Last King of Osten Ard 02 - Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  They were uneasy, she realized. Her guards, the queen’s chosen Teeth, were fearful of the places they now walked.

  At last a more profound shadow rose before them that Tzoja realized must a doorway. The guards took her arms and, still without speaking, thrust her through it. She stumbled and almost fell. After regaining her balance in the impenetrable black, she almost thought she was floating in a void. Only the stone beneath her feet was real, and the smell of the cold, dry air, and the dim sense of great spaces all around. Then the door behind her closed with a quiet thump. The sound echoed and then died, leaving her alone in the dark heart of the mountain. But she was not alone for long.

  Tzoja saw a faint pale shape in the distance, a drifting oval that glowed like marsh-fire. She backed away until she felt the heavy door against her spine. She scrabbled for the latch, but could not find it. The oval floated toward her, more following behind it, two, three, then a half-dozen faintly gleaming shapes that bobbed in mid-air. Only as they wound closer in a sinuous line did she finally understand that the glimmering objects were masks.

  As the nearest approached, Tzoja saw that the masks had open mouths and wide eyes, like the moaning faces of suffering victims—but the eyes, she also saw, were only carved surfaces. Whatever these creatures were, they could not see.

  Tzoja cried out then, weeping wordlessly as cold hands closed on her arms. The silent shapes lifted her until her feet barely touched the stony floor, then carried her forward. She could see nothing of the bodies beneath the glowing masks but a hint of robes billowing like dark smoke. The scent of ancient, rotting cloth rose and filled her nostrils, and although she could not hear these creatures breathe, she could now feel them singing in her thoughts, a slow, mournful song whose words she couldn’t understand and whose melody she had never heard, but still felt she knew.

  Her thoughts fell apart as the shadows took her.

  * * *

  • • •

  When she came back to herself, Tzoja was lying on the hard ground in darkness. For a time she did nothing but breathe, because to breathe was to be alive and she was frankly astonished to find herself still living. Then the singing began again, this time from all around and even above her; as the strange, almost tuneless melody rose, a light began to kindle. At first it was scarcely brighter than the sparks that fluttered behind closed eyelids, but it slowly grew until it she could make out a cold blue-tinged brightness with angles and straight lines.

  It was a box. No, she realized with a pang of terror, it was a great stone casket that lay before her, and the light inside it was growing. Now she could get an impression of what was around her as well, of wide, high spaces mostly draped in deep shadow. Then the light became bright enough to see what lay in the casket.

  First she caught the glint of the queen’s silver mask, then the shapes of Utuk’ku’s white-gloved hands as they reached up and closed on the sides of the box like the talons of a snow-owl. Tzoja wanted only to get to her feet and run and run and run, but her legs were useless. She tried to cry out to God, to all gods, to anyone who might listen, but a great silence lay on her, heavy as the weight of the mountain itself, and she could not break that silence no matter how she struggled.

  The Queen of the Norns sat up in her oblong box and turned slowly until the two lightless holes of the silver mask were fixed on Tzoja.

  You are the one who lived in the house of Viyeki sey-Enduya. It was not a question, nor was it spoken aloud. Instead, the words seemed to form in her head like frost spreading across the surface of a puddle. You are the one who gave birth to the halfblood Sacrifice Nezeru.

  Tzoja could not speak or even imagine speaking, could only pray that the end would be quick. The Queen of the North reached into her thoughts and began to sift through her memories, pulling them up and spilling them out like a net full of wriggling fish while Tzoja could do nothing but helplessly suffer the strange violation. The queen’s search was swift and brutal, and if Tzoja had not been rendered mute by the queen’s control, she would have cried out at the rough cruelty of it.

  Then the presence was gone from her mind. The queen sat motionless for a time, the eyes in the mask still fixed on Tzoja, who sat entranced, like a small furry thing before a swaying serpent. The glowing masks appeared once more out of the darkest places at the edge of the chamber and approached the great stone casket. Silent and graceful as floating goosedown, they helped the queen rise from the box, then draped the slender shape in a cloak made of what looked and sounded like the rustling wings of a thousand pale moths. More masked figures appeared from the darkness and surrounded Tzoja, then bore her up and away.

  She was carried out of the chamber and back along lightless, murmuring tunnels, her feet hardly touching the ground, as helpless in their grasp as a leaf plucked loose and blown away by a hard, chill wind.

  * * *

  After her defeat of the Sacrifice scouts, Nezeru fled southeast on foot, desperate to escape the Hikeda’ya boundary forts as swiftly as she could. She knew she must be under death sentence for killing one of Rinde’s soldiers even without Saomeji’s accusation of treachery.

  Was this Jarnulf’s plan? Did he aim to ruin me? She cursed herself, letting her thoughts snag on something so unanswerable. Because if I am caught it will be a shameful death for me, far crueler than anything he might do to my comrades.

  Perhaps the only honorable thing to do was to let herself be caught and executed, to go to her death in silence and thwart the mortal’s plan. Otherwise I let the fear of torture—of mere physical pain—prevent me from doing my duty to the Mother of All.

  But what was her duty now that she was exiled and disgraced? Nezeru no longer had any idea, and that was the worst thing of all.

  Nezeru lay on her belly in a scruff of dry grass and stared out toward the southern horizon. In hope of getting a better idea of where she was, she had climbed a granite outcrop that stood out from the hilly meadowland. Her Sacrifice training had taught her little of these lands, so far beyond her people’s territory. She did know, however, that once—before the hateful mortals and their iron weapons came—all this had belonged to the clans of the combined Witchwood Children, both Zida’ya and Hikeda’ya.

  The rolling grassland spread before her, but not without limit. To her left, only a few leagues away to the southeast, stood the endless breakfront of the Heartwood, where the Zida’ya still lived. Along its eastern edge she could make out the undulating shapes of the nearest hills, which grew higher and more indistinct as they stretched away toward the south. This was the range her people called the Earth-Drake’s Back, Seku iye-Sama’an. Mortals called it the Wealdhelm, and it marked the separation between the ancient forest on one side and the mortal land called Erkyland. No matter which side of the Seku she chose, she would still be surrounded by deadly enemies.

  A dove hooting softly in a tree behind her fell silent, and in that moment of stillness she heard a tiny shower of pebbles somewhere below her and became instantly alert. She crawled to the edge of the outcropping and lay silent and motionless watching the track she had just climbed until she saw something moving that was separate from the wind-swayed grasses.

  It was no deer or other grassland animal, she saw with sinking heart, but a Hikeda’ya Sacrifice following her trail up the tall stone. She cursed silently as she saw a second following close behind. Nezeru scuttled like a crab until she could see the entire length of the trail, but saw no more enemies, only two horses waiting at the base of the hilly outcrop.

  Still, both her pursuers had bows, and she did not want to wait until they caught up to her, so she drew the polished length of Cold Root from its sheath and crept along the hilltop as noiselessly as she could until she was crouched on all fours some twenty cubits above the track where her first pursuer would pass. At last the low, silent shape came into view. She held her breath, waiting until the angle was just right, then leaped down onto the a
rmored figure.

  Nezeru had hoped to kill the first pursuer with that attack—to break their neck or back and then be able to turn her attention to the second before any arrows started flying. But she was not quite that lucky. She struck the Sacrifice only a glancing blow, and the off-center shock of her landing pitched her off the track so that she nearly went tumbling the rest of the way down the steep slope. She managed to catch herself on a well-anchored root, scrambled back onto the track, then caught the Sacrifice struggling up from where Nezeru’s sudden attack had flung him. Her foot had struck his shoulder and one of his arms hung limp. Before he could even turn toward her she swung Cold Root with both hands and separated his head from his body.

  The second Sacrifice, a female, came into view from below with her bow already in her hands, but although her first arrow scored Nezeru’s thigh, she did not get a chance to fire a second. Nezeru had picked up a large stone, and she flung it down the slope at her pursuer, forcing the Sacrifice to leap out of the way. By the time she had squared herself to shoot again, Nezeru was on her, and although the warrior was no weakling, she had not had the vicious instruction that lifted Nezeru out of the ranks of ordinary Sacrifices into the exalted murderousness of a Queen’s Talon.

  When her second enemy lay dead at her feet, Nezeru looked her over. The corpse wore the emblem of the War-Shrikes. She was surprised and disheartened that they would follow her so far into the wilderness—into what surely must be mortal lands.

  She made her way down the granite hill as quickly as she could, wary in case any more pursuers still waited, but she found nothing at the bottom but a single horse: the other had taken fright and bolted. She mourned the loss—she could have taken enough flesh from it to last her for a cycle of the moon or longer—but at least she had gained a mount.

  As she climbed into the remaining horse’s saddle, she looked out at the great wall of hills and the seemingly endless forest, which looked even more daunting from ground level. Nezeru knew that if she rode into the Heartwood she risked encountering her people’s craftiest enemies—their own kin, the Zida’ya. But on the other side of the Earth-Drake’s Back a thousand times as many mortals waited. She could not delay her choice: it was clear the pursuit by her own people would not ease, and even now there were doubtless other Sacrifices not much farther behind those she had just killed.

  She chose the forest.

  * * *

  Tzoja awakened in utter darkness, half-certain she was still on the journey of the dead. She almost reached down to feel for the birch bark shoes of bleak legend before she realized that though she lay on a cold stone floor, she was wrapped in a blanket that smelled pungently of living bodies, and she could feel her heart beating in her breast.

  Even as she sat up, wishing her light-giving ni-yo had not been taken from her by the palace guards, along with the rest of her meager possessions, she heard a door open. Light spilled in, a dim radiance that barely gave shape to anything, but suggested she was in a small cell. Tzoja tried to crawl into a corner but was immediately seized by one arm and dragged onto her feet.

  They are going to kill me now, she thought. Or worse. Her legs felt as though they were made of butter, and she nearly fell back down, but now two large, helmeted shapes stood over her in the tiny cell, one holding each of her arms to keep her upright.

  Nezeru, daughter, I did what I could for you. I gave you life. What little else I had, I gave you too.

  Tzoja was steered out into the corridor. In the depth of her panic, she found something she had not expected—a place inside her where terror stopped and acceptance began. Viyeki, I loved you in the best way I could. I sometimes feared you thought of me as little more than a pet, but I gave you my all. If they destroy me now, they cannot take that away. They cannot make it as though it never happened.

  These guards wore the stark white Teeth armor, decorated with the labyrinthine sigil of the queen’s Omeiyo Palace. Their sharp-angled faces showing in the slits of their helmets gave nothing away, but they were not unduly cruel in their treatment of her, letting her try to walk when they could more easily have simply dragged her to her fate.

  Can they feel pity for a mortal? Or do they simply not care at all?

  They guided her a long distance over ancient smooth stones. The corridors were lit only by thin plates in the ceiling of what might have been the same crystal as her lost ni-yo. Other than an occasional Hikeda’ya rune carved into the walls at the place where passages crossed, there was nothing to see, nothing to relieve the cold, plodding horror of her predicament.

  At last they reached a stairwell that had been worn low in the middle of each step as thousands of feet had climbed and descended over the centuries. At the top was a landing and a great black door with several more guards waiting outside it, all showing the pale, armored sheen of Queen’s Teeth.

  Her two escorts shared hand-signs with the door guards, then guided her past them into the interior, which in comparison to the dark hallways, dazzled her with its glare. While she was still trying to accustom herself to the new light, the guards let go of her, turned, and left. She heard the great door close behind them with a solid, permanent sound.

  The chamber was full of flickering candles—dozens, perhaps hundreds—set in niches and on stands. Tzoja’s eyes filled with frightened tears, which blurred the candleflames into hundreds of streaming smears as she slumped to the ground in exhausted surrender. Her moment of calm and bravery was over. She could only crouch and wait for death.

  “Face the High Anchoress,” said a female voice from the back of the room. “Did you hear me? Lift your head, mortal. Our mistress would see your face.”

  Tzoja wiped her eyes with the ragged sleeve of her garment, the same she had been wearing since she was dragged from her hiding place by the underground lake. The candles made an aisle of light that led to the far side of the room and a figure seated there on a high-backed chair. For a terrible moment she thought that it was the queen herself, ready now to see her executed, and she almost cried out, but this female shape was more strongly built than the queen, wearing gray beaded robes and a high headdress made from what seemed to be the skull of a huge, horned snake. Her mask, too, was different than the queen’s. It had something of the look of the blind servants who had helped the queen rise from her stone sarcophagus, but where their masks had been eyeless, a dark stare glittered in the depths of this one, a gaze that examined Tzoja intently, though the head and its tall headdress never moved.

  “Bow to the High Anchoress Enkinu.” The speaker stood just behind the figure on the tall chair, her face hidden by a dark, hooded robe. Tzoja lowered her head until her forehead touched the cold stone.

  “You may look up, mortal.” The new voice was deep and slow and full of the certainty of power. Tzoja obeyed. “So you are the mortal slave who came to live in Viyeki’s house,” the Anchoress said. “And before that lived in the north, among the mortals who call themselves Astalines.”

  It was strange beyond belief to hear her past, her personal, unimportant past, being announced as though it were common knowledge. She was too startled to answer at first. “Yes,” she finally said.

  “Speak more loudly,” said the High Anchoress.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Then you may thank whatever spirits your kind believes in. Because you have been chosen for a high honor.”

  Among the Hikeda’ya any death for a mortal that did not end with a ruined body being thrown into the Field of the Nameless was considered a gift they did not deserve. Tzoja said nothing, but felt her heart rushing blood through her veins and wondered how much longer she would be able to feel such a simple, reassuring thing.

  The masked figure did not move, but the voice took on a tone of mild irritation. “Do you have no words of gratitude?”

  “Thank you.” And if it truly was to be a painless death, then her gratitude was real. “Thank you, my lady.�
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  “Come closer.”

  Tzoja tried to stand but her legs still would not support her, so she crawled across the polished stone floor until she kneeled only a few paces from the daïs on which the High Anchoress sat.

  “No words said here say may be shared with anyone else, unless one in authority over you asks. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, High Anchoress,” prompted the figure next to the chair in a tone of irritation.

  “Yes, High Anchoress.”

  “Do not forget this. Those who spread tales about the Queen of the People are sent to the Cold Slow Halls. Their last moments are . . . much prolonged. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, High Anchoress.” Tzoja felt a moment of ridiculous hope. Did they plan something other than to execute her immediately?

  “Listen carefully, for I will only speak to you this once. The queen will soon leave Nakkiga on a grand and holy mission. This has not happened for many Great Years. As she goes out into the world, the Mother of All wishes to have with her at least one person trained in the arts of healing as mortals know it. Our queen knows that there are plants and other simples that her own healing orders no longer understand, so long have we been kept away from the lands your ancestors stole from us. You were taught these arts when you lived among the Astalines, were you not?”

  Tzoja drew in a sudden, surprised breath. It was astonishing that the queen meant to leave her mountain, more so that ageless Utuk’ku could want the help of any mortal. And even if the queen had taken the memories of the Astalines and the training they had given her from Tzoja’s own thoughts, how had she known to look?