Queen of Fire

by Anthony Ryan

  For a moment Vaelin was certain he had killed him, that this great design had been revealed as the desperate ploy of a grieving fool … But then, Erlin blinked.

  He rolled upright, remaining on his knees, sparing a brief glance at the ropes that bound him before raising his gaze. His expression was curious, inquisitive, lacking malice or anger as his eyes tracked across them, lingering on Vaelin, whereupon he smiled. It was a genuine smile, warm, even appreciative, as was his voice when he spoke, Erlin’s polyglot accent moulded into something stronger, the tone deeper, “Thank you.”

  He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky, smiling yet wider as the air played over his skin.

  “Kill it!” It was Kiral, standing well back from the bound man, face bleached to near whiteness as her cat crouched at her side, fangs bared. “This is wrong!”

  “The decision is mine,” Vaelin told her. “Regardless of your song.”

  “We should never have done this.” Her hand moved unconsciously to the knife in her belt. “My song screams it.” She started forward, drawing her knife.

  “He needs to be taken to Volar,” Vaelin said, stepping into her path. “And I will take him there.”

  “You don’t understand,” she hissed at him. “This entire journey, every life taken and lost, every battle fought. We have done everything it wants, taking it closer to its goal with every step.”

  Vaelin turned to the bound man, now regarding him with placid features, free of fear or protestation. “We will make an ending, you and I,” he said, and began to laugh.

  “What was your name?”

  The bound man didn’t turn at Vaelin’s question. He sat at ease on the saddle he had been tied to, continually preoccupied with the passing landscape as Vaelin rode ahead leading his mount, eyes bright and wide as if trying to capture every detail. “My wife called me husband, my children called me father,” he said. “The only names I ever truly needed.”

  Vaelin frowned in consternation. The idea of this thing fathering offspring was both absurd and appalling. “You had children?”

  “Yes. Two boys and a girl.”

  “What became of them?”

  “I killed them.” The Ally looked up at the sky, a faint expression of wonder on his face as he spied a lone bird wheeling above, one of the broad-winged vultures common to the mountains.

  “Why?” Vaelin asked.

  The Ally’s face darkened a little as he turned to him, puzzlement and anger mingling on his brow. “A father’s duty is often a hard one, but cannot be shirked. A truth you will never discover, for which you should thank me.”

  “So you intend to kill me?”

  “You killed yourself the second you opened this body to me. The girl is right, this particular circumstance suits my purpose very well.”

  “How? How does it suit your purpose?”

  “You know I won’t tell you that, regardless of what tortures you might inflict on this flesh. Fear not though, the answers will not be long in coming.”

  They rode in silence for much of the day, Orven’s guardsmen scouting ahead whilst the Sentar guarded the flanks and rear. Kiral kept close to Astorek, both staying far back along the line of march with his wolves close on all sides. From the continued paleness of her complexion Vaelin deduced her song hadn’t abated. Lorkan and Cara were less afraid, regarding the Ally with a wary curiosity, though so far only Vaelin had spoken to him.

  “Why don’t you ask me?” the Ally said eventually, his eyes lingering on clouds gathering to shroud the late afternoon sun. “Surely you want to know if I caught her.”

  Vaelin gripped the reins tighter, Scar issuing a faint snort as he sensed his rising anger. “Did you?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

  “Oh yes. And greatly diverting she was too, if tiresomely stubborn. I could see why you loved her, such a bright soul is rare. Had I the time, no doubt I could have shaped her, crafted a dream rich in all the necessary temptations. I did the same for your brother, Caenis was it?”

  Vaelin came to a halt, the Ally’s mount bringing him closer until he was no more than a sword length away. He stared into the Ally’s blank, uncaring gaze, his hands trembling.

  “He had a suitably heroic death,” the Ally said after a moment. “Saving your queen from one of my servant’s delightful traps. He would have been of great use, his gift being so strong, but thanks to you, all lost. Along with that woman you loved so dearly. Had you left me there, you might one day have heard their voices again, but now they are gone, vanished to nothing like any other soul. You did that when you brought me here, for without me there is nothing to hold them.”

  “You’re lying,” Vaelin said, finding he had to force the words out. “Something held you in the Beyond. It could hold them too.”

  “The Beyond,” the Ally repeated with a caustic sigh. “What a ridiculous name. Still, I suppose you had to call it something. My people never thought to name it, as if in denying it a title, they could wipe away the crime of creating it.”

  More lies. The Beyond is surely eternal. Caenis and Dahrena will be bound there forever … The notion stirred a fresh welling of grief, and yet more unwise anger. The sword felt heavier on his back now, a constant temptation.

  Vaelin turned Scar about and kicked him into a walk.

  “We didn’t know, you see,” the Ally continued, his tone reflective but also cheerful, an avuncular uncle relating past mischief to a curious nephew. “We imagined ourselves so wise. And why would we not? The marvels we crafted on this earth would have left your primitive mind reeling. But that is the eternal dilemma of curiosity, its boundlessness. Having conquered much of one world, a conquest won without battles or blood I might add, why not seek out others? The stones were the key of course, as they were the key to everything in our world of wonders. Dug from the earth and shaped, and only with the shaping was their power revealed. The power to store memory and knowledge, preserving our wisdom for all the ages, and, it transpired, the power to reach between worlds.”

  “The black stone,” Vaelin said, refusing to turn.

  “Yes.” The Ally laughed in surprise. “I clearly don’t give you enough credit. Yes the black stone was to be our greatest achievement. I imagine you must be burning to know what it is.”

  “I know you made it, and feared what you had made.”

  “What did Lionen tell you? That it was a box to lock me in, perhaps?”

  Vaelin glanced over his shoulder, finding the Ally’s gaze more intent now, his cheerfulness displaced by calculation. So he doesn’t know everything. “He told me your wife’s death had driven you to destroy the world you built, and he killed you to prevent that.”

  “True enough, though I suspect it was more a matter of primal hatred. He didn’t give me a quick death, you know.”

  “I saw what you did to your people. You had much to atone for then, and yet more now.”

  “Atonement? I have spent countless years without pain, pleasure or the knowledge of anything that might be called human sensation.” He reclined in the saddle, shrugging in his bonds. “Please, feel at liberty to inflict whatever torment you like upon this flesh. I’ll take it all and ask for more.”

  “What is the black stone?” Vaelin demanded, the sword shifting on his back as he rounded on the Ally. “If it is not a prison, what is it?”

  The Ally glanced over at Lorkan and Cara, riding just within earshot. “In my time there were none like them. None who were born with a gift, with the power burned into their souls and passed through the bloodline for generations. Our gifts came only from the black stone.”

  Touch it once and it gives … “There was no Dark in the world,” Vaelin said in realisation. “You unleashed it.”

  The Ally’s face betrayed a mix of scorn and amusement. “How little you know. There has always been power here, in the water and the earth, ancient and capricious, but beyond the reach of human knowledge. The stones brought something new, something different, a gift of power from across the ch
asm that divides the worlds. We took it and built wonders…”

  The Ally trailed off, glancing around at the Lonak and the Gifted, his expression darkening into contemptuous disdain. “And this world is our legacy,” he went on. “Did Lionen tell you when he first received his visions he thought he was seeing the past? Some long-forgotten age of barbarism where people killed each other over mere superstition. Then he saw the ruins of my city and knew he looked upon the future. A future we built together.”

  The Ally didn’t speak again, remaining apparently content in his bonds, riding without protest and accepting the food spooned into his mouth with a grateful smile. Vaelin asked many questions during the first two days of silence but gave up when it became plain this thing had nothing more to share.

  They left the mountains behind ten days later, proceeding into the plains beyond. It was pleasant country, dotted with small, forested gullies and, the farther south they travelled, plantations and villas of varying size and luxury. Some showed signs of recent abandonment, others were littered with bodies and part destroyed by fire or deliberate vandalism. Vaelin initially suspected the Witch’s Bastard of having vented his malice when he led his army north, but it soon became clear this destruction arose not from oppression, but revolt. Time and again they found black-clad bodies hanging from the archways of partially destroyed villas, often families who had met an identical fate, the corpses showing signs of torture.

  “The red men conscripted their Varitai on the way north,” Astorek surmised after surveying a particularly large villa that had been reduced to its foundations by fire. “The slaves rose and they were defenceless.”

  “Why kill the children?” Cara asked. The villa had burned but its owner had not, his body lay spread-eagled and eviscerated in the forecourt alongside a woman and a small boy, both recipients of the same treatment.

  “A lifetime of rage is not easily tempered,” Astorek said. “Children born into slavery are taken from their parents and sold, those permitted to live that is.”

  “Doesn’t make it right,” Cara murmured. “Nothing about this dreadful journey has been right.”

  Vaelin saw the Ally regarding the burnt remnants of the villa with an incurious eye. His demeanour over recent days had been one of boredom, reminding Vaelin of the privileged nobles he had seen suffering through the banal entertainments of the Summertide Fair. He grows impatient for his end. As do I.

  Another week’s travel brought them to the first town they had encountered, a walled collection of somewhat mean houses rising from the green fields like an ugly growth. Astorek struggled to place its name but did remember being garrisoned there with his father’s regiment before they proceeded north to their fateful encounter in the mountains.

  “The men got drunk and started a brawl with the townsfolk,” he recalled. “Knives were drawn, it got very ugly. The next day Father had one hanged and ten flogged. Oddly the men didn’t seem to mind that much, I think that was the only time he might have won some respect.”

  “Stinks worse than the Merim Her hovels,” Alturk commented. “Our numbers are small. We should go around.”

  “The Northern Road begins here,” Astorek said. “It’ll take us to Volar. We can pick it up to the south.”

  The townsfolk, however, proved unwilling to let them pass. As they neared the road a motley group of about three hundred people emerged from the town gates to place themselves astride it. As Vaelin drew near he saw they wore a variety of clothing, black and grey with the occasional flash of red, and all were armed, though not particularly well and their line was distinctly ragged.

  A large man stood at the head of the mismatched host, bare muscular arms crossed and staring at Vaelin with stern defiance. He wore a red tunic and black trews, his meaty wrists liberally festooned with bracelets of gold and silver.

  “Tell him he’s in our way,” Vaelin said to Astorek as they closed to within fifty paces of the townsfolk.

  Astorek called out to the large man, receiving a loud, and prolonged tirade in response, the man waving his braceleted arms about and pointing in various directions.

  “He says he is king of this land for as far as the eye can see,” Astorek related. “He has killed many men to win this city and will kill many more to keep it.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Tribute and obeisance, if you want to use his road.”

  “He’s a slave?”

  “A Garisai if I’m any judge. It appears this province has undergone a political transformation recently and, amidst chaos, the strongest are likely to gain authority.”

  “Tell him we have seen many murdered children in these lands. I would know if he is responsible for that.”

  The large man spat contemptuously on the ground as Astorek related the question, gesticulating with even more fury and pointing at Vaelin in obvious challenge. “He has wiped the cursed blood of the masters from these lands, their seed will never again rise to trouble them. He is master here now, and demands his due.”

  “And he’ll have it.” Vaelin climbed down from Scar’s back, approaching the large man with a swift stride. The new-made King’s heavy features tensed in puzzlement then outright alarm as Vaelin drew his sword. He dropped into a fighting stance, short swords appearing in both hands from sheaths hidden beneath his tunic, displaying considerable poise in his stance, one sword held low, the other high.

  Vaelin sent a throwing knife between the twin blades, the steel dart sinking into the large man’s eye socket up to the hilt. He staggered, his blades moving in an automatic counter that rebounded from Vaelin’s parry with a clang before Vaelin brought the Order blade up and round in a blurring arc. The blade made it perhaps two-thirds of the way through the Garisai’s thick neck, obliging Vaelin to withdraw it and deliver another blow to sever the head from his twitching corpse.

  He raised his gaze to the ragged host of risen slaves. Instead of surging forward to avenge their fallen king, they had retreated several paces, each face displaying a gratifying level of shock and dismay. Vaelin turned and beckoned Astorek to his side.

  “Translate every word as I say it,” he told him before addressing the crowd, “I hereby claim this province in the name of Queen Lyrna Al Nieren of the Unified Realm. Until such time as she makes provision for fair and just governance, you will conduct yourselves as free citizens of the Realm, refraining from murder and thievery. If you do not, the queen will be swift in making judgement, and”—he paused to nudge the large man’s head with the toe of his boot—“she is not so forgiving as I.”

  He flicked the blood from his sword and returned it to the scabbard, walking back to Scar. “Now get out of the way.”

  The land grew more populous farther south, but no less troubled. They would often catch sight of people on the road ahead, weighed down with goods, either their own or the product of looting. Most would flee at the sight of a large group of mounted warriors, scattering to the surrounding fields where, incredibly, some slaves continued to labour. Not all would flee however, some, mainly the old or those burdened with children, would shuffle to the side of the road and stare in dumb fascination as they rode by, the young ones shushed to silence as they pointed at the strange men. Nor were all so cowed, they endured many insults from the dispossessed, those who had lost everything to marauding slaves seemingly had little left to fear. One old man in a torn black robe assailed them with missiles drawn from a pile of horse dung, his face a mask of unreasoning fury as he spat unintelligible insults. Alturk rode forward to stare down at him, war club resting on his shoulder until the old man finally collapsed, sinking onto his odorous munitions as he wept.

  “These people are very strange,” Alturk said, trotting back to the column. “Seeking out a good death then falling to tears when it’s offered.”

  They covered two hundred miles over the next week, at no point encountering a single Volarian soldier, though they did find evidence of battle. They lay strewn across the road, perhaps over a hundred bodies, m
ostly men but women too, Astorek judging them as a mingling of slaves and free folk from their garb. Many had died in mid-struggle, hands still clutching throats or knives, one young woman lying with her teeth clamped onto the forearm of the black-clad who had killed her.

  “If this continues for much longer,” Astorek said, “your queen will have nothing left to conquer.”

  “Except land,” said the Ally, the entire company starting at the sound of his voice. He cast a dispassionate eye over the carnage before adding, “Land is the only true wealth in a world like this. Your queen will do rather well out of it all, I expect. Pity I can’t let her keep it.”

  “You might speak differently,” Vaelin told him, “if you had met her.”

  He couldn’t dream. Every night he lay down and slept, falling into slumber with barely a pause, and each time his sleep remained free of dreams. He had dreamt every night in the Emperor’s dungeon, of Dentos, Sherin, even Barkus. At the time he had thought it a torment, well-earned torture fulfilling a desire the Emperor resisted. Now he knew it as a blessing. Dahrena was gone, truly and completely, and he was denied even the delusion of a dream, the brief, precious lie that she still lived, even though the waking would be hard, when the knowledge descended like an axe blade as he reached for the cold, empty place beside him. Still, he yearned for it.

  “She spoke of you.”

  Vaelin rose from his bedroll, avoiding the Ally’s gaze. The hour was early and the sky not yet bright enough to see well, rendering the Ally a slumped, shadowed form on the other side of the still-smoking ashes of last night’s fire. “Don’t you want to know what she said?” he asked.

  “Why choose now to speak again?” Vaelin countered. “Is it because we draw nearer to Volar?”

  “No, just honest boredom. Also, you primitives are proving more diverting by the day. I may have bequeathed you an age of ignorance but you do make it interesting. Tell me, why didn’t you keep that man’s head? Presumably there was some ritual significance in taking it.”