Gold Throne in Shadow

by M. C. Planck

  “If it’s so valuable, why did you use it just to unmask Uma?”

  Friea put her hands together. A subtle signal, but he understood. She thought the question was stupid. “We did not; we used it to unmask you.”

  He drew back, shocked. Before he could speak again, Friea continued.

  “Christopher, you’ve already asked three questions. I believe it is my turn.”

  Too late he remembered the very first time he had met Lalania, and how difficult it had been to have a conversation with her without giving away secrets. Now he was talking to the woman who had taught her those skills.

  Friea smiled disarmingly at him. “First: are you going to open that wine?”

  It was as infuriating as sitting down to play chess with someone, and the first thing they did was knock half their own pieces off the board. The old harridan was toying with him.

  Driving the corkscrew into the bottle and yanking out the cork released some frustration. He filled her glass. He left his own glass empty. She was too polite to mention it.

  “Second: why are you here?”

  “Possibly because you kidnapped me and carted me here in a box.”

  She pursed her lips disapprovingly.

  “Seriously, Friea. What do you mean by here? This room? This county? This Kingdom?” He stopped himself before he added, this planet?

  “We already know you are not from our realm. I have heard your Saint’s tale, that you are merely a victim of a random gate. I do not find it terribly convincing.”

  The last thing he wanted to do was tell these people the one thing the Saint had told him to keep quiet.

  “How about if I tell you what I’m trying to do here?” That he could at least answer. “I want to make a change to your society. One I think you’ll agree with.”

  “I have read Lala’s report of your cultural revolution. I am not as certain as you that the gain is worth the cost to the small folk; in a clash of titans the grass is always trampled, and yet you seek to change not just our ruler but our rules. But to clarify my question: why have you agreed to do this? What do you get out of it?”

  Another easy answer. “I get to go home.”

  “So you’re here to go home.” Friea arched an eyebrow at him.

  “Yes. I didn’t want to come here, and I don’t want to stay. I was promised a way home, if I did . . . something.”

  “By whom? Did what?”

  How much could he tell her? On the other hand, how much could the truth hurt?

  “By Marcius. And I don’t know what. He didn’t seem to know, either. So I’m doing what I can. I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track.” He had to be. There was nothing else he could offer this world, other than the gift of technology.

  “You are still hiding something.”

  “Yes. But it isn’t important. It doesn’t affect my task. I’m going to give everybody guns and teach you how to run a democracy. Then I’ll get to leave.”

  He hurried on before she could keep ‘clarifying’ her ever-expanding question. “That was three questions on your part. My turn. Unmask?”

  Friea’s lips softened into a discreet smile. Finally he had asked a question she thought was sensible.

  “Lala says you did not recognize the word lich. I trust, then, that you will not recognize the word hjerne-spica.”

  “You trust right.” He’d learned this language by magic. It had rarely let him down. But the word she used was utterly foreign to him.

  “Try it as two words, Christopher.” She repeated the term slowly, so the words became distinct. “Brain. Eater.”

  The two words hung in the air while his stomach turned.

  “OK, I get it. But what does it mean?”

  “It means death, doom, and destruction. It means the Black Harvest.”

  “Um. Yes. About that. What does that mean?”

  She took a sip of her wine. “Lala did not exaggerate. You are . . . mystifying.”

  “Trust me, Friea. You’re plenty mystifying to me, too.” This poised and genteel old lady ran a high-class brothel, a national spy ring, and had recently come perilously close to killing him. Now they sat in a dungeon, chatting. How weird could he be, compared to that?

  “Tell me: what is the most horrifying creature you have ever seen?”

  Black Bart was at the top of that list, but he knew she didn’t mean monsters of the human kind. Ulvenmen weren’t that bad: just eight-foot tall wolves that walked on two legs and carried axes. Even their dinosaurs weren’t horrifying. Terrifying, yes, with teeth the size of his thumb, yet not truly grotesque. For that appellation he would have to stick with ten feet of slimy, deformed green man-beast, creatures that got up again no matter how many times you shot them and only stayed dead after cleansing fire.

  “Trolls.”

  “Fearsome indeed. You are lucky to have seen one and lived. Yet I tell you, if a troll were to catch sight of a hjerne-spica, it would piss itself and run gibbering in terror.”

  She didn’t sound like she was exaggerating.

  “Imagine a bushel of tentacles, black and oily, as hard as leather but spongy to the touch. A lopsided sack flops at the root of these limbs, and two dreadful yellow eyes gaze out at you with malevolent intelligence and unadulterated contempt. The creature lurks in the darkness, waiting for you to stumble into its trap, a deadfall, a snare or pit, or worse. When you are helpless, or merely distracted, it springs on you with an unnatural animation. Horned tentacles crush your skull; its greasy skin smothers your face. The creature unfurls its penultimate horror: a slender tentacle tipped with adamantine. With unbelievable force it drives the spike deep into your forehead. You are not dead, not yet: you can still hear the sickening slurping as it begins to suck out your brain. The creature deliberately prolongs the act, allowing your pain and consciousness to persist as long as possible.”

  Christopher poured himself a glass of wine. He felt a need for some fortifying.

  “But the worst is yet to come. Afterwards, it gnaws off your head and discards it, like a crushed and empty eggshell. Now it unveils its most horrifying aspect: a long, thin tentacle with a delicate spider-web of cilia. It inserts this tentacle down your neck, the cilia digging into and meshing with your spine. Then it restarts your heart, your lungs, your vital organs, and your body rises under its new master. You have given the creature legs, arms, hands. All it lacks is a human face, and that it creates with magic. It transforms itself to all appearances as you. It walks in your stead, speaks in your voice, shares in your memories. And there the nightmare truly begins. The Black Harvest; the Feast of Souls. Many will fall before its appetite is sated. And it will feed first on those closest to you.”

  He poured them both another glass. The first one hadn’t lasted long.

  “Gods, Friea…”

  “No! Not gods. Never that. Monsters of ancient lineage, yes, masters of the underworld, Lords of the Night if you must. But not gods, no matter what tales they spread.”

  Halfway through his second glass, he finally understood.

  “You thought I was one of those?”

  “It was a possibility, Christopher. You are new to our realm. You have strange ideas and stranger tricks. Your rise to power is swift beyond reckoning, and you are apparently indestructible. It was a possibility.”

  “So you trapped me in a small room with a null-stone. To dispel my disguise.”

  She smiled at him. He liked her ever so much more when he was asking intelligent questions.

  “It was not our first choice. We would prefer to keep its existence a well-forgotten secret and to preserve it against exhaustion. But when Lala could not seduce you, we had to find another way.”

  The thought of Lalania striving to sleep with one of those things made his stomach clench. With an act of will he stopped himself from throwing up. The wine was first class. It was too expensive to waste.

  “Why did you want her to do that?”

  “We are certain the creature’s control over i
ts stolen body is insufficient to perform such intimacy. When you resisted Lala’s every lure, and turned down the woman she connived into your bed, I became convinced that your chastity was merely a cover.”

  So he had Lalania to thank for his unexpected visitor in the night rather than his innate charm and good looks. The troubadour had been exerting an unknown amount of influence over his every interaction with the people of the realm. He had no idea how much of his fame or trouble was her fault instead of his.

  “I watched you on many occasions, but you never let your mask slip. I realized that you must either be innocent, or a fiend of diabolic proportion and discipline.”

  He almost asked her how she had spied on him, until he glanced down at the crystal ball.

  “Next we set you to a test, Christopher. One under our control, instead of deep in the Wild. A band of thugs had seized an inn on the border. We learned of it too late to save the innkeeper’s family, but nonetheless resolved to punish the murderers. Our College has few resources: our strength in numbers is little more than what you saw today. Attacking Too Tall Tan and his Bloody Mummers was not a task undertaken lightly. And then you agreed to come to the College, alone, without your screening cloud of boys.”

  “Friea, did you consider that if I had lost that fight, I would be dead?”

  “We did consider it. Our company waited but a short distance away, and I had your own men close at hand as well, led to your rescue by Carala. If you had died, you would have lived again. We would have succored your body and your Saint would have succored your soul. But with the threat posed to you, we assumed you would be forced to reveal your true nature to defeat them. I was watching. I was waiting to see the monster reveal itself.”

  He was having trouble keeping the wine down. Again.

  “You were watching what they were going to do to Lala?”

  “Yes.” She glared at him. “I have seen worse, and not been in a position to do anything about it. But Lala played her part well. By becoming a victim instead of a threat, she made them toy with her, giving us time to act.”

  “Did she know you were ready to save her?” He wondered how much of her fear had been acting.

  “No,” Friea admitted. “She surely must have known we were watching, but she could not know we were close enough to intervene. You must forgive her: she knew only that we wanted her at that inn, that night. If she had known more, you might have plucked it from her mind by spell or craft. And you must forgive us: we were not aware of the assassin’s involvement. We did not expect her poison, or that all-consuming fire.”

  The old witch had played fast and loose with other people’s lives. She saw his accusation in his eyes.

  “We needed only to save a fingernail, Christopher. Your Saint would have revived you, like he did before. And we would have paid for Lala, too.”

  “Just a Darkling moment. If I was such a monster, why would the Saint bring me back the first time? Wasn’t the fact that he was on my side proof that I wasn’t a brain-eating octopus from Hell?”

  Friea stared at him earnestly. “Where there can be one hjerne-spica, there can be two.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I can, and I am. My entire life I have been mocked as a superstitious old fool, even when I was young. I saw shadows at noon, they said. A silly girl who could not tell nightmares from nightsoil. And yet, I have watched my College side-lined and reduced, while the reach of the Shadow grows steadily. It falls over the Gold Throne, of course; but that is only to be expected. A truly diabolical plan would corrupt the White Church at the same time. And the hjerne-spica are nothing if not the very definition of diabolical.”

  “Can I take it I passed your tests? And by extension, the Saint as well?”

  She bowed her head. “Yes. The null-stone has not only proven you human, but also free of mind-altering enchantment. You are neither the monster we seek nor its servant. We were wrong; I was wrong. My only excuse is that my reasons seemed persuasive to me. We will not doubt you or yours again.”

  A lame surrender, for all the trouble she had caused him.

  “It’s going to take more than that. I don’t want you off my back; I want you on my side. And I won’t set any ambushes on you to get it, or ask you to sleep with monsters. All I want is Lala. No, damn it, not her body. Her service. Full-time, as an advisor. You’ll keep me out of trouble with the nobles while I teach the peasants how to make trouble. You’ll help me find my assassin. You’ll tell me things, without making me explain why I need to know them. And you’ll send Uma to the Saint get her face fixed.”

  Friea smiled graciously. “Accepted, my Lord Vicar.” Of course she was smiling. He’d just taken her viper to his bosom and buttoned his shirt over it. He’d never have another secret from the conniving old biddy. “Can I render you any other service this day?”

  For once, he was out of questions. He’d learned more than he wanted to in the last hour, and this hardly seemed like the time or place to start asking about inter-planar travel, since it would undoubtedly set the Skald on the path to figuring out the one secret he was trying to keep. Then he thought of a tiny detail that had been niggling him for a while. Surely a question this innocent could not lead to a mind-numbing lecture on unspeakable horrors.

  “One more thing. How old is the Kingdom?”

  Friea stared at him, the whites of her eyes suddenly wide, and her mouth drawn tight like a wire.

  “What? What did I say?” Damn, but she was touchy.

  “Why would you ask that, Christopher? In all my years as the Skald, in all my years as a Troubadour and Minstrel roaming the land, singing in the courts of lords and spying on them, in all my life I have never heard anyone ask such a curious, pointless, irrelevant question.”

  “Does that mean you don’t know the answer?” That would probably explain why she’d gotten so riled up.

  “I know the answer. But before I tell you, understand that if I had not just sworn to never doubt you, I would think you a hjerne-spica all over again. No one has ever asked that question, because no one has ever cared. What possible difference could it make to anyone? Anyone, that is, but a hjerne-spica, calculating whether our Kingdom is due for the harvest. Only the farmer asks how long the wheat has been in the field.”

  He wanted to know why there weren’t stone fences in the old farmlands. He wanted to know why they hadn’t made any technological progress. He wanted to know how long ago they had come over from Earth. But he didn’t want to tell her all that.

  “Remember the part of the deal where you tell me stuff without making me explain why I asked?”

  “Of course, my Lord Vicar. Though it is not widely known, indeed may not be known outside of this building, the Kingdom is precisely two hundred and fifty-seven years old. It was a Sevenday, in the third week of summer, when Varelous the Arch-Mage stepped through a Gate at the foot of the spire of stone that would become Kingsrock. Behind him came his trusted companions, Palence and Byrnia, and a hundred and eighty-seven men, women, and children. They were refugees, fleeing a Kingdom called Attica. That Kingdom had been their home, and it was a place worthy of such heroes as they. Vast numbers of people had lived there, under a wise and just Council, in wealth and plenty, with such a surfeit of strength of arms and magic that monsters were hunted for sport or study, not from fear. Attica had been supreme; Attica was now rubble. Varelous and his pilgrims were the sole survivors, the last out of millions. The Black Harvest had come to Attica, and in a day her pride was thrown down, her spine broken, her people devoured.”

  She paused for breath. Christopher sat open-mouthed, stunned into silence.

  “I know all of this, because I have Varelous’s diary. At least, the handful of pages he wrote before life in this new land demanded all of his attention. In the last passage, he hints at his greatest fear: that the hjerne-spica purposely allowed their tiny band to escape the slaughter. The term he used was ‘seed-corn.’ Then he set down his pen, wrote no more of his though
ts, and spent the rest of his life struggling to rebuild. We have only legends from that time, adventure stories fit only for children. The people chose to forget the truth. The past was buried; the future birthed in ignorance and hope. But we cannot blame the people. Even Varelous the Arch-Mage could not long bear the burden of this knowledge. It was left to the Skald, one woman in every generation, old and wise and sad, to remember.”

  “And now,” Christopher said sourly, “one man.”

  “You asked.”

  Of course he had. Pretty much every lump on his head was there because he’d stuck his noggin in front of somebody’s club and asked for it.

  “How much time do we have?” If his task was to save this society from the Black Harvest, he was going to need a lot more rifles.

  “Varelous wrote of millions of people. Our realm is a fraction of that. We always assumed the harvest would wait until the crop is ripe. And yet, now the enemy moves against us deliberately. The shadow grows over the Gold Throne only as a stepping stone; its goal is the entire realm. Just as we prepare for the resistance, so does the enemy prepare for the onslaught.”

  The wine bottle was empty. Christopher felt sick, but not from alcohol. He wanted out of here, out of this underground lair of misery and despair. On cue, a knock came from the door. The guard captain spoke from the other side.

  “My lady, the Vicar’s soldiers are here, and they ask to see him. They are quite insistent.”

  Christopher stood, ready to leave. At the last instant he remembered his manners.

  “Begging your pardon, Lady.”

  “You no longer need beg my pardon, Christopher. I serve your cause now. Our only hope lies with you and the god Marcius. To that hope, and that alone, I bend the knee that has defied kings for three generations.”

  He should play the question game more often. If he had done so a year ago, he might have realized that Marcius was seriously underselling the size of his task. He should remember that though all his battles had been with monsters outside the Kingdom, the true war was against monsters within.