Her spirit, Darneth, returned. It whispered, “If you remain where you stand, you’ll die.” So speaking, it wrapped itself around her like a swaddling cloak, as if trying to hug her. Or protect her.
White light enveloped her, even as what she imagined as a human-sized fly-swatter smashed her across the length of her body.
“I’m all right,” she rasped, hoping it was true, though she wasn’t sure to whom she spoke. She was sprawled on the ground, her limbs entwined with a duplicate who’d fared much worse in the explosion than her. It could’ve been the one she’d looted, or a different one. How did the fucking things tell each other apart?
Pain needled through her joints and neck as she tried standing. “Less all right than I thought,” she amended, and stayed on the floor.
One panel was gone, as were all the reds who’d tended it. A crater-like blast pattern scorched the floor where the translation gate had hung in the air. A zigzagging crack splintered the face of the opposite panel.
She couldn’t see Raul or Gamma, which worried her. Fresh rubble lay between her and where they’d been fighting at the chamber’s edge. They’d been farther from the gate detonation than she’d been. Raul was all right, she told herself. Unless that rubble – was it from the ceiling? – had fallen on him.
Pushing through the sharp spikes of pain she was ready for this time, she got up.
Darneth was gone – the spirit’s misty shape was nowhere in the chamber, as was its sense of presence she’d earlier detected in the ring. Darneth had wound itself around her to protect her. The spirit hadn’t been willing to fight for her, but it had tried to save her. And now… she wasn’t sure where it was. A hollow feeling made her swallow. Funny, because in a way, Darneth wasn’t real.
Except he was. This was all real. At least, it was as real as life on Earth, which was made up of particles, waves, and maybe tiny vibrating strings even deeper down. Whatever dark energy mechanism was imposing order and structure to everything around her was just as comprehensive in fashioning an instance of unique reality. Which meant that the reds she’d killed directly, and those who’d died in the subsequent blast she’d caused were also real. Clones or not, they’d been alive. But no more.
She bent double and retched.
26: Reflection
Elandine, Queen of Hazurrium
Seven moons fell among the brilliant stars along their nightly course. Each lunar sphere was named for a Rule, or perhaps an Incarnation, for they were one and the same. The glimmer of false dawn edging both horizons meant it was near middle-night, when the sun swam beneath Ardeyn, illuminating its craggy, barren underside.
Though Queen Elandine and her host were closer to the Daylands’ western edge, nothing blocked their sightline eastward across the empty Glass Desert. The hard plain had already radiated away the heat from the day before, rendering the night surprisingly frigid. The darkness and the morning hours of the next day still offered at least nine or ten hours of travel time across the desert’s reflective surface. Not long after that, as the risen sun crested toward noon, without clouds it would grow so hot that they’d need shelter. Which was a difficult proposition out on the glass. Only fools would choose to go in that direction. Yet it was their course, because that way lay Megeddon.
Elandine carefully reached into a wicker cage and pulled out a tiny bird. Wings fluttering, it chirped at her. “Hello,” she told it. “Are you ready to find the way forward?”
The bird chirped again. The queen smiled. The creature had been a lucky find, considering all that had happened since they’d surprised the sark in the Green Wilds.
Surviving the sark attack had been her number one priority. And thanks to their planning and the skill and bravery of her people, they’d done exactly that. The sark had been woefully unprepared for an army of Hazurrium’s finest. Surprised and likely terrified that they were the target of a much larger invasion, the creatures pulled back into their Green Wilds lairs. A three-day passage, without any further encounters with the debased qephilim, saw her army to the southern edge of the forest.
Their good luck failed – a particularly rabid sark tribe infested a ruined fortress overlooking the crossing of the Drudessa River, which was some considerable distance from the boughs of the Green Wilds. No one had expected any further trouble with sark so far from their haunts. When about half her army was across the river, stretched out and vulnerable, the savages boiled out of the fortress on the opposite bank in a perfectly timed ambush.
She’d lost at least twenty peacemakers. But in the end, a thousand warriors against a single tribe of sark, no matter how bloodthirsty, ended with the sark’s elimination. Flora would’ve been appalled. Though her mother would’ve been proud of the queen’s tactics, Elandine was sure. If she’d been around to see them.
Elandine had ordered the wounded tended, and sent a small unit into the fortress to scout for any additional danger. They returned a few hours later claiming the creatures would be no further trouble and carrying salvaged sark treasure she allowed them to keep for their effort. All except for the little bird in her hand, which they’d given her.
It was a sere dove, pearlescent with a delicate beak. Unlike most of its avian kin, it knew the pockets, cracks, and wrecks littering the desert. The sark probably kept it for the same use she had in mind.
Elandine raised the creature. Its scaly feet pinched her thumb.
She said, “Seek your path eastward. Fly!”
The sere dove took wing. She half expected it to wheel back toward the sark fortress or northwest toward the Green Wilds. But whether it was trained or because that was simply its nature, the dove fluttered southeast, out across the reflective plain.
“Sound the horn,” she told Navar.
The First Protector complied, sending a long, high call ringing across the assembled ranks. Her forces moved out, with their queen in the lead, her eyes on the dove. They walked into the night, reflected stars and tumbling moons at their feet.
***
As the sun’s disk broke over the horizon like a molten gold coin, guilt stabbed Elandine. She hadn’t spared a second for Flora’s plight since well before the Drudessa River crossing. After spending so many months almost prostrate at sorrow’s altar, it seemed like a kind of betrayal that she hadn’t given Flora’s memory its due recently. Going over her death again and again somehow kept the woman part of the present, and not merely a shade of the past.
Except, not thinking about it was easier… a thought that made her feel even more guilty.
But she did have other things to think about. Hazurrium couldn’t stand for the embodiment of its power, the symbol of rulership, to be stolen without an answer. Their standing as a primary power in Ardeyn was at stake. Keeping this expedition on track required nothing less than Elandine’s full attention.
And yet, wasn’t it to snatch her sister back from the Night Vault that she was actually challenging the Betrayer, why she led her forces across the most desolate part of Ardeyn? Elandine knew of no other way to effect that escape other than with the Ring of Death.
Oddly, she could still feel it on her finger, a phantom band like a severed limb, cold and serene in the face of all calamities.
Given all that she was doing to recover that Ring and thus Flora’s escape from death, Elandine reasoned, she didn’t have the time to grieve.
Shielding the blinding dawn and its equally blazing reflection with one hand, Elandine gazed across the reflective plain. She’d lost sight of the bird hours ago, but not before establishing the ruler-straight direction of its flight. Sere doves flew between oases, and an observant traveler who following one’s path could pick their way across the desert, including armies led by observant queens.
She didn’t need to find water or food – her forces carried adequate provisions. Just a crack, hill, or even a lone dune of encroaching dust from the Borderlands that was large enough to shelter her forces during peak heat if they dug in.
No cave, dune, structu
re, or other protective feature leaped out at her as she scanned the landscape. That wasn’t a complete disaster, because they had a few hours before the warmth really picked up. But it concerned her, because it would take about that much time to walk as far as she could currently see. It was even farther if they turned back. They had to go forward.
Navar watched, a question in the angle of her ears.
Elandine said, “Onward!” and Navar blew the horn, signaling the short rest was over. The army marched on into the sunrise.
Less than an hour later, with the sun well up, the sweat trickled under her armor and stung her eyes. She wiped her forehead with the cuff of her sleeve, managing to keep an exasperated profanity from escaping her lips. Everyone looked to her for strength, not complaints.
That’s when she spied a narrow crack in the glass ahead and to the left. She pointed it out to Navar, who ran ahead to check it out.
Ran, instead of rode, because they lost their mounts when her ships foundered in the storm. That loss wounded her pride as much as anything else, but Elandine knew that for Navar, it was worse. The First Protector had formed a close bond with her charger, and its loss weighed on the qephilim heavily. Not that she’d ever say. The regent in Hazurrium had much to answer for, not the least being the death of horses. All would be accounted for when Elandine returned, she promised herself for the hundredth or thousandth time. The dull anger that burned when she thought of the regent was one of the goads that kept her moving forward.
“This may serve!” called Navar, and motioned for Elandine.
She joined her and looked down a much larger space than she’d expected. The crack was narrow, but it opened up into a hollow, darkened space a few feet beneath the glass. A rubble of boulders actually looked as though it would make a passable stair. Cool air and the faint scent of water came up from below.
“This is where the sere dove was leading,” she said, hoping it was true, and that it was large enough give everyone a chance to rest in the shade. If it wasn’t, they’d devise a schedule to rotate the army into the coolness unit by unit.
“I’ll call up a team to investigate,” said Navar.
“We don’t have time – the sun is going to bake us if we don’t do this quick. I’m going to check it out–”
“My queen!” protested Navar. If it wasn’t Navar’s job to protect the queen, Elandine was pretty sure the First Protector would kill her one of these days.
“I’ll keep a force of peacemakers at my elbow,” Elandine said. “You stay here and prepare our forces to descend immediately, one unit at a time.”
Navar shut up and did as Elandine commanded, and the queen was grateful for her forbearance.
Elandine called over the captain of the nearest peacemaker unit and, as Navar began forming up the tiny army on the glass, the queen ventured down into the coolness with twelve peacemakers ranging out before her with lanterns, crossbows, and drawn swords.
She descended several tens of steps. The underground space grew wider and wider. Her apprehension about whether her forces would fit evaporated. The scent of water sharpened, and the air grew even cooler.
They found a subterranean forest, of a sort. Instead of trees, great glass pillars stretched upward, trunks wider than any four humans could encircle, spreading away into a darkness that was lit here and there by glints of light from above. Dust caught in the shafts danced like fireflies.
“Your Majesty,” the lead peacemaker called. “Over here.”
Joining the peacemaker, a man named Ghali, the queen saw that he was squinting into the depths of a glass pillar. “What is it?” she asked.
“I thought I saw someone moving within.”
Elandine resisted asking the peacemaker if he was certain. He wouldn’t have wasted her time on anything less.
“Describe it,” she said instead, bringing her own lantern to bear on the surface. The light penetrated a few hand spans, but the pillar grew milky and opaque.
“I thought it was my own reflection at first,” Ghali said, “but then I realized the face was too thin and pale, the armor too raged. Perhaps it was a rogue spirit.”
Some spirits didn’t find their way to the Court of Sleep, but instead lingered on the surface. It wouldn’t surprise her if a place as deadly as the Glass Desert was haunted by more than its fair share of the uneasy dead. If she had the Ring of Death…
If. If dreams had wings Elandine would fly back to Hazurrium, strike the false regent’s head from her shoulders, and ask her departed sister Flora to the royal veranda for sweet cakes and strong coffee. If.
Instead she said, “You’re probably right, Ghali. Keep watch. If sere spirits haunt this delve, they may grow unquiet when the rest of our forces descend. Or, maybe they will flee so much attention.”
“Let’s hope for the latter, Your Majesty,” Ghali said.
Elandine arranged for another peacemaker to give Navar the all clear, so the First Protector could bring down the host. She knew it was getting warm topside. Then she continued to press into the hollow. How big was it, really?
Thirty or forty paces further in, she found a spring bubbling up to form a shallow pool. A stream slipped away from the pool, running down between sharp edged glass boulders and reflective pillars. She directed the beam of her lantern to follow the stream’s uneven path down–
The phantom Ring on her finger vibrated. The sensation was so unexpected she froze for a full second before jerking her hand into the light of the lantern. Her finger was bare.
When her eyes came back up, she was looking directly into the empty gaze of a grinning skull! No, it was a reflection in a glass pillar; the figure was standing behind her.
Elandine spun to face the thing that had ambushed her. Nothing was there.
“Lotan’s hoary nethers,” she cursed.
When she snapped her glance back to the glass pillar, the skull was still there, and it had grown a hand that was reaching for her. She flinched away, and the thing’s bony fingers, glowing with searing heat, grazed her. She felt the contact, smelled the burning metal of her breastplate, and a faint surge of heat.
Yet she couldn’t see it at all with her own eyes – only by its reflection.
“Good enough,” she grunted, unsheathing her sword. She swiped Rendswandir through the air where the reflection told her the spirit should be. The runes on her blade flared gold as she struck something, and a suggestion of a shape briefly occupied the empty air before fading back to invisibility.
A scream of rage followed, sepulchral for all that it aped the passion of life. Shouts from the direction she’d come, of peacemakers realizing their queen had gone forward without them, followed.
Fighting a foe you could only see by its reflection was damn difficult, she decided when she sidestepped into the thing’s next burning touch instead of away. This time the scent of burning material included skin, though it took a moment for the pain to follow. When it did she almost dropped her sword.
Suddenly Ghali was with her, eyes alight with alarm, searching for the foe she faced.
“Look for its reflection!” she yelled, and swung at the grinning spirit. Misjudging, her sword whistled through empty air. She checked the sheet of glass, frowning to see two more spirits fade into the image, one human and the other qephilim. They hissed, the sound like blowing sand.
Elandine tried reason. “We are not treasure seekers or soul sorcerers here to trap you. We’re only shelter seekers, fleeing the noonday sun. I beg you, allow us to share the coolness for a span, and then we will be gone.”
The new spirits paused, looking uncertain, if that was possible. But the original’s reflection only laughed louder, hollow and echoing in the underground space. Where had it gone? Its reflection in the original sheet of glass had vanished.
A searing line of pain drew itself down her back. She rolled forward, realizing the thing had positioned itself so she hadn’t been able to see it in the glass. Thank the Maker her relic breastplate was light enough
she could move as if unencumbered.
The peacemaker Ghali, standing farther up the broken trail among the glass pillars, had a different vantage of the fight. He screamed, “I see you!” and lunged.
From Elandine’s perspective, his thrust cut emptiness. But the sere spirit’s laughter choked off. When Ghali withdrew his blade a haze of spectral light flared around the steel, then dissolved to ash. The tortured spirit was sent to its rest, she hoped. Even if not, it wouldn’t bother them for at least another revolution of the seven moons.
She fixed her eyes on the remaining two spirits. Brandishing her fist as if she yet wore the Ring of Death, she decreed, “Leave us, or your fate will prove the worse. I will erase you, I swear by the Incarnation of Death!”
A thrill of potency electrified her as she spoke, starting from her bare finger. The echo of the power she’d worn for so long seemed to reach from the past and give her words truth. The two remaining spirits fled as if blown away in a sandstorm.
After a pause, to make certain it wasn’t a ruse, Elandine relaxed. She glanced at Ghali, and couldn’t quite restrain a grin. “I think that’s done it, then,” she said.
“My queen, it seems so.”
Navar and a riot of peacemakers stampeded down the steps and surrounded her, blades drawn, eyes blazing with indignation and vigilance.
Elandine could tell from Navar’s expression that she was furious, though she held her tongue. Probably only because Elandine and the First Protector were among her forces, and it would be unseemly. But the queen knew that she was in for a dressing-down when they were alone next. Not that she didn’t deserve it, of course. Shame threatened to warm her cheeks. She considered appointing the peacekeepers who’d followed the First Protector as the “queen’s personal detachment” for the foreseeable future, just to put off the dressing down as long as possible. She didn’t need to hear it. She already knew Navar was right.
“How fares the bivouac?” Elandine said.
The Myth of the Maker Page 24
