The Dark Queen Read online

  Sargonnas again.

  Oh, she knew the power behind such veil and vanishment.

  Quickly the goddess glanced around, her brilliant black eyes flickering over the gloom, the void. Scav shy;enging wings circled at the edge of sight, and a mocking laughter rose from the darkness.

  Sargonnas. He wanted to be first as well. But he was a buzzing insect to her, insidious vermin in the barren night.

  Takhisis would treat with him later. This red-bearded rebel was more immediate, perhaps more dangerous.

  The Plainsman was a hunter, no doubt. They all were. And a fighter-«lse why the great threat to her plans? But there was more. There had to be more.

  The past denied her, Takhisis rummaged the pre shy;sent of her new adversary. Scenes of a bright and relentless desert rushed at her. Twice more she brushed away the obscuring wings of Sargonnas. When she bellowed, the rebellious god drew back, tucked into the safety of the void.

  She had not even discovered his name. Not yet.

  She knew he had some kind of power with words. He spoke, and then the tribe moved, always finding the water they needed in their desert travels. She had watched him as he grew older and changed, his words taking on the colors of war, and his adoptive people gathering to make armies of men who respected him and women who not so secretly wanted him. His enemies-goblin and ogre, Solam-nic and Istarian-fell before him by the thousands. At the end of every battle, there was a new song sung about this hero.

  A small blond singer stood ever at his side, unkempt, her beauty masked by dry wind and miles of travel, a shallow flat drum in her hand and a hawk upon her thin arm. Her features were those of the Plainsmen-the high cheekbones, the deep brown eyes with their intelligent fire. Though she was lithe and long-limbed and gracefully formed, she was rough and awkward in movement, as though unaccustomed to the rule of her own body.

  She was small, almost elven, and the white-blond hair was odd, freakish among the dark Que-Nara. She was the kind of child they would, during the Age of Dreams, have left exposed to the elements and fates. At their most merciful, they would have left a child such as she with sedentary villagers, where she would live life as a changeling, an oddity, in a humdrum farming hamlet where no one would ever look at her anyway.

  But this one was different. Imilus, they called her kind-"gifted outlander." She traveled with the Que-Nara, singing the old songs of their legends, inventing new songs as the stories passed into myth.

  There was power in her voice; she could be formi shy;dable …

  Takhisis's laughter rumbled viciously in the dark void.

  There was history between these two, the hero and the outlander, a subtle energy that surrounded them, creating a space, a distance. The Plainsman ignored the girl's worship and spoke to her sel-domly, foregoing a place beside her at the nightly fires to watch and patrol with his warriors. Occa shy;sionally, he even took other women, indifferent to her obvious heartbreak.

  More often he spoke to and fought alongside another: a small Lucanesti male, with the dark braided hair and mottled, opalescent skin of his kind.

  This elf was ropy and flexible, a sinewy specimen who would never tend toward extra weight. He wore the leggings and tunic of the Que-Nara, yet his overshirt spoke of his own people-dark blue to ' match the height of the sky, or brown to match the depth of the desert, depending on how you looked at the garment, which way the light caught it.

  Another outsider, this elf. And more interesting.

  Takhisis chuckled, and the darkness shivered and tilted.

  The elf fought without spear or throwing knife or kala. Hands and feet alone were his weaponry-all the protection he thought he would ever need.

  Takhisis sighed in relief as the images of these three continued to flicker and dance in the darkness of the Abyss. The opals protected them all, proof against her magic-the tore of the Plainsman, the skin of the elf.

  Nonetheless, all of them were outlanders-all treading a very narrow path of acceptance and power in this tribe of clannish, superstitious people. An easy structure to alter, to invade, to break. The pieces of her plan were coming together.

  Ah… my fragile, pretty singer, Takhisis cooed to the light-haired girl, your song of Istar's fall at your beloved's hand will never be sung. For he cannot out shy;run me, the little man cannot resist me, and you …

  I will shatter your song like glass.

  The elf would be easy. Revenge must be what he was after, revenge and freedom for his hostage people.

  So it always was for the Lucanesti. In the intricate world of elves, oppression had made them simple, binding them, freeborn and slave alike. She could not destroy them herself-the opalescence of their skin and blood saw to that.

  But again and again, the Kingpriest was useful. His mines were filled with the Lucanesti, digging and dying.

  Takhisis turned in the great void and laughed low and sweetly. A slight echo of her uncertainty still rang in her ears. She rode the warm, swirling nightwinds of the Abyss through darkness on dark shy;ness, darkness layering darkness until those places where light had fled entirely seemed hazy, almost pale compared to the kind of darkness that sur shy;rounded them-a gloom of the spirit.

  Arcing outward in the perpetual blackness, fluttering her pennons, she dropped straight down ten thousand fathoms, plummeting, falling, dreaming, until at length she floated amid a wild, universal hubbub of stunning sounds, a cloud of confused, disembodied voices, drift shy;ing through the hollow dark.

  Through that negative plane of terror and chaos, borne on the nightwinds that whirled about her, buoying and buffeting her, indifferent to the contin shy;ual whining and whirring of voices at the edge of nothingness, murmured the hysterical gnatsong of the damned.

  She spread her wings and turned in a hot dry ther shy;mal, rising to the lip of the Abyss, to the glazed and dividing firmament beyond which she could not travel. It looked forbidding, mysterious, like thick ice on a bottomless pool.

  Like the black face of the raw glain opal.

  There, in the heart of nothing, Takhisis banked and glided, aloft on the current of her own dark strategies.

  * * * * *

  Behind her another shadow glided relentlessly at a safe distance, its own black wings extended like those of a giant scavenger, an enormous predatory bird.

  Takhisis's consort, Sargonnas, banished into the Abyss along with his powerful mistress, had hidden in the deepest shadows to observe the same vision billowing out of the darkness. He saw the same burning city, the collapsing tower, and the elf and the girl and the blue-eyed man whom they followed.

  And the armies-the irresistible armies-at the outskirts of Istar.

  Oh, what Takhisis would not give to destroy this Plainsman hero and his few hundred followers! The upstart rebel was little more than a gifted escape artist now-eluding and fighting the slavers in a desert that his advisors, his oracles, and his own

  common sense told him not to leave.

  But five years from now, when his strength and judgment had matured, when his numbers had increased by thousands and he stood at the gates of Istar, liberating the countless slaves and conquered peoples, his power would be grown so mighty that not even a goddess could stop him.

  The salt flats of the southern desert lay a mile from the boundaries of the Que-Nara's firelight. Called the Tears of Mishakal since the Age of Light, it was an alien landscape to Plainsmen, to barbarians, even to the nomadic desert bandits who skirted its edges with muttered prayers to Sargonnas or Shinare.

  Legends had it that those who strayed onto the salt flats rarely found their way back, but wandered the faceless landscape forever. Those same legends claimed that often the unwary traveler was drawn there by the song of the crystals, the contorted, glassy growths that rose from the heart of the flats, through which the desert wind chimed a faint, bizarre music.

  None of the Plainsmen camped close to the salt flats, nor did the sentries patrol its borders. Its landscape extended to the blank horizon, as ori
ginal and pure as it had lain during the Age of Dreams, and the eyes of the Que-Nara, turned north toward the grasslands and the distant Istarian threat, failed to notice a stir shy;ring in a nearby cluster of crystals, a twisted, sparkling tree of salt that began to sway and turn.

  In the blended light of the three moons-the white, the red, and the unseen black moon, Nuitari- the crystals boiled and blackened, as though an unbearable heat passed through them, welding facet to adjoining facet until the branching facets melded and slowly took on a new shape.

  As faceless as the salt flat, anonymous and half formed, it was nonetheless human …

  Or humanlike.

  For a moment it hovered between mineral and life, between salt and flesh, as though something in it warred between sleep and waking, stasis and movement. Then hands and fingers branched from the glossy arms, and the features of the face took sudden shape, as though an unseen sculptor had drawn them from the stone.

  The woman moved, and the desert shuddered.

  She was beautiful, dark and curiously angular, and naked in the black moonlight.

  The woman knelt and scooped up a handful of salt. It poured black through her fingers, shimmer shy;ing thin like silk, and she wrapped herself in the new, cascading cloth. Magically, her features soft shy;ened, her skin grew supple and pale, and her amber eyes glittered under heavy, sensuous lashes.

  But the hearts of those eyes were black, slitted ver shy;tically like a reptile's.

  For a moment the woman stood still and practiced breathing as though it were a new and odd sensa shy;tion. Then she stretched lazily, the silk riding soft and translucent up her pale, perfect legs.

  "Oh, too long away," she murmured, and there was a chiming echo trapped in the depths of her voice. "Too long away from Ansalon and from the little world …

  "If I cannot be opal yet, I shall be salt."

  She walked out of the Abyss, out of the dead val shy;ley and into the pathless desert, the massive weight of her delicate feet crushing the sunbaked mosaic and parting the winds in her passage.

  Chapter 2

  Six hundred and more of thc sack-robed rebels crossed the northern stretch of sand, the horizon shimmering purple and green in the midday heat.

  Twice the scouts shouted forth a warning, sending a nervous flurry through their column. The miscalls were forgivable. After all, the lads were young, mas shy;terful on horseback but new to reconnaissance. Mirages they would have ignored a week ago boldly deceived them now.

  Towers, they told Stormlight. Towers made of water at the northern edge of sight.

  The elf smiled at their rashness, their excitability.

  On horseback, hooded against the desert winds, he shielded his eyes and looked to the horizon, where the scouts beckoned and pointed.

  "Illusion," he told them. "False light."

  He sent them back in the column for refreshment, for shade.

  They complied unwillingly, insisting that they had seen the great colored spires of Istar.

  Stormlight knew better. The city was thirty miles away, across mountains and the expanse of Lake Istar. Furthermore, Fordus the Prophet had no plan to go there.

  Not until he could walk through those gates in tri shy;umph.

  That would be years and many followers in the future. For now, there was the Kingpriest's army to reckon with.

  Stormlight stared across the tawny grassland, toward the north where the bright red star of Chislev rode low over the bunched backs of the mountains.

  It was easy in the desert, where he and Fordus read the faceless terrain much like deep-sea naviga shy;tors decoded the swell and tilt of the waves. It was Stormlight's nature to do so-the sympathy with water and rock that was his inheritance.

  However, the fancy, soft generals of Istar had had little chance in the shifting sand and merciless heat.

  Remembering it gave Stormlight a savage plea shy;sure.

  In late autumn, the Kingpriest had sent an irri shy;tated legion south into the desert, with orders to uproot the bandit, Fordus. That expedition had lasted two weeks in the blowing sand, with never a clear sighting of the quarry. Led by a few old fire pits and wisps of hope, the Istarians trudged south to the borders of Balifor where, short of water and exhausted by a dozen nights of fruitless searching, they were easy prey for Fordus's rebel force, which was half their size.

  Twenty-seven Istarian soldiers were still miss shy;ing-their helmets, shields, and bones scattered for miles among the dried, branching riverbeds the Lucanesti knew as the Tine. The rest of the unit had returned to the city with tales of a wolfish, wraith-like commander who could be in three places at once, who moved over sand like the wind and car shy;ried a thousand throwing axes on a belt at his waist, all designed by a mage who had vowed that never would a cast miss its target.

  Twenty-seven Istarians and a mythology. Small payment for a hundred elves enslaved in the dark undercity, Stormlight thought bitterly. At least Istar would think twice before venturing into the desert again.

  This, however, was a new place-the yellow grasslands south of the city itself, as promising as they were dangerous. It would take a full day of riding across their open expanse to reach the foothills, the mountains, and finally the outskirts of Istar. It was unknown country, treacherous and vague, and Fordus had been forced to leave behind more than two hundred of the Que-Nara, devout and basically peaceful Plainsmen whose gods had forbidden them to leave the desert in any act of aggression.

  Still, close to four hundred Que-Nara remained with the rebels, proceeding against the warnings of their clerics, and the rest of the invading force was a ragged assembly of bandits and barbarians only lately come to the cause. Now, somewhere between these rebels and the dark foothills waited two proper legions-two thousand members of the crack Istarian Guard: crossbow, spear, and sword units, along with a cavalry famous throughout Ansalon. Enemy enough to strike fear in the most daring com shy;mander.

  Yet there was no fear, no hesitation in Fordus Fire-soul, the pale-eyed Plainsman, Water Prophet and Lord of the Rebels.

  Stormlight set his face in approval.

  No fear was good.

  After all, had not the Prophet routed the Istarians four, five times in the past?

  Easy in the saddle, his translucent skin mottling with glittering green and orange flashes of an early opalescence, Stormlight watched the first shadows or the peaceful blue evening stretch across the level grasslands.

  No fear was very good.

  He cast aside his darker speculations.

  In a small advance party not fifty yards away, For shy;dus the Prophet, on foot as usual, dropped to the ground in midstride. Behind him, two lieutenants and the bard paused and did likewise, Larken muf shy;fling the variegated head of her drum with the flat of her callused hand.

  "Istar approaches," the commander whispered to them, with no more drama and moment than if he were observing the color of a horse or a strange cast of light in the clouds.

  The tiny bard stared toward the foothills, straining to see what Fordus saw through the patch of knife-edged grass. Nothing.

  But he knew. Fordus always knew about water and armies.

  "If indeed it is two legions, we'll know it by night shy;fall/' Fordus continued. "We'll count the lights of their campfires, like they want us to. Then I'll send Stormlight and six men to scout them closely and part the flesh from the shadows. If they've set enough fires for four legions, they're even more afraid of us than I've reckoned."

  And tomorrow? the bard signed with one hand. Fordus lifted his eyes, anticipating her gesture, her question.

  "They'll want to meet us in the open fields, Larken, to use their numbers and horse to advan shy;tage." The Prophet rose to a crouch, drawing a line with his finger along the sandy ground. "When they see our ragtag troops, only Que-Nara and bandits and a handful of Balifor crossbowmen, they'll think those are all who stand with me."

  The lieutenants nodded, oblivious to the softly plodding hooves of Stormlight's horse
some dis shy;tance behind. Long ago they had learned to give their entire attention to their commander, to wait before they spoke.

  Stormlight dismounted silently, bade the horse to lie down, and slipped through the circle of squatting ..rebels.

  He knew well his old friend's ways. The plan would be simple, direct, and clean. Fordus was the type who'd take a sword to a knot rather than suffer a second more to untie it.

  Yes, simple. And as always, successful. Fordus was no tactician, but in his hands, the most basic maneuvers blossomed to brilliance.

  "The desert is with me, wherever I go," Fordus concluded quietly, his gaze focused on a distant place. "And we will bring them the desert, bring them sand and wind and mirrors of air, the deception of birds in the high grass."

  One of the lieutenants, a young archer from Bali-for, shifted his weight and stifled a cough. It was always this way when the Prophet spoke in riddles.

  But that was where Stormlight's task began. The elf let the Prophet's words settle on the assembled officers, then hooded his eyes with the white, translucent underlids of his people and stepped slightly away from the circle surrounding the chieftain.

  "Second eyes," the Plainsmen called them-the white lucerna of the mining elves. Through that milky film, legacy of their race, the Lucanesti could see gems in dark tunnels, long veins of water in the heart of the sand …

  Could see other things as well. The vein of truth in the subtle strata of words and images.

  "The Prophet has spoken!" Stormlight proclaimed quietly, standing to survey the wave of mystified faces. The lucerna lifting, he raised hands that glit shy;tered purple with reflected light. It had come to him again, as it always did, in the midst of murmuring. Like lightning, the meaning of Fordus's cryptic poetry had struck his second in command.

  "We'll hide half of you on the flanks," Stormlight continued, "and close around the Kingpriest's army when they charge. Gormion will command the southernmost troops, and when the Istarian lances contact her lines . . . the rest of us will spring out of the grass behind them. And may the axe of Jolith cleave through their ranks! There will be such a storm of sand and wind as never they have seen, and it will not touch us. The powers gather already." He pointed into the distance, where a rising cloud of dust marked the southern horizon. A hot breeze began to blow from the same direction.