The Bone Queen (38 page)

As the night deepened, it grew colder. There was no wind to drive away the rising mists, and they pooled and swirled about the Bards’ feet, making ghostly eddies in the pale magelights. Selmana could see no sign of the mountains, which were hidden completely in the haze. A half-moon, haloed in icy blue light, stood low on the horizon, but it cast little illumination. All around them stretched a wide silence. Even their footsteps, damped by the mist, made little sound. It was as if they waded through a vast, shallow, edgeless sea.

They were cloaked and muffled against the cold, and were heavily shielded, invisible to any casual eye. Nelac, Dernhil and Cadvan were poised on the very threshold of the Shadowplains, which meant that their vision was uncertain, a doubled pattern of light and shadow from both realities. Selmana, the only one of them able to see clearly, had to act as guide so they didn’t stumble.

Staying at the midpoint between the Circles without falling one way or the other was difficult. Dernhil, who had never journeyed to the Shadowplains before, already had drops of sweat rolling down his brow. He had no desire to enter them; even at the threshold, the Shadowplains felt malign and deadly. The double vision meant the Bards could see into both Circles, if imperfectly, and had the lesser chance of being ambushed by the Bone Queen; and it also meant that they could find the rupture that was afflicting Jouan. Walking on the edge of things, they could feel it near by, an anguish in the fabric of the World.

The others, especially Cadvan, had argued fiercely with Selmana about her proposition that she should act as a bait. But her panic had solidified into defiance; she was driven by a smouldering anger that burned out her fear. How dare this revenant rise and seek to destroy everything she loved? How dare the Bone Queen hunt her cousin through the long plains of death? How dare the Dark try to destroy the School that had given meaning to her life?

A cold voice inside her recognized that this confrontation might be in vain, that they might be courting their own destruction. It seemed worth the gamble. She was tired of being frightened. When she hadn’t been afraid in the past weeks, she had just been exhausted. Now she felt neither exhausted nor afraid: fury ran silver through her, a bright energy that lightened her limbs. It tasted good.

They halted about half a mile out of Jouan. Selmana could see the mine winch not far away, silhouetted on the bare rise, and a lone star prickling through the haze behind it. “Here,” said Cadvan. There was a flinching in his voice, something nearer disgust than fear. Nelac and Dernhil nodded. Selmana couldn’t see how this place, a little way off the path to the mine, was different from anywhere else.

The four Bards arranged themselves in a ring, their hands still locked together, and Nelac spoke into Selmana’s mind.

We’ll start the mending,
he said.
Are you ready?

Selmana swallowed. She hoped she was.
Yes,
she said.

Whatever happens, don’t break the ring,
said Nelac.
You will be outside the mindmeld, but we will be aware of you. You are our watchman and our guard. The instant you sense Kansabur, do not hesitate: call us.

Selmana nodded. She still felt no sign of life as far as her senses could quest, and it made her uneasy. She thought with a shiver that perhaps, as they stepped out of the warm lamplight of the tavern, the Bone Queen had devoured every living thing for miles. Perhaps she was hidden right next to her, listening to her thoughts, and Selmana’s mind was naked before her, all their plans exposed, despite the veils of magery that sought to conceal them. For an instant, Selmana’s resolve wavered. With an effort, she pushed her fears aside.

The other Bards bent their minds to weaving, and for an endless moment Selmana forgot everything else. This was a charm unlike any she had encountered before, and she was awed by its power. Weaving magery was like making music, if music were forged out of steel and light: its melodies and notes were the fabric of reality itself, softened and made fluid in the voices of the Bards. She saw that each Bard possessed a subtly different magery from the others; Nelac glowed with a rich gold light that made her think of sunset, while Dernhil was like the rays of the spring sun through new foliage, and Cadvan was a pure silver, the quality of starlight. The mageries met and flowed together, making a complex, ever-changing harmony, like the mingled melodies of a river, but shaped with conscious purpose and form.

She saw how the Bards stood in the impossible place between the Circles, weaving a fabric of light over the breach that opened between them. The gap was horribly visible now, even to her: she wondered that she hadn’t seen it before. It was huge, a rent that bled a deathly vapour of darkness, its spectral edges flapping in unseen winds. She flinched, as from a terrible wound. It was a violence against the World, a wrong. There was a will behind this act, she perceived that clearly. It was a will that saw the obscene damage it would create and was indifferent, that coldly enjoyed the suffering it caused as a confirmation of its power, a will that accounted only itself as the measure of value, that sought to possess and command but never to understand. She gagged, wondering how the other Bards could bear it. She had learned to fear the Dark in the past few weeks, but now she felt more than fear or horror: she shuddered with revulsion and contempt.

She drew a deep breath, suddenly aware of her cold hands grasping Nelac and Dernhil’s glowing fingers, and wrenched herself out of the vortex of magery. She was supposed to be keeping watch… She sent out the web of her perceptions, her listening and that other awareness, the between sense that Larla had called the Sight. Around her stretched that strange, unnatural silence, as if all sound had been swallowed in the vast, chilly dome of the sky. If anything, the quiet was deeper now: even her blood seemed stilled in her veins. But was there a feeling of watchfulness, of waiting? Was there something there?

The back of her neck prickled. She turned her head slowly, dreading what she might see. Behind her stood a child, perhaps ten years old. He was staring at her, his face blank but hungry, his hands stretching out towards her. And then, out of nowhere, behind him was an old woman, her dull eyes staring out of her hollow face. A young girl. Three men, all with the heavy shoulders of miners, who looked like brothers. The more she looked, the more there were, as if looking summoned them into view, dozens and then hundreds of people. They seemed as corporeal as the mages beside her, but something told her they were apparitions only. She knew they were dead, but somehow she wasn’t frightened; instead, she was pierced with a sharp, intolerable sorrow. They all seemed so lost. She had seen something of that forlornness in Ceredin’s face.

She took a deep breath, feeling the icy air knife into her lungs with relief: at least cold was just an ordinary thing. Her neck began to ache from looking over her shoulder and she turned back, facing inside the ring of Bards. The dead were all around them, stretching into the darkness as far as she could see, more than she could possibly count, all of them motionless, their eyes fixed on her, as if they were mutely pleading. She was tempted to interrupt the other Bards, but they had agreed that the signal was to be given if she saw Kansabur, or was in any way imperilled. The dead were uncanny and sorrowful, but she felt no threat from them. She looked for Ceredin, wondering if she were among these sad ranks, but saw no sign of her. She shifted uncomfortably, and blinked, and the dead vanished. Now the darkness was empty again.

It was strange, being part of a ring of Bards, but not part of their mindmeld. She could see the power building between the other three, but she was outside it. She heard their mingled voices at the margins of her mind, patiently weaving the gaping edges of the rent Circles together, but within that singing she was silent. She felt terribly alone, even though they were hand-linked. The power of magery rippled out of their circle, a beacon in the darkness. Every creature of the Dark for leagues would be aware of them now. And yet she felt no trace of sorcery, nor of the suffocating pall of malice that she associated with the Bone Queen. She would never forget that sense, which was more than physical: it afflicted the mind as the stench of a rotting corpse might affect the body.

She reminded herself that the other Bards would know if Kansabur walked in the Shadowplains; they would recognize that presence just as she did. Her absence troubled Selmana; for the first time since they had left Jonalan’s tavern, she began to be fearful.
She is so close,
Ceredin had said.
So close…
But where was she? Was she hiding herself? Did she tense to strike them down, even now?

Selmana didn’t need to look to know that the charm of mending was almost complete. The power of the three Bards almost made her feel dizzy; they were drawing on deep magery, funnelling the hidden powers of the world through their bodies as they wove the shimmering tapestry that would close the gaping rent between the Circles.

Perhaps Ceredin was wrong, she thought. Perhaps the Bone Queen is not here. Perhaps it is simply that this break makes everything seem close, when it is not, because it twists and distorts the matter of the Circles. Time and space are not the same in the Shadowplains as they are here. She could feel the inexorable weight that the torn place exerted, like a whirlpool that stretches and distorts the water around it. It was getting hard to judge where she was, it was hard to know who she was.

I am Selmana, Bard of Lirigon, she said fiercely to herself, I walk on this earth as myself, I am no other thing. But the force was bearing down on her: as the mingled light of magery wound itself around the gap, the vortex became more violent. She felt herself leaning towards the whirling centre, helplessly drawn, as if she were a branch trembling at the edge of a waterfall, held from tipping over the brink only by a crumbling bank, by some chance of the raging torrent that had swirled her to a boiling flood of darkness that fell down and down and down, endlessly beneath her. What held her? Was it a hand, or was it stone? She couldn’t tell any more. It was slipping, her hand was slipping, she scrabbled desperately, blind with panic. And then she fell.

C
ADVAN
could patch a broken kettle or a worn boot with a word when he was seven years old. Patching was the least of mageries, as easy as making illusions. It was sometimes a useful skill, but the result was never as good as crafting: after a few days the charm would evaporate, usually leaving the object more tattered than before. A mending charm required a more profound magery, and was beyond the untaught skill of a child, however talented: the aim was to make the object whole, as if it had never been broken.

The first time Cadvan had used that charm, it was to mend an old jug that belonged to Ceredin. It was fine glassware from Lanorial, a gift from Ceredin’s mother. He had knocked it over one night, gesticulating too wildly during one of the gatherings they sometimes had, when the young Bards would drink wine and argue about everything under the sun, from music to herblore, the proper way to make cheese, the greatest poet of the Light, the best composition for inks… Cadvan was remorseful at his carelessness and had offered to mend it. Even with a simple object, the charm was much more difficult than he had imagined.

The next time had been to close the rift between the Abyss and the World that the Bards themselves had opened, when they sought to banish Kansabur back to the Abyss. It was essentially the same charm, but amplified through the power of six Bards and many times more complex. Making the magery while attempting to keep Kansabur chained was a torment. Cadvan remembered the hunt and defeat of the Bone Queen as pure anguish; he had lain ill for days afterwards. And for all the anguish, they had failed.

At the time, although he said nothing, Cadvan had thought there was something of sorcery in the spells used to open the rift. Even in the mending charm, which undid the earlier charm that opened the Circles, there were rhymes and echoes that reminded him of spells he had encountered with Likod. Now, weaving the charm with Nelac and Dernhil, he felt these echoes again, and more strongly. This time the magery was different: the wound between the Circles hadn’t been cut by Bards, who worked with the precision of surgeons, seeking to make as little disturbance as possible. This rift had been torn open crudely, wreaking damage widely around it. No wonder the Jouains were suffering from bad dreams; it was such a serious breach that Cadvan thought it likely that the rumours of the dead walking at night were more than the imaginings of frightened villagers.

As the mindmelded Bards felt gingerly about the torn edges, which furled vaporously through the threshold between the Shadowplains and the World, Cadvan fought against an overwhelming feeling of revulsion. He had hoped, despite Ceredin’s warning, that this flaw between the Circles was a natural distortion, which might as naturally close over. The cosmos was full of ruptures: it was well known that in certain places there were fault lines. The Pilanel had told him that the shamans in the icy vastnesses of the far north called such places fountains of truth, thinking of them as akin to the hot springs that burst through rock with healing waters. They tended these places, using secret charms to keep them open for their visions and prophecies. But this rift was a wanton, deliberate violence.

He nodded to Selmana, who stood pale in front of him on the opposite side of their ring, and began to concentrate on weaving the charm. He kept part of his mind watchful and separate, letting the weight of the magery fall on Nelac and Dernhil. He had argued most forcefully against Selmana’s proposal that she stand out to lure Kansabur, and although they had taken every precaution they could imagine, he was still worried. He remembered Kansabur’s strength: even if she were diminished, they didn’t know how weakened she was. What if she took Selmana, despite everything they had done? If Selmana held the secret to Kansabur regaining her full power, wasn’t it the deepest folly even to consider what they were planning to do now? He was surprised that Nelac even considered it; he was astonished that he supported Selmana. In the end Cadvan had given way with great reluctance, insisting that they should set the strongest shields they could make.