where the surface of the pink, opalescent windows whirled with unnatural light.

  Like calls to like, they told him, each window speaking in a voice of different pitch and timbre, until it seemed as though a choir sang the words into his baffled hearing.

  "Like calls to like, indeed," he whispered in reply, when the corridor had settled into expectant silence.

  "Water to water, and stone to stone."

  He did not know why he had thought of water and stone.

  Furtively, he glanced up and down the hall. Per shy;haps someone was weaving deceptive and illegal magic to make him seem the fool…

  Seem unsuitable.

  Two windows at the bend of the hall widened and darkened, as though the corridor itself were watching.

  Like calls to like, they repeated, strangely and absurdly, as the great scholar ransacked his memory of ancient scroll and codex for any mention of speak shy;ing windows, of omen and sign and portent.

  His memory returned to the girl, to the candlelight pale on her bare skin. In the corridor, the windows promised him that auburn-haired girl. Her, or another just like her.

  It was time, they urged him, to take a bride.

  She was approaching, the windows told him. The Kingpriest's bride. Soon the time would come, in ceremony and ritual, when he could call her forth, anchor her errant spirit in a new, lithe body.

  When the time was right, they would teach him the chant, the arcane somatic movements. But for now, he should gather the material components.

  The dust of a thousand glain opals.

  It seemed an obscure command, and yet, lulled by the prospects of the young girl, he vowed to comply, to gather. There in opalescent light he took a firm, unbreakable oath, and twenty years later, when he ascended the throne of the Kingpriest, he set about fulfilling his duty to the swirling, disembodied voices.

  The stones would house his approaching bride, some god had promised him, through the translu-cency of opals.

  The sounds of the city faded into the darkness and the approaching morning. Sleepless and eager, the Kingpriest sat on the edge of his cot, black dust sifting and tumbling through his pale, anticipatory fingers.

  The young man slipped through the dark Istarian alleys, his movements silent and veiled.

  Twice he lurched into shadowy doorways, stand shy;ing breathlessly still until a squadron of soldiers rattled by on the moonlit street, Lunitari spangling their bronze armor with a blood-red light. Winding his way through the intricate streets of the city like a burglar, he passed the School of the Games.

  Silently, anonymously, he continued past the Ban shy;quet Hall and the Welcoming Tower, once festive buildings now muted with night and the recent news of an Istarian defeat. He stepped into the moonlight here, and the red glow tumbled onto his dark skin, his green-gold eyes, the short, well-kept beard. His hair was cut in the dark roach of Istarian servitude-the topknot extending from nape to widow's peak. His wide mouth fell into a secret mocking smile.

  They said Fordus had put it to the Kingpriest. Put it to him well in the grasslands to the south. Who shy;ever Fordus was.

  Now those vaunted legions, decimated and lead-erless, camped by Istar's outer walls with their backs to the cold stone, their garbage piling up around them, had orders to defend the city at all costs.

  It was ludicrous. They heard the march of rebels in the wind and confused the low stars on the northern horizon with a thousand rebel campfires on the plains. They saw Fordus's face under every lackey's hood.

  Still, Istar was far from beaten. The army that this Fordus had crushed, though formidable, was not a tenth of the Kingpriest's power. Already the city echoed with new tidings, with the rumor of military movement in high places, of counterattack and reprisal.

  When the young man was halfway across the Cen shy;tral Court, a third patrol approached-slowly, with a clatter of gruff voices and new, ill-fitting armor. The young man crawled catlike beneath a broken wagon abandoned not a hundred feet from the main entrance to the Great Temple. He held his breath again until the last of the soldiers passed, muting his thoughts in case a cleric traveled with them. When the courtyard was once again clear, he peered through the cracked spokes of the wagon wheel at the dome of the Great Temple glittering in moon shy;light, red as the helmets and breastplates of the patrolling soldiers.

  As he watched, the bell in the lofty tower swayed and tolled the fourth hour since the turn of night- the last hour of darkness.

  Vincus was somewhat early; the call to First Prayer was not for several minutes. He would have to wait until the clerics began their silent, ritual movement toward chamber and candlelit chapel. Then, when most of the residents' thoughts wool-gathered in peasant rite and pretty ceremony, he could cross the open courtyard undetected.

  Vincus crawled up into the tilted bed of the wagon and, lying back in the sour straw, lifted and then settled his seamless silver collar so that it did not clank against the wood. The bright heavy circle was marked only by the com
mon lettering of his name.

  Vincus was a temple slave, and not a contented one.

  For a year now, he had served as silent go-between in the usual tower intrigues, and in one case, he abetted the out.-and-out treason of an eccentric, superstitious priest from the west-a man strangely attuned to weather and seasons and growing things, more pleasant to him than any of those mush-faced, white-robed sycophants.

  But in the end, all sides were the same to Vincus. All sides but his own. Daily, patiently, he awaited an opportunity either to steal enough to pay off his father's debts or somehow to break the silver collar, the sign of Temple slavery that neither smith nor armorer would dare loosen. If he were free of that collar, he could flee into the city shadows, let his hair grow back and lose himself among the narrow side streets and alleys and winding sewers he knew so well.

  His chance would come. Not tonight, but soon, he knew.

  Meanwhile, this hiding place was odorous, but at least it was comfortable. He had waited in far worse surroundings: in the dark rat-infested cellar of an ale-house, in the cobwebbed rafters of a foul-smelling tannery, once even neck-deep in oily har shy;bor water, clinging for his life to the treacherously barnacled side of a moored ship.

  The ship had been the worst, for Vincus was no swimmer, and the barnacles had cut and savaged his hands.

  With that memory in mind, the wagon bed seemed suddenly more than sufficient.

  Scarcely an hour from now, while the clergy droned and murmured in the first foolish rite of the day and the hard-hatted soldiers drowsed at their assigned guard posts, he could cross the courtyard virtually unnoticed. Slipping from shadow to shadow, he could scale the outer wall, stroll through the garden to the braided green silk rope dangling from the high window that would be left open for him, and there, in the shadow of vallenwood branches, scramble up the tower wall like a burglar.

  For wasn't that what he was? A thief of secret thoughts?

  Vincus laughed silently and closed his eyes, rustling into the soft, makeshift mattress. He could drowse now, for his days on the streets of Istar had taught him to sleep with a strange vigilance. Soft sounds three blocks away tumbled like dreams through the edge of his senses, and Vincus took note of each of them: the low chuckling of a pigeon stir shy;ring in sleep, the scuttling of a rat amid the offal in an alley.