Upon the Flight of the Queen

by Howard Andrew Jones

  Kyrkenall cleared his throat. “That’s better. But it doesn’t describe what I look like, does it?”

  “You are small,” Ortok said. “And you look puny.”

  “I suppose,” Kyrkenall admitted grudgingly. “But what’s distinctive about me?”

  His strange eyes, Elenai thought. Obviously. And his elongated eye teeth.

  “Your height,” Ortok said.

  Kyrkenall’s reaction was carefully blank and Elenai could almost hear the dry rejoinders he didn’t speak. “Let’s try this. When you’re describing someone, to make them distinctive, your listeners can usually only hold on to about three characteristics. Make them stick. For instance, in Elenai’s case I’d describe her as striking, with hair like autumn leaves and eyes like a misty morning.”

  “Striking?” Ortok rumbled.

  “Pretty in an unconventional way,” Kyrkenall explained.

  Elenai liked the compliment, though she strove not to show a reaction.

  “It is not very precise,” Ortok objected.

  “All right,” Kyrkenall said waspishly, then breathed out, paused a moment, and was calm once more. “Be precise about me.”

  “Hmm.” Ortok pushed out his jaw so that his lower fangs protruded over his upper lip. It gave him a doglike appearance. “Your eyes are black like night and like the deadly bow you hold.”

  Kyrkenall brightened. “Good!”

  “And you are puny, but deadly.”

  Kyrkenall closed his eyes, his mouth tightly clamped. Elenai waited for the expected sarcasm when he opened his eyes again, but heard, instead, a polite statement: “You’re getting there.”

  “Thank you!”

  “Certainly.” Kyrkenall’s tone suggested that he might not be entirely happy. “Maybe think about how you’d describe the lands while we travel.” He climbed to his feet.

  As the archer bent to grab his sword belt, Elenai wondered whether she should say anything about her dream. She watched him for a moment as he tightened his buckle, and then he vented his suppressed ire with a snapped question. “What are you staring at? Do I have food on my collar?”

  Owing to the way his pupils blended with his sclera, it could be a challenge to know where he was really looking. “No.” No time like the present, she thought. “What did Rialla look like?”

  His eyebrows arched and he swore. “What in the deepest dung pit does that matter now?”

  She had expected avoidance but not anger. She bit her lip and persisted. “Humor me. What did she look like?”

  Kyrkenall glared for a long moment, then said, grudgingly. “She was about my height.”

  So she was short, Elenai thought, though in Kyrkenall’s mood she didn’t say it. “What else?”

  “Broad hipped. Thin waist. Sort of a high forehead. Lovely eyes, though.”

  “What color were they?”

  “You gave more than three things,” Ortok pointed out.

  Elenai glanced at the kobalin and nodded shortly. She returned her attention to Kyrkenall. “What color?”

  “Blue,” he said, simply, then spoke with a poetic undertone, as if he’d decided to resist his natural impulse no longer. “A pale blue, going to gray, like you’d see on a clear winter day. Except that there was a bright intensity behind them.”

  “Oh, that was nice.” Ortok sounded as though he might want to take notes.

  Elenai wondered briefly if kobalin knew how to read or write down their stories, then returned her full attention to Kyrkenall. “I never knew what color her eyes were. I’ve seen her statue, I think. I suppose I only looked hard at the most famous ones.”

  Though Kyrkenall frowned still, his tone was more curious than challenging. “Why are you suddenly interested?”

  “I dreamt about her.”

  He grunted in surprise.

  “Who is Rialla?” Ortok asked, climbing to his feet.

  When Kyrkenall didn’t answer, Elenai offered, “One of Kyrkenall’s old friends. An alten and mage.”

  “Ah. Dreams can tell you things you saw but never noticed.”

  At this sage observation, Elenai looked more closely at Ortok but saw that he looked as open and guileless as ever.

  The kobalin continued. “Is she living, or dead?”

  “She’s dead,” Kyrkenall said with finality, and there was a challenging set to his stance, clear indication he wanted the conversation over.

  He always acted strangely about Rialla.

  Ortok didn’t pick up the human cues, and spoke blithely on. “Sometimes when the dead speak in dreams you must listen. But sometimes demons from the waste take the shape of trusted dead ones to spread fear and hurt.”

  Elenai pressed on. She hadn’t gotten to the most important factor yet. “The thing is, in my dream I saw her eye color. But I shouldn’t have known that. I never saw a single tapestry or painting of her.”

  “There aren’t any,” Kyrkenall said bitterly. “Maybe you heard me talk about her.”

  “No. Any time I ask for more information about Rialla, your mouth seizes up like a rusted clamp. I think it was a true dream. I think she might have been real.”

  “Oh,” Ortok interjected. “When a mage has a true dream, you should pay attention, Kyrkenall.”

  Kyrkenall was famously quick to anger, yet she saw him breathe in shortly, then sigh audibly. He was far more patient with the kobalin than she’d ever seen him prior. In some ways, Kyrkenall treated him like a child unused to social niceties. “Thanks, Ortok,” he said quietly.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Ortok was apparently indifferent to or unaware of the tension. “What makes you think it was a true dream, Elenai?”

  She answered him, but looked at Kyrkenall. “I knew I was dreaming even before Rialla appeared. But the moment she did, nearly everything else faded away. And I felt that she was real.”

  “Why would she appear to you?” Kyrkenall demanded, sounding a bit injured now.

  She shook her head. “I tried to ask her that, but she kept asking nonsensical questions. She wanted to make sure you jumped left.”

  “What does that mean?” Ortok asked.

  “I didn’t know, so I asked her to clarify, but it didn’t seem like she was making sense at the end.”

  “What more did she tell you?”

  “She was wanting to make sure I was the ‘right’ Elenai. And,” Elenai said, hesitating briefly before deciding to plunge straight on, “she warned me that you had to be there when the world ends. Before I could ask more, I woke up.”

  “So I have to jump left, and I need to be there for the end of the world.” Kyrkenall shook his head.

  On repetition, her whole dream conversation seemed nonsensical.

  She’d expected Kyrkenall to tease her, but that would have required him being in a good mood. “If it was really her,” he groused, “she wouldn’t waste time with cryptic jokes.”

  “Was this Rialla a powerful mage?” Ortok asked.

  “One of the greatest weavers the Altenerai ever fielded,” Kyrkenall answered. Suddenly he sounded tired. “Better than Commander Renik.”

  “Mighty Renik!” Ortok declared with pleasure. Only a few weeks ago the kobalin had expressed great interest in the long-missing alten, a man so revered by those who served under him, Elenai had yet to hear any of them, even Kyrkenall, refer to him without mentioning his rank. “N’lahr said he was the best at both sword and spell.”

  “He was,” Kyrkenall said sadly. “But Rialla would have grown to be better. Maybe she already was, that day she died.”

  And she had died the same day she had won the ring, Elenai knew. She had the shortest service record of all the Altenerai whose plaques she’d polished as a squire.

  “If she was a great mage, the matter is clear,” Ortok announced. “Her spirit went to Elenai’s because she, too, is a magic worker.”

  Kyrkenall seemed almost to be talking to himself. “I’m more sensitive to the inner world than most non-mages. She can speak to m
e any time she wishes.”

  “I’ve been using her hearthstone,” Elenai reminded him. She still carried it, though she’d yet to activate it on their current trip. So far she’d resisted the temptation. “Maybe she could find me more easily through it than she could find you.”

  He threw up his hands. “She doesn’t even know you! You think I should move left whenever I have to jump? Or that I should continually jump left?”

  “That would look very foolish,” said Ortok, and then laughed. “I can picture it!”

  “I think,” Elenai said slowly, growing annoyed Kyrkenall would pretend to be so dense, “that you shouldn’t dismiss what I say out of hand.”

  “Sure,” he said, and turned away. He forced lightness into his voice. “We’ll worry about the world’s end some other time. We’ve enough on our plate right now. You two keep your eyes peeled for any sudden drops. In case I have to jump.”

  They didn’t take long to load up the camp and did so in silence. She and Kyrkenall had brought one horse apiece and a pair of pack horses. Ortok rode a huge white gelded plow horse recovered from the Naor invasion. If a little slow, the animal had proved remarkably sturdy and unfazed by the often peculiar aspects of the Shifting Lands. He had also shown no fear of Ortok, or inclination to unseat his inexperienced rider. The kobalin had no inkling of how fortunate he was. His only prior experience with horses had been hunting them. While he claimed to enjoy riding, she noticed he still clutched the reins in a death grip as they headed downslope.

  A storm had recently swept through the shifts. All was stable now, but they saw its remnants. It looked as though some mad deity had dropped geometric monoliths upon a distant line of irregular hills. Immense, perfectly square onyx and celadon blocks had embedded in three of the nearer ones, and the slopes were littered with smaller cubes of gray and green.

  The faded red orb of the sun was their constant companion, ever balanced upon the line of the left horizon. Behind them, all was darkness, and ahead was nearly so, a condition that never changed no matter how long they traveled. The rare grasses were dark as well, though they seemed ordinary in other ways, for the horses ate them without hesitation or ill effect. Kyrkenall seemed to trust Lyria’s instincts on the matter, so Elenai followed suit. Occasionally they passed little copses of twisted trees with sickly red boughs that all of them kept clear of.

  After what seemed hours, she sensed that they approached a long section of unwavering reality, very different from these fragile shifting lands through which they’d traveled. This place, she knew, was solid. A storm might cause it damage, but would never destroy or completely remake it. Far smaller than a realm, it was still large enough that an edge was a few miles on, so it was a fragment rather than a splinter. Unlike the famed realm known as The Fragments, though, there seemed no other nearby formation of similar size.

  “Be on your guard,” Ortok told them. “We are in kobalin land.”

  “How do you know?” Elenai asked.

  “The winds sing to me,” Ortok answered simply.

  “What’s this place called?” Kyrkenall asked.

  “This is Gray Sky holding. We will ask those here where the ko’aye have gone, if the winged ones truly left this way like your people say. First we present ourselves. If we have the approval of a clan mother, the hunting groups might be less challenging—although with your Altenerai markings you shall tempt the brave and foolish.”

  “Shouldn’t we have seen hunting groups before now?” Kyrkenall asked.

  Ortok raised hulking shoulders in a shrug. “They will be chasing something.”

  As they advanced, though, no kobalin appeared, and Elenai wondered if they might be watching from the brush, or the little rock piles, preparing an ambush. Ortok led them onto a trail winding through the scrub, and they followed that up through some green hills, passing for a time beside a cheerful burbling creek that seemed straight out of a Darassi folktale.

  It was then that they saw the first body. It was larger and thicker than a human, and three odd horns projected from the front of its skull. Ortok called a halt, and the three of them readied weapons, though whatever had picked these bones clean was probably long since gone. Beyond that body was another, and another with elbow spikes, stretching on toward a flowering place between the hills, under a chalky cliff.

  Silently, carefully, they worked their way up to what appeared to be a large campsite, complete with a burned-out fire pit. Kyrkenall signaled her to watch, and then slipped off his horse as Ortok, looking a little confused, considered the devastation on every hand.

  Skeletal remains were scattered over a wide area circling the fire pit; rib cages, pelvises, arm and leg bones, and heavy skulls. As Elenai studied one long thigh, she realized with a chill it had been gnawed upon and broken in two, probably to suck out the marrow.

  In mute dread, Elenai tore her eyes from the killing field and scanned the distance for enemies, then the nearby ground. She realized that the piles of rocks at key points were likely deliberate defensive points. Here the knots of dead were thicker.

  In search of something less grisly, she let her eyes drift to a pile of large stones, where she’d glimpsed something colorful. She discovered an immense display of swirling, childlike figures inscribed upon the stone with bright reds and blacks. Some appeared to be dancing in circles, others bearing gifts. Perhaps the extra limbs upon some were artistic license or denoted the lack of skill of their makers, but they might also have represented kobalin as they actually appeared.

  Kyrkenall fixed upon something he spotted in the dirt. He followed a trail he alone could see, tracking it through the massacre site.

  “What could have killed so many kobalin, Ortok?” Elenai asked at last.

  The kobalin’s answer was muted. “I haven’t seen a thing like this before.”

  “Are there any kind of … hunting beasts in these lands?” Elenai asked.

  “None powerful enough to do this.”

  Elenai fought a rising sense that the place was a death trap and that they should flee on the instant.

  Ortok lowered awkwardly from his saddle. He chose his footing with care so that he didn’t step on part of a broken rib cage. Almost she asked if kobalin would have done this, but held back. She wasn’t entirely clear that they wouldn’t kill and eat each other, but if she were wrong that assumption would be terribly insulting. And Ortok had said that he’d never seen anything like this.

  Their hulking, hairy companion moved gingerly toward the fire pit, sidestepping a misshapen bulbous skull, then advanced upon the tallest pile of boulders, before kneeling, head bent either in sorrow or curiosity.

  After a moment, Kyrkenall crept silently around one of the piles of rock. He worked his way past his dun mount. Lyria’s slowly turning head appeared to demonstrate her grave consideration of the situation.

  The archer stopped at Elenai’s stirrup and looked up at her. His voice was strained with false nonchalance. “Remember that thing we fought at N’lahr’s tower? The lizard creature with too many legs and the long tail?”

  “I do.” She didn’t expect she’d ever forget. The creature had been beautiful, for its scales displayed shifting patterns of colorful light. And it had been deadly, owing to its inexplicable power to share any pain it felt with any who inflicted it, something Kyrkenall had learned to his regret. “Do you think that’s what did this?”

  “Judging by the tracks I think that at least five of those did this.”

  Elenai regretted paying so little attention to any markings near the tower where they’d found N’lahr. It reminded her once more that, for all of his idiosyncrasies, Kyrkenall was a veteran Altenerai, and she still had habits to acquire and skills to refine. “Fighting one was bad enough.”

  The archer pointed behind him. “I think the things caught a foraging party on its way back to camp.” He swung his extended finger to the defensive points. “The kobalin here tried to hold them off, but it didn’t matter.”

  Elena
i knew that was because kobalin males usually traveled in packs, separate from the matriarchal groups that were true kobalin society. Only young and aged males were usually welcomed among the females. And this would have been a fine grouping, with lots of fierce defenders and wise leaders.

  “The older ones tried to make a stand on the other side of the firepit, but it didn’t do them any good,” Kyrkenall finished.

  She never thought that she’d be touched by the death of kobalin. But this sad little battlefield moved her. “How recent was this?”

  “A month or more, I think. Judging by the bones.” He shrugged. “But it’s hard to know. Environmental conditions aren’t always what we’re used to in these outland fragments.”

  Ortok rose, his fists tight at his sides as he strode toward them.

  “Was this place important to you?” Kyrkenall asked.

  Ortok grumbled deep in his chest. “It was an oasis, a peace place. One that I had sometimes visited.” He pointed to a hilly slope strewn with purple-leafed bushes. “The klektik grows here, and we gather it for long journeys. It sweetens things. And there are the roots that are good to eat, in abundance. Always enough.”

  “Did you ever see any long lizard beasts, about half as tall as a horse?” Kyrkenall indicated the size of the creature they’d seen by lifting his hand and patting the empty air. “Very fast, with scales the color of shifting water struck by a rainbow?”

  Ortok pointed at the space beneath his hand. “I see what you described. You gave me a picture with words.”

  “Yes. Have you seen anything like that?”

  Ortok shook his shaggy head. “No. Why?”

  “Elenai and I fought one when we found N’lahr. I think they’re what attacked this place.”

  “Are they always this hungry?”

  “It seemed pretty motivated to eat us,” Kyrkenall mused.

  “What do they taste like?”

  Kyrkenall could only look back blankly.

  “We didn’t sample it,” Elenai replied, and changed the subject. “If we encounter them, you have to be careful, because any hurt you cause them, they magically share with you.”