The Hollow Queen (20 page)

The Scales weighed against both the idea and the individual aspirants.

Then the Hierarch of the eastern Mercantile, a man named Ihvarr, came forward to be Weighed on behalf of the merchant class. The jest in which he had tossed a gold coin of the realm, a Sorbold sun, indicated how certain he was that the Mercantile, a class of people often viewed with disdain by royalty, nobility, and landed gentry for being of the working class, was not the resource from which the next emperor would come.

His shock was no greater than that of the crown when the Scales balanced the coin against the Ring of State.

He made his way amid the taunts of the nobility to the Weighing plate, carefully stepping into it.

And was thrown violently across the square to the base of the reviewing stand set up for dignitaries, local and foreign, breaking his neck with a sickening
crack
, to Talquist's great shock.

When the bitter members of the rejected nobility began taunting Talquist, who was Ihvarr's counterpart as the western guild Hierarch, Talquist's response to the nobility's jeering speaker had impressed Fhremus. He recalled some of the words by heart.

Nobility, are you, now, Sitkar? You only know one meaning of the word, apparently. There is far more nobility in the hand of a man who earns his bread, rather than stealing it from the mouths of those who do by a distant scrap of Right of Kings. Perhaps the Mercantile represent something that none in your faction ever could: an understanding that the Earth rewards the man who works it, honors it, respects it—not just feeds off it.

Then he stepped into the plate of the Scales and was lifted high, silently, above the stunned crowd in the square of the Place of Weight.

Fhremus remembered the sensation of his knee touching the ground.

A feeling that justice had been served.

And the indication that the new emperor of Sorbold might bring about needed change that even he, a devoted supporter of the empress, knew was necessary.

The words of Nielash Mousa, the benison of the basilica of the Dark Earth, currently missing from Terreanfor, Sorbold's elemental cathedral, had given the last word on the subject.

Whosoever doubts the wisdom of the Scales, it is as if he is calling into question the integrity of the Earth itself. Let none be so blasphemous as to do so.

And yet, all of that memory notwithstanding, Fhremus was feeling blasphemous.

A beating of heavy wings sounded over his head.

Fhremus looked up as an enormous crow soared above him, seeking a place to land for the night. Fhremus's lip curled; crows were loathsome birds as far as he was concerned, filthy and diseased and dangerous in some places of Sorbold that bordered the grainlands of the Alliance, where they could grow to have a wingspan of seven feet, live a hundred years, and pluck out the eyes of deer and small children.

He watched in disgust as it settled into one of the plates of the Scales.

And sat there, making no impact on the balance whatsoever.

Fhremus's brow furrowed.

He stepped closer. The bird was planted squarely in the center of the plate, but that plate remained in balance with its counterpart.

Fhremus picked up a stone from the street and, feeling disrespectful, hurled it at the crow, which ascended into the sky quickly, cawing loudly, and flew off.

The Scale plate did not move.

Fhremus could not believe it.

Even the stone, which was now lying in the Weighing plate, should have set the Scales off balance.

And yet they remained utterly equal.

Fhremus shook his head violently to clear from it the effects of the drink.

When Nielash Mousa was undertaking the first round of determination of which class should be considered for Weighing, he had put the symbols of each class in the opposing plate. The shield of the empress's regiment, the nobility's seal, and the slight weight of even a single gold coin had unbalanced the Scale enough for a moment.

And yet the weight of a large bird, and a sizable stone, did not register at all.

Like a moth drawn to fire, Fhremus walked forward.

And, ignoring the screaming in his soul of the voice warning of his unworthiness, stepped up into the hanging plate.

Which balanced against its empty counterpart without sinking at all.

Sweet All-God,
he thought, the world spinning violently around him.
Sweet All-God. The Scales have been altered—rigged.

He would have more willingly believed in the possibility that the sun could have been convinced to stop its trek across the sky than what he was witnessing.

Like a man who had drunk far more than he had that night, the supreme commander of the forces of the emperor stumbled out of the plate and onto the street.

Then stood, his hand on his chin, contemplating the benison's words again.

Whosoever doubts the wisdom of the Scales, it is as if he is calling into question the integrity of the Earth itself. Let none be so blasphemous as to do so.

Bitter gall rose up in his throat.

If doubting the wisdom of the Scales is blasphemy, then what would the word be that captures the act of altering them to one's whim? Treachery? Betrayal? Treason?

There were no ample words.

Like a man in a stupor, he made his way from the Place of Weight back to the barracks without remembering how he got there.

He lay down on his cot and stared at the ceiling, contemplating the spinning of the Earth.

Which had just gone off-kilter.

And closed his eyes, unsuccessfully praying for sleep to come.

Before his morning shift of guarding the emperor of Sorbold began again.

 

21

THE INNER TEETH, SORBOLD, ABOVE THE GREAT CANYON

At least getting past the first layer of mountains was easy,
Achmed thought to himself.

He had just traversed the last rocky slope at the inner edge of the Outer Teeth, the mountains that bordered Tyrian and served as a barrier between the Middle Continent and western Sorbold. Except for a line of watchtowers that were clearly manned and occupied, this outer layer was sparsely settled and obviously used more by the Sorbolds for observation and reconnaissance than for assault capability.

It had served as the first test of his cloaks, and the skill of the leathermakers of Navarne.

From the time he had abandoned the last of his Wings in Tyrian and had traversed the terrain solely on foot, Achmed had taken to traveling at night and sleeping, covered by whichever of his cloaks most nearly matched the terrain, by day. The lack of habitation, the scarcity of man-controlled light and signal fires, allowed his night eyes, eyes of cave dwellers with sight that did not require light in the tunnels of caves and mountains, to function almost as well as normal vision did in the daytime. As a result he was able to cross the first ring of mountains without notice.

Whereupon he found himself now at the top of the ridge, staring down into the deep, twenty-one-mile-wide chasm and across at the second ridge of mountains beyond it.

At the edge of which stood the gleaming palace of Jierna Tal, its beautiful minarets and its famous guardian tower shining brightly in the distance like a jewel in the daytime, like a beacon at night.

Sprouting from the midst of the immense, heavily populated, and heavily armed city of Jierna'sid.

Achmed sighed in annoyance.

The canyon was far more open than the maps had led him to believe; inwardly he cursed Ashe's reconnaissance. The floor of it was relatively flat, but rocky outcroppings of irregular sizes ran across it, providing some decent cover but not as much as he had expected. Large areas of the floor were also obvious flash-flood plains, which made him wonder if one of the reasons for a minimum of human guardianship was the fact that the weather was an ally of the emperor; it was clear that even the smallest of rainstorms could provide savage flooding in a realm where the ground was baked hard as clay pottery.

He quickly checked his supplies before he descended. The water had held up well, as had the flatbread, but a few of the small fruits he had brought along for energy and fluid had molded, making them unusable. Achmed tossed them aside in disgust.

The day was still young when he reached the canyon bottom, so he found a large rock formation with an overhang and, after doing a quick preliminary scouting for wanderers, and finding nothing but a few snakes, settled into the shady side of the formation, covered himself with the matching cloak, and disappeared from the sight of nothing.

*   *   *

The tedium of the crossing suited Achmed well.

Other people might have found the endless plotting of the course through a vast and dry rocky gulch to be frustrating, but actually it was a harkening back to his past, a time in his life when he was alone, having not met Grunthor yet, and traversing a part of the world that looked almost entirely like this canyon.

In the old world he had discovered people living in caves at the upper edges of the canyon, his first introduction to humans who had a great deal in common with Firbolg. There was enough settlement, enough commerce in that place in the old world for him to occasionally come up from the trails to the ridge and purchase or trade for water or food, and so he did, whenever he felt the need.

He recalled a morning when he noted a small child, a good deal less than two summers old, tottering on the rock rim above a canyon almost as deep as this one. The child was unwatched, his mother busy manufacturing a blanket for possible sale to one of the travelers that came by, few and far between. Achmed had no affinity for children; in fact, his sensitive skin-web, the tracings of nerve ending and veins that scored the surface of his skin, allowing him to sense the vibrations of the world, was often in pain in their presence, particularly if they cried or were in need of changing.

But, even in spite of his dislike of children, he was made nervous by watching the little boy walking endlessly back and forth, balancing on a thin, rocky ridge that ended with a drop of a thousand feet or more.

Finally he attempted to get the attention of the woman he thought was the child's mother, and in his best semi-verbal signaling, indicated his concern for the child's welfare.

Should he—be allowed to walk like that up there?

The woman looked up from her weaving and shrugged. As uncertain as Achmed had been of his own communication, he was utterly positive in her reply.

They only fall once
.

For days afterward, Achmed had been simultaneously appalled and impressed.

He was recalling the experience when he almost stepped on a bony hand sticking out from beneath some canyon scrub.

The Bolg king regained his balance and stopped.

Lying in the scrub was a body, broken and desiccated. It had clearly been there for some time, but not more than a year or even a few seasons.

Achmed looked up.

He had traversed the entire canyon; how he had managed to not notice this was a shock to him. The roots of the mountains that were the Inner Teeth had begun subtly, and now he stood directly below the rise to the top of the ridge whereupon the city of Jierna'sid was built.

On the southwestern face.

High above him, the tower loomed, piercing the clouds.

Not knowing if this was a trap, Achmed quickly took cover.

He waited beneath his leather cloak for several hours until sunset, and, having seen no one and nothing, made his way out from under his camouflage and went back to the body again before all light had left the sky.

After draping his cloak across two rock formations to mask his movements, he bent down again and brushed the scrub back.

The bones had belonged to a woman, by the appearance of the clothing that they were wrapped in. There was a familiarity about the clothing that nagged at the back of Achmed's mind, though he could not imagine he had ever seen anything like them before.

On his one foray into Sorbold, for the funeral of the Empress Leitha, he had spent all his free time wooing a Panjeri gypsy who was a sealed master in the art of glassmaking, something he needed desperately to aid him in the reconstruction of the Lightcatcher. He had spent every moment he was not actually at the funeral negotiating with her, and finally succeeded in convincing her to come to Ylorc with him and work on his project.

Which she did.

Until Grunthor discovered she was actually Esten, the mistress of the Raven's Guild.

Achmed cursed silently now, recalling the treachery and his own stupidity in allowing it to happen.

But, in any case, he had not spent any time examining the garb of Sorbold women, so the sense that he had seen this form of dress before puzzled him.

Slowly, so as to not be seen from any of the guard towers in either the Outer or the Inner Teeth, or in the tower itself, he uncovered more of the body.

The woman had been tall, from what he could surmise; the bones that were wrapped in shrunken skin were long and thin. The robes she wore were light, making sense with the desert clime, but old-fashioned, as if they had come from another era in Time. Achmed took the fabric between his thumb and forefinger; it felt silky, but also modest of manufacture. It also appeared to be worn and threadbare, as if the owner were poor or not well looked after.