The Queen's Necklace

by Teresa Edgerton

  “But you don’t think so now?” said Lili.

  “No,” said Raith. “I believe I have detected another—superior Maglore—at the heart of the conspiracy to steal the Jewels. To be more precise, I believe I have detected evidence of a mind capable of a plan far more complex and subtle than any ordinary Goblin could possibly devise, but with certain flaws inherent in that plan that a Human might have avoided.

  “But at the time of which I speak, I was very far from suspecting anything of the sort. I had heard rumors of the existence of the Specularii. I felt that their purpose and mine exactly matched. I longed to seek them out, to prove myself worthy of membership in their noble order. Eventually, I succeeded, but at a great cost. There is little privacy in Anti-demonist households, and it did not take long for my foster-parents to discover that I was involved in the practice of magic, which is strictly against our Doctrine. So I was cast out, so I was excommunicated. This was painful to me, of course, but as I had been taught that physical and mental anguish were good for the soul, this only confirmed my belief that I had chosen the correct path. I was not being punished, I was merely being tested.”

  By now, Lili was almost past wondering at the odd motivations of this strange cult. Almost, but not quite. “They cast you out—but still kept your secret from the rest of the world?”

  “I do not know, Mrs. Blackheart, the strength of your own religious convictions. But whatever your inclinations, you could not easily over-estimate the overwhelming power of faith among the Anti-demonists. They are not in the habit of questioning miracles. They continue to believe there is some divine plan being expressed through me. Because they do not understand this plan, that is no reason for them to doubt its existence. At the same time, they do not think it wise to allow me a place among them, lest I corrupt their children with evil influences. They cast me out to make my own way in the world, yet their belief that I will ultimately redeem myself remains as strong as ever, and they keep my secret. Now it seems that the time of my testing is near at hand. I hope I will not disappoint them.”

  Lili turned toward the back of the ship. She stood for a while in thought, with the wind in her face and her hair streaming behind her, before she ventured another question. “Then you don’t think that this!—all this we have seen, is the beginning of the end of the world, as foretold by your prophets?”

  “No, I do not. The Apocalypse, when it comes, will be an Act of God, not the work of Men or Goblins. Once, I believed that day might not be far off, but I can no longer maintain that comforting thought.”

  “Why comforting? How comforting?” asked Lili, shaking her head in wonder at this strange new friend, so calm without, so intense within. He was a creature whose very existence as he stood there before her now was a study in irony—Maglore, Anti-demonist, Specularii magician. How did he live with his own contradictions?

  “Because when the Apocalypse comes there will be nothing to do but accept the Will of God, knowing that after the Fire and the Flood there will come Rebirth, knowing that what the Almighty tears down He can easily build up again.”

  They were sailing past a line of rocks, where there was evidence of some recent wreck. Broken spars floated on the water, and scraps of wet canvas, which had caught on the rocks, flapped in the breeze. “But what Men and Goblins destroy,” said Raith, “it will be for Men and Goblins to restore.”

  The days before Midsummer found Tarnburgh in turmoil, as rumors that the king was dead swept through the city in a matter of hours.

  The story seemed to originate with the tradesmen and the common laboring-men, who gathered on every street corner, whispering at first, then shouting the news out loud. In the summer heat, it did not take long for their excitement to reach the boiling point.

  In the cafes where the nobility met to eat strawberry ices and drink coffee and cinnamon water, the topic was discussed and debated through three long restless, sleepless twilights. King Jarred had been steadily improving for more than a month—No, he had wasted away and died two weeks ago, and the body was spirited away from the palace and secretly buried—No, no, it was a living Man they had smuggled out of Lindenhoff and carried to a house in the country, that he might convalesce from his long illness, far from the noise and the hurry of his capital city.

  But down in the streets, there were very few who doubted that King Jarred was dead. It was the queen who ruled the country now—Ys the upstart, Ys the foreigner. She had replaced all the government ministers with her favorites, just as she had earlier replaced the palace guards and servants.

  Where was the king’s rightful heir? a hundred voices demanded, as the days passed. Why, he was dead, too, a hundred voices answered—and of the same mysterious malady that carried off Jarred. That Lord Rupert had reportedly been seen hours or days ago, hale and hearty—sailing his yacht around the islands off the tip of Nordfjall, or fishing at his lodge in the mountains—carried little weight with anyone. Even if true, the news could hardly have reached Tarnburgh so soon. These reports must be, no, they were afabrication invented by the queen, spread by her agents throughout the city to conceal her complicity in the heir’s death.

  Meanwhile, ill news came from everywhere. It was a time when reassuring words were needed from the palace, but those who inhabited the palace no longer seemed to care for the people. The queen and her favorites lived only for pleasure. They danced for ten, twelve, even twenty hours at a stretch, on the marble dance floor—just as the last Maglore Empress and her court had reveled in mindless pleasure, fifteen hundred years ago, while their world crumbled around them.

  Or so the story circulated, and it grew with every repetition. The queen and her favorites were not dancing, they were engaged in orgies of drunken debauchery. Strange rituals were performed daily at Lindenhoff, by masked adepts behind locked doors—cats and wild birds had disappeared from the palace gardens, and their blood was flowing in scarlet streams on the palace floors. Meanwhile, the queen’s Goblin servants were busy in the palace kitchens brewing up vats of poison, which would soon be tipped into all of Tarnburgh’s wells and fountains, slaying thousands. The queen—

  But these rumors came to sudden halt and a new sort of panic passed through the city, when steaming gases began to escape through cracks in the earth just to the north, and ashes were seen blowing on the wind.

  51

  Tarnburgh, Winterscar—7 Messidor, 6538

  At Lindenhoff, Ys was alone in her private apartments. Those down in the city who spoke of dancing and debauchery would have been surprised to learn just how quiet and solitary her life had become. With Madame and Zmaj dead, with Aunt Sophie and the rest so devastatingly estranged from her—without the aid and support of those imaginary sycophants and favorites, better known to the populace who had invented them than they were to Ys—she was growing daily more frightened, more uncertain as to her future.

  So Ys paced alone in her rooms, rather than reveal her agitation to the servants. When Lord Wittlesbeck came to call on her, he was turned away by the Padfoot page, who said that the queen would receive no visitors.

  As for that gaudy little music box, the Winterscar Jewel: it sat on her dressing table, looking deceptively innocent. Her attempts to establish a rapport with the tiny Maglore engine inside had been responsible for the intermittent explosions of steam and ash which had been plaguing the city for many days now; responsible, too, for the underground rumbling heard in the city since an hour before sunrise.

  Ys paused in her restless transit to look at the sparkling, dangerous thing. She shivered at the very sight of it, terrified to think what might happen if she tampered with the mechanism again—if, in her ignorance, she upset some delicate, vital balance, and started a process impossible to halt. She could picture in her mind all too clearly a city flooded with liquid fire, herself destroyed along with the rest. But the Jewel was her only chance now, the only way that she could hope to regain some control in this rapidly deteriorating situation.

  There came a po
unding on her door, a voice demanding to be let in—louder and more vehement than the shrill voices of the Padfoot servants she could hear in the background. Realizing her Goblins might not be able to keep whoever it was out, Ys dashed across the room in a panic, to lock and bolt the door.

  But she was too late. The door flew open before she could reach it, and a stocky young man in the sky-blue uniform of the Palace Guard entered the room all in a rush.

  “Your Majesty!” At the sight of the queen, the lieutenant came to an immediate halt and saluted smartly. “I bring you an urgent message.”

  Ys drew a long sigh of relief, realizing he had come to serve her, not to harm her. Gathering what dignity she could, she smoothed out the silken skirts of her gown, adjusted the diamond bracelets on her wrists, and replied imperiously: “Tell me your message at once, then.”

  “Your Majesty, there is a mob forming outside the gate. They demand to see you. They insist that you turn over the keys to the palace and leave the city at once. They—”

  Ys stopped him by striking her hands together loudly. “It is not for the rabble to present me with their demands—or even,” she added sternly, “for you as my representative to carry their messages.”

  Wheeling about, she moved swiftly to her writing desk, took up a pen and dipped it into the inkpot, and wrote out a quick proclamation. “You may read this to the mob at the gate,” she said, signing and underlining her name with a decisive flourish, then handing the paper on to the young officer. “Tell them—tell them this is my answer, which you received directly from me. It is the only answer I will ever give them, so they need not trouble themselves further with more ultimaturns.”

  The lieutenant read through her declaration quickly, shaking his head as he did so. When he looked up again, all of the color had drained out of his face. “Your Majesty, you must realize that if I were to read this out exactly as you have written it, they would tear me to pieces before I was halfway through it.”

  “If you are afraid to read it, then have it nailed up by the gate. Have other copies written out and distributed to the crowd. What?” she added, with a scornful little laugh. “Do you turn coward even at that? But if they do not receive my warning, if they do not do exactly as I tell them to do, then you will be the one to blame when the entire city is de—”

  “Madam, I urge you to think,” the lieutenant interrupted. “You cannot mean—or if you do mean, it is a grave mistake! You cannot turn them aside with such threats as these. Indeed, you will only enrage them. Be wise, Your Majesty. Be more temperate. If you will not do as they ask, at least send them some soothing message. Buy yourself some time and the frenzy may pass.”

  Ys fingered the cold white stones at her throat. Conquering her distaste for using the necklace in this way, for initiating that intimate contact with yet another Human creature, she looked the guardsman straight in the eye. “I ask you, lieutenant, to deliver my message. Will you not do as I say?”

  A confused expression crossed his face, one of mingled pleasure and distaste, and his face, which had been very pale a moment before, was now suffused with blood. “Yes, madam, I will do as you say.” And he turned slowly, and walked dazedly out of the room.

  Ys hurried after him to slam the door and bolt it shut. Then she threw herself down in a chair and wept uncontrollably for a quarter of an hour.

  It was an exhausting journey from Ottarsburg to Tarnburgh, though Luke provided the money to hire a large and comfortable coach as soon as they landed in Nordfjall, and the hired coachman proved stalwart and invaluable all along the difficult northern roads.

  But the countryside was in chaos and strangers were no longer welcome. Half the inns where they stopped refused to serve them, and they missed many meals before their long journey was done. The men grew irritable and contentious—as hungry people will—and Tremeur and Lili turned light-headed.

  As they approached the Winterscar border, mountains smoked and rumbled in the distance. The River Scar was in full flood, swollen by snow-melt from the high peaks. In other years, the peaks remained white all through the summer, but volcanoes long dormant were coming back to life, and heat from their vents had melted the snow.

  Whenever Lili and Raith stopped to take a bearing with their wands, crystals, and compasses, the results seemed to point in a half-dozen different directions.

  Blaise had possessed the forethought to obtain a map before leaving Catwitsen. Now Lilliana and the Leveller covered the face of that map with mysterious markings, and they spent many long hours studying and discussing these notations, while the heavy coach jolted along the rutted forest and mountain roads.

  “But what does it all mean?” Luke asked, from the seat facing them, as he craned his neck to get a better look at the unfolded parchment. It was the first civil word he had spoken in many days, but the map with its puzzling notations was exactly the sort of thing which invariably engaged his curious mind.

  “It means, Mr. Guilian, that there seem to be Philosophic Engines located in each of the large cities which lie on or near this line we have drawn—which describes an arc more or less similar to that of the Circumpolar Mountains, many miles further north,” said Raith.

  Under the shadow of his dark hat, the set of his jaw, the uncompromising line of his thin lips was as grim as ever, but his black eyes sparkled with emotion. “Which of the missing Goblin Jewels are in which cities we cannot determine—even less, where in each city a Jewel might be hidden. Whether the Chaos Machine is even among them, we cannot tell. It may be that it has not yet travelled so far north as we have, yet it is clear, at least, that many of the missing Jewels are now located within a two-day journey of Tarnburgh.

  “This makes us more convinced than ever,” the Leveller concluded, “that the person who can answer all of our questions will be found in your cousin’s capital city.”

  Luke was appalled by the changes he saw in Tarnburgh. Riding beside the coachman up on the box, while Raith perched behind him on the roof, he could not resist commenting on everything he saw.

  “What has become of her? She was exquisite—the most elegant little city in the world. Now there is mud in the streets, the house-fronts are dirty, and as for her people—” Luke almost fell off the coach in his efforts to see better. “That gentleman there, the one with his wig askew and his lace all in tatters—I’m sure I know him. He was a pompous old merchant, ten years an alderman of the city; now he looks like a man run distracted.”

  Luke resumed his seat on the box, with an ache in his heart. Nothing he had seen along the way had produced quite the same impact as this ruin of Tarnburgh. “It is hard to believe that so much damage has been caused in this city by one small female.”

  Before long, the press of moving bodies in the street made it impossible for the coach to go any further. While Lucius paid off and thanked the driver, Raith opened the door and informed the rest of their party that the time had come to go on foot. They piled out of the coach, staring with wide eyes at the tide of dirty, unkempt, and hysterical citizens moving past them.

  When they tried to make inquiries, no one was willing to answer their questions, but by listening to messages shouted back and forth by the crowd, Raith and his companions soon learned that Lindenhoff was under siege. An angry populace was attacking the palace, but the guards were putting up a spirited defense. The fighting had already gone on, intermittently, for several days now.

  “We must get inside the palace before the mob does,” said Lili, as she and the other travellers gathered in a doorway. “If the queen has the Winterscar Jewel—if it should be lost or carried off in the confusion—then the entire city could be buried under a sheet of molten lava in a matter of hours. Or if she doesn’t have the Jewel with her but has sent it away for safekeeping, then—”

  “—then it would scarcely be advisable to allow her to be torn to pieces by revolutionaries, before she reveals its whereabouts,” Raith finished for her.

  “But how do we get inside, past the
insurgents, past all of her guards?” asked Will. “For myself, I am ready to make the attempt, to follow any plan no matter how desperate or foolhardy, but we ought to have some small chance of succeeding.”

  The roar of the crowd swelled for a moment, then there was the sound of tramping feet, followed by a vast creaking and shaking, as if some tremendous wagon or immense piece of machinery on ironclad wheels went rumbling over the cobblestones two or three streets away.

  “There is a way that I know of into the palace,” said Luke. “One that has seen very little use for fifteen hundred years, and it may well be that no one else has thought of it. If we take that way, our path may be clear.”

  Moving through the crowd, he had reached out instinctively and taken Tremeur by the hand. Now, he pulled her closer as he spoke. “Lindenhoff was built by the Maglore, though it’s been extensively renovated. It was originally a summer palace, but the staff of servants who lived there all year round heated the place during the winter in the usual Goblin fashion: with vents and pipes, and elaborate machinery to bring up heat from the volcanic fires below. The tunnels and underground chambers which house that machinery still exist. While the men who maintained the machines used to enter from the city, some of the tunnels do connect to the palace. Jarred and I often explored down there when we were boys. It is like a great maze, and anyone who ventured recklessly in without knowing the way would soon get hopelessly lost and might wander for days in the dark. But I think I remember enough about those childhood explorations to take us through.”

  “It may be very warm down there, with the volcano stirring,” warned Lili. “It may even be dangerous. But if these tunnels of yours provide our only chance of entering Lindenhoff in advance of the mob—”

  The others agreed that it was worth the risk, and that it was necessary to move on to the palace as swiftly as possible.

  “However, there is another matter we ought to consider,” said Raith. “Once we are in, it may be difficult to get back out again, or to bring the Winterscar Jewel out with us to safety. The mob may mistake us for allies of the queen. We may need friends in the city to speak for us. I know of at least one Specularii magician who has lived in Tarnburgh for many years; if he is still alive he may be able to summon further friends to come to our aid. One of us must go to him, while the rest attempt the palace.”